James Pattinson
The Spanish Hawk
ONE:
NOT FUNNY
The ship was lying on the bottom in ten fathoms of limpid water. She was lying on her starboard side, and her masts and funnel slanted upward at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizontal. She was a steamship of the old three-island type, a freighter of possibly five thousand tons, and it might have been imagined that she had foundered in a hurricane if it had not been for the hole in her port side where the torpedo had ripped her open.
The hole told how long she had been there: it had to be more than thirty years, because the war ended in 1945 and even before that the U-boats had drawn away from the Caribbean when the hunting in those waters became less happy.
So she had lain there for all those years and the marine creatures had made use of her as they would have made use of any natural rock formation on the floor of the sea. There were incrustations of barnacles; fishes swam in and out through the torpedo hole, exploring the engine-room as though it had been a submarine cave; shoals of them sailed like flocks of birds between the trailing strands of rigging, the airless ventilators and the silent winches, the four-inch gun at the stern and the twelve-pounder in the bows. And there she would continue to lie, this victim of man’s violence, undisturbed by any convulsion on the surface, while hidden inside her were the bones of drowned or slaughtered seamen, picked clean by underwater predators and scavengers long, long ago.
Fletcher swam warily, peering through the eyepiece of his aqualung and watching for snags like jagged projections of iron or lengths of slimy cordage that might entangle the legs; watching also for sharks or barracuda, the wolves and jackals of the depths.
He swam along the sloping port side of the ship and saw the gaping hole where the torpedo had torn the life out of her that long past moonlit night, and he tried to imagine what it had been like for those on board. The sudden blast coming without warning, and then the water gushing in, the vessel sinking, the panic rush for rafts and lifeboats … And now it was all so calm, so silent; something that was past, finished, completed; the men no longer mourned, perhaps even forgotten.
He swam past the hole and could see the abandoned davits above it, and then he was gliding along the forepart of the hull towards the bows. He came round the forecastle and only then did he see the boat.
The boat had come down between the foremast and the centre-castle of the ship, but it had not been there so long; not by years; not by decades. Indeed, when he came closer to it Fletcher made a guess that it had not been there for more than a week or so, and maybe less. It did not have the look of something that had been lying on the bottom for any length of time; it had not yet merged with its surroundings, had not been colonised by the inhabitants of the sea bed; the paint still looked good.
It was a sea-going launch, maybe thirty feet long and ten feet in the beam. As far as Fletcher could judge, it was not of the most modern design; probably a fairly old boat that had done its share of work before ending up the way it had. And why had it finished like that? Certainly no torpedo had sent it plunging to the bottom; there were no U-boats hunting in these waters now, and a boat of that size would never have been worth the expenditure of a torpedo anyway. But there had to be a reason: boats did not sink without cause; and there had been no recent storms that might have overwhelmed such a craft. So why?
He swam in closer. The boat, unlike the ship, had settled on an even keel and was to all appearances undamaged; it might have been floating on the surface rather than resting on the bottom. There was a cockpit aft and a cabin in the forepart. The cockpit was abandoned, but whether or not the same could be said of the cabin was impossible to be sure without investigating further. Fletcher decided to investigate further.
The door of the cabin was closed, but it was neither jammed nor locked; under the pressure of Fletcher’s hand it swung slowly and a shade reluctantly inward. He floated in the doorway, peering into the interior. Diffused light filtered in through the windows on either side, revealing the bodies in their various attitudes of death. He felt a sense of shock and an impulse to retreat, to get back to the surface as quickly as possible, to the fresh air and the warm sunshine. Nevertheless, he stayed there; he counted the bodies carefully and made the total five: two blacks and three whites.
Five dead men in a sunken boat! And again, why? Why all in the cabin? Had they made no attempt to escape? Had they remained there passively waiting to be drowned without so much as a struggle? Or had they perhaps not been drowned? Could there possibly be some more sinister explanation for their presence there?
He steeled himself and moved into the cabin and came to the first man. The man was lying on his back, stretched out as though sleeping; but it would be a long, long sleep for him. Fletcher took a closer look and saw the hole in the man’s head where the bullet had gone in; and he did not like what he saw. He had a feeling that he had stumbled on something which it might be wiser to forget. For his own good it might be best to get out of that cabin at once and never come back, never breathe a word about what he had seen, never.
But he could not do it; he could not leave the thing like that, however much it might have been in his own interests to do so. It was just not possible.
He examined the other bodies, one by one. Each man had been shot in the head, probably at close range with a small calibre pistol. It looked like an execution rather than a fight, as though perhaps the men had been taken by surprise. But by whom? And for what reason? Who were these dead men?
Fletcher had come down with the intention of photographing an old ship sunk by a U-boat in 1942, and he had all the necessary equipment; instead, he took pictures of five dead men and the boat that was their coffin. When he left the cabin he was careful to close the door behind him. To protect the bodies? To prevent them from escaping? He himself would have found it difficult to provide an answer.
“You find anything?” Joby asked, helping Fletcher to take off the aqualung.
Joby Thomas was a tall black man; six feet tall and with about as much fat on him as you would find on a wire nail. They were on board his motor-boat Snow Queen, and it might have been said that he was doing only what he was being paid to do; only he would have done it anyway, because he was John Fletcher’s very good friend.
It was not a friendship of very long standing: about six months or so, which was the length of time Fletcher had been resident on the island, and during which time he had been lodging with the Thomases— Joby, his wife Paulina and the two kids, Willie and Millie. A few months before that Fletcher had come into a legacy on the death of an uncle; nothing very big, but enough to persuade him to pack in his job with an insurance company and pull up roots. He was twenty-five and unattached, so why not make use of the money while he could still enjoy life rather than stow it away in some bank or building society, or even in shares that might go up but could as easily slide down?
He decided to go out to the West Indies and write a book.
He had never thought of writing a book until that moment, but it seemed a good thing to do; the legacy was not going to last for ever and he would need to make some more money somehow. So why not make it by writing, which was surely as easy a way as any? After six months he had still not started on the book; there were so many other things to do and there was no hurry; he would wait for some ideas to bubble up from the subconscious, which was a well-known breeding ground for ideas, jot down a few notes, let the thing germinate. It looked like being a slow germination, but never mind; life was good; life, in fact, had never been better.