The Surgeon Lieutenant put down his book. ‘Hullo, Number One. Long time no see.’
‘Had my head down most of the afternoon. Been with the Old Man since.’ The First Lieutenant looked round the wardroom, raised his voice. ‘Anybody seen Andrew Weeks?’
‘Playing Judo with AB Carmichael on the iron deck, sir.’ Galpin, it appeared, had not been asleep.
‘Tell him I want him up here, chop-chop.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ The midshipman got up, shook himself, ran a hand through tousled hair and made for the door.
‘Care for a drink, Number One?’ The Surgeon Lieutenant yawned.
‘No thanks, Docker. Too early. And there’s a busy night ahead.’
‘Oh, what’s on?’
The First Lieutenant lowered his voice. ‘Quite a lot. We’re going into battle, Docker.’
‘Good heavens, Number One. Quel drame.’ The doctor pulled himself up in the armchair. ‘Who with?’
‘You’ll hear in due course. The Old Man’s doing a fireside chat at 1830 — there’ll be a briefing in here at 1900 — for the chosen.’
‘Well, well. Going back to War, are we? Giving up the desert island jolly? How very exciting. Will I be among the chosen?’
The First Lieutenant took off his uniform cap, sat down. ‘I doubt it. The Old Man hasn’t given me the list yet. He’s working on it.’
The doctor shrugged. ‘Well, it all sounds very mysterious. Remember you can count on me for anything safe. Cut me out if it’s not.’
After a moment’s preoccupation, the First Lieutenant said, ‘How would you define a psychopath?’
‘Odd question, Number One. What’s on your mind?’
‘The Old Man used the word a moment ago. Talking about the Fort Nebraska massacre. He said the Jap captain must be a psychopath. I know roughly what the word means but wondered about its medical definition.’
‘My dear chap, it runs to pages. Difficult to be brief but I’ll try. In general a psychopath is someone emotionally unstable to an almost pathological degree, though he has no specific or marked disorder.’
‘Can you enlarge on that? Sounds a bit obscure.’
The doctor looked surprised. ‘I thought I’d put it in sufficiently simple terms for even a naval officer to comprehend. However, let’s have another shot.’ He scratched his chin. ‘A psychopath is a mentally deranged, abnormal personality. Difficult to classify psychopaths. There are two main groups: the aggressive and the inadequate. The sadists, the killers, the hard men, belong to the former. The latter include the impulsive, the irrational and the unbalanced. Social misfits, minor delinquents, trouble-makers, Don Quixotes. They can be highly intelligent, gifted, but their behaviour is repeatedly abnormal, their attitude turbulent and emotional, particularly under stress. One often sees the beginnings of it in adolescents; the so-called difficult children. If the Japanese captain is a psychopath I imagine he’d come under the aggressive label. But he’s probably not one. Simply conforming to the norms of Japanese militaristic behaviour. They’re a pretty primitive lot in that respect.’
The First Lieutenant half smiled. ‘I didn’t mean you to write a book on the subject, Docker. But thanks all the same. Most interesting.’
Further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of an athletic-looking young man wearing loose, baggy, canvas jacket and shorts. ‘Excuse my rig, Number One, but Galpin said you wanted me chop-chop. Carmichael’s been giving me a work-out.’
‘So I see.’ The First Lieutenant eyed the red weal across Weeks’s cheek. ‘I’m due for the Last Dog tonight. I wondered if you’d do it for me. The Old Man’s given me a job.’
‘Yes, of course I will. I’m free until the morning watch tomorrow. Then I’m on with you.’
‘That’s why I asked you. Anyway, thanks for the help.’ The First Lieutenant picked up a magazine. ‘Better get back to your bruising.’
Lieutenant Andrew Weeks, RNVR, left the wardroom at the double.
‘Incredible,’ said the doctor. ‘In this weather.’
‘Mad dogs and Englishmen.’ The First Lieutenant shook his head, put down the magazine unopened.
Sitting at the desk in his cabin, head in hands, Sandy Hamilton stared bleakly at the snapshot in the silver frame: a young woman in a bathing costume sitting on a beach towel against a background of coconut palms; tresses of fair hair trailing forward over brown shoulders, white rimmed sun-glasses giving a commonplace anonymity to a face he knew to be beautiful. The scrawled inscription, Love, Camilla, was the only clue to the subject’s identity. But he wasn’t thinking of anything as pleasant as the week-end at the Tuna Inn, nor the promise of a repeat performance on Restless's return to Kilindini.
Something more serious, less pleasant, was occupying his mind; the conversation in the Captain’s cabin shortly after the message drop. Barratt had given no hint of what was in the message, no indication of its origin. It was almost certainly from Navy HQ in Kilindini since it was an official drop, but why that and not W/T? Other than remarking that it was information, not orders, and that it had influenced his decision, Barratt hadn’t referred to it. Nor had he mentioned it when outlining his plan of attack, a plan which struck Hamilton as harebrained, suicidal; the words he’d so nearly used to Barratt. The Captain had not gone into the details of Operation Maji Mark Two — ‘You’ll get all that at the briefing, Number One. Nothing to be gained by going over it now’ — but its outlines were enough to fill Hamilton with foreboding. Not so much for the tactical disaster and the casualties he foresaw, as for the scale of the diplomatic consequences of so flagrant a breach of Portugal’s neutrality, however much her sympathies might lie with Britain.
The Captain had made no attempt in recent weeks to conceal his attitude towards the Japanese. It was not the intense dislike of an enemy that was normal and rational; fiercer, more primitive than that, it was motivated, Hamilton suspected, by emotional stress. The whole affair, the way in which the hunt for the submarine had been conducted, the failure to answer signals from Captain (D), the refusal to obey orders, or to cooperate with the RAF, was so irrational, so abnormal, as to suggest a mind that was unbalanced.
It was not the captain of the submarine Hamilton had had in mind when asking for the definition of a psychopath:… someone emotionally unstable to an almost pathological degree though he has no specific or marked disorder… impulsive, can be highly intelligent… attitude turbulent and emotional… The doctor’s words persisted in the First Lieutenant’s mind. Did not Barratt’s actions place him somewhere in that catalogue of symptoms?
The weather began to change soon after sunset, tumbling masses of cloud drifting in from the north-east, the barograph stylus tracing a steep downward slope as the glass fell.
In the chartroom Charlie Dodds watched the trace with frowning disapproval. Though not on watch he was in a constant state of anxiety with the destroyer close inshore in such hazardous waters, and a dark night with rainstorms still to come. A few minutes earlier the Captain had come to the bridge, looked at the weather and decided that the patrol line should be shifted a mile to the north-east to give Restless better radar coverage of the creek.
Dodds had pointed out that the alteration would make sighting of the destroyer easier for the Japanese each time she reached the north-eastern end of the patrol line, particularly if there was moonlight.
‘I’ve no doubt we’ve been sighted, Pilot. By now they must have put a lookout on the headland.’