The Snow Tiger / Night of Error (55 page)

‘Why don’t you study that file, M. Chamant? You’ve got it down in black and white – Hadley was the man who is supposed to have found my brother, but whom
I
say was his murderer – and Schouten told me so. I can’t prove that now, but I can prove everything else.’

I remembered another fact and produced it triumphantly.

‘I took photographs. Develop my film. It will tell you everything.’

‘M. Trevelyan, I am listening carefully. Of course we will check your camera, and we have already sent a police patrol boat to Tanakabu. But you still have a great deal to explain, and you are not yet released from arrest.’

I said, ‘I’ve got plenty to tell you! That damned bastard and his mate Kane – they’re the ones you want. They murdered Sven Norgaard, they murdered my brother, they murdered that poor bloody Schouten and they killed fourteen patients in his hospital – burnt them alive, do you hear – they burnt those poor wretches alive!’

Chamant was gesturing to the two policemen who heaved on my shoulders. I had lost all restraint in my anger, and was trying to climb over the table in my frenzy of trying to make Chamant see the truth. I slumped back, shaking a little and fighting for self-control. There was silence for a moment as we all contemplated my words.

‘Where is Hadley now?’ I asked him, trying to stay on the offensive.

He regarded me closely in silence still, then nodded gravely. He gave instructions to one of the men in rapid French, and the officer left the room smartly. Then he looked at me. ‘I am not yet ready to belieye you. But we will speak again with M. Hadley, I assure you. Meantime, I ask you to explain this, if you can.’

He pointed to a small box on a side-table and one of the remaining policemen brought it to his desk. Opened, it revealed four guns and a little pile of boxes of ammunition. I recognized two of the guns immediately.

‘Four guns with enough ammunition to start a war, M. Trevelyan. Not a cargo for a peaceful ship, a scientific expedition.’

‘Where did you find them?’ But I could guess, and I was troubled. This was going to set back the progress I’d made.

‘Three in the cabin of your M. Campbell. One in the possession of M. Wilkins, your captain.’

I made a weak gesture. There didn’t seem to be much to say.

‘You have seen them before?’

I said, ‘Yes, two of them. Mr Campbell gave me that one when we discovered that Kane had gone from our ship. I must tell you the whole story, in sequence you understand. This other one he had himself. But –‘

‘But?’

‘Neither of us fired a shot! If you exhume Schouten you’ll see he was shot three times, I think.’

‘Only the other two were fired.’

‘Yes, on our ship – when Hadley was getting away. We did try to ram him, to stop him – to bring him to justice.’ That phrase sounded melodramatic enough even for a Frenchman to gag on it, I thought.

‘You will tell me the story.’

So I did, leaving out all references to our search for manganese nodules, to Ramirez and Suarez-Navarro. I thought
that made it all far too complicated. I said only that Hadley, once chartering a boat for my brother and Norgaard, had quarrelled with them for reasons unknown, had murdered both of them and had implicated the Dutch doctor in his crime. I had come to seek the truth and had run into a hornet’s nest. It was circumstantial and very tidy. He made notes from time to time but said little.

When I finished he said, ‘You will write all this down and sign it, please. I am going to allow you to return to your ship, but you will see that you and all your crew are confined to quarters on board. There will be a police guard.’

He was interrupted by the return of the officer he had sent out, who came straight to his side and whispered agitatedly to him. They both got up to look out of the window and went on speaking in urgent undertones, in French. And somehow I guessed what they were talking about.

‘It’s Hadley, isn’t it?’

He turned to face me.

‘You’ve let him get away, haven’t you? You’ve let that murderous thug walk out of here!’

He nodded heavily. ‘Yes, he has apparently left. You must understand that there was no reason to hold him, after he placed the information and made a deposition. We would not expect him to leave here – it is his home port.’

Something about the way he spoke told me that he was deeply troubled, to the point of forgetting that he was speaking to a man under arrest. I could guess why. Hadley was surely known here as a tough and a trouble-maker. The police may well have had him under surveillance already, for his connections with Mark and Norgaard, and for all I knew for a score of other things. And in letting him get away M. Chamant had blotted his own copybook rather badly. I was furious and exultant at the same time.

He got himself in hand and gave instructions to take me back to
Esmerelda
, and I was only too happy to go. House
arrest seemed insignificant compared to being locked up in a cell. I went on board and was not particularly bothered by the sight of armed police dotted about, a couple on deck and more on the quayside, and a little knot of spectators shifting about as if waiting for a show to begin. In fact I managed a grin and a half-wave at them as I was ushered below, to their delight and the guard’s disapproval.

There was a babble of voices at my return and the same air of tense expectancy as on the dockside, only here it was tinged with anxiety and bafflement. They all crowded around me and started firing questions.

‘Wait up!’ I held them off goodnaturedly. ‘Plenty of time – too much, if anything. First, I want a wash-up and about a gallon of coffee and some food. Who’s cook?’

I headed determinedly for my cabin to get a change of clothes, leaving the others to see to my inner comforts – and was brought up by the sight of Geordie, still in his bunk in the cabin we’d been sharing all along.

‘Geordie! What the hell are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?’ I was already seething at this inhuman treatment, but he waved me down casually.

‘I’m fine, boy. It’s good to see you. What happened to you?’

‘Geordie, I’ll tell you together with the rest, once I’ve washed and had some coffee. Are you sure you’re all right?’

But in fact he looked a lot better, and I could see that his face had been professionally attended to, with neat stitches and tidier bandaging. As I stripped he said, ‘They wanted to cart me off but I sat firm. There’s nothing wrong with me that their pretty visiting nurse can’t fix. I’d get her to take a look at you too.’

He nodded at my hands, still partly covered with burnt skin, though they had started to heal pretty well on the short trip back. I completed a quick ablution and was finally seated in the saloon over breakfast and surrounded by the
whole of the crew of the
Esmerelda
– bar one. It was an immense relief not to see Kane’s face among the others.

I told them as much as they needed to know, reserving a few more private comments for Geordie and Campbell later.

‘He’s a worried man, that Chamant. Was even when he saw me, and he has to be even more so now that Hadley’s skipped,’ Campbell said.

‘He saw you?’

‘Oh yes, and the girls too, and Ian – wanted to speak to Geordie but he was unaccountably sicker just then.’ Geordie, propped up on a saloon berth, winked at me, and I realized that my news had cheered everyone up amazingly. Although we, and our ship, were all technically still under arrest it was clear that we weren’t in any real trouble, thanks to the various bits of evidence I had offered the police chief, and we lacked only physical freedom – not any of the oppression of spirit that imprisonment usually meant.

‘Tell me about your interview,’ I asked Campbell.

It had apparently been somewhat hilarious. Instead of being chastened at being caught with a small armoury under his bunk Campbell was airy and unconcerned about it, claiming that the guns were properly licensed, that he was a well-known collector and wouldn’t dream of travelling without something for target practice, and that in any case only one of his guns had been fired – and that by his daughter, gallantly defending herself from attack by a shipload of murderous pirates. He was scathing about Clare’s poor shooting and seemed not at all troubled by her having winged a man, only irked by her not having killed him outright. It appeared that while in Papeete, Kane had had a small bullet taken from his shoulder, ironically by the same doctor who tended to Geordie. He was not, it seemed, badly hurt, which disappointed Campbell considerably.

He was soundly reproved for not having declared the guns on his arrival and was threatened with their confiscation,
but he’d wangled his way out of that somehow; and had got away with their being sealed at the mouth for the duration of our stay.

It turned out that the other gun that I had seen belonged to Nick Dugan, and he was similarly ticked off. According to Clare there had been at least two other small handguns in use during
Esmerelda
’s fight with
Pearl
, but none of them surfaced during the search that was made, and I asked no questions. I also learned that Geordie had a shotgun on board which apart from being legally licensed, had even been declared by him to the Papeete customs – and was the only gun on board that had not seen some action.

Campbell had blustered much as I had and had invoked all the powers he could think of to back his credentials, and apparently M. Chamant had done much what he had done with me – had let him speak at will, listened carefully, and had finally released him back to the ship with a fairly mild request that he write down an account of the affair. Everything pointed to our story being accepted, and indeed later that afternoon the guards began to let us all out on deck in twos and threes for some exercise, after they’d moved
Esmerelda
to a mooring buoy well away from the quayside. Things were looking up, and we all turned in that night a great deal happier than we’d been at the start of the day.

A senior police official came on board next morning and took formal statements from everyone on board, which took a considerable time, though some of us had written them out in advance and needed only to sign them in the official presence. My camera was removed as well, and I prayed that my photography had been up to scratch. The doctor came to see Geordie again and Campbell cornered
him and asked innumerable questions about the hospital on Tanakabu, and about the possibility of getting another doctor to go out there soon.

We were all beginning to feel restless and uneasy. In spite of some relaxation, we were still confined to the ship and as they kept us battened down apart from whoever was being allowed on deck it was stifling and airless on board.

Some time in the afternoon Geordie sent word that he’d like a word with me and so I went to his cabin. He was propped up in bed and surrounded by books. His face was still heavily bandaged but he was obviously much stronger and the effects of the concussion had long worn off.

‘Sit down, boy,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve found something.’

‘To do with what?’ I asked, though I could already guess. Several of the books were nautical and the
Pilot
was prominent among them. ‘Has it got to do with those damned nodules?’

‘Yes, it has. Just listen awhile, will you?’

I felt a small indefinite itch starting in the back of my skull. At the end of the terrible business on Tanakabu I had felt sickened of the whole search and had wanted nothing more to do with it. The nodules could lie on the seabed forever as far as I was concerned, and with the murder of Mark more or less exposed even the urge to lay that ghost had died away to a dull resignation. But now, deprived of ordinary activity, I couldn’t help feeling that it would be interesting to have the problem to chew on again, and my professional curiosity was rising to the surface once more. So I settled down to hear Geordie out without protest.

‘I was thinking of that lunatic Kane,’ he said. ‘He slipped up when he mentioned New Britain – the time he shouldn’t have known about it. I got to thinking that maybe he’d slipped up again, so I started to think of all the things he ever said that I knew of, and I found this. It’s very interesting light reading.’

He handed me Volume Two of the
Pacific Ocean Pilot
opened at a particular page, and I began to read where he pointed. Before I had got to the bottom of the page my eyebrows had lifted in surprise. It was a lengthy passage and took some time to absorb, and when I had finished I said noncommittally, ‘Very interesting, Geordie – but why?’

He said carefully, ‘I don’t want to start any more hares – we blundered badly over Minerva – but I think that’s the explanation of the other drawing in the diary. If it seems to fit in with your professional requirements, that is.’

It did.

‘Let’s get the boss in on this,’ I said and he half-lifted himself from his bunk in delight. He’d played his fish and caught it.

I got up and went to round up Campbell, Ian and Clare and brought them back to the cabin. ‘Okay, Geordie. Begin at the beginning.’ I could see that the others were as pleased as I had been to have something new to think about.

‘I was thinking about Kane,’ Geordie said. ‘I was going over in my mind everything he’d said. Then I remembered that when he’d seen Clare’s drawings he’d called one of them a “scraggy falcon”. We all saw it as an eagle, didn’t we? So I checked on falcons in the
Pilot
and found there really is a Falcon Island. The local name is Fonua Fo’ou but it’s sometimes called Falcon because it was discovered by HMS
Falcon
in 1865.’