Scend of the Sea

Tafline broke in. 'Those other words and scratches — they run into one another. What do they mean?'

'We've tried them and the figures also, but they look pretty hopeless,' Warren replied. 'Most of them are on top of each other. We could try some specialized photography and the handwriting experts, but I'm not very hopeful. It seems as if the man who wrote this was either dying or injured.' He turned to me. 'Sorry, I forgot for the moment he was your father. One becomes impersonal about these things.'

'I don't accept that,' snapped Joubert. 'Anyone could have fabricated a thing like that. Who ever heard of a will being scratched on a chunk of metal by a pilot who died at the controls of a plane which vanished without trace?'

'I might agree with you, except that panel came from a Viscount,' answered Warren. 'No question about it.'

'Is that all you can tell?'

Warren glanced at the Inspector of Crashes and grinned. 'I said we were busy on it all night. It tells a whole story.'

The colonel flushed with annoyance when Tafline said quickly, 'Such as?'

Some of the tiredness seemed to ease out of Warren as he warmed to his explanation. 'One works backwards in these matters. The buckling of the panel forward where the Gemsbok's name was shows that the force of the crash was underneath and upwards; in other words, the Viscount did not crash nose-first into some obstacle. It also shows that there was no explosion in the turbines on the port side, or else there would be blackening. We can pretty well rule out fire.'

'The sea would put out a fire anyway.' Joubert tried to halt Warren's exposition.

Warren ignored him. 'The style of curvature of the buckling shows that the airliner went in at full power, hit something hard like the sea, bounced, and then hit something else with the starboard or opposite wing. That something did the real damage. Probably tore off the wing and killed most of the passengers.'

'You can't possibly tell me you can find out all this from one piece of metal,' objected Joubert.

The Inspector of Crashes rushed to the support of his technical colleague.

'We have a set number of things we look for in every crash.’

'Listen. .' exclaimed the red-faced colonel, but the Inspector and Warren continued to ignore him.

"There was no explosion in this case, or else the pilot couldn't have written the message.'

'Scratched,' corrected Warren. ‘It was then prised loose with some instrument — after the disaster.'

The Inspector remained in full flight. 'Could there have been misreading of the altimeter by the pilot, or simply an error in the instrument itself.. '

‘I'd rate the chances of an altimeter fault high,' argued Warren. 'It's pretty certain that he hit the sea at full power and that he was confident that he was flying high enough not to encounter any obstacles.'

Major Bates, the Air Force man, said, 'My squadron searched all that area with everything we had. Sonar and electronic instruments aren't the whole answer, though. But visual sightings and spottings are difficult in a sea which is murky from all the sand the current brings with it and the mud from all those rivers.'

Colonel Joubert thumped the table with his fist.

'This isn't an inquiry into the loss of the Gemsbok. That was held years ago,' he grated. 'It found that the pilot died at the controls-and that is good enough for me. I'm a policeman, and I say there is little proof that this inscription was made by Captain Fairlie's father.'

Take it or leave it, that panel is from a Viscount — probably the Gemsbok,' replied Warren.

The colonel glared at the two experts, at Tafline, and then let his gaze rest on me. Slowly, deliberately, he lit a cigarette and watched me through the cloud of smoke.

'I don't deny it,' he said. 'I'll accept that it was the Gemsbok' He eyed me fixedly. 'Captain Fairlie, the C-in-C gave me a transcript of your interview with him.' He indicated the pile of typescript in front of him. There were newspapers in the collection, too, sensationalizing Musgrave's questions about the Waratah. Waratah Found?' asked one headline. 'Did Fairlie Brothers have a Treasure Tryst?' I squirmed at the sight of them. Musgrave had known just the right note to strike for the press.

'There are pages and pages here about your views on the search for the Waratah . .' He stopped and looked at me inquiringly.

'Yes?'

'Do you not find it strange that after your ship had nearly sunk in that big storm, you were sent a telegram which didn't say anything about your escape, or wish you safe, but only told you to stay away from the Waratah’

'I understood what was meant.’

'Did you, Captain Fairlie? Did you?'

'I mean, we had talked about the Waratah, we shared something over the old ship.' 'What did you share?'

Tafline interrupted. 'It was the thing which really brought us together. It was a kind of starting-point, our first common ground. .'

Joubert eyed us both. ⁴A very strange form of introduction, I may say. It struck me as so strange that I felt it necessary to ask you to come along here today and tell me more. "Keep away from the Waratah until I see you". Why keep away? What did you intend to discuss about the ship when you met Captain Fairlie again? If you keep away from something, you must know where the something is, not so?’

Tafline blushed and was confused. 'It-it was a form of expression. I didn't know Captain Fairlie very well at that stage. I…'

'You were in the area recently where the panel was found, were you not, Captain Fairlie?'

The faces round me turned blank at Joubert's tone of interrogation. It seemed, too, that the friendly surge of professional interest by the civilian experts had dimmed.

'Yes, but. .’

'But what?'

I gestured towards the documents on the desk. 'I explained it all to the C-in-C. I tried to at the Buccaneer inquiry. I have long believed that the clue to Waratah's disappearance was the answer to safety for oil rigs in that area.'

'Quite so, quite so. Yet the telegram says, "keep away from the Waratah"'

He let the silence fall, and then went on, 'I said before, I am a policeman, Captain Fairlie, and in order to get to the bottom of things, we look below what lies on the surface. There are a number of very strange undercurrents in all this. The juffrou's telegram is one of them.'

'It was just a simple message with no hidden or sinister meanings …' I began.

'What do you say, juftrou’

'It was an everyday thought wishing him well.'

Joubert smiled sarcastically. ' "Keep away from the Waratah" — a very ordinary thing for a young lady in love to say!'

'You're reading all sorts of things into this, colonel!' I protested.

There is nothing ordinary about a testament being scratched on a sheet of aluminium,' retorted Joubert. ‘It is less ordinary still for someone whom everyone believes was killed in an airliner crash to bequeath his son a non-existent ship. In all my experience, I have never heard of anything like it.'

I said, 'You've forgotten the watch, Colonel Joubert.'

'No, Captain Fairlie, I have not.'

The police major chuckled in the background like a jackal at a lion's kill.

'That watch is just the sort of extra fancy touch that rouses a policeman's deepest instincts of distrust. It makes the job look too right, too watertight. If it weren't for that watch, I might have had doubts. But look at it-it's one of those self-winding calendar types and the hand has been set at October 23, 1967. Not you notice, at the date of the crash, July, 1967, but a couple of months later. Very clever, very clever indeed!'