Offshore (25 page)

He
studied the pictures closely, looking for clues, but the more he
looked, the less he saw. He needed a fresh pair of eyes and someone
to give him advice.

Half
past one in the morning found Eddie Capstan tapping softly on
Lydia’s cabin door, his face close to the wood.

“
Lydia? It’s me. Eddie,” he rasped. “I need to talk to
you.”

Silence.

Another
rap. “Lydia?”

From
deep inside came a muffled response. “Go away, Eddie. I’m
sleeping.”

“
It won’t take a minute.”

Tap,
tap, tap.

“
Please.”

She
groaned, swore, and a few seconds later, wrapped in a towelling
robe and rubbing her bleary eyes, she opened the door and let him
in.

“
This had better be important, Eddie, or I
swear I
will
have to hurt you.”

“
It is.” He placed his laptop on her desk, pulled out the
chair and sat her down while the computer booted up. He pulled up
the spare chair, turned it around and straddled it.

“
I want to talk to you about Reynolds and the fight he had
with McAllister last week,” he said. “How did he seem when he left
you?”

“
This is what you get me out of my nice warm bunk for? Two
blokes having a scrap?”

“
So how was he?”

She
yawned widely. “Cracked nose, black eyes, in some pain from his
ribs. I bound them up in a compression dressing, gave him some
painkillers and told him to contact me again if things
changed.”

“
Things changed alright.” Eddie bit his lip. “You gave him
pills? Any chance they–?” He twirled a finger by his temple. “Sent
him bonkers.”

“
Like they did with me you mean?”

“
I’m just grasping at straws, Lydia.”

“
It’s possible, but unlikely. They were only a codeine
paracetamol combination, and not very strong. The worst they could
have done is made him constipated. What’s going on?”

“
Like I said, I’m grasping at straws, looking for some
reason why a man like Reynolds, who thought the sun shone out of
his own backside, would want to kill himself.”

“
Kill himself? You said he died in the fire.”

“
At first glance, that’s what I thought.” Eddie rooted the
memory stick from his pocket and plugged it in. “Will you look at
something for me? Give me your opinion, as a medical
person?”

Another
yawn. “If I must.”

A
dialogue box appeared and Eddie placed the pointer over it. “I warn
you now, it’s pretty grim,” he said.

“
Go ahead.”

A click,
and in all their grisly glory a gallery of photographs of the
charcoal human figure were displayed – the blackened grinning skull
with its boiled away eyes, the split abdomen, the gaping slashes in
the arms.

Lydia
sat back in her chair, distancing herself from the screen, her hand
over her mouth. “Oh my God!”

“
See here,” said Eddie, pointing out the sliced wrists.
“Straight across, almost down to the bone. Classical suicide
wouldn’t you say? I think, for a reason we’ll probably never know,
he set a fire and slashed his wrists hoping that when he passed out
from blood loss, the fire would finish him off.”

“
Did he leave a suicide note?”

“
Haven’t found one. It might have burned up.”

“
Possibly.” Lydia leaned closer to the screen. “I’m not sure
about his method.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
It’s too clean.” She touched the screen. “There would be
more cuts.”

“
Surely one would be enough, if it’s deep
enough.”

“
True. But very few are confident enough to slice right
through first time. More often than not there are a few exploratory
superficial cuts.”

“
Which I am presuming would be literally skin deep,” said
Eddie. “Shallow enough to be destroyed by the fire?”

“
Possibly, but contrary to popular belief, even when done
deeply, cutting across is not very effective. The flow is too slow
and sometimes it shuts down altogether. There was no guarantee he
would even pass out, let alone die from it. Slicing down the arm is
much more effective. A vein opened up lengthways bleeds out faster.
It was the Roman way and they knew what they were
doing.”

“
And I suppose you’ve seen plenty of both ways in your line
of work?”

“
You could say .. .I have a personal interest.”

She held
him for a moment with a firm gaze, and then pulled up the left
sleeve of her robe.

Eddie’s
eyes shifted to her arm, and the fine silver line running from her
wrist to her elbow. He gaped at it, his face turned inside out with
astonishment, shock, and horror.

In
silence she lowered the fabric, hiding the scar from view, the
plaster mask set of her face telling him two things – although she
trusted him with the knowledge of the existence of the scar, he
should never ask her how she got it, and she in turn would never
tell him, even with her dying breath.

A common
bond forged itself between them. Both had been taken to the brink
of death at the point of a knife and both had been dragged back and
given second chances, and neither of them wanted to talk about
it.

From his
cabin across the hall, Euterich heard every word of their
conversation and the clicks of the mouse, and smiled to
himself.

Capstan
was a very worried man. He had been given a puzzle he couldn’t
solve, events were slipping out of his control and it was eating
him up, unbalancing him, making him jittery.

This was
getting better and better.

However,
when a long silence fell, he felt sure something intimate had once
more occurred between the pair and it unsettled him, wiping the
smile from his face and replacing his feeling of haughty
self-satisfaction with a growing envy and detestation. Even hearing
Capstan leaving again did nothing to lessen the feeling.

Three
a.m, the darkest of the wee small hours when time slowed to a
trickle, Eddie Capstan shuffled through the door to the dark and
silent mess hall, to find Lydia already occupying a
table.

“
What are you doing here?” he said.

She
turned her mug around on the tabletop. “After that horror show, did
you really expect me to be able to close my eyes again tonight...”
She looked up at the clock on the wall. “...this morning. Could ask
the same about you.”

“
Couldn’t get to sleep. Too much going on in here.” He
tapped his temple.

“
There’s some fresh coffee made.” She held up the mug. “Get
me some more will you?”

Eddie
placed coffee mugs and two Tunnock’s teacakes on the table between
them.

“
Why are you here, Lydia?” he asked.

“
I told you. Because you woke me up and scared me half to
death with your pictures and horror stories.”

“
I’m sorry.” He pushed a cake across the table to her.
“Peace offering?”

Lydia
took the cake and peeled off the red and silver foil wrapper. “You
mean why am I here on Bravo, not why am I sitting at this table
pigging on chocolate cakes?”

“
Aye.”

“
I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours, and you go first
while I eat this.”

“
Because I’m being paid to be here,” Eddie said, picking the
wrapper off his own cake. “And when my paymasters say jump, I don’t
just ask how high, I just do it and ask if I can kiss their arses
on the way back down. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter.
I’m a company man, I do as I’m told, always have done, always
will.”

Lydia
laughed. “You really are a numpty aren’t you? You don’t have to do
anything you don’t want to, no matter who’s paying you. There is a
world of difference between the individual and the institution; the
two are not inextricably linked. You might think you’re just a deep
rooted company man, but peel away that veneer and we find plain old
Eddie Capstan underneath; a decent guy who wouldn’t say boo to a
goose, keeps five miles an hour under the speed limit, has never
had a parking ticket, likes meat and potato pie, loves his Mum and
never forgets her birthday. He’s a man who probably changes his
underpants twice a day because he might get run down by a number
nine bus and wouldn’t want to embarrass the nurses. Am I
right?”

Eddie
cleared his throat and looked at the table top. She had cut a
little close to the bone for comfort. He considered himself to be
an ordinary, law abiding sort of bloke, who recycled when he could,
had been a Boy Scout, and still helped old ladies across the
street.

He did
also have a passion for a decent meat pie, particularly when it
came with a thick flaky pastry crust, and was not allowed, on pain
of death, to forget his mother’s birthday.

“
Close enough,” he said, and pushed his whole sweet in his
mouth, swelling his cheek like an overstuffed hamster’s
pouch.

In total
contrast, Lydia broke the chocolate dome delicately with her teeth
and picked out a loose piece, exposing the soft white fondant
beneath. She explored the cavity with her tongue. It came out
coated in foamy white and she sooked it into her mouth, catching
every tiny morsel. More dipping. More sooking.

Satisfied that the sweet bubble had nothing left to offer,
she nibbled it away until only the sponge base remained, which she
popped into her mouth whole, letting her tongue sweep over her lips
and into the corners of her mouth, seeking out any stray flake of
chocolate.

Eddie
watched fascinated, and more than a little turned on. He had never
before seen anyone eat a chocolate teacake in such a seductive
manner and he felt sure he would never be able to look at one again
without getting a hard on. Not a good look in the biscuit aisle of
his local Tesco.

“
That was nice,” Lydia said, screwing the foil wrapper into
the tiniest possible ball. “I enjoyed it.”

“
Want another?” offered Eddie, a little too quickly. “I can
find one.”

He
dearly hoped she would say yes, because he would gladly have given
his entire week’s rations to see her do it again.

“
No,” she said, patting her stomach. “Got to watch the old
waistline.”

Bugger!

Silence.

“
So …” Eddie said. “Your turn.”

Lydia
rolled the silver foil ball between her fingers. “It’s a bit of a
cliché, but I’m here to get away from it all, to give myself some
time to take stock of where I am and where I’m going with my life,”
she said. “I’ve been thinking about making some changes for a
while, but I can’t decide what or how, and if I bugger about for
too long, it might be too late to do anything at all. I’ll be too
old and too poor to enjoy it, and if you can’t enjoy it, what’s the
point in doing it?”

“
You’ve been given a second chance, you don’t want to waste
it,” said Eddie, risking a cautious dig.

No
answer. Fair enough. He expected as much.

“
But of all the places in all the world, why here?” he
said.

“
It’s as good a place as any for an adventure. And let’s
face it, how many people get the chance to spend time on an oil rig
out at sea?”

“
Thousands.”

“
For
fun
?”

“
You call this fun?”

“
Compared to what I’ve been doing for the last ten years,
potting up broken limbs, clearing up after fights, patching up
scratches and gouges, doling out inoculations and antibiotics,
mopping up blood and shit and sick, believe me this is pure
Disneyland. At least it was until …”

“
Until we lost two crewmen?”

“
None of what’s happened is your fault, you know,” she said,
taking hold of his hand.

Eddie
wrapped his fingers around hers. “I wouldn’t be too sure about
that,” he said. “Whatever happens, and to whom, the ultimate
responsibility is mine. That’s what they are paying me
for.”

“
Now there are two people gone, will Longdrift send someone
out to investigate?”

Silence.

“
Eddie?”

“
They can’t investigate what they don’t know
about.”

“
Meaning?”

“
Meaning I haven’t told them about Reynolds’ death yet
–”

“
Eddie!”

“
I will. Soon. Tomorrow. I just wanted to get things
straight in my head first. That’s why I showed you the pictures, to
get your opinion, to get things straight before I said
anything.”

“
Did I help … or make it worse?”

He shook
his head and took a long slow mouthful of his coffee, his tired
world weary face contorted with angst. “A bit of both. You gave me
something to think about and… um …I’ve changed my mind. I’m not so
sure Daz did kill himself.”