The Pirate Ship by Peter Tonkin

Author:Peter Tonkin [Tonkin, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Thriller
Goodreads: 26800702
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

The problem with preparing for the worst, thought Robin glumly, was that you didn’t always know which direction the worst was coming from. She had no sooner set Edgar Tan onto the trail of Anna Leung, the facts about what had happened during those lost days in Singapore, and some kind of an estimation as to whether Seram Queen would be allowed out of the port again, than Tom Fowler called. They met in the coffee bar on the ground floor of the Queen Elizabeth.

‘It’s very much as we discussed,’ he said, stirring his coffee slowly with a biscuit and choosing his words with the utmost care, every inch the absent-minded professor. ‘He seems to have no clear idea of personal identity. He certainly has no memory which he can access for any part of his life before he woke up in hospital here.’ He pulled the biscuit out of his coffee just as it was beginning to crumble and sucked on it meditatively.

‘His general knowledge is quite wide, but I have no idea how wide it was before. Equally, he knows an awful lot more than I do about ships and shiphandling, but again, I don’t know how that measures up against his original knowledge. There are no personal memories there at the moment. No matter how far back I went, there was nothing we could get hold of. Business matters came and went. I can sense a pattern there, but I can’t see it. No real grasp of political events, nothing current about the cinema or television.’

‘He doesn’t watch much television as a rule.’

‘No, indeed.’ He reached for another biscuit and slid it into his increasingly lumpy coffee. ‘But it’s a standard indicator, you know.’

‘I have his whole file in my briefcase here. All sorts of stuff from home.’

‘Good. The problem as I see it is, that we don’t know exactly who got shot in the head.’

‘What do you mean?’ Robin felt an obscure sense of outrage as though Richard’s truthfulness had been called into question. As though her most basic beliefs were being challenged.

‘I’m sorry, I phrased that badly.’ He sucked on his biscuit again. This time his timing was not quite so good. As he pulled it out of the cooling liquid it began to crumble. A fair amount of it landed on the table, looking like rusks and baby food.

‘Well,’ she asked, slightly mollified, ‘what did you mean to say?’

He gave no appearance of having heard her. ‘What I meant to say,’ he popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth and chewed, ‘what we have to ask — though I cannot at this moment begin to wonder where we will find an answer — what we have to ask is, was he already in some kind of hysterical amnesia when the captain shot him in the head?’

There was a brief silence.

‘You brought up the question yourself almost as soon as we met,’ he continued. ‘And that’s what it seems at this stage to come down to.

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