The Rigger-2 (of 2)

WEDNESDAY

The light was definitely beginning to go. He checked the time, the piece of paper. 18.55. Safe crossing ended at 19.20. Time to start running.

 

A dull ache below his ribs on his right hand side, just after the refuge. Press on, nothing else for it. He could feel the cartilage in his knee rubbing as his trainers slapped up and down on the tarmac. Dark now. He fumbled for the switch on his head-torch. Light bounced off the stakes on the side of the road, flittered off the dark, gathering water.

His breath wheezed in and out of his lungs, an odd, almost mechanical sound that seemed to belong to someone else. He felt a sharp pang of fear, almost physically painful as his left foot landed with a splash, then a thrill of relief as his right thumped off the tarmac again. Just a puddle.

 

The water closed coldly around his ankles. He lifted his feet higher, trying to outstep the waves. He plunged forward; his leg half disappeared, water halfway up his calf. “URRGH!” he gasped, involuntarily. The next step was harder, the next harder still. The light from his head torch flickered uncertainly off the marker board. He stopped, the cold water up to his chest. He kicked his legs up behind him and, fighting the current, doggy-paddled the last fifty yards, grasping the reeds and pulling himself out of the water. If he’d been a couple of inches taller, he’d have made it all the way on foot, he told himself.

“OK, Sea, you win today. But tomorrow I’ll be back.”

 

 

A windowless inner room in an office suite in Newcastle. The two black-suited men from the MAIB – the Marine Accidents Investigation Branch – nodded quietly, the ghost of a smile playing around the lips of the older, balder one. They’d already explained that theirs was not a court of law, just an enquiry to try and establish the facts of the matter.

He recognised his handwriting in the notebook the younger one had opened in front of him.

“Well, your calculations all seem to be in order, at least as far as they go,” he said. “Of course, we’re assuming that the information on the transport plan is all correct; garbage in, garbage out, as they say.” That almost-smile again.

“In your view, could anything have caused the information not to be correct?” The younger guy, this time.

“Well, not really, like. I mean, we’d handled an almost identical piece already, couple of them in fact. Of course, I checked the drawings; everything seemed to be…everything was fine…” (He’d been coached not to sound vague or evasive.)

“Almost identical? But maybe not quite?”

“As near as humanly possible. Maybe a few kilos difference, here and there – I mean, you have the drawings in front of you there. You can see, like…”

 

And so it had continued. Like the coroner’s court, the Health & Safety enquiry; no one could explain why an apparently routine lift had gone so badly wrong. Had someone changed the manufacturing process of the boiler, without letting on? The cargo getting distorted somehow on the voyage from China? Perhaps the load calculations WERE wrong? Maybe the margin of error wasn’t as great as they’d thought it was; they’d just got away with it on the previous two lifts.

In the end, he blurted out to the two men: “Look, if I thought I were at fault, that I’d done summat wrong, I’d tell ye! It’d be better than all this…not knowing!”

They nodded quietly. The younger one switched off the recorder. They had half a dozen more interviews to get through that day.

 

 

THURSDAY

Safe crossing time ended at 20.00 today. (There was no rhyme or reason to the tides that Brad could see.) The time on his phone flipped from 19.34 to 19.35; he stuffed it in his pocket. He was off.

He deliberately tried to run with a long, loping stride, trying to place his feet lengthwise on the tarmac; his natural tendency was to run splay-footed, that was probably why he’d never been picked for the running events at school sports days. Weightlifting was much more his forte.

He passed the halfway-point, the refuge, sensing that he was making better time. He didn’t pause to pull his phone out of his pocket. He increased his effort as he mounted the slight slope. No sign of a stitch, his breathing was smooth, steady. There was the patch of seaweed that looked a bit like a cow’s head, just to the left of the road, a sign that he was nearing the three-quarters mark. Less than eight minutes. Piece of piss…

 

That odd, flat little ridge in the tarmac, where it had buckled in the heat, one summer. The five-minutes-to-go point, he reckoned. Now the board was in sight, easier to pick out than the night before. Slight splashing, an inch or two of water on the tarmac, but nothing to slow him down. He levelled with the board and pulled out his phone. 19.59 – 24 minutes, 7.5 miles an hour (he worked it out in his head) and no need to swim this time.

Tomorrow’s target would be 23 minutes. Maybe 23 and a half. Best to be sensible.

 

A big cargo ship was a rare event in the small port, which was just a fishing harbour. Half a dozen of the locals had been out filming the unloading operation on their phones.

 

So footage of the accident had gone viral on Youtube, even used by the news channels.

Against Deidre’s advice, he’d clicked on a couple of clips; they all showed the piece sliding slowly out its sling, down towards the deck, the muffled boom, the shouts, running figures the swirling blue lights.

‘RIP Donny’ said a comment below. ‘Someone must pay for this!!!!’

And: ‘How can this happen in this day and age!!!???? Didn’t anyone check the rope????’

He’d stopped looking at Youtube. Shut down his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Didn’t open the local paper any more.

 

 

 

FRIDAY

The phone flipped to 19.36. He started to count slowly; he’d go on 30 seconds. Or maybe let it flip to 19.37? Yeah. That’s what he’d do. Knock a whole minute off.  None of this poncing about with half-minutes

Start off, nice and steady. Don’t burn all yer energy up at the start, man. Keep it nice and smooth, keep it efficient. Watch out how you place those feet. Twenty three minutes would be, what, close on eight mile an hour. Amazing for him, amazing for his age. Deeds would be dead impressed, when she finally made it, after the end of her shift, after the tide had lifted.

The slight roughening of the road surface told him that the refuge was close, halfway. He wouldn’t check his phone. No time; tonight’s run would be a tight one.

The refuge loomed through the twilight. He snorted, a half-cough. His trainers clattered on. He reached up and switched on his head-torch. The light flickered and danced on the tarmac ahead, each little ridge and undulation thrown up into sharp shadow by the powerful light.

Behind him, more sensed than seen, car headlights swept across the flat marshland. Courting couple, heading for a layby on the quiet road to the now cut-off causeway? A stranger who hadn’t checked the tide time?

Almost involuntarily, he wheeled round as he ran, then back again as the headlights blinded him. His left foot caught a lump in the road; he stumbled, corrected himself, stumbled again, went down. ‘AAAH!’ as his knee grazed the rough surface. He thrust out both hands to catch himself, wincing as the stones tore into the flesh. His headtorch unhitched itself from his head, the light making an arch in the darkness, then a plop and a faint hiss as the light disappeared. He pushed himself to his feet with his bloodied hands and pressed on. He felt cold water lapping around his ankles. He corrected himself, veering right in the darkness. His feet splashed again. He blinked, trying to get his eyes accustomed to the dark, all the way trying to keep up the pace. He stumbled again, almost as if the road had reared up to meet him. ‘UHHH!’ almost a scream as his already injured knee scraped tarmac again. Which way, which way? Any way, even the refuge. Just stick to the road, stick to the road…

He felt his feet splash again, one foot in the water, the other on tarmac. That would be the best way of keeping going, a line to guide him. How much time had he lost? Must be four minutes, at least, five probably.

Was he heading for the island or the refuge? No idea. Just keep going, keep going…

 

 

 

 

SATURDAY

‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Roberts,” said the man from the Coastguard, ‘but I think we have to conclude…we have to conclude that we’re not going to find your husband, at least not find him, find him…”

“Alive?” said Deidre, almost a whisper.

‘I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…Is there anyone who can be with you; someone we could call, pet?’

‘Our son’s on his way up; he only lives in Hartlepool. He should be here as soon as the tide drops. He’s a good lad…I’ll be…fine, thanks.’

Then: “Brad was a good man; he didn’t deserve this!” She was surprised at her own vehemence.

They were in the sitting room of the B&B. The owner had made a discreet exit and could be heard busying herself quietly in the kitchen. The bright winter afternoon sunshine lit up the refuge in the distance– empty, of course.

‘Obviously, we’ll go on looking. But it’s been 20 hours since he was last seen heading towards the causeway. And if you look around here, if he was here to be found, we’d have found him by now.’

‘Do you think you’ll ever find him? Find his body, I mean…’

‘Hard to say, very hard to say. I mean, sometimes they just get swept out into the open sea, mebbe they get washed into a creek or an inlet; depends what the waves and the tides are doing. Mebbe we’ll be lucky…’

‘Lucky…lucky … Yes, maybe we’ll be lucky. We were, once…’