As Albert Morris took in the implications of that towing wire’s presence he ran for the near-horizontal after ladder, making for the seaboat’s davits, but he was already much too late. The tow materialized out of the fog immediately astern of the sinking lightship just as Morris reached the head of the ladder. A huge, a monstrous, black shape with vast sides like a railway cutting… Albert Morris stared uncomprehendingly, and then the vast shape hit.
The lightship was pushed, thrust away. The great shape slid over the remains of her hull, forcing her over and under. Her red-painted sides, her great life-saving lamp, were bumped and scraped in torment along the bottom of the vast unknown thing that had finally run her down. The body of Albert Morris, with the head smashed in, went down with it into the Dover Strait, as did that of young Bates. Young Bates lay entombed in the shattered steel; steel plating that had buckled and then folded around him like a leaf. He was still alive as that metal shroud carried him downward through the sea.
There were no survivors.
Early that morning, the fog cleared.
The rising sun, coming up palely over the eastern sea-rim through a pink-pearl dawn haze, showed up a calm and friendly sea, a sea empty but for two objects: The vast wall-sided shape, motionless where it lay, and the Trinity House vessel Hilary speeding out towards the spot where the Wrangles lightship should have been on station.
Chapter Two
‘And what the hell,’ Shaw said coldly into the telephone, ‘has a floating dock hitting the Wrangles lightship got to do with us?’
It was Carberry at the other end — Captain Carberry, the Outfit’s Number Two. He said, ‘Possibly nothing, old man. I told you this isn’t terribly important, at least I don’t think it’ll turn out that way, and I wouldn’t normally have asked you to handle it. But since you’re at a loose end and it just might be up our street, I—’
Shaw broke in, ‘Let’s have the details. I’m in the middle of breakfast and the coffee’s getting cold.’
‘Oh — right.’ There was a pause, and Shaw, running a hand irritably through his hair, heard a shuffle of papers coming along the ‘hush’ line from Room 12 in the Admiralty. ‘A floating dock of indeterminate origin was found this morning, deserted, where—’
‘Just a minute. Did you say deserted? Nothing towing her?’
Carberry said, ‘Yes, deserted. Obviously there were towing vessels, but they seem to have disappeared for some reason or other. They wouldn’t have found it hard to do there was a nil-visibility fog out there last night and it didn’t clear till around dawn.’
‘It’s a trifle odd just to abandon the dock, certainly—’
‘Exactly, and that’s what brought us into the picture in the first place, you see. I think it would be a good thing if you took a trip to sea to have a look at it. But to continue… it was found where one would normally have expected to find the Wrangles. And there’s no Wrangles and, I’m sorry to say, no survivors either. Trinity House was on the spot right away and their people have had a look-see, but they’re not much the wiser as a result — except they’ve signalled us that the dock’s fittings appear to indicate she was built in Hamburg. That doesn’t tell us much, though.’
‘It doesn’t, does it,’ Shaw said irritatingly Then he frowned and glanced at his watch. He would have to ring Debonnair and cancel a date now this had cropped up. ‘Does anyone,’ he asked, ‘claim this dock?’
‘Well,’ Carberry said slowly, ‘that’s the odd thing, you see. No one does — at least, no one has yet. No one’s made any song and dance about any such thing having gone adrift, and you needn’t remind me, as I’m sure you were about to, that it’s early days yet. What’s worrying me a little is the fact that we’ve contacted the West German Embassy and they’re being… well, I can only call it cagey. Very cagey. They’re prepared to admit, from our description of maker’s tallies and so on, that the thing could be German built, but that’s all, and it’s only admitting the obvious, of course.’ He paused, shuffling more papers into the phone. ‘So there’s a chance there’s something more behind this, old man, and I dare say you can see now why I feel N.I.D might become involved.’
Shaw squeezed the telephone savagely, as though he would like to strangle somebody. ‘Not really. By the way, what about Latymer?’
‘What about him?’
‘What does he think?’
‘Oh,’ Carberry said airily, ‘I haven’t bothered him, old man. It’ll do when he comes in. I’ll leave a report. I’m more than sorry I’ve had to bother you with it, but—’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Shaw broke in. ‘I’m well accustomed to having my private life hashed up at short notice.…’
A fast chauffeur-driven car was already on the way, according to Carberry. It pulled up outside Shaw’s flat less than ten minutes after Carberry had rung off.
Shaw, sitting back comfortably on thick cushions, watched idly as London, and then the Kent countryside, flashed past. He was somewhat preoccupied, though not as yet with the problem of the floating dock; that could wait till he’d had a look at the thing. He was thinking of Debonnair Delacroix… and he was thinking, with a great deal of irritation directed towards the Outfit, that things hadn’t been so good in that direction just lately, and now he’d had to disappoint her again. Feeling pretty certain of a few days’ leave after tying up the ends of a routine sabotage job in a guided-weapon destroyer in Portsmouth, he had arranged to take the girl out to a quiet spot in the country. It had been a long-standing date, because he’d fixed it three weeks ago, while still in Portsmouth. With luck he might make it tomorrow, of course — but she hadn’t sounded pleased at being put off and left in the air, and there had been something else in her tone too, as if she wanted to tell him something, but he’d been in a rush and had to hang up. He’d had to break dates so often… far too often, and Debonnair was getting discouraged. She wanted marriage and so did he, but it was no good, he thought gloomily as he stretched out long legs towards the back of the front seat, it was no good at all so long as they hung on to him in the Outfit. Men like Shaw were fools if they got married; that was almost axiomatic. Marriage dulled the edge of a man, and that led to trouble, dangerous trouble not only for the man himself but also for the people with whom he worked. In this game, you had to be on the alert — always. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Let enervating thoughts of wife and family creep in when you were on a job and you were a dead duck. Shaw had seen that sort of thing happen — quite literally — to more than one of his friends, and he hadn’t even been able to go to the funerals in case his very presence should make him a man to be marked in the future. And he’d seen what it had done to the girls they had married, too. He wouldn’t inflict that kind of life on any girl he was fond of.