Endangered Species (40 page)

‘Yes.'

‘You had a rough time from what I hear. I only got locked in the shit-house!' They chuckled together, reviewing their respective luck.

‘I'm sorry we didn't save the woman,' Stevenson said, thinking of the baby.

‘Pity, after what the Old Man, Chas Taylor and Freddie did.'

‘Yes, poor Chas . . . I keep thinking of him and poor old
Ernie York; even Macgregor. He was going to fill me in here, if he got the chance.'

Sparks grunted. ‘Man proposes and God fucks him up,' he philosophised.

‘Old Gorilla did pretty well, though, didn't he? Took us all by surprise.'

‘Especially Rawlings,' said Sparks, and they chuckled at the Mate's discomfiture. ‘
He
's not so bad really. Did a good job with the boat people.'

‘Yes. He's okay.'

‘I wonder what'll happen to the Viets.'

They relapsed into silence and then Sparks straightened up, slapping the teak rail. ‘Well, Alex, I've a busy day tomorrow, up to my bollocks in bumph. Better get some shut-eye. Good night.'

‘Good night.'

‘Come on, Pritch, drink up.'

Braddock stood with the mess-room rosy in one hand and the other held out for Pritchard's beer can.

‘Tidy bugger. You're wors'n my old woman.'

Leaning back in his steel chair, Pritchard tipped the last drops of lager into his upturned mouth with exaggerated finality. Then he lobbed the empty can neatly into the rosy, simultaneously letting his chair slam back on to the deck. The crash of the chair and clatter of can was accompanied by a loud belch.

‘You are a coarse sod,' said Braddock inoffensively, returning the rosy to its corner.

‘Dat's what my old woman used to say.'

‘She'll be able to tell you regular now, remind you what we've had to put up with.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Funny about Macgregor.'

Pritchard hoisted himself unsteadily to his feet. ‘What's funny?'

‘Don't know, really. Didn't like 'im, but . . .' Braddock shrugged. ‘Well, I didn't wish 'im dead.'

Pritchard stretched, his extended fingers reaching the deckhead. ‘What's it fucking matter, Brad?'

On the deck above, the refugees were almost all asleep. Armed Chinese constables guarded the doors of both the saloon and the smoke-room. For long into the night the men had smoked and talked in undertones, their voices hissing like waves breaking on a beach. At about one o'clock Freddie Thorpe had made his last rounds before turning in. Peering into the dimly lit saloon he watched the last debate end, the last cigarettes glow in the darkness.

‘What happen Vietnamese people?' he asked the policeman, who shrugged. The Chinese officer had seen too much during his service among the Alsatias of Hong Kong's overcrowded purlieus to produce a compassionate response.

‘Maybe go to camp, maybe be repatriated.'

‘There's cholera in the camps.'

‘Maybe. They' – the Chinese constable jerked his head at the settling forms beyond the double doors – ‘are a problem; Hong Kong is too small. Hong Kong has plenty of problems.'

‘Too many problems in the world,' Thorpe said, turning away.

‘Too many people,' said the Chinese policeman to his retreating back.

At two in the morning Stevenson shared a pot of tea with the Chinese constable on the bridge. Their conversation was monosyllabic and neither sought to prolong it. With his cup the policeman retired to the bridge-wing. Stevenson remained in the chart-room writing up the log when Tam, having evaded the guard on the smoke-room door, whispered his name:

‘Alex!'

He spun round, pleased to see her. ‘Hullo,' he whispered, and quickly drew her out of the policeman's line of sight. ‘No can sleep?'

She shook her head and tried to peer out on to the dark bridge-wing in search of the police guard.

‘He's okay,' Stevenson reassured her. ‘You're all right with me. I'll make you some tea.'

While he bent to the task she asked, ‘What happen tomorrow?'

He shook his head, handing her the hot mug. ‘I don't know, Tam. Now you are here, in Hong Kong, the padre says the authorities will let you stay. You'll know tomorrow.'

‘We'll go to a camp, yes?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid so.'

The girl nodded. Illuminated by the dim chart lamp her face was like ivory, a beautiful mask, Stevenson thought, hiding the turmoil and uncertainty within. His heart was thundering in his breast as he braced himself, knowing that her evasion of the police guard and her appearance on the bridge may have been motivated by fear, but hoping something more personal had triggered her action. He felt a prickling shame that despite his bold resolutions all he had done for her was make her a cup of tea.

‘There may be cholera in camp,' she said and he felt the force of implication in her dark eyes. He guessed the opportunist desire which might lie beneath the bald statement, yet she had made no effort to entrap him. He suddenly found he did not care, and with the carelessness came the conviction that life was an act of faith. He had cast Cathy aside, but he did not want to lose this girl.

‘Tam,' he began huskily, the ridiculous fluttering in his belly inexplicably making his voice quaver so that it faltered. Instead he held out his hands to her.

The morning was a suffocating sequence of bureaucratic obligations for Captain Mackinnon. The crew had to be paid
off, statements made in the presence of the Panamanian vice-consul; the deaths had to be registered and depositions made at the Coroner's office. From the agent's he made a telephone call to York's son seeking instructions about the body, followed by a fruitless attempt to do the same for Macgregor. The wretched man had no next of kin, he discovered, and Mackinnon wasted an hour tracking a sister who had long ago deserted the only address they had for her.

Nothing seemed real. His interference with those distant lives as he blundered into their night hours gave him a sense of remote detachment.

A further hour was devoted to locating Caroline Taylor. A man's voice sleepily anwered the number he had been given. He refused to let Mackinnon speak to Taylor's widow.

‘D'you know what time it is?' the voice protested.

‘It's about her husband. She should have been informed . . .'

‘Yes, yes, she heard yesterday.' There was an edge of complicit guilt in the man's tone. ‘Look, I'm afraid she's not very well at the moment.'

Mackinnon felt a rising anger. Taylor's preoccupied misery came back to him. He held on to his temper and explained he wanted instructions regarding the body.

‘I don't think she knows,' the man said after a pause in which, Mackinnon hoped, he had at least consulted the young woman. ‘You'd better contact his family. Wait, I'll give you a number.' A strong sense of the lovers divesting themselves of any responsibility came to him, and he imagined it bouncing up to the satellite and back to the other side of the earth while he hung on. In her deceit, Caroline Taylor was, he guessed, far beyond the point of remorse. Perhaps Taylor had known.

When the man finally provided the information Mackinnon dialled again and waited. In his mind's eye the telephone rang in the empty darkness of a large house.
Taylor's mother was icy in her self-control, only her silences betrayed the effort it cost her.

‘How did it happen?' she asked and Mackinnon explained at length. From what she subsequenly said Mackinnon concluded she was a widow or lived alone.

‘Bury him in Hong Kong, Captain,' she said at last. ‘Let me know when it is to be and I will . . .' Her voice caught.

‘Are you sure?' Mackinnon asked.

‘Yes,' she said, her voice stronger, ‘It is what he would have wanted.'

‘Yes, I rather think it is,' Mackinnon agreed.

He put the phone down. He was stiff with sitting and rose slowly to his feet. The reactive fatigue after his ordeal was beginning to catch up with him. Wearily he shook his head to clear it, bracing himself for the encounter with Dent.

James Dent received him in an opulent office high above the streets. It commanded a magnificent view of the harbour and Mackinnon knew he was supposed to feel awed, to be trepanned from his familiar environment of a ship's bridge and caught at a disadvantage upon the acre of blood-red carpet. Dent sat behind a large desk, staring out of the window. Over his shoulder the
Matthew Flinders
looked no bigger than a child's shoe.

‘I have effected the change of Master,' Mackinnon reported formally. ‘Apart from your agent's attendance with the money to pay off the crew, that concludes our business together.'

Dent turned with a studied and intimidating arrogance. ‘I looked at your file before I left London, Captain. You've been with us a long time.'

‘I knew your grandmother.'

‘There's no room for sentiment in business, Captain.'

‘Quite so. But you've had your pound of flesh.'

Dent's expression became hard, the handsome, proud young face flushed beneath its cow-lick of blond hair. ‘You've
caused me a lot of trouble.'

‘It doesn't matter much now, does it? Pay off the crew—

‘I'm going to,' Dent said with a sudden petulance, and Mackinnon saw, beneath the bland assurance of the businessman, the thwarted youth. ‘The whole bloody lot are going. You've made things very awkward for me by bringing the ship here instead of taking it to Shanghai.'

Mackinnon mastered his rising anger. He was too old and tired to change the world. A sudden, terrible and perverse yearning came over him, a poignant desire to be once again on the bridge of the
Matthew Flinders
, to be pitting his wits and his ship against the insensate fury of the typhoon. Odd so awful a situation should seem preferable to giving this spoiled, overpowerful brat a piece of his mind. But it did not matter, could not matter, for he was without influence.

‘Call it an act of God, Mr Dent,' he said calmly. ‘That's the official designation of the typhoon through which we passed. It made things very awkward for us too.'

‘I'm afraid the company will be unable to foot the bill for your wife's accommodation after all,' Dent went on, ‘and her air fare is being deducted from our final settlement of salary to you.'

The meanness of Dent's decision failed to outweigh the irony of his action. Despicable as it was, Mackinnon's contempt overcame his affront.

‘As you say, Mr Dent, there is absolutely no room for sentiment in business.'

He went out into the wide atrium. A huge and abstract oil painting thick with impasto hung above the beautiful Eurasian receptionist. She smiled mechanically at him. Mackinnon glared ferociously back. In his mind's eye a hundred and forty-six pallid faces stared up at him from the deck of a derelict junk.

‘You know nothing,' he said to the astonished young woman, ‘nothing at all.'

The room at the Orient Star Hotel was much cheaper and closer to the true heartbeat of Hong Kong. ‘More like the
pensiones
of Florence,' Shelagh said, smiling and reminding Mackinnon of the prospect of a leisure limited only by death.

He grunted, sitting on the edge of the bed. Death had obsessed him lately. First the funerals, then the days in court reliving those few, climactic moments of Macgregor's end . . .

‘What's the matter?' Shelagh asked.

‘Eh? Oh, nothing. Just missing some air conditioning.'

‘And I thought you such a tough guy,' Shelagh said, still smiling as she stepped out of her dress. ‘I'm going to take a shower.'

He lay back exhausted after their day of sight-seeing, wanting his own turn in the shower, followed by a drink. For Shelagh's sake he would endure these dog-days of tourism, but already he missed the ship's routine and had begun to consider the galleries of the distant Uffizi preferable to this haunting of a waterfront upon which he now wished only to turn his back.

He had discharged his final duties two days earlier. There had been the court appearance necessary to try Phan Van Nui for the murder of Macgregor. The witnesses were
called, unfamiliar figures out of their uniform. Stevenson boyish and almost a different person from the young officer with whom Mackinnon had spent the last two months of his life. It was always like that, Mackinnon mused, at the end of a voyage.

Under the circumstances, justice had been swifly done. Alone among the boat people, Phan's life imprisonment was a decision easier to reach than the fate of his fellow Vietnamese. The irony of the life-long detention at Her Majesty's pleasure struck Mackinnon forcibly. Was it an old man's indulgence to question so solemn an institution as the law? Somehow he found it impossible not to, to contrast the limbo into which the innocent boat people were cast with the solicitous incarceration meted out to Phan Van Nui. In a sense Phan had won.

Even now Mackinnon found the situation's flaws outweighed the law's remorseless majesty, so much so that the memory of the defence's claim that in the person of Captain John Mackinnon Phan Van Nui had met ‘great and insupportable provocation' only made him chuckle. Something had happened to him during the typhoon, something he was only just beginning to understand, to recognise as a profound change within himself. He was not yet certain what it was, but he seemed to see things with a bewildering clarity, as though for the first time. There had been a craziness about the courtroom proceedings to match his own madness in defying Dent and his gunboat cronies, a fact obliquely referred to at one point in an unwise attempt to demonstrate his, Mackinnon's, despotism.

Fortunately the judge had directed the snide remark inadmissible and Phan had been sentenced to life imprisonment, but Mackinnon was uneasily aware that this collision of variant stupidities begged the question of which was
reality
.