The Black Tide

But he shook his head. ‘I have to tell you—’ He held his hand up as though to restrain me. ‘Gwyn has got it into her head you’re planning to kill me, you see. She is being over dramatic, of course. But it is what she says in her letter, so I thought it best to have a word with you. If it is true, and you think I had something to do with what happened to the Petros Jupiter, then I understand how you must feel.’ His hands finally clasped themselves together, locked so tight the knuckles showed white. ‘First, I must explain that the Petros Jupiter was not at all a good ship. Not my choice, you understand. The skipper was all right, but a man who did everything by the book, no imagination at all. The deck officers were much the same, but I only saw them at meals. It was the chief engineer — he was the real trouble. He was an alcoholic. Whisky mostly, about a bottle and a half a day — never drunk, you understand, but always slightly fuddled, so that nothing ever got done and I was expected to cover for him all the time. I didn’t know about that until we were the better part of a week out from Kuwait. He was a Greek and a cousin by marriage of the skipper.

I knew then why I had got the job. Nobody who knew the ship would touch it, and I’d been on the beach, you know, for a long time…’

He looked at me as though seeking sympathy, then gave a shrug. ‘But even when I knew about him, it never occurred to me there would have been a whole voyage, more than one probably, when the oil filters hadn’t been properly cleaned, almost no maintenance at all. You leave the oil filters dirty, you get lack of lubrication, you see — on the gears, both the primary and the secondary. The primary are double helical gears and the debris from them settles to the bottom and finishes up under the secondary reduction gear. In a seaway, rolling like we were that night, broadside-on to the waves, pieces of metal must have got sloshed up into the gears. We were all working flat out, you see, on the evaporator pipes. It had been like that all the voyage, the tubes just about worn out and always having to be patched up, so I didn’t think about the gears. I didn’t have time, the Chief mostly in his cabin, drinking, you know, and then, when we got steaming again…’ He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t put anything in the gears. It was the debris did it, the debris of bad maintenance. You understand? We were only a few miles off Land’s End when the noise started. It was the secondary reduction gear, the one that drives the shaft. A hell of a noise. The teeth were being ripped off and they were going through the mesh of the gears. Nothing I could do. Nothing anybody could do. And it wasn’t deliberate. Just negligence.’

He had been talking very fast, but he paused there, watching to see how I would react. ‘That was how it happened.’ He passed his tongue round his lips. ‘My only fault was that I didn’t check. I should have gone over everything in that engine-room. But I never had time. There was never any time, man — always something more urgent.’

He was lying, of course. It was all part of the game. ‘What did they pay you?’ I asked him.

‘Pay me?’ He was frowning, his eyes wide.

‘For doing the job, then slipping away like that so that no one else could be blamed, only Speridion.’ A professional scuttler, he would only have done it for a straight fee. A big one, too, for there was the skipper of the Breton fishing boat to pay and then the cost of flying out to Bahrain and fixing passage on the Corsaire.

He shook his head, his dark eyes staring at me and his hands clasping and unclasping. ‘How can I convince you? I know how it must appear, but my only fault was I didn’t check. I thought we’d make it. After we got through Biscay I thought that junk yard of machinery would see me through to the end of the voyage.’ Again the little helpless shrug. ‘I did think of going to the captain and insisting we put in for complete refit, but it was a Greek company, and you know what Greek shipowners are like when you suggest anything that cuts into their profits, and after the Cape… Well, there was nowhere after that, so I let it go.’ And he added, his hands clasped very tight, ‘Only once in my life—’ But then he checked himself,

shaking his head slowly from side to side, his eyes staring at me as though hypnotized. ‘Can’t you understand? When you’ve been without a job for a long time—’ He paused, licking his lips again, then went on in a rush of words: ‘You’ll take anything then, any job that comes along. You don’t ask questions. You just take it.’

‘Under an assumed name.’

His mouth opened, then closed abruptly, and I could see him trying to think of an answer. ‘There were reasons,’ he murmured. ‘Personal reasons.’

‘So you called yourself Speridion. Aristides Speridion.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you had a passport — Speridion’s passport.’

He knew what I was driving at. I could see it in his face. He didn’t answer, his mouth tight shut.

‘What happened to the real Speridion?’