The Cold Jungle

  THE COLD JUNGLE

  Gavin Black was the pseudonym used by Scottish author Oswald Wynd to publish his highly successful thrillers. Born in 1913 to missionary parents in Japan, he was educated at The American School in Tokyo until his family moved to the United States where he undertook a year of high school in Atlantic City. Upon graduation, he attended The University of Edinburgh until the outbreak of WWII. He then joined the Scots Guards and was sent to Malaya with British Intelligence, attached to the Indian Army. After the Japanese invasion, he was captured in the jungle and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp in Hokkaido where his fluency in the language aided both himself and other prisoners of war. It was when he returned to Scotland via the Philippines that he thought to try his hand at a ‘first novel’ contest run by Doubleday in America. His entry Black Fountains (about a young American-educated Japanese woman embroiled in the war) won him both first prize and the staggering sum of $20,000. He went on to make his fame and fortune writing critically acclaimed thrillers as Gavin Black, most of which were set in Asia and featured Paul Harris. He died in 1998.

  THE COLD JUNGLE

  GAVIN BLACK

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  The Cold Jungle © 1969 Gavin Black

  ISBN 978-1-78002-025-9

  THE COLD JUNGLE

  1

  THE PHONE RANG, not a rude noise, harshness muffled for an upper floor suite in which a transient executive was likely to be suffering from taut nerves. I was suffering from the after effects of air travel. I groped out and tugged the handset over pillows to my ear, remembering that I was in London. It didn’t feel particularly like London, just top price hotel accommodation any place. I was aware of the sun shining, which surprised me.

  “Hallo? Paul Harris.”

  No voice came for a moment. During it I looked at my watch. Quarter to eight.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Bill Cope here.”

  “You mean calling from Scotland?”

  “No. Downstairs. My train got in before seven.”

  “So you’re breakfasting with me?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  It didn’t seem a good one. I’ve never had any enthusiasm for the levee business conference, something all wrong for my metabolism which is not put with-it by a glass of orange juice.

  “All right,” I said. “But I’m just awake.”

  “I’m coming up.”

  There was no way to stop him. I got out of bed, confirmed that the sun really was shining, and went into the bathroom. This was a mass of pale green tiling and green porcelain. The floor was heated, even in a British July. I had a shower but didn’t sing under it. When I left the bathroom I was wearing one of the largest towels in the world, about the size of a small carpet, but cosy. There was a dressing-gown in one of my cases, but I couldn’t remember which.

  The sitting-room had a balcony and Bill was out there, with the sliding door open behind him, apparently staring down fascinated at all the trees which still manage to grow in London parks in spite of killer fumes.

  “Hallo,” I said.

  He turned. Even with the light behind him I could see that he had aged. This came with the little bump of shock it always does, the years which have so happily left us untouched none the less hitting fairly hard at our friends. In Singapore I had liked him very much and was prepared to go on doing that.

  “If you had bright blue eyes,” Bill said, “you might be Peter O’Toole wearing an Arabian nightgown. How are you?”

  “At this hour I don’t know. Let’s order.”

  “I already have. And I’d like a bath.”

  “Just use the place as though you were paying for it,” I said.

  While he was in the green room I got into the suit my Chinese tailor in Kuala Lumpur had designed for the British summer. Out there it had looked all right. Here it didn’t. The tie that went with it wasn’t a happy choice, either. Bill came out of the bathroom as I dealt with the knot.

  “Good lord,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Maharajah who got the family money into a Swiss bank before the new India over here for his annual beat up. And where did you get those shoes?”

  “Singapore.”

  “I thought so.”

  We went into the sitting-room where a trolley was waiting. Bill helped himself to grilled kidneys, eating like a man at a snack counter whose train leaves in four and a half minutes. Then he put marmalade on a piece of toast, poured a second cup of coffee and sat back to look at me.

  “Paul, I came to London to find why you’ve been stalling.”

  “I haven’t been stalling.”

  “You’ve had our costing and estimate for two months.”

  “I’ve also had to wait until I saw what came of our company share issue on the British finance market.”

  Bill picked up the toast and bit into it with a crunch.

  “You can come off that with me,” he said. “You knew damn’ well your issue would be fully subscribed the day it came out. And it was. There aren’t many shipping companies showing a nineteen per cent profit after tax.”

  “After Malaysian tax,” I said.

  “All right, after Malaysian tax. But you knew perfectly well you’d get your money. What’s up? Had a better bid from a German yard?”

  I looked at him.

  “The Bremen price works out at slightly more than yours. But they offer a guaranteed delivery date. With penalties. Can you?”

  He smacked his cup down.

  “Buying British doesn’t mean a thing to you?”

  “My fellow directors are one Dane and three Chinese, none of whom have any urge to help this country’s balance of payments situation. And frankly, I’m not all that emotionally involved myself.”

  “It was our money you got for your share issue.”

  “We used London as a mart, that’s all. And were in two minds about doing that. We could have gone to Sydney and probably will next time. There’s a faint hope that Australia will help fill the vacuum out my way left by the British scuttle. The Australians are still interested in what happens to Malaysia. Which is more than can be said for London.”

  Bill pushed back his chair.

  “I’m interested in saving Cope, Wilson and Company from liquidation.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. I had heard the rumours. Cope, Wilson were one of the smaller Clyde yards which had long specialised in building coasters, with a size ceiling of about five thousand tons gross. They built a good ship, but so did a lot of other people.

  Bill I had known in Singapore when he was working for Jardines and before there had been any question of his going into the family firm. A cousin had been heir, but the cousin’s death had resulted in a surprise appeal from Bill’s uncle to come home and train for the chairmanship. I knew, because he had told me, that he hadn’t really wanted to leave Singapore at all. Even eight years earlier Cope, Wilson had been shaky, threatened with being priced out of world markets. I knew, too, that it had been a fight all the way, with no clear decision in his favour at any time. And his company, largely due to its specialisation, hadn’t been able to get in on one of the amalgamations that were beginning to nationalise the industry. His was a small firm out where the winds blew cold and getting colder.

  “You can call this a personal appeal,” Bill said. “I need that order of yours on my books. Without it there could be no Cope, Wilson very soon indeed.”

  I lit a cheroot.

  “And I need that delivery date guarantee.”

  He stared at me.

 
“How can you guarantee no strikes?”

  “One way might be by putting the facts to your workers.”

  “God! Do you think I haven’t? We’re like bloody preachers these days, not capitalists. Come on, boys, work for your own good, and the country’s good, and the management will take a loss just to keep everyone happy, including this blasted government.”

  “If you’re at that point maybe a shut down is the answer?”

  He swung anger straight at me.

  “You can say that. All right, it’s the logical answer. But I’m not logical. I’m not writing off years of fight … yet. Paul, you’re going to let me down on this, aren’t you? You’re in Britain just to do that. And you’re flying on to Bremen, not Scotland.”

  He wasn’t too far from the truth.

  “Nothing’s decided. But if we go to the Clyde for this order that’s something I’ll have to sell to my co-directors in Malaysia.”

  Bill laughed.

  “Oh, certainly. Hide behind your directors. Paul Harris isn’t a free agent any more.” He took a deep breath. “Now don’t come that with me, either. You built that company out there, you made it. And wherever you went to get the money to start up, you run things now and no one else. Not your Dane nor your Chinese towkays. You have the power right here this morning to say who builds that ship.”

  I didn’t deny this. It wasn’t only time which had aged Bill. He was a man who had been stretched taut for too many years, with too few of the breaks coming his way. A man of ability, too, fighting odds that had always turned out to be weighted heavily against him. The Bill Cope I had known out in Singapore had been totally replaced by the harassed executive struggling through a time of evolutionary change.

  “Bill, I want to build with you if I can, but this isn’t a replacement. We plan to start a new service before anyone else gets the idea. Early delivery is essential. I thought demarcation strikes and that kind of thing were under control up on the Clyde?”

  “They are with the big amalgamations. But the little companies are still exposed to the wildcats.”

  “Would it do any good if I came up as a prospective customer and talked to your men?”

  He laughed.

  “Democracy in action. No, I don’t think it would do any good.”

  “Hell, they must see that it’s vital to get orders?”

  “Oh, sure, but that’s Management’s job. They can’t seem to see that it’s coming to the point where if I can’t give delivery dates I can’t get orders. I want to be fair to my men, though. Most of them are okay. And I inherited a curious position at the firm. To put it politely, my late lamented uncle was a bit of a bastard, with a decidedly Victorian outlook on the matter of his workers. I’ve had to fight that. And I’ve succeeded to this extent, there has been no union authorised strike since I took over. The thing that held us up for two months on the dredger we’re building was a wildcat. Organised by a little nucleus of seven or eight men.”

  “You know who they are?”

  “Of course I know who they are. And if I sacked them we’d have a victimisation strike the next day. Every man in the yard knew, when they came out on the dredgers that they might be putting an end to their jobs with us for good and all. Still, they came out.”

  “Are your troublemakers communists?”

  “Probably. But they’re not listened to because they’re communists. They have the power because the unions have lost authority with the workers. That dredger business was a shocker for us. You should have seen our share values drop. Ten years ago Cope, Wilson stood at nineteen shillings. It’s now four and eightpence. Look, I don’t suppose it would do any good if I went down on my knees on this nice thick carpeting and begged you to let me fly back to Glasgow on the noon plane with that contract in my pocket?”

  “I’ll do what I can. And I will come north to see the yard.”

  “Come with me today. We’ll go straight out to Mull and get some fishing before business.”

  “The fishing to soften me up?”

  “That’s right.”

  I had heard about Bill’s holiday home on Mull. It was a castle, which sounded to me like the perfect background for a newly rich social climber in the eighteen-nineties, but perhaps a shade too ambitious for a near bankrupt shipbuilder in a contemporary Britain with its back to the wall once again. Bill’s wife had wanted that castle.

  I had met her once during their honeymoon in Singapore. It is always a mistake to bring a bride straight from the church to the scene of carefree bachelor days in the hope that some of the tone of gaiety is going to be revived. It won’t be. Elizabeth hadn’t liked Singapore and nearly all of Bill’s old friends there had got the feeling that they were part of something she proposed to eliminate from her husband’s patterns. She was from Northern Ireland, a Belfast shipping family which had quit the business in time to keep most of its money and it seemed probable that she had brought quite a bit of this over to Scotland with her. For all I knew some of that money might have gone into Cope, Wilson, in which case Elizabeth would have a commercial as well as domestic hold over her husband. Certainly on marriage she had made a declaration of continuing independence by hitching her maiden surname on to Bill’s with a hyphen, a proceeding which always suggests a vote of no confidence in your man’s status and prospects from round one. Bill had never seemed to me a type likely to take kindly to signing hotel registers as Mr. Cope and Mrs. Cope-Hendrey, but he must have trained himself. There was also the fact that Elizabeth was extremely good looking, if you fancied brunette icebergs.

  “I see you’re thinking about our castle,” Bill said, though I had actually moved quite some distance beyond this.

  “To a foreigner like me a castle doesn’t suggest company shares down to four and eightpence.”

  “Believe me, it’s not grand. Not any more. The house was practically derelict. The Forestry Commission took over the estate years ago, but all they wanted was the ground for trees. We got the building for about the price of a six-roomed bungalow. And I have the fishing on three lochs. Coming?”

  “Not this morning.”

  “Got to see a man from Newcastle about a rival bid?”

  Somehow a hint of bitterness irritated me.

  “Not Newcastle,” I said. “Rotterdam. I got a cable as I left Singapore. They’re standing by to fly a man over.”

  Bill took a deep breath. Then he pulled out a long envelope from an inside pocket.

  “I’ve come with a new bid,” he said. “No one knows about it but me. I pared down our accountant’s figures myself. The net result is a five per cent cut in the figures you hold. It’ll mean an initial loss that could easily be increased by rising costs while we’re building.”

  “So my ship would really get you nowhere?”

  “It would buy time.”

  “Is your order book empty?”

  “It is. Totally and completely.”

  He left me for the balcony. I stared at his back for a moment or two.

  “Bill, to what extent have you switched to the new production techniques?”

  He answered without turning.

  “Well, we’ve given up rivets for welding, if that’s what you mean?”

  “It’s not what I mean.”

  Slowly he faced me again.

  “I’m up against conservative directors who don’t like pouring good money after bad.”

  “Who are the other directors?”

  “A Glasgow accountant, a banker, and the design shop manager. There’s also my wife’s half-brother.”

  Bill’s postscript interested me. It suggested that there was Hendrey money being steadily lost on the Clyde. And Elizabeth would simply hate that.

  “Is there a vote on the board you can always count on?”

  “The design shop manager. But he hasn’t yet learned to say things in a loud voice.”

  “It’s three to two, then?”

  “No! I’m chairman. Why am I being pumped?”

  “I’d
have said legitimate customer questions in the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances? You mean threatened liquidation?”

  I didn’t say anything. He came back into the room and sat down at the trolley, pouring more coffee. He was in something of a state. This didn’t show in trembling hands or a perspiration dew on his forehead, but he was still as wound up as an old clock with a slack mainspring. There could be a sudden ping from tension and then no ticking. It was a tightness of a kind one sees a good deal at executive levels and it never does the man who suffers from it any good, not a creative tension at all. I had a strong desire to tell him that he could fly home with his order, but then I knew I simply couldn’t do this. I had a ship to be built and it was a buyer’s market.

  “I’ll fly up to Glasgow day after tomorrow,” I said. “The noon plane. If you meet me at the airport and take me straight to the yard we can perhaps do business that afternoon.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’m sorry if this is going to bring you back from Mull in a hurry.”

  “I won’t go north until you’ve been in Scotland.”

  “You have a house in Glasgow?”

  “A small flat. Elizabeth has another here in London. Not that I often see it.”

  He sipped coffee. His thoughts seemed to have moved from a ship order.

  “God, it’s all a long time ago,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Singapore. The playboy period.”

  “I was working.”

  “Sure. But you weren’t what you are now. Your brother was alive. You were a kind of employee with a sports car. What do you drive now? A Rolls?”

  “A Merc.”

  He laughed.

  “It would be a Merc. The towkays’ status symbol.”

  “There is no need to be offensive,” I said sweetly.

  He stood and looked down at me.

  “You’re right outside us, aren’t you?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that your stake is somewhere else and this country can go to hell.”