Drug on the Market

by Nigel Tranter

Genres: Action & Adventure

Synopsis

A stealthy fishing-boat, blacked-out in the dead of night, and strange blinking lights on the shores of Aberlady Bay add up to a mystery that Lieutenant-Commander Philip Hepburn can't ignore. Following a chance sighting of the elusive vessel while on shore-leave, and a violent encounter with some shady characters on the desolate salt-marsh, Philip is drawn into investigating the sinister goings-on in the bay. He and his newfound companion, feisty local girl Trisha Denholm, stumble across something neither of them expected to find and uncover a criminal conspiracy in sleepy East Lothian. 'One of Scotland's most prolific and respected writers' The Times

Release date: February 14, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 222

Sample

PHILIP HEPBURN, peering through the whirling disc of glass that kept a circle of the wheelhouse window clear of the streaming raindrops and drifting spray, pointed northwards into the windy blustering night.

“I’m sure of it, Tommy,” he declared. “It was a fishing-boat, I should say. Something about our own size. Completely without lights. Twice I saw it. No—it wasn’t one of the Fidra rocks. Well out from the line of them—eastwards. D’you think I don’t know a vessel from a rock, even on a night like this? She may have turned away, end-on to us now . . .”

“Och well, Master Phil—maybe you’re right,” the old pilot said, shrugging massive shoulders under his oilskins. “Maybe my eyes are no’ so sharp as once they were. But what would a fishing-boat be doing here, lights or none?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. Her electric lights could have failed on her, I suppose—but she should have been wearing emergency oil-lamps, then.” The younger man swung the wheel round a few points to port, correcting the drift in the opposite direction caused by the powerful gusting Force Six wind from the north-west.

“There’s no fish here, man. The things they’d be maist likely to catch would be bluidy seals!” Tom Wauchope had to shout, even in that confined space, to be heard above the whistling buffeting of the wind, the noise of the sea, and the creak of timbers. “They’d no’ be sheltering, either—anybody that could get in here, would run for North Berwick. Anyway, it’s no’ that much o’ a blow, for fishers.”

“No. But I saw it, I tell you. May not have been a fishing-boat, but she seemed like it, the glimpses I got. Some dam’ fool, anyway, out on a sea-way on a night like this, without lights. A menace . . . Oh—sorry, Tommy!”

A particularly violent rolling plunge of the pilot-boat had cannoned Hepburn against the older man’s stocky figure. The latter remained solid, unmovable, as though he grew on wide-planted feet out of the little wheelhouse floor, like some old tree that only sways slightly to the blast of the storm. He grinned, removing his pipe from his lips, to point its stem at his taller companion, mockingly.

“You losing your sea-legs, eh? Too much traipsing about in yon floating esplanade you call an aircraft-carrier, Master Phil?” Tom Wauchope had called Hepburn Master Phil ever since his boyhood days, although he was now a Lieutenant-Commander, Royal Navy.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it! I’ll have to work a shift somehow, to real sailoring again. A frigate, now, would just about suit me. Something smallish that a man could get friendly with.” He was staring out still, northwards, into the inky darkness, head lifting and sinking and canting to keep a moderately steady gaze through that spinning disc of clear glass. “I thought I just caught another glimpse of that craft, Tommy—a bit more to the east. But I’m not sure. I wouldn’t swear to it. If the beam of that lighthouse wasn’t so high . . .”

The Forth pilot-cutter Gala Law was lying, sturdy 66 horse-power diesels just turning over sufficiently to maintain her position, in the lee of the small and rocky inshore island of Fidra, at the wide mouth of the Firth of Forth. The islet was quite tall, with moderate cliffs, the lighthouse perched a-top, and since the cutter lay as close in as she dared, the four recurrent white beams that swept the streaming emptiness at 20 second intervals, did so away above their heads, doing practically nothing to light up the sea around them. Although the island to some extent broke the force of the north-westerly wind, and the short steep seas that it was raising, it provided only a very modified shelter, and the underlying long North Sea swell coming in from the east, had its own effect, so that the craft rolled and heaved and dipped with a curious corkscrew-like motion which would have played havoc with any but seasoned stomachs. The rain-squalls that blattered against the wheelhouse windows made it seem an even wilder night than in fact it was, so that the red glow of the veteran pilot’s pipe was a warm comforting thing in that tossing darkened box which appeared to be making so lonely a challenge to the elements.

Hepburn glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. “Nearly eleven,” he reported. “No sign of the Arab Emir yet?”

They both turned to peer eastwards, directly towards the open sea. The last radio message relayed from the tanker had given her estimated time of arrival at the pilot rendezvous as twenty-three fifteen, which, even with tonight’s poor visibility, ought to be bringing the ship’s lights into view by now. But all that was to be seen in the tossing spume-blown void to eastwards was the pale and intermittent gleam of another lighthouse, that on the towering Bass Rock guarding the entrance to the Forth six miles away.

“Och, what’s a wee small matter like half-an-hour to one o’ these foreign tanker masters?” the pilot shrugged. “They’re no’ just Navy-style, these boys, mind.”

“She’s a foreigner, then—this Arab Emir? Not one of the big oil companies’ own craft?”

“No’ her. She’s a Wog. One o’ the Hadji Assouff ships. Syrian owned, sailing under the Liberian flag. Four or five o’ them, there are. Och, we ken them fine, here in the Forth. Seldom have the same captains three trips running, that kind. Chartered by B.P. or Shell or one o’ the big combines to deliver their oil at the Grangemouth refineries up-river. Twelve thousand tons, Jap built. That’s the style o’ this one.”

“M’mmm. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world, doesn’t it!” the Navy commented generously. “Grangemouth,” Hepburn repeated. “A bit tricky that approach to Grangemouth, isn’t it? With big stuff like a tanker, and all those mudflats around? And the Forth narrowing up there, too.”

Old Wauchope grinned. “Och, it’s all right if you keep sober. Stick to tea, when you’re making for Grangemouth! Aye—and that’s well thought on. How about a mug o’ tea before the Arabs turn up? Put some warmth into that thin blood o’ yours, eh?”

He blew down the voice tube, and then spoke conversationally into it. “Aye, Dougal. How about a cuppa for the Commander and me? If you can tear yoursel’ away from your wee fire doon there?”

Philip Hepburn by no means refused the white pint mug of steaming hot tea, thick with condensed milk, which Dougal the steward brought up to them in only a matter of a minute or two—and, despite the boat’s crazy lurching, without spills or dribbles. After eleven months in tropical waters in the Far East, he felt the chill of even a mid-October night in the Forth more than he cared to admit. This was only the first week of his long-awaited leave at home.

They were just finishing the tea when the pilot tapped the younger man on the shoulder. “There she is,” he pointed out. “No’ that late, after all.”

It took his companion a few moments to pick out the faint wan glimmers of light, so much lower down and to the north of the high-set Bass Rock light. “Not much wrong with those ancient eyes of yours,” he commented. “Funny that you didn’t see the fishing-boat.”

“It is that,” the other agreed dryly. “Maybe I should consult an optic-merchant, laddie!”

Hepburn took the night-glasses, and steadying himself by wedging a shoulder into the corner of the wheelhouse, trained them eastwards. “Yes—it will be her. She’s a tanker, anyway, and fair-sized. Let’s go.”

All briskness now, he rang down to the motorman for engines.

The Lieutenant-Commander was in fact skippering the pilot-cutter tonight. The pilot was only by way of being a passenger, to be taken out and delivered on board the great ship coming nosing its way into the narrow dark waters of the Forth. All his life Philip Hepburn had been fascinated by the pilot-boats which made his little home-town of North Berwick on the East Lothian coast their base. His father, himself a retired naval man, had been a member of Trinity House and the Pilotage Authority, and while the cutters were not allowed to carry passengers there had been not a few occasions when regulations had been mildly waived—times when a schoolboy had sailed out on these exciting missions as assistant-steward or even assistant-motorman. Tonight, of course, was rather different. Now a naval officer and fully qualified navigator, he was standing in, and happily, for the relief skipper, who was at any moment anticipating an addition to his family, the regular master being ill. Some might have suggested that this was a strange way to spend leave from sea—but not anyone who knew Philip Hepburn.

As the Gala Law swung out in a wide arc east by north, the fact that the island of Fidra had indeed been sheltering them, was very swiftly made apparent. The wind struck them with abruptly increased violence, and even though it was almost full astern, made steerage immediately more difficult. This was enhanced by the steepness of the boiling white-veined seas that it was driving down the Firth in snarling succession, and which, in conjunction with the heavy ground-swell from the opposite direction, pitched even the sturdy 22-ton cutter about like a cork, her precipitous nose-diving frequently thrusting both screw and rudder high out of the water, in roaring vibrating protest, while the wheel swung slack. Water came streaming and foaming aft, and then streamed back forward—if a sudden cant to port or starboard did not send it cascading off sideways. The wheelhouse was enveloped in a continuous smother of spray, not only from their impact with the seas, but because the wind was whipping the crests off the waves, out here, and filling the air with spume.

“A bit of motion about,” Philip mentioned, but grinning happily. He had to shout in his companion’s ear, now.

“Och, no’ worth calling that,” Wauchope protested. “Just a bit jabble. But . . . no picnicking on Craigleith tonight, mind! I say, no picnicking on Craigleith tonight!”

That was an old joke, dating from the occasion when a schoolboy had piled up his sailing dinghy on the islet of Craigleith, and had to spend the night on the barren guano-covered rock in company with ten thousand highly odoriferous seabirds, to the marked alarm of most of North Berwick. It was not to be suggested that the pilot was reminding the Lieutenant-Commander that the said navigational hazard lay directly ahead of them now at something over a mile’s distance, and was not likely to be visible in all this splatter until about sixty seconds before they struck.

There was another islet, called the Lamb, still closer than Craigleith; and scattered reefs named the Law Rocks between that and the shore. That is the sort of coastline it was. The need for pilotage did not have to be underlined.

When the high Bass Rock light was suddenly obscured, and at the same time most of the lights of North Berwick, a mile or so to starboard, were hidden by something, like a dark curtain, Philip swung his wheel a few points to port, seawards. The first was caused by the loom of Craigleith ahead, and the other by the Lamb on their flank. The helmsman knew exactly where he was, therefore. Presently they could catch glimpses of the tanker’s lights again, which had been hidden also by the bulk of Craigleith. They seemed considerably higher above sea-level now, and therefore more frequently visible through the spray.

“Two miles?” Hepburn suggested. “About right.”

The other nodded.

The large vessel and the small approached each other quickly now. They seemed to have the entire wide estuary to themselves; even the prominent Isle of May lighthouse, which lay a bare ten miles to the north-east, was hidden in the thickness of the night. As they drew closer, Philip took the Aldis lamp, and flashed it towards the tanker’s lights, making the recognition signal. The other should have seen the red-and-white pilot’s mast-head lights by now, anyway.

Faintly, wierdly, sobbing unevenly against the bluster of the wind, they heard three wailing blasts of the big ship’s siren.

“I’d give her plenty room, and come in from astern,” Wauchope mentioned, almost apologetically in his companion’s ear. “These boys don’t give a damn. I’ve been near run down before now.”

The other nodded, and as soon as he could see the long dark outline of the tanker, as distinct from merely the pattern of its lights, began to swing round in a long curve to fetch up in her wake. As the cutter’s bows came about to face the west once more, suddenly the man’s grip tightened on the wheel.

“Confound it—see that!” he cried. “There he is again. Look! Against Fidra light . . .”

The brief watery illumination of the lighthouse’s beam swung away, leaving only more inky darkness—but this time the pilot had seen it. Nothing very clear, distinct or prominent—but enough to suggest the square wheelhouse and twin masts of a typical seine-net fishing-boat.

“Queer,” the older man said, rasping his chin with the bowl of his pipe. “Looks like he was trailing us, almost. A right strange thing that.”

“A right dangerous thing that!” Philip returned. “He’s a menace, as well as a fool, whatever he’s up to. Without lights, out here. He’d better watch out, or he’ll be run down!”

“Och, he can see that ship as well as we can,” the pilot pointed out. “And they’ll have him on the tanker’s radar screen.”

“Not when he’s as close up as that. Anyway, it’s dam’ stupid. And against the law . . .”

Philip had no more time further to bother his head about lightless small craft, just then. To bring his cutter alongside the big ship in this sort of weather, without mishap, was quite a test of seamanship. He approached the tanker from the southeast, to leeward, using its long massive bulk as a breakwater.

Soon the tall black sides of the great vessel were soaring up above them monstrously, and in contrast to this solid cliff of iron, the small boat seemed to be plunging and swaying more alarmingly than ever. Philip switched on their bow spot-light, and there, half-way along the rust-patched side, directly below the pale tower of the centre castle, the rope pilot’s-ladder dangled, frail and most inadequate-seeming, jerking and tossing. Two small dark-visaged figures could be seen peering over at the head of it.

Tom Wauchope pocketed his pipe, pulled on his sou’wester, and squeezed Philip’s shoulder. “See you the morn’s night, Master Phil. Stand you a drink if you dinna wet my feet!”

Nodding, Hepburn opened the starboard wheelhouse window—and an almost overpowering smell of crude oil blew in. The tanker was not stationary, creeping forward under steerage-way. Dougal Mackay the steward, in oilskins now, made a carefully-timed appearance, to push over the side two more fenders. Then he produced a boathook, ready to hook the ladder.

Philip made his run up the long side of the Arab Emir, throttled back to about five knots to the other’s three. He did not go too close before he must, for the cutter was rolling from side to side despite the sheltering effect of the ship—and the latter was rolling too, though slowly and with great dignity compared with the small boat. Even so, at times the great iron rampart seemed to be leaning right over the cutter, and their pennant-tipped mast threatening like a puny lance to stab the giant, now far below it, now almost up at rail-level.

Choosing his moment out of great concentration, seeking to balance roll against roll, backwash against swell, rudder against motor, as the cutter surged past the swinging rope-ladder, perhaps a score of feet out, Philip swung his wheel, and came slanting in to the ship, at the same time ringing down to the motorman to reduce speed. For a moment it seemed as though there was bound to be a collision as the Arab Emir rolled over towards the small craft. And then, as the wheel spun back again, and the tanker began its reverse roll, the cutter levelled off, its fender-guarded bows swinging within inches of the barrier of steel-plating—and there was the ladder hanging only a foot or two from where the pilot and steward stood outside the wheelhouse. The boathook caught it easily, and Tom Wauchope, reaching out, grabbed the rope. For a few seconds the two vessels moved forward at identical speeds, as the pilot waited for the next roll to begin, so that the ladder might hang clear for him. Then, with a thumbs-up sign and a grin, to Philip, he stepped over on to the rungs, and went expertly up the precarious and horribly-swaying contrivance, bulk, years, motion and flapping oilskins notwithstanding. The white foaming crest of a black sea seemed to chase him up—but as far as Philip could see did not quite reach the pilot’s climbing sea-boots. Even as the former watched, he was ringing for speed, and spinning the wheel to port.

A thin high-pitched liquid-sounding voice came down to them, shouting something which Hepburn could not make out. Frowning, he thrust his head out of the wheelhouse, and brought his helm round again some way, so as not to draw too quickly away.

“Eh? What’s that?” he yelled.

“Hey, Meester—you like ceegarettes, yes? Ceegarettes. Eenglish.”

“No thanks.”

“Hey—ver’ cheap. Eenglish ceegarettes.”

“No. No thanks, friend.”

“A watch, hey? Good watch. Ver’ cheap, Meester. Sweess watch . . .?”

“Sorry. No sale.”

“Ladies’ per-fume. Ver’ good. French ladies, yes? Ver’ nice. Ver’ leetle money . . .”

“Nothing at all, thanks. Keep it, chum.”

“French brandy? Cognac? French, Meester—no dam’ Spaneesh. Ver’ cheap.”

“No, I tell you,” Philip bawled. “No sale. Try them on the Customs bloke at Grangemouth! Goodnight!” Once again the Gala Law swung away.

A volley of abuse in mixed Arabic and pigeon-English came after them erratically on the wind gusts, full-blooded however liquid-toned. Seldom had the Lieutenant-Commander been thus addressed on the high seas.

At the wheelhouse door, Dougal Mackay grinned. “He has the cheapy-cheapy onion man fair outclassed, that one!” he said, in his musical Highland voice. “I’m thinking he didn’t like you that very much, sir.”

“I got that impression myself! D’you get much of this sort of thing, these days?”

“No. No—I’ve not known the like, before.”

“It seems crazy—on a night like this especially. Even if I felt like doing a bit of smuggling on the side—how the devil did he think it was to be done? I mean, get the stuff down to us, and the cash up to him? Did he expect Tom Wauchope to shin up and down that ladder, acting as go-between?”

“Aye. It was a daft-like ploy, that . . .”

The cutter was heading away landwards at a forty-five degree course to that of the tanker—which seemed to be slow in surging ahead again. It was the comparative tardiness of the big ship at picking up speed again, which set Philip Hepburn to glancing backward once or twice. And it was at the third such backward glance that he stiffened suddenly.

“Look! See there!” he shouted to the steward, who was just disappearing down his hatch again. “Dougal—look there. Astern of her. See it? It’s that confounded fishing-boat again!”

“Eh? What’s that, sir? A fishing-boat, d’you say? I don’t see . . .”

“See, man—a couple of hundred yards behind the ship. She’s not easily seen. She’s swinging away end on now, I think. No lights . . .”

Not easily seen was no exaggeration. It was only for a few seconds that Philip had glimpsed the same outline as before, possibly very slightly illuminated in the glow of the tanker’s lights. In the almost horizontally driving rain and spume, and the pitchy thickness of the night, the steward made no confirmatory sighting.

“We saw him before,” the helmsman shouted. “At least, I did. Off Fidra. And then again as we were coming out here. Looked as though he was following us, almost.” Philip was still peering back north by east. “Can’t pick him up again, now. But I saw him—no question of that. And what’s more, he was facing back up-Firth this time. The higher mast was to the east, seaward. This is a dam’ queer thing. Some fool cruising about out here without lights, in a thick night. A danger to himself and everybody else . . .”

On a sudden impulse, Hepburn altered course drastically, turning the cutter in as tight a circle as he might, almost back in her own wake. A point or two east of north he aligned her bows, and rang down for all the speed that the diesels would give him. Tom Wauchope was the last of three pilots to be ferried that night; they were only going home to bed, now. This blacked-out character ahead could do with a warning, whatever he was up to, for everyones’ sake—that was certain.

Philip switched on his bow spot-light again, when he calculated that he was facing in the right direction—and frowned at the result. The blaze of white light seemed merely to emphasise the obscurity, glistening and shimmering on the spears and droplets of rain and spray, creating a dazzlement before them rather than a lane of light. Promptly he switched off again. It was only destroying his own night vision.

Rolling more unpleasantly than ever, now that she was almost exactly broadside on to the wind and surface seas, the cutter churned her laborious way outwards. Dougal Mackay came into the wheelhouse with Philip, and together they peered into the blustering void. But without success.

“Eyes!” the naval man exclaimed, exasperatedly. “To have only our eyes, in this day and age! If we had radar. Or even hydrophones, to hear their engines . . .”

“Och well—this is not a battleship at all, mind,” Dougal pointed out reasonably. “Maybe if we were to be shutting off our own engines a wee whilie, we might hear the other man’s? Give us a bit line on him, just.”

Hepburn shook his head at this suggestion. “No good. If we heard anything at all, in this wind, it would be the tanker’s turbines. They’d outbeat anything small. It’s hopeless, I’m afraid. They can see us coming, with our lights, and can take avoiding action.”

“We could easy douse our own lights, Commander.”

“That would hardly give me much right to protest to them about not showing lights! And I’ve no authority, at the moment, to do more than make such a protest. No—I’m afraid it’s no go, Dougal.”

Reluctantly Philip accepted the inevitable, and turned his craft round to face for home once again. “As well look for a needle in a haystack,” he grumbled. “I wonder what it’s all about? Fisher skippers have too much sense, usually, to behave like this.”

“Aye. Right queer it is, yes. Mind you, though, I’ve seen a boat before, one time, without lights.”

“You have? Out here? Recently? The same kind of boat? A fishing craft?”

“Well, I reckoned it was a fisher, yes. Mind, I didn’t see it that very well, at all. But it looked that size. I pointed it out to Skipper Wilson, but och, he didn’t see it.”

“When was this?”

“It would be a month or six weeks ago. Maybe the beginning of September. It was a better night than this. But dark too, mind.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

“Why should I, sir? I thought no more of it, at all. And the skipper didn’t see it. Och, if it was anything at all, I reckoned it might be just a fisher crew drifting for salmon. Maybe illegally, just. Nobody would be wanting to spoil a bit sport, Commander . . .”

“No—of course not. But—is that possible? Out here? I don’t know much about salmon fishing in the sea. But ar. . .