I sat down on the bed again, conscious of his eyes on my face. ‘Choffel’s daughter.’
He nodded, and my heart sank, remembering her words as I had left for the airport. ‘She claims you killed him. Says she’ll go to the police and accuse you of murder. Did you kill him?’
‘No. I told you—‘
He waved aside my protest. ‘But you intended to kill him, didn’t you? That’s why you went to Colchester to check what other names he used, why you went to Nantes, why you got the Lloyd’s agent to take you to see his daughter. You were tracking him down with the intention of killing him. Isn’t that true?’
I didn’t say anything. There was no point in denying it.
‘So the girl’s right.’
‘But I didn’t kill him.’
He shrugged. ‘What does that matter? He’s dead.
You had the opportunity and the intention.’ He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Just so that you see it from her point of view. I’d like you to get yourself lost for a time. Sooner or later the man’s body will turn up. They’ll find a bullet in his guts and you’ll be arrested.’ And he added, ‘I don’t want you charged with murder before those tankers materialize.’
‘And when they do?’ I asked.
‘We’ll see. If they do, then part of your story will be corroborated and they’ll probably believe the rest of it, too. At least, it’s what I would expect.’ He asked me to continue then with the account I had been giving Pamela. ‘There’s one or two things towards the end I’d like to hear again.’ His reason was fairly obvious; if I was lying, then it was almost inevitable I’d slip up somewhere, small variations creeping in with each telling.
The first thing he picked me up on was Choffel’s reference to the Lavandou and what had followed. ‘His mother was ill. That’s what you said in my office. She was dying, and it was to get her the necessary treatment that he agreed to scuttle the ship. Did he tell you he was only a youngster at the time, twenty-two or twenty-three?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Twenty-two he told me.’
‘That’s what his daughter said. Twenty-two and the only ship he ever sank. Did he say that to you?’
‘No, not in those words.’
‘But he implied it?’
I nodded, the scene coming back to me, the sound: the sea and the stinking lazarette, and the dhow wallowing. ‘Only once, he said, or something like that. He was talking about the Lavandou, how the operation had gone wrong and Lloyd’s had twigged it. I remember that because it was an odd way of putting it.’
‘You didn’t tell me that. Why not?’
‘Well, it’s what you’d expect him to say, isn’t it?’
‘You said that before, when you were trying to shake the destination out of him.’
‘Not the destination,’ I corrected him. ‘I’d been asking him that, yes. But when I was shaking him, and shouting Where? at him, it was where the two tankers were going to meet I was asking him.’
‘And he didn’t know.’
‘I’m not sure he even understood. His mind was wandering, not quite delirious, but bloody near it. I think he was probably referring back to one of the ships he’d wrecked. It might even have been the Petros Jupiter. There was a Dutch salvage outfit trying to get her off the Kettle’s Bottom before he’d even come ashore.’
‘And where do you think those tankers are going to meet up?’
‘You asked me that before. I don’t know.’
‘Have you thought about it?’
‘Not really. I’ve had other things—‘
‘Well, I have. So’s Michael.’ He turned to Pamela. ‘We discussed it for quite a while after you’d left. We even got the charts sent up. If the destination is Europe—‘ He turned back to me. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it — that the target is somewhere in Europe?
If it is, then it’s over twelve thousand miles from the Hormuz Straits to the Western Approaches of the English Channel. That’s about forty days slow steaming or just over twenty-eight at full speed; and they could meet up at countless points along the west coast of Africa.’ And he added, ‘The only alternative would be the Cape, but I am not aware the Iranians have ever shown any interest in Black Africa. So I agree with you, if there is a target, then it’s somewhere in Europe where several countries hold Iranian prisoners, the Germans and ourselves certainly.’
We discussed it for a while, then he left, taking Pamela with him. He had his car outside, and when he said he had arranged to meet her father for a drink at their club, she immediately got her coat. ‘Can I take this?’ She had picked up the typescript and was holding it gripped under her arm.
I nodded dumbly, standing there, watching, as the lawyer helped her on with her coat. ‘I’m glad you didn’t kill the man,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder and smiling. ‘His daughter was quite positive the Lavandou was the only ship he wrecked.’
‘She was bound to say that,’ I told him angrily.
He nodded. ‘Nevertheless, I found her very convin-cing. She said he had paid dearly for that one criminal action.’
That phrase of his struck a chord, and after they had left, when I was standing at the window, staring up at the street and thinking about the way she had accepted his offer of a lift, as though coming to see me had been just an interlude and her own world so much more congenial than this bare little room and the company of a man who might at any moment be charged with murder, it came back to me. Choffel had used almost identical words — God knows I’ve paid, he had said, and he’d repeated the word paid, spitting blood. Had he really become so desperate he’d taken jobs he knew were dubious and then, when a ship was sunk, had found himself picked on, a scapegoat though he’d had no part in the actual scuttling? Could any man be that stupid, or desperate, or plain unlucky? The Olympic Ore, the Stella Rosa, the Petros Jupiter — that was three I knew about, as well as the Lav-andou, and he’d used three different names. It seemed incredible, and yet… why lie to me so urgently when he must have known he was dying?
I thought about that a lot as I sat alone over my evening meal in a crowded Chinese restaurant. Also about his daughter, how angry she had been, calling him an innocent man and spitting in my face because I didn’t believe her. If she could more or less convince a cold-blooded solicitor like Saltley…
But my mind shied away from that, remembering the Petros Jupiter and that night in the fog when my whole world had gone up in flames. And suddenly I knew where I would lie up while waiting for those tankers to re-emerge. If they wanted to arrest me, that’s where they’d have to do it, with the evidence of what he’d done there before their eyes.
I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t tell anyone. I left just as dawn was breaking, having paid my bill the night before, and was at Paddington in time to catch the inter-city express to Penzance. And when I arrived at Balkaer, there it was just as I had left it, the furniture and everything still in place, and no board up to say it was for sale. It was dark then and cold, hardly any wind and the sea in the cove below only a gentle murmur. I got the fire going, and after hanging the bedclothes round it to air, I walked back up to the Kerrisons’ and had a meal with them. They had met me at Penzance and Jean had seemed so pleased to see me I could have wept.
That night I slept on the sofa in front of the fire, unwilling to face the damp cold of the empty bedroom upstairs. The glow of the peat was warm and friendly, and though memories crowded in — even the sofa on which I lay conjured a picture of Karen, her dark eyes bright with excitement as it was knocked down to, us for next to nothing at the tail end of a farmhouse sale — they no longer depressed me. Balkaer still felt like home and I was glad I had come, glad I hadn’t put it up for sale immediately, the key still with the Kerrisons.