As Yorke clattered down the iron ladder to the large cabin in the poop he thought that the officer who had escorted him there and slammed the door shut once he had passed through had in fact then locked it. As he did not want the Swedes to guess that he had any suspicions about anything, he continued going down, deliberately not trying the handle, just in case the officer was waiting outside and watching.
His men were already making themselves comfortable: each had a mattress, which had obviously just been issued by the Swedes, and there was a pile of trousers, jerseys, wool shirts and socks which they had also provided. Most of the seamen had already stripped off their wet clothes and towelled themselves down and were now picking through the pile to find clothes that fitted. There was a good-natured babble as they exchanged shirts or jerseys which proved too large or too small, and the pile of wet clothes was mounting and smelling of damp wool.
Reynolds, already rigged out in grey flannel trousers and a garish woollen shirt in what some Swedish weaver obviously thought was a Scottish tartan, met Yorke at the bottom of the ladder.
‘I’ve put a set of dry clothes to one side for you, sir. Jenkins is sitting in the head – it’s through that door there, lavatory, handbasin and shower, including hot water – cleaning the revolvers and wiping off the grenades. None of the grenades got really wet and he reckons the fuses will be all right.’
‘Who put Jenkins in the head?’ Yorke asked out of curiosity.
‘I did, sir. The guns and grenades needed wiping off and we couldn’t risk the Swedes coming down and finding us all sitting round doing it, but the one place where a man can reasonably lock himself in is the head, so Jenkins volunteered. The Swedes have given us some tins of food and loaves of bread (they’re preparing a hot meal) and Jenkins took a tin of margarine to give the guns a wipe over. Is that all right, sir?’ the cadet asked anxiously.
‘Splendid, Reynolds. You’ve done just the right thing.’ He looked round the cabin. ‘Where’s Mr Mills?’
‘He’s helping Jenkins with the grenades. They fascinate him. Says he’s going to use that small bin there for lobbing practice. Like clock golf, he says; you get twelve throws. The man who lobs the highest number of grenades into the bin gets the prize. Seems dangerous to me, but…’
‘Clock grenades are forbidden, Reynolds. Cards or uckers are all right, but any game your grandmother would not play is strictly forbidden.’
Reynolds’ face was so serious that Yorke held back a grin. A quiet word with Mills would be sufficient to stop a new game developing – one which deserved to be called Swedish Roulette.
The Swedish officer would have gone by now and Yorke told Reynolds: ‘Go up and see if the door is locked. Just turn the handle once; don’t rattle it. You’ll probably find it is.’
He walked over to the table on which stood the pile of clothing Reynolds had put out for him, and Watkins helped him off with his lifejacket and the duffel coat. ‘I’ll take the grenades to Jenkins,’ the signalman said. ‘And your gun, too, sir: let him give it a wipe over.’
Yorke stripped off his clothes, shivering violently, and towelled himself vigorously. He was just wondering how long Jenkins would need the head to use as an armoury, so that he could have a hot shower, when Reynolds returned, disconcerted and obviously unsure how to report to a naked naval officer.
‘It’s locked all right, sir. Who did that? Supposing we’re torpedoed – we’d be trapped!’
‘A grenade hung on the handle would probably open it for us, but don’t worry: obviously the Swedes don’t want us wandering around on deck, which means that they probably have something to hide…’
As Yorke mulled over the first piece of real evidence he had against the Swedes, tiny as it was and even then perhaps an accident, he pulled on dry underclothing, a thick tartan shirt – he recognized the lumberjack style – grey flannel trousers and heavy woollen socks. Several boxes of what were obviously tennis shoes had not yet been opened; the seamen were sitting round rubbing their feet, now clad in thick socks, warming them before trying on shoes. Yorke looked through the boxes for his size, remembering the Continental number system, and pulled out a box just as Cadet Reynolds knelt down to help him find the right pair.
Now he was rigged in dry clothes and no longer shivering, although his unshaven face felt like a toothbrush, Yorke wondered how to get his duffel coat dry. He was looking around at the array of piping which ran round the cabin like continuous Pan pipes when he saw three or four coats already wrapped round them at the forward end of the cabin.
Reynolds saw where he was looking. ‘They’re all steam pipes, sir: Mills thinks it’s part of the ship’s heating system for when she’s up in the Baltic in the winter. I’ll hang your duffel up.’
Yorke saw a chair at the far end of the long table which offered a little isolation and went over and sat at it. Beneath his feet he could feel the deck trembling slightly: below, two great thick propeller shafts, each probably the diameter of a man’s chest, were turning slowly; occasionally as the ship gave a bigger pitch than usual and brought them nearer the surface, the propellers speeded up slightly, slowing as the stern sank down again and put them back in deeper water.
He waved towards Reynolds. ‘Ask Mr Mills if he can spare a moment, please.’
The fourth engineer arrived with a broad grin on his face, smelling of margarine, his hands greasy and holding a grenade in one and a margarine-stained cloth in the other.
‘Ha, Mr Yorke, how did things go on the bridge?’
‘We’re not welcome guests,’ Yorke said. ‘In fact we’re locked in at the moment, though we’re not supposed to know it.’
‘One of these would make a good key,’ Mills said, waving the grenade. ‘Just show me the door.’
‘There’s no rush: we just act stupid for the time being. Now, what do you reckon the ship’s engines are doing at the moment?’
‘Both are just turning over at enough revolutions to keep the ship head to wind, I’d say.’
‘Does there seem to be anything wrong with either of them?’
‘No! I was commenting to that chap Jenkins not above five minutes ago that they were running very sweetly.’
‘The reason this ship gives for dropping out of the convoy every day is that she has engine trouble.’
Mills shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose she might have originally, but she hasn’t now. Keeping big diesels like these turning over at low revolutions brings out any roughness, and you can hear for yourself, they’re running like sewing machines.’
Most of the seamen were asleep after an enormous hot meal brought down by a trio of cheery Swedish cooks and stewards when Yorke felt the ship begin to vibrate and a moment later heard the rumble of the propeller shaft increasing to something approaching a whine. The gentle but deep pitching became sharper and quicker as the ship increased speed, but there was little rolling: she was staying on the same course, for the time being anyway.
Yorke stood up from his mattress and scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for his pencil and little notebook. It had dried out now though the paper was crinkled. He looked at his watch and wrote: ‘1415 – increased speed.’ Mills was awake and looking up at him. ‘What do you reckon we’re doing?’ Yorke asked.
‘Going up to near full speed. Fifteen or sixteen knots.’
‘“Estimate 15-16 knots,”’ Yorke added to his note. ‘Course unchanged.’
Two hours later they heard the Penta’s engines slow down and once again the ship resumed the gentle pitching, only this time there was a slight roll, too. Either she had come round to starboard a few degrees to bring the wind and sea more on to her port bow, or the weather was changing. Again Yorke made another entry in his notebook. The facts themselves might be relevant or they might not, but he knew his memory was bad and if he survived this present nonsense without finding the answer to the ‘insider’, the notebook entries might help put an idea into someone else’s head. Or be needed as evidence at his court martial.
Watkins sat up on his mattress and groaned. ‘Four thirty – time for a cuppa. But no chance of char in a ship like this. Or if there was it’d taste like a Whale Island gunnery instructor’s love song, weak and salty.’
The signalman’s movement showed that by now most of the men were awake, lying on their mattresses because there was nothing else to do. For months they had stood regular watches at sea or painted gun shields, stripped and greased guns in port, and kept their mess deck clean. Now they were passengers; dunnage, even, as Jenkins grumbled. The Swedish cooks had brought down three packs of cards, but, Jenkins added, the ‘square heads’ weren’t up to uckers yet.
Yorke spent the next half an hour trying to think what he should be doing now while on board the Penta and ended up deciding that apart from breaking open the lock at the top of the ladder and searching the ship with a revolver in his hand, for the moment there was nothing he could do. He had to investigate but not raise suspicions; and he had to do something which would put an end to further attacks (on this convoy, anyway) while trying to avoid causing a diplomatic incident. Britain needed the ball-bearings made in Sweden of the special hardened steel; needed them so desperately – no engine of any sort could run without them – that high-speed boats like MTBs went to fetch them. No diplomatic incidents: Uncle had been most emphatic about that.
His orders had come from Downing Street and were (as one could expect from the Prime Minister) brief but explicit: if you have absolute proof, act; but relying on guesses and outward appearances would lead to a diplomatic incident and Sweden cutting off the supply of bearings, which Britain could not afford. ‘Proof, proof, proof!’ the old man had said, slapping his desk and then lighting a cigar, offering one to Uncle and cursing because he could not find his matches. Yorke could hear those three words, even third hand, because Uncle’s description had been vivid and ended up with the warning: ‘No medals if you’re right but if you’re wrong expect a court martial, excommunication, castration and a rude commemorative rhyme scribbled on the wall in one of the men’s toilets in the House of Commons. And a Parliamentary debate in secret session, of course.’
‘That might be fun,’ Yorke had said, ‘providing I’m allowed a seat in the Distinguished Villains gallery.’
‘You’ll be chained to the railings in the Members’ car park,’ Uncle had said grimly, ‘and then hanged, drawn and quartered while the Naval Estimates are being debated.’
In Uncle’s office at the Citadel it had sounded funny enough; the very remoteness of it even happening added to the humour. Now it was here; the diplomatic incident was only as far away as Omelette and Cornflower the names by which he found himself thinking of Ohlson and Pahlen. What was going on out there? In half an hour it would be dark and by now the Penta had probably caught up with the convoy – the slowing down three miles astern, the slow creep up into position – and yes, Mills had noticed it too: a further slowing down, very slight but noticeable to an engineer or someone like himself whose nerves were on edge. Mills walked over to him.
‘Dropping only a few revs. Maybe a knot in speed,’ he said, anticipating Yorke’s question and watching as Yorke wrote down another entry in his notebook against the time, 1711.
In London it would be dark already; office workers would be folding up their four-page evening newspapers and squeezing out of trains in the suburbs, queueing up for buses, fumbling for their pennies while the conductresses tried to issue tickets by the light of small blue bulbs… Some people would be setting out early to see a film, wives cooking suppers, children trying to find excuses for putting off doing their homework or going to bed. Clare would be off duty by now unless there had been another change which put her on nights. She would probably have supper at the hospital and perhaps go round to Palace Street to see his mother.
Curious that he never felt any jealousy. He had noticed some men going through agonies when they thought about their girlfriends, fiancées or wives, afraid they were out with other men. More than ‘out with’, all too often ‘in bed with’. Real love had to be based on trust; anything else was just a physical attraction or a one-sided affair. Perhaps that was not fair to all those lonely women: he was sure of Clare because she had suffered, and had thought never to fall in love again. Now she had done so (there was no conceit in stating that) it was ridiculous to suppose she would be unfaithful. At least, he supposed it was ridiculous. She was a beautiful woman and any man could be forgiven…he turned to Mills with a question which would stop that train of thought.
‘Engines still seem to be running smoothly?’
‘Sewing machines,’ Mills said. ‘The chief engineer of this schnapps bottle must be a happy man. Probably pretty cross at being stuck in a six-knot convoy when he can make sixteen or so and probably with an economical cruising speed of twelve, but still…’
Suddenly all the lights went out. Yorke was just registering that there had been no explosion when he realized what was happening. ‘Someone’s opened the door,’ he called out to the men, who were scrambling up from their mattresses, and a moment later the lights came on again and Yorke looked up at the narrow grating at the top of the ladder and saw the young officer who had greeted him at the top of the net.
‘You!’ the Swede shouted, pointing down at Yorke: ‘To the bridge!’
‘Keep talking,’ Yorke told Mills, ‘it’s time this fellow was taught manners.’
‘Aye, he’s a cheeky booger,’ Mills agreed. ‘Treated us like sheep-stealers being transported when we were brought down here. I took him to one side and said that if he ever wanted to see Stockholm again he’d better ease down.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Said he came from Malmö. He was serious, too. But he got the point.’
The Swede had repeated his shout while Mills was talking but no one looked up at him and a minute or two later Yorke heard the clatter of leather shoes on the steel rungs of the ladder. Then he felt a hand pulling at his shoulder. He turned his head and looked up at the Swedish officer. Two gold bands on his sleeve, face flushed with anger, a heavy gold ring on the ring finger of his right hand elaborately carved.
‘You, English, up to the bridge!’
Yorke looked at the man’s hand and suddenly stood up, facing him, and said quietly: ‘It is a long way to the bridge and it is dark out there.’
‘You’re not afraid of the dark, are you, English?’
‘No,’ Yorke said evenly, ‘but you will be, in a minute. Have you ever fallen over the side at night in bad weather with the ship making six knots, you can’t call for help and you’re not wearing a lifejacket?’
‘No, of course not!’ But the voice was less sure now, and the man slowly looked round. Every man in the cabin was standing round in a ring and watching him, their very silence a menace.
Yorke waited a full minute while the Swede realized that the only noise was the Penta’s engines and the hum of her propeller shafts, and that he was alone at the extreme after end of the ship with fourteen – strangers.
Yorke reached out and suddenly chucked the Swede under the chin as though he was a child. ‘Imagine that that was a fist, and now you are unconscious. Two of these men carry you up on deck and drop you over the side. How long before you are missed? By then, what will you care, because you will be dead.’
‘Gott im Himmel! My apologies, sir,’ the Swede blurted. ‘The captain is angry and wants you on the bridge at once!’
‘My dear fellow, you should have said so,’ Yorke said amiably. ‘Now, let me find my coat and I’ll come with you. I’ll just have to visit the head a moment – the lavatory, you understand?’
The jacket he had borrowed from the Marynal’s second officer still felt a little damp but it was warm from having been tucked between the heating pipes. Pulling it on, Yorke went into the head, took his revolver from among the five or six nestling between the folds of a towel in a locker over the handbasin, checked that it was loaded and tucked it into the front of his trousers. Then he pulled his jacket straight and did up the buttons. The gun did not show in the mirror on the back of the door. He did not really need to carry it, but that it made him feel braver.
Omelette and Cornflower were both in the chartroom and but for the fact that it was now dark and the light went off and on as the door was opened and closed, neither man appeared to have moved since he had left them several hours earlier.
Ohlson was obviously angry but, dazzled by the lights in the cabin, Yorke could not for a moment see the expression on Pahlen’s face. Ohlson began speaking immediately.
‘Your vice-commodore,’ he said accusingly, ‘will not allow us to transfer you to another ship.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Yorke said, resuming his placid, second-officer manner. ‘It’d mean stopping the convoy in the dark, because it’d be dangerous to stop only one or two ships. Still there’s all day tomorrow.’ That, Yorke thought, should start something.
‘Tomorrow!’ Pahlen exploded. ‘We are supposed to take you all the way to Freetown.’
Yorke shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sorry about that. We didn’t ask to be torpedoed.’
‘And we didn’t ask to pick you up!’ Pahlen snarled.
‘You did, though. Brotherhood of the sea, you know. Might be you one day. Leaving a lifeboat full of men to die of starvation and exposure is reckoned bad luck.’
Pahlen snapped something at Ohlson but the captain shook his head violently.
‘Look, old man,’ Yorke said, adopting the voice of sweet reason, ‘yours isn’t the only ship in the convoy carrying survivors. Nine ships sunk so far means nine sets of survivors. An average of fifty men per ship means 450 men distributed on board the remaining twenty-six ships. That works out at seventeen men per ship, mister, and you’ve got only fourteen. Supposing you get your lot tonight – how are you going to feel if some British ship’s master says he doesn’t want you on board, eh?’
‘That won’t happen to us!’ Pahlen said angrily and a moment later obviously regretted his hasty words and tried to correct himself. ‘I mean, no British ship would refuse to have us. It’s not the British tradition. Play the game you chaps, what-ho, by jove, chin-chin, bad show. You see? I know the British!’
‘Aye, I can see that,’ Yorke said stolidly. ‘And now it seems I’m getting to know the Swedish tradition. What is it you want? Money? The British Government will pay for our victuals. I didn’t bring any money with me as there was a bit of a rush, you see.’
His sarcastic tone made Pahlen go even whiter: the harsh overhead light threw shadows over his face from his high cheekbones, so it seemed even more cadaverous; a skull over which bleached parchment was stretched.
‘You talk too much!’ Pahlen snapped.
Yorke took a step towards him and spoke very slowly, as though to a child or a backward adult. ‘You called me up to the bridge. You told me the vice-commodore won’t let you transfer us to another ship. If I had been you, mister, my pride would have kept my mouth shut because what you wanted to do isn’t the usual way of treating survivors. Yet you told me. Still, you’re a neutral so we’ll let it slide. But what the bloody hell do you mean by blaming me for it? If the vice-commodore has to remind you what’s the honourable and decent thing to do, don’t expect me to wipe your eyes or congratulate you.’
‘Come, come, there’s no need for us to lose our tempers,’ Ohlson said soothingly. ‘Mr Pahlen and I are just worried about your comfort: fourteen men stuck in that miserable accommodation.’
‘We’re comfortable enough, captain,’ Yorke interrupted dourly. ‘It’s a lot more comfortable than a lifeboat, and providing we don’t get torpedoed tonight or any other night we’ll have no complaints.’
‘Ah, well, then let’s hope we have a good trip,’ Ohlson said with the heartiness of a doctor comforting the widow of a man who had just died because of his wrong diagnosis.
‘Aye, we can live in hope,’ Yorke said, adopting a Yorkshire accent, ‘even if we die in despair.’
Ohlson paused a moment, working out what had been said, and then he smiled. ‘You English, you have these wise sayings.’
‘Ah, there are plenty more where that came from: “He who hesitates is lost!”’ Yorke said, and a moment later could have bitten his tongue, but Ohlson merely nodded in agreement, and Yorke said goodnight to both men and left the cabin.
The young officer was waiting in the darkened wheelhouse. He was alone, but Yorke wondered if others were waiting below on the maindeck. The officer led the way down but once they were on the maindeck motioned Yorke to lead the way along the starboard side, which was the lee side. Instead Yorke turned, as though misunderstanding him, and ducked round the hatch and made his way aft in the darkness along the weather side, arriving at the door of the cabin a good minute before the other man, who arrived puzzled and out of breath.
‘Why did you go that way? I am your escort.’
‘I needed the exercise,’ Yorke said as he waited for the Swede to undo the door.
He went down the steel ladder as the men, alerted by the opening door extinguishing the light, were looking up at him, and he heard the door slam shut behind him and sensed that the Swede had not come inside. The men looked worried. Mills and young Reynolds obviously wanted to ask questions, but had learned the hard way that one did not question superior officers. However, it was better that the men knew exactly what was happening; there was nothing secret about it, and he had learned one thing in the war so far: men were usually frightened only of the unknown. Once they knew what threatened them, they were not scared. Fear was a question mark, and a good leader gave the answers as soon as possible.
He gestured to the men to gather round and brought them up to date, describing both visits to the Penta’s bridge and the attitude of the Swedish officers. He did not mention Cornflower’s comment that torpedoing ‘won’t happen to us’ – the man might have been one of those incurable optimists that believed only his neighbour’s car crashed, never his own.
The seamen seemed almost bored, and when Yorke finished and asked for questions, there was none; only a comment from Jenkins.
‘That door, sir,’ he said, gesturing to the top of the ladder. ‘I had a look at it while you were gone. Any time you want it opened, just pass the word.’
Yorke looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were a locksmith.’
‘I’m not, sir, but locks have to be fitted. That one, like most, is intended to stop anyone breaking into this cabin, which means it’s screwed into the wood from the inside, with no fastenings showing on the outside. I just have to undo four screws on our side and the lock either falls off or moves enough to open the door. The Swedes haven’t realized that!’
Yorke grinned with pleasure. Like most people (including these Swedes) he tended quite wrongly to regard a lock as a lock, thinking that whether you were standing on one side of the door or the other when you turned the key, the door was locked and that was that. But of course a lock could be smooth only on one side: the outside of the front door of a house but the inside of a cell door in a jail.
‘Screwdriver ready?’ He was only joking, but Jenkins held up the remains of a deck knife and Yorke saw he had broken the blade so that only a narrow sliver near the hilt remained, where the metal was thickest.
‘I took the liberty, sir,’ he said apologetically, ‘but I ’ad a word with Mr Mills first. I’ve just “started” all four screws on the lock. Nobody’ll notice and I haven’t scratched the paint, but it means I know all four will come out. Otherwise you risk getting three out and the last bleeder sticks like a limpet.’
Yorke thought of Ohlson and Pahlen, the Omelette and the Cornflower, both secure in the knowledge that ‘the English’ were locked down below. The best laid plans (whatever they were) of those two villains might yet be brought to nought because they forgot which side their lock was screwed.
But what were their plans? There was nothing on board the Penta that they felt had to be hidden from the eyes of the English officer: he had walked up to the bridge and back and it was obvious the escort was only concerned to fetch him and see him back to his quarters. There had been no attempt to hide anything on the bridge: he had seen the wheelhouse and the chartroom. So what could be done? There was no point in unscrewing that lock and turning the lads loose so they could take over the ship. He realized, with a sick feeling, that he was going to have to hear tonight’s attack on the convoy – and surely there would be one – from his prison and there was nothing he could do about it. The Penta might have something to do with these insider attacks, but it was damned obvious that whatever it was they did did not occur during the night: it must happen, over the horizon, in broad daylight, when no one from the convoy or escort could see the Penta.