The Black Tide

It’s hard to explain, for in the hours I sat there, sleepless, with the noise of the front coming in out of the Atlantic steadily increasing, I went through several stages. I had already passed through shock and had reached the point of feeling sorry for myself when I came down seeking the comfort of the Armagnac. But then, as the fire of it gave me courage to face my loss and the loneliness that would follow, I came to feel that Karen wasn’t dead, that she still existed, not in her own body but in mine — that she had become part of me.

It was a strange feeling, for my thinking immediately became different. It was as though death had opened the door for me so that life had a new meaning, a new dimension — all life, not just human life. I was beginning to think like her. I suddenly felt at one with the Greenpeace movement and all those people who had tried to stop the harp seal killers of Canada or to prevent the slaughter of the dolphins by the fishermen off Iki.

The world as I drank seemed to be shrieking aloud the cruelty of humans — not just to themselves, but to all living things. Greed, and a rage against nature. Karen was right. A rogue species. She’d read that somewhere. And about vested interests, too. There’d always be vested interests, always be reasons for not interfering, for allowing another species to be wiped

out, for letting them cut down another rain forest, pollute another stretch of coast, another sea, an ocean even, with oil or nuclear waste. She’d seen it. Now I was seeing it. And I hadn’t reasoned it out — it was just suddenly there in my mind, as though she had put it there.

A gust shook the walls, the wind tugging at the door and a sheet of spray lashing at the windows. The peat fire glowed and I saw her face in it, the long black hair let down and burning like a torch. Slumped in the old rocker, I relived the moment, the holocaust, confusing the peat-glow and seeing her body shrivel in the heat of it, and with that hallucinatory sight the anger that was there, deep inside me, boiled over, vengeance then my only thought. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Somebody had put that bloody ship on the rocks, somebody had been responsible — for the pollution, for Karen’s death.

Speridion? Another gust, the cottage trembling, and I spoke the name aloud. Aristides Speridion. And he’d got away in a boat. That’s what the marine consultant, an oil pollution specialist from Cardiff, had said at the meeting, that the second engineer of the Petros Jupiter was missing and they’d traced him through a Penzance fisherman to a stolen dinghy and a Breton fishing boat. I’d hunt him down. I’d kill the bastard. The wind howled and I emptied my glass, hugging that thought to me.

A bloody little Greek — they were always Greek. I’d find him and I’d get the truth out of him, and if he

was responsible, if he’d deliberately caused that damned tanker to go on the rocks …

Dawn was breaking as I finished the. last of the bottle and began to dress. The razorbills were dead by then, only the cormorants still alive, and the room was very dark, a lot of noise. There always was a lot of noise with a gale blowing out of the west and a big sea running. Lloyd’s! That was what was in my mind now as I shaved and dressed. With an insurance claim in, Lloyd’s would know where the man had gone to earth if anybody did. Lloyd’s of London — I’d phone them as soon as I had banked up the fire and got myself some breakfast.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn’t bother to clear up, I just got my anorak, picked up the containers holding the two live cormorants and shouldered my way out into the gale. One night. One single night. A split moment of time, and now everything had changed, my whole life. Clear of the cottage the wind took hold, thrusting me up the path. It was blowing a good force 9 and I could hardly breathe, the collar of my anorak whipping against my chin with a harsh whirring sound, and the waves thundering below me, the cove a white maelstrom of broken water thrown back by the rocks.

It was quieter when I reached the lane, a grey, miserable morning with ragged wisps of cloud flying in the wind, the moors all hidden. A herring gull sailed past my head, a scrap of paper blown by the gale. She would have liked that — one bird at least without oil on its feathers.

The blue van was parked in the yard of the Kerrisons’ place and I found Jimmy cleaning out the chicken

roost at the back of the outbuildings. I handed him the cardboard containers holding the cormorants. ‘The last thing she did,’ I said.

‘Okay, I’ll see they get to the cleansing centre.’ ‘Can I use your phone?’

He nodded and took me through into the house.

Jean called down to see if I was all right. The phone

was at the foot of the stairs and she leaned over the

banisters to ask if I could use a cup of coffee. I

answered her automatically, trying to remember the

departmental details given in Lloyd’s Nautical Year

Book. I didn’t want underwriters or salvage experts; I