The Black Tide

It must have been about ten minutes later that the door was pushed open and he came bustling in, a briefcase in one hand, a file of papers in the other, his face still pink with the cold outside and his overcoat glistening with melted snow. A bright red woollen cap was perched incongruously on his head. ‘So you’re going to Nantes.’ He dumped his papers and briefcase on the desk. ‘Mrs Shipton asked me to tell you they’ve booked you on tomorrow’s flight.’ He glanced at his watch, then passed me my anorak from the chair where I had thrown it. ‘We’ll be late, I’m afraid. I said one o’clock and it’s that already.’ He hurried me out, along a corridor that led to another set of lifts, explaining as we went that after I had left his club the previous night Michael Stewart had suggested we had lunch with him in the Captain’s Room at Lloyd’s.

‘That’s if you were going to work for us. I take it you are?’

‘So long as I have a free hand,’ I said.

He gave me a quick hard look. ‘The Petros Jupiter?’

I nodded.

The lift came. ‘I don’t think we’ll object to your running the enquiries in-tandem. I know Mike won’t. He knows now he slipped up on the Petros Jupiter. He should never have written the slips. As good as told me so last night. But it’s the other two claims … if he has to meet those—’ He gave a little shrug. We were out into Lime Street, picking our way diagonally across the grey, churned-up slush of the roadway and into the great arched portals of Lloyd’s itself.

I couldn’t help it. I suddenly felt overwhelmed, a sense of excitement, of awe almost. All my life, ever since I had gone to sea, I’d always heard of Lloyd’s. It had always been there in the background, to initiate enquiries into any misadventure, any slip-up in navigation, to survey the ship, check seaworthiness, pay for damage, arrange salvage, the cargo too — and here I was entering the building, being taken to lunch in the Captain’s Room. A waiter took our coats, a magnificent figure in long scarlet greatcoat, black-collared and cuffed, the whole elaborate archaic paraphernalia topped off with a gold-banded tall black hat. The grandeur and opulence of that entrance; it was more like a museum, except the undercover roadway went through to the offices of the Baltic Exchange. ‘I said

I’d pick him up at his box,’ Saltley said. ‘Give you an opportunity to see the Room.’

We went through swing doors into a high room floored in black, white and grey marble, half a dozen flags flanking a stained glass window at one end, and at the other a scarlet-coated waiter sitting at a desk. Saltley said good morning to him, produced a plastic pass card and went on through revolving doors that were posted as Private — for the use of Members and their associates, through into a lofty, galleried room the size of a football field filled with dark-suited men armed with papers, books and files. They stood about, talking softly or hurrying between the ranks of ‘boxes’ that were the underwriters’ pitches and looked like old-fashioned, high-backed pews, except that the men sitting in them were writing busily or looking up information in the books and ledgers that were stacked on the shelves.

‘It goes on like this all day,’ Saltley said over his shoulder as he pushed his way to the far end of the Room. ‘Most of the fellows you see rushing about are brokers and their clerks busy getting underwriters to sign the slips that give insurance cover to whatever the business is they’re handling. Looks a madhouse, but the box arrangement is the most space-saving way of handling such a huge volume of business.’

The wall to the left was papered with telex sheets and typed information, the Stock Exchange news running into weather forecasts and sports results. There were three lifts, but Saltley turned away from them, threading his way quickly between ledger-piled