Next morning Yorke spent only fifteen minutes writing an account of the previous night’s attack on the convoy. He had a convoy diagram and it took no time to work out where the U-boat had been lying: she had been at right angles to the convoy course between the commodore’s fourth column and the Marynal’s fifth. The German had definitely fired a bow tube at the second ship in the commodore’s column, and the single torpedo from his stern tube had hit the ship ahead of the Swede. Then the Florida Star, third ship in the commodore’s column, had come into his sights. And, with three ships hit, the U-boat must then have dived clear.
The German would have guessed that he was safe until he heard the fifth merchant ship in a column pass overhead: then he would expect the frigate or corvette crossing back and forth across the stern of the convoy and know her Asdic might pick him up. So he would have gone deep and then stopped, probably knowing exactly where there was a cold layer of water.
The Penta had behaved perfectly. Apart from the breakdown and an earlier tendency to be careless with glowing cigarette ends, the ship had done exactly the right thing. She had not used her radio transmitter, she could not have signalled to any U-boat, she had done nothing that could be criticized or arouse the slightest suspicions in a bloodhound with a persecution mania.
Yorke put down his pen impatiently. It had taken one night, one attack by an insider, to show his theory about Swedish ships was nonsense; it was all one of those enormous coincidences (circumstantial evidence was probably the phrase) that at first arouses suspicion but which logical examination by a clear brain eventually shows up as just coincidences. Even if Yorke’s brain had been a little muddled, there had been the clear brains of Jemmy, the Croupier and Uncle… All right, so they too were mistaken.
He walked over to the handbasin to shave, and as he lathered his face he knew that what was annoying him at the moment was not so much that the Swede theory had fallen down with a crash but that he personally was going to have to stay in the Marynal until the convoy arrived in Freetown. Admittedly it would become a nice cruise once the convoy began to turn south towards the Tropics, leaving astern the grey seas and grey skies of winter in the North Atlantic and replacing them with the blueish-purple of the deep ocean, the startling blue skies, and the night never really dark because of the millions of stars and the Milky Way like an artist’s wash across the sky. Providing, of course, the Marynal stayed afloat that long.
He seemed to surface to find he had showered, shaved and dressed without conscious effort, and went down to the saloon for breakfast. A weary chief officer and a cadet had just come off watch and were eating fried eggs and bacon and grumbling that the toast was hard. The coffee was hot and strong. In fact the good food, Yorke reflected, was one of the compensations of Merchant Navy life: the wise chief steward bought plenty of whatever was available in a foreign port: a year’s supply of currants and raisins, sugar, ham and bacon, chocolate, butter, cheese…all were stored on board, so that wherever the Marynal happened to be, alongside the Queen’s Dock at Liverpool unloading a cargo or steaming in a convoy heading for Freetown with supplies for the Eighth Army which would be ferried across the Sahara, the men on board at least ate well: last night, just before the attack, Yorke had eaten a large wedge of currant pie, an inch or more deep, and containing more currants than he had seen for a year or two.
After breakfast, and after a quizzing by the chief officer, who seemed to assume that Yorke had in some mysterious way solved the insider problem by watching three ships sink, he collected his thick duffel coat and went up to the bridge. It was a cold, grey day with low cloud, but the wind had veered and although he had seen neither barometer nor barograph he guessed the depression was passing north. Unless it was trailing secondaries or there was another depression close behind, the weather would certainly get no worse for the next couple of days and might even improve.
The third officer and Cadet Reynolds were on watch, their binoculars searching the horizon all round. A periscope, a drifting lifeboat or a raft – a wooden crate built round empty oil drums and which floated a foot or so out of the water, giving survivors something in which to sit, and containing food and water – were the only manmade objects they were likely to see. Occasionally there would be planks and baulks of timber spread over many hundreds of square yards; either wreckage from some sunken ship, or dunnage thrown over the side to get the deck clear. Dunnage – a curious word and probably an old one, and particularly suitable to describe timber used to wedge or protect cargo in the hold. Usually there would be a few gulls balancing delicately on the planks like old ladies paddling on a pebble beach. Many a distant ship had gone to action stations because the sun reflecting from the white of gulls’ feathers in the distance made them look like a long metallic object.
Yorke nodded to Reynolds and stood at the forward side of the bridge. Always he felt this curious sensation that the ship was standing still and the ocean rushing past, the same impression a fisherman had standing in a fast-flowing mill stream. All the other ships in the convoy seemed stationary, too, because they stayed in the same position relative to the Marynal.
Now there were the gaps. Always after a night attack one waited until daybreak and looked for the gaps. It did not identify the ships that were hit but merely showed how many had been lost, because the gaps had usually been shifted astern: a ship would move up into a gap ahead and her next-astern would move up too, like the ripple of thuds made by the wagons when a goods train started. There were only three ships remaining in the commodore’s column to port this morning; the last ship was now abreast the Marynal, although the rescue tug was still following and abeam of the Flintshire.
As he had done almost every morning since the first day of the war, because he had served continuously at sea until he was sent to hospital after the Aztec sinking, Yorke looked slowly round the horizon the moment he reached the bridge. Out there, probably watching the convoy through its periscope, was a German submarine. Hunter and hunted. Which was which? The U-boat was the wolf that raced into the flock and killed a few victims before running off. The convoy steamed along slowly, the ships as much a flock as the goats being herded by wandering Arabs across a desert, but it was a herd protected by wolfhounds: the frigates and corvettes that were hunting the U-boat. A wag in the ASIU (he could imagine Jemmy saying it) might accurately describe the situation as an insider being hunted by a pack of outsiders.
The Marynal’s third mate was a plump and spotty young man who had obviously worked hard on his diction to lose his Newcastle accent and who had made it clear from the beginning that he was not going to be impressed by a Royal Navy lieutenant, even if he was wearing the ribbon of the DSO. The youth’s attitude was unnecessary and boring, and Yorke kept out of his way. As the third mate traditionally kept to the port side of the bridge, leaving the starboard side to the cadet, it was interesting to see that the captain seemed to prefer the starboard side too; clearly he found the third mate’s fawning manner was too much, particularly since it was often interrupted to bully young Reynolds, most frequently when a senior officer could hear.
The third mate was a particularly poor lookout, apart from having a panicky manner, whereas Reynolds had sharp eyesight and, it was quite clear to Yorke, very sensibly only reported things to the third mate when action was needed: reporting to him a sighting of something not connected with the Marynal would usually provoke a spasm of near panic, recrimination and needless shouting. The risk that Reynolds ran was that the third mate might subsequently sight something and bellow across in front of the wheelhouse (thus ensuring that the captain in his cabin on the deck below would hear), pretending not to hear Reynolds’ reply that he had already sighted the object and decided not to report it. However, Captain Hobson was not the man to be impressed by the third mate, Yorke realized, but for the sake of discipline there was nothing he could do about it.
The DEMS gunner acting as additional bridge lookout and watching the Penta reported nothing unusual. He was a careful man and took out a notebook and read the entries to Yorke: an officer had walked out to the port wing of the bridge and read the log, like that in the Marynal, which was streamed from a boom amidships with a repeater recording the distance run at the inboard end; an officer and someone with the four stripes of the captain had gone up to the monkey island and, with binoculars, had inspected the ships in the convoy. That was all.
Had they shown an interest in any particular ship, Yorke asked.
‘No, sir; looked to me as though the captain slept late, then came up to the bridge and had a look round with the officer o’ the watch to see who bought it last night.’
‘Any interest in the escorts – their positions, that sort of thing?’
‘No, sir, I was watching for that ’ticularly. Neither looked at ’em nor ignored them. Just about what one would have expected, sir.’
‘And no garbage?’
‘No, sir, I’ve been watching for that, too.’
In the course of a day a ship created a great deal of garbage: eggshells from, say, forty breakfasts, and odd scraps of bread, often a few mildewed loaves, empty jam and marmalade tins…on top of them, as the day progressed, there would be potato peelings, the outside leaves of cabbages or cauliflowers, chunks of white fat cut from pieces of meat. All had to be disposed of in the sea, the universal dustbin, but standing orders for merchant ships said it was not to be thrown over the side until nightfall. Under no circumstances was it to be thrown over in daylight. Submarine commanders, Allied and German, were skilled detectives where floating rubbish was concerned: from half a dozen bad oranges, a few leaves of cabbage or a sodden loaf, a submariner could tell how long it had been in the water. The line in which the rubbish floated on the water – usually the cook’s mate had two or three drums to empty – could show the ship’s course (or its reciprocal).
A submarine commander examining a few sodden bits of garbage could, if he recognized that it had been in the water for, say, six or seven hours, know for certain that within forty miles or so in one direction or its opposite there was a convoy. In little more than two hours on the surface at fifteen knots he should sight it… So rubbish was thrown over as night fell, things like the big tins used for jams and marmalade were supposed to have holes pierced in the bottom so that they sank, and bottles were to be broken, but cooks’ mates had little imagination, and rooting round in old oildrums – the usual dustbins – was something they would do only if the chief officer was standing over them. As it was, throwing over the rubbish at nightfall gave a short enough margin – twelve hours of darkness, and during that time a six-knot convoy would be lucky to have steamed seventy miles. A zigzag or two might throw off a pursuer, but zigzags, as Jemmy was only too keen to point out, were only zigs to one side and then zags to the other of a straight line from Point A to Point B, and because the whole book of zigzag diagrams was given to every neutral ship sailing in a British convoy, it was obvious the German U-boat commanders had copies, too, so finding point B was not too hard.
No messages from Johnny Gower, so there were no ideas from the escorts. And, he reflected bitterly, no messages from him to Johnny Gower either. Sailing in the Marynal was a crazy idea, and one he would never have had except that he was getting desperate. A contented mind might be a continual feast, but a desperate mind is a fertile ground for crazy ideas. Now he was stuck for weeks in this damned convoy. If only one of the frigates – better still one of the corvettes, because that would not weaken the escort too much – developed some defect that required her to go into Londonderry, or anyway return to the British Isles – then he could cadge a lift back and report to Uncle.
It was hard to guess what Uncle’s reaction would be. Perhaps patient and accepting that the only way to be sure the Swedes were not up to some nonsense was to sail in a convoy and watch them. He might be irritated, having had second thoughts himself soon after Yorke left London. He might be under great pressure from Downing Street, in which case Yorke would receive a monumental bottle, and Uncle was just the kind of man – quick tongue, fluent command of the language – to be good at handing out bottles to errant lieutenants.
Well, standing up here on the bridge looking astern, like a seagoing Wellington surveying the lie of the land at Waterloo (well, perhaps not a battle that later rated a railway station; maybe one of his defeats. Or just staring down from the heights of Torres Vedras was more like it) was achieving nothing. He had some old copies of Horizon to read – it was always amusing to read that bunch of Spanish War poets and writers patting each other on the back and saying how wonderful they were, even if several had fled to the safety of America, shouting across the Atlantic how freedom must be defended at any price. He went down to his cabin, knowing they would irritate him so much he would end up reading a pre-war Blackwood’s again – there were several left in the bookcase.
He had been reading for less than half an hour when Cadet Reynolds came down to report that the Penta had just received permission from the commodore to complete her repairs. Yorke put on warm clothing and went up to the bridge, where Captain Hobson was standing inside the wheelhouse, examining the Swedish ship with binoculars.
‘She’s swinging out now and reducing speed,’ he said. ‘It’s what he told the Commodore last night.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be smoking much,’ Yorke commented.
‘Aye, but I had a word with our chief engineer. He says the smoke yesterday could have been just the normal sooting up, and what the Swede actually stopped for might have been something quite different.’
Yorke went back to his cabin and tried to forget about the Penta until, an hour before nightfall, he watched her rejoining the convoy. There was the same high speed approach from over the horizon, the same slowing down two or three miles astern, and the same leisurely return to her position in the convoy.
He commented to Captain Hobson: ‘That’s just how we’d do it. And he hasn’t called up the commodore so I suppose all his repairs are completed.’