The Titanic Secret (41 page)

‘I can see the lights of a ship over there,’ Evans said, pointing to the south. ‘You don’t suppose that’s the
Titanic
, and it’s all been a big mistake, do you?’

Hutchinson swung round to stare in the direction that his First Lieutenant was indicating. Then he shook his head.

‘No. That’s a passenger ship of some sort, by the looks of it, but it’s too small to be the
Titanic
.’

The submarine was moving very slowly across the still, dark water, and Hutchinson then ordered a heading change, so that it would proceed in the general direction of the ship they could see. He presumed that vessel was also looking for survivors.

Two minutes later, Evans saw a dark shape bobbing in the water just off the port bow.

‘There,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

In moments, it was abundantly clear what it was. The body of a man wearing a dark suit, his body supported by a life jacket, drifted slowly down the port side of the submarine. There was absolutely no doubt that he was dead, no point at all in attempting to recover his corpse. When Hutchinson had briefed his crew on their way to the site of the sinking, he had made one thing absolutely clear: the D-Class boat was a very small submarine, carrying a crew of only twenty-five officers and men, who lived in cramped and generally appalling conditions. No matter what their personal feelings, Hutchinson said, they would have to ignore any bodies they saw and only attempt to save anyone still alive. Even then, he doubted the submarine could handle more than about half a dozen extra people.

‘There’s another one,’ Hutchinson said, pointing ahead.

Evans nodded, and gestured silently over to his left.

Hutchinson looked, and then shook his head. The submarine was entering a veritable ocean of corpses, white faces staring upwards, sightless eyes wide open, their bodies rising and falling limply as small waves washed past them.

‘Dear God,’ Evans whispered, ‘there are hundreds of them.’

Hutchinson ordered a further reduction in the submarine’s speed, so that it was barely crawling along, nosing its way past the floating corpses. The bodies of men, women, and children drifted past the sides of the boat in a seemingly endless and macabre procession of the dead.

‘We’re too late,’ Evans said. ‘They’re all dead. Didn’t they have any lifeboats?’

‘Not enough, obviously,’ Hutchinson replied quietly. ‘I suppose the cold killed them, those that didn’t drown. I think we’re wasting our time here, but we’ll keep going, just in case.’

The submarine moved on, now encountering scattered pieces of wreckage as well as literally hundreds of floating bodies. There seemed little point in trying to do any kind of a formal search, simply because they had seen not a single sign of life since they’d arrived at the location. All around them, in every direction they looked, were floating bodies, the stuff of enduring nightmares.

‘What’s that?’ Evans asked, bringing his binoculars up to his face and resting his elbows on the steel side of the conning tower.

Hutchinson stared as well, but for several seconds he simply had no idea what he was looking at. The shape in the water almost directly in front of the boat looked like some strange sculpture, small right-angle shapes interspersed with long sweeping curves. Then it suddenly dawned on him.

‘I think it’s a section of a staircase,’ he said, ‘a massive wooden staircase. All stop,’ he ordered down the voice pipe.

The submarine eased closer, until the bow was almost touching the huge wooden structure. And then there was no doubt what it was.

‘It must have floated out of the ship when it sank,’ Evans said, staring at it.

And then, at almost the same moment, they both saw something else. A darker shape lying close to the centre of the floating staircase, a shape that Hutchinson was certain he’d just seen move.

‘There’s somebody lying on it,’ he said urgently. ‘He might be alive, and at least he’s not in the water.’ He leant forward, over the edge of the conning tower and issued crisp orders to the half-dozen men waiting on the foredeck of the submarine.

‘Get a line across to that wreckage,’ he shouted. ‘Make it fast to the boat, and then a couple of you climb onto it. There’s somebody on it. Find out if he’s dead or alive.’

The first grappling iron clattered off the wooden structure and fell back into the sea, but the second time the seaman threw it, the steel spikes lodged around a banister rail. Within a minute or so, one end of the staircase was resting firmly against the side of the submarine, partially supported by the port-side ballast tank.

‘Be careful,’ Hutchinson called, as two of the men clambered over the side of the boat onto the wreckage and made their way over to the dark shape he had seen.

They bent over the figure, and then one of them stood up, turned and shouted back towards the submarine: ‘He’s alive!’

Manoeuvring the body of the semi-conscious man across the staircase was difficult, but the two seamen were both strong, and within five minutes they had reached the side of the submarine, where other willing hands were waiting to help them with their burden.

‘Get him below,’ Hutchinson ordered. ‘Strip him and wrap him in a blanket. Get him warm.’

A few minutes later, the grappling hook was freed, and the submarine again resumed its slow and pointless progress through the sea of the dead. The boat remained in the area until dawn broke, but found no other living survivors. Then, reluctantly, Hutchinson ordered the submarine to reverse course, and increased speed to the east. They had to make their final rendezvous with the oiler, and still had a long way to go.

30 April 1912
London

Maria Weston was in a black mood when she opened the door of Mansfield Cumming’s office in Whitehall Court and walked in.

The
Carpathia
had taken three days to reach New York after picking up the survivors from the
Titanic
, arriving on the evening of the eighteenth of April. The final tally of survivors was 705, meaning that over 1,500 people had lost their lives in that single, dreadful night.

Maria then had to wait before she could get a passage on another transatlantic liner and return to Britain. She had checked the lists of survivors time after time, haunting the offices of the White Star Line in a vain attempt to find the name ‘Alex Maitland’ recorded. But eventually she had been forced to face the reality that he had done exactly what she had expected he would do: he had remained on board the ship to the very end, so that he could give other people the chance to live.

The eastbound voyage across the Atlantic had seemed interminable. For most of the time, she had remained inside her cabin – the accommodation she had booked did not merit the term ‘stateroom’ – only venturing outside for meals. And the mood on board the ship was sombre. Everybody knew about the loss of the
Titanic
, and everyone on the ship, it seemed, wanted to talk about it, and Maria simply couldn’t face that.

Mansfield Cumming stood up as she entered, shook her warmly by the hand and led her to one of the chairs in front of his desk.

‘I’m so pleased to see you again, Maria,’ he said. ‘I know you must still be in shock, but do you feel up to telling me what happened on board the ship?’

What she wanted to do more than anything else was take out a pistol and blow a series of holes in Mansfield Cumming’s body until he finally died. Thanks to him, 1,500 innocent people had died, among them the only man for whom she’d harboured any deep feelings for a very long time.

‘Frankly, Mansfield, the temptation to do you serious bodily harm is almost overwhelming. Why the hell didn’t you tell us what you had planned for the ship before we set off?’

Cumming shook his head. ‘Because at that stage we didn’t know. It was only when my agents in Berlin confirmed that Voss had really good printing plates and enough paper to produce counterfeit currency with a face value of over ten million pounds that the government decided we had to have a backup plan. If Tremayne’s message hadn’t been delayed for over three hours, or if I’d managed to get the Admiralty to extend the deadline, none of this would have been necessary. Believe me, Maria, nobody regrets what happened more than I do.’

For a few moments she just looked at him. Then she replied. ‘I think I can make you feel a whole lot worse.’

‘How?’

‘By telling the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic what really happened to the
Titanic
.’

Cumming smiled at her and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Maria. Who do you think would believe you? Who would credit the British government with an act of such appalling brutality? And in any case, all the evidence is at the bottom of the Atlantic. No, I do understand your feelings, but you’re a professional, and if you think it through I hope you’ll agree that what we did was the only proper course of action in the circumstances. Now, can you please just fill in the blanks for me, and tell me exactly what happened on board?’

Maria really didn’t feel like explaining events, but knew she really had little option. Sooner or later she would have to go through the debriefing process, and she might as well get it over with.

She explained how they had identified Voss and the other two conspirators, and how Alex had tackled them and finally eliminated two of them. Obviously she didn’t know what had happened to Voss, but she presumed he’d gone down with the ship. And when she spoke about her fellow agent, her voice was quiet and subdued, as she tried desperately to distance her emotions from what she was saying, her voice cracking with the strain.

‘And you were both, you and Alex I mean, certain about the plan Voss had hatched?’

Maria nodded. ‘Yes. In fact, after Alex had tackled the two bodyguards who had been sent out to kill him, Voss actually admitted his involvement in the plot, and basically told Alex it was too late for him to do anything about it. No, there was no doubt about what they were trying to do.’

‘As you know,’ Mansfield Cumming said, ‘Alex sent me a message to confirm that you’d completed the mission, and in it he said that you had managed to find the lever, the information, that Voss was going to use to persuade the American president to do what he wanted.’

Maria opened her handbag and pulled out an envelope which she slid across the table to Mansfield Cumming. ‘That’s what we found,’ she said. ‘Voss had the original documents, and the other two each had copies of them. I think it’s clear that they intended to blackmail the president into agreeing with what they were doing.’

Cumming opened the envelope, took out the documents and stared at them, his expression confused.

‘What are these?’ he asked.

‘I’m fairly certain they could prove beyond any doubt that the American president has been engaged in illegal financial dealings with companies back home. Reading between the lines, I think he’s been taking massive kickbacks from awarding government contracts. Those documents certainly have his signature on them.’

‘That makes sense,’ Cumming said. ‘I think if Voss had threatened to release this information’ – he tapped the paperwork on his desk – ‘the president would have done whatever he wanted. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but that man has an awful lot to lose. His wife controls the family finances, and if this did come out, he’d not only face political ruin and a possible prison sentence – though by pulling a few strings he might have been able to avoid that – but he would also face catastrophic financial ruin as well if he had to pay back the money. These documents are an incredibly powerful weapon.’

‘So I suppose you’ll destroy them now, will you?’

Cumming smiled slyly. ‘We’ll certainly keep them securely under lock and key,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure if destroying them would be in our best interests. Or not just yet anyway. You never know when we might need a favour from our cousins across the Atlantic.’

Maria stared at him. ‘You do know that makes you almost as bad as Voss?’ she said.

‘Not quite. Now,’ Cumming said, rubbing his hands together briskly, ‘I do have some good news for you. You did very well on that last assignment, and you certainly deserve some leave. After that, I’ve got another little job I thought you could help us with.’

‘No thanks, Cumming. I’ve had about enough of you and the sort of work you do to last me a lifetime. I came here to report to you because I had to, but as soon as I can I’m heading back to the States where I can find some sanity. I still can’t believe you were willing to sink a ship and kill fifteen hundred people just to stop Voss.’

Cumming looked somewhat sheepish, and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he said, ‘but of course it’s your decision.’

‘It is. In this game, you have to be able to trust your own side, because you can’t have any confidence in anyone else. I thought I could trust you, and so did Alex, but what happened proved just how wrong we both were. There’s no way I’ll ever work for you again. In fact, I don’t even want to see you again.’

Without another word, Maria turned and strode out of the office, slamming the door closed behind her. Outside she stopped beside Mrs McTavish’s vacant desk, tears springing to her eyes as her pent-up emotions finally gave way. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes, trying to compose herself before she left the building.

She’d taken a couple of steps down the corridor when a voice from behind stopped her dead.

‘Hello, Maria.’

She stopped dead and turned round. Alex Tremayne stood framed in a doorway, supporting himself on a stick, his left arm in a sling, his face unshaven and scarred by patches of raw red skin.

‘Dear God, you’re alive,’ Maria whispered. ‘I’d given up, completely given up all hope.’

‘You did it,’ Tremayne said. ‘The last thing you said to me was “be lucky”, and I was. You remember the grand staircase on the
Titanic
, with that huge glass dome above it?’ Maria nodded. ‘I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I suppose the wooden staircase was so buoyant that it ripped away from its fittings and exploded up through the dome as the ship sank. I was floating on the surface of the Atlantic, waiting to die, when something rushed up from the depths below and smashed into me. Apparently it lifted me out of the water and provided a little shelter from the elements. The next thing I remember was waking up on board a British submarine, heading for Dover. I’ve got a broken arm, a sprained ankle and slight concussion, and I suffered a bit from exposure because of the conditions, but basically I’m fine.’