The Ferry (7 page)

“There’s no need for you to stick around,” Stratton tells me. “I’ve got a team here. Mark Phillips shouldn’t even have called you in the first place. I still don’t quite understand why he did that.”

“I’d like to stay,” I reply, “at least for the rest of today. Now I’m here, I might as well see if I can be useful.”

“No more wild moves, though,” he mutters. “You don’t go anywhere without my express permission. I don’t know what things were like before my time, but now that I’m in charge, there’s a chain of command, and I’m right at the top.”

“Have fun up there.”

“I know who you are, you know,” he continues. “People still talk about you, Sophie Carpenter. If you hadn’t quit, you’d probably be in my shoes right now.”

“Lucky miss,” I reply with a faint smile, before turning as I hear raised voices nearby. Over by the farthest trailer, an elderly woman is being guided back by a couple of rescue-workers, but she’s shouting about something.

“Great,” Stratton says with a sigh. “Another crazed local doing her best
Straw Dogs
impression.”

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“It’s the old dear from that house on the other side of the bay. She’s been down here all morning, ranting about how we need to pack up and get out of here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t care. She must be ninety if she’s a day.” He turns to me. “I’m not taking advice from her, and I’m not taking advice from you. I don’t believe in heroes, and I run my operations as a team effort based on data analysis and strict interpretation of the rules. Anyone who tries to stand out or overstep their role is unwelcome. Maybe that seems boring, but it gets things done. If you don’t like that, you can follow Mark and get the hell out of here.”

“No, I just -” Pausing, I try to work out what he means. “Follow Mark out of here?”

“After this operation,” he replies. “Didn’t he tell you? He handed in his notice a couple of hours ago, he’s following you out into the real world.” As his radio crackles, he takes a step back. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a million and one things to be doing, so I’ll catch up with you later. If you cause any trouble at all, you’re out of here.”

As he walks away, I try to make sense of that last bombshell. Mark never mentioned anything about leaving the coastguard, which would seem like kind of relevant information given that he called me up out of the blue, five years after our last contact. It never occurred to me that he was keeping something from me, but now I’m starting to think that he hasn’t been entirely honest about his reason for getting in touch.

A few hundred feet further inland, the old woman is finally being led away.

Chapter Five

“So we took that registration number you were able to read while you were on the ferry,” Louis explains, as he works on his laptop in the data trailer, “and we ran it against every database we could think of.”

“And?” I reply.

“Nothing. According to national and international maritime agencies around the world, there’s no vessel with the 4889013 mark.” He pauses, and I can tell that there’s something else, something he hasn’t told me yet. “At least,” he adds, “there’s no
current
vessel with that mark.”

“Where’s Mark?” I ask, looking back along the trailer.

“He stepped out for some fresh air. The thing is, I checked -”

“Fresh air?” I reply, turning back to him. “How did he seem?”

“I don’t know, really. Tired?”

“How well do you know Mark?” I ask.

“We’re on the same pub quiz team.”

“Do you know why he’s quitting the coastguard?”

“Quitting?” He stares at me for a moment, and it’s clear that this is news to him. “The coastguard is his life. There’s no way he’s quitting.”

I pause for a moment, before turning back to the laptop. “Sure. I must’ve got my wires crossed. Show me what you’ve got here.”

“I finally checked out a database that covers lost vessels,” he explains, opening another browser tab, “and I found this sucker on a list of lost, un-recovered cargo vessels.”

“Lost?” I ask, leaning down to look at the screen. “As in stolen?”

“As in sunk,” he replies, scrolling down the page until he comes to a black-and-white photo. “As in glug-glug, down the spout, sleeping with the fishes. Recognize it?”

As soon as I see the photo, I realize that he’s right. Even from this grainy view, it’s clear that he’s found an image of the ferry in some far-off port. After all these years, we’re finally starting to find out where this damn thing comes from. Looking at the photo’s caption, I see a name.

“The Aspheron?” I mutter. “Sounds… What is that, Greek?”

“Could be. We’re still trying to find the origin of the boat, but so far we know that by the 1940s it was running trade routes out of Hong Kong. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that, of course. It was quite common back in the day to flog rusty old piles to the other side of the world.”

“The 1940s? How old is this thing?”

“This photo shows it in 1946,” he explains. “As you can see, even by then it was in need of a fresh paint job. It’s hard to believe anyone would risk their life by sailing in the damn thing, but I guess people get desperate. Safety standards weren’t exactly top-notch back then. I’ve located partial records for the trade routes of the time, and the Aspheron seems to have been in near-constant use, mainly heading out to places like Singapore and as far south as northern Australia.”

“Talk about a workhorse,” I mutter. “But how did it end up here?”

“That’s where we’re stumped,” Louis continues, scrolling further down the page, “because in 1949, age and poor maintenance finally caught up with the Aspheron.” He turns to me. “The goddamn thing sank in Hong Kong harbor, taking three crew-members with it. Mark and I tried to make sense of the whole thing, but we’re stumped.”

“Okay,” I reply, “but -”

“And here it is,” he adds, scrolling down a little further until he reaches a grainy underwater photo, “in 1972, when divers looking for another wreck happened to find the remains of the Aspheron. Right where it should have been, in Hong Kong harbor.”

Staring at the screen, I can’t help but feel a shudder of recognition as I see the same deck that I was briefly walking on last night. I want to say that there’s been a mistake, that somehow they’ve mistaken one boat for another, but deep down I know that isn’t possible. This photo even shows the bridge, with the windows dark, just like they were when I was swinging past them.

“That’s nearly thirty years,” Louis points out, “that the Aspheron spent in the depths of Hong Kong harbor.”

“So who raised it?” I ask. “And why?”

“No-one, according to the records. Another research team reported seeing the wreck in 1981, but there’s certainly nothing to indicate that it was ever recovered.” He turns to me. “Hong Kong harbor is one of the busiest in the world, you can’t exactly raise a boat without anyone noticing. You need permits and documentation coming out of your wazoo before you can even think about something like that.”

“If it had been underwater for that long,” I point out, “there’s no way anyone could just bring it up and start using it again. The amount of work required would be economically and practically unfeasible, you’d be talking about a massive undertaking, and for what? Just to get that heap of junk to float again for a few more years? There’s no reason for anyone to do anything like that, and even if they did, there’d be a record.”

“So how did that boat,” he asks, tapping the screen, “end up off the shore of Cornwall last night?”

***

“I thought I’d find you out here,” I say half an hour later, as I reach a section of the clifftop that overlooks the entire bay. “I remember how you always used to find the most desolate spots when you needed to get away from everything.”

“Should’ve known I couldn’t hide from you,” Mark replies, with a faint smile.

As I sit next to him on the tarpaulin he’s using as a makeshift blanket, I can’t help but reciprocate that smile. The storm has mostly died down now, and the rain has stopped, leaving just a strong wind that keeps trying to pull my hair loose from the pins that are holding it back. All around us, the long grass is waving and rustling, while down below the edge of the cliff there’s still a strong tide, with waves – albeit much weaker than before – battering the pebbly beach. I always think the natural world is at its most beautiful in the wake of a good, strong storm.

“Did they find anyone else?” I ask, looking back out at the gray, choppy sea.

“Search and rescue crews are all over the area,” he replies. “I don’t think they expect to do much rescuing, though. The odds of anyone being pulled out of there alive are…” His voice trails off, but he doesn’t need to finish the sentence.

We both know there’ll be no more survivors.

“The entire ferry is below the surface,” he continues. “There’s nothing floating, but they think they’ve found the location.”

“We need to go down there,” I tell him. “We need to check it out.”

He nods.

I shake my head. “We need to do it soon.”

He nods again.

“And you need to tell me the truth,” I add.

He turns to me.

“Stratton mentioned that you’re quitting,” I continue. “No offense, Mark, but you live for your work, you’re the kind of guy who’d probably drop down dead within six months of retiring.” I wait for him to offer an explanation, but finally I have to ask. “So what gives?”

“I…” His voice trails off again, and he turns to look back out at the bay.

“And why did you call me down here for this?” I ask. “You don’t need me here. You want me here, I’m useful here, but you laid it on a bit thick when you called.” Again, I wait for a reply, and again none is forthcoming. “What’s this all about, Mark?”

He stares out to sea for a moment, as waves continue to crash against the rocks below the cliff.

“It’s about that goddamn ferry,” he says finally. “Every time we come close to finding it, it slips away.”

“I know, but -”

“I won’t let it happen this time. Still…” He pauses. “You were right earlier. I was so focused on solving the mystery, I ignored the human element. If you hadn’t been here -”

“I
was
here,” I reply. “Is that another reason for calling me in? To act as your conscience?”

Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a battered notebook that I recognize immediately. “Remember this?” he asks.

Taking the notebook, I start flicking through the pages. Mark and I used to take turns making notes about the ferry, so there’s a mix of my handwriting and Mark’s. Turning to the first page, I spot an entry marked almost ten years ago, which was when we first became aware of the ferry.

“It became our white whale for a few years, didn’t it?” he says after a moment. “Remember how much time we spent trying to pin the damn thing down? Every time it slipped into view, it’d slip away before we could do anything.”

“I never mentioned it to anyone else,” I reply. “I thought they’d write us off as crazy.”

“Me too, until it hit the Sullivan’s cruiser.”

“To be fair,” I point out, “we don’t
know
it was the ferry that hit them.”

“Don’t we?”

Pausing, I realize that he’s right: there’s no other explanation. Five years ago, the ferry hit that cruiser and caused it to overturn, and we weren’t able to save the family in time.

“I don’t want to say that I’ve become obsessed,” he continues, “but… I’ve become obsessed. After you quit, I carried on with my research. Over the past few years, I’ve found half a dozen references to the ferry in shipping documentation from around the world, and I’ve personally been involved in two investigations where an old ferry just like this one has been cited as the cause of an accident. It looms out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly, like a…”

His voice trails off.

“Say it,” I tell him.

“Like a ghost ship,” he admits. “Everyone else just thinks it’s a joke, but I tracked down a guy who used to work this coast in the eighties. He’d heard about the damn thing too. Turns out it’s a bit of a whispered legend in these parts.”

“There’s no way a rogue ferry of that size could be operating,” I point out. “With modern radar systems, modern shipping technology, it would’ve been identified and seized by now.” I wait for him to reply. “What port does it sail from? What routes does it take?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then what -”

“People have died because of this thing,” he continues. “Last year, a fishing boat called the Coretianna sank off the coast of Brittany, after being hit by an unknown vessel when visibility was low. Two years before that, another fishing boat near the Shetlands got into trouble when it was rammed by a boat that the captain claimed had come out of nowhere and struck them. He described an aging ferry that ignored all attempts at communication.”

“And you think that was the Aspheron?”

“I
know
it was the Aspheron.”

“Then what -”

“Did you read the report into the Sullivans’ deaths?”

A shiver passes up my spine at the mention of that incident. “Mark -”

“Did you read it?”

I shake my head. “I avoided it.”

“There was evidence on the upturned hull of their cruisers that they’d been hit by a large vessel.” He pauses. “I went through the records and there was no evidence of another vessel in the area, but -”

“Stop,” I reply, fighting the urge to get up and walk away.

“Now do you understand why I called you last night?” he asks. “If I’m right, this ferry has caused several incidents over the years, including the accident that killed the Sullivan family.”

“You’re putting two and two together and coming up with forty,” I tell him.

“I’m considering the possibilities. When you quit the coastguard five years ago, after the Sullivan family’s accident, I damn near followed you out, but I decided to stay and keep investigating this ferry. I swore that if I ever tracked it down properly, that’d be the end for me. I came close several times, but it always slipped away before I could get to it. Given the link to the Sullivan family, I thought you’d want to be involved. We always agreed that you’d come back if we had a real shot at this thing.”

“There’s only so long you can get away with calling me a consultant,” I point out.

“I don’t care. I’m willing to break every rule in the book to get this thing nailed down.”

Nodding, I watch as waves continue to crash against the rocks below. I open my mouth to tell him about my visions of the dead Sullivan girl, but at the last moment I hold back. Glancing toward the other end of the bay, I spot the distant house. Again, I open my mouth to tell Mark about the girl, but again I resist. Finally, I turn to him and see that he’s still looking out at the horizon.

“I see the girl sometimes,” I tell him, my voice trembling slightly.

“Which girl?”

“The girl from the Sullivans’ boat. Mary Sullivan.”

He pauses. “When you say you see her -”

“Clear as day,” I continue, with tears in my eyes. “Standing right in front of me, staring at me as if she knows I should have done more to save her.” Taking a deep breath, I force myself to keep from crying. “I first saw her that night on the rescue boat after I came around. I thought it was an artifact of the concussion, but ever since, every few months… I have nightmares, too. I never used to believe in ghosts or any of that stuff, but I swear to God, I see Mary Sullivan sometimes. When I’m awake, when I’m asleep…” Pausing, I watch the waves for a moment longer, before turning to him. “I’m glad you called.”

“I almost didn’t.”