The Pirate Submarine
9781465643551
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THAT'S done it! Scrap brass has fallen another thirty shillings a ton, Pengelly. The slump has knocked the bottom out of the market. We're in the soup. Thus spoke Tom Trevorrick, senior partner of the firm of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co., shipbreakers, of Polkyll, near Falmouth. He was a tall, powerfully-built man, standing six feet two and a half inches in his socks, red-haired, florid featured, with a high though receding forehead and a heavy protruding jaw. His rich deep voice had a plausible ring about it—a compelling, masterful yet persuasive tone, that had largely influenced the shareholders of Trevorrick, Pengelly & Co. to part with their money with the absolute certainty of a pre-war ten per cent. return. Paul Pengelly, aged thirty-three, or three years older than the senior partner, was of different build and temperament. Trevorrick represented the Celtic strain of Cornishmen; Pengelly had dark curly hair and sallow features—legacies of an Iberian ancestor, one of a handful of survivors from a vessel of the Spanish Armada that had been cast ashore on the rock-bound Lizard. History does not relate why the Cornish wreckers spared the lives of the olive-featured mariners, but it does record that the shipwrecked Spaniards took wives of the Cornish maids, and lived and died in the country of their adoption. Pengelly was slow of speech, stolid in action save when roused to anger. Of an argumentative nature, he acted as a foil to his partner's exuberance. If Trevorrick suggested a certain course, Pengelly almost invariably went dead against it, not that he disapproved of the scheme, but simply as a matter of habit. He was secretive and cautious; but he never hesitated to do an underhand action if he felt reasonably secure from detection. He was a man of many parts—a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Given to building castles in the air, he would soar to dizzy heights in planning fantastic schemes. Some of them might take definite shape; then, almost without warning, he would "chuck his hand in" and cast about for something else. Eighteen months previously, Trevorrick and Pengelly had met for the first time. Trevorrick had just left the Royal Navy. He had been a lieutenant-commander attached to the Portsmouth submarine flotilla. He had not resigned under the favourable terms offered by My Lords to redundant officers; he had not been "axed" under the Geddes Scheme. He had been courtmartialled and dismissed from the Service under circumstances that could not be termed extenuating. Trevorrick was at a loose end when he encountered Pengelly. He had a limited amount of capital. So had Pengelly. The latter's latest scheme appealed to the ex-lieutenant-commander. Just then, hundreds of ships of all sizes were being sold out of the Service for breaking-up purposes. There was money to be made out of the business, with very little capital required for plant, while surplus destroyers and submarines could be bought at a flat rate of one pound per ton, subject to the condition that they had to be broken up. Of the hundreds, nay, thousands of people who patronise the little steamers plying between Falmouth and Truro—or Malpas, according to the state of the tide few are likely to notice a small creek on the starboard hand of the picturesque river Fal. Fewer still know it by name. Its entrance is narrow, between steeply rising, heavily wooded ground. Although barely twenty-five yards in width across its mouth, it carries nearly thirty feet of water at Springs. Two hundred yards up, the creek widens out. One bank retains its precipitous, tree-clad nature. The other dips, forming a wide bay, with a flat belt of ground between the shore and the high ground beyond.
