Isvik Read online

  ‘Nothing – just the sea.’

  She was looking up at me with an expression of concern. ‘You are thinking about what lies ahead.’

  I nodded. I was looking down at her, brown knees drawn up to her chin and the open V of her shirt showing the round of her breasts, even the pinking of the nipple circles. She patted the broken wall beside her. ‘Does it scare you?’ I didn’t say anything and she turned her head away, facing the sea again. ‘Well, it does me.’ She said it in a whisper. ‘It’s so vast. That’s what I find disconcerting. It goes on and on and on – ten thousand miles of virtually uninterrupted ocean. And where we’re going the winds come from right around the globe.’

  I sat down beside her, both of us gazing out through the mist at the heaving, pounding water, the noise of it thundering in our ears, filling our whole world with sound. ‘He’s coming with us, is he?’ I asked her.

  ‘Ángel? Yes.’ She nodded. ‘He’ll navigate us down into the ice, and afterwards he will act as our guide.’ And she added, speaking quietly as though to herself, ‘He knows where it is.’

  ‘You trust him?’

  She hesitated. ‘No. No, I don’t trust him. But he will take us there.’

  ‘Why?’

  She gave a hollow little laugh. ‘Ah, if I knew that …’

  I waited, but she didn’t pursue the matter. ‘Do you love him?’ I asked.

  She turned on me then, but not with anger, her tone one of contempt. ‘Love! That is not something he would understand. You don’t love a man like Ángel.’

  ‘What then? He fascinates you, is that it?’

  Her mouth was compressed into a tight line. ‘It is none of your business. But yes, he is very attractive. Don’t you feel it?’ And she added slowly, ‘He is as attractive to men, you know, as he is to women.’

  I wondered about that, why she had said it. ‘It’s you I’m concerned about. I’m asking about you.’ It was presumptuous of me, but I had to know, and now I had the opportunity. The atmosphere of the place, the mood between us, everything was right.

  She nodded almost reluctantly. ‘I suppose. It is the way we are made. He is a devil, but you cannot help what the gods …’ Her voice tailed away in a little shrug of the shoulders that was like a shudder. ‘And he is not my brother.’

  ‘Not even your half-brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who is his father?’

  ‘How the hell do I know? I have barely seen him since my father died.’

  ‘What about Carlos then? A cousin, you said.’

  She ignored the question, turning to me and asking why Iain had brought us here. ‘Why does he insist on Chanchán? All these mud walls – it is so depressing.’ There was a pause, and she added, ‘He never does anything without a purpose. The play acting, those accents, the changes of mood – all is intentional I think.’ She was looking at me again, waiting for an answer. And I thought, my God! We’re going to lock ourselves inside the fragile skin of a small floating home, and all of us, three of us anyway, at odds and full of motives I didn’t understand.

  She nodded as though she had read my thoughts. ‘Looking at that sea, you have reason to be scared.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ I assured her. ‘Just a little concerned.’

  ‘A leetle concairned!’ She laughed at her mimicry.

  ‘About Carlos?’ I reminded her.

  ‘What about him? He is all right. The police will sort it out, and if they have arrested the boy, then he will be released as soon as they realise the body is not mine, but that of some poor little Dockland tart.’

  ‘But your handbag.’

  ‘My handbag? Yes, of course. It suddenly came to me. If they mistook the body …’

  ‘And the ring. Victor Wellington said there was a ring of yours on the dead woman’s left hand.’

  ‘I got very wet.’ She nodded, smiling. ‘Also I was a little frightened, and the water was filthy. There was nobody around. Nobody saw me, thank God. Poor little Carlos!’ She glanced at me quickly. ‘Why are you asking about him? You think they will blame him?’ She said it almost eagerly.

  ‘You recognised him when he followed us out of Greenwich.’

  ‘Of course I recognise him. He is –’ She stopped there. ‘You ask too many questions.’

  ‘I only want to know what his relationship is to Gómez. You said he was some sort of cousin.’

  She was staring at the sea again. ‘Per’aps he is. Per’aps not.’ She shook her head, the dark hair glinting with moisture, her eyes turned to me and searching mine. ‘I can talk with you, I think.’ I was to learn that her English always tended to deteriorate when her emotions took hold. ‘With Iain, no. I can’t talk to him, not about private matters. I don’t understand him. I suppose in a way I don’t trust him. On practical matters, yes. He is a good man to have with us on this journey …’ She shrugged. ‘You ask about Carlos. I don’t know what that boy is, except he is something very close to Ángel. His mother is that Rosalli woman, I think. But who his father is –’ Again the slight shrug of the shoulders. And then she got to her feet. ‘It is time we rejoin Iain and get going. We need to be in Lima tonight.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked as we turned our backs on the Pacific and began working our way back through the maze of walls and rubble.

  ‘I left him examining what appeared to be the remains of a cemetery. He was armed with an archaeological book he had dug out of that bulging briefcase of his and was on his hands and knees sifting through a pile of discarded bones.’

  We found him seated on a particularly high section of wall sketching the decoration of an inner chamber, and when I climbed up beside him I noticed his vantage point gave him a clear view of the Toyota. When we had parked there hadn’t been another vehicle in sight. Now it had been joined by several cars and a coach was disgorging a gaggle of tourists. ‘I see you’re not taking any chances.’

  I said it more as a joke, but he took it seriously. ‘Would ye after what happened on the way up to Cajamarca?’ I realised then that Iris had been right. It wasn’t entirely his thirst for knowledge that had made him insist on driving north to Chanchán.

  It was almost eleven before we left that great mud complex, driving back through Trujillo and on south across dull, desiccated country, a lot of it near-desert. The sun gradually ate up the mist until by the afternoon we were in a blazing oven under a burned blue sky. By the time we rolled into Lima it was dark and, though we had taken hourly turns at the wheel, we were all of us limp with exhaustion.

  The following morning we flew to Tacna in the far south of Peru, crossed into Chile by taxi and flew on from Arica to Santiago. From there a delayed flight took us on to Punta Arenas where we arrived late in the evening.

  I don’t remember much about our arrival, only that the fourteen-kilometre drive from the airport was something of a nightmare with visibility almost nil in pouring rain mixed with flurries of hail and howling gusts of wind. It seemed bitterly cold after the heat of Peru. ‘Ah doubt this fuckin’ place has even heard o’ primavera,’ Ward said in his foulest Glaswegian, and that just about summed it up.

  The house we were in was solid Victorian in style, both inside and out, except that it had a tin roof. Between the gusts, the sound of rain on the roof and water pouring off it was continuous. The place was owned by an old ship’s captain. He gave us coffee laced with Chilean brandy. ‘Es bueno. Hara dormir bien.’ He had been at sea on the Chilean coast most of his life, running cargoes between the isolated ports of the southern waterways, a marvellous-looking old man, big gnarled hands warped with rheumatism and a long wrinkled face, little lines running out from his eyes, which were slitted as though he were permanently peering out into fog. His hair was thick and iron grey, and the rather drooping moustache was curved round the mouth to finish in a little tuft just below the under lip. The effect was that he always seemed to be smiling.

  I was half asleep when he showed us up to our rooms, Ward and I sharing one at the
rear of the building, which, in place of beds, had a double-tier bunk in the corner. The wind in the gusts seemed directed straight at the small casement window, which rattled and banged. At times the whole house shook.

  When I woke the sun was shining, everything very still. Ward had already washed and was getting into his clothes. ‘Mornin’.’ He was smiling. ‘Ah think we can regard this as being the start of our voyage. D’ye think it’s an omen?’

  ‘What?’ I was still half asleep.

  ‘Ye’ll see what Ah mean when ye get to the bathroom. It looks right out on to the Strait, and it’s flat calm, not a breath, the ships anchored off all standin’ on their heads in marvellous reflection. And somethin’ else –’ There was an excitement about him that showed the boy behind the man. He looked so much younger with a mountain peak all covered in snow peering over his shoulder through the little window. ‘Come on, stir yerself. Ye’ll find me down on the quay looking at her. She’s right there, right in front of us, and she’s rusty as hell. But she’s a good-lookin’ boat all the same,’ he added as he went out.

  Thus my first glimpse of Isvik was from the bathroom window of a seafaring man, who had exchanged his small coaster for a house on the quay looking straight out on to the Magellan Strait. She was, as Ward had said, rusty as hell, but behind the rust she had a solid look to her. I just hoped he’d had a good surveyor on the job before committing himself.

  By the time I reached the quay the water out in the centre of the Strait was darkening with little puffs of wind and the mountains west of the town were half obscured by cloud. My breath smoked and I began to feel the wind-chill even through my sailing jersey and the special anorak I had bought for southern latitudes. The quay was white and slippery with the granules of a recent hailstorm.

  I was only a short time standing there, but long enough to take in the vessel’s lines, the quite dainty sheer, her size and the layout of the masts and rigging. By comparison with a freighter, moored so close her black stern virtually hung over Isvik’s knife-edged bows, she looked very small, but viewing her from the standpoint of the maxi in which I had raced round the world, I guessed she was roughly the same size – at least twenty-five metres long with a good beam and what looked like a deep V-shaped hull. There was a low deckhouse amidships with an upper wheel and emergency tiller steering from a small cockpit aft. I thought at first she was ketch-rigged, but then decided she was more of a schooner. Her running rigging was in an appalling state, the ropes all frayed and tangled, but the standing rigging, which was partly of stainless steel, seemed to have been well looked after. The hull was presumably steel; it was this that gave her a rust-streaked look under the dirty coating of ice and snow. The topsides and deckhouse, many of the fittings, were of aluminium or some smooth grey alloy.

  A blackened pipe stood up out of the deck, just aft of the deckhouse on the port side, a heat haze dancing from the top of it and the ice on the metal supporting bracket dripping moisture. A delicious smell of bacon frying was wafted on a blattering down-blast of wind. I was suddenly very hungry. I went on board and from the open doorway of the deckhouse came the murmur of voices. ‘Mr Ward?’ I called his name twice, ‘Are you on board?’

  ‘Aye.’

  But it wasn’t Ward who poked his head up the companionway. It was a big, bearded man with a shock of blond hair on a round bullet head that seemed to have no neck. The shoulders were immensely broad, padded out by the grey and brown loose-woven rollneck sweater he was wearing. ‘You are Pete Kettil, ja?’ And when I said I was he held out a massive paw that gripped my hand as though in a vice. ‘Nils Solberg. Velcome on board Isvik. The boss, he is already here. You come for frokost, ja? Bakkon, eggs, some seaveed, also fried lichen, what we call lav. Is god. Kom down.’

  Ward was already eating. ‘Nils is a bloody good cook,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘But Ah learned one thing already. Ye take a gander at the engines. She may look a ruin topside, but beJaisus, the engine-room … Reck’n ye could’ve fried the eggs on the cylinder heads it’s so bright and clean and polished. That right, Nils?’

  ‘Ja. Engines okay.’

  ‘So we need a cook. First priority. Nils may be a good cook, but his time will be better spent away from the galley. And we need to dae somethin’ about the drive shaft.’

  Apparently the retired sea captain, in whose house we were billeted, was willing to provide us with beds ashore, but nothing else. The deal was we made our own beds and fed on board.

  ‘What about Mrs Sunderby?’ I asked.

  He looked at me with a quizzical lift to his eyebrows.

  ‘I suppose she’s sleeping it off.’ I said it without thinking.

  ‘Then ye suppose wrong.’ He was grinning. ‘She was down before me, breakfasted and lookin’ as though she was just off to complete a big business deal in the money centre of BA or wherever. In fact, she’s over at the Yard now chattin’ up some foreman or other she’s got eatin’ out of her hand. As ye doubtless noticed, there’s work to dae.’ He thrust his head forward as the big Norwegian dumped a plateful of an extraordinary mixture in front of me – a great wadge of fried bread, two eggs, two very thick rashers and the rest a mêlée of doubtful greenery swimming in bacon fat. ‘Ah’m Iain, this is Nils, Mrs Sunderby is Iris – no, better call her Eeris, she responds to that much quicker – ye’re Peter, or Pete for short, and what the hell we call Gómez we’ll find out in due course. But Christian names from now on. Quicker to say, quicker to react to. And by God, where we’re goin’ we’re likely to need quick reactions. Had a look at the riggin’?’

  I nodded, suddenly realising what was coming.

  ‘That’ll be yer department. Ah know nothin’ about sails, nor does Nils – he’s a wizard of an engineer, that’s all. And Iris, she’s the managin’ director. Okay?’

  ‘And you?’ I asked, my mouth stuffed full of lichen which was really much nicer than I’d expected.

  ‘Me? Ah’m just old moneybags. But Ah tell ye this, laddie, Ah’m a helluva fast learner, so don’t think ye can pull the wool or sit around on yer fat little arse doin’ bugger all. Ah want that riggin’ fixed and workin’ inside of a week.’

  ‘And the sails?’

  ‘Iris is checkin’ on that now. We’ve yet to find out if they’ve any sail-makin’ facilities here at all. Ah suspect not, in which case we’ll have to measure them up and have them flown out. Or we make our own. In a place like this there are bound to be some good seamstresses and Singers will surely have had their salesmen down here back in the days of the square-riggers. Iris will soon have some women organised. She’s a great organiser, that girl.’

  It was, in fact, Iris who found us a cook. He was a youngster of twenty-two just on the point of being invalided out of the Chilean Navy. Besides cooking, he seemed to have done most things, course after course. His name was Roberto Coloni and he had been in hospital following a bad fall in which he had broken his shoulder blade, forearm and two ribs, as well as suffering bad concussion, which had affected his hearing. It was because of his deafness, not his more obvious injuries, that he was being invalided out, and it was several days before he finally joined us and took up his culinary duties.

  My immediate concern on that first morning in Punta Arenas was to learn all I could about the ship. Iain filled me in on the essential details while I was devouring that gargantuan breakfast. Isvik had been built in the Canadian Maritimes for an American millionaire who wanted to emulate Staff Sergeant Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounties who, in the years 1940–42, had sailed the schooner St Roch from west to east through the North-West Passage. He was the first to make the Passage except for Amundsen. And then he did it again in 1944, that time from east to west, the first man to make it across the top of Canada in both directions.

  The design for Isvik was influenced to quite a marked degree by the Peterhead-type sailing vessels of the Mounties, also by a sketch made for him by that extraordinary Antarctic single-hander, David Lewis. ‘Roughed it out fur him on
the back of an envelope, a squeeze-up steel hull design with platin’ thick as a tanker.’

  It was, in fact, a much beamier vessel than the police ship, the hull fining up sharply towards bow and stern so that both fore and aft her deep, strong wedge-shape would cause the ice to squeeze her upwards in the event of her being caught in a series of pressure ridges. She was also much smaller, the police ship having been over three hundred tons. But it was from that and the scribbled design on the back of an envelope that Isvik had been pupped. Unfortunately her building was delayed by the failure of the small specialised steel company that was constructing the hull. Then the American millionaire had had a heart attack. He lost interest after that, his plan overshadowed by the oil tanker Manhattan making it across the top of America.

  Lawyers handling his affairs had then dumped the boat on the market just after Wall Street had had one of its periodic crashes. Three years had passed since the time of her conception and she was still without spars and rigging and had not been fitted out internally. Her purchase by the B. J. Norsk Forsking of Larvik for seismographical work in the Bellingshausen Sea almost due south of the Horn was, as Ward put it, ‘just about the very first good thin’ that had ever happened to her,’ even if it was a slightly clandestine operation.

  He didn’t say the vessel was jinxed, but after the sail plan and the interior layout had been redesigned and the ship completed for her new role in Antarctic waters, the B. J. Norsk Forsking, a drilling outfit operating in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, struck a bad patch following a fall in the price of oil and abandoned the Southern Ocean project. They had acquired Isvik at a knock-down figure, spent about the same again completing the fitting of her out to their requirements, and Iain Ward had picked her up for not much more than they had originally paid for her. ‘Ah tell ye this, Pete –’ He was leaning across the table, his little steely grey eyes bright with a barrow boy’s excitement at striking a bargain – ‘it’d cost a wee fortune now just to build the hull. She’s plated in the bows with steel eighteen mil thick. If we get caught up in the ice that means she’ll pop up like a cork when the pressure’s on. At least’, he added, with a down-turn to the corners of his mouth, ‘that’s the theory of it.’