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Not surprisingly, newcomers will find the explanation for what follows in the introduction to the whole sequence before episode 1. Meantime, for other visitors, this is a story called Death Ship …

EPISODE 6

By the time I got back down to the hold, some of the crew had already left. Others were climbing into hammocks and the boatswain was still arguing with Noah.

“We shouldna have to do any of it,” Noah was shouting. “We’re no sailors. You ken what you’re doin, you can look out for yourselves, we never know what’s comin at us.”

The boatswain bunched his fist in front of Noah’s face.

“This is what’ll be comin at you if you dinna do as you’re told.”

He was a big man. Too big for Noah.

“Ach, leave him, Noah,” said Tam Donald. “Come away. We’re on lookout in a while. Just think of the money.”

Noah spat on the deck, pushed the boatswain’s fist aside, shoved Tam out of the way and started back up the steps.

“He’ll be alright,” said Tam. “I’ll keep him quiet.”

“If you dinna, he’ll be next. And it’ll be me who does it,” said the boatswain.

Tam grinned.

“I’m surprised to see you with them,” I said, as he turned to follow Noah.

“Why?”

I didn’t want to mention his daughter but I think my face must have shown my embarrassment.

“Life goes on,” he said. “Anyway, I’m no with them. It was just chance that I was there that night you kidnapped us.”

“You seemed happy enough.”

“Does drink no make you happy?”

“Not if I’m with a man who’s . . .”

I stopped. I couldn’t say it.

He shook his head and looked hard at me.

“Nobody kens what goes on in folks’ heads,” he said.

I thought of following him as he climbed up to the deck, but I was weary. I hauled myself up into my hammock and watched the bulkheads moving up and down as I hung steady between them.

****

I don’t know how long I slept but I was woken by shouts and a rough hand shaking me. It was the boatswain.

“On deck,” he said. “We’ve lost another one.”

Others were stumbling from their hammocks and it was a while before I could pull on my boots and go up to join the crew around the foot of the mainmast. The word was that Tam had gone forward looking for Noah. It was their lookout watch but there was no-one there. In the end, Noah joined him and it was only when they started talking that they realised that Cammie hadn’t been there to be relieved. It was Tam who raised the alarm and all hands had been called to search the ship from stem to stern. Noah was still at his lookout post in the bows, one of the mates was at the wheel, and Big John had some questions for Tam. The rest of us spread through the holds and spaces, crawling into the bilges, opening every compartment.

We searched for a good hour but there was no trace of Cammie. No-one doubted that he was now at the bottom of the black German Ocean. Big John got us together again. We stood there, listening to his new orders and knowing that, for all the wind’s whistling and the sea’s crashing against the hull, the real dangers lay somewhere in the crew. Some of them had been shipmates for many years, but their eyes were flicking around, each man unwilling to trust any other.

“So forget about being in pairs, we all work together from now on,” Big John was saying. “Wherever you are, make sure there are always at least three other men with you. We’ll take a chance and set more sail. I want to get us back while I’ve still got a crew.”

He nodded to the boatswain, who immediately started shouting his orders.

“All hands. Clew up the mainsail. Stand by the braces.”

“What about Noah?” said Tam. “He’s still on lookout.”

“Stay with him,” said Big John. He jerked his thumb at me. “You, too, Joe. And keep your eyes aloft, too.”

I nodded and climbed up onto the foredeck with Tam. The ship was heeled over on the larboard tack and we bent into the wind to crab our way up the slope to the bows. Suddenly, Tam stopped.

“Where is he?” he shouted.

If you’ve been here since the start, congratulations and thank you. If not, explanations of it all are back in December 2023’s posting. Now read on for…

EPISODE 5

These were the men who were sharing our ship. We’d found them in the London Tavern on Waterloo Quay, drinking with Windy Geech and Tam Donald. I was surprised to see Tam with them. His daughter had been one of their early victims. Perhaps time does let you forget. But Big John was in a hurry. He told them that he had two ‘spare’ bales of Mr Anderson’s silk in his hold and that whoever helped him to bring them ashore would share the money they fetched. The six of them stumbled to the ship and down into the hold. Once they were below, Big John simply fastened the hatch over them and there they stayed until we were well out of Aberdeen the following day.

And now two of them were dead. Big John’s remark about ‘unsettled business’ made sense.

He finished filling his pipe, lit it, and the blue smoke hung in the air of the cabin.

“Death follows them wherever they go,” he said.

“Aye, and we’ve brought it on board.”

“Better to have it out here than stalking the good folk of Aberdeen. We’ve no family at home to worry about, and I’m glad of that every time I sail.”

I said nothing. Neither Big John nor any of the others knew that Emma Fielding, the woman I was to marry, was already living in my house in York Place. It was an arrangement that would scandalise the ‘good folk’ Big John was speaking about, so we kept it our secret, shared only by Lizzie, our maid. And, as for Big John’s own marital status, everyone knew his appetites. Each time he sailed, he left not one but a dozen women behind him.

“Does that not chill you,” I asked, “that we have a monster on board?”

He thought for a moment.

“Aye, but it’s an ill wind . . .”

He sucked long and hard at his pipe, coughed, and then continued.

“I’m thinking there’ll be a fuss when we get alongside, but that Mr Anderson will maybe not be too upset by it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“By the look of it,” said Big John, setting his pipe in a bowl on the chart table, “we’re going to be another week or more at sea.”

I nodded. The wind was still steadily against us.

“He’s paying the six rogues we found in that tavern a shilling a day. With two of them dead, he’s already saved himself a guinea or so.”

I laughed.

“Have you not thought, then, how much more he could save if the victims were yourself or me?” I said.

He looked at me, his eyes dark, unsmiling.

“Look,” I said, “I know our master is a powerful man, but he’s in Aberdeen. Not even he can kill men on a vessel some five hundred miles distant.”

“But someone could do it for him.”

“Who?”

He raised his shoulders and spread his hands.

“Mr Anderson has enemies, too,” I said. “Perhaps they have a hand in it. Perhaps these deaths are not meant to help, but to embarrass and inconvenience him.”

Big John nodded.

“In that case, we’re all in danger. We’re going to have to stop him doing it again. I’ll make sure the crew always work in pairs.”

“Which means that someone will be with the killer,” I said.

Big John gave one of his great laughs.

“Grand. So when the next body’s found, we’ll put the man he worked with in irons and sail home happy.”

I was surprised at how quickly he could find amusement in it all.

“And who will you and I be paired with?” I asked.

His response was immediate.

“Each other.”

I was glad of his choice and saw the sense in it. Our responsibilities for the trip overlapped in many areas and we were both answerable directly to Mr Anderson.

“It’s the way our master would want it,” he added.

He put on his jacket and we went back on deck. We left just the helmsman and the lookout at their posts and Big John called everyone else together in the forward hold where they’d slung their hammocks. Their small sea-bags were jammed into corners and gaps in the timber and they crowded together in the low, narrow gloom. There were two mates and twenty-two men and boys there, including three of the four remaining of the six Big John and I had found in the London Tavern. Cammie Drewburgh was on lookout duty. As I listened to Big John, I thanked God that my trade was building ships rather than sailing them. The constant noise and movement, the filthy, cramped conditions on board, the stinking, insistent presence of others, all gnawed at me, and only the need to work together to survive kept the frustrations and angers beneath the surface. And now, this extra, nameless fear brought new tensions to our exchanges. For myself, I wanted only to be done with it all, and back with Emma.

“The slayer seems to prefer your friends,” Big John was saying to Noah McPhee. “So maybe the four of you should work together.”

“We shouldna be here,” said Noah. “Shouldna be working for Anderson.”

“Well, you are, so look out for yourselves.”

“I’m no wantin to be paired up with anyone,” said Tam Donald.

“I’m no asking you to do it, I’m telling you that’s how it’ll be,” said Big John.

Tam stared at him but kept his lips shut tight.

“Should we double up on helm and lookout too?” asked Daniel McStay, the boatswain.

“Not the helm. I can see him from the charthouse. Anyway, nobody would be foolish enough to leave the ship drifting. But we’ll keep two up forward.”

He looked round at the men. Their bodies swayed with the ship’s pitching and rolling and there was a strange silence in the hold, a stillness at the heart of the rushing wind and sea. All their eyes were on him.

“Right, Daniel,” he said. “Get the new watches made up and organise the pairings.”

He motioned for me to follow him as he climbed up to the deck.

“Do you trust me?” he asked as we turned to keep the wind at our backs.

“Of course.”

“Good. I like your company well enough, but the thought of spending every minute with you pains me. I’m going to settle the course then have a silent pipe in my cabin.”

“Then I shall go back down and see what the crew are saying.”

He swayed his way back along the deck, moving easily to counter the ship’s movement. His strength with the men and with the unusual situation in which we found ourselves was admirable. I can only think that he had seen more things at sea than I could imagine and that the killings were almost a diversion in the daily task of thrashing across the wind towards Scotland.

Anyone arriving by mistake or for any other reasons and who wishes to continue reading will find the explanation for this sequence of posts, not surprisingly, at the start of episode 1. But now we’ve reached…

 

EPISODE 4

 

I have been to Pensioners Court only infrequently and, each time, the degradation of the place has made me shudder. Drunks lie still and silent in their own and others’ urine and vomit. Groups rage and argue over a woman, a half empty bottle of whisky, or nothing. Few of Aberdeen’s forty-seven night watchmen ever venture there. For the most part they are older men and the eleven shillings a week they’re paid is not enough to persuade them to risk the fists, boots and knives which await them there. Every black doorway holds menace. Figures wait in their shadows, still and watching, and many innocents, children and adults alike, have been dragged into these corners to be filled with their own darkness by the knife which slides quickly across their throat. In Pensioners Court, life is brief and cheap.

I was glad of the company of Big John. He’d fought in bars from Newfoundland to the East Indies and China and feared no-one. He also seemed to know who he was looking for.

“Noah McPhee, we’ll start with him,” he said. “Find him and you’ll find all the scum you want.”

It was a name I knew well.

“Is it not dangerous to have such a man on board?” I asked.

Big John laughed. There was no joy in it.

“He’s no man. He’s raped and killed and robbed, but he chooses women and old men, or people too far into their drink to know who they are. He’s a coward. Take him away from his whisky and set him on a slippery deck. That’ll pull his teeth.”

I wanted to share his confidence, but I could not dismiss with such ease the history of McPhee and his gang. With Cammie Drewburgh, Rab Robertson and Davie Strachan, he seemed to have set out to move beyond mere crime into evil itself. Even as youngsters, they’d built themselves reputations as the blackest rogues, running into Mother Watson’s ale-house with live rats and throwing them on the fire, cutting the tendons of horses waiting patiently in the shafts of their carts. Once, they hacked off a dog’s leg and set the animal to run free in the street, trailing its blood amongst terrified mothers and children.

And then, as they grew into men, their attention turned to women, whom they treated just as they had the animals, perpetrating crimes on girls as young as eight, systematically raping them, selling their pale bodies to visitors in Pensioners Court.

They spent many months in the Bridewell Prison in Rose Street and seemed only to use their time there to refine their villainy. Everyone was afraid of them. Their crimes were rarely reported and the police officers themselves preferred to stay away from them.

“They should have been hanged long ago. Or sent to Australia,” said Big John, his voice low, barely audible.

I just nodded.

“What they did to those lassies,” he went on. “Slashing their horse’s neck, dragging them out of the carriage.”

I knew the incident he was speaking of. Everyone in Aberdeen did.

“The old one,” he said. “Stripping her, beating her, taking everything and sending her crying through the streets like that. In just a shift.”

“She was the lucky one,” I said.

“Aye. I’ve thought many times how the young one must have felt, lying on the cobbles, in the dung, with the four of them taking their turns with her.” He shook his head. “A lassie, Joe. What enters into men to make them do it?”

I could only shake my head.

“And then throwing her behind a fish store, like a bundle of rags. It would’ve been better if she’d died.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She survived. She beat them in the end.”

“Aye, but she canna say so. Canna speak, canna walk, canna even wave her arm. It’s the devil’s work they do.”

It was hard to disagree with him. There had been no punishment. The drunken crowd in Sinclair’s Close had been entertained by it all but no-one was ready to speak to the police about it and the two women felt such shame that they simply retreated behind their doors to fight the memories in silence.