The Black Tide

I glanced at them all, pausing here and there to read. And then I had passed beyond that terrible Twelfth Night, back to cuttings that reported the effects of the stranding, the damage to the environment, the probable cost of pollution control, the proportion of the insurance claim to be borne by the London market, Lloyd’s in particular. There were pictures from two of the Sunday papers of the wreck and the salvage ships taken from the air. And then I was looking at a picture of the crew being landed at Sennen Cove. They looked Chinese, all except the officers whose names were given in the caption below. Aristides Speridion, Second Engineer. It was the first time I had seen a picture of the man. He had a lined, rather sad face, squarish with a dark moustache and dark hair, and a hooked nose so that he might have passed as a member of almost any of the

Mediterranean races. He was wearing a sweater under his uniform reefer and his ears stuck out prominently on either side of the peaked cap, which he wore pushed up on to the back of his head and at a jaunty angle as though he was pleased with himself and to hell with everybody else. The picture also revealed that, if this were the full complement, officers and crew numbered only fifteen.

I was sitting with my chin in my hands, my elbows on the desk, concentrating all my mind on absorbing and retaining the image of the man I now knew to be Choffel, and then suddenly my attention was caught by the face of a bystander right on the edge of the crowd to the left of the picture — a big man, half a head taller than any of the others, broad-shouldered, thick-set. He was in profile, but even so I could see the heavy set of the jaw, the big jowls and the round bullet head. The size of the man alone, the way he stood, the arms slack but the body balanced and alert — I didn’t need a caption to tell me who it was. Baldwick! And the date of that cutting was January 3, which meant he had come from Bristol immediately the news of the stranding broke. Why? That Sunday when he had come to Balkaer… he hadn’t said anything about having been in Sennen nine days before.

I leaned back, staring out of the window with its rime of snow, wondering why he had been there. Was it Choffel he had been after? At Balkaer all he had said was that he’d be in Falmouth that evening, to see the captain of the Petros Jupiter. No mention of the second engineer, no reference to the fact that he had

been there, in Sennen, when the whole crew were brought ashore. In any case, it wasn’t the captain who’d put the engines out of action. No, it had to be Choffel, and if I was right, then the one man who knew where the little bastard would be now was Baldwick. The card he had given me was in my pocket, but when I rang the Liverpool number he had scribbled on the back of it he had already left — for France, the hotel said, but they had no forwarding address.

His next destination was Nantes, a river port on the Loire, so probably Choffel had given him the names of possible ships’ officers he knew who needed money and were not too particular how they came by it. I phoned the Nantes number. It was the Hotel du Commerce. Yes, Monsieur Baldwick had a reservation, but he do not arrive yet. His room there was booked for two nights.

I leaned back again, staring out at the darkening sky, thinking about Len Baldwick and a story I had once heard of his early life in Sheffield, from a little rat-faced Sparks I’d met at an oil man’s flat in Basra. He’d been a shop floor convener in a privately owned steelworks then, a paid-up card-holding Communist, the man had said, and to his certain knowledge Baldwick had set fire to the home of a well-known Labour supporter who had accused him of intimidation. Was that what he’d done to Choffel, intimidated him? Had he fixed it all, the Vague d’Or, the Corsaire, the dhow in the Hormuz Straits? Was he the link by which I could catch up with the man?

My hand reached slowly out to the internal phone,

trembling slightly as I lifted the receiver and dialled the grey-haired woman’s extension. Phone me, she had said, if you want anything… and Saltley the night before trying to insist that I went out to Karachi for him. The woman answered. I took a deep breath and asked her to contact their usual travel agents and have them book me on the next flight to Nantes. She didn’t argue. She just took it in her stride as though a sudden request like that from a total stranger was the most natural thing in the world. All she said was, ‘Return or single, Mr Rodin?’

‘Single,’ I said. I thanked her and put down the receiver, and after that I just sat there, not caring what Saltley would say, only wondering what the hell I was letting myself in for.