There was no wind that night, the air very still and the wash of the sea in the cove below muted to a whisper. The place was snug and warm and homely, my mind at peace now. Choffel was dead. That chapter of my life was closed; it was the future that mattered now.
But in the morning, when I walked up to the headland and stood staring out across the quiet sea at the Longships light and the creaming wash of the Atlantic swell breaking on the inshore rocks, the wretched man’s words came back to me — you can’t escape, can you, from either yourself or the past. I knew then that the chapter of my life that had started out there in the fog that night was not closed, would never be closed.
This was the thought that stayed with me as I tramped the clifftop paths alone or went fishing off Sennen in Andy’s boat. The weather was good for late January, cold with little wind and clear pale skies. It was on the fourth day, when I was fishing out beyond the Tribbens, that I felt ChoffePs presence most. The swell was heavier then and the boat rocking; I suppose it was that *vhich conjured up the memory of that dhow and what had happened. And his words… I found myself going over and over those rambling outbursts of his, the face pale under the stubble, the black curly hair, and the stench, the dark eyes staring. It all came back to me, everything he had said, and I began to wonder, And wondering, I began to think of his daughter — in England now and hating my guts for something I hadn’t done.
The line tugged at my hand, but I didn’t move, for I was suddenly facing the fact that if I were innocent of what she firmly believed I had done, then perhaps he was innocent, too. And I sat there, the boat rocking gently and the fish tugging at the line, as I stared out across the half-tide rocks south of the Tribbens to the surf swirling around the Kettle’s Bottom and the single mast that was all that was left above water of the Petros Jupiter. I’ve paid and paid. And now the girl was accusing me of a murder I hadn’t committed.
I pulled in the line, quickly, hand-over-hand. It was a crab of all things, a spider crab. I shook it loose and started the engine, threading my way back through the rocks to the jetty. It was lunchtime, the village deserted. I parked the boat and took the cliff path to Land’s End, walking fast, hoping exertion would kill my doubts and calm my mind.
But it didn’t. The doubts remained. In the late afternoon a bank of fog moved in from seaward. I just made it back to Sennen before it engulfed the coast. Everything was then so like that night Karen had blown herself up that I stood for a while staring seaward, the Seven Stones’ diaphone bleating faintly and the double bang from the Longships loud enough to wake the dead. The wind was sou’westerly and I was suddenly imagining those two tankers thundering up the Atlantic to burst through the rolling bank of mist, and only myself to stop them — myself alone, just as Karen had been alone.
‘Think about it,’ Saltley had said. ‘If we knew where they were meeting up…’ And he had left it at that, taking the girl’s arm and walking her down the street to where he had parked his low-slung Porsche.
And standing there, down by the lifeboat station, thinking about it, it was as though Karen were whispering to me out of the fog — find them, find them, you must find them. It was a distant foghorn, and there was another answering it. I needed an atlas, charts, the run of the pilot books for the coasts of Africa, dividers to work out distances and dates. Slow-steaming at eleven knots, that was 264 nautical miles a day. Forty days, Saltley had said, to Ushant and the English Channel. But the Aurora B would be steaming at full speed, say 400 a day, that would be thirty days, and she had left her hidey-hole by the Hormuz Straits nine days ago. Another twenty-one to go… I had turned automatically towards Andy’s cottage above the lifeboat station, something nagging at my mind, but I didn’t know what, conscious only that I had lost the better part of a week, and the distant foghorn drumming at my ears with its mournful sense of urgency.
It was Rose who answered the door. Andy wasn’t there and they didn’t have a world atlas. But she gave me a cup of tea and after leaving me for a while returned with the Digest World Atlas borrowed from a retired lighthouse keeper a few doors away, a man, she said, who had never been outside of British waters but liked to visualize where all the ships passing him had come from. I opened it first at the geo-physical maps of Africa. There were two of them right at the end of Section One, and on both coasts there were vast blanks between the names of ports and coastal towns. The east coast I knew. The seas were big in the monsoons, the currents tricky, and there was a lot of shipping. The Seychelles and Mauritius were too populated, too full of package tours, and the islands closer to Madagascar, like Aldabra and the. Comores Archipelago, too likely to be overflown, the whole area liable to naval surveillance.
In any case, I thought the rendezvous would have been planned much nearer to the target, and if that were Europe then it must be somewhere on the west coast. I turned then to the main maps, which were on a larger scale of 197 miles to the inch, staring idly at the offshore colouring, where the green of the open Atlantic shaded to white as the continental shelf tilted upwards to the coastal shallows. I was beginning to feel sleepy, for we were in the kitchen with the top of the old-fashioned range red-hot, the atmosphere overwhelming after the cold and the fog outside. Rose poured me another cup of tea from the pot brewing on the hob. Tristan da Cunha, St Helena, Ascension — those were all too far away. But on the next page, the one for North and West Africa, there was Hierro, Gomera, Palma, all out-islands of the Canaries and on the direct route. The Selvagens, too, and the Desertas, and Porto Santo off Madeira. Of these, only the Selvagens, perhaps the Desertas, could be regarded as possibles, the others being too well populated.
The tea was strong and very sweet, and I sat there wrapped in the cosy warmth of that hot little kitchen, my head nodding as my mind groped for something I knew was there but could not find. Andy came back and I stayed on and had a meal with them. By the time I left, the fog had cleared and it was very close to freezing, the stars bright as diamonds overhead and the flash of the Longships and other lights further away, the glimmer of ships rounding Land’s End, all seemingly magnified in the startling clarity.
Next morning I went up to the main road at first light and hitched a ride in a builder’s van going to Penzance. From there I got the train to Falmouth. I needed charts now and a look at the Admiralty pilots for Africa, my mind still groping for that elusive thought that lurked somewhere in my subconscious, logic suggesting that it was more probably a rendezvous well offshore, some fixed position clear of all shipping lanes.
The first vessel I tried when I got to the harbour was a general cargo ship, but she was on a regular run to the Maritimes, Halifax mainly, and had no use for African charts. The mate indicated a yacht berthed alongside one of the tugs at the inner end of the breakwater. ‘Round-the-worlder,’ he said. ‘Came in last night from the Cape Verdes. He’ll have charts for that part of the African coast.’ And he went back to the job I used to do, checking the cargo coming out of the hold.
The yacht was the Ocean Brigand. She flew a burgee with a black Maltese cross with a yellow crown on a white background and a red fly. Her ensign was blue and she had the letters RCC below her name on the stern. She was wood, her brightwork worn by salt and sun so that in places bare wood showed through the varnish, and her decks were a litter of ropes and sails and oilskins drying in the cold wind. The skipper, who was also the owner, was small and grey-haired with a smile that crinkled the wind-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had charts for most of the world, the pilots, too. ‘A bit out of date, some of them,’ he said. ‘But they cost a fortune now.’