Back in the interrogation room, Nobre de Carvalho first asks open and harmless questions in an attempt to get Lampon to relax.
“How many times have you sailed with the Thunder?” he asks.
“This was the first,” Lampon answers.
This was the answer they had been hoping for. The Interpol agent snaps to attention and starts leafing through the folder of intelligence information he has brought from Lyon. Inside it there is a crew list showing that Lampon has been on at least three trips with the Thunder. His first answer is a bald-faced lie. Kelve Nobre de Carvalho repeats the question, this time slowly enough so it cannot be misunderstood.
When Lampon gives the same answer, the Interpol agent sees an opportunity to make him crack. He leans toward Nobre de Carvalho and says loudly:
“We must start a criminal case against Captain Cataldo. He claims that Lampon has been on more than one voyage. The captain has clearly lied and wronged Lampon’s name.”
The investigators receive the response they were hoping for. The fishing captain asks for a chance to change his answer. He has been on several voyages, he admits.
Then he starts talking about the missions, the nets and the fishing. This is information that can be useful if the Spanish authorities should decide to investigate Lampon, but which won’t have any consequences for the fishing captain in São Tomé. He hasn’t been fishing in São Tomé’s waters and the country has no laws enabling the court to penalize a foreign citizen for fishing illegally in international waters. Therefore, they allow Lampon to travel home to Ribeira.
Even though he is the ship owner’s and the fishing master’s puppet, it is Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo who is legally responsible for the ship.
“Investigate the case as a suspicious accident, not as illegal fishing,” is the advice Nobre de Carvalho receives from the Interpol agent.
The young public prosecutor must find the person responsible for sinking the ship and the pollution of São Tomé’s waters. Then he must find the person against whom criminal charges can be brought for the ship’s sailing under forged papers. Who will be allowed to leave and who must stay is already becoming clear to Nobre de Carvalho.
From the luxury hotel Pestana first engineer Luis Miguel Pérez Fernández posts photographs of himself in the swimming pool on Facebook. “Qué bonito” – how lovely – his wife at home in Ribeira comments. In his home town, friends and family “like” the picture of the man they haven’t seen in almost five months. But suddenly the first engineer stops publishing updates from his life in the tropics. While 37 of the Thunder’s crew are granted permission to leave São Tomé, the passports of Pérez Fernández, chief engineer Agustín Dosil Rey and Captain Luis Alfonso Rubio Cataldo are confiscated.
They are informed that they cannot leave the island.
Captain Cataldo makes a final attempt to extract himself from the problems. Alone and unannounced, he turns up at the office of the public prosecutor Nobre de Carvalho and tells him that he has a family at home in Chile, that he is an ordinary man who is trying to feed his wife and children. He didn’t know anything about the documents being forgeries, he claims. When this doesn’t work, he tries to place the blame for the shipwreck on the engineers, but the public prosecutor doesn’t believe the Chilean captain’s stories.
In São Tomé it is said that the conditions in the prison are so favourable that if you are gaunt going in, you will be fattened up by the time you leave. This is meagre comfort for three forsaken men.
During the investigation of the Thunder shipwreck, disturbing things begin to occur in the life of public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho. On his way to work at eight o’clock in the morning, the domestic servant calls and tells him that some strangers are inside his house. In the bedroom she found the public prosecutor’s suits torn out of the wardrobe and strewn across the floor. Beside the pile of clothes was a one-litre tin of petrol. Somebody wanted to burn the house down, but the domestic servant surprised the intruder, who ran off. In the weeks that follow two policemen sleep in the public prosecutor’s house.
One week later he is awakened at night by the sound of splintering glass. When he goes out onto the dimly lit square in front of the house, he sees that the windscreen on his car has been smashed.
There is a dog lying on the ground with a broken leg. That could of course have been a coincidence.
41
THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
CAPE VERDE, MAY 2015
At the end of May Peter Hammarstedt is in Cape Verde, where Sea Shepherd has one of its permanent bases. In the Porto Grande Bay outside the city of Mindelo he notices a ship. Hammarstedt loves ship stories and every time he sees a vessel he wants to know more about, he jots down the name – Itziar II. Then he Googles it.
The stories he reads about the Itziar II are astonishing. The ship rocking peacefully in the turquoise water outside Mindelo has been blacklisted for 12 years for illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean. Hammarstedt realizes that the Itziar II could have been one of “The Bandit 6”.
A dinghy transports him out to the ship. The windows are broken, the hull is shedding rust, there are piles of woodwork on the deck and the interior has been ripped out. Local fishermen who paddle past in a canoe tell
