Countercharacter 4 (from Septimus Grout) part 3

'But didn't you say a moment ago that the Finnlander went down fifteen months ago.'

'Yes indeed. Why do you ask me that?'

'I suppose you expect me to take part in this search?'

'Quite so,' said Victor Ruhoff. ‘I should like you to set off for those parts and find Johnathon Kande.'

'But why?'

'Why not?'

'No, what I meant was: what hope can you still reasonably entertain of finding a shipwreck victim after fifteen months?'

'We pinpointed the Finnlander just eighteen hours after she transmitted her distress signals. She had broken her back on the shoals of a tiny island to the south of Rangoon, in latitude ? by longitude ?. Despite the monsoon, a British Gurkha rescue team succeeded in reaching the yacht the following morning. Inside, they found five corpses, and they were able to identify them: Carlos and Felipe, Arthur Stead, Frederick Martzin and Laetitia Kande. But there was a sixth name on the manifest, the name of a ten-year-old child, Johnathon Kande, and his body they did not find.

By checking the ship's log against harbour documents from each port of call, against weather reports and radio positioning records, we were subsequently able to make a fairly adequate reconstruction of the circumstances in which the Finnlander went down. On 7 May, as was his daily custom, Frederick Martzin took his bearings and noted the position in the log, ? , or less than one hundred nautical miles from the site of the shipwreck. The next day, unusually, bearings were not taken or, in any case, not entered in the log, which from our point of view comes to the same thing. On 9 May, at 3a.m., a British Protectorate vessel working in the Bay of Bengal and a radio ham in Derby, Western Australia picked up a distress call from the Finnlander but failed to establish radio contact with her. The call was relayed to us less than five hours later, but the yacht had already gone silent and when our stations here and at Rangoon tried to raise contact it was to no avail. The report of the Gurkha rescue service makes it clear the Finnlander's SOS was put out very shortly, a few minutes, maybe only twenty or thirty seconds, before she went silent. The lifeboat stays had not been unfastened, three of the five corpses were not even dressed, no-one had had time to put on a life vest. The force of the collision must have been fantastic. Arthur Stead was literally smashed against his cabin bulkhead, Frederick Martzin's skull was shattered when the main mast fell on him, Carlos was broken to pieces on the rocks and Felipe was decapitated by a steel hawser. The most horrible death was Laetitia's: she did not die instantly like the others but, with her back broken by a badly lashed steamer trunk which came adrift in the impact, she had tried, probably for hours on end, to reach and open her cabin door; when the rescue team found her, her heart had only just stopped beating and her bleeding fingernails had made deep scratches in the oak of the jammed door.'

'And her son?'

'His cabin was next to Laetitia's. Everything in it, clothes, toys, was topsy-turvy. But he was not there.'

'Perhaps he went overboard.'

'That is very unlikely. He would have to have been on deck — and there was no reason for him to be there.'

'But if he had been?'

'At 3 a.m.! What would he have been doing?'

'Maybe someone — Martzin for instance — thought that the sight of the monsoon would have a real impact on the child …'

Victor Ruhoff shook his head.

'No,' he said, 'that is impossible. If he had been swept overboard , the sea would have smashed him on the barrier rocks like poor Carlos and we would have found some kind of clue, something of his, blood, a lock of hair, a hat, a shoe. No, we looked. Our frogmen dived until they were exhausted. We searched every cranny of the rocks. To no avail.

I did not speak. It was as though, at this point in his story, Victor Ruhoff expected me to give a reply or at least a sign of some sort, even if only an expression of indifference or hostility. But I found nothing to say. He too fell silent; he was not even looking at me. Somewhere someone was playing an accordion. I had a momentary vision of a sailors' dive on some tropical lagoon, the monsoon tearing the paradise to shreds, the rescuers harnessed to their deck or clambering across slippery rocks on a long rope leash, the divers struggling out the pitching ocean. I hunted in my pockets for a cigarette.

'Your packet is on the table,' Victor Ruhoff said quietly.

I tapped out a cigarette. His hand stretched out, offering a lighter flame. I mumbled barely audible thanks.

We remained silent like that for maybe five minutes. Now and again I drew a lungful of warm aromatic smoke. He seemed lost in contemplation of his lighter which he was turning round and round in every direction. Then he cleared his throat two or three times.

'If,' he said at last, breaking an increasingly oppressive silence, 'if we were to take into account the Finnlander's average speed, and her noon position as calculated and logged on 7 May, then we can see that at 3a.m. on 9 May she should have been much further west. If, moreover, we accept that a master will fail to perform an elementary but essential safety routine of taking his daily bearing only in the event of extreme disruption or outright panic, then we are led of necessity to only one conclusion. Can you see what it is?'

'I think so, but I am not sure there is only one.'

'What do you mean?'

'They turned around to look for him: that could mean the boy had escaped — maybe he had — but it could also mean they had abandoned him and then had a change of heart.'

Does that make any difference?'

'I do not know.'

Another long silence ensued.

'How did you track me down?' I asked.

'I was fascinated by this catastrophe, by the victims' personalities, by the mystery surrounding the boy and his disappearance. From port of call to port of call I reconstructed the story of the voyage: I contacted the families and friends of those lost, obtained sight of the letters they had received. Three months ago, taking advantage of a trip to ?, I met Laetitia's former private secretary, a man you know, the one who gave you your identity papers; he told me of your existence, told me what he knew of your story. You were much easier to find. There aren't that many ? in this part of the world.'

'And thousands of unmapped islands,' I added, thinking aloud.

Yes, well over a thousand. Most of them are inaccessible, uninhabited, uninhabitable. The British Residents have had men searching the others, tirelessly.'

I said nothing. For a brief moment I wanted to ask Victor Ruhoff if he thought I would have better luck than the whole of the British Colonial Force. What he would answer remained unspoken between us. I was one who had disappeared and, despite Johnathon Kande never having entered my head, there was something there, something elusive between me and my namesake. That was a question which from then on only I should be able to answer …

The barge suddenly bumps against something. I look up from the faded script wondering what Hubs would make of my situation and just what connection these two really quite unidentified men have to this vanishing tale. There is little time for such speculation, though. The motor sputters, coughs in a stricken manner, and, quite suddenly, dies. Its absence is somehow terrible. That racket, rough as it was, was the sound of progress. I spring up, as do my companions.

The ginger man tries to restart the engine, the other exclaiming, probably profanely, and wrenching off the cover. Despite our best efforts, and although they soon begin to believe that I know my way around a motor, we cannot get that machine going again. Some hours go by before, grease-streaked and exhausted, we give up and collapse into exhausted sleep on the open decking.

I awake again to someone shaking my shoulder. It's dark and both men are standing over me, making barely visible signals and talking rapidly in Dutch. The smaller one pushes a pack into my arms. The sound of a splash and they're gone. I stare out into the blackness. I can hear them crashing through the vegetation. Unsure of which direction the sound is coming from, I cry out. A voice calls back (it might have been 'Wiedersehn') followed by what is either a laugh or the sound of a disturbed beast or bird. Then nothing except the occasional rustling of the night forest, the quiet lap of water around the barge.

I sit in the stillness, barely breathing. I have no idea of their intentions but, like the villagers, I have to presume they're trying to help. Probably gone to get something to fix the engine. If I try to follow them, I'll surely become lost. There is nothing I can do. I might as well sleep and worry about the situation in the morning.

It's hot but at least it isn't raining. I try to settle down. The riverbank is alive with sounds and every time I close my eyes, something splashes or rustles so close to me I have to leap up and peer into the night. First light and I finally dwindle to a fitful doze.

If I had thought disappearing difficult and living in fear of disclosure, in the end,  untenable, I found searching for a long-missing person who is your namesake but not your relative is almost ridiculous. It was often more useful to not disclose the boy's identity or, if possible, my own. I imagined Kande (for that is how I came to refer to him) either dead these many months or a survivor taken aboard a tramp steamer and perhaps deposited anywhere on the globe. And what if I found him? What then, you might ask?

Victor Ruhoff, that curiously persistent man, had made arrangements for funds to be available to me to continue the search on his behalf if I so wished. Was there an implied threat in this? There comes a time when a man must sort himself out, when he must take control of his own path and not let the Hand of Fate or the shadow of the past shape his story. There could be no harm, I reasoned, in travelling under the auspices of Victor Ruhoff and his Shipwreck Victims Relief Society.

When I left the Raffles that evening I crossed back to the middle-class waiting room, retrieved my packed bag from the locker and joined Victor Ruhoff in boarding the late ferry out of Penang, yet again surrounded by those hale Dutchies. I wasn't the man I had been seated amongst them earlier that day. I felt a great weight had somehow lifted from my stooping countenance and I smiled as Victor joined in their singing and drinking and even bought a round of beer.

Strange to think of poor Victor now, and how it was he, partially communicating in German, who brought up the Andaman Sea and Kande. One of the Dutchmen, a large florid fellow with a wild crown of ginger hair, apparently made it known he had rescued someone of that name, a woman, from a small atoll north of Preparis Island. Despite the obvious discrepancy, Victor became quite animated, quizzing the Dutchman as best he could, passing on fragments of a strange story regarding a woman living with the nuns at Port Blair in the Andamans.

While the crossing from Georgetown to Butterworth is not very long, it can on occasion become quite rough. The ferry pilots ply their unstable tubs through all kinds of changeable weather and the passengers are forced to take their chances — there are somehow always more passengers than ticketholders and the craft are unfailingly overcrowded, Chinamen and Malays gambling on the open boards of the lower foredeck and Europeans of all nationalities crammed into the bar and lounge aft. It was monsoon season and the night had turned squally. Most of us were fairly under the weather by the time we reached port and it was only then I noticed Victor had not returned from the facilities. I bid a beery 'Auf Weidersehn' to the Dutchmen, availed myself of his case and went in search of my new mentor — with no success. I was ushered off the ferry by a tired port worker after searching every nook and cranny. Victor was neither on the boat nor waiting on the dock. Overcoming my disbelief,  I began to suspect Victor had become his own client. I've often wondered why I did what I did next. I raised the alarm with the harbour master and, on being quizzed for my details, volunteered the name Victor Ruhoff. The next morning, after spending a comfortable night in the reserved hotel room, I took my papers down to the harbour authorities and sorted things out, mentioning the man overboard was a stateless deserter whom my current investigation had uncovered by chance. I ventured that, although I had not known him long enough to speculate on his drowning, he was quite drunk and may simply have missed his footing on going out for a little air to clear his head. Alternatively and regretfully, he may also have thrown himself into the sea in fear of the possible consequences his discovery might bring.

It was perhaps Spring when I entered the convent garden at Port Blair. My memory of such things is often not as precise as it should be, but the scent of frangipani, sweet and sharp, caught on the breeze of the new morning remains rich in my mind. My wife, Candy (as I call her), has a slightly different reminiscence of our meeting but what is a marriage if not a yearning tale, a tide forever turning. She was standing alone, one arm shading her eyes, watching birds in high formation over the beach. Our subsequent happiness has most certainly been built on shifting sands but that, I would say, is our strength.

While a life of investigation has its fascinations, a man must consolidate what he has to offer and, some years later, we ceased to travel as much (which had always unsettled my wife), making our home in the foothills of the Pyrenees, not far from that area they call the Costa Brava, shortly after I was offered a directorship in the Bureau Veritas. I find in myself a mien for administration and have, in idle moments, considered offers of replacing my M.D. for an M.P. (as the British have it).

As to the chance sighting in Barcelona, it may have been a lineament in the face, a particular gait or stance. There are many of these Viking types and one or another of any race can summon a familiarity.

Natural disasters in the far Orient rarely impinge on our Western consciousness. I can think of only one. Krakatoa, and that because of its sheer enormity and spectacular nature, the ash being measured on the opposite side of the globe. Monsoons, hurricanes, tidal waves, waterspouts, landslides, flood, drought, famine and disease — things too exotic or repugnant for the civilised world — this is the Orient. A tidal wave, a group of unknown islands beyond India, this sort of thing barely makes print in The Straits Settlement let alone halfway round the world. I did indeed sail to that god-forsaken island, some months after the tragedy. Apparently not much more than a cay, a mangrove sandbar and reef supporting a seasonal migration of natives. There was little remaining bar debris. The smallpox had taken most of the villagers and the wave had drowned what was left.

There was one small thing of interest to me. The British Resident in Port Blair had on the wall of his quarters a broken wooden propellor. He claimed to have got it off a native who wore it on ceremonial occasions. It was his belief that it was the propellor of the missing airwoman, Amy Johnson.

Of course I could relate more of our story but it would be no more than speculation. As for my wife, Johnather, she remains a beautiful mystery and the best partner a man could wish for. It has become my habit after the evening meal to take tea with her then retire to the club for a cigar. I have, on occasion, asked her if she would care to accompany me. Hubs, she says, for that is how she affectionately refers to me, politics is all any of them speak about these days.

Will we have a war? I go about my business. Wars are always about the past. People harbour old grievances and live yesterday. It is my belief that we must look ahead so that the past cannot touch us. And yet I feel compelled to tell something of what happened to me. Perhaps, as I have endured, and even become a man of some substance, it is understandable that I should think to emerge from the shadows, to show how able is an identity such as myself. The world is in quite some trouble and it must now be upon those who are able to lead to find new and better solutions to these problems that have dogged us since the very beginning.