“Yes, sir.”
“Would you, from your wide experience, say that the conditions revealed in those photographs were such that a large boat like Wildtrack might have been pooped?” Kassouli still spoke in his measured, grave voice, as though, instead of talking about his daughter’s death, he spoke of politics or the Stock Market’s vagaries.
I insisted on looking through all the papers before I answered.
The sequence of charts and photographs showed that Wildtrack had been pursued, then overtaken, by a small depression that had raced up from New England, crossed the Grand Banks, then clawed its way out into the open ocean. The cell of low pressure would have brought rain, a half gale, and fast sailing, but the isobars were not so closely packed as to suggest real storm conditions. I said as much, but added that heavy seas were not always revealed by air pressure.
“Indeed not,” Kassouli acknowledged, “but two other boats were within a hundred miles, and neither reported exceptional seas.” I shuffled the photographs with their telltale whirl of dirty cloud.
“Sometimes,” I said lamely, “a rogue wave is caused by a ship’s wake. A supertanker?”
“Miss Kirov’s researches have discovered no big ships in the vi-cinity that night.” Kassouli had the disconcerting trick of keeping his eyes quite steadily on mine.
“Even so,” I insisted, “rogue waves do happen.” Kassouli sighed, as though I was being deliberately perverse. “The best estimate of wave height, at that time and in that place, is fifteen feet. You wish to see the report I commissioned?” He clicked his fingers again, and Jill-Beth dutifully brought me a file that was stamped with the badge of one of America’s most respected ocean-ographic institutes. I turned the typed pages with their charts of wave patterns, statistics and random sample analyses. I found what I wanted at the report’s end: an appendix which insisted that rogue waves, perhaps two or three times the height of the surrounding seas, were not unknown.
“You’re insisting that such seas are frequent?” Kassouli challenged me.
“Happily very infrequent.” I closed the report and laid it on the sofa.
“I do not believe,” he spoke as though he summarized our discussion, “that Wildtrack was pooped.”
There was a pause. I was expected to comment, but I could only offer the bleak truth, instead of the agreement he wanted. “But you can’t prove that she wasn’t pooped?”
His face flickered, as though I’d struck him, but his courteous tone did not falter. “The damage to Wildtrack’s stern hardly supports Bannister’s story of a pooping.”
I tried to remember the evidence given at the inquest. Wildtrack had lost her stern guardrails, and with them the ensign staff, danbuoys and lifebelts. That added up to superficial damage, but it would still have needed a great force to rip the stanchions loose. I shrugged. “Are you saying the damage was faked?” He did not answer. Instead he leaned back in his sofa and steepled his fingers. “Allow me to offer you some further thoughts, Captain.
My daughter was a most excellent and highly experienced sailor.
Do you think it likely that she would have been in even a medium sea without a safety harness?”
I saw that Kassouli’s son was leaning forward in his wheelchair, intent on catching every word. “Not unless she was re-anchoring the harness,” I said, “no.”
“You are asking me to believe”—Kassouli’s deep voice was scornful—“that a rogue wave just happened to hit Wildtrack in the two or three seconds that it took Nadeznha to unclip and move her harness?”
It sounded lame, but sea accidents always sound unlikely when they are calmly recounted in a comfortable room. I shrugged.
Kassouli still watched closely for my every reaction. “Have you seen the transcript of the inquest?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“It says that the South African, what was his name?” He clicked his fingers irritably, and Jill-Beth, speaking for the first time since she had come into the room, supplied the answer. “Mulder,” Kassouli repeated the name. “The report says Mulder was on deck when my daughter died. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know.” I hesitated, and Kassouli let the silence stretch uncomfortably. “There’s a rumour,” I said weakly, “that Mulder lied to the inquest, but it’s only pub gossip.”
“Which also says that Bannister was the man on deck.” Kassouli, who had clearly known about the rumour all along, pounced hard on me as though he was nailing the truth at last. “Why, in the name of God, would they lie about that?” I was beginning to regret that I had come to America. It had seemed like a blithe adventure when Jimmy had delivered the ticket to Sycorax, but now the trip had turned into a very uncomfortable inquisition. “We don’t know that it was a lie,” I said.
“You would let sleeping dogs dream,” Kassouli said scathingly,
“because you fear their bite.”
I feared Kassouli’s bite more. He was not a sleeping dog, but a very wideawake wolf. “There is something else.” Kassouli closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if his next statement was painful. “My daughter, I believe, was in love with another man.”
“Ah.” It was an inadequate response, but my Army training was not up to any other reaction. I could discuss the sea with a fair equanimity, but I was discomforted by this new, embarrassing and personal strain in the conversation.
Kassouli, oblivious to my embarrassment, turned to his son. “Tell him, Charles.”
Charles Kassouli shrugged. “She told me.”
“Told you what?” I asked.
“There was another fellow.” He was laconic, and his voice was very slightly slurred.
“But she did not say who he was?” his father asked.
“No. But she was kind of excited, you know?” I did know, but I kept from looking at Jill-Beth. “Isn’t it odd,” I said instead, “that she sailed with her husband if she was in love with someone else?”
“Nadeznha was not a girl to lightly dismiss a marriage,” Kassouli said. “She would have found divorce very painful. And, indeed, she shared her husband’s ambition to win the St Pierre. It was a mistake, Captain. She sailed to her murder.”
He waited once more for me to chime in with an agreement that her death had been murder. I’d even been fetched clean across the Atlantic to provide that agreement, but I did not oblige.
Kassouli gave the smallest shrug. “May I tell you about Nadeznha, Captain?”
“Please.” I was excruciatingly embarrassed.
He stood and paced the rug. Sometimes, as he spoke, he would glance at the family photograph. “She was a most beautiful girl, Captain. You would expect a father to say that of his daughter, yet I can put my hand on my heart and tell you that she was, in all honesty, a most outstanding young lady. She was clever, modest, kind and accomplished. She had a great trust in the innate decency of all people. You might think that naivety, but to Nadeznha it was a sacred creed. She did not believe that evil truly existed.” He stopped pacing and stared at me. “She was named after my mother”—he added the apparent irrelevance—“and you would have liked her.”
“I’m sure,” I said lamely.
“Nadeznha was a good person,” Kassouli said very firmly as if I needed to understand that encomium before he proceeded. “I believe that I spoilt her as a child, yet she possessed a natural balance, Captain; a feel for what was right and true. She made but one mistake.”
“Bannister.” I helped the conversation along.
“Exactly. Anthony Bannister.” The name came off Kassouli’s tongue with an almost vicious intensity; astonishing from a man whose tones had been so measured until this moment. “She met him shortly after she had been disappointed in love, and she married him on what, I believe, is called the rebound. She was dazzled by him. He was a European, he was famous in his own country, and he was glamorous.”