North Star (15 page)

He shook his head. ‘I see your point. But I can’t go along with you. It’s the chicken and the egg. The economic climate is dependent on union co-operation. No union co-operation, no change in the country’s economy. Maybe that’s what they want, eh?’

‘The militants, yes,’ I said. ‘They want anarchy. But that’s not what the rank and file of the trade union movement wants. I’m convinced of that.’

He looked at me, a quick, appraising stare. ‘Changed your spots, haven’t you?’

The question brought me up with a jolt. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Your background,’ he said. ‘You missed out on a few details.’ His manner had toughened, the friendliness gone. ‘Perhaps if I tell you an Inspector Garrard came to see me at my offices in London – to warn me about you …’

The tiredness came back, a sense of weariness, of deflation. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’ I got to my feet, suddenly furious – furious because I knew Garrard had been right to warn him. But to spring it on me like this … ‘If you want to break that charter agreement, you’ll have to buy me out.’

‘You’ll fight, is that it?’

‘Yes. I haven’t spent a month of my life slaving to get that trawler ready for sea …’ But what was the use? Everything I did – all my life … that devil Stevens had been right, the past would always dog me. ‘I have a police dossier. But how you read it depends whose side you’re on.’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice, seeing him, sitting there, a man who had got himself to a position of power by using money the way a militant like Scunton would use a mob – what was the difference?

‘Sit down,’ he said quietly.

But I didn’t move, seeing him as representing everything I had fought against, and that voice of his, so accustomed to command he didn’t have to shout. It was men like Villiers who turned youngsters into anarchists.

‘Sit down,’ he said again. And as I hesitated, he added, ‘Now I’ve talked with you I have a proposition.’

He waited until I was seated, and then he said, ‘Garrard showed me your file, yes. And I agree that most of it is open to different interpretations, according to whether you’re a capitalist or a socialist. But it was somewhat alarming from my point of view.’ He paused. ‘Except for one thing. It doesn’t explain what induced you to become a trawlerman, or why a man with your record of industrial action should commit himself so wholeheartedly to the salvage and management of a vessel for gain. That’s capitalism by my reckoning.’ He raised his hand. ‘No, don’t interrupt me please. And don’t look so stubbornly defensive. I’m not going to enquire your reasons. I wouldn’t get a sensible answer anyway. In fact, I doubt if you really know yourself.’

‘What’s your proposition?’ I said.

But he ignored that. ‘I have to consider the safety of the men on this rig. And that’s not all. There’s a lot of money locked up in the rig itself that would be better employed elsewhere if there were any real risk. Also, of course – and this is between ourselves – we are very confident that we are sitting on oil – right here, this minute.’ His fingers were drumming a tattoo again as he stared at me speculatively. ‘Suppose you were going to sabotage
North Star
, how would you go about it?’

The question, so abruptly flung at me, came as a shock. ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ I told him.

‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘It’s something all rig operators have had to face up to for several years now. Indeed, everything going on to a rig has to be checked for the possibility of explosives. It would have to be explosives, wouldn’t it? Pieter van Dam and I were discussing it just before you came in.’ Abruptly he got up from his chair and crossed to the corner table. ‘Come and have a look.’ He unfolded the design sheet again. It was a drawing of the rig’s underdeck lay-out. ‘There, and there,’ he said, stabbing his fingers on the junction points of the cross-struts. ‘Two large limpet bombs. Mines perhaps. But if those struts go, then the column towers will fold inwards with the weight of the drill tower and all the mud and fuel and pipe we carry.’ He gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Our Achilles’ heel. That and blasting holes in the pontoons.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ My mouth felt dry.

‘You don’t have to be an engineer to identify the weak points of a rig like this one,’ he said quietly. ‘Anybody with any imagination can see it at a glance. It would mean divers, of course, and they’d have to be transported out here by sea. You’re the guard ship. The orders you’ll be given require you to make sure no vessel comes within the circle of the anchor buoys, only the supply ships. The crews on those ships have been thoroughly screened.’ He turned, looking me straight in the face. ‘That leaves you, doesn’t it? That trawler of yours is the only ship that has a right to be here – and that I’m not sure about.’

Put like that I could see his point. ‘If you don’t trust me,’ I said uneasily, ‘then you’d better find another ship.’

He shook his head. ‘As you say, it’s very suitable employment for that trawler of yours. You’d require compensation, and anyway, there isn’t another in Shetland, not that’s available.’ He turned away and began pacing the room. Finally he said, ‘No. What I’ve got to do is make certain of you.’ He had stopped and was facing me again. ‘That’s the answer, isn’t it?’ He went back to his chair and flopped into it, drumming with his fingers on the table top. ‘Vulnerable was the word Garrard used. You’re vulnerable – because of an incident in Hull. There’s a suspicion you might have set fire to the house yourself.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘He didn’t put it as bluntly, but that was the implication.’ He stared at me, waiting, and when I didn’t say anything, he went on, ‘Fuller went into this charter blind, knowing nothing about you. It was a mistake, and now I have to make up my mind – whether to employ you or not. You weren’t there by accident, were you?’

‘Have you been in touch with the police handling the case?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I phoned Hull myself.’

‘What do they think?’

‘Either you threw that petrol bomb, believing the house to be empty, or you were there because you knew something like that was going to happen. They haven’t made up their minds, but don’t imagine they’ve closed the case.’

It was almost two months ago, the memory of that night blurred and unreal here on an oil rig, cocooned in power plant heat, the smell of oil and the background hum of the rig’s machinery. ‘You may not like my record,’ I said, ‘but I don’t go around throwing petrol bombs.’

‘But you were there. Why?’

I hesitated. He had no right to question me, but it could be a way of clearing myself with the police so I told him about
the meeting I had attended in Hull that evening, how it was packed with militants, most of them brought in from industrial towns farther north and some who had no right to be there at all. ‘It was a particularly ugly meeting. A union official, who had come up from London, was howled down and virtually kicked off the platform. They’d got pickets on all the shipyard gates, a busload of them from the Tyne, and some from Liverpool, even the Clyde. Pierson & Watt were non-union. They whipped themselves up into a mood where they were ready to march on the offices and smash them up, and a man kept yelling for them to be set on fire. Then somebody, I don’t know who – it was just a voice – shouted that the foreman was the bugger to get. The mood was pretty violent by then, half the room on its feet and everybody worked up. Somebody else shouted, “I’ll fix the bastard”. That was when I left.’

‘To go and watch the foreman’s house.’

‘To warn him. I knew Entwisle. I’d been mate on a trawler when it was into Pierson & Watt for repairs. But there was no answer when I rang the bell. I thought they were all out.’

‘So you hung around.’

‘Yes – fortunately as it turned out.’

‘And afterwards, why didn’t you wait for the police?’

‘Why should I? Nobody was hurt.’

‘A man’s property was set on fire. That’s arson.’

‘The
Fisher Maid
was sailing at first light. And my hands hurt. They were cut and slightly burned.’

‘So you went off on a distant water trawler. And when you got back, instead of returning to Hull, you headed for Shetland and got involved in salvaging the vessel we’ve now chartered.’ He smiled, shaking his head. ‘Some people would regard that as pretty strange behaviour.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘Depends what your motives are. I think I can guess, knowing your background – and now that I’ve talked to you. You want to make something of your life before it’s too late. I could help you there.’

I started to tell him I didn’t want his help, that his whole outlook was entirely opposed to mine, but he stopped me. ‘Of course our outlooks are different. You’ve been switching from one thing to another, experimenting with drugs and ideological theories. I’ve kept to one single basic tenet, the profit motive. You probably abhor that. But you’re running your own business now. You’ll learn. You can’t run even a broken-down old trawler unless your cash flow is sufficient to keep the damn thing afloat.’

I stood there, silent, knowing it was true and that I hadn’t considered what would happen when the charter ran out. The scrape of his chair as he got to his feet interrupted my thoughts.

‘You’re an awkward cuss,’ he said. ‘I was going to make you an offer – a gamble I suppose you’d call it.’

‘I don’t gamble,’ I told him.

‘No? Then why did you salvage that trawler?’ He was smiling, his tanned, strangely handsome face suddenly alive. ‘I’m not talking about cards or betting on horses. I’m talking about pitting one’s wits and one’s energies against the odds in life. That’s what I’m doing drilling out here with this rig. It’s what you’re doing with that trawler. The rig’s old, and so is your ship – both of us taking a chance.’ He turned abruptly towards the door. ‘Had any breakfast this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Nor have I.’ He pulled it open. ‘Let’s go and feed. I’ll tell you what I have in mind over our bacon and eggs.’

We went down a flight of metal treads to the lower deck of the crew housing. It was hot and airless with the same stale smell of food and oil combined with salt to be found on a ship. The shower was running in the men’s room, the glimpse of a fat white body towelling itself, and inside the mess a long aluminium counter with two cooks in white chatting behind it. ‘Bacon and eggs twice,’ Villiers said. He handed me a plate. ‘Try the rolls. They bake their own on the night watch.’

The room, with its three long, bare-scrubbed tables, was
almost empty. We got our coffee from a machine set between windows looking out to an empty sea. The wind had freshened, occasional whitecaps breaking across the low line of the westerly swell. The barge engineer was there, sitting over his coffee with a Dutch cigar. We joined him and the talk centred on the drilling crew coming in on the first helicopter flight. A man named Ken Stewart would be relieving him. The toolpusher was American, a hard driver, van Dam said. ‘Ed don’t waste any time.’

‘How long before we start drilling?’ Villiers asked.

‘Depends on the zeabed. The divers are going down in the bell now. If the zeabed is okay, then maybe tomorrow.’

‘Pity, I have to be in Holland tomorrow.’

‘Then you give my love to Rotterdam, eh?’ And he added, ‘Better you go today. Iz full ‘ouse ven both drill crews are ’ere.’

The bacon and eggs came and Villiers began discussing gale conditions, up to what wind force the supply boats could keep going and whether the proper tension could be maintained on the anchor cables so that drilling could go on uninterrupted. Except that he was unshaven, it was hard to believe that he had been up all night, his voice quick and concise, his brain sharp. He was brimful of energy and I wondered how many years it would be before he burned himself out. Every now and then I glanced out of the windows, but the sea remained empty, no sign of the trawler, or any other vessel, in that cold northern light.

At last van Dam left, the whiff of his cigar lingering as Villiers reached for another roll. ‘How do you ever keep your ship stocked?’ he asked. ‘Three nights at sea, no exercise, and I’m so damned hungry … You know, the time I’ve spent on this rig, it’s given me an idea. City rents have reached a point where it would pay to build an office block on pontoons and moor it off the coast. No rents, no rates, and with the sort of radio equipment we’ve got on
North Star
there’s not much business you can’t transact. What do you think of that?’

‘Personnel,’ I said. ‘Drilling,
I imagine, is like trawling, it’s a way of life.’

He nodded, his mouth full. ‘A week on, a week off. Can’t do that with office staff. But what about Sparks? His stint is three weeks. It’s what you get used to, isn’t it?’ He was silent a moment, chewing over the idea. ‘Sea City … The idea’s not new, of course. And there are problems, as you say. But this rig is obsolete now. An easy conversion – and if the experiment came off we’d do a lot better than the scrap value.’ He glanced at me. ‘Where’s your wife now? You’re not divorced.’

‘I’ve no idea. She was brought up a Catholic.’

‘Irish, I believe.’

‘Yes.’

‘Communist?’

I didn’t answer.

‘So you hide yourself away at sea. Well, it would make a nice job for a man like you – the first ever sea office block skipper.’

‘Is that your proposition?’ I asked him.

He threw back his head and laughed, a gold tooth showing. ‘No, not really. But it’s an idea.’ He pulled out his diary and made a note. ‘You go and talk to Sparks. If you’ve got a girl friend, ring her up – tell him I said you could. I know a lot about planes, nothing about ships or rigs. But I got through to Frankfurt and Sydney yesterday just as quickly as I could from my office in London, and with the FAX machine scrambling teleprint messages can be made safe.’ He buttered the other half of his roll. ‘That reminds me. I said I’d call Rotterdam …’ He glanced at the clock over the door and I knew his mind was switching to whatever business deal it was that required his presence in Holland.

‘You said something about an offer,’ I reminded him.

He looked at me, the eyes shrewd and calculating. It was a mistake, I had been too eager. He smiled. ‘Are you prepared to stay on station until we finish drilling?’