There was no wind that night, the air very still and the wash of the sea in the cove below muted to a whisper. The place was snug and warm and homely, my mind at peace now. Choffel was dead. That chapter of my life was closed; it was the future that mattered now.
But in the morning, when I walked up to the headland and stood staring out across the quiet sea at the Longships light and the creaming wash of the Atlantic swell breaking on the inshore rocks, the wretched man’s words came back to me — you can’t escape, can
you, from either yourself or the past. I knew then that the chapter of my life that had started out there in the fog that night was not closed, would never be closed.
This was the thought that stayed with me as I tramped the clifftop paths alone or went fishing off Sennen in Andy’s boat. The weather was good for late January, cold with little wind and clear pale skies. It was on the fourth day, when I was fishing out beyond the Tribbens, that I felt ChoffePs presence most. The swell was heavier then and the boat rocking; I suppose it was that *vhich conjured up the memory of that dhow and what had happened. And his words… I found myself going over and over those rambling outbursts of his, the face pale under the stubble, the black curly hair, and the stench, the dark eyes staring. It all came back to me, everything he had said, and I began to wonder, And wondering, I began to think of his daughter — in England now and hating my guts for something I hadn’t done.
The line tugged at my hand, but I didn’t move, for I was suddenly facing the fact that if I were innocent of what she firmly believed I had done, then perhaps he was innocent, too. And I sat there, the boat rocking gently and the fish tugging at the line, as I stared out across the half-tide rocks south of the Tribbens to the surf swirling around the Kettle’s Bottom and the single mast that was all that was left above water of the Petros Jupiter. I’ve paid and paid. And now the girl was accusing me of a murder I hadn’t committed.
I pulled in the line, quickly, hand-over-hand. It was a crab of all things, a spider crab. I shook it loose and
started the engine, threading my way back through the rocks to the jetty. It was lunchtime, the village deserted. I parked the boat and took the cliff path to Land’s End, walking fast, hoping exertion would kill my doubts and calm my mind.
But it didn’t. The doubts remained. In the late afternoon a bank of fog moved in from seaward. I just made it back to Sennen before it engulfed the coast. Everything was then so like that night Karen had blown herself up that I stood for a while staring seaward, the Seven Stones’ diaphone bleating faintly and the double bang from the Longships loud enough to wake the dead. The wind was sou’westerly and I was suddenly imagining those two tankers thundering up the Atlantic to burst through the rolling bank of mist, and only myself to stop them — myself alone, just as Karen had been alone.
‘Think about it,’ Saltley had said. ‘If we knew where they were meeting up…’ And he had left it at that, taking the girl’s arm and walking her down the street to where he had parked his low-slung Porsche.
And standing there, down by the lifeboat station, thinking about it, it was as though Karen were whispering to me out of the fog — find them, find them, you must find them. It was a distant foghorn, and there was another answering it. I needed an atlas, charts, the run of the pilot books for the coasts of Africa, dividers to work out distances and dates. Slow-steaming at eleven knots, that was 264 nautical miles a day. Forty days, Saltley had said, to Ushant and the English Channel. But the Aurora B would be steaming
at full speed, say 400 a day, that would be thirty days, and she had left her hidey-hole by the Hormuz Straits nine days ago. Another twenty-one to go … I had turned automatically towards Andy’s cottage above the lifeboat station, something nagging at my mind, but I didn’t know what, conscious only that I had lost the better part of a week, and the distant foghorn drumming at my ears with its mournful sense of urgency.
