The Black Tide

engine-room of HMS Formidable in 1952. There had been two of them. Forthright’s had then checked four sinkings in suspicious circumstances in 1959, also two in late ‘58. There followed details of the sinking in October 1958 of the French cargo vessel Lavandou, an ex-liberty ship, off the Caribbean island of Martinique. She had been abandoned in deep water, but the edge of a hurricane had drifted her into the shallows north-east of the island so that divers had been able to get down to her. They had found extensive damage to the sea water inlets to the condensers. Second engineer David Price, accused of sabotage by both captain and chief engineer, had by then disappeared, having taken passage on a vessel sailing for Dutch Guiana, which is now Surinam. The enquiry into the loss of the Lavandou found Price to blame. Final clincher for us, the telex concluded, is that he was signed on to the Lavandou as engineer at the port of Cayenne in French Guiana in place of Henri Alexandre Choffel who fell into harbour and drowned after a night on the town. Company owning Lavandou registered in Cayenne. A David Morgan Price served HMS Formidable 1952. Thank you. Pritchard.

That settled it. No good his daughter, or anybody else, trying to tell me he was innocent. Not now. Price, Choffel, Speridion — I wondered what he was calling himself now. None of the names, not even Price, was on the hotel guest list. I asked Gault about the dhow that had met up with the Corsaire in the Straits of Hormuz, but he knew nothing about it and wasn’t really interested. ‘Dhows gravitate to Dubai like wasps

to a honeypot. If you think he was brought in here, then you’d better try the carpet dealers, they know all the gossip. As far as I’m concerned, the Petros Jupiter is a UK problem. Choffel’s no concern of mine …’ He sat staring down at his coffee. ‘Who do you think would employ a man like Baldwick to recruit ships’ officers?’ Another pause. ‘And why?’ he added, looking straight at me.

‘I hoped you could tell me that,’ I said.

‘Well, I can’t.’ He hesitated, then leaned towards me and said, ‘What are you going to do when you meet up with this man Price, or Choffel, or whatever he’s calling himself now?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve got to find him first,’ I muttered.

‘So you’re letting Baldwick recruit you.’

‘Yes.’

‘A ship you know nothing about. God, man! You don’t know where she is, who owns her, what the purpose of the voyage is. You’re going into it absolutely blind. But you could be right.’ He nodded to himself. ‘About Choffel, I mean. A man like that — it makes sense. There has to be something wrong about the set-up or they wouldn’t be offering double rates and a bonus, and Baldwick wouldn’t be mixed up in it. When’s he get in to Dubai, do you know?’

‘Mustafa said tomorrow.’

‘Have you got his address here?’

I remembered then. ‘A telephone number, that’s all.’

He went to his desk and made a note of it. ‘I’ll

have somebody keep an eye on him then. And on this Libyan travel agent. Also, I’ll make enquiries about the tanker you’re joining. But that may not be easy, particularly if she’s over the other side of the Gulf in an Iranian port. Well, that’s it.’ He held out his hand. ‘Nothing much else I can do, except tell you to be careful. There’s a lot of money washing around this port, a lot of peculiar people. It’s much worse than it was when you were last here. So watch it.’ He walked with me to the stairs. ‘That boy who brought the tea. His name is Khalid. If my people pick up anything useful I’ll send him to you.’

‘You don’t want me to come here?’

‘No. From what you told me it could be dangerous. And if it’s politics, not money, you’ve got yourself mixed up in, then my advice is take the next flight home. Your background makes you very vulnerable.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. ‘Salaam alykoum.’

I walked back to the hotel, changed into a pair of swimming trunks and had a light meal at a table by the pool. The courtyard, airless in the shadow of piled-up balconies, echoed to the murmur of voices, the occasional splash of a body diving. Afterwards I lay in a chair sipping an ice-cold sherbet and thinking about the Aurora B, what it would have been like on the bridge, on watch, when spontaneous combustion, or whatever it was, sent her to the bottom. The people I had contacted in the insurance world — underwriters, Lloyd’s agents, marine solicitors, everyone — they had all emphasized that marine fraud was on the increase. Like ordinary crime, it was tax free, and as the stakes