Death Ship Read online

  The bell became a buzzer, the buzzer became an alarm. Air, rushing in through the manlock exit, failed to fill Robbie’s lungs. The first seizure struck, his body snapping at the waist like a mousetrap, so that he fell to the floor.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Shaw and Valentine picked their way through the rocks below the town’s emblematic multicoloured cliffs: the white chalk and the red chalk, lying in neat layers over the terracotta ironstone. The beach echoed with the chatter of birds, their calls amplified by the concave amphitheatre of the rock face above. Shaw, unable to resist a childhood habit, clapped his hands and counted to three before the sharp echo bounced back. With the sea flat, the humid summer air seemed trapped against the cliff face, creating a sense that they weren’t outside at all, but on a wide outdoor stage, in a limitless auditorium, full of still air. When Shaw spoke, the words seemed to have the resonance of an actor’s, bouncing off the seats in the circle, reaching up to the gods.

  ‘You OK?’

  Valentine, a hundred yards to the rear, struggled on, stopping briefly to disentangle a frond of seaweed from his shoe. The way ahead lay through a maze of smooth ironstone rocks, like the wet backs of a vast herd of hippopotami, each with its head down, drinking at a waterhole. Many were covered in a slimy green algae which made it precarious to try to step from one to the next, although Shaw managed, leaving Valentine to zigzag on the sand, stepping over the myriad pools that lay between the wave-sculpted rocks.

  ‘Peter!’

  Looking back, he saw Valentine, his hands cupped in a living megaphone, then pointing out to sea, where a bright yellow air ambulance helicopter was approaching the rig. It circled once, before dropping down to the heliport deck. Checking his phone, he found he had no signal. Valentine shrugged too, holding out his own in a despairing gesture. Something had happened on the rig, but they’d have to wait for a clifftop signal to find out more.

  Ahead, amongst the green-backed rocks, they could see Anna Roos, clutching a clipboard to her chest, surrounded by a dozen school kids of varying ages in shorts and T-shirts. Shaw recalled that one of the many eccentric innovations of Winterhill was that all ages were part of one class, and that all were invited to stay at school throughout the holidays if they wished.

  Roos sported the same rimless reflective sunglasses she’d worn in the STP offices, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the sound of approaching voices. Shaw had often asked witnesses to remove dark glasses during interviews so that he could watch their eyes. He was unsure if this was a breach of anyone’s basic human rights, but he somehow felt that the attempt to hide the eyes was an infringement of his. They might not be windows to the soul, but they provided a spectrum of clues to the keen observer. One of the many positive side effects of his disability was an almost unnatural fascination with the eyes of others.

  Roos crouched down, and so did her audience, as Shaw vaulted the final line of ironstone boulders. He couldn’t be sure if she’d done it deliberately, a snub to his arrival. In the unnatural calm below the cliff he heard her voice: ‘We can think of each rock pool – every single one – as a little world of its own. An ecosystem – who remembers that word?’ A series of small hands rose tentatively.

  Shaw found himself a rock to sit on and waited for Valentine. Roos told her pupils about the rock pool, how it was linked to other ecosystems – like the sea – and how it was really two ecosystems – one at low tide, when it was a world apart, and one at high tide, when it was reduced to a shallow depression on the heaving floor of the sea. So each day, twice a day, the ecosystem was transformed, and that affected the fish, and the plankton, and the weed. The tides, she told them, also brought energy to the pool – to go alongside the heat and light of the sun. What kind of energy was this?

  Shaw heard the word ‘kinetic’ whispered, followed by a round of applause.

  Roos stood, her knees caked with sand, and pretended to see the detectives for the first time. Shaw pointed at his watch, and she nodded, clutching the clipboard again. ‘Now,’ she said, in that tone of voice perfected by teachers, ‘in your pack are the first few pages of the book we discussed in class – The Shrimp and the Anemone. It tells you how two children played on this beach a hundred years ago. Right here, in these rock pools. So – let’s go up on the sand and read, and then we can have our picnics.’

  As the children fled up the beach, she sauntered over, and for a moment Shaw thought she was going to reveal her eyes, but the hand dropped from the metal arm of the frame and brushed instead at the salt and sand on her knees.

  ‘Inspector. I hear there may be other bombs in the sand.’ She nodded south, where metal barriers now kept the public off nearly a mile of prime holiday beach. ‘I’m surprised, given the dangers, that they’re still working out there on the rig …’

  On cue, the helicopter rose from its pad out at sea, swinging over their heads inland.

  Shaw waited for the noise to fade before asking the question that had brought him to the rock pools. ‘I don’t have a lot of time, Ms Roos. When we last spoke, you denied any knowledge of the email threat posted on Blue Square’s website.’

  ‘STP issued a press release. We said our campaign was a non-violent one. We issued it again after they found that man in the water.’ She glanced along the shore to a police launch that was still anchored over the spot where Dirk Hartog’s body had been recovered.

  ‘It’s a skill, tracking a digital post like that back to the account of the sender,’ said Shaw. ‘Especially if they know the tricks of the trade. A message can be broken up into separate digital packages, you see, each one a nonsense of numbers or letters, before being sent through a series of different mainframe servers to the same target site. At that point they can be programmed to reconstitute themselves into the original message. Fiendishly clever, my sergeant here is on top of the detail obviously, but I’m just fine with the big picture.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Roos, flicking a stray hair out of the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Indeed. I have a young DC who’s into this stuff. She’s just spent fifty hours without sleep tracking back through the servers to the sender of the Blue Square threat. The sender’s account is [email protected]. That’s your work email address, isn’t it?’

  ‘I leave my laptop in the staff room at school, and at STP’s offices for that matter. Neither is a secure environment.’

  ‘That’s a very rapid response,’ said Shaw. ‘No time for a direct denial, I note. You’ve leapfrogged my implied question, Ms Roos. Did you send the message?’

  ‘No. Of course not. We’re running an ecological campaign – an ethical campaign. Mindless threats of violence are counterproductive.’

  ‘Where is your laptop now?’

  ‘At home.’

  Shaw consulted his notebook. ‘At forty-one Lancaster Buildings? DS Valentine here has a warrant. He’s going to go back there now with you and secure the laptop, and then we’re going to review the emails sent. I’m sorry about this. In the meantime, I’d like you to stay in the town. No unexpected trips. Is that clear?’

  Both fists balled into white knuckles, she didn’t move.

  ‘Do you have something to hide, Ms Roos?’

  ‘No.’ She waited ten seconds, and then removed the dark glasses. ‘What am I supposed to do with the class?’

  ‘I’d give them some licence to freedom, Ms Roos. That’s the motto, surely? Several are teenagers, so perhaps a lesson in leadership would be timely. I think they can survive in downtown Hunstanton unchaperoned, don’t you? But if we walk them back to the esplanade, I have a police constable ready to make sure they get back to school safely.’

  ‘Am I being charged?’

  ‘Not unless you want to be. But we are in a hurry. We need that laptop. I’m afraid we have to ask that you don’t use your phone until we’ve signed over the computer to our forensic unit. Sorry. Rules.’ He held out his hand.

  Looking out to sea, she eventually gave Shaw the phone. ‘I have
a right to care about this place, you know. Just because my name doesn’t fit, it doesn’t mean I can’t invest in the landscape. The beach. The beauty of it.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that. Sorry – I don’t really understand. You have a mildly exotic name. It never crossed my mind that you don’t fit. Do you encounter prejudice? Has anyone ever questioned your right to be here? I doubt that very much.’

  ‘It’s unsaid. That’s a very English vice. It’s the surname, of course. It does mark me out as an outsider. The immigrant. I’m not allowed to be angry, I don’t have the birthright.’

  ‘Ms Roos,’ said Shaw. ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘I think, sometimes, that I’m seen as a newcomer, trying just a little too hard to be accepted. Patronizing, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not the issue here. The issue’s the law. We need access to your laptop.’

  She told the children to finish their packed lunches and collect their things, then she turned back to Shaw. ‘My father was Dutch. An Engelandvaarder – you know of this?’

  Did Shaw detect the slightest of Dutch rhythms within the sentence? Had it gone undetected before, or had she consciously switched the cadence?

  Shaw shook his head, checking his diver’s watch, watching her pack up her books and clipboards.

  ‘A broad term, but a group – I suppose – all Dutchmen, who wanted to go on fighting after the Germans invaded in 1939. Some walked to Spain, or Switzerland, or got to Norway in time. Thirty of them – very brave – crossed the North Sea in kayaks. Crazy, I know. Now I think about it, very British. Eccentric perhaps. It’s more than a hundred miles and it took the few who made it more than fifty hours. There’s a memorial down the coast to the ones who failed. My father was one of the lucky ones. He came ashore at Sizewell – a bleak place. Not a pretty spot. Not picturesque. He settled here. But he always told the same story. How they landed at dusk, with the sun going down, and how he felt in that moment that he had arrived home, because it was – you see – so much like home. The marshes, the sands, the silence. The cliffs here are an aberration. It’s a flat coast for a hundred miles – more. The pier, if it opens, will destroy all this.’

  ‘Is that a confession?’ asked Shaw, as Roos prepared to gather the children into line.

  ‘No. I’m just saying I have a right, like everyone else, to resist. I belong. This is my home, as it was his. Adopted homes are precious.’

  Shaw found the little speech preachy and unconvincing, and now that he saw Roos’s eyes, he noted they were an oddly lifeless grey.

  ‘The dead man, Hartog, was Dutch,’ noted Shaw, testing connections. ‘A tourist only. Did you meet?’

  Roos’s natural colour had bled away. Did she regret her little lecture on family history? ‘No. Never.’

  Valentine’s mobile buzzed once, cut out, and then buzzed again. He scrambled on top of one of the boulders and held the phone up above his head, trying to recapture the signal. ‘Text,’ he said, reading. ‘Twine says there’s been an incident out on the rig. He says the army’s got an inflatable we can use down on the beach. Thirty-two ill – two in the ’copter. No details, but he says sabotage. No fatalities – yet.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Seen from the beach, the pier-head construction resembled a steel city, a suspended chaos of girders, cranes, and platforms; up close, as Shaw navigated the army dinghy along a channel marked by yellow-and-green buoys, the site divided neatly between three separate structures: the support tug riding at anchor; the crane, towering nearly eighty feet above the sea, supported on four legs sunk to the sea floor; and finally the rig itself, the work platform, supported over the sunken caisson by a series of metal pillars. This too, it seemed, lived part of its life as a ship; its name – MV Telamon – ran vertically down one of the supporting legs. At the base of one of these legs a floating landing stage led to a switchback flight of metal stairs, leading up to the deck – a work area the size of a football pitch, holding a two-storey accommodation block, the platform control room, and the entry/exit shafts for the manlock and the mudlock.

  Valentine, who’d felt sick in the boat, stood to get his breath back at the top of the stairs, framed against a No Smoking sign ten feet long and six feet high.

  ‘Dry land, at last,’ he said, tracking the crane as it lifted a bucket from the mudlock chute, swinging it out over the sea and down to a floating barge, where the claw-like hand opened, spilling out sand and gravel.

  Half a dozen men in shorts and trainers stood around talking on a marked-out basketball pitch, cradling mugs. A cook in a white smock trundled bins behind a Portakabin.

  ‘Christ. Imagine if this was home,’ said Valentine.

  Shaw looked back at Hunstanton, a view once available for the price of a ride on the old pier’s miniature railway. While the beach was still closed, the fun fair and rides were all working on the South Beach, the big dipper plunging from its heights as he watched, the accompanying wave of mock screams reaching his ears a few seconds after the cars splashed down in the crocodile-infested river provided. His good eye tracked north until he saw the sun glinting on the windows of Surf!, the blue dolphin flag flying from the Old Boathouse. Shaw appreciated for the first time this unheralded virtue of piers, that they allowed you to look back on your own life, as it were, framing the everyday from a fresh angle.

  A yellow line on the concrete deck, made up of arrows, pointed them towards Bridge.

  Captain John Ring, commander of the MV Telamon, sat in a swivel chair in front of a panel of gauges and digital computer screens. Observation windows surrounded him at all four compass points. A bank of CCTV screens showed men working in the caisson below with that same shadow-like lack of 3D reality that reminded Shaw of the Apollo moon landings.

  Shaw knew Ring: born and based in the town, he travelled the world with a master’s ticket, captaining supertankers and long-distance freighters, but always made a point of contacting the lifeboat crew when he was home on leave, as he was listed on the station’s back-up crew. One Christmas he’d joined Shaw’s crew on the hovercraft to rescue a family of three marooned on a sandbank after trying to rescue a runaway dog.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, shaking hands but not getting up. ‘Sickbay first? It’s your shout.’

  ‘Just run us through security, Captain. The basics.’

  Ring manipulated the CCTV screens by remote, showing them a complete set of live images of the exterior of the Telamon, a second bank of interior images, including the view inside the caisson. A further display panel controlled an emergency automatic lock system with which he could close bulkhead doors throughout the structure in the face of fire, flood, or unspecified threat.

  ‘Standard kit now to deal with pirates,’ said Ring. ‘You don’t want to be on one of these things in the Indian Ocean without the ability to lock it down.’

  ‘She’s run as a ship?’ asked Valentine, sensing for the first time a slight shudder in the structure.

  ‘Part ship, part rig. When she floats, she’s not exactly graceful. But that’s not her job. Her job’s to stay afloat until the tugs get her into the right spot, and then drop her legs to the seabed, hauling herself up out of the water. Which is not a bad trick when you think about it.’ Suddenly embarrassed by his enthusiasm for his command, Ring jumped down from the captain’s chair. ‘Sorry. That’s not why you’re here, is it? Follow me.’

  A short man, and slight with it, he compensated with a smart, rapid pace, as he led them out across the deck towards the accommodation block, a one-storey prefab belching steam from an aluminium chimney.

  As Ring punched in a security code to release the door lock, Shaw recalled that a telamon was a male caryatid – a figure in stone, supporting a roof, as might be seen on a Greek temple. In his mind’s eye, he saw the rig as a giant, its feet on the seabed, the platform held high above the water by upturned hands.

  Inside, down a corridor that smelt of bathwater, they found the sickbay. All the beds were full. Two men provided a soundtr
ack of groans, their bodies jackknifed at the waist. The air-conditioned interior was laced with the unmistakable aromas of vomit and urine. One patient sat up, coughing drily into a wad of tissue paper.

  ‘We flew in a couple of doctors from Lynn. Everyone’s fine – well, everyone’s recovering. Ross and Cheetham have been flown back out. They’ll be all right, but they’d both worked double shifts, so they need a blood transfusion and monitoring in intensive care. But they’ll live.’

  ‘Robbie Ross?’ asked Shaw, recalling the scene around young Eric’s bed the day after the bomb explosion on the beach.

  ‘Indeed. He passed out inside the manlock itself, the last man through. Everyone from the previous shift was back in the accommodation block, or in the TV lounge, when the symptoms hit. It’s all a bit random. Take Joey there.’ Ring pointed at one of the jackknifed patients, lying on top of his sheets, scratching at his legs and arms. ‘He was fine. In fact, I reckon he was the first through the chamber after the second shift. He watched Top Gear, had a plate of chilli con carne, then couldn’t remember where his room was: total blank-out. One of his mates found him wandering the corridor. Memory loss – plus some double vision. The rest have got joint pains, and the itching, of course – that’s classic.’

  ‘We need to see this manlock chamber,’ said Shaw. ‘Is it up here, or down there?’