Jenkins held out his hand for Bernie to shake. Bernie didn’t move. He continued staring at Jenkins as if seeing a ghost. The silence was only broken by the heavy raindrops falling on the window ledges outside.
“I’ve often thought of you over the years, Bernie,” Jenkins said.
The Chief and I exchanged mystified glances. What was this all about?
Hesitantly Bernie took Jenkins’s hand.
“Hello… Mr Reeves,” he said.
Harvey Jenkins gave a sad sigh.
“I’m not called Reeves any longer. These days my name is Jenkins… Harvey Jenkins.”
There was a moment of loaded silence before he added, “I’m glad that you’re here… all three of you. Though, for the life of me, I can’t understand how you got to know one another. Or how you found me.”
“It’s a long story,” the Chief said.
Jenkins gave a vague smile.
“Indeed, I can believe it,” he said. “Let me finish off what I’m doing here and we’ll go back to the funfair. We can talk undisturbed in my van.”
The Chief looked at the coffin.
“We heard that your cockerel was dead,” he said. “It survived to a good age.”
Jenkins nodded.
“I’m intending to hold a funeral as soon as this rain eases off. It will be a funeral at sea. I believe that’s what he would have wanted.”
On the way back from the joiner’s workshop Jenkins stopped at Wiener Platz to buy bread, sausage, milk and a couple of bottles of beer. I noticed that the Chief stayed close to him the whole time in case he took it into his head to make a run for it. But that didn’t seem to be Jenkins’s intention.
We ate in silence in the drab, little fairground van in which Jenkins lived. Once our plates were empty, he turned to me and the Chief and said, “By this stage I imagine you know what it was I was looking for on your ship, don’t you?”
“Indeed we do,” the Chief said. “We found the pearl necklace a month or so later. By chance, in fact. It was hidden in a secret compartment in the ship’s wheel.”
Jenkins stared at the Chief in amazement. Then he gave a low, hoarse laugh. “In the wheel! He always was a sly old fox, Jack was!”
Then Jenkins’s eyebrows wrinkled in a look of bewilderment. “But why are you here if you found the necklace? You must have enough money now to make the Hudson Queen shipshape again, so you should be out at sea rather than here.”
“We haven’t sold the necklace,” the Chief said. “We’ve been trying to find out who it actually belongs to. That’s why we went to Glasgow.”
Jenkins looked at Bernie and then at the Chief again.
“I think I’m beginning to see how it all hangs together… but tell me more.”
It took the Chief a good hour to tell of our meeting with Li Jing and how our search for Rose Henderson also led us to Moira Gray and her gang. He said a few words about his own voyage on the Valkyrie and also told what he knew about my time in the house on Oswald Street.
Jenkins listened attentively. Finally, the Chief told him about our visit to Mrs Culduthel at the orphanage in Inverness. Jenkins’s jaw dropped in amazement.
“Rose Henderson is alive, then?”
“Yes, it seems so,” the Chief said. “Apparently she lives in France and we’re on our way there to give her the necklace.”
“Well I’ll be damned!” Jenkins muttered. Then he swallowed hard and said, “Imagine if old Jack had still been with us!”
“It’s because of Jack Shaw that we’ve come here,” the Chief said. “We want to find out what happened to him so that we can tell Rose when we meet her. She has a right to know.”
For some reason, Jenkins cast a hasty glance in Bernie’s direction before he spoke. “The rain has left off now so it’s time to hold the cockerel’s funeral. Once that’s done, I’ll answer your questions.”
The sun was low in the western sky as our little funeral cortège left the fairground. Jenkins led us through wooded parkland that grew along the River Isar.
He had already picked out a fine stretch of flat grass down by the waterside and there he prepared the small funeral ship that would carry the bird to his last rest. He’d made a raft of empty bottles and thin strips of wood on which he’d prepared a bonfire of twigs and dry branches. The elegant little coffin was placed on top of the bonfire. The aged cockerel lay in the coffin on a freshly ironed linen handkerchief, looking as grey and dishevelled in death as he had in life.
Once darkness had fallen over the river, we launched the funeral ship, Jenkins lit the bonfire and let the current carry the cockerel away on his final voyage.
We remained standing and watched the flaming vessel drift away into the darkness. Jenkins quietly sang a sailor’s song I’d heard many times before:
Our anchor we’ll weigh,
Our sails we will set,
Goodbye, fare-ye-well
Goodbye, fare-ye-well.
The light of the fire grew ever weaker and at last passed out of sight.
Jenkins’s song came to an end, but he remained standing, head bowed, for a little longer. Then he gave a deep sigh and said, “Thank you for being with me.”
Bernie was standing beside me and I could hear from his breathing that he was uneasy.
Jenkins placed a hand on Bernie’s shoulder.
“Now your friends must hear what happened to Captain Jack.”
A shudder ran through Bernie’s body.
“Don’t be worried,” Jenkins said. “After all, I was there and I know what happened. It wasn’t your fault, Bernie. Will you let me tell them?”
Bernie swallowed hard. Then he looked at Jenkins and nodded slowly.