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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.

I’m hoping that, by now, the title conveys all you need to know. I’m posting Death Ship, one of my longer stories, in episodes to try to help me overcome my slackness in posting blog entries. I hope it’s being enjoyed. If you want any, you’ll find slIghtly more information in the introduction to episode one. But here’s…

EPISODE THREE

Big John put the sailmaker to work again and asked me to come back to his cabin with him. As soon as the door closed behind us, he swore and threw his heavy jacket across the chart table.

“What is it, Joe? A curse?”

I just shook my head.

“It’s worse than Baffin Island,” he said.

I knew that Big John had spent many years on whaling ships in the North Atlantic but I had no idea what he meant. My expression must have shown my puzzlement. He sat down and leaned forward.

“Dropped like flies there. We’d get stuck in the ice, victuals got low and you’d have them with their gums peeling back off their teeth from scurvy or their fingers snapping off with the frost. You’d see them going mad, dropping over the side and wandering away over the ice. Sometimes, there’d be hardly enough crew to sail her back when the thaw came. But at least you knew why. It was the ice, the cold. Here, there’s no reason.”

“There has to be. Two in two days. And no question but that they were murdered. And that they suffered. No-one murders by accident. Or just for pleasure.”

“Why those two then? And who’s next?”

I couldn’t answer him. He started filling his pipe.

“Jack Stretton found them both. A coincidence?” he said, half to himself.

“Can you see Jack doing such things?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“They’re all capable of it onshore, when they’ve had a few drams, but Jack would never be the first. And anyway, Davie and Rab, they’re not regular crew. Remember where we got them. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s unsettled business from back there.”

****

I waited. I knew what he meant. The opportunity of the Christian Rose had taken Mr Anderson by surprise. When his offer had been accepted, he still had not had time to gather a full crew. He always liked to talk to all of the men separately, to test whether they understood his special ways of doing business and make sure that they would ask no questions about what they saw. He’d come to see me in my boatyard on the afternoon before we’d sailed for Norway.

“I’m still wanting some half a dozen men,” he said. “And there’s no time to find them.”

“Then we’ll have to be short-handed. Given a fair wind, it won’t add too many days to the voyage.”

“One day is too many. All I need is six men. For two weeks, perhaps less.”

“But we need people who understand the Anderson style.”

“No,” he said. “They can be from anywhere. They need understand nothing. Their sole instruction is to sail with Captain Michie and do as he tells them. In a matter of days, they’ll be back in Aberdeen with money in their pouches and the freedom to do as they please. In the meantime, I shall look for proper crewmen to take their places when she sets sail for Jamaica.”

“So you don’t care whether they have experience at sea?”

“God, man, anyone can haul on a rope.”

“Then we should perhaps look in Sinclair’s Close or Pensioners Court.”

His look told me that it was an idea that had already occurred to him. The alleyways I’d mentioned were the breeding ground for pickpockets, prostitutes and others who grow like scabs on our society. Every evening, the cobbles are awash with drunken men and women, singing, sleeping, cursing and behaving like beasts. For anyone brave enough to risk the contamination of their proximity, it would be a simple matter to find six or more men drunk enough to be persuaded to take a short sea trip, at the end of which they would receive more money than they could beg or steal in the equivalent time onshore.

“Six men, then,” said Mr Anderson. “I leave it to your best endeavours. I shall talk to Captain Michie. I suggest you accompany him there this evening.”

I inclined my head by way of answer. I would have preferred to spend the evening with my Emma, but I was used to carrying out unplanned commissions on his behalf, many of them completely unconnected with the construction of ships, and, once you were part of his trusted circle, he paid well.