The Black Tide

company reflected my own mood, the sense of being alone and on the brink of a voyage whose end I didn’t want to think about. The cabin was hot and airless, the two windows looking for’ard obscured by an ochre-coloured wash, the lights dim. I scratched at the window glass with my thumb nail, but the wash was on the outside. It annoyed me that I couldn’t see out, the place seeming claustrophobic like a prison cell. I changed into my clean white shirt, combed my hair back, my face pale and ghostly in the damp-spotted mirror, then turned to the door, thinking of that beer. It was then, when I was already out of the cabin and had switched off the light, that the windows were momentarily illuminated from the outside, a baleful glow that revealed a tiny diamond-gleam of white where a brush stroke had lifted clear of the glass. It was in the bottom right-hand corner of the further window, but it was gone before I could reach it, and when I crouched down, searching with my eye close to the glass, I had difficulty in locating it. Then suddenly there was light again and I was looking down on to the deck of the tanker, every detail of it picked out in the beam of a powerful torch directed for’ard at two figures standing in the bows. I saw them for an instant, then they were gone, the torch switched off, and it took a moment for my eye to adjust to the shadowy outline of the deck barely visible in the starlight. A man, carrying something that looked like a short-barrelled gun, came into my line of vision, walking quickly with a limp towards the fo’c’sle, and when he reached it the torch shone out again, directed

downwards now, three figures, dark in silhouette, leaning forward, their heads bent as they peered into what was presumably a storage space or else the chain locker.

They were there for a moment, then there was again no light but the stars and I couldn’t see them any more, only the dim shape of the fo’c’sle with the two anchor windlasses and the mooring line winch. Several minutes passed, my eye glued to the little peephole of clear glass, but the figures did not reappear, the steel of the deck an empty platform with the black silhouette of the cliffs hanging over it. Once I thought I saw the glow of a light from a hatchway, but my vision was becoming blurred and I couldn’t be sure.

I straightened up, blinking my eyes in the dark of the cabin. It was an odd feeling to be an officer on a ship and not know who was on board or what they were up to. Those shadowy figures, and the man with the gun limping towards them — probably they were just checking the mooring lines, or inspecting the lie of the anchor chain, making certain that the ship was ready to haul off and get under way, but the sense of something sinister was very strong.

I went out then and shut the cabin door, standing uncertain in the dim-lit passage. There was a small baggage room opposite my door, an oilskin store next to it, then the officers’ washroom and the alleyway leading down the starboard side to the messroom. I could hear the sound of voices. But still I hesitated, thinking about the men Baldwick had shipped in by from Baluchistan. Had they brought the ship

into the khawr and moored it against the cliffs, or had there been a different crew then? The crew’s quarters would be on the deck below. I had only to go down there to learn if they were Pakistanis. I glanced at my watch. It was just after six-thirty. They’d probably be having their evening meal, in which case this was the moment to take a look round the ship. There’d be nobody in the wheelhouse now, or in the chart room, the radio shack too — somewhere up there on the navigating bridge there would be some indication of the ship’s background, where she was from. And on the deck below, on the port side of C deck — the opposite side to the captain’s quarters — would be the chief engineer’s accommodation…

Perhaps it would all have been different if I’d gone up to the bridge then. But I thought it could wait, that just for a moment a beer was more important. And so I turned right, past the washroom, down the alleyway to the messroom door, and there, sitting talking to Rod Selkirk and the others, was Choffel.

Behind him a single long table with its white cloth stood out in sharp contrast against the soft, almost dove-grey pastel shade of the walls. The chairs, upholstered in bright orange, gave the room an appearance of brightness, even though the lights were ahnost as dim as in my cabin. Nevertheless, I recognized him instantly, despite the dim lighting and the fact that his chin was now thickly stubbled, the beginnings of a beard. He was wearing navy blue trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt with chief engineer’s tabs on the shoulders. He looked older, the face more drawn than

in the photographs I had seen, and he was talking with a sort of nervous intensity, his voice quick and lilting, no trace of a French accent.