The Black Tide

‘Go on,’ she said, and giggled because she hadn’t intended it as an invitation. ‘You started telling me about the man who came to your cottage. I interrupted, but please … I want to know everything that happened after I left you that day at Lloyd’s.’ She patted the coverlet beside her. ‘You went off the following day by air for Nantes…’

I took it up from there, and now she listened intently, almost hanging on my words, so that halfway through, when I was telling her about my eerie night walk the length of the tanker’s deck, I suddenly couldn’t help myself — I said, ‘I warn you, if you stay and listen to the whole thing I may find it very difficult to let you go.’

‘I could always scream the house down.’ She was suddenly laughing and her eyes looked quite beautiful. But then she said quickly, ‘Go on, do — how did you and Choffel land up alone on that dhow together?’

But at that moment footsteps sounded on the stairs. There was a knock at the door. ‘Can I come in?’ It was Saltley. He checked in the doorway, smiling at the two of us sitting on the bed, his quick gaze taking in the details of the room. ‘So this is where you’ve holed up.’

‘Why have you come?’ I was on my feet now, resenting the intrusion.

He unbuttoned his overcoat and seated himself on the chair. ‘Have the police been to see you?’ And when 1 told him about the Special Branch visit, he said, ‘That

was inevitable, and I warned you.’ He was staring at me, the smile gone now and his eyes cold. ‘Are you sure you didn’t shoot Choffel?’

‘Why do you ask? I told you how it was.’

And Pamela, suddenly very tense, asked, ‘What’s happened?’

He turned to her and said, ‘It was just after you left. A girl came to see me, a dark-haired, determined, very emotional sort of person. A secretary at some clinic in France, she said, and in her early twenties. She had flown in from Nantes this morning and had been given my name and the address of the office by the Lloyd’s agent.’

I sat down on the bed again, conscious of his eyes on my face. ‘Choffel’s daughter.’

He nodded, and my heart sank, remembering her words as I had left for the airport. ‘She claims you killed him. Says she’ll go to the police and accuse you of murder. Did you kill him?’

‘No. I told you—’

He waved aside my protest. ‘But you intended to kill him, didn’t you? That’s why you went to Colchester to check what other names he used, why you went to Nantes, why you got the Lloyd’s agent to take you to see his daughter. You were tracking him down with the intention of killing him. Isn’t that true?’

I didn’t say anything. There was no point in denying it.

‘So the girl’s right.’

‘But I didn’t kill him.’

He shrugged. ‘What does that matter? He’s dead.

You had the opportunity and the intention.’ He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Just so that you see it from her point of view. I’d like you to get yourself lost for a time. Sooner or later the man’s body will turn up. They’ll find a bullet in his guts and you’ll be arrested.’ And he added, ‘I don’t want you charged with murder before those tankers materialize.’

‘And when they do?’ I asked.

‘We’ll see. If they do, then part of your story will be corroborated and they’ll probably believe the rest of it, too. At least, it’s what I would expect.’ He asked me to continue then with the account I had been giving Pamela. ‘There’s one or two things towards the end I’d like to hear again.’ His reason was fairly obvious; if I was lying, then it was almost inevitable I’d slip up somewhere, small variations creeping in with each telling.

The first thing he picked me up on was Choffel’s reference to the Lavandou and what had followed. ‘His mother was ill. That’s what you said in my office. She was dying, and it was to get her the necessary treatment that he agreed to scuttle the ship. Did he tell you he was only a youngster at the time, twenty-two or twenty-three?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Twenty-two he told me.’

‘That’s what his daughter said. Twenty-two and the only ship he ever sank. Did he say that to you?’

‘No, not in those words.’

‘But he implied it?’

I nodded, the scene coming back to me, the sound: the sea and the stinking lazarette, and the dhow

wallowing. ‘Only once, he said, or something like that. He was talking about the Lavandou, how the operation had gone wrong and Lloyd’s had twigged it. I remember that because it was an odd way of putting it.’

‘You didn’t tell me that. Why not?’

‘Well, it’s what you’d expect him to say, isn’t it?’

‘You said that before, when you were trying to shake the destination out of him.’

‘Not the destination,’ I corrected him. ‘I’d been asking him that, yes. But when I was shaking him, and shouting Where? at him, it was where the two tankers were going to meet I was asking him.’

‘And he didn’t know.’