‘Jesus CHRIST!’ the Chief yelled, thumping the long-suffering book again with an oil-grimed fist. ‘Does yon fancy Grey Funnel Line man Braid think I can run mah wee engines on sea watter? Does he?’
I grinned placatingly and reached for the bottle again. If it hadn’t been the Royal Navy sabotaging his oil it would have been the perfidious Company Agents somewhere — and if it hadn’t been them it would have been the fault of the Old Man, the Second Engineer or the ship’s cat. For forty years the Chief had been fighting a running battle with the Phantom of the Fuel Bunkers, and the only time he’d ever won was when, as Second on the old China Steamship Company’s Fuktien, they had brought her through the great typhoon of ’21 by burning every stick of wood aboard, including the masts, saloon and cabin furniture and the Old Man’s rosewood sextant box, before the Mate had suddenly remembered they carried five hundred tons of coal as cargo in their number three hold.
‘Henry,’ I said, ‘you know bloody well that if you’d been apprenticed in sail you’d have grudged the cook the oil he used to fry chow in the galley.’
He stood there in his red carpet slippers with the Chinese dragons embroidered on them and fumed impotently, ‘And don’t call me “Henry”, Mister Mate! Ah’ll remind you that ma name’s McKenzie… Chief Engineer McKenzie tae you.’
‘Aye, aye, Henry!’ I said as the knock sounded at the cabin door. The Chief slap-flopped across the cabin and opened it suspiciously. Young Conway stood outside in the alleyway.
‘WHIT?’ interrogated the Chief ferociously.
Conway shuffled nervously at the confrontation and tried to see through the Chief’s cellular-vested torso to me, ‘Mister Kent, Sir. The Captain sends his compliments and asks if you would come to the bridge immediately… Sir!’
‘The bloody man’s no’ going to change course further south again, is he?’ yelled the bristling McKenzie. ‘Over ma dead body, he’s no’.’
I groaned inwardly. ‘What’s up, Conway?’ I asked as I reached for my cap.
He looked very excited and flushed. ‘It’s Mister Foley, Sir — the Chief Sparks. He’s missing!’
I looked sideways at the Chief, who stopped snorting abruptly and frowned at the cadet. ‘He cannae be missing, lad. He’s bound tae be somewhere. Mister Foley’s no’ a wee laddie on his first trip, tae get himsel’ lost.’
‘No, Sir. But… but he doesn’t seem to be anywhere aboard. We’ve already had a pretty good scout round on deck and in the officers’ cabins.’
I was already on my way through the door when McKenzie kicked the red slippers off and started struggling into his deck shoes. ‘Ah’ll have my gang search the engine spaces, Mate. Ye’ll no’ need to worry about those.’
On the way up to the bridge I asked Conway who had reported old Alf’s disappearance. ‘The Second Wireless Op, Larabee, Sir. He said Mister Foley should have been on watch but when he called into the radio shack to get a book the Chief Sparks had… well, he’d gone. There was no one manning the set at all. Mister Larabee’s standing by just now.’
The velvety black air was still pleasantly warm on my face as I climbed to the darkened bridge. Only the dim green glow from the binnacle relieved the gloom, shining up on the underside of the helmsman’s features like some Frankenstein colourwash. In peace time it would have been a lovely night to relax out on the wing, sixty feet above the rushing phosphorescent sea below, and think how nice it was to be a sailorman.
Tonight, though, I couldn’t relax. I was too scared. The pleading message from the Kent Star had somehow unsettled me even more than the violent spectacle of the death of the Commandant Joffre. And Foley? Was poor, bumbling, whitehaired old Alf choking dementedly only a few miles astern?
I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that, if it had to be anybody fighting for an already forfeited life back there in our shimmering wake, if it had to be anybody… then why couldn’t it have been the Second Sparks instead? The thin-faced, coldly sardonic Larabee.
It took over an hour for us to rouse the crowd and go over the ship from truck to keel — crew accommodation, galleys, paint and lamp lockers, empty passenger cabins. We sent men up the masts too, watching them as they went higher and higher until their blue-jeaned backsides were lost in the blanketing darkness of the night. We even searched the strong room, with its steel-bound cases of banknotes and its three critically vital, lead-weighted mail bags.
But Alf Foley was gone. We never saw him again.
Larabee was still in the radio room when I went in, pulling the blackout curtain quickly to behind me. He was perched right back in his chair with his feet up on the transmitting table and the headphones slipped casually round the scrawny neck, reading a paper-backed wartime edition of some detective story or other. He heaved his legs to the floor and looked up.
‘Find Alf, did you?’ he queried, still with that half-mocking twist to the thin mouth.
I lit up gratefully without offering him one. I didn’t like not being able to smoke on deck in the dark. ‘No,’ I said, briefly.
He shook his head critically, ‘Stupid bastard!’
I felt the angry flush burning into my race as always when he spoke like that. ‘Do you mean me, Larabee? Or your poor bloody oppo?’
The Second Operator still seemed to smile slightly. ‘Oh, not you. Mate. Never you. No, I was thinkin’ about Alf. Stupid bastard!’
My cigarette glowed fiercely as I dragged hard to keep control. ‘Yeah? Well, he’s probably a stupid dead bastard now, Larabee. Or don’t you mind too much?’
He shrugged indifferently. ‘He was an old man, Mate. Old men like Alf shouldn’t be at sea if they can’t keep off the bottle before they get to the stage of going over the wall.’
I knew what he meant. Foley was too fond of the hard stuff, especially when we were alongside and, unlike the rest of the ship’s officers, the radio men didn’t have a great deal to do when in port. Alf never went ashore more than once a voyage, when he would climb into a baggy, pinstriped blue suit, irrespective of the climate, and sweat around the local bazaars in search of a present for his wife, that elderly flyblown woman who stared severely and almost reprimandingly from the cheap Woolworth’s frame over the Chief Operator’s bunk. The rest of the trip Alf — as soon as we were secured — would vanish into his cabin and drink steadily until ‘Stand by’ was rung for leaving harbour. I can’t say, even then, that I ever saw him really three sheets in the wind, but on the other hand I never saw him really sober either. It still didn’t fit together though.
‘How do you know he went over the side, Larabee?’ I asked suspiciously.
The almost hairless eyebrows went up in exaggerated surprise. ‘There’s an alternative? A bloke disappears off a ship in mid-ocean — which must be true ’cause the Mate says so — and you think there’s some other place he could be, other than over the wall?’
‘No,’ I muttered, trying to ignore the sarcasm and feeling a bit stupid. ‘But how, in God’s name, did he manage it? Alf wasn’t the kind of bloke to put himself over.’
Larabee shrugged again. ‘Like I said, Mate. He was stoned, stepped outside for a breath of air, and… splish, splash!’
‘I’ve never seen him drunk as that when we were at sea. He could maybe absorb it pretty well off duty but I can’t ever remember Foley drinking much on passage. And it’s bloody hard to go over the rail on a dead calm night like this, too.’