The Black Tide

‘He didn’t want you to take any chances. That’s what he said. It’s just possible there’ll be a warrant issued for your arrest. And it was on the radio at lunchtime.’

‘On the radio?’ I stared at her.

‘Yes, an interview with Guinevere Choffel. She gave the whole story, all the ships her father had sailed in, including the Petros Jupiter — but differently to what you told us. She made him out a poor, unfortunate man trying to earn a living at sea and always being taken advantage of. Then, right at the end, she accused you of murdering him. She gave your name and then said she’d be going to the police right after the programme. It was an extraordinary statement to come over the radio. They cut her off then, of course. But

the interview was live, so nothing they could do about it.’

I was in their sitting-room, leaning against the door, and I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. I felt suddenly as though the world of black and white had been turned upside down, Choffel declared innocent and myself the villain now. I offered her the packet and she shook her head. ‘Vengeance,’ she said, a look of sadness that made her gipsy features suddenly older. ‘That’s Old Testament stuff.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’ The match flared, the flame trembling slightly as I lit my cigarette.

‘It was in your mind.’

She didn’t need to remind me. I half closed my eyes, inhaling the stale duty-free nicotine, thinking of Choffel. She didn’t have to start lecturing me, not now when I was being hounded out of the country. I wondered how he had felt, making up stories nobody believed. And then to seize that dhow just because I was on board the tanker, confronting him with his guilt. Did that make me responsible for the bullet in his guts?

‘Would you like me to try and see her?’

‘What the hell good would that do?’

She shrugged, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just thought it might be worth a try. If I could get her to come down here. If she saw where the Petros Jupiter had been wrecked, what a threat it had been to all our lives — if I told her, woman-to-woman, the sort of person Karen was, what she had done and why… Perhaps she’d

understand then. Don’t you think she would?’ Her voice faltered and she turned away. ‘I’ll go and see what Jimmy’s up to,’ she said. ‘You phone Plymouth and find out when the ferry leaves.’

In fact, there wasn’t one until noon next day so I had a last night at Balkaer and took the early train from Penzance. I felt very lost after saying goodbye to the Kerrisons, feeling I would never see them again, or Balkaer, and that I was now a sort of pariah condemned like Choffel to roam the world under any name but my own, always looking over my shoulder, half afraid of my own shadow. Even when I had boarded the ferry, my temporary papers given no more than a cursory glance, I positioned myself at the rail so that I could see everyone who boarded the ship, until at last the gangway was pulled clear and we sailed.

It was the same when I got to France. There was no trouble on landing, yet I still glanced nervously over my shoulder at the sound of footsteps, watchful and suspicious of anybody going in the same direction as myself. It was all in my imagination, of course, and a psychiatrist would probably have said I was developing a persecution mania, but it was real enough to me at the time, that sense of being watched. And so was the stupidity of it, the sheer craziness of it all. It was like a nightmare what was happening. A man wrecks a ship, your wife kills herself trying to burn up the oil spill he’s caused and you go after him — and from that simple, natural act, the whole thing blows up in your face, the man dead and his daughter

accusing you of killing him. And nobody to prove you innocent.

Just as there had been nobody to prove him innocent. That thought was in my mind, too.

How quickly you can be brainwashed, by changing circumstances or by the behaviour of other human beings. How strangely vulnerable is the human mind when locked in on itself, alone with nobody to act as a sounding box, nobody to say you’re right — right in thinking he’d sunk those ships, right to believe he was the cause of Karen’s death, right to believe in retribution.