Lost Voyage

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Pauline Rowson from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Recent Titles by Pauline Rowson from Severn House

  The Art Marvik Thrillers

  SILENT RUNNING

  DANGEROUS CARGO

  LOST VOYAGE

  The Andy Horton Mysteries

  DEADLY WATERS

  THE SUFFOCATING SEA

  DEAD MAN’S WHARF

  BLOOD ON THE SAND

  FOOTSTEPS ON THE SHORE

  A KILLING COAST

  DEATH LIES BENEATH

  UNDERCURRENT

  DEATH SURGE

  SHROUD OF EVIL

  FATAL CATCH

  LETHAL WAVES

  LOST VOYAGE

  An Art Marvik Thriller

  Pauline Rowson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  This eBook edition first published in 2017 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2017 by Pauline Rowson.

  The right of Pauline Rowson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8732-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-848-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-908-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For all those who work at sea.

  ONE

  Monday

  Marvik stared across the dark, deserted stillness of Newtown Harbour on the Isle of Wight, his thoughts troubled. Only the gentle slapping of the sea against his boat and the rustle of the reeds on the April breeze disturbed the silence. He hadn’t felt like sleep, which was why he was on his motor cruiser drinking a beer rather than in bed in his cottage close by.

  His head was throbbing, not just from the wounds incurred in combat while on service in the Marines but from the bombshell that Detective Chief Superintendent Crowder, head of the National Intelligence Marine Squad and his occasional boss, had tossed in his lap at the end of March: that the murder of Sarah Redburn – whom he’d met only once in a steamy café in the Dorset coastal town of Swanage – was possibly connected with his parents’ deaths in the Straits of Malacca in 1997 when he’d been seventeen. He didn’t see how it could be and Crowder had refused to elaborate, which wasn’t unusual, because Marvik’s role in the National Intelligence Marine Squad was to go into a mission cold with the minimum of information, to ask questions, stir up trouble and provoke a killer into the open. Was Crowder giving him another mission? To find Sarah’s killer? It couldn’t be his parents’ murderer because they had died in an underwater tremor while diving. It had been an accident. Or so he had thought. But if Crowder wanted him to undertake the mission then why not come right out and say it?

  The trill of his mobile phone pierced his thoughts, shattering the silence and causing him to start. Perhaps this was Crowder now calling him, he thought, reaching for his phone, but then Crowder only ever used the specially designated mobile phone he’d given Marvik. He wouldn’t call him on his personal one. It had to be Strathen, then, his close friend and former Marine colleague who he worked with in the Squad, but it wasn’t. Surprised, Marvik saw the caller was Helen Shannon, a woman he had met back in February on his first mission for the Squad, when he and Strathen had been detailed to discover who had killed her sister in 1997. The same year his parents had died, he thought, answering her call, wondering what had prompted her to ring him and so late. It was just before midnight. He hadn’t heard from her since finding the man who had murdered her sister.

  ‘I need to see you, Art. When can you get here?’ she curtly demanded.

  ‘I’ll tell you that when I know where you are,’ he asked, curious and surprised at the summons.

  ‘Sovereign Harbour Marina, Eastbourne.’

  That was on the mainland, about sixty nautical miles to the east. He had a powerful motor boat but it would still take him about two-and-a-half hours to reach there. He headed for the helm. There was no need for him to return to the cottage. It was locked and he always kept provisions and a change of clothes on board in case he had to leave in a hurry – a product of his service training. His laptop computer was also with him in his rucksack.

  ‘What are you doing there?’ he asked as the engine throbbed into life.

  ‘Didn’t you say never to trust mobile phones?’

  He did. Mobile phones could be easily hacked so whatever she had to say was something sensitive, and something she was afraid of if her tone of voice was anything to go by. She sounded frightened and Helen didn’t scare easily. His concern deepened. He made for the deck. ‘I can be there by three a.m.,’ he answered with the phone crooked under his chin as he loosened the lines.

  ‘Can’t you make it sooner?’ she asked, disheartened.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be calling you if I was,’ she snapped.

  ‘I’ll be there as quick as I can.’

  ‘See that you are.’

  ‘Where shall I meet you?’ But he was speaking to a dead line. That was typical of Helen, he thought, casting off. Bluntness was her customary style.

  Within minutes, he was in the Solent heading east with only the lights of the buoys and the city lights of Portsmouth on the coast to his left to puncture the darkness. There was no moon or stars to guide him but he didn’t need them. His night-vision was excellent and the equipment on his boat was the latest state-of-the-art technology. Even if it hadn’t been he’d still have been able to navigate the English Channel. This was child’s play compared to the night ops he and Strathen had been engaged in on far more perilous seas.

  He’d thought of Helen often since February, as he was sur
e Strathen must have done, although neither of them had mentioned her. It had been their first mission after being invalided out of the Marines, he on account of a head injury which he still bore the scars of on his face and Strathen because of the loss of his left leg just above the knee incurred during the conflict in Afghanistan. Marvik again wondered why she had called him. Why not Strathen? He also had a powerful motor boat, which was moored at the Hamble close to where he lived, near Southampton. But perhaps Helen felt closer to him because of their shared danger while travelling the coast on his boat in February in search of her sister’s killer. Or perhaps she had already tried Shaun and, getting no answer because he was engaged on one of his private security consultancy projects, she’d rung him.

  Marvik was tempted to call Strathen but he thought he’d wait to see what Helen wanted and, if truth be told, he was rather glad of the action – remarkably his throbbing head was easing. He opened up the throttle. He had plenty of time to consider what it was that had panicked her into calling him. From what he knew of Helen, she wasn’t the panicking kind. Was she in trouble? He hoped not. But it sounded very much like it. What sort of trouble, though? Did she think he was the only person who could help her out of it? She didn’t know the full details of what he did but she did know he was often engaged on assignments that involved risk.

  Ruminating over what was disturbing Helen, though, and why she had summoned him was pointless. He’d find out soon enough, so he let his thoughts return to Sarah Redburn’s murder. He might have dismissed Crowder’s claims that her death was connected with his parents in 1997 but for the fact that he’d discovered a notebook in Sarah’s belongings which had belonged to his father. It was a small, dark blue hardcover book with blank pages in the front, while the rest of the pages had been torn out. Taped to the inside back cover was a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk with his father’s handwriting on it: Vasa, the name of Marvik’s parents’ research vessel.

  Marvik couldn’t fathom how it had got there when all his parents’ papers had been catalogued by the solicitor after their deaths and placed in his safe-deposit box in the bank in London. And he was certain that Sarah had never known or worked with his parents, his father a leading oceanographer and his mother a renowned marine archaeologist. True, Sarah had also been a marine archaeologist, but he’d researched her background and could find no connection between her and them. She had heard of them, but then so had everyone in that field of expertise.

  He’d placed the notebook and floppy disk in his safe-deposit box in London two weeks ago. He didn’t have the hard drive at his disposal to open the ancient computer disk but Strathen did. He hadn’t mentioned it to him yet, or, in fact, even to Crowder. He’d wanted time to check out a few things for himself first. The black expanse of sea spread out before him as he recalled his conversation with the retired solicitor’s clerk he’d visited earlier that day.

  ‘It was a tragic accident,’ Bell, a lean, bald man in his early seventies with steel-rimmed spectacles shielding restless grey-blue eyes had said in a precise manner as Marvik sat opposite him in the neat, small retirement apartment in Lymington on the south coast. There was no sign of a Mrs Bell physically or photographically. Perhaps Bell was a bachelor. It was of no consequence to Marvik. ‘Everything was listed and a copy of the contents given to Mr Colmead and to yourself,’ Bell had told him.

  Michael Colmead was the managing partner at the Southampton-based legal firm that had managed his parents and now his own affairs. Marvik had contacted Colmead last week and asked him about his parents’ research papers. Colmead had passed him on to Bell, but had reassured Marvik that Bell would only reiterate what he was telling him. It seemed that Colmead was correct.

  ‘Were you alone?’ Marvik had asked Bell.

  ‘No. Mrs Rathan assisted me. Sadly, she’s no longer with us. Is there something wrong?’ Bell’s high-domed forehead had creased with concern.

  Marvik had said there wasn’t and had given Bell what he hoped was a reassuring smile which hadn’t quite hit the spot, perhaps because his scarred face always seemed to make him look sinister even when he didn’t mean to be. He’d said, ‘I was just curious because something has turned up belonging to my father and I wondered where it had come from.’

  ‘He might have given it to someone before his death, a friend or colleague, perhaps?’

  But who? Not Sarah Redburn, as far as he was aware. She had gone straight from school to Southampton University, where she’d gained a BA (Hons) in Archaeology and an MA in Maritime Archaeology. She’d had no living relatives. Her mother had been laid to rest in 1998 in the same cemetery as Sarah had been three weeks ago. Her father’s body had been consigned to a watery grave eleven weeks after she’d been conceived in 1979. After graduating she’d worked as a maritime archaeologist for English Heritage and for various consultancies in the UK.

  Bell had said that their task of cataloguing everything had been undertaken a month after the accident in July 1997. Marvik knew what Bell was implying – that anyone could have entered their house on the Isle of Wight or broken into the boat before then and helped themselves, except as far as Marvik was aware there had been no forced entry of either and no one else had had keys to the house or boat except him and the solicitor. But how did he know that for certain? He’d been at boarding school miles away and had had minimal contact with his parents since being despatched there very much against his will at the age of eleven. For all he knew, they could have dished out keys to neighbours, cleaners and friends – anyone, in fact, except relatives. Neither his mother nor father had had any of the latter or, if they had, no one had come forward after their deaths, which had been covered by all the professional magazines and by newspapers both home and abroad, along with glowing obituaries. The scattering of their ashes at sea according to their wills had been a very private affair with just him, his guardian, Hugh Freestone, the solicitor, Colmead, and Fred Davington, a diver and the only crew member on their boat when they had died.

  As the coast of southern England sped past him he thought he knew so little of his parents’ life; once at boarding school he had rarely seen them. Before that he’d led a nomadic existence with them on board Vasa. It seemed, looking back, to have been sun-filled and happy. But memory could play tricks, as Langton, the army psychiatrist, had told him. The least remembered is usually the most accurate. Memory is very malleable; it’s dangerous to think that it is a perfect picture of the past. It’s not.

  Where did he go next with his enquiries? But he knew the answer to that as the lights of the small but busy port of Newhaven drew near. It was quiet now. No fishing boats and no ferry sailing to Dieppe in France at this time in the morning. Soon he would be at Eastbourne. He needed to speak to Colmead again and visit his bank in London to trawl through the catalogue that Bell and the late Mrs Rathan had compiled. He also needed to know what was on that disk.

  As Eastbourne approached, he turned his thoughts to the present and Helen. The lock to the marina was looming. Making his way through it, he caught sight of Helen pacing up and down on the pontoon. She was wearing the dark-mauve sailing jacket he’d bought her in Weymouth in February. Her hair was still purple but longer, blowing across her narrow-featured face, and she still favoured Doc Marten boots, black tights and a skirt. In the low-level lights he could see all too well the anxiety etched on her angular features. It bothered him. He threw the line to her, which she expertly caught, but instead of tying off she held on to it and leapt on board.

  ‘I thought you were never going to get here,’ she said with feeling.

  ‘I came as quickly as I could.’ It was just before three a.m.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

  ‘We’re leaving?’

  She nodded and glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s not often I take hitchhikers,’ he said, smiling, but she didn’t return it. Her green eyes still sported the same heavy, dark make-up, but they were ringed with fatigue.

  �
��For God’s sake, Art, can we go?’ she cried.

  He swung the boat around and headed out of the lock, disturbed by her evident distress and keen to know the cause of it. He noted that she made sure to stay below as they went through the lock. Only when the marina was behind them did she emerge. He could feel the tension in her slender body as she stood beside him at the helm. She made no attempt to explain her actions or tell him what was worrying her. Marvik said nothing. She’d tell him when she was ready but he knew that, whatever it was, it had to be something substantial to have rattled her this much. There was no hurry, except he had no idea where she wanted to go. He was heading west. He’d put in at Newhaven, the nearest port with marina facilities.

  After several more minutes had passed, she said, ‘What does a girl have to do around here to get a coffee?’

  ‘You know where everything is. And while you’re at it, make one for me.’

  ‘I’m not your skivvy.’

  ‘Never said you were,’ he muttered as she disappeared below to the galley.

  He remembered the cold February days and nights he’d travelled with her on board along the south coast in a bid to find her sister’s killer. She’d had a tough time in the past. Her father, who had served in the army, had been killed in the Falklands War when she was eleven and her mother had died of multiple sclerosis not long before her sister, Esther, had been murdered. Like him, she’d been left without family at the age of seventeen, but unlike him she’d had no money and none of the stability and comradeship that the Marines had provided for him. They’d faced danger together and Helen had stood up to it well. She was not easily scared, so whatever had frightened her in Eastbourne had to be significant, but he began to wonder if it was real. He knew a great deal about the emotional and psychological symptoms of trauma and Helen was exhibiting them in bucketloads. She was edgy, tired, anxious and afraid. Perhaps her telephone call to him had been a cry for help. All the horror of her sister’s brutal death, which had been recently dredged up, refused to cease tormenting her. She was lonely and desperate. He was the only person she could reach out to for help. He knew how that felt. There had been no one he could turn to when his parents had died. No one he could trust or that he felt would understand his sense of isolation. The Marines had been his salvation, the rigorous training, the comradeship, the shared danger, the focus on the missions. The adrenaline surges had made him feel alive. The missions had given him a sense of purpose and a feeling of self-worth despite sometimes witnessing appalling brutality which had saddened and sickened him. For a long time he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died. Injury, incapacity and failure had been his biggest fears and he’d faced all three. He’d thought he’d come to terms with them but he knew he hadn’t, not completely.