The Titanic Secret (39 page)

When the
Carpathia
steadied on its new course, the time was thirty-three minutes past midnight EST, and at that moment the two ships were almost sixty miles apart. Even at full speed, the
Carpathia
would take nearly four hours to reach the
Titanic
.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne and Maria stood in the centre of the first-class promenade on the Boat Deck and watched the first lifeboat being lowered to the sea below.

‘I don’t understand this,’ Tremayne remarked. ‘That lifeboat’s still less than half full. I’ve counted twenty-eight people in it, and it could hold over sixty. Why are they launching it already?’

Maria looked at the boat and shook her head.

‘I’m worried,’ she admitted. ‘You notice that at the moment there’s still no real sense of haste? Nobody’s running about or shouting. I don’t think that most of the passengers have actually realized what’s going on. They probably still think that the
Titanic
’s unsinkable, and they’d rather stay on board, where it’s warm and dry than take their chances in one of these little wooden boats. And there’s the weight problem. These lifeboats probably weigh two or three tons each. Add a full load of passengers and you could almost double that. I think the ship’s officers are worried about the weight of a fully laden lifeboat breaking the falls that lower it from the davits.’

Tremayne nodded. That made sense. But now he knew it was time to say goodbye. He had to get Maria to safety. She’d stood beside him watching the lifeboat being lowered, and made not the slightest attempt to join the women and children who had crowded into it. She seemed determined to remain by his side. But Tremayne wasn’t going to let her go down with the ship.

‘You’ve got those original documents somewhere safe?’ he asked, and she reached into her coat and showed him the pouch. Then he looked around.

The ship’s crew were now loading a second lifeboat, the one numbered five, again on the starboard side. Tremayne took her arm, and began leading her in that direction.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, tucking the pouch away again inside her warm coat.

‘I’m putting you on that lifeboat,’ Tremayne said firmly.

‘And you’re coming with me.’

‘No I’m not,’ Tremayne replied. ‘The captain has ordered women and children first, so you can get into that boat and I’m going to stay here, on the ship, until he changes that order.’

‘But you’ll die,’ Maria snapped. ‘Don’t you understand that? I’ve already told you. There aren’t enough lifeboats to take even half the people who are on board this ship. Please, you must come with me.’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not particularly proud of, but I’m damned if I’ll go to my grave and have people say that I took the place of a woman or a child on one of these lifeboats. I would rather kill myself right here and right now. Besides, there’s still unfinished business on board the ship. Gunther Voss is still here somewhere, and I need to take care of him before the end.

‘You’ve done your bit, Maria, done more than your fair share on this operation. You can go back to Mansfield Cumming and tell him exactly what happened, how we achieved what he told us to do, and you can give him the documents.’

Maria looked at him for a long moment, then stepped close and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tight. Tremayne bent forward and kissed her gently on the forehead.

‘Go now,’ he said. ‘It’s been a privilege to know you.’

Maria nodded, hardly trusting herself to speak. ‘Be lucky,’ she murmured, then turned and walked away.

A couple of minutes later, the lifeboat began the long descent down the side of the ship to the water, over sixty feet below. Maria stared up at Tremayne until his face was lost to view high above her.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Alex Tremayne had been able to do the mathematics as easily as Maria. When he saw her lifeboat being lowered down to the sea, he knew at that moment that he would be staying on board the ship to the bitter end.

Oddly enough, the thought of his impending death didn’t particularly scare him. He knew that he and Maria had indirectly saved Britain and her Empire from becoming embroiled in a European war. There were not many men, he reflected, who could claim to have achieved even a tenth as much as that in their lifetimes. And Maria was safe, assuming her lifeboat didn’t get swamped or suffer some other catastrophe. That, to him, was infinitely more important than whether he himself lived or died. His only regret was that he hadn’t known her for longer, become a real friend, or perhaps even more than that.

He wasn’t even particularly concerned now about Voss. Maria had the original documents, and she was safely on board a lifeboat that was even then pulling away from the side of the ship, well out of his reach. As far as Tremayne could see, he was going to die when the ship finally sank beneath his feet, and he expected that Voss would share exactly the same fate. Killing him before the ship went down would simply spare him the agony of drowning in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. Maybe he should spare him.

So he stayed up on the Boat Deck, where he would be able to watch the last minutes of the mighty liner’s short life.

The lifeboats then began being loaded much more quickly from the deck now, as more and more people finally realized the life-threatening situation they were in, as the
Titanic
sank even lower by the bow.

By now the crew had obviously ordered all the passengers out onto the decks in order to abandon ship, and the crowds were growing by the minute as more and more people streamed out onto the Boat Deck. It was also clear that the appalling reality of the situation had become apparent to almost everyone: there were simply not enough lifeboats, and at least half of the people on board the ship were going to perish. And there was nothing that anybody could do about that.

It was a race for life. Getting in a lifeboat meant a chance to live: no seat meant immersion in the Atlantic Ocean and almost certain death.

In the crowds around the lifeboats some people were starting to panic, men shoving women and children out of the way in a desperate attempt to secure a place on board, and being forced back by the efforts of the ship’s officers and crew, and by other male passengers. Tremayne heard shots fired as one officer fought to maintain some semblance of control over the lifeboat he was attempting to lower.

The air was pierced by yells and shouts of pain as men fought each other for precedence, either for themselves or their families. Women screamed as the realization hit home that there were no spaces left on the boats – for them or for their children. The number of lifeboats diminished steadily, and now every boat was not simply loaded to capacity, but dangerously overloaded, crammed with people.

A cacophony of noise rose, growing ever louder as the seething mass of people seemed almost to merge into a single terrified organism, its shape changing and growing as more and more passengers joined the throng and started trying to fight their way towards the last few remaining lifeboats.

Eventually, the crowds on the Boat Deck became so large and violent that Tremayne had to walk away. He had done what he could for Maria. He had saved her life, he hoped, and now all that was left for him was to wait for the end, for the huge ship to finally slip beneath the waves. He wondered if it would be peaceful when it came.

He climbed up onto the roof over the first-class lounge, the room where he and Maria had spent their last evening together, and where even then he could clearly hear the sound of music as the ship’s band, the Wallace Hartley Quintet, continued playing in the lounge. They probably hoped that the music would help keep the passengers calm as the end drew near, but from what Tremayne had seen, that was a vain hope. He strode across to the compass platform in its centre and looked around. That, he thought, was probably as good a place as any to wait. At least he would have a good view of the final act in the drama.

15 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Voss had been searching for Tremayne ever since he’d arrived on the Boat Deck, but he’d been unable to find him, simply due to the press of people clamouring to be allowed into the lifeboats. He’d been blocked at every turn, and he’d also been trying to check the occupants of every lifeboat before it was launched, to ensure that his quarry hadn’t somehow been able to climb on board. If Leonard had turned up to help him, it would have made the search more efficient, but he had no idea where his bodyguard was.

But Tremayne was simply nowhere to be seen, and eventually Voss reached the uncomfortable conclusion that the Englishman must already have got off the ship somehow. He was making his way towards one of the last lifeboats still being loaded, shoving people out of his way and counting on his loaded pistol to guarantee him a place in the boat. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a familiar figure standing on the roof of the first-class lounge.

At last. He’d found him. All he had to do was climb up onto the roof, get the documents from him, and then make sure he still had time to get down to the Boat Deck and force his way on board one of the last lifeboats.

Further distress rockets were being fired from the
Titanic
in an attempt to summon assistance. In the Marconi suite, the radio operator continued to send messages which marked the increasing desperation of the situation, pleading for help for the occupants of the sinking ship. Just before zero-one-forty EST, he transmitted:

Displaying traditional British calm in the face of adversity, at about this time the ship’s band moved out of the first-class lounge and established themselves on the forward section of the Boat Deck, where they continued to play classical music and ragtime tunes in a vain attempt to keep the passengers calm. They would remain there, still playing, until the ship sank beneath them.

Tremayne looked around him at the throngs of people who had clearly realized that there was no room, that they were not going to get a place in a lifeboat. Many were still struggling futilely, trying with increasing desperation to force their way forward through the crowds, even though there was not the slightest possibility of getting a place. Others had clearly become resigned to their fate, and were frantically pulling on lifebelts, which would at least keep them afloat in the water. But Tremayne knew very well that drowning was perhaps going to be the least likely cause of death when the ship finally sank: it would almost certainly be the cold that would kill them first.

And there was another danger facing them. When the ship sank, it would cause a massive suction effect that would drag down anything on the surface. A lot of the passengers evidently knew this, and had decided to try to get well away from the
Titanic
before the end, because Tremayne watched dozens of them line the side rails of the ship and then jump into the freezing waters far below. Sometimes, they swam away, but a lot didn’t, and he thought he knew why. Their life jackets had slid up their torsos when they plunged under the water, and the rigid flotation pads rammed them so hard under their chins that it broke their necks. As soon as he realized that, he decided that jumping in wasn’t the way he was going to go. He’d just ride the ship down and hope for the best. For the first time in his life he slightly regretted not believing in any kind of god: to have prayed might have been a comfort right then.

The noise of the crowd had changed, too, as the screaming began to die away. That sound was being replaced by sobbing and wailing as the mood changed from violent anger at being denied access to the lifeboats to increasing horror and desperation about the fate which now awaited everyone left on board.

Tremayne knew he was looking at the faces of over 1,000 people, all of whom would all be dead within the hour.

But as he looked back towards the stern of the ship, his focus changed. Gunther Voss, a Luger pistol grasped in his right hand, was walking clumsily towards him over the roof of the lounge, a roof which was sloping to an increasingly large angle as the bow of the
Titanic
sank further beneath the waves.

Tremayne’s own pistol was tucked in his pocket and out of reach, and he didn’t even bother trying to get it.

‘Hello, Gunther,’ Tremayne said. ‘Come up here to watch the show, have you?’

‘You know what I’m here for, Tremayne. Hand over what you took from me, then I’ll shoot you and at least that will save you from drowning.’

Tremayne smiled. ‘And you think that’s a good deal, do you?’

‘It’s the best offer you’re going to get now.’

Tremayne reached into his jacket pocket with his left hand and pulled out the envelope containing the copied documents.

‘These are what you’re after, I think,’ he said, extending his hand.

The bow of the
Titanic
had now sunk so far that the stern of the vessel was rising high out of the water, the strain on the steel plates in the mid section of the hull simply enormous, and clearly unsupportable. As Voss leant forward to seize the envelope there was a rending crash from the sinking bow section, and the whole ship shuddered as if it had received a mortal blow. The immense strain had caused the forward smokestack to break free from the superstructure and crash over the side of the ship and into the water. The huge mass of steel killed dozens of people struggling in the sea and created a huge wave which overturned one of the canvas-sided lifeboats. Alex was relieved it wasn’t Maria’s.

For an instant Voss looked away, and in that same instant Tremayne kicked out, knocking the Luger from his grasp to send it spinning off the roof.

‘You don’t concentrate enough, Gunther,’ Tremayne said, drawing his own pistol and aiming it at Voss.

Then he smiled, and tossed the weapon away.

‘But I think shooting you would give you an easy way out,’ Tremayne said, with a tired smile. ‘I’d only be doing you a favour. If you want these copies – and that’s all I’ve got, because the originals are in a safe place, right out of your reach – you come and take them off me.’