Ocean Prize (1972) by James Pattinson Page A

gripped the top of the bulwark and pressed his forehead to the cold iron, trembling.
    A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up and saw the bosun staring at him in no very friendly fashion.
    “What’s up with you now? Taking forty bloody winks?”
    “I feel sick.”
    “Sick! So am I. Sick of useless tools like you.”
    The pilot-boat had reached the ship. The new pilot began to climb the Jacob’s-ladder. Wilson saw that the police launch was less than fifty yards away. Suppose he were to run away and hide. But where? In the bilges? In one of the lifeboats? In the chain locker? All equally futile. They would find him wherever he was. It was inevitable.
    Rankin snarled an order and Wilson moved as if in a trance. He could hear the stammer of the engine of the police launch and it seemed to be beating a tattoo in his brain. It came closer, louder, then, unbelievably, began to decrease. The launch slipped past the stern of the Hopeful Enterprise and moved away.
    Wilson felt weak with relief; there was sweat on his forehead and his hands were shaking. They had not been coming for him after all. So perhaps the body had not yet been discovered. He clutched gladly at this small reprieve and the receding sound of the launch was like sweet music in his ears.
    Not so sweet was the bosun’s impatient voice snarling at him. “You’re dreaming again. Get moving.”
    Wilson got moving.

FIVE
RUMOUR
    T he Hopeful Enterprise hauled up her anchor and left Quebec astern. The St. Lawrence widened like a funnel with the water pouring through it in the wrong direction, and they steamed along the northern curve of the shore between Anticosti Island and the mainland, through the narrow Belle Isle Strait and out into the broad Atlantic.
    And Madden’s engines had not given a single moment’s cause for alarm—except to Madden himself, who looked upon even the smoothness of their working as an evil omen, a sinister design on the part of that ill-favoured machinery to lull him into a false sense of security before springing the trap.
    “It’s not going to last,” he confided to Mr. Loder. “It’s all going a sight too easily. But we’re not home yet, not by a long chalk. There’ll be a day of reckoning.”
    The mate did not bother to disagree. Madden’s fussing provided him with a good deal of malicious amusement, and he was not above throwing in a word or two to fan the chief engineer’s resentment at Barling’s failure to pay sufficient attention to the needs of the engine-room.
    “Perhaps,” Loder said, “there’s a day of reckoning coming for George Barling too. And not so very far away at that.”
    Madden’s gloomy eyes stared at Loder and his eyebrows went up like animated question-marks. “And what might you be meaning by that?”
    Loder dropped his voice to a conspiratorial level. “I fancy there’s a crash coming for the Barling and Calthorp line.”
    Madden looked even gloomier. “You’ve heard something?”
    “No, I haven’t heard anything. I’m just using my own powers of observation and deduction. It’s sticking out a mile. What do B. and C. add up to when all’s said and done? One rusty old ship with worn-out engines.”
    “They may have other assets.”
    “Do you believe that?” Loder gripped Madden’s lapel and pulled him closer; so close that he could see in detail all the unsightly blotches that littered the surface of Loder’s face like so many bits of rubbish littering a public park after a Bank Holiday. “Do you think if they had there’d be all this penny-pinching over ship’s stores? Dammit, they don’t buy enough paint to keep an auxiliary ketch in decent trim.”
    “So you really think they’re going under?”
    “I look at the signs, and if you want my opinion they all point that way.” He drew Madden even closer, so that their noses almost touched. “It seems to me, Chief, that you and I are likely to be looking for new berths before we’re very much older.”
    Madden put a hand