The German Numbers Woman

TWENTY-FOUR

No imagining ever came close to the real thing. You could pitch yourself into the future from the comfort of a room on shore and just about size up what it would be like. Past experience, combined with a sympathetic push of cognition through the limits of understanding into half-known situations — that was more or less it. He should have realised that on the Scoreboard of such a business you’d be lucky to manage two out of ten.

Penlee Point was behind, Eddystone somewhere ahead, or would be soon enough. This much he knew. In the meantime everything superfluous to his guts was going over the side. At least he had made allowances for that, though the weakness depressed him.

He’d come aboard with Richard from near Plymouth. ‘We’ll hide the fact that you can’t see for as long as we can. Just keep your eyes down and act drunk.’ And now he was half seas over, and the sea seemed half over him, head against the wood, discouraged by the smell of a savoury meal from Ted Killisick’s galley, the same gulls mocking that might have followed the car from home.

An hour before departure, Laura was stuffing sweaters and books on tape into his bag. How would he find time to be bored? Unless some unforeseen event turned his holiday into forever, or he never came home and they’d become useful in the next world, or they would form the basis for beginning civilisation from scratch. She was still ironing a white shirt — as if he might be required to dress for dinner at the invitation of some local consul — when Richard came to the door.

You were never so close to earth as when taking in the salt smell of the sea, droplets hitting hands and face like grits of sand. Even the continual earthquake of his stomach afforded a smile, proof at least that he was on his way; and by the time they found out he was blind there would be no turning back. Equilibrium was doubly precious to a blind man stricken with mal de mer. He didn’t need eyes to see the turmoil of the sky, or the stern old God who may well have been looking down on him. Richard had called it a squall, the last time passing, a bit of nothing, but up the boat went, and down the boat came, all hundred and fifty feet of her, yet bashing powerfully along.

Pushing him up the gangway, Richard had called to George Cleaver one side of the rail and Paul Cinnakle the other: ‘I got him out of the pub. Been soaking his bloody self all day. Blind drunk isn’t the term for it.’

‘It’s a good thing Waistcoat ain’t here yet,’ Cleaver said. ‘He don’t like lushes.’

Richard helped him to a bunk, came back later with a sandwich and tin of Coke, telling him to stay wide of the bridge till they were well at sea, and even then not to push his way in. ‘They’ll probably sling us both over the side when they know.’

Howard was in no state to bother. Richard watched him from the stern. He hadn’t banked on having a helpless twelve-stone baby on board. On shore he’d been chipper enough, so assumed he’d be getting about the boat on his own by now. No use trying to shame or bully him, and he was best in his hideaway in any case, Waistcoat being nervy and jumping at everyone, as always at the start of a trip. It would be better if he didn’t find out till calmer times, though he’d still do his little spectacular, probably bigger than they’d ever seen. He touched Howard on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right in a while, shipmate.’

‘Oh, I know I shall.’ His face was serene, a smile in spite of the dark waters of ages past trying to engulf him. He rejected the picture absolutely, knowing he must. ‘I’ll try a walk soon.’

‘Hold on tight when you do. We don’t want to lose you. Or I don’t anyway.’

He could even laugh. ‘You won’t.’

‘Scoff these, in the meantime.’ He took a packet of biscuits from his pocket. ‘They’re the best things out.’

A dying man feels better after eating, Howard supposed, though he still dies. ‘I’ll give it a try.’

‘I’ll get you to your bunk. You’ll be OK tomorrow.’

But would he, so soon? He might. He had to be. The radio had given a low synopsis, though not so bad, with wind variable, northwest, two to three in strength, and visibility fair, outside the squalls. ‘I’m sure I shall,’ though his putty face didn’t suggest as much to Richard. ‘You won’t hold me soon. I’ll be all over the boat.’

‘That’s the stuff.’ Richard made his way to the bridge, where Cleaver was at the wheel. ‘We’re doing well. Dead on two-o-five at twelve knots. As long as that light don’t go out in front. God swept it away once, didn’t He? But it won’t crack up in this I think.’

‘Where’s the chief?’

He turned. ‘How should I know? In his cabin sewing a button on his waistcoat, I expect. The less I see of him the better. He’s in his usual bad mood.’

Richard hoped he would stay out of the way for the first few days. ‘A lot of lows lurking about.’

‘I’m ploughing on, that’s all I know. We’ll lose ’em later. I can’t wait to see the dolphins.’

He played with the idea that maybe it would be wise to tell Waistcoat about Howard’s disadvantage as a sailor before he discovered it himself. His usual feeling would have been to leave well alone, but for the first time in his life he wasn’t sure. ‘You don’t advise disturbing the chief?’

‘Not a good idea. Wait for him to disturb you. He will, soon enough. He’ll find something to go off his head about. He always does. There’s the light. We’re spot on. By the time we pass it’ll be your turn to take over.’

‘I’ll have a stroll beforehand.’

‘How’s that pie-eyed chap you brought on board?’

‘He’s getting over it,’ Richard said.

‘He looked as if he’d been swimming in it. Never seen such eyes. Fluttering like a butterfly just out of the pickle jar.’

‘He’ll be all right soon. You’d better watch that tanker coming up the Channel.’

The lighted flank of a building slid towards them on the other side of the light. ‘I’ve seen him,’ he snapped, as if his competence was being queried. ‘I’ll pass behind.’

Howard stood, as if he too wanted to see the light blinking in the dusk, and the tanker going by. He might swim to it and get a lift home, certainly felt the backwash. If Laura was on the beach she would see it in the morning, but she was a minuscule figure, no longer real. Richard put a hand on his shoulder. A zone of murky orange flooded from the west: fires being stoked, moiling and fusing northwards, metal blue between the clouds. ‘I’m not sure the weather’s going to be all that much improved tomorrow.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m feeling better,’ not so much in his stomach but from the shock of leaving everything behind. He’d left even himself out there in the darkening east, tapping his way, day in and day out, around the dull town. ‘I’ll have a go at the radio in the morning.’

‘It’s early days,’ Richard said. ‘There’ll be a meal later, if you can take it.’

He turned towards the sunset as if he too could see the closing of the day. ‘I’ll stick to biscuits for a while. Then I can look forward to breakfast. I suppose the boat will be pretty loaded on the way back.’

Richard saw no point not being open. ‘We’ll keep the deck above water, though what won’t go in this boat can be put in another.’

‘The one Judy’s on?’

‘That I don’t know. If they’re still there. They could be going in another direction altogether.’

‘Where might that be?’

‘We don’t know yet. At least I don’t. It may be irrelevant to us where they’re going.’

Howard guessed that he did know, but wasn’t saying. ‘Maybe I can pick them up on the radio later.’

‘I hope not. Everybody’s supposed to keep to radio silence. Anyone breaks that, and they’re dead — a bullet in the brain, and tipped overboard.’ No doubt about that, whoever it might be. The silly bitch had done enough damage already. ‘You won’t hear her anymore.’

‘Unless we meet her?’

‘There’s always that. Maybe she’ll come on board when we get to the beach. Everything’s in the air, except where we’re concerned.’

His stomach was no longer a needle floating in alcohol, the man from home having joined him now, back together in one body on the bouncing boat, forging towards the end point of his search. All those nights of talking to her girlfriend had built up a picture in his planetarium of a mind, and in a few days he might stand close, hearing nuances in her voice not possible or apparent over the radio.

Richard took his arm. ‘You’re wet and cold. Be a shame to go down with hypothermia. Better get to your bunk.’

He would fall asleep by thinking of Judy, then dreaming about her. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘Laura said I was to take care of you, but it might not be possible every minute of the day.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I’ll do my best, but we ought to stay close.’ Should Howard go overboard, for whatever reason, expedient or otherwise, Richard knew he could have Laura to himself for as long as he wanted, or as long as she could go on caring for him. ‘I’m so easy to seduce, aren’t I?’ she said, after the first time. ‘Only when you want to be,’ he told her. Recalling the three occasions they had been together, he knew he must see her again, and it would make no difference whether Howard got back or not, though because of his promise he would have to make sure he did. The responsibility bothered him, a bond he didn’t know how to unravel.

Having no right to be on board didn’t worry Howard. He was at last where he wanted to be, and this was his life for as far as he could see ahead — now they were so far from land. He was alone, in spite of the crew around him, and whatever happened he was indestructible, because the boat was going exactly where he wanted it to go.

Following Richard, he registered every plank of the architecture, feeling his way so that he would sooner be able to move on his own, a small world to master. Obstacles were noted, he counted steps, the height of a door latch. They met Scuddilaw coming on deck. ‘Still out of action, is he?’

‘He won’t be in the morning.’

Scud’s laugh had a touch of envy. ‘I’d be lucky to get over a bender like that, at least without getting a string of ulcers.’

Howard tried a suitable growl. ‘It ain’t the first I’ve had. Nor the last, I expect.’

Scud looked close. ‘Can’t you see at all, though?’

‘I’m waiting for the light o’ the sun to come back.’

‘He’ll stand watch for me at the radio,’ Richard said. ‘You don’t need eyes for that.’

Scud whistled his way up the steps, leaving Howard to fumble a twisting path into a lower bunk, which smelled of mildew and sweat. Richard drew off his boots, unpeeled him from the anorak. ‘There’s a bowl, if you have to throw up again.’

‘Thanks, a lot.’

‘There’ll be time for thanks when we get back. I’ll wake you in the morning, and sit you down to a Killisick fry-up. I expect real life will start then, but we’ll be fifty miles off Brittany, so it won’t much matter.’

Howard pulled the blanket close, though needed no covering to keep out the light, of which it seemed there couldn’t be much. He felt harrowed and helpless with exhaustion, as if he hadn’t fallen asleep for months. Flashes of light dominated his human sphere, tail ends of phrases stabbing like toothpicks sticking out of delectable titbits, the sort Laura had put between his fingers at a party they’d given for the neighbours when first moving into the house.

He was happier for being away, gammy stomach or not, though Richard would be on the carpet for bringing someone like him on board. Hard to think why he had, even though I know so much. He could have told me to get lost or do my worst, but supposed I would give the game away, which I have in any case. Stolen a march on them there. Having me on board was safer, but they didn’t imagine someone so far at the end of his tether, who could do nothing more to stay alive than get mixed up in a stunt that would either push me into another world, or get off the world altogether.

He gripped the boards, hung on for fear of being thrown out. Neither sea hands nor sea legs were with him yet, and at such bumping around he couldn’t see how they ever would be. A scene of Richard talking to Laura played, and to get the picture right he put an age on Laura and gave Richard a more distinctive face, though the one from the first meeting stayed clear enough. He heard him denying there was any option but to give permission for the trip. Out of darkness came enlightenment, for what it was worth, at this late stage. He knew Richard’s arguments but couldn’t place his tone of voice, or the persuasive phrases he must have used, and sensed a mystery in what had been exchanged between them, something finally powerful enough on Richard’s part to win her agreement. From the day she had returned with an altered view of the matter he picked up a connection between her and Richard which no longer existed between the two of them.

He was now in the mind to think about it, with the crunching bump of water against the bunk, and a low whistle of wind carrying down the companionway, feeling emptiness and fatigue, alone in the narrow space, shouts and laughter from the others who seemed all over the boat. Happy to be on their way, they were light headed, relieved that the die had been cast. So was he. When Laura returned from her call on Richard, and said he could go to the Azores after all, he had finally made his decision to send the letter in morse to the police. Searching the labyrinth as to why, he lost consciousness into sleep.

Not a light anywhere, no land between them and the northern hump of Spain, five hundred miles away. On the bridge Richard almost disdained to look at the murk. As always on the first day aboard he wanted to sleep, so much that he felt a pain at the ribs, as if months would be necessary to get him back to normal, though by the second day his alertness was always as sharp as ever.

Slight swell, sea moderate, as they termed it, but one bash after another sent them all over the place. A sunshot tomorrow would show how much they had strayed. Satellite navigation was on its way in, but this trip (probably the last without it) they would go by sextant and radio, which had never failed them before.

George Cleaver was hot stuff with sextant and almanacks, taught to him as a youth by one of the trawler skippers going back and forth to Iceland. He’d practised and studied all his life, and Richard admired his professional stance as he stood on deck like a ramrod to clean and adjust the mirrors, as if he were Captain Cook himself, but with a swinish temper when the midday sun didn’t show, as if it stayed hidden to spite him alone. He never took a drink to smooth the creases out of his frown. Richard could work sunsights but preferred to let Cleaver do it so that he would never stop assuming he was top of the class, as indeed he was. The log was also his to keep, and he measured the distance run like a fussy old hen at times, though never cursing when it wouldn’t come right. Nothing to do but keep a straight course, he was as reliable as any man could be.

Richard saw Laura, but would she have shot so clearly to mind if Howard hadn’t been on board? The answer had to be yes, for such a magnificent woman who had given herself so completely. How he had come to be lumbered with her husband was a puzzle, and he recalled his impulse while driving by Plymouth to stop the car and push him out, leaving him to wander like a blind beggar until — till what? The police would pick him up and he would tell them his story as they drove him home. An intriguing scene, that of shooting off at top speed while Howard fumbled his way around a lay-by looking for a place to piss. The rest was nightmare material. Waistcoat would have so many guts for garters they’d think they were at the Moulin Rouge. So here Howard was, dead to the wide and crippled by seasickness, like an anchor waiting to go overboard.

He shook the vision away, to mull on their present expedition. At this stage it seemed that getting back to England with such a huge pick-up would need a miracle to bring it off, though the collective intention was there and the fires of greed burned in them like the best of true Britons.

Steadying the wheel, he couldn’t stop dwelling on Laura’s resplendent body, while the enveloping green drek tumbled around the boat slapping its way on a steady two-o-five for land at the end of the world. He would like to spend some of his money on living with her, rent a house in the farthest north of Scotland (as far as they could get away from Howard) where they would fuck themselves out for as long as it took. A mad plan to dote on, yet the prospect wouldn’t go away. Better to steer through dangerous shoals with lots to think about, or be anxious at the boat getting lost in empty watery space, the mind only fixed on survival.

More was unknown about the journey than any set out on before. Yet he was relaxed, intrigued on getting at part of himself which damped both hope or anxiety, and brought a peace of mind he entirely trusted, heading into such thoughts as easily as the boat was chopping a way through the drizzle and darkness.

Sometime after breakfast Ted Killisick shook Richard out of his dreams. He had gone to sleep wanting to piss and, unwilling to get up and go to the heads, had experienced a different intensity of dream than when he’d had a little to drink before going to bed and didn’t need to do so. Dreams induced by a full and irritated bladder were deeper and more turgid on the pictorial front, yet harder to grasp and impossible to recollect on waking. When not aware of needing to piss he hardly dreamed, or the dreams were so shallow there was more chance of recalling the tail end of one, though being so close to the surface there was little enough worth noting. He saw Ted’s grinning face. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘Waistcoat wants to see you.’

‘What for?’

‘He’s raving about old Blind Pugh. I think he’s going mad.’

Back from the heads, he knocked at the door and went into Waistcoat’s cabin. The chintzy bed had been made, a button-eyed teddy bear wearing a sailor’s hat lying across the fluffed-up pillows. Waistcoat held onto the side rail of his desk. He seemed about to jump up and down, not only hit the ceiling but crash through the superstructure and up into the inclement sky. The hard features of a drug boat master had taken away that superficial resemblance to an eminent Harley Street surgeon. A line of blood showed from the shaving cut on his cheek. He was halfway into his blue and white padded anorak. ‘That fucking radio wizard you brought on board is stone blind.’

‘He looks it, I know, but he had a few over the odds yesterday. Once he hits the bottle it’s hard to get him off.’

‘He must have drunk the fucking Thames, then.’

‘Should be all right soon.’

‘Listen, don’t fuck with me. You’re lying. He’s been blind since birth, you stupid bog-nosed swivel-eyed get. Blinder than the blindest fucking bat, the way he wiggled his eyelids at me. How did you put him onto us? I mean, it’s a nightmare. He’ll do for us. We’ll get three hundred fucking years apiece.’

Richard, split between amusement and wrath, let the force-nine gale wash over him, pulled back his years as a ship’s officer so as to stay cool, no twitch or smile or alteration to his face, a stance that never failed. This, however, was a hard one. He had never seen Waistcoat’s hand tremble, which did as he lit his usual slim cigar. Maybe something other than Howard’s blindness had boiled him up, though impossible to guess what it might be. ‘I told you in London why he had to come with us, and you agreed.’

‘But you didn’t tell me he was fucking blind.’

‘I didn’t think it mattered.’

‘Mattered? On a boat like this? I can’t believe it. Do you think it’s a floating St Dunstan’s?’

‘We brought him because of what he knows. We did the only sensible thing. Apart from that he’s an ace radio man, the best I’ve known, and we’re lucky to get him. His ears are sharper than those of anybody who can see. He’ll be a godsend when we get close. Blind operators aren’t rare in full employment. Half those on the coast stations were blind at one time. Another thing is that from our point of view he’ll see nothing of what goes on. In that respect we couldn’t have a better man. He can take my place at the radio, so that I’ll be more use on board. Another thing is you won’t have to pay him like the rest of us, maybe just a bit of bonus for a handout when we get back. You’ll have a lot to thank me for when it’s over. And when it comes to getting back, with the danger of us being intercepted, he’ll be very useful indeed.’

Waistcoat must have been a neat man in a cell. He tapped his ash carefully into the silver tray, its handle the debonair figure of Sir Walter Raleigh wearing cap and sword. ‘You’re either the cleverest man on my books, or you’ve got more than one fucking screw loose. I can only hope for your sake that you’re clever.’

Richard sensed a little cooling down. ‘You had a crew of six, and now we have seven. Could prove lucky.’

‘Well, I’m not superstitious. I got rid of that crap long ago’ — though Richard noticed his glance at the teddy bear. ‘Just make sure he don’t fall overboard, that’s all I say.’

‘I’ll see to it.’

‘A fucking blind man!’

‘Is that all you wanted to see me for?’

‘Yes, piss off.’

Glad to go, but Waistcoat called him back. ‘Did you hear that Nimrod this morning?’

‘I was getting some shut-eye.’

‘He buzzed us.’

‘They always do. They like to know what’s going on.’

‘Let’s hope that’s all it is.’

‘They buzz everybody. He took some pretty pictures, I expect. We didn’t sign out with the coastguards?’

‘None of your fucking business.’

He was sure they hadn’t. ‘Everything’s as normal, then. It’s the last they’ll see of us, dead on course for Spain they’ll think, to stock up on fags and brandy.’

Waistcoat looked troubled. ‘The French’ll be looking at our number plate next.’

‘They’ll be none the wiser.’

Waistcoat came as near to a compliment as he could get. ‘Not a bad manoeuvre of yours though, to alter course before Finisterre. As long as we don’t run out of fuel fifty miles off land. We’d look a right lot of charlies paddling into harbour with our passports. It might have been possible at one time, when they were stiffbacked, but now they’re like fucking laundry books.’

Richard arranged a chuckle. ‘Yeh, a real come down. But don’t worry about that, Chief. It’s part of my business, to think,’ he said before going out.

Eleven at night, when all lights were off and they were halfway across Biscay, they’d change direction and go due west until eight in the morning, well out of Spanish surveillance. From then on it would be a straight course for the Azores. It had been Cleaver’s plan as much as his, but compliments from Waistcoat never came amiss.

TWENTY-FIVE

The sea was losing its bumps, and his lack of sleep led him to think the air was warmer. He scrounged a coffee from the galley, and found Howard looking — if that could be the word — astern, as if to see the last of England, and wonder what Laura was up to. I should know. She’d be mooning about us both, Richard supposed. Take her off to Scotland I will, and when we’ve done all there is to be done and I can’t stand the sight of her stern and lovely face I’ll kick her out. Meanwhile I’ll cherish the memory and, damn, love her as well.

‘I hear you had a hard time with the chief?’

‘He gave me hell, but I think it’s going to be all right.’ Howard’s head went back as he laughed. ‘I heard a croak or two, and lots of swearing. His face was right up to mine. I thought he was going to punch me, so I got ready to give him a bigger one back. But he pulled off, and I heard a door slam. I can’t think why he should be so upset, except maybe he should have been told already.’

‘Did you eat a good breakfast?’

‘Eggs, sausages, tomatoes and fried bread. Luckily, just before the chief came in.’

‘Killisick’s good at that sort of thing. But if I’d told Waistcoat before, you might not have been here.’

‘And that wouldn’t have done at all.’

Not difficult to know what he meant. ‘Did you hear the plane go over?’

‘Couldn’t miss. Four Rolls-Royce engines. A very healthy sound. Nostalgic, as well. It brought back the old flying days with a vengeance. RAF on reconnaissance. I can never forget the sound of the Lancaster’s engines, either. They were a bit cruder then, had quite a roar when taking us off down the runway with a full bomb load. Merlins they were.’ He turned his face towards Richard. ‘Do you think the Nimrod was following us?’

‘No, just routine. They usually like to keep an eye on people like us. Think we’re a bloody U-Boat, I suppose.’

Howard wondered whether they were being tracked because of his morse letter. ‘I gave them a wave.’

‘You must have made their day.’

‘Maybe they sent our position back to base, wherever that can be. They have air signallers on board, as I recall. Unless they just store it in their computers.’

Such talk brought back what Richard regarded as a normal edginess, after his calm spell on the bridge. Real life, and none the worse for it. ‘If you’re feeling fit I’ll show you the chart room where we keep the communications gear. It’s never too early for a spot of listening. See what you can get. There’s a portable typewriter to take down the weather from Portishead. You’ll be just in time.’

Space was cramped, and he sat side on to the table to find room for his knees. Richard explained the mechanics of the equipment, and Howard’s fingers went over the various facias to get an identikit picture of each, almost as if they were human features, hoping his particular languishing at the transmitters wasn’t too obvious. Richard tuned in to Portishead. ‘I’ll go over it with you this afternoon, to make sure you’ve got it. And once more tomorrow, if you like.’

Howard unlocked the manual typewriter, easy enough to use because of the standard keyboard. The pitch of the boat made it more difficult than on shore, though he hadn’t expected to work on a millpond. He turned out a creditable text nevertheless. ‘I’ll be word perfect in a day or two.’

‘You can get this afternoon’s weather as well, and between times see what else you can pick up. Best to show your face as little as possible. Keep out of the chief’s way, unless you hear something good on the air, though if you do, call me first. I shan’t be far away.’

Nothing except mush on most bands, the loudest reception from coastguards on the Biscay shore, or odd-bods on medium wave wanting berths at various ports. He took a break, to breathe the ozone, sensing more than four thousand metres of water under the keel, the sea slightly rougher but no longer bothering him. Back inside, the cramped space reminded him of the wireless position in the Lancaster, when times had been good. The German Numbers Woman, an old friend from far away, came through with the same schoolteacher tone, though he wasn’t able to make out every individual cypher. She was concerned for him, warning him that he must look out for his wellbeing. Though her support was only spiritual, he liked it nasalling into his earphones.

He cut her off, clicked back to long wave, and got a bearing from LEC at Stavanger. ‘Not much use, though it shows we’re more or less on course,’ Richard said. Consol was a German wartime direction-finding system, called Sonne, to give U-Boats their position in mid-Atlantic, and the Allies kept it on after the war, though it could be far from accurate near coasts and at night. On the other hand it was simple to use, and useful at times. Picking up Lugo or Seville as well would give cross-bearings for a reasonable fix. George Cleaver did more than all right with his sextant, unless cloud cover foxed him, then Howard would get the azimuth of a beacon, fingers already making out numbers on the direction finder. Navigation, with variable conditions, could be a bit of a mix: dead reckoning, radio, astro, which between them tied things up more or less satisfactorily.

He was starting to feel at home, doing what his temperament might have kept him at had it not been for the cannon shell over Essen. This time a similar missile was already lodged on board, embedded in himself, waiting for a different sort of explosion, a tension not too difficult to live with.

Cleaver put down his cucumber sandwich, and took the Consol bearing for plotting. ‘Whatever you get, I’ll have. Never turned up my nose at anything, except a Chinese breakfast.’

Howard edged away so that he could write up the log. ‘Have you ever had one?’

‘Not so far, but you never know.’ He tapped the chart with his finger. ‘The bearing tallies. You’re earning your keep. It’s all the same to me whether you’re blind or not. I don’t suppose the rest of us can see very far, anyway. It might turn out just as well if we can’t. Richard told me you were a wizard at the radio.’

‘I do my best.’

‘The more boffins on board the better.’ He climbed back on deck. ‘Never say die, that’s what I say.’

Afloat as a member of the crew was like being one of eight, as in the good old days in an aeroplane, all gung-ho for the target a few nights ahead. He wanted the pleasure of a stroll on deck, enjoying his new found medium, but knew he must show willing and keep the earphones clamped. He searched eleven megacycles for news from aeroplanes in either morse or voice but found nothing, the same on other wavelengths that had been so promising at home. Like a superfluous cabin boy, he had been given something to do, to keep him out of the way, whatever was said or thought, while Waistcoat regarded him as a hostage because he knew too much. The shade of fear was wiped away by Lisbon coming in loud and clear on charlie whisky — which a cabin boy certainly wouldn’t be able to copy. ‘I’m disappointed at not getting a squeak out of the Azores.’

‘You will.’ Richard led him to the stern for a rush of clean air from the west. ‘You’ll pick up stuff soon enough. Best to savour the cruise while you can.’ Birds pursued the boat, hoping for snacks. One was wounded, or weak, and slid into a stall over the mast, followed with head swinging side to side as if trying to talk. ‘We’ll have one on board soon. We usually do about this time.’

‘That’ll make nine of us,’ Howard said, ‘instead of eight.’ He leaned as if to put a hand in the water but the green line slid down again.

‘Don’t get too close.’ Richard drew him back. The temptation to do evil needed wrestling with. Or was the frisson merely out of concern for his safety? Hard to know, too lazy to work it out. A man must be given a chance. ‘Even an old deckhand goes overboard now and again.’

‘I’m firmer on my feet than you might think. I’ve got my sea legs already.’

‘Glad to hear it. But don’t frighten me or you’ll have to wear a life vest whenever you come on deck. We all should, by rights, but it’s a big boat, as boats go, and it’s not really rough yet, believe it or not. They’ll be handing out lunch any minute, so follow in my wake. Ted promised hamburger steaks with all the trimmings, which means spuds and carrots, and apple charlotte to follow. Better than hard tack and a bit of old raincoat. He’s a dab hand as a cook.’

The domestic provision satisfied him, everything found and a bunk to get his head down, he and the blankets slowly drying. He stood in line as if others were also blind, recalling a framed print in his father’s study of men made sightless by poison gas in the Great War. Richard shuffled from behind, Scud and Cinnakle in front, no queue at all, though Richard’s hand on his shoulder steadied him as the deck came up and space opened under his feet. The side wind sent them swinging, gave a spiteful push, force four weather though sea and sky were blue.

He had thought that once on board, and with sea-sickness gone, the joy of being alive would come back, and so it had but eating with such appetite made him afraid to ask for more in case he mistakenly overstuffed. He found a seat on deck, head clear, praying his stomach would take care of him, gazing at space between boat and horizon, little enough to lock onto even if he’d been able to see. The wind, and an occasional warm sun on his cheeks, and maybe a gull now and again resting on the undulations, told him all that was visible.

Richard came from the bridge and put a flask of brandy into his hand. ‘I feel the same. It takes three days for the system to settle down, unless there’s some action, when it has to right away. Take a suck at this. It’ll work wonders. Three-star Napoleon. Only the best is good enough.’

‘I couldn’t disagree with that.’ He controlled his shaking hand, clamped the glass spout to his mouth, and took a flame-like swig. ‘You’re well equipped.’

‘A tot or two of this brew’s saved my bacon more than once.’

‘Is there plenty on board?’

‘Never fear,’ he laughed. ‘Enough to take us to Doomsday City and three times back. Just ask Ted Killisick, if you feel the need. He keeps it under lock and key, but hands it out to whoever puts a good case, which is to say you don’t need a lawyer to blab it out. All duty-free. He’s got everything from mineral water to Warrington moonshine. When we get back to Blighty we’ll be guzzling champagne by the bucket. Looks like you’ve got a visitor.’

A weight tapped his forearm, bare below the line of his short-sleeved sweatshirt. ‘It must be a bird.’

‘A racing pigeon,’ Richard said. ‘It’s dull and dirty grey, but it’s looking at you as if you’re his saviour. Half starved, it seems. It was just about to hit the water and go under when it spotted this plump white arm at the rail and thought it would take a chance on sanctuary. They do that now and again. There must be something halfway human in them to come to the likes of us for help. Unless they want a bit of company before going into the pigeon version of the great unknown.’

Howard stilled himself so as not to frighten it away. ‘It seems fit enough to me. I can almost feel it breathing. Hear it as well.’ He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out half a biscuit. ‘There you are, Jehu. See what you can make of that.’

‘You’ll have a friend for life.’

‘I think it’s eating.’

‘Scoffed the lot. On its last legs.’

He shook the rest of the packet on the deck and felt the bird leave him to sort it out, webbed feet padding on wood. ‘What a privilege, to save a life, even a bird’s.’

Richard resisted telling him it wouldn’t live. They never did, always too far gone when they came aboard. ‘It knew where to come, which is more than most people know, especially the ladies of the world.’

Disturbed by Howard’s laugh, the bird hesitated as to whether it should stay on the comfortable platform of his hand or try its luck again over the water. ‘It’s up to the men to know that.’

‘Ah, well, there’s no pattern in that one.’

‘Aren’t we born knowing it?’ He stroked the pigeon’s neck, a finger drifting along the warm pulsating feathers that felt like silk, and brought forth a warble of gratitude. ‘If we aren’t, we should be.’

‘There’s a ring on its leg,’ said Richard, ‘with a name, I expect. I’ll read it.’

‘A message as well?’ Laura had set a pigeon to race after them, with words of encouragement for their travels on the briny. She had called at a coop behind the town and urged the man to send his best and strongest. ‘Don’t keep me waiting.’

‘No message. It just says Terry, and gives a number.’

‘I’ll call it Jehu. Won’t I, Jehu? Is it looking at me? I feel it is.’

‘Lovingly,’ Richard said, as it flew up to the mast. ‘It’ll come back. We often pick one up, miles off its course, utterly knackered and lost. Maybe it’ll stay till we reach land, glad of a lift, and spend the rest of its life in the Azores. Plenty of lovely lady pigeons there. Why call it Jehu? What kind of a name is that?’

‘Just shot into my head. As I remember, it’s from the Bible. Jehu murdered all and sundry so as to set himself on the throne. Must have heard it at Sunday school. No connection, really, is there, Jehu, my old bird?’ — looking to where he thought it had gone.

‘Do I feel a spot of rain?’ Richard said. ‘Or is it a bit of spit? Anyway, I’m due on the bridge for a stint at steering this de luxe waterbus. Floating gin palace, if you like. I’d better get Jehu entered in the log as another mouth to feed. Boiled rice usually goes down well. Ask Ted for a handful. The poor bloody specimen looks as if it needs building up. Then back to the wavelengths. If you happen to chit chat with God ask him to let us know how this little run is going to turn out.’

A build up of the sea and wave pattern made the boat roll, but Howard knew where hands and feet should go to stop him getting too bashed about. One foolish miss left a scrape along the arm, useful in teaching what not to do.

Jehu had a quick flight around the boat, as if to keep its wings in trim, not much to its liking, so it came back, found a way to Howard on the radio, either drawn by the warm billet of his arm, or pulled by the birdlike rhythmical whistle of the weather forecast in morse, and the steady clack of the typewriter.

The head of the bird went from left to right as he moved the space bar. Maybe somewhere in Jehu was the spirit of a dead radio officer from the war, faint echoes of an old life coming back. He couldn’t think so, because when you were dead you were dead, a meltdown into the eternal blackout. He took the paper from the machine and tapped, felt, trod his way to the bridge. ‘Here’s the latest weather, if you want a look-see.’

Richard noted the pigeon resting on Howard’s shoulder as if he was Long John Silver, and they’d been friends since the bird left the egg. ‘He’s looking livelier.’

‘He was warbling back there, short-long-short in morse. Same letter over and over again. Maybe R for Richard.’

‘If you teach it the rest of the alphabet it might tell us what it’s like to be a pigeon.’ Richard glanced at the forecast. ‘You’ll need ten million years, that’s all.’

Another person was on the bridge, but he wasn’t sure who, until: ‘Let’s have that fucking weather, then’ — unmistakably Waistcoat. ‘That pigeon will crap all over the boat, though I suppose it’d be the right sort of camouflage for this shower of a crew.’

‘The weather’s on the mend,’ Richard said. ‘Those north-east will have the worst of it.’

Waistcoat took the paper, read, and folded it into his pocket. ‘Stay at the wheel. I’m going in for some shut-eye. And I don’t want anybody banging on the door to ask any stupid questions. I’ll be out.’

Cleaver came in, put his sextant carefully into the box. ‘He gets jumpier and jumpier. We’d be a lot better on our own, except he doesn’t trust us to run the show.’

‘That’s how he’s got as far as he has,’ Richard said.

‘Pity they’ve done away with hanging. I’d love to see him swinging in the evening breeze. He thinks we’ll take the stuff to the Bahamas rather than head back for Blighty. There’s got to be honour among thieves, though. If we can’t trust each other who can we trust? I don’t like these big jobs. Never did. I’d rather do two or three smaller ones. You can’t help but get jumpy on such jaunts.’ He sat down to work out his sights. ‘Still, it’s better than shovelling cod around on a trawler.’

‘We’re all doing better than otherwise, or we wouldn’t be here.’ Richard glanced at the compass, and flicked on the wipers to clear a light drizzle shooting across. Or was it spume from a wave? He turned them off. We’re going after the great white whale, and no mistake, packed tight with dope. Half of Europe will be out of its thought box when the stuff gets on the streets and boulevards.

‘What’s up ahead?’ Howard stood to one side, as if his blind eyes were looking at trouble.

‘Nothing,’ Richard told him. ‘So we can feel happy without popping pills or shooting up. The sea’s lumpy and in a bit of a twist, as I’m sure you can tell. There’s a cumulo stratus about six octers over the grey sea, but it’ll better itself during the night.’

Ted Killisick came from the galley with biscuits and tea, and a plate of paper thin cucumber sandwiches for Cleaver. He put a mug into Howard’s hand. ‘There’s a plastic bag of cooked rice left over, so you can feed your pigeon. We usually give ’em a bite. They’re English birds, after all, so we have to look after ’em. Anybody else’s wouldn’t get a crumb, Common Market or no Common Market.’

‘You wouldn’t starve a French pigeon,’ Howard said. ‘Would you?’

Ted handed the tea around, scalding and sweet. ‘Compliments of the galley, which is so posh I have to call it a kitchen. I might not begrudge a French pigeon, but if I got one that was Spanish I’d wring its neck. I suppose they’ve got more sense though than to land on us. As soon as they see the flag they hop it.’

‘You can’t blame the pigeons.’ Cleaver stowed his box as if there was a top hat inside. ‘They’re innocent enough creatures.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if it landed a streak o’ white on your mirror while you was taking a sunsight, would you, Mr Cleaver?’

He sat down as if to think about it, one cucumber sandwich after another going into his mouth. ‘Well, it hasn’t happened yet.’

Ted put a hand on Howard’s shoulder. ‘I hope your pigeon don’t bring us bad luck.’

‘What, my Jehu?’

‘I’ve always thought pigeons were lucky,’ Cleaver said. ‘Not like seagulls. They’re the only things in life I can’t stand. If it was a seagull that landed we might be heading for shit’s creek at a fair rate o’ knots. We had a seagull once, all the way from Aberdeen to near Iceland. It stuck to us like shit to a blanket. Couldn’t get rid of it any how. The old skipper had a two-two rifle, and took a few pot shots, but it was so darned clever he could never hit the mark. He wouldn’t let any of us have a go in case we took it in mind to shoot him. Talk about bad luck. We caught practically nothing that trip. The weather was so bad we all but capsized. We thought it was the end a time or two. When we got out of it and straightened everything up the seagull had gone. They’re dead unlucky, but pigeons are all right.’

Howard felt the pressure of Jehu on the palm of his hand, head pecking at rice grains in the other, a gentle scratch against his skin. On deck the wind made him an island, clean air surrounding each searching gust fresher than the last as it washed against him. He wondered why he was here, but the only answer was that he was here because he was here, as in the old song, but also that he was here yet not here, here because he could be nowhere else, and not here because as another person he was able to look on himself vividly from the dark, an entity in control and separate from the self looking on. The soft touch of the pigeon’s beak joined the two parts, its throaty warbling a pleasure to hear, so easy was it to make a creature content.

Maybe all on board feel they’re not absolutely here either, conscripted by Fate into the same somnambulist trap — until the action starts, when they can be themselves again. To know the truth of it he would have to be able to see like them, and he couldn’t. He was the lodestone, the man beyond them and on the outside, the pigeon feeder, the blind wireless operator who could listen but not communicate with any agency beyond the boat. He was among thieves, out of reach, had tricked his way on board hoping to find Judy of the alluring voice, no other reason.

Jehu left his hand, wings whirring into the wind. He would be back. If the radio and all else failed, or the boat sank under them in a storm, Jehu would be the survivor. ‘He’s off for his constitutional,’ Paul Cinnakle said. ‘They have charmed lives sometimes.’

‘How are the engines?’

‘They’ve got a charmed life as well. Time for a roll-up.’ Howard heard the slip of paper rustle out of the packet, the quick manufacture of a cigarette, and the scrape of a match. Paul handed the where with all to Howard. ‘Make one, if you like.’

‘Not so easy for me.’ He spoiled the attempt, and put the barely crumpled paper into his shirt pocket, not wanting to untidy the boat, but made a shapely enough fag the second time round. ‘Thanks.’

‘It’s easy enough at the moment,’ Cinnakle said. ‘We have to take advantage of it. Be daft if we didn’t. But I prefer things when all hell breaks loose. That way, I know I’m living.’

Howard felt the pigeon shooting him up, waft of wings across his forehead. ‘I’m only living at the radio. Always think I might hear something good.’

‘What would be good, though?’

‘I wouldn’t know till I heard it.’

‘Something interesting, or surprising, you mean?’

‘If you like. I’m sure you can guess the sort of stuff. The more I glue myself to the wireless the more chance there is, that’s all I know.’

‘Better you than me. I never did know why blokes like you didn’t go off your chump with all those dots and dashes.’

‘It’s because we were bonkers to start with.’ He stood, and Jehu perched again on his shoulder as he made a slow trek to the radio space, thinking he could hear the crumpling of the rejected cigarette paper, so thin and delicate that, if need be, it would fit perfectly into the tube on Jehu’s leg, with any message he cared to write. Jehu would be a winged chariot in the sky, braving the underbelly of the worst dank cloud, navigating by the sharpest gusts but careful to stay clear of the spume tops. He would backtrack the course of the boat, bounding against the odds for Blighty and, once over the Devon or Dorset cliffs, would sink for sustenance at some friendly door, so that whoever picked up such a pliant bird to feed would find the clip and read a message written in the tiniest of letters on the cigarette paper.

He was long practised at writing. Often in previous years he would ask Laura to read what she could, and after a while the skill increased, till by strict control on his fingers and a grid of imaginary lines he wrote at least halfway intelligibly. At first it was four out of ten for the test, and stayed there for a long while, but by inner tears at his cackhandedness, the five mark was passed, then six and seven. The most Laura gave was eight, which was enough, because even with eyes nothing could be a hundred percent.

He typed half a dozen navigation warnings, none relevant, but it was something to earn his and Jehu’s bread. They concerned the North Sea coastal waters, telling of a wreck shifting position by a few feet, or a fog signal not working, or something in the oil fields to be given a wide berth, or a light gone out, vital information for ships and boats in the vicinities.

They were steering southerly, and back on deck Jehu took it easy at the rail as if waiting for a message to be attached to its leg, the antithesis of an albatross hanging around the neck, a friend, if only the unfeeling brain pan of a bird could know it. The warbling was outpaced by the radio teletype of a weather station, a sound beyond the interpretation of either, but soothing nonetheless as the well motored morris dancer of a boat clogged its way into the dusk.

TWENTY-SIX

The German Numbers Woman in her forest cabin parroted her wares, but he was too far off to hear, a thousand miles south-west, threads pulling ever tauter. In any case she was involved with her children, and the lover Howard had generously given her.

The Moscow station had also gone off the air, too far over the horizon to impinge. Vanya was so assiduous at his secret bottle of vodka he would only bother with planes on the east-west run across Siberia. Well into the zone of radio silence, Howard no longer hoped to hear Judy on the Daedalus. She had already left by plane to prepare the ground in the Azores, or she was on the boat which would set aside lethal stores which the good yacht Waistcoat was on its way to collect, material Howard knew would never reach the streets. For all its calm moments the adventure was becoming warmer by the hour, more heated than anyone else on board could know. He smoothed under the poll: ‘Eh, Jehu, my little darling?’

Richard came down from his stint on the bridge. ‘You must be crackers, talking to that bird.’

‘I’ve been barmy all my life. It’s a sad world if you can’t go through a good half of it off your trolley. Makes existence tolerable. Keeps me sane.’

‘For somebody like you, I suppose it does.’ He took a packet of rolling tobacco from his anorak pocket. ‘I’m out of cigarette papers. Do you have any on you?’

‘Wish I had. Can’t oblige, I’m afraid.’

‘What about the one you took from Paul?’

‘I don’t have it anymore. I held it up, and Jehu scoffed it. He loves rice paper.’

‘On your own head be it.’

Hard for a blind man to realise he was spied on, even to know when someone looked in his direction. Such a boat was a small world, though it still seemed big enough in the complications of getting around. Not to know that he was being watched at all times was a failure of the imagination. If he lost the rice paper Jehu would be out of a job. ‘After tomorrow I should be picking up the weather direct from the Azores.’

Richard had cigarette papers after all, must have, because Howard sniffed the smoke. ‘That could be useful. We’ll need to know. Especially about visibility and wind. It’s a small beach we’re going to.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘Waistcoat only said what I’ve told you. He keeps things close till the last minute, though I don’t see why. Cleaver knows, of course. In any case it wouldn’t mean anything to you.’

No more questions. Let them tell him, or not. Or let him overhear, or let the gen leak, as gen had a way of doing. ‘Oh, I know it’s none of my business. I won’t see the place anyway.’

Richard leaned against the table. ‘No, but I hope I do, though I won’t want to set eyes on it again after we’ve high-tailed our way north, believe you me.’

‘I’m looking forward to that.’

‘But for what reason?’

Howard knew something he didn’t know, what none of them could, and Richard seemed to think it would be worth his while, and everybody’s, and even Howard’s perhaps, if he could find out what it was. ‘Oh, I don’t have a reason. I don’t much care how long the trip goes on. If it lasts months I won’t be unhappy. I’ve forgotten everything about the past, a state more than enjoyable to me. It’s a blank. Don’t even know if I had one most of the time. I just fit myself into the spirit of the ship and feel happy. What’s good for you and the others is more than good enough for me.’

‘I’m glad you think that way.’ Richard stroked the pigeon. ‘You’ve reassured me.’ He pressed a finger around the bird’s neck, and Howard sensed he wanted to put out the feeble light of its life. So did Jehu, fluttered from his shoulder, up to the ceiling and out of the door. ‘Doesn’t like me. Only you.’

‘He’s off for a breath of the old sky.’

‘I expect he’ll be back.’

‘I hope so,’ Howard said, the bird his only friend on board.

All hands were called to the chief’s quarters. Dinner had gone by, and the sea was calm. ‘We’re making progress, so we’re earning our keep,’ Waistcoat said, which Richard considered a fair way of putting it, though only to be expected from someone who’d never earned anything honestly in his life, and who saw those mirrored walls and pastel shades as the height of glamour. More a tarted up penthouse flat near the Elephant than an honest boat made for the ocean and the job in hand, though things would look different after the stowage from the beach. ‘Except for that fucking pigeon,’ Waistcoat added, glaring at Howard.

Paul Cinnakle sipped his vodka, ice rattling back from his lips. ‘I heard it had gone.’

‘It has,’ Howard hoping it was pressing on regardless along the reciprocal.

‘We could have put it on the treadmill and got another half knot.’ Scuddilaw sat on one of the leather pouffs scattered around, too low for his legs to be easy, so he stood up as if he had hinges instead of muscles. ‘Unless Ted decided to let us have it on toast for breakfast.’

‘Slit its gizzard,’ Paul said, ‘and gravel pours out.’

‘It’s not a London pigeon.’ Waistcoat stirred his little silver swivel stick around the bowl of his purple stemmed fluted glass. ‘I know the difference. They taste fucking awful. I once ate one as a nipper. Knocked it down with a catapult, and made a fire on some wasteground. We all nearly puked. Garbage it was, tasted like the back end of a twenty-four bus.’

Howard sat on the sofa, only Richard left standing: ‘Maybe it would have been better cooked in a stove.’

Ted cackled. ‘With olive oil and garlic, and a couple of bay leaves. You’d think it was grouse then. Wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘They didn’t show us how to do that sort of thing at school,’ Waistcoat said. ‘I wasn’t very good at domestic science.’ At which remark they had a good laugh, a booze party in the offing. Unusually gallant, Waistcoat took the vodka bottle from the freezer compartment below the table and poured a good wallop into Howard’s glass. ‘Knock it back, old son. You might be able to see in the morning, eh?’

‘Unlikely,’ Richard said.

‘Don’t fucking tell me. We’ll need every eye we’ve got in a couple o’ days. Even a fucking glass eye would be better than nothing.’

Richard wondered whether AIDS, syphilis or cancer would finish Waistcoat off, and hoped for a powerful dose of all three. He wants us to believe he’s deteriorating, but we all know he’s only dangerous when he stops effing and blinding. ‘We’ll cope,’ he said.

‘You don’t need to say so. I know we will.’

Jack Cannister wobbled Jamaica rum to the top of his glass. ‘I’ll be a month in the Bahamas after we’ve done. I’ll need to wind down. I always do. Trouble is, when I’ve done winding down I’ve got no money left.’

‘They taught us fuck-all at the school I went to.’ Waistcoat followed the submarine cables through his own mind, which could put anyone in despair who thought to try and find out how his mind worked. ‘I learned to read and write, that was all.’

‘Same for the rest of us,’ Scud said. ‘Except I suppose for Richard, and Mr Cleaver, who learned trigonometry at their posh schools.’

‘I taught myself,’ Cleaver said.

Richard laughed with them. ‘I learned to tell the time, as well. It was a grammar school.’

Waistcoat stood, as a sudden thought occurred. ‘If you’re in here, Mr Cleaver, pardon me for asking, but who’s running the fucking boat?’

‘It’s on auto at the moment. Better be on my way back though.’ He finished the cucumber sandwiches, and what was in his glass, and went.

‘I’m fucking well self made,’ Waistcoat said, fingers stuck in his pockets. ‘Every bit of me.’

‘Our mums and dads must have had a hand in it somewhere,’ Scuddilaw said with a giggle.

‘Yeh, but none of you’s as fucking self made as I am. Some are more self made than others, let me tell you.’ He turned to Howard. ‘How about you, blind man?’

Howard held his glass towards their voices. ‘Pure grammar school, Higher School Certificate, then into the Air Force. Trained as wireless operator, aircrew, Bomber Command. I’ve been blind over thirty-five years. Caught a packet over Germany.’ The floor to himself, he stopped all talk. ‘It wasn’t long after the bombs had gone and we turned for home. I’d done a dozen raids, and we knew the war would soon be over, and thought maybe we’d get out of it all right, though we didn’t talk about it, just hoped against hope. The chances were a lot higher than what they’d been a year or two before. We had two selves, the other one gung-ho and wanting to bomb Nazi Germany back into the stone age.’

Waistcoat broke in. ‘How much did it weigh?’

Howard seemed to stare him out. ‘What weigh?’

‘The bomb load, fuckhead.’

‘Oh, anything up to six tons. More, in some cases.’

‘You dropped six tons at one go!’ Waistcoat sat down to enjoy the picture, envious of a man in their midst who had been involved in such mass destruction, and wondering if you could ever trust a chap who’d been part of something he’d have given both arms to have been party to.

‘Mind you,’ Howard went on, ‘if you think about it, it was wrong to carpet-bomb women and children, but that’s how it had been at the time, no feeling for what you were doing, or you couldn’t have done it. Or maybe some of them could. Not that I feel guilty. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. But the best part of a raid was always when the bombs were away and you felt the kite lift, so much lighter to get you home.’ He was shooting a line, had drunk too much, stuck in his maudlin planisphere and seeing comets passing each other for the second (and in some cases the third) time.

Waistcoat fell silent, as did they all, awed by Howard’s experience of violence, that they could never hope to match. And he had got away with it — almost.

Waistcoat was the first to break silence. ‘Hey, how old are you?’

‘A big flash,’ Howard said, ‘when a cannon shell from a JU 88 ripped through the fuselage. Sight gone forever.’

‘So that’s how it was?’ Scud said.

‘I’m pushing sixty.’ Howard dropped a year or two so as not to alarm them about his ability to manage on the boat.

Waistcoat poured another drink. Maybe he too had lost count, if ever he had kept one. ‘I’d never have thought it. You look about forty-five.’ He came close again. ‘So how was it you rumbled this trip to the Azores, as Richard conned me into thinking you had? And then getting us to bring you along?’

‘He’s a radio wizard,’ Richard said. ‘He found out.’

‘I want it from the horse’s mouth.’

‘There isn’t much to tell,’ was all Howard could say. ‘Anyway, it’s in the past, and almost forgotten.’ The boat rocked, half across Biscay by now. They wanted more from him. ‘I heard two yachts in the Mediterranean talking to each other. They gave nothing concrete away but I put two and two together. Guesswork and intuition, you might call it. I can’t prove what I heard, or say exactly how I did it, because I burned the log books before I left, in case somebody found them. You don’t keep things like that.’

‘I’d give a fucking million to know who it was who gave us away.’

He knew but for some reason was trying to trap him. ‘No names were mentioned. I told no one else. Not even my wife. Only Richard.’

‘And you thought you would come with us, just like that?’

‘I won’t say I didn’t want to.’ He laughed. ‘I blackmailed Richard, didn’t I? But if he had refused I couldn’t have done anything. Nor did I want to. What would be in it for me? Who would believe a blind man?’

‘We could take no chances,’ Richard said. ‘I told you, and you said bring him. So we did. He’s in it up to the neck like the rest of us, obliged to keep mum forever to save his skin.’

‘That’s right,’ Howard said quietly.

Waistcoat put his glass down, came across to Howard, and pulled him upright. He looked into his sightless eyes. ‘Listen, Howard, we’re the “Matter-of-Life-and-Death” brigade, and the slightest sign of fucking around on your part, and you go over the side. No messing. Ask ’em. They’ll all tell you. You won’t be the first, and you wouldn’t be the last. Nobody stamped your passport, and they won’t be waiting for you to come back. And if they start to look for you they won’t know where to begin.’

Howard wasn’t unhappy at this moment to be blind. ‘You don’t have anything to fear from me,’ he said with guiltless calm.

‘So let’s enjoy ourselves,’ Waistcoat said, topping up Howard’s glass. ‘We’ll drink to a good haul and a safe return to our loved ones. Come on, let’s see you swill it down.’

They needed no second telling.

Howard fell into his bunk, though not before whatever was in his stomach had gone over the wake, which he hoped would make sleep more willing. For a while nothing could, the glare of incomprehensible lamp signals from shore to shore, from one corner of his brainbox to another. Hard to tell whether he was in sleep or not. From just under the surface a snorkel-periscope cut through to air above, like a wartime Atlantic submarine keeping an ear cocked for a communication from base. There was no base, and an unstable place it was, as the boat indulged in more motion than he thought the sea warranted. Not to have drunk much would have made them think he wasn’t one of them, that he had something to hide, was biding his time.

An hour may have passed, no way to tell whether he was going into sleep or being wrenched from a few minutes of it, but the boat turned ninety degrees to starboard, done by a skilled hand at the wheel, calm, inexorable, well planned, onto a westerly heading. Either planned, or the sharp eyes of the helmsman had noted something on the radar screen, or he had seen a glow in the spray ahead, a light, some obstacle to avoid at all cost, though he had time for a deliberate manoeuvre to avoid it. Impossible to decide, unless he put on his trousers and went up to find out.

They were still drinking, voices sometimes angry, occasionally merely rabid. Then came laughter, maybe complicity at past activities, certain remarks rising to hysteria. The change of course stopped his sleep, and because no other occurred it was obvious that the boat had altered direction by prearrangement. He wondered about the reason, but would have to wait to find out, uncertainty drawing him at last into unconsciousness.

Ted Killisick in the galley stirred a large cast-iron pan of bacon and scrambled eggs. ‘You’re an early bird.’

‘I slept well,’ Howard said, ‘after we changed course.’

He filled a plate, put knife and fork into his hands. ‘You noticed it?’

‘Couldn’t not do. Heading for Florida, are we?’

Which brought a laugh. ‘No, it’s a scheme of Richard’s. We were set for Spain, to throw anybody off our back who might be interested. In an hour we get in line for the Azores again. We’ll be going south-west. Cunning, eh?’

He ate from the plate on his knees. ‘No business of mine. I’m just here for the trip.’

‘We all are, in a manner of speaking.’ He adjusted the upper set of his teeth. ‘Best to think so, anyway.’

Scud picked a piece of overcooked bacon from the pan. ‘The others were up till four last night, so they won’t be wanting their scoff yet, which is all the more for them as does.’

At eight o’clock Richard took the wheel from Cleaver, and altered course to two-three-five, dead set for the eastern coast of São Miguel island. The wind shifted, warm from the south-west, a clear sky, promising for sunsights. The sea was still lumpy, but the boat cut through at a dutiful twelve knots.

He saw Howard at the stern, feeding Jehu, who had come back out of nowhere (a streak of crap down the windscreen on its flightpath) leftovers from the galley under its discriminating beak. With less than three days to the longest night all was going well. Complicated manoeuvres of navigation would be called for when they got close, and the slightest whiff of change from any unexpected quarter could make an abortion of the trip, though he had no misgivings. Success lay on his and George Cleaver’s shoulders. They had sweated blood over the charts, fuel and range, tides and winds, and presented the package to Waistcoat who was leery at putting himself in the hands of mere chance, and who could fault that?

Richard had said that to make sure of success they should enrol George Cleaver, a navigator who knew his worth, and was worth all he knew. When the amount for hiring was named Waistcoat did a going out of his mind performance. Richard said that Cleaver in the smuggling trade was as priceless an expert as a safe cracker in the burgling game, and though never guaranteeing success knew they might have difficulties without his expertise. A wizard with the sextant, his dead reckoning was second to none.

‘We either go without him,’ he went on, ‘with the prospect of a balls-up, or we take him and have more than an even chance. With millions involved, what’s the point arguing about a few extra thousand? If we hit that beach on the nose at just past midnight of day six without him we’ll be lucky, but with him it’ll be no problem. If we don’t get clear days and nights as we get further south we’ll still ding along because he’ll give us latitudes and longitudes to the split second. I’m not even sure we can get him. He may be tied up. But I’ll call as soon as I can and, if he’s free, put him on standby. He’ll ask for half the money to be put into his account by banker’s order, and the other part when we get back. He’ll have it no other way. Any day now we’ll be getting satellite navigation, but until that time Cleaver is our man. Luckily he wants to make all the cash he can rake in, because when we do fit ourselves up with satellite like everybody else he’ll be well and truly superannuated, and his easy days will be over.’

‘Yeh, I’ll see to it. Paying a navigator that much’ll ruin me, though.’

Richard smiled. ‘There’s one more thing. George Cleaver’s mad about cucumber sandwiches. He has to have a constant supply. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he likes to think he’s still master of his own big ship. I’ll tell Killisick to keep it in mind when he’s getting the stores.’

Howard talked to Jehu, but in silence. Waves had ears. Beggars can’t be choosers, as he had often heard. He registered the second alteration of course, at eight o’clock precisely, over thirty degrees to port, an increase of sound as the creaming foam objected to an arrogant push into another direction.

‘Everything going well,’ he said, on the third day out, ‘but if they knew what we knew — eh, Jehu, my pretty little pigeon — they would be running about like ants in a jam jar.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

By the fifth day Howard felt he had been born and bred on the water, at one with the wind and the sky that had turned blue. Everyone was seemingly content with work and prospects, not a snappish word anywhere. From his bunk after midnight he noticed the increase in speed. ‘I would guess we’re doing fifteen knots instead of twelve.’

Richard came outside with his breakfast plate. ‘I’m surprised you could tell.’

The extra noise and lurching power of the engines, as if one of the shafts led through him, had been unmistakable. ‘Things seemed different.’

‘By midnight we’ll be there, or pretty close, all being well. I haven’t seen that pigeon lately. What did you call it?’

‘Jehu. He took off again. Maybe he smelt land and, as you say, had a plump little Portuguese sweetheart in São Miguel’ — unless, as he hoped, it was flying on a Darwinian beam back to a plumper girlfriend in England, with the neat piece of cigarette paper folded into its container, on which he had written their course and ETA at the island. Trouble was, even if it was picked up, their boat would get there sooner, and be away before anyone could intercept them.

He had done his best, a long shot, stupid to think a pigeon could fly all that way. If, too exhausted for the journey, it landed in France, there might be a chance of someone finding the clue and following it up. A telephone call to the Azores needed only the time it took to dial.

Weather prospects came in morse from CUG, Punta Delgada, louder by the hour, pleasing Richard and everyone because conditions were good: light winds, calm seas, almost clear sky. ‘In one way, better than we might want.’

Howard lifted his hand, and typed out that Tempo promised a slight deterioration around midnight, maybe somewhat worse for tomorrow.

‘Stick at it.’ Richard took the paper. ‘See what else you can get.’

‘I’ll try VHF soon.’

Radio silence meant not even breathing near the microphone, hands away from switches. But he listened, lulled by static, took a traffic list from Chatham, Massachusetts, then swung onto Judy’s old frequency but heard nothing, as expected, since she would be already waiting for their boat to arrive at the Azores. After loading, supposing it took place (despite his efforts, however futile, to put the authorities on the alert) she would get back onto the Daedalus, and out of the danger zone by following a track to the Straits of Gibraltar.

If the powers that be — bigger than any of them — were clever, they would allow Waistcoat’s boat to be loaded, and apprehend it with the incriminating material on board before they were beyond the exclusion zone. By then the Daedalus would be safely away, and Judy out of peril. He didn’t want her to be in trouble with customs or police, only to hear the sound of her voice while the stuff was being put on board. Perhaps in the future, at a less risky meeting, they would reminisce about past adventures.

She was the reason for him being on a trip that would have been unimaginable a few months ago. But the second purpose which had entered the equation filled him with anxiety, had come in without him being aware, a mistake demanded as payment for the luxury of becoming himself again. One or the other purpose should have been kept in mind, and rigidly followed, because passion and the laws of morality could never join to advantage. Both were now in train, and he had a glimmer as to how it would end, though afraid and full of doubt.

In his weakness — as he saw it — he thought of Laura, and the picture was wistful, even tragic, a face left behind in another world. Her features were indistinct, hard to recollect, as if under the sea and corroded by salt spray. Even when together the memory of her face had been an effort of the imagination. And now the face was wiped clean and replaced by the supposed one of Judy’s, longish and competent features belonging to someone who was easily hurt and vulnerable, making her liable to sudden actions which overwhelmed her before she could try to control them, or take account of the consequences.

Woe betide anyone who gets close to her, he thought, yet whoever did wouldn’t find life dull, and once out of her orbit would have plenty to remember her by. He was sure that her relationship with Carla couldn’t go on forever. He had picked up nuances in both voices indicating that the affair was coming to an end, the passion diminishing beyond what such natures were able to accept. Their final parting made him both sad and happy, unsure which was uppermost, only aware that they, like he, were controlled by a force impossible to resist.

The boat chopped into the swell, ever forward with lift and crash, as if to eat all water in its way. A strong northeasterly encouraged them along, no other vessel seen for days, Waistcoat saying it was a good thing too.

His stomach none too settled, he went on deck for air, feeling every good reason for tumbling overboard. In like a bomb, and down he would go, pressure building up to burst his lungs, suddenly warmer, and then dead.

A hand gripped his elbow. ‘Put this on,’ Richard shouted.

‘What for?’

‘You’d know why, if you went over.’ The life jacket was pulled tight. ‘We won’t want to lose you, though even with this it would be touch and go if you went in.’

‘I never think about it.’

‘You wouldn’t have climbed aboard one of your trundling old aeroplanes without a parachute, would you?’

He looked, as he supposed, along the wake, his favourite stance. ‘What clouds do we have?’

‘Fair-weather cumulus, or some such stuff.’

He saw the photographic plates clearly, from the folders given out at training sessions: archipelagoes of vari-sized fluffballs, others coming up behind like slow-moving cavalry across the sky, elongated and flat, plenty of blue for them to float in. What else might be coming up was hard to say, which may have been why Richard added: ‘You never know what to make of clouds like that.’

Two sheerwaters, battered by heady showers, took refuge on the upper deck. Richard was sorry Howard couldn’t see them. ‘We pick up passengers all the time,’ he told him. ‘Tens of thousands of square miles of water around us, and these pathetic bits of living flotsam cling to anything that promises a bit of rest. They feel the closeness of our warm blood, I suppose, as if they can pick up directional beams from it, so subtle only they can detect it. We probably send a Loran grid of rays in all directions, which they know how to use, and home in on us. They find it a comfort before they fly off and die, their last touch of life. By getting close I expect they renew the ability to live, pick up a few scraps from the wake as well. That sort of rest can bring enough survivor’s strength to reach land, or another boat halfway to it. Sea birds are a perfect balance of fragility and endurance. We’ve picked up some who feed and strut about as if they’ve taken command and will live forever, but a day or two later we find them dead under the davits. That body we thought so nice and plump and full of life turned out to be hollow, its skin like a drum, so that when you press it there’s nothing in between. Then again, you get a scraggly pathetic specimen half dead on the boards, looking at you with its button eyes as if to say goodbye, and a few days later it’ll go winging away towards land hundreds of miles off. I think they use such an intricate navigation system that they can always get to the exact point aimed for. I don’t suppose that pigeon called Jehu had any difficulty finding a place it wanted to go to.’

Howard appreciated the lecture. ‘You think not?’

‘The chief wondered if you hadn’t sent it off on its travels for some reason or other. He mentioned it to me on the bridge last night when he was wandering around in his dressing gown because he couldn’t sleep. At such times he’s crippled with a persecution mania. I said I thought it a funny idea. I told him you kept the pigeon as a mascot, for good luck. But he’s got a bee in his bonnet that you wanted to use it for communication. Well, I thought, at such a barmy idea, how are the mighty — and not so mighty — fallen. I laughed, and said if so you’d only wanted to send a loving message to your wife, though you’d be more sure of one reaching her if you put it in a hooch bottle and dropped it overboard. It might even get there in ten years. And you could get more writing in it than on those micro-dot pieces you’d have to use in a pigeon leg capsule. In any case, I said to him, how can a blind man write, especially on a bit of sparrow’s arse paper?’

‘It just flew away.’ Howard aimed a look at him. ‘I was sorry to lose it.’

‘I expect it only went fly-around. It’ll be back.’

‘I’d like to think so. What does the sheerwater look like?’

‘It’s a Manx, I suppose. Slate-black, with a mottled neck, bit white underneath. There are two, man and wife maybe. I always like a bit of bird life on board. The place doesn’t seem so desolate.’ He lit a cigarette, cupping the match flame from the wind, and passed it across before making one for himself. ‘It’s no good hoping they’ll take your thoughts or longings away. They’ve got business of their own, and can’t consider us at all. The best thing for you is to get below, out of the rain. Stick to the radio. Try to hear something that’ll stop us from sliding into the big hole we might be digging for ourselves.’

Richard had come as close as possible to warning him, without knowing for certain there was anything to warn him about. What better friend could a man have? Friendship was a priceless bond, yet everyone on board was already betrayed, though perhaps more in thought than reality. So much hung in the balance, but who in the scales of villainy would weigh more precious than anyone else? ‘You can be sure I’ll do my best.’

‘You’re one of us,’ Richard said, as if to cauterise Howard’s wound, ‘and don’t forget it.’

‘I won’t.’

‘There’ll be a bit of ready cash when this is over, maybe even more than you expect. Waistcoat can be generous when the pressure’s off, and he coughs up the gratitude.’

‘I’m not in it for the money.’

‘That could be why he doesn’t trust you. Try seeing it as if you are for a change. Or at least let him think so.’

‘I thought it best not to appear mercenary, being as I’m such a useless lump on the boat.’

‘Never a good policy.’ Richard let his cigarette go into the scuppers. ‘Everybody has a value, and that includes you, so when the sea chops up be sure to wear your Mae West. The low’s still moving north, and it’ll take a while yet — though we should be clear in a few hours, according to the gen you got from Punto Delgado. Nice bit of interception, that. Waistcoat was pleased to know we’d have a calm sea when we got there.’

So he was one of the crew, no matter how he had set up the machinery of getting caught. He was in it for the money, and there was no reason for them not to succeed if his warning hadn’t taken. In gloomier moments, he felt there was little chance that it had, and if all went well, and he landed back in England with more money in his pocket than had ever been there before (how would he explain it to Laura?) there would be little he could do to compromise them.

Crossing the Azores Current meant they were only a hundred and fifty miles from the island, and no regular watches were set or, rather, everyone was on watch. Waistcoat put himself beside Richard at the wheel, Cleaver stood upright like a soldier, and fiddled with his sextant, while Howard kept out of their way at the radio, and Ted Killisick in the galley provided nonstop food and drink. Paul Cinnakle tended his precious engines, and Cannister and Scuddilaw were posted on deck as lookouts fore and aft. The booze had been locked up by Waistcoat, and he would keep the key in his pocket for forty-eight hours.

The sheerwaters did a graceful flyover — part of their ceremonial before departure — and headed south as if the boat was too slow, outlined against the clearing sky. Far to starboard, an escarpment of cloud, like the long trunk of a giant tree, stretched as far north and south as could be seen, stationary, waiting for a wind to rush it towards them.

Richard didn’t like the look of it, but it was fruitless to worry about what might never happen. If it did happen no amount of worry would have stopped it, and if it didn’t happen you had worried for nothing. Such phenomenon often melted before it got to you, so what the hell? If everything goes all right tonight, he thought, I’ll be too happy to worry from then on.

Howard could get nothing intelligible from the waveband he needed to hear from, as if the world roundabout was drawing them into radio emptiness, or to extinction in the earth’s biggest hole. Higher up the frequency there were weather reports, and a few ships working messages from the coast, tankers mostly.

On one frequency he heard a forlorn low-note squawking, like the sound Jehu made after an excursion around the boat before flopping hungry and exhausted back on deck. It was as if he was tuned into its body moving north under the menacing cloud base, picking up the faltering rhythm of its wing beats straining to keep up the rate and stay airborne, but losing heart at the distance still to go. Its throat was making the noise, and by some technological quirk the bird had assumed the properties of a radio, so that he could hear its discouragement and the valiant beating of its wings not many feet above the clawing wave tops, hoping for a boat or plank of wood to rest and maybe feed on.

He flipped the needle away from a breaking heart, feeling more blighted by his state of blindness than at any other time. Why now was impossible to say, but the depression had to be climbed out of, so he turned back to the radio, into his all-enveloping home, no different now — except for the motion of the boat — to when he had been in his room on land. Locked in the darkwarm cloth of the ionosphere and all its noises, he was himself wherever he might be. No need to seek a reason for existence, even though too far off to hear Moscow or the German Numbers Woman since, more than anything, he had become part of the Flying Dutchman, that ever-travelling phantom hulk of the marine void forging along to who knew where.

Ted put a mug of coffee and a saucer of biscuits in front of him, clicks and rattles of comfort, almost the way Laura had so often done when he had been numbing his mind with too many wasted hours at the radio. Care for each other stopped people sliding uselessly into a state of living death. Talk and action bound them, and a blind man must find a role for himself, so he called thanks as Ted walked out, marvelling that he was again part of a crew whose survival depended on their concern for each other, but this time the mission was to pick up something deadly. The effect would be little better than unloading bombs onto cities, a high explosive powder to destroy the minds instead of bodies.

His hand was close to the VHF transmitter switch. The range was short, not much further than the horizon, so if he sent a mayday call who would pick it up? If he began to talk into the microphone and no other boat was apparent, he would be killed for nothing. He couldn’t do it. In any case, it was foolhardy, too stupid even to contemplate. To die in such a cause needed courage, like going on and on regardless into a wall of flak. He couldn’t imagine it anymore, too old except for the imagination — a pathetic substitute for action. He would never do it, had no wish to, was afraid to, was at one with them in their game, hoping all would go well, a wish he hadn’t imagined on setting out. The boat had a set purpose and he had become part of it. Blindness wouldn’t save the state of his soul if they were caught. After taking in the truth, up to now impossible to acknowledge, he felt exhilarated at knowing that the height of a blind man’s existence was in being accepted as a villain by the rest of the crew. He drew his fingers back from the transmitter switch.

He stared into the froth of the wake as if to let the air cleanse him, but he had calmly accepted whatever was coming, no greater bliss to be got from the world. Whatever he had been on starting out, he was now in their thrall, and would not be the same person when he got back to Laura, though the picture of such a reunion wouldn’t come, no matter how hard he tried to see it.

Cannister was by his side when he went to the bows. ‘I’m keeping a lookout, see?’ Jack explained. ‘With a pair of old rusty binoculars. They’ve got a purple haze at the top of the right-hand circle, but they’re good enough. They work. I bought ’em for a tenner at a junkshop in Pompey. They make me look like a real bloody captain on the bridge, like in “The Cruel Sea”, or something. But you seem full of thoughts, Howard. Are you getting tired? You never say much. You’re waiting for that pigeon to come back, I suppose.’

Spray curled up and caught his face, cool out of the afternoon humidity. The splash across his eyes, as if to make him see again, sent vision after vision, each crowding the other out, showing the sky and the pale receding beam of the wake he would have preferred to be looking at. None of them opened onto the detail of everyday life on the boat which he wanted to see, as if he’d been blinded for his sins, but even more sins would not let him see again. God was oblivious to your sighs, and whoever did not hear could not exist. You were left to argue with yourself. He laughed, in his new guise of buccaneer, hoping it sounded hearty enough. ‘I was wondering how far we are from Blighty.’

‘No good in that. Never look back,’ Cannister said. ‘When I change watch and go to the stern I’ll have to look back, until we hit the coast. Orders is orders. See that blob to port? It’s a bloody great tanker, right on the horizon.’ He laughed. ‘No, of course you don’t see it. The funny thing is you look as if you see everything. Even the chief thought you might be putting it on, though I don’t think he does anymore. Best not to think about Blighty till it’s under your feet, then you don’t need to.’

‘I wish I was putting it on,’ Howard said.

‘I’ll bet you do. But you should go on top sometime for a change, and make it seem as if you’re taking a shufti from there. You might feel a bit better. You’d get a different bump under your feet at least, with everything all around you. It’s a long day, though. The last day always is. I’d rather be back in Hartlepool with the family, but on the other hand I’ve got to be here to earn enough money to keep ’em. They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. Four kids eat a lot o’ popcorn. How many you got, Howard?’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘Don’t you want some?’

‘I never thought so.’

‘My buggers just came, so I had to shake their hot little hands when they did. I wouldn’t be without ’em now.’

Howard was curious. ‘Do the others have big families?’

‘I wouldn’t say big ’uns, but they all have kids. Except Richard, he don’t mention any, but he don’t mention much anyway. People who go on jobs like this are often good family men. Not much else you can do these days. I’ve got a nice bungalow to keep up, and a wife who likes to be taken out now and again. I like to go out a bit as well when I’m on shore. I did seven years in the Navy, but there wasn’t much money in that, so I fell into this trade. Waistcoat likes to employ men with a bit of service behind them. Makes him feel good. He knows he can trust ’em in a tight corner. He’s even glad to have a bloke like you from the RAF, blind or not, though you’ll never get him to say so. I think in some ways he regards you as lucky, a bit of a mascot, if you don’t mind me saying so. Up in Geordie land where I come from it used to be thought lucky, for instance, if a black man knocked on your door on New Year’s Eve. Or was it Christmas Eve? When we was kids we used to black our faces with a bit of Cherry Blossom and go knock-a-door. If we didn’t get a penny or so we got a bun or a piece of lardy cake. They was happy days, Howard!’

‘Has Waistcoat been in any of the services?’

Cannister’s laugh almost drowned the sound of the engines. ‘Him? I wouldn’t like to say what kind of service he’s been in. Whatever it was, though, it’s made him as hard as nails. Mind you, as long as you do as you’re told, and do your work, he’s all right. He’ll stand by you, as much as he can stand by anybody. I sometimes think he’s a bit off his trolley when he gets to yammering his filthy language, but that’s only a cover. He’s a peculiar bloke, that’s all. I know he nearly cut your windpipe when you came on board and he found out you was blind, but he’s the sort now who might even ask you to come on the next trip because he’s got some notion he’ll need you — or for some reason he’s even taken a shine to you. He’s a funny bugger, I tell you. That tanker’s gone now, right off the radar screen. Let’s go and see if old Ted’s got his urn on the boil. I’ve never known him not to. Chuck the old sod overboard if he didn’t. Just follow me, then you’ll be all right from the soupy sea. Seems you’ve seen the last of that pigeon. I expect a shite hawk’s had it for its elevenses.’

Balancing his tea mug and a large bun Howard made his way to where Scuddilaw was looking ahead. ‘How much longer before we see land?’

Scud took him by the shoulders, turned him for orientation. ‘Not long. It’ll be over there, but you won’t see it, I’m sorry to say. A sight for sore eyes for the rest of us, when we do. Not that I’ll see it properly, either, because it’ll be dusk already, if not dark. We’ll see the light winking at the end of the island, and it’ll be welcome after coming all this way. We shan’t get too close, because we don’t want anybody to see us. It’ll be black-out, like in the war, even cigarettes doused, and because I smoke sixty a day that’s a rule that gives me the willies.’

Judy was somewhere in the distance, waiting for them to draw near. What would she be doing? She would be peeling an orange, putting it segment by segment into her mouth while gazing north to penetrate the darkness, hoping to see a vision of Carla. She would only find a blind man who had fallen in love with her voice. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting this girl Judy, who works on the other boat.’

‘You know her, do you?’

‘No, I’ve only heard her mentioned. What’s she like?’

He laughed. ‘She’s her own woman, Judy is. Mad as they come. You can never tell what she’ll do next. One minute moody, and the next all lit up. A good sort, though. She likes a bit of fun. The trouble is, you never know where you are with her. She likes blokes one day and women the next. You can’t take liberties, and that’s a fact. She knows how to put you down if you try anything.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘Look like?’

‘I’m asking because I shan’t be able to see her.’

‘Oh well, you won’t miss all that much. She’s tall and gawky. A bit of a tomboy, like a lot of women who’ve worked a few years on boats. She’s got a nice enough face, though. Once you’ve seen it you’ll never forget it. Grey eyes and a beaky nose.’

‘Is she blonde or brunette?’

‘A shade mousey, though she’s been known to dye it a few times. Normally more blonde than brown. You seem quite taken by her.’

‘Just curious. I wanted to put a picture to what I’d heard.’

An evening breeze cooled against his cheek, a slightly heavier chop on the sea. He gripped the rail. ‘How long before we see the light?’

‘Here comes Sextant Blake, our shit-hot navigator. I’ll ask him.’ Howard heard the definite tread of someone approaching, and a respectful tone in Scud’s voice: ‘How long before we see the light, Mr Cleaver?’

‘In this visibility, I should think’ — was he looking at his chronograph watch? — ‘at twenty-five minutes past nine. Landfall’s always a great moment, Mr Scuddilaw, as regards seeing the light. That’s when you begin to feel God might be looking after you again. He presents you with the evidence of his wonders, after you’ve been lost at sea, which is another of his wonders in that all knowledge comes from Him.’

He sounded like a preacher in a crematorium chapel, though not, Howard thought, at the grave side, for his self assurance seemed rather friable. All the same, since he was talking, you had to listen to someone who had no trouble cranking himself up for a mini sermon.

‘He gave man the wit to devise a sextant and a chronometer — bless Mr Harrison for the latter — and make charts — hats off to Captain Cook — and He made the stars on which we can take angles and get our position to one nautical mile or even much less — with sufficient care. So it’s down on our knees to Him now and again.’

‘No thanks,’ Howard heard Scud say. ‘I’m on watch.’

‘Well, never mind, He’ll look after us anyway, but we have to do our bit as well. After all, what more do we want when the sun and the stars are all laid on? I must say, though, I’d give a lot right now for a nice fresh cucumber!’

Howard heard him walking away, the deliberate tread of highly polished boots, he imagined. ‘I have to get back to my charts,’ Cleaver called. ‘It’s been good talking to you both.’

‘Sanctimonious streak of piss,’ Scud said. ‘I’d like to slit his fucking windpipe.’

‘He knows his business.’

‘I suppose so, but you know why? He was master of his own ship once, a real tartar, because I once met somebody as served under him. He worked the River Plate trip, ferrying beef from Buenos Aires to Blighty.’

‘Sounds like a good job.’

‘The best. Ship’s master, and he thought nobody could touch him. Well, like a lot of them toffee-nosed tight-arsed high-and-mighty scumbags he came a cropper, didn’t he? Overreached himself. He was fiddling the company something rotten. Off-loaded only half the stuff, and the rest went elsewhere. The manifest was a masterpiece of the forger’s art. He was at it for years. Got his fingers in the till all right. He had bandages on both wrists though by the time he’d finished. Spent a few years inside, but he’d been stashing it away for long enough, so he had plenty to live on when he came out. I suppose he could have retired for life, but a bloke like that’s got scorpions in his boots, and greed knows no bounds. Instead of setting himself up in a pub, which he thought was beneath him, I suppose — but which I might have a go at one day — he got took on for jobs like this. Richard swears by him, but I don’t like him, so I don’t trust him. There’s just something in the way his grey eyes look at you and don’t care whether they see anything or not. It makes you wonder what he’s found out about you that even you don’t know about. Not that I believe there’s much to see when he looks at me, buggered if I do. He’s the one I’d say was blind, not you, Howard, though Waistcoat would never agree. All George Cleaver sees is the stars and the sun through that priceless sextant of his, and then he jabbers to the likes of us about God, as if he knew him personally. God! God would turn in his grave if he saw him in church. I don’t know what he thinks we carry on these trips, though it ain’t jelly babies, and that’s a fact. I know what I’d do to him if I had a nice fresh cucumber!’ He spat side on to the wind. ‘Which reminds me, I’m getting a bit peckish in the old locker box. I wonder what Ted’s got cooking in the galley? Bloody chilly, as well.’

‘Red sky at night.’ Richard put a plate down for Howard. ‘So it ought to be good for us.’

‘What have we got?’ He smelled meat, and rich gravy, not caring that he had put weight on these last few days from sitting too much and eating whatever Ted dished out.

‘Stew.’

Waistcoat was passing through. ‘And it’s too good for all of you.’

‘He sounds happy,’ Cannister said. ‘No turdburgers on this outfit. Must be the red sky. We’ll be seeing the happy coastline soon. Better than a bit o’ magic lantern, any road up. I shan’t be sorry to get away from it, either.’

‘Some work to do before that,’ Richard said.

‘I don’t mind. Takes my mind off things.’

Ted laid out the tray, to be taken to Waistcoat’s saloon: shrimp cocktail to start, chilled white wine, with immaculate linen and silver cutlery. He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better hump the first course in. The chief don’t like to be kept waiting.’

‘And I’ll get back to my perch,’ Scud said. ‘We don’t want to argue with any old tanker coming up ahead.’

‘Bang would go my pretty engines.’ Paul Cinnakle spread a white napkin over the knees of his pale Rohan trousers, consulted his Rolex. ‘Waiting is always the worst. Even with full steam ahead we never seem to get there.’

The boat made almost a full turn to starboard. Howard felt it, vibrations to the feet, a positive increase of tension all round.

‘That means we can see the light.’ Richard hurried to the bridge. ‘Spot on, Mr Cleaver.’

His eyes seemed brighter in the dim light. ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? But we can’t rest on our laurels. Not yet, anyway. I’ll be doing the fixes till it’s time to turn south. Take over, will you? Keep on at two-seventy, neat as you can.’

‘Neat it will be.’ He fancied he could make out the hump of the island, but went by the oscultating light.

‘How are we going?’ Howard asked.

‘We’re onto it. No lights on board, but that shouldn’t bother you. We turn south at eleven, and hit the beach at midnight, as soon as we see the signal. All being well, we’ll be away by two, and out of trouble by daylight.’

‘I’ll get back to the radio, then. Work the push buttons on VHF. See what I can pick up.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Nothing to help or hinder, so half a minute on BBC Overseas was restful — before serious listening began. The die was cast, the Rubicon boated over, everyone into the venture, out of themselves and agog for what it seemed they were born to do. A turn of ninety degrees into the welcoming sunset would bring them onto the pinhead of light saying all was well for their predatory swoop. Until then the tension of not knowing for sure put them into an ideal state for work.

Shortwave was calm and orderly. Howard caught a message to a departing ship concerning cargo and some dispute over the crew’s pay. No weather or navigation warnings of any interest came, and the distress frequency on five hundred kilocycles was quiet except for a sunspot blemish playing its little tune. Half an hour went easily by. He would be a hindrance on deck, was only of use in his corner, earphones close to his head for as long as he could resist being away from the world outside. He momentarily wished to be back in the old shore billet, imagined the cat warming his knees and Laura about to come in with a hot drink or to say supper was ready. Then he was hearing Judy, saw her walking along a palm-lined street. She waved, smiled, and waited for him to come close. By which time he wouldn’t care what had pulled him into such an adventure.

A distress call startled him, in voice on VHF, from the north-east, according to a given position. A three-man sailing yacht radioed that the skipper had fallen ill and was thought to be dying. Of what, they couldn’t be sure, but he had collapsed at the wheel and was in great pain. A search and rescue plane was looking for them. Howard sensed the alarm behind their talk. Benighted, they grieved for the sick man, lost in a dark world, wind in their sails the only sound.

He wondered if those on deck heard the plane, and what it would bode should their escape route lay that way in the morning. A further signal said the skipper had died, date and time given with sailor-like coolness. He typed both exchanges, pulled the paper free, and took it to the bridge.

Waistcoat, standing behind Richard and to the left of Cleaver, read the messages by the light of a pocket torch. He repeated it to the others. ‘Anybody hear a plane?’

‘It’d be too far west,’ Cleaver said.

‘Just our luck, to have a fucking kite around.’

‘They won’t see us,’ Richard told him.

‘What makes you think so?’ Waistcoat’s tone was venomous, but Howard detected fear.

‘Because they’re not looking for us.’

‘Let’s hope not. That’s all we need. The whole Portuguese air force shooting us up. Why did that fucking skipper have to pop his clogs tonight?’

‘Are they British?’ Cleaver demanded.

Howard told him they were.

‘The other blokes on board will have the body in port by morning, or near enough. They’ll lose no time, then the search will be off. It probably is already. The plane will identify and get back. It won’t come out again. God looks after his own.’

‘He’d better,’ Waistcoat grumbled.

Howard turned away. ‘I’ll see what else I can find.’

A call from plane to yacht acknowledged their signal. The yacht said they needed no assistance, and would reach Punta Delgado next day with the body.

‘Thank God for that,’ Waistcoat said. ‘You’ll get a medal for this, you blind old bastard.’

Back at his listening post he heard nothing more that was relevant, silence mostly. He drifted towards sleep, which he had been short of since embarking. A dream came, of walking the lanes in spring around the Malverns, Laura’s commentary sounding through: ‘A splash of sun on the ivy brings out the sheen and shape of every leaf, Howard. There’s a patch of primroses, a lovely fresh mustard yellow, about a score of them a bluish one in the middle that the others are cherishing. It’s really beautiful. Ah, now there’s a cheeky celandine! We’re coming to a dead elm, dead twigs dried by a week of dry wind. They rattle like bones, dry bones, dead bones. It’s all dead.’

‘I can hear them,’ he thought he had said on waking up.

The boat was turning south, and it was quiet on deck, eleven o’clock, lightning flashes towards the north-west, wind shifting, an almost silent chop. Richard was called to the stateroom, leaving Cleaver at the wheel.

Waistcoat was going at a large whisky, though at such a time it would have no more effect than water. Probably cold tea. Better if it was. He stared at the chart. ‘This is the time I get nervous.’

‘I know how you feel.’

‘You don’t.’ He laughed. ‘But I’ve got the stomach for it, that’s all I know. Will they be there, is what I’m concerned about. You never know till it happens. I shouldn’t like to come this far for fuck-nothing. Will we get there at all, though?’

‘No doubt about that.’

Richard preferred a chief whose nervousness bubbled on the outside, found him easier to trust and more reliable than some of the tight lipped masters he had known. ‘We’re on our way. Nothing can stop us.’

‘But are we tracked? Will that fucking plane pick us up?’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that. We were lucky it didn’t happen under our noses. They’ve done their work for today. It’s good for us.’

‘You think so?’

‘They won’t be out looking tomorrow. It’s all happened today.’

‘I hope you’re right. Let’s get back on the bridge.’

The turn shook Howard from his green and pleasant lanes, and the sound of Laura’s voice from the time when his eyes were working, in the days when he saw as clear as she did. On deck in the uttermost blackout of the night he was in total darkness anyway. Nor would anyone else see much, hear only the hum of engines and a softened rush of water as the bows cut towards the mountainous island. They relied on Cleaver’s skill as a navigator, without which, or a warning light, they would hit the shore at fifteen knots and the end would be quick: a line of surf and a tangle of black razor rocks smashing the boat to pieces.

‘How much now?’ Waistcoat said.

‘Half an hour,’ Cleaver’s cool voice told him. ‘Another seven miles.’

‘But where’s the fucking light?’

‘We’ll see it, when we get down to four.’

Howard came and went unnoticed, wasn’t part of their fixed unity. Each time inside he reconnoitred the relevant wavelengths, heard a few ships asking if any messages had been left for them at the various coast stations. A gabble of voices from Porto Delgado was killed by static, but seemed nothing to concern them. Unable to sit still, he walked to where Scud was keeping watch. ‘Anything?’

‘No. But I’d like to suck on a fag. Senior Service for preference. Black as pitch, ain’t they? I can see the water, but knock all else. I’ll be glad when this part’s over. I told my wife that when I got back we’d jump in the car and go off to France. Find a nice three-star hotel to relax in. I’ll need cosseting by then.’

‘Sounds like a good way to get it.’

‘You bet it is. Eh, what’s that?’

‘Is it lightning?’

‘No, it’s steady. Now it’s gone. I must be seeing things. That’s the danger. You expect something, then you think you see it, when you don’t at all. Got to be careful, because if I tell the chief I see it, who don’t because it ain’t there for him, he’ll have a fit — and that’s not a pretty sight. He can’t stand somebody who isn’t a hundred per cent sure of what he sees.’

‘It’s not good for his confidence, I suppose.’

‘It don’t matter all that much. He can pay for them as knows how to see and how to do. He’s better than good at that.’

‘You can see the light now, though, can’t you?’

‘I’ve just caught it. How did you know? You saw it before I did. Are you blind, or aren’t you?’

Howard’s head went forward, as if to smell the light. ‘I felt it, can’t tell why. A light in my darkness, and I’ll never know where it came from.’ I shouldn’t have spoken, he thought, but hadn’t been able to resist showing off the powers of instinct. ‘It must be my sixth sense. Sometimes jumps into action. Is it still there?’

‘It is, for sure this time.’ He pushed by. ‘They’ll want to know on the bridge.’

Richard called Waistcoat from his pacing up and down the state room. ‘I knew they would do it. More than their legs are worth not to. Straight on, Mr Cleaver. You found it, anyway. Spot on. Right out of the night, and dead on the snout. Send one short flick on the lamp to say we’ve got ’em.’

Cleaver grunted himself into a ramrod straightness, shoulders back. He didn’t need praise. No praise could be good enough. It was irrelevant. Navigation was an art as well as a craft, dependent on confidence and occasional luck, the ability to move in darkness with no points of reference except those last seen in daylight, or sights on stars and planets when the curtains or night were about to come down. You couldn’t be praised for what you did, praise not being praise from those who knew nothing about the profession. ‘Just stay on course, I’ll tell you when to reduce speed.’

‘It’s flickering,’ Waistcoat said. ‘What’s it saying?’

‘The letter A,’ Richard told him.

‘Alpha,’ Cleaver added. ‘Aleph, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Exactly what it should be.’ Waistcoat rubbed his hands. ‘All’s well for the right letter. Anything else and we’d about turn for twelve hundred miles.’

‘No need,’ Cleaver said. ‘Keep straight on. On and on, Richard.’ Other lights jewelled faintly up the hills behind. ‘Ignore those. Hold the correct one in your mind’s eye. He’ll send the A now and again, so there’ll be no mistaking.’

‘I see it,’ Richard said. ‘No problem.’

‘Twenty minutes yet,’ Cleaver uttered. ‘A piece o’ cake, now we’ve got their signal.’

Killisick came in with a tray of mugs, and each took one silently. ‘Cocoa,’ Ted said, ‘with plenty o’ milk and sugar.’ He put one in Howard’s hand. ‘You’ll need it as well.’

‘Fuck off,’ Waistcoat hissed. ‘You’ll wake the dead. It’s lights out and silence till we hit the beach. And the same then.’

Ted whistled a tune as he went.

‘Cocoa,’ Waistcoat snarled, but he drank it. ‘Reminds me of that time when I …’

Richard broke in. ‘Me too.’ Neither he nor anyone else needed to say where. ‘It’s good stuff.’

‘Dead slow, no lights, and not a squeak, that’s what I said, wasn’t it, Mr Cleaver?’

‘It was, sir, and we heard you.’

‘Give ’em another glow on the flasher to say we’re still on our way. If theirs changes from an A to an N it means we can’t land.’

‘It’s still on A,’ Richard said.

‘I know, cunt. Even I can recognise it now.’

Richard, as always on such trips, had one of his handguns snug and loaded in the pocket of his naval jacket. He carried it, as a guarantee against what contingency he didn’t care to think about. He saw no situation in which he might use it, not in a normal state of mind anyway, which he had no intention of ever abandoning. But a cutting weal flashed over him at Waistcoat’s rebuke, and to take out the gun now and squeeze the trigger at the back of his head seemed a short journey towards teaching him a lesson, except there would be no improvement in his behaviour because he’d be dead. Waistcoat had made worse ripostes before, but in less tense circumstances, and wrapped them up in his usual fluent abuse at which you could only smile. Silence as always was good for dignity, and the temptation passed, though he worried that it had come, not liking to have the moods that shot over him influenced by any man.

Waistcoat swayed, as if seeing double from the whisky. ‘It’s the best sight in the world.’

‘A beautiful letter,’ Cleaver agreed. ‘The first in the alphabet.’ Howard thought if he had been a detective trying to work out what recognition light they would choose for the landing he would decide it had to be an A. People like them would naturally pick the first out of twenty-six. It was simple because easy to remember, and they wouldn’t have to think further, and be less liable to detection because it was so obvious. They might even imagine it to be safer. They could persuade themselves it was an inspired choice. Having selected it they wouldn’t then have to sit around a table sweating for hours about what letter to use.

Yet maybe a detective would never imagine they’d use an A, that they couldn’t resist trying to choose something else. In the contest of wits, however (as he looked at the identikit picture of a drug runner pasted up on the wall) he would conclude that to choose A as an identifying letter might be the most subtle move of all.

‘You can’t go wrong with it,’ Waistcoat said. ‘Number one. Always go for number one. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’

Richard, joined to him by hope if nothing else, saw no reason not to. Yet he was beyond caring, as usual at this stage. The black emptiness of the sea had entered him, a void rarely if ever to be filled, but giving energy for the job in hand. They would refuel, get the bags on board at the double and after the delivery had been seen to he would do no more such trips. No one can be lucky forever. The time had come to enjoy the money in the bank, and find ways for his life to change.

The light twinkled every few seconds, short-long, short-long, like an eyelid trying to shake off an insect that insisted on settling. He took the wheel, going directly towards it, the boat closing with each beat of the engines. Every pull of the water, and he waited for an announcement from the lookout that the shadow of land was close. ‘Won’t be long,’ Howard said. ‘I smell it, feel it for sure. Trees and dry soil.’

‘Like a canary down a coalmine for the first whiff of gas,’ Waistcoat said. ‘We’re lucky to have you on board. How far, though.’

‘Two miles?’ he suggested.

‘Nautical or statute?’ Cleaver must have smiled.

‘Oh, statute. They’re the ones I’m used to.’

‘He’s right. I see it, dead ahead.’ A trace of excitement came into Cleaver’s tone. ‘It’ll be rocks to starboard for a mile. Then starboard again, and we’re right in.’

Scud came to say he had also seen it. ‘Even the fucking blind man got it before you did,’ Waistcoat said. ‘Get back and keep a sharper butcher’s. Tell Paul it’s half speed. Hear me, Richard?’

‘Half speed.’

Black palisades of rock to the right cut them off from the west. ‘I’m keeping well clear.’ He would need all the tricks of the trade to get in, foam at the base of the rocks as if magnetised to pull the boat onto them, positive touches at the wheel to fight it.

‘I see the point up ahead where we turn,’ Cleaver said. ‘Plain as a pikestaff. We’ll make it now.’

‘Dead slow when we go to starboard,’ Waistcoat said.

‘Less than a mile to the beach. We’ll see the gravel soon. Let the anchor go half a cable from shore. Head for their light.’

Howard listened again on VHF. Maybe those who normally used the channels were as intent on radio silence as themselves, but if so, why? A clear and empty spectrum seemed strange, as if a trap was laid, unless it was a coincidence. Someone was usually gabbling, yet he’d heard no one since the skipper’s demise on the sailing yacht. Perhaps the missive in morse, posted before leaving, had reached its destination, and even Jehu had made land to provide more gen. Unable to sit, he went back on deck as the anchor rattled down. ‘I smell a lot of land now.’

‘And well you might,’ Richard said. ‘If you could see the slit we’ve got into you’d say it was a miracle we found it. Just a touch of beach, no more than a few yards, and a track winding down to it, though how they got Land-Rovers here I’ll never know.’

‘Midnight,’ said Waistcoat, ‘as near as damn it, so let’s shift our arses.’

Howard heard the oars of a dinghy coming from shore. Time to lean against the rail and guess what was going on. He wanted to smoke but didn’t care to hear Waistcoat’s screams of rebuke. The earth seemed all around, even behind them, the way they had come. A strange yet homely smell of warm but cooling vegetation mixed with that of the sea. A rattle of the gangplank, and a heavily built man was careful to put one step before the other as he came on board. ‘Have you got it?’

The English voice sounded more genuine in its class than Waistcoat’s, cool and uppercrust. ‘We have our lot, if you have yours.’

‘There’s no problem, then.’

‘None at all, old man. They’ll begin loading as soon as I say it’s time. Enough juice to get you back as well, though it was no joke hauling it to this godforsaken spot.’

‘Come to my cabin, and I’ll hand over the wherewithal.’

‘Expect no less.’ The man laughed. ‘But no false-bottomed suitcases, eh?’

‘Not where I come from,’ Waistcoat said, as if he had met someone, Howard thought, on an even higher level of villainy, but couldn’t openly curse him as he would like.

The crew stood waiting. ‘Wouldn’t mind going ashore for a drink,’ Cannister said. ‘I was in Delgado once, and met a girl. Had a wonderful time. Got robbed of every penny!’

‘You’ll have to come back as a tourist,’ Scud said. ‘Me, I don’t want to see the place. There’s plenty better in the world.’

‘I’d rather go to Greece,’ Ted put in. ‘Topless bathing on the islands, and all that. There’s one where all the German women are lesbians. I forget what it’s called. I hear they rip you to bits if you get close. France is safer. Was that a plane I heard?’

‘No,’ Cannister said, ‘it was a car up the coast. They’ve got the fuel on the beach, by the look of it.’

‘You’ve got good eyes. We’d better not drop a barrel, or we won’t get home.’

Waistcoat and his business partner had done their dealing, and when the door opened Howard heard the man say: ‘I’m sending one of my crew back with you — surplus to requirements.’

Waistcoat must have nodded. ‘Yeh, all right’ — and when the man was settled into his boat he turned to the others: ‘Come on, then, get to work. We’re loading any minute, diesel one way, dope another.’

Richard, through his night-vision monocular, the latest thing from Russia, watched the boat pulling from the shore. Three people were getting packages and barrels over the rocks. One was a tallish woman, fair hair moving in the breeze, obviously not someone local. The dinghy went ashore with Waistcoat, as if he wanted to know what he was getting. Now was the time for someone to put a knife in his back. Richard waited for the sound of a pig being killed, a squealing to wake the whole island, if not the dead. Music to his ears, he and Cleaver would get the boat home — though not without fuel. But the squeal didn’t come, and the signal was given for loading.

Howard heard each piece of cargo bump onto the deck, slide along and be snatched for stowing below, a counterpoint to barrels of diesel for refuelling the engines. Cinnakle dipped a finger in each to sniff the quality (not too much water mixed in so that they would stall within the twelve mile limit and get caught) while Waistcoat fussed and put each bundle to his nostrils, as if any clue of quality could get through the wrapping, gave a pat to one, the rump of a loving girl — or boy, Richard thought, never certain, but he made sure each of the forty packages was checked and counted, and concealed in prepared hidey-holes below.

Howard wanted to know where they were, but was pushed so hard at the doorway, almost a punch, that he fell against the rail, and only the strength of his sending arm stopped him splashing into the drink, where there would be no air-sea rescue service to pick him up. ‘Out of the fucking way,’ Waistcoat said.

Richard steadied him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘As far as I can tell.’

‘Keep your mouth shut. Nobody likes questions of that sort. Get to the stern, and melt into the night.’

But he stood close enough until everything relevant had been brought on board. The dinghy came for its final call, and Waistcoat said, at someone stepping onto the deck: ‘What the fuck do you want?’

A woman answered. ‘I’m going back to England with you.’

‘Oh no, you’re not.’

‘I should have gone a couple of weeks ago from Turkey, but I couldn’t, so I’m going now.’

‘I have all the crew I want.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’m only hitching a lift.’

Howard sat, head towards his knees, like a man with perfect sight trying not to look.

‘What’s in that sack?’

‘Pineapples. It’s my contribution to the galley. Clarence said I was to come,’ she told Waistcoat. ‘He promised I’d go back with you. He won’t be needing me for a while.’

‘And I don’t need you, either.’

‘Well, you have to take me. It’s part of the deal.’

Howard hadn’t heard anyone exchange contrary words with Waistcoat, and sensed the explosion on its way. ‘Yeh, but he didn’t say it was a fucking woman.’

The expletive must have set her off: ‘Yes, but I don’t suppose he said it was a man, either,’ she called, in a tone of fiery sarcasm. ‘But I’m as good as any fucking man, you shit-head, so I’m here.’ She dropped the bag of pineapples. ‘Let some prick take these to the galley. I’m shagged out and pissed off, and I want to get my head down.’

‘Ted!’ Waistcoat shouted, in a voice of panic and loathing.

‘Yes, sir, what is it?’

‘Get these fucking things out of the way, then we’re shoving off.’ He kicked the bag, and sent one of the choice fruits so far it only stopped rolling at Howard’s feet. He picked it up, and held the delicious scent to his face.

TWENTY-NINE

Engines bumped into life, a monotonous song that wouldn’t stop until the boat was tied up to be unloaded, a song of words that became his own, saying to himself over and over all she had said, fair words and foul, repeated and reiterated, anagrammed and oxymoronned, words that had put Waistcoat in his place and caused fruit to scatter over the deck. The Goddess had boarded the Flying Dutchman.

He lay in his bunk and hoped for oblivion, yet too inert to vanish from the world by slipping over the side. Dreams were all he had been given in life, had ever been able to handle. They’d had their uses in lulling him not too painfully through months and years, but one had stepped from his theatre of fantasy, and walked into reality, macerating his ability to play any part.

Anchors up, the boat headed from the cove at a carefully measured rate. Everyone knew what they had to do and how to do it, but he couldn’t move. Not a finger would uncurl to get him on deck. Words from the outer world shot clear into his brain, crisp islands of sound, an effort needed to unite one with another in terms of meaning.

Clear the headland, and then it’s a course of zero-one-zero, half speed till o-one-thirty. Open up and get as far north as the boat will go before daylight. Lady Moon is still in bed, wind pulling her blankets off and laying them on again. All well because, they said, by morning we’ll be beyond the aircraft reporting point at Position Bravo. Let them chew on that. He heard laughter, as if more than a few drinks were being sucked from the leather covered flasks everyone carried, and now thought it all right to use. Forgive them, Lord, they know not what will happen.

He sensed the bumping and sliding of soft packets around him, even under his feet it seemed. If customs officers marched on board they wouldn’t find a thing, such was the idea of the others, unless he explained that the only way was to take the boat apart, board by board and strut by strut. ‘I saw them bring it on. All of it.’

‘What did you see? Don’t make us laugh. How could you see anything?’

‘It’s what I know. I felt it. Heard. Forty or more parcels of hard drugs.’

And they would search the boat, the crew looking on with anger and fear. ‘We can’t find a thing,’ adding when they turned to Howard: ‘Don’t make stupid jokes. We’re busy men. We don’t like it.’ After their departure he would be allowed off the boat, though not get far before the knife struck or the bullet made a hole in him. The same for Richard.

If someone had taken in the sense of his morse letter the customs would dismantle the boat anyway, and he would stand in panic with the rest, including Judy. The game had been turned upside down, because her skipper had wanted to make up for ordering her to stay behind in Turkey. In the Azores her replacement had appeared, and she was being sent back on their morris-dancing vessel because it saved the price of an airline ticket. Or maybe it was her idea. She liked boats, was at home on them, thought the trip would be more interesting, even adventurous (it certainly would) going back this way. What was the price of an airline ticket to them?

He wanted a helicopter to come down now, didn’t want to wait, the game up at the right time. But any time was the right time. They knew exactly what was going on, playing cat and mouse, aware of where the boat was, the direction it was heading. They would strike when the boat reached international waters, the crew lulled by thoughts of a quiet trip. Or they would lurk in ambush at a landing place on the British coast and catch whoever was meeting them as well.

He’d wanted to hear her, to be close, and would now give anything to mellow down the banging of a heart unable to manage the sudden gift. He wanted to get up and tell her what was on board (as if she didn’t know) and what he had done about it, but they were on their way together, and he could reveal it anytime. She would think him a crazy old man on the Flying Dutchman who had been too long at sea. She might even mention his lunacy to Waistcoat.

The door banged open. ‘What are you doing?’ Richard called, ‘at a time like this? I know you’re tired. We all are. But pull yourself together. Get on the radio, and find out if anyone’s tracking us. Time for shut-eye later.’

People with nothing to worry about slept easily at night, so there was less traffic on the airwaves. His legs ached, knees pressed against the table. Voices on VHF were too distant even to make out the language. Ships or smaller boats were out there. He went on deck with the mobile receiver and its ferrite direction finder, the bearing undoubtedly east, though with so much metal around he couldn’t be too specific. Louder chat might indicate a vessel coming towards them, which he mentioned to Waistcoat, on the bridge with Richard and Cleaver.

‘You’ve got to expect it. As long as there isn’t a boat coming the other way as well. Still, they might get us on their radar soon, the nosey bastards.’

‘Not while we’re heading for Polaris.’ Cleaver’s tone was as close as he would allow to gloating. ‘All worry gone when that little sparkler’s in sight.’ He turned to Howard. ‘Listen some more. You’re doing well.’

The talk was a shade clearer, therefore closer, timbre and rhythm telling him it wasn’t English. After a further report he went on deck, a treacle of cooling blackness all around. Cigarette smoke came against his face.

‘I can’t sleep. There’s too much going on.’

He hadn’t heard her approach. ‘Well, so it is. Or it might be.’

‘I wouldn’t mind knowing what.’

‘Nothing to worry about.’ He fumbled for his cigarettes, and took a step closer. ‘Will you light one for me? Keep it down, though. We’re still under blackout regulations.’

‘I don’t care about that.’ She gave him hers, without thought. Very matey, but that was the kind of person he’d always known her to be. He tasted the dampness, and a faint flavour of lipstick, a kiss by proxy. She lit one for herself. ‘What’s your job on this jumblies boat?’

‘I’m the wireless hack, listening for any opposition.’

‘A sparks, eh? They don’t generally carry one.’ After a silence she asked: ‘How long till we get back?’

He stroked the rail, as if it breathed for them both. ‘Are you in a hurry?’

‘I’ve someone to see. The other boat’s gone to the Med. I want to see my girlfriend.’

She was so close he touched her when the boat lurched, its course coming into line with the north. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘No more than you can.’ She laughed. ‘What a funny question.’

‘I can’t see, even when I look.’

‘How do you mean? You’re getting a bit philosophical. I’m not used to that.’

Her voice was so much the same, locked in by darkness, and the rushing of the sea, that he wondered if he wasn’t hearing it as in former days, earphones clamped, and she chatting to a male interloper who had wandered onto the wavelength. ‘Can you see me smile?’

‘If I look close. Your eyes are fixed. I’m not surprised you can’t see. How do you do it?’

He jumped the inches, hands going over the features to take in her image. ‘Like this.’

‘What the hell?’ she cried.

‘Sorry. I wanted to see you. I wanted to make out what you looked like.’

‘Oh, that’s all right then. I’ve never had that excuse before. Very funny.’

‘I really am.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It doesn’t make any difference being blind if you’re a wireless operator.’

‘You’ve got to be joking.’

‘You could even say it sharpens the ears wonderfully.’

‘I’ve never met anyone who’s blind.’

To say he’d caught her in a rare area was more than right. She’d never been such a way before, and since it was something to his advantage he sensed an element of cheating. ‘Not many people have.’

‘You aren’t kidding?’

‘Who would, about that?’ He wallowed in the closeness of her voice, and her face as she looked closer for confirmation. ‘I only wish I could be.’

‘What sort of a boat have I landed on?’

‘You may well ask.’

‘Was it in a car crash, or have you been like that from birth?’

There was a possibility of her spending a long time in jail, because sitting at his radio night after night he had malignly influenced the turn of events which brought her before him. Back at the radio he might hear voices closing in on them by the minute, a pair of powerful launches crossing searchlights over the bridge, a bellow through megaphones for them to heave-to. The jaunt would be over. She would be handcuffed, and led away with the rest of them.

Better to be with her while he could, time too valuable to waste on such imagining. So many emotions beat at him. He had expected, for all his trickery — sheer bluff — to hear no more than a few casual words, either on the beach or on the boat. She would drift away, and he would be satisfied. Now she was close enough to touch, waiting for him to talk, which was all he wanted, when he should be at the radio, working on a scheme that might save them. ‘In an aeroplane. I caught it over Germany, at the end of the war. I was twenty, and haven’t seen anything since. I feel I can see you, though.’

‘Oh, right! You are a strange bloke.’

‘I might not have been, but for this. You’re a rare person yourself.’

‘How can you know?’

Nights at the radio made her voice as familiar as a friend not seen for a while.

‘I suppose it was the way you jumped on board and said you were hitching a lift home. In no uncertain terms, when you didn’t seem wanted. You really let rip at the chief.’

She laughed. ‘I don’t take any nonsense from men like him. He knows who I am. I was on a boat with him on the Med once, for a month’s cruise. He treated me like rubbish, until I let him have it. He wasn’t so bad after that, though I still think he’s a nasty piece of work. I don’t often swear, but sometimes you have to.’

‘You seem in a hurry to get to England.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said after a pause. ‘I have a girlfriend, and she might be there. She might not be, though. You can never be sure with her. She’s got a boyfriend, so maybe she’s still in Barcelona.’

He didn’t want to hear about Carla., ‘Take my hand, and lead me to the wireless place. I can do it on my own, but it’ll be easier with you.’

‘Why not?’ Her fingers closed over his. ‘I’ve done some funny things in my time. Woof-woof! I’m a blind man’s dog! Come on, then. The thing is,’ she said as they went along, ‘I’m not sure about my girlfriend anymore. Everything’s getting too difficult for her. I sometimes think I might be wearing her out. And it’s hardly ever possible for us to get together. When she’s in Spain I can’t phone because her boyfriend might answer, so she told me not to. We used to natter over the radio, but the skipper put a stop to it.’

She talked openly because he was blind. He was much older and not involved, so he too could be frank. ‘Do you prefer women to men?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just her.’

No more talk. She found him the place, and he tuned in. The voices were no louder, because the boat was pushing along at top speed. A clipped police menace, obvious in any language, was still there. Judy stood by, thinking that if Carla wasn’t too far off she would ask to use the VHF, or perhaps even shortwave. ‘You could call her, if she’s still on the boat,’ he said, knowing her mind. ‘Except that you would blow our cover. Our lives depend on radio silence.’

‘How did you know what I was thinking?’

‘I put myself in your place. Everyone has a sixth sense, or whatever number it is, except they don’t know how to find it. Being blind, it comes more readily. I developed it over the years.’

‘I’ve often wondered about that. I get a whiff of it when I’m in love, and then it lets me down.’

‘If you’re blind you have to be in love all the time, with life, just to keep going.’

‘Right! I can see that. Do you want another cigarette?’

‘Yes, it’ll help me stay awake.’

‘I’m feeling dead beat.’ She drew her chest away from his shoulder. ‘But my eyes won’t close. Tensed up, I suppose. I always am.’

Waistcoat put his head around the door. ‘Any news, Sparks?’

‘They’re still there, but they aren’t gaining on us.’

‘Tell us if they do, and we’ll dance a few zig-zags.’

‘I know what you picked up on the island,’ she said when Waistcoat had gone.

‘It might be best if you didn’t. If we get caught with this lot on board we’ll get twenty years each.’

‘Probably forty,’ she laughed.

The earphones rested on the back of his neck. ‘Why did you choose to hitch a ride with us, in that case?’

‘It’s a free trip. And I have a date. Or might have. The trouble is I’m not sure anymore. Do you think we’ll make it?’

‘We’ll get away from here, but they may be waiting for us up-Channel.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘It’s a risk we always take.’

‘Does Waistcoat know about the odds?’

‘I could be wrong.’

‘I hope so.’

‘I usually am, so don’t worry.’

She felt safer with such a man on board, who wasn’t the usual hyped-up yuppie or jailbird hysteric. He might be blind, but at least he was more interesting. ‘Oh, I never worry.’

‘I know how to put you to sleep,’ he said. ‘I have a technique.’

‘You’re not a dirty old man, are you?’

He was glad of her laugh. ‘Of course I am.’ While sleeping she could no longer talk to him, but with four or five days still to go there would be enough time. He followed her to her bunk.

‘Lie on your stomach, and I’ll massage the back of your neck. I do it for my wife when I’m on shore. You’ll be off in no time.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘I must do another stint at the radio first, but I’ll be back.’

‘You work hard.’

‘Only at times like this.’

The wavelengths were clear, all voices gone, so everyone was happy. Even Cleaver at the wheel was humming a tune. He hurried as safely as he could back to Judy.

His hand, touching her hair, rested gently on her neck, fingers opening along the flesh then coming together, firm without pinching. He pondered on the nature of a miracle. No such thing. He made it happen. His mind was beamed onto making her relinquish all connections with her troubled world, threads snapping one by one to let her float into the clear space of nothingness so that he could have peace for a while and take in her apparition.

‘I’ve heard of blind healers,’ she murmured. ‘There used to be one in Boston.’

‘Tell me about it tomorrow. You need sleep.’ He wanted oblivion for her even more than she wanted it for herself, needed her to be unconscious so that space for her own thoughts would come back. Kneeling, and leaning forward, both hands worked a rhythm, thumbs coming in from the sides of her neck and pushing a short way upwards, a forceful semicircular motion over and over to the beating of engines carrying them for the moment out of danger.

A changed rate of breathing told him she was asleep, a faint whistle, the slightest snore, but he kept on a few minutes beyond the usual number so that she wouldn’t wake at the drawing back of his touch. The insomniac put in such a way to rest either woke up in half an hour, assuming they had been under for days, or they didn’t come to until the clock had gone round, thinking they’d slept only a few minutes.

The treatment exhausted him, so he fumbled his way to the bridge, where he sensed people standing around in silence, nothing left to say. The blacked out boat was on one of Cleaver’s courses taking them out of trouble, but they might have been dead, turned to stone as the boat drove under its own will, taking the crew on a straight line till there was no more fuel, the timbers went rotten, and it quietly sank. He and Judy, the last people alive, would go under together.

He went back to the comfort of the radio, tuning into morse on shortwave as if to connect himself again to the world beyond this ghostly boat. At the same time as finding Judy it had turned into the Flying Dutchman, and he a fully paid-up but soon-to-be-superannuated member of the crew, because everything had its price and there was only one lump sum for that.

A telegram rippled to a Philippines’ coastal station, a member of the crew requesting his brother to take two kilos of the best ice-cream to his wife on her birthday. A tanker wanted anchorage at Antwerp in two days’ time, giving its position in the eastern Atlantic. Normal life went on, traffic passing to and fro beyond the limbo of their boat speeding God knew where.

Laughter came from the bridge, the touch of glass against glass as he got close. Voices on VHF had faded, leaving them free and beyond range of interception, he said.

‘Come in, Howard,’ Waistcoat said. ‘We’re through the worst. The bags are on board, and all’s well with the world. Have a drink, and a smoke if you like. We’ve got enough of it. Or you can have a shoot-up — in the arm though, not the arse!’

‘You want it, we have it,’ Scud cackled.

‘Except it’s teetotal with the powdered stuff,’ Waistcoat said. ‘It’s too top quality for the likes o’ you lot. Just plain whisky’s good enough.’

‘Start meddling with the cargo,’ Cleaver said, ‘and we’ll end up chasing skuas in Spitzbergen. It’s not the stuff to indulge in at sea. Thank you, Chief, I will have another, but that’s my limit. Then I’ll go out and get a fix. There are stars about at the moment. You can take her in a tad, Richard. Make it zero-five-zero, and we’ll be all set for hearth and home.’

Howard felt the glass at his hand, then a slice of bread and salami from Ted’s tray, as half starved as the rest of them, after more excitement for him, he thought, than anybody else.

‘You run a good ship,’ Cleaver’s jaws munched. ‘Can’t fault the food, Mr Killisick.’

‘Cut yer throat if yer did,’ Ted said.

‘Cucumber’s a bit off, though.’

‘It’s been more than a week, Mr Cleaver,’ Scud put in. ‘Ted ain’t God.’

‘No, he’s not.’

‘More than my life’s worth, not to provide a good cook with all the trimmings.’ Waistcoat was relaxed and in humour. ‘That, and a shit-hot navigator, and we can go anywhere.’

‘Thank you,’ Cleaver said.

Refills were handed out, the tray passed around. ‘How’s that tart who came on board?’ Waistcoat said.

‘She’s sleeping,’ Howard told him.

‘I know her. She bumped in to the big gaffer a long time ago, so he gets her a job now and again. Otherwise she’d be serving in a chippy, or creating hell somewhere. Family man, the gaffer is, though I’d like to sling her overboard. She’s got too much lip.’

‘I don’t think anybody would like that,’ Richard said.

‘I know they wouldn’t. But she was on the radio, the one who flapped her mouth off. She should be taken to task.’

‘Better you than me, Chief,’ Scud said.

‘At least we’ve got pineapples for a day or two,’ Ted remarked. ‘Which was thoughtful of her. I can use ’em.’ He laughed so merrily that Howard heard his teeth rattle. ‘They’ll keep scurvy out, and that can’t be bad.’

‘It’s two o’clock, so we’d better get some shut-eye,’ Waistcoat said. ‘Except for Mr Cleaver, and you, Cannister. Richard and Scud can take over at six. I’m knackered, so nobody wake me. You can sort out the watches among yourselves. I want to see dolphins in the morning. Polish my sea glasses, Ted, when you’ve got a minute.’ He was on his way out. ‘There’s fog all over ’em.’

THIRTY

Nobody was willing in their work, certainly not with a smile, as if landing and loading, and getting away from the island, had worn them to the bone. Whatever was done had a sullen air about it, no banter, not even grumbling — the worst sign of all. Only Cleaver didn’t seem unusual, obsessionally occupied in obtaining astronomical fixes of the highest possible accuracy. Cannister and Scuddilaw, when not on watch, sat behind Howard at the radio and played brag, swearing when on hands and knees to find the rolling ten pee pieces. Ted Killisick’s prowess at the stove had gone a step down in dexterity compared to the first week out. On the second day north Waistcoat was seen to lope from his quarters and throw both plate and food into the drink, without even the spirit to berate his cook.

The sea was churlish, grey and uncooperative, so had no say in cheering them up, though the boat drove neatly on. A gull came from no one could guess where, but after an hour or so took off, as if unwilling to stay with such a mournful crew.

Each did his job, as he had to, but whatever joy had been there before had now dissolved. They lived only to reach home, not even that at times, merely to stay alive from one minute to the next.

‘We’re such a glum lot,’ Richard said, ‘you’d think the bottom had fallen out of the glass.’

Cleaver grunted, unsympathetic to what he regarded as a drop in morale. ‘It’s always the same after a big pick-up, though this is a bit worse. I don’t like it. You’d think everyone was locked in his own thoughts because they can’t decide what they would do with the stuff on board if they had it to themselves. The mood will lift, I’ve never known it not to.’

‘What if it doesn’t?’

‘I’d rather not think about that. But if it doesn’t, you and I might have a job on our hands.’

‘Who would you be wary of,’ — he didn’t say afraid — ‘if it came down to that?’

‘Everybody. But whoever tried anything would be very misguided. Nobody could do it on his own, and if we keep a lookout you and I should be able to spot whoever tries to form a combination. It’s a small boat. The conversation between those two cardsharpers is pathetic. Worse than the chief’s, every word a swear word, though at least they’re opening their mouths again. I don’t think they have a moral thought between them. They’ve got lots of immoral notions, but none so strong as would lead them to doing what we fear. Then there’s Paul Cinnakle, who’s too much in love with his engines to burn his fingers on a stunt like that. Ted’s harmless. And Howard is blind, so we can count him out. He’s your loyal ex-serviceman type, and in any case he’s besotted with that girl. Follows her round like a dog. Or she follows him, I’m not sure which. As for her, she’s useful about the boat. She cleaned up my bunk this morning, told me she didn’t mind earning her keep on the trip. So neither of them’s plotting anything. Wouldn’t know how. He’s our radio officer, anyway, and he’ll be more than useful when we go up Channel.’

‘What about me?’ Richard said, by way of humour.

Cleaver polished his sextant mirrors one by one with a spotless yellow cloth and slotted them into place. ‘We’re the backbone of the ship, and you know it. Both of us know Waistcoat would be useless in the face of adversity. Oh, I know he’s got a nose like a shit-house rat, but at bottom he’s poor stuff. Never had the Nelson touch. So it’s up to us to keep the firm afloat. It’s always a fraught situation, going back with stuff on board. Too tempting to expect peace. But if you and I understand each other we can make sure peace is kept. The least sign of hanky-panky, and everyone loses, especially any greedy snipe-nosed tyke who imagines he’ll get away with the jackpot.’ He slotted his beloved sextant into its box. ‘No, we won’t have any of that.’

‘I thought I’d mention it so that we at least could get things straight between us.’

Cleaver leaned over the chart to mark in the position. ‘I’m glad you did. I was wondering if you would. Take her five degrees to port. We’re getting bumped around a bit this morning. Damned rice pudding flying about.’ Spray came over the windscreen, as if an angry housewife was behind it with a cloth. ‘You’d better call the lovers inside.’

The aerials got little vision above the tops of the waves, but Portishead came in strong and crisp so that he could take down the weather. Judy looked over his shoulder, and he kept the earphones off for her to hear the singing morse, on top volume so as not to be drowned by the noise of his typing. Waistcoat, bilious and cantankerous, passed on his way to the bridge, telling him to put the earphones back on. ‘That noise gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. How’s it going, though?’

‘Fine. Not too rough,’ Richard said, when he came in, trying levity. ‘We’ll keep our powder dry.’

Waistcoat laughed. ‘That’s all we need. But a few smiles on this pig-boat wouldn’t come amiss.’

Richard wondered how he passed the time in his state room. Probably played with his little pocket calculator to see how rich he’d be on getting home. Or he gave his teddy bear a good hiding. This morning he was on a high, eyes more button like even than those of the pigeon Howard had looked after. Or maybe Waistcoat had been at the powder. A few doses all round wouldn’t do any harm. ‘We’ll be getting another forecast from Howard soon.’

‘If it’s bad ask him to shop around and try to get a better one.’

‘I’m sure he’s doing his best.’

‘Funny bloke, though.’ Waistcoat looked over the chart to check the latest position. ‘I know he’s good at the radio, but I just don’t have it in my heart to trust him. There’s something about him, and I can’t throw it off.’

‘Is it because he’s blind, yet manages so well?’

‘I’m not that fucking stupid.’

‘He’s all right. I’ll vouch for him.’

‘I’m sure he is, since you say so. You’re like a parrot, though. You say it over and over again. Still, I’ll be more than happy when the trip’s over.’

‘Won’t we all?’

He went to his quarters, walking as if the boat was on the smoothest of seas, and Richard at least admired his slick sense of balance, glad all the same to see the back of him. The unstable weather was enough to deal with, though there was no sense not trusting a bloke just because you didn’t like him. He handed the wheel to Scud and Cannister. Let them earn their keep. On the way to his bunk he met Howard zig-zagging along with the weather forecast.

‘A low in south Finnisterre. We might just clip it. Rougher in Biscay, but we’ll cut across that. It’s south-east four to five in Sole as well.’

‘Doesn’t sound too bad,’ Richard said. ‘I expect we’ll hit Blighty in one piece.’

He felt the sea in him, dark layers overlapping, folding into his night space, neutral and causing no fear. ‘What does the sky look like?’

‘Almost clear, a few whiffs of cirrus, though we’re bound to hit the arse end of the front sooner or later. I’ll pop this into the chief. He won’t be happy, but at least he’ll know.’

Howard asked what was being chopped.

‘Pineapples,’ Judy said.

‘I could smell it.’

‘I’m doing it on a plate so that I can pour all the juice off for you.’

Ted slid a tray of scones in the oven. ‘What about the rest of us?’

‘Get lost,’ she said, but with a smile. ‘He’s my man on this voyage. Anyway, you’ll still have some fruit. There’ll be a share for everybody.’

‘Howard’s a lucky man, to have someone like you so sweet on him.’

‘Of course I am. He put me to sleep first night on board with his magic touch, and I didn’t wake for twelve hours. Brought me back to life.’ She touched Howard’s arm. ‘No more insomnia, right?’

He wasn’t only hearing her voice from nearby, or coming into the box of his earphones, but the affectionate squeeze meant they were closer than any dream had promised. For some reason she liked him, and his heart was like a drum about to burst at the same rich tone, as rich for him as when she had talked to Carla. He caught hold of the table, fearing he was about to fall.

She held him again. ‘Don’t get too close to the stove.’

Ted laughed. ‘Yeh, we don’t need you for dinner.’

She passed a glass of the juice. ‘A reward, for putting me to sleep.’

‘It wasn’t so much to do. I’d rather wake you up though, so that you would see the world twice as plainly as you do now.’

Ted put the slices onto a platter, and took it to the bridge. She stopped in her work. ‘That sounds like something I need, so I want it, but I can’t see it happening. I mean, how could it?’

‘For a start, I’d tell you not to bother with your lover anymore. She’s not waiting for you.’

‘How do you know she’s my lover?’

‘The tone of your voice. Whoever she is, she’s not good enough. You deserve someone who would go to the end of the earth and over the edge for you.’

Each word was followed by regret that he had been stupid enough to say it. He’d even known he was going to before he had. The words spilled, they were in him and always had been, and wouldn’t be wished back. No stopping had been possible because only in that way could he get directly to how he felt, though it had been plain on first hearing her voice. Words that came were his alone. ‘I’m the only person who can make you see. Even though my eyes went bang a long time ago, you’d be a lot better off using what’s left so as to sharpen yours. I could show you how to get the best of what’s in you.’ He couldn’t see her, whatever claims were made, had to shape a picture, his skin burning with the effort.

He talked as if they had been close for years, yet she had been on board little more than a day. ‘What are you saying? I wonder if you know.’

She was playing at surprise, though her tone was regretful because she wasn’t able to take on his mood. She closed her eyes, as if to find out what it was like being blind, and on opening them he had gone.

The radio was tuned to the frequency on which he had first heard her, as if part of her former self might come back and talk to him, an exercise to dull the pain of having spoken so brashly. Yet he couldn’t feel ashamed, having nothing to lose. I can say what I like. Happiness was never out of place when you spoke with the honesty of youth.

She stood behind him. ‘You’re a funny bloke. I was frightened you might walk overboard. Well, not really. I only hoped I hadn’t offended you in some way. You’re special. Here, you forgot to finish your pineapple juice.’

He drank, the elixir of love whatever happened. ‘This is my first long boat trip, so maybe it’s going to my head. I function best at the radio, keeping my mouth shut, letting it do the talking for me.’

‘I don’t mind it, when you talk to me. Not many people have, not properly. It doesn’t matter what you say. I love to hear you taking morse, though. It’s like magic. Maybe I’ll go to college and become a radio officer. They have women doing it on ships now. I could send a message.’

‘I wouldn’t even need to type it,’ he said. ‘Your voice would come through with the dots and dashes, and I’d know your “fist”. The message would have to be a short one, not more than a few words, because it isn’t allowed, to send private telegrams.’

‘A short one would be all I’d need. I’d be happy, tapping to you.’ She held his hand, bent down and kissed him on the cheek. ‘If I did become a radio officer I’d keep myself to myself. I’d be mysterious and quiet, and wouldn’t get off with any of the other officers. I’d look very nice in my uniform. But I’d have a peaceful life, which is all I’ve ever wanted. I can’t tell you how tired I am.’ She laughed: ‘And I don’t mean sleepy!’

The exhaustion was similar to his own. ‘I knew it the other night.’

‘Only you could. Not that I ever show it. I’m paid not to.’

The boat was small enough, but even the largest ship would be seen as small from the moon. ‘It’s turning rougher.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘It’s no surprise. I took the forecast.’ He didn’t care how aggressive the sea became now that she was on board, but stopped himself saying so. Gusts exploded around them, one bang after another as the boat cut over and through the waves. ‘All hatches battened, though it shouldn’t last long.’

‘I’ll see if Ted needs help in the galley.’ She kissed him again. ‘Have a nap. You look done in as well.’

‘I’ll get my head down for half an hour.’

The sweaty pillow felt like the purest down, his blanket a linen sheet, but sleep wouldn’t draw him in. The boat was duck-and-draking on its homeward bound, a caged animal trying to break free, but from what and to where? Sleep in any case was a waste of life. Thoughts were pointlessly tormenting. However mocking wind and buffeting water were produced, the intertial dynamo behind them couldn’t drive out Judy’s presence. Poignant visions of the boat subsiding into the salty waste didn’t alarm him, since they would go down together, though he couldn’t say why she should pay the final price for his schemings. He only knew it was hard to imagine reaching land again, because what would he do when he got there? A curtain fell on every scene magicked up by his fevered mind.

Richard took the wheel. The boat seemed alive as it rode one sliding wave after another, up the green silk of a slope then over and through the horizon of white-green foam. Waistcoat came close: ‘I can’t think I was born for this.’

‘We’ve been in worse.’ Cloud was low and ragged but: ‘Visibility’s not too bad. A tanker over there.’ He passed the binoculars. ‘North-north-west. Take a look.’

‘Where’s he going?’

‘Coming from Venezuela, I should think. He’ll be up Channel before us. I don’t suppose he even sees us.’

The glasses were handed back. ‘We can hardly hitch a lift, with what we’ve got on board.’

‘We’re not exactly lagging behind.’

‘I’ve made enough in this game to get into the airline business. I’m fed up, messing in boats, up to my neck in this shit every time. I’ll get myself a Boeing, then we can jet the stuff in in crates. Three hours in the air instead of a week in a motorised bucket. There must be plenty of pilots out of a job.’

‘Sounds a good idea,’ glad to see him quietened by thinking on something positive. But he came close again: ‘I’m still worried about that blind bastard.’

‘How come?’

‘You brought him on board so that he would keep his mouth shut, right?’

‘If I remember. You told me to.’

‘It don’t much matter now. But what’s he going to say when he gets ashore? I mean, is he safe?’

‘As safe as any of us. Safer, maybe, if that’s possible.’ He was far in front of Waistcoat’s drift, as maybe he was meant to be. ‘He’s been useful, and still can be. A bob or two at paying-off time, and he’s in it as deep as the rest of us.’

‘I expect he will be. But I’m worried, and I don’t like to be worried. When I’m worried I feel nagged at, so I want to do something about what’s worrying me. Even when I was a kid I didn’t like to be worried. I worried a lot when I was a kid. Would the old man come in and try to break my arm again? Would there be anything on the table when I got back home and hadn’t been able to half-inch a thing? Had anybody seen me when I snatched the wallet? Every minute of the day and night I worried, so I said that when I grew up I wouldn’t let anything worry me.’

‘What is it, then, Chief?’ Scud said, in from the rain and drek.

Waistcoat pushed by on his way back to the cabin. ‘Mind your own fucking business.’

‘Bad tempered,’ Scud said, ‘but who can blame him?’

‘He’s worried about Howard.’

‘He would be, wouldn’t he? If it wasn’t Howard it’d be one of us. He does worry when he’s got nothing on his plate. That’s when you’ve got to be careful, because it means “watch out”. He always picks on somebody, and it seems it’s poor bloody Howard this time. It’s too dangerous to get onto any of us. If he did he might wake up one morning and find he’d got no ear to put an earring in when he goes on the town with his boyfriend. Or he might trip himself up when he goes on deck, and fall into the drink, and nobody’ll give him a helping hand back on board because he’s been misbehaving. They’d kick his face in and push him back under, like he’d do with any of us if we gave him half a chance.’ He rolled a perfect cigarette, in spite of the rocking. ‘What’s he got against Howard, anyway?’

Richard took the boat over another glassy escarpment. ‘He thinks he might blab when he gets ashore.’

‘He’s off his trolley.’

‘He doesn’t trust him.’

‘Howard mystifies him, that’s why. Howard’s the sort he likes to hate. You’ve got to be careful.’

‘What would you do?’ Richard asked.

‘Watch the blind chap every minute you’ve got.’

‘I can’t. Will you keep an eye on him as well?’

Scud thought about it. ‘Put it like this. If I saw he was about to come to harm I’d do what I could. But it don’t look like he’ll be needing either of us, not with that Judy around. She’s stuck on him, seems to think he’s got something. It’s just as well.’

‘That should take care of it, then.’

‘I expect so. But you never know with Waistcoat,’ Scud said. ‘I’ll have a word with the others. Mr Cleaver’s only interested in number one, but I expect Jack will understand.’

‘The thing was, I promised Howard’s wife I’d get him back safe. If he goes overboard we’ll all be for the high jump. I can only suppose the chief knows as much.’

‘You never can tell. He’d just say he fell, and get us to say the same. We’d have to fall into line to save our necks. But he’d only do such a thing to Howard if he really went off his head, and I don’t think he’d do that because there’d be too much to lose. Just tell Howard to give him a wide berth, though it’s not easy on a pea green boat like this.’

Richard felt relieved at having put the notion around. Everyone’s future depended on the safety of a blind man who — and in many ways it was strange — bound them together as a crew. But if Waistcoat was worried then so was he. Unlike the others Waistcoat never worried without good reason. He’s got something on Howard that I don’t know about, Richard thought, or he has proof of what some would only suspect. He thinks Howard’s jeopardised the trip.

Richard had been uneasy since Howard first proposed coming with them — more like a stipulation. The idea that he was a mole from Interpol, however, was laughable, yet one he couldn’t stop popping into his head. Howard had known from the start who they were and what they were going to do, so it was inconceivable that he would do anything to short circuit the trip, especially as a paid up member of the crew unless — a revelation to ice the blood — he had guessed about his fling with Laura.

Perhaps from some stupid notion of marital openness she had told him. There was so much about her he would never fathom that it was easy to imagine her spilling out details of their meetings, with that glassy stare of unreality lighting her up after they had made love. Such a confession would give a little more life to the deadness that was in her, and so Howard, having no other way to get his own back, either on his wife for unnecessarily tormenting him, or on someone who was supposed to be his friend, decided to let it come down, and had found a way to inform on the pick-up before they set out, had arranged a neat little ambush at wherever they landed up-Channel.

Fantasy was running him off. If Laura had talked, Howard would have shown by now that he knew. No man could keep that kind of blow to himself. But if suspicion of treachery goes through my mind, Richard’s thoughts went, why should it not lodge in Waistcoat’s as well, at least sufficiently to make him wonder. Neither he nor anyone on the boat needed a real reason for distrust — if it was felt strongly enough. When intuition pointed to a rat, motives followed, and among so few people, quartered in a space of wood that became smaller the longer they were on it, and in so large an ocean, a darker cloud was generated than any swirling across the sky.

‘I’ll take over.’ Cleaver, wrapped in a hood and oilskins, came in from his turn about the deck. Pipe smoke spread smells of burning kipper over the bridge. ‘You look all in.’

‘Nothing one of Ted’s fry-ups won’t cure.’

‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s good to be on a happy ship, even though the chief is off his head again. He’s going like a demon at the bottle, pacing up and down the state room. I saw him through the window.’

‘Maybe he’ll wear a hole in the carpet, if he walks for long enough, and slide down into the briny.’

‘Perfect,’ Cleaver said. ‘But it’d take all of us down as well. I wouldn’t like to share hell with the likes of him.’

‘I was going to have a chat with him, but maybe I’ll leave it till he calms down.’

‘Take longer than that, I should think,’ he puffed. ‘Give him a day or two. Wait till he’s all fair and square in that little pink paradise he’s got fixed up in Harley Street.’

Darkness brought isolation, talk minimal, but Howard was never without human noise, either voice or morse. On upper shortwave he heard navigation warnings from Karachi, good to know life went on beyond their world, and he the only one who had firm evidence of it. Warship and anti-aircraft practice was announced, coordinates given where firing with live ammunition was to happen, all craft told to stay clear of the danger zone.

Judy read over his shoulder, and wished they were sailing near Karachi. ‘I’d be on the sun deck getting a tan, and looking forward to a nice hot curry when we landed.’

‘Have you been that way?’

‘No. One day I hope. Would you like to go?’

With you I would. ‘Maybe I will.’

‘You have a funny way of speaking, as if you see too much to use words. You jump your phrases a bit. I like it. I never know what you’re going to say till you say it, not like everybody else.’

‘Do I fascinate you, then?’

‘Utterly, you old thing!’

He laughed. ‘I suppose I might, being so much older. You’ve seen more of the world than I have, yet you think I’m wiser in some way. Well, I don’t see it like that.’ He paused, then went on. ‘Did I tell you I was in Boston a few months ago? It’s a nice place. I liked it. Went for a holiday. I’d rather be there than near Karachi, to tell the truth.’

He felt a shock run through. ‘Eh! I know Boston. I have relations there. I’ve stayed often.’

‘Maybe I was looking for you.’

‘There you go again, jumping ahead. I wasn’t there, though, was I?’

‘You might have been.’

‘Oh, right. You make me think it would have been nice if I had.’

‘Walking with your girlfriend — and I would have been taken by your voice as you talked to her.’ He enjoyed going close enough to be found out, felt excitement in them both. ‘We wouldn’t have got to know each other, but I’d have felt a thrill as you passed by.’

‘I wanted to take my friend to Boston, but we never made it. I’m beginning to think I’m more in love with her than she is with me. It’s flippin’ amazing how often it’s been like that in my life.’

‘Great natures make big mistakes — if mistakes they are.’

‘I wish I could talk to her. Have you got shortwave in all this gear?’

‘There’s the transmitter. My fingers have been figuring it out. How close are we, do you think?’

‘She might be near Spain. Close to Corunna, perhaps.’

‘The day after tomorrow you could try. If she was listening you’d get her loud and clear, but the chief would have us thrown overboard if he caught us using a transmitter.’

She stretched back on the seat, and he wondered, not for the first time, if her kindness was only because she wanted to get at the transmitter. He would be glad enough to help, would at least have the privilege of being remembered by her. ‘You can try if you like. It’s nothing special.’

‘To me it would be.’

She wanted to know why. So did he, the blind leading the unblind, he thought drawing her close. ‘I’m satisfied if I can do something for you.’

‘I’m not sure I’m worth it.’

‘Who is? Yet everyone is. Best not to ask, unless you want me to say I’m in love with you. I hope it doesn’t strike you as strange. Imagine I’m not blind.’

She couldn’t keep away from him, that much he knew. When there was no work in the galley she would come to find out what he was doing, wanting to talk, and hear what he had to say. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I’ve got used to you, even in so short a time. I feel something for you; though I don’t know what. I don’t want to know. There’s just something good about being with you.’ She put her arms around him, lips kissing his. He smelled her hair, the fresh trace of perfume, felt her breasts against him, close bodies providing solace for them both.

THIRTY-ONE

Waistcoat shouted for him to come in. Sunshine made a rising and falling line across the state room, as Waistcoat farted what sounded like the first bar and a half of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Richard couldn’t think such peace would last. ‘Have a drink,’ he was told.

A good start, though a bad one was usually a better omen. When Waistcoat was pushed into liberality it was time to watch out. ‘A short one. I like to keep my wits while running the ship.’

‘Don’t we all.’ He lounged on the sofa. ‘Best to start that way from the beginning.’

‘I can’t fault that. Cheers!’

‘Too fucking right you can’t. But you boobed over bringing that blind man on board. I’ve known for a few days now that he’s sold us up the river. Or he’s tried to.’

Richard thought he deserved to sit for the work he had put in, but wouldn’t in such company, deciding to save it for when he could get his head down at home, his usual need after a trip. Waistcoat was talking from more than intuition, however. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘No think about it. You remember that pigeon he was so sweet on? The ship’s pet. What a soft heart he’s got, everybody said. Superstitious lot, sailors. Not superstitious enough, if you ask me. I was standing on the top deck for a bit of air, and the fucking bird flopped at my feet. Lost its way, I suppose, and came back, after blind man sent it off. It was half dead, so I wrung its neck. Then I noticed the capsule on its leg. Opened it, didn’t I? Read the message. Some scribble I couldn’t make out, or thought I couldn’t. A blind man can’t do copperplate, can he? I was about to throw it overboard after the pigeon, but I put it in my pocket. Yesterday I took it out and looked at it through a magnifying glass. There’s one over on that table. Give it a butcher’s, and tell me what you think. It’s no get-well message, I can tell you.’

Hard to shake anything from the maze of hieroglyphic scratches. For a while he thought the only sense must have come out of Waistcoat’s disordered brain. The small oblong of cigarette paper had been scored on by a sharpened dark leaded pencil, and the clear result, enlarging as his arm went up and down and held the glass steady on its highest magnification, jumped into focus with a position in latitude and longitude.

‘It’s taking you long enough.’

‘I’m getting there.’ And so he was, until everything was framed in the glass circle, and he could pick out the time and date of the position, isolate the name of the boat, and fix the ETA of their reaching the Lizard. If Howard hadn’t looked at Cleaver’s navigation summary for the trip, which was impossible, he had done some pretty nifty mental arithmetic. Maybe he had heard Cleaver talking to Waistcoat. ‘Could be he has a woman pigeon fancier, and wants to let her know when he’d be getting back.’

‘Don’t fuck with me. If he’s tried to do this he’s done something else as a back-up. Or before we left. And if it hadn’t been for that pigeon going round in circles we’d never have known.’

‘At least whoever it was meant for didn’t get it, if it was meant for anybody. I don’t suppose he thought for a second it would land anywhere.’

‘The way you’re talking I could almost think you were in on it with him. I don’t, though. I just think you’ve been duped. We all have. He wouldn’t have tried sending a message if the ground hadn’t been prepared in some way. The only thing is they don’t know our ETA now, which could be anytime, though they might keep up a twenty-four-hour watch for a week. And those planes we saw on the way out must have got a lovely clear shot of the boat.’

‘You’re jumping to conclusions.’

‘That’s what I’m here for. It’s my job. I could cry my eyes out. Do we have to get just outside the twelve-mile limit and scuttle the most valuable boat that ever was? Or wait for the choppers and a couple of customs launches to box us in? If anything like that happens, old blind fuckpig goes overboard with a bullet in each dead eye.’

‘You’re painting a worst-case scenario.’ He might not be, but it didn’t hurt to tell him so. Howard had scorched the sensitive skin off his fingers, no mistake, and deserved whatever Waistcoat thought fit to put him through. He had played for something and lost, maybe scuppered all of them, no use thinking otherwise, unless Cleaver could stage a tricky feat of navigation, and get them clear of bother. He had the coolest brain of the lot, but when Richard mentioned such a possibility, he got no response.

‘In this game you never give up. I’d like to blind the bastard for what he might have done, but I can’t. He’s got us there. We’ll find out why he wrote that message, though. Go and get him.’

Richard sat, come what may. ‘I will by and by. But we ought to talk first.’ Talk eye-wash, because Waistcoat, due to the uncertain situation (it always was, at this stage) and the whisky he had put back, was in a classical fit of paranoia, the sort Richard had often witnessed. Not only that: it was powerful enough for him to catch the sickness as well, so he had to work it out of himself as much as Waistcoat: ‘You know that whenever I say there’s going to be some sense in my head, it turns out that way.’ Talk and more talk had to shift a cloud that could gas everybody on the boat. Happily he also knew that Waistcoat, not a man to whom words came readily — except curses — was always amenable to the gift of the gab, and though Richard had never been aware of possessing such a trait, knew he must find it now.

‘There’d better be some sense in it.’

‘I’ll have another shot. It’s good whisky.’

‘I’m drinking it, aren’t I?’ He splashed some in. ‘Now earn it.’

‘It seems fishy to me as well, you finding this message, and the impulse is, as you say, to push him overboard. That’s my reaction, but I think it’s the wrong one. It would be totally counter-productive. First of all, my opinion is that he was playing a Boy’s Own game with that pigeon — a stupid one but a game nevertheless. Even in his right mind he couldn’t have thought such a scrag end of a bird would get anywhere. It’s his first trip to sea, so he had a go at a message to kill the monotony, instead of knitting socks or making a ship in a bottle. As batty as they come, you might say, but he’s one of us, and looking forward to a successful end to the trip, even hoping for a bonus so that he can update his wireless equipment at home. You might think about it. But I know you won’t forget him at the handout. You’re good at that.’

He liked to hear it, but said: ‘Cut the shit, and get on with it,’ wanting a bit of entertainment at this uncertain stage, something to divert him, and pass the time.

‘The help he’s given us on the radio since we set off must be taken into account. None of it’s been false. And if he’d been intending to give us away he could have done it when we were taking the stuff on board, but he didn’t. He’s as keen as the rest of us. You say push him into the drink, but if we do, a bullet in him or no, we’re going to be in the drek — and no mistake. His wife at home would leave no stone unturned to find out what happened.’

Waistcoat broke in: ‘She’d start with you, wouldn’t she? and you’d never talk, would you?’

‘No, you know me.’

‘Nobody knows anybody.’

‘That’s another matter. Let me go on.’

‘Hang your fucking self, then.’

‘I’ve no intention of doing that.’ He surely hadn’t, because he knew something Waistcoat couldn’t, who neither saw nor suspected the compact and loaded Luger deep in the pocket of Richard’s thick coat. ‘I stay alive and kicking to the end.’

‘And so say all of us, but it wouldn’t be such a bad way out if things went wrong.’

‘They haven’t, and won’t. If he disappeared that would be the start of our troubles. It’s unnecessary, to top him. He’s with us. He might have been playing a foolish game but he’s a hundred per cent loyal. Loyalty’s all he’s ever known in life. He’s that sort of person. You know as well as I do, better, I suppose, that you’ve got to be cunning in this game. I’ve nothing against violence. When it’s the only solution I’m all for it, but my idea is to leave him be, to watch him, keep him in view. I’ll find out what he knows, what his game is, or was — if there was or is any game.

‘In my view,’ he went on, ‘we could just as easily mistrust any other member of the crew, though I don’t at the moment see why. Anybody else could have written on that bit of paper, and done it so that it would look as if a blind man had scribbled it. Or some of them are so subliterate it’s the best they could manage. Or they could have done it as a joke, or out of boredom, or to put a bit of excitement into the trip, but for themselves alone. I’m not convinced Howard did it. I only know for sure I didn’t, and you didn’t. It could have been anybody. But if you think there might be something in what I say about the others for God’s sake don’t question them, or mayhem will break loose, and we can’t afford that. We’re a crew, and a good one, not a group of bloody ballet dancers. Just let’s carry on as if we’re united, and hope that there isn’t an idiot in our midst.’

‘You make my blood run cold on all counts.’

‘So would mine if I thought the matter was serious. Let me pump Howard, and find out whether he did tamper with that bird. I can’t think he did, and if he didn’t I might find a way of getting a word from the others, though I don’t guarantee it. I wouldn’t like to upset ’em.’

They stood at the same time, and Waistcoat looked unblinking into his eyes. ‘You’ve earned your whisky. But he’d better find something on the radio with his magic ears that will get us home and save the ship. Any dust in our eyes, and he’s dead flesh, whatever the consequences. And so is anybody else. I’m telling you, the first sign of us getting into trouble, and he’ll go, whether he’s dropped a bollock or not. I’m leaving it to you, but I shan’t rest easy till I’m back in London.’

Richard was sweating when he got outside, shoulderblades as wet as the Straits of Gibraltar. Settled as Waistcoat might seem after such a talking to, he was in a dangerous and friable state, though not likely to do anything to put the priceless contents of the boat at risk. He wasn’t born yesterday, but needed watching nonetheless.

Howard at the stern was indulging in deep talk with Judy. It made a pretty picture, though Richard couldn’t imagine what she saw in him. He couldn’t see much good in her, though the scene gave hope, because Howard must realise that if he sold them up the creek she would be in trouble as an accessory, be seen as guilty as the rest — a very unsmart plot on his part. ‘Sorry to have to break up your lovers’ chat, but I’d like a word with Howard.’

She turned. ‘Can’t I be in on it?’ — eyes saying she had a right to be, didn’t care if she did die, as long as she went to hell and back in her own way, though preferably with Howard.

Richard had always been mystified at how most women latched onto totally unsuitable men, as he had known from Amanda staying so long, and at Laura giving herself to him with such blind confidence. Laura had been perfect for him as he had thought she was for Howard, and he could understand how that was, but he had imagined Judy to be very much her own girl on hearing her put Waistcoat in his place. ‘We’ve a bit of private business to discuss.’

‘We can finish our talk later,’ Howard said to her.

‘Oh, right! I’ll see how Ted’s getting on.’

Their conversation had seemed the sort that could never finish, and Richard felt a shade of envy. ‘You could bring us a mug of tea.’ He watched her balance against the ups and downs of the deck. ‘What were you talking about?’

‘This and that,’ Howard said.

‘Have you told her about the pigeon you looked after?’

‘Yesterday I did.’

‘And did you mention the message you put into the capsule?’

‘What capsule?’

‘Giving our position, and the wildly inaccurate ETA back in Blighty.’

‘I wouldn’t know how to do such a thing. Nor would I if I could. I’m not that stupid.’

He told him something of what Waistcoat had said.

‘It could have been a different pigeon he found.’

That was as maybe.

Theirs wasn’t the only boat on the ocean, Howard added.

‘It didn’t seem like that to me. Only a blind man could have made such a dog’s dinner of the writing.’

‘Or someone who wanted to incriminate me.’

‘The chief’s convinced it was you.’

Howard was no longer surprised at his ability to lie so calmly and, he hoped, believably, feeling nothing unpleasant about the subterfuge anymore, in view of the situation, all weapons valid in such a fight. Necessity brought the reward of self discovery, however seemingly unethical the means. ‘He would, wouldn’t he? I’m the most vulnerable man on the boat, that’s for sure. It wasn’t me, that’s all I know. I have no motive.’

‘Maybe not. But the chief isn’t the man to mess with. I’m being straight with you.’

‘Maybe he isn’t, but what can I do?’

‘The position on the message had the date and time as well, so it’s bound to be somebody who knew a bit about navigation.’

‘Everybody on the boat does.’

‘Well, I got you on board, and I hope you haven’t landed me in the shit. You know that if anything happens to us, Judy will be for the high jump as well, not only you and the rest of us? I can’t make your game out. Waistcoat was for tipping you in the drink, but I talked him out of it. If you did it, and I don’t see who else, you’d better glue yourself to the radio and see if you can get us out of the hole we might be in — whatever happened.’

Judy steadied the large mugs of tea, Richard’s slopping over the brim. ‘Compliments of Mr Killisick. Can I have lover boy back now?’

‘As long as you don’t keep him too long from the radio. He has work to do. And so have I.’

‘What was all that for?’ she asked.

‘He was warning me about the chief.’

‘Yeh, he’s a nasty piece of work.’

He told her about Jehu.

‘He’s off his crust.’ She looked close. ‘Did you do it, though?’

He felt the warm breath. Rain had splashed her cheeks, in spite of the hood, beads on her smooth skin. The roughness of the skin on his hand was the same as that on his face, he assumed, an old man and a young woman. ‘Nothing came of it.’

‘Why do it? I don’t understand.’

‘I’m not sure. A bit of excitement. A blind man’s gamble.’

‘You denied it just now?’

‘Not much use. But I did.’

She didn’t know what to think. The mind spun. She couldn’t adjust to what went on behind the sight he didn’t have. There was an all-or-nothing aspect about him, wild and unpredictable, amoral you might say — which she found appealing. ‘Luckily, the bloody bird snuffed it. Unluckily though, Waistcoat got in on the act. But as long as nothing happens and we get safely ashore everything will be all right.’

He held her hand. ‘What if we did get pulled in?’

‘Oh, I’ll be OK. I hitched a lift. I just hope they’ll believe me. I don’t have a clue what they’ve got on board, do I? And you don’t know what they’ve been up to because you’re blind.’

‘We’ll try and swing it that way.’

‘I expect we’ll land the stuff with no problem. I’ve been on many boats that have been as lucky. The pigeon didn’t make it with the message, after all. I mean, how could it? You are funny! But if the worst happens and I get arrested, maybe the court will award me ten thousand hours community service, looking after a blind man!’

French and English morse stations were bouncing messages up and down the Channel, the best music in the world. Homeward bound, he would like to know whereabouts the stuff on board was to be off loaded, though from now on it had to be none of his business. Any enquiry would lead to ructions that might be fatal. Not that he was afraid. Such threats made life worthwhile, you might say, though he didn’t want unnecessary danger, having no intention of vacating the world willingly now that he had found Judy. He could, on the other hand, see the reverse side of the matter, that being with Judy he couldn’t care less what happened, having dispensed with the German Numbers Woman, said a last goodbye to Vanya in Moscow, and found out that you could be more than happy on the Flying Dutchman.

THIRTY-TWO

The feeling on the boat was of being almost home and, though far from true, at least they had done most of the journey back from the Azores. The Ouessant light flickered forty miles to starboard, Cleaver keeping well clear of the reporting point before heading into the Channel.

‘A sight for sore eyes.’ Killisick lounged at the galley door. ‘I’ve been longing for this like a woman waiting to get a kid out of her. From now on it’s full speed for the off-loading.’

‘But where will that be?’ Judy said.

‘You’ll have to ask the chief, only don’t. He’s no man for questions. He gets the screaming ab-dabs. Wait and see is the only rule. No use riling him when things are going good, except you don’t know whether things are going good till you’re sitting in a bed and breakfast making sure the Queen’s head on your money is the right side up.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ she said. ‘I’m only here for the ride.’

‘It might be bumpier the next few days.’

‘All that time?’

‘If we drop it off on the east coast it will be.’

‘As long as I can get a train to London.’

‘Somebody might give you a lift. Or we’ll dump the stuff and then backtrack, all lily-white to Dover. Only a couple of hours then to London.’

‘It seems tailor made for me.’ They went inside. ‘I’ll take Howard his supper.’

‘And yours as well, while you’re about it.’ He ladled potatoes, stew, baked beans and bread onto two plates.

She nudged Howard, and kissed the top of his head before he could turn. ‘I like my man to eat.’

‘Hardly time.’ He scooped it with the spoon.

‘What’s on Radio Four tonight?’

‘Can’t say. But there’s something interesting on VHF.’ He plugged in the spare jacks and passed the phones, undecided before she came in as to whether or not he would let her know.

‘Can’t hear anything.’

‘You will.’ The bad dream voice was unmistakable, he had heard it scores of times, and now they listened to the clear transmission, the demanding tone of a woman who knew that persistence furthered. Howard couldn’t say how long she had been trying, but the voice put him into despair. Once more it came: ‘Pontifex calling Daedalus, can you read me, over. Pontifex calling Daedalus,’ again and again, sometimes with hardly a pause. He wanted the sea to open its green mouth and swallow the woman, which was as much of a miracle as him being here with Judy should it do so.

He had anticipated, was ready, but Judy flicked at the VHF transmitter switch as if she had been looking over the equipment during his absence from the cabin, and only waiting for the moment. ‘Daedalus calling Pontifex,’ she cried, ‘I hear you, darling.’

He gripped her wrist and dragged her away, turned the set off. ‘If the chief hears you you’re dead. And so am I. It’s radio silence — until he says so.’

‘They can’t stop me.’

‘Well, I have. You can listen, but not send.’ Tears fell onto his wrist, and he wondered how long he could hold her. Hysterical, she pushed and dragged. He had no will to fight, though strength and an instinct for survival overrode him. ‘Let’s not argue. Leave her alone. Maybe tomorrow you can talk, or the day after.’

He caught the rush, and her body pressed hard, as if she had come at him out of irresistible passion instead of loathing. ‘She’ll be gone by then.’

So he hoped. She’d be out of range. There was nothing more to say, and he again exerted all his strength to stop her reaching the switch, till hearing Waistcoat: ‘What’s going on in here. Is it a lovers’ tiff, or what?’

‘You might say so.’

‘I heard the bloody racket on the bridge. You can sort your arses out later. Just listen in and get some good news.’ He poked Judy. ‘Piss off to the galley, and earn your keep.’

She walked away, and Howard stayed round-shouldered at his dials, moving onto shortwave to rid himself of Carla’s voice. Let her yammer into nothingness, pleas bouncing back and meeting no one’s ears but her own — the ultimate in futility. She must have heard Judy’s exalted words, so would go on till her windpipe withered and she stopped for lack of air. Judy was his whatever happened.

The north Atlantic forecast played its music, a stream of morse not impinging as it should. Misery forced him out of his stillness to go on deck and look, as if he had eyes, seeing grey and tattered cloud pushing them into the hundred mile mouth of the Channel.

Judy came back, as he had known she would. ‘I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do. I’ll only listen. Promise.’

He felt her shirt wet from tears, unless driving spray had caught her coming along the deck, or she had leaned too far over with the idea of throwing herself in. Sea salt tasted like tears. ‘My boat and its hero is going up-Channel,’ she sang, Ted having given her a glass of icy vodka. ‘I finished it before leaving the galley.’

‘I’m not your hero,’ he told her. ‘You wanted me, from the moment you came on board, because I had my hands on the transmitters. I wondered why you were so set on me.’

‘That’s not true. Honestly. I never thought she’d be close enough to hear on VHF. In any case it was you who told me about her. I wouldn’t have known for sure, would I? She might be my lover, but you’re my hero for telling me. You’re the odd man out on this damned boat. Just let me listen, and I’ll be happy.’

Her voice came as if from across the aether, except that now he was close enough to breathe against her cheek. She took his hand warmly, the other on his shoulder. She had come from the Azores with a basket of pineapples, and he could hear her talking.

He went back to the VHF channel, but she stayed beside him. Carla had given up. Two southward-bound yachties chatted about having a piss-up when their boats got to La Coruña — last man arriving pays the tally. ‘We can try again later,’ he said. ‘If she’s on the same course she may come back around midnight.’

‘She’ll be going south. I’ve lost her.’

‘She didn’t sound as if she wanted to lose you.’

‘I’ll never hear her again. Or see her.’

He couldn’t believe Fate would be so good to him. ‘We’ll try, anyway. I don’t want you to think I haven’t given her a fair go.’

‘I’m tired of it all. She doesn’t want me, anyway. She only wants me because she thinks I’m available at the moment. I know her. She once left me sitting outside a café in Greece, to follow another woman, and came back half an hour later because the woman told her to get lost or she would call the police. She told me as if it was a joke. Loyalty was a funny notion to her, but I believed in it — though maybe that was because I was in love. She told me she was in love with me, but that didn’t mean she had to be faithful, she said. I was a fool to think it meant anything. The only time I’m not burning in hell is when I’m talking to you.’

Love, he well knew, is mostly anguish, which either burns itself out, or goes on till no love is left. Or the light may stay constant, shine with enduring affection, but even then it’s a dead end, though what better way is there of being alive?

He tried the radio again, but the yachties were still trading backslaps and guffaws. ‘At least they’re happy,’ she said, and he saw her smile.

‘How did a nice woman like you come to work on boats such as this?’ She didn’t suffer while talking. ‘Sounds a strange career, though it must be a long story.’

‘Not too long. I’m twenty-eight, and it sometimes feels I’ve been alive forever. My father’s a farmer, owns a lot of land in Lincolnshire, and there were five of us, all girls. I wasn’t the sort of university or agricultural college type, not like the others, so I did secretarial. I dropped out, and went to some cookery place, believe it or not. I worked in a restaurant, till I got thrown out. I won’t say why. Other places took me on, and I did all right. I met this chap who told me he was a sailor. He was rich, and had a yacht as big as this. We lived together. He had a flat in London and a house on the coast in Devon, and we sailed all over the Med. He was a bully though. He saw me talking to another skipper, in a bar in Corfu, and when we got back to the boat he knocked me about. That was only the first time. But one day I gave him a mouthful, and slammed him back. He went down like a skittle, right? Poor bloke! I didn’t know my strength, and he didn’t know what hit him. I was crying with happiness, but was terrified at the same time. He just lay there, moaning. Must have cracked his head as he went down. I threw a bucket of water over him, and when he began to stir I ran. Never saw him again. I bummed around, and just before my money ran out got work on another yacht, no strings attached this time. After a year or two I met Carla.

‘Carry on from there, if you like. I roamed around a bit. Some boats smuggled, some didn’t. The last I worked on did, so I got known by this lot, and worked for them. I even learned how to navigate, and switch the radio on and off. All summer I was talking to Carla, whenever I felt like it. It’s the only life I know, and I like it, so I suppose I’ll go on doing it.’

She talked as if disembodied, nothing happening around her, and almost, he thought, as if no one was listening. ‘You’d be better off giving up the sea.’

‘You think so?’

‘Get back on dry land and stay there.’

‘I sometimes wonder. I’ve done plenty to live on for the rest of my life. I’d like an income, really, and a nice house. I’ve got a bit saved, but not enough. My father wants me to live in a cottage near the farm. Don’t know that I shall. Wouldn’t like to be an old maid with a cat.’

Such dreams might be too late, everyone on the boat finished, doomed. ‘This is my one and only trip,’ he said.

‘Seems you’re not exactly made for life as a mariner.’

‘Is anybody? I came on board to meet you, and hear your voice.’

‘It’s sometimes hard to believe you can’t see.’

‘I don’t need to. I see you more clearly than you think. I know you’re beautiful, for instance.’

‘I’m a mess, is all I know, inside and out. But thanks anyway.’

‘If I said that much about myself at least I’d know I was alive and could see properly. I’m happy now, though it hasn’t always been like that. When you’re blind everything on the outside comes into you, but there’s no room for all of it, so to avoid chaos you have to chop the detritus clear, meaning there’s so much that you don’t see, or can’t afford to let yourself see. After a while a lot of what’s on the outside stops its rush to get in, and from then on you only see what’s essential for your wellbeing. You live in the dark, so what you miss you don’t need anyway. At least that’s what you tell yourself — another piece of survival technique! Strange, me being able to tell you this, because I haven’t been able to tell myself up to now. But I feel a different man to what I was six months ago, because I can let everything rush in that will, though what it means I wouldn’t like to say. I don’t really know, so I expect I’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘You are a funny chap. I love it when you tell me things about yourself.’

‘I like to hear you talk, whatever you say.’

‘I wonder if you’d think so if we’d been living together for five years.’

‘You’re a bit young to ask that. I’d give you loyalty, though.’

‘I’m sure you would. And I’d treasure it.’

He thought of Laura — a rare occurrence since leaving her — knowing he couldn’t claim to be loyal at all, because he had no intention of going back, the moral ground cut from under his feet. He was too happy to let the idea disturb him. ‘There’s not much we can do.’

‘When I don’t think of Carla, it’s you I love. It was just the sound of her voice that upset me. I haven’t seen her since Malaga, a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn’t so good. I don’t care if I never see her again. She’s given me the run-around ever since I’ve known her. Maybe I like that, as well, and that’s why I love her.’

He smiled. ‘You mean that if I give you the run-around you’ll begin to love me?’

‘Don’t try, darling. I don’t want to stop liking you.’

The boat was so battered by the waves that he was fearful it would upend any moment and take them on a zig-zag to the bottom, food for the fishes after their brief time. ‘I can’t believe in that sort of thing.’

‘Hold me,’ she said. ‘I want someone to hold me.’

He stroked the back of her neck. She liked the subtle hands of a blind man. In his disability he didn’t see her, so she felt safe. The spark gap between them lit back and forth, blind man’s fingers soothing her anguish. Too much in turmoil to be eased by what he was doing, he only knew he should say nothing for a while. Words distanced people. Sometimes they broke bonds.

The spine was distinct through her sweater, which he lifted, touching warm flesh. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘You’re doing the right thing.’

Easy to know what she wanted, as he stroked her loose breasts with their soon prominent nipples. She kissed him while his fingers moved in a gentle massage. The band of her slacks was elasticated, and as his hand went down he felt no need to speak, an expert touch lulling her into an ease that made her lose all sense of where she was, or even who was giving such comfort and pleasure. Half asleep, she willed him to descend her seemingly enlarged body so that only moments after his fingers became wet and entered, she cried out, gripping him with harder kisses while he went on stroking till she had finished.

‘Oh, that was wonderful, my love. I needed that, from somebody else, but most of all from you. Let’s go to my bunk. I want all of you now.’

During the night through the morning they passed the submarine training areas, their small craft on the inshore traffic lane, the seascape eerie and silent under a half moon, shadows of tankers and container ships ahead and behind. Waistcoat called on Howard every few minutes, to be told there was only chatter on the aether, which had nothing to do with them.

‘He’ll calm down when it’s dark.’ Paul Cinnakle took a rest from tending his engines. Howard, relaxed and easy at the stern, wondered what a man like Cinnakle was doing on such a boat, whom he saw as neatly dressed and knew as quietly spoken, hardly one of the others, though who was similar to anyone else on board? They worked for the ongoing motion of the vessel, each his own well camouflaged rock.

‘Night’s better for the chief’s condition,’ Cinnakle said. ‘Better for us, as well. As long as the other boats have lights, we don’t need any. It’s better to be on a dark boat, in more ways than one. When I’ve made my pile with this lot I’ll never go near sea-water again, even if it means living in the middle of Australia. Still, I’m not unhappy, belonging where I do at the moment. As long as I don’t have to look at the perishin’ water. I like engines, and you know why?’

Howard had to say he didn’t.

‘Because they can’t talk. I listen to ’em singing, but when I shout they don’t answer back. Engines are my cup of tea. They sing as they work, and don’t give any lip. I must get below. See you.’

That’s why we’re here. Howard fumbled a way to his radio post, but paused by the rail, as if he had lost his way, direction topsy-turvy, bearings gone. He stilled his shaking hands, couldn’t think, reason gone overboard. He wanted the reassurance of his radio gear, craved his beloved toys.

Nothing on the air waves, though there would be soon. Radar was tracking them along the Channel, but they were beyond the twelve-mile limit. If the morse letter had not been taken note of Waistcoat would get the stuff unloaded and away without molestation. It had gone astray. Or perhaps not. He couldn’t yet know. If it hadn’t, a pre-emptive strike was called for, legal or not. Impossible to predict. Hard to care what happened, warm in the arms of Judy whenever they had the chance to be alone. The suppressed anxieties of everyone on board convinced him he was as much a member of the crew as they were, hoping for success with the rest of them. He had once, beyond his own control, gone into an amusement arcade and pushed every coin from his pocket into the one-armed bandit, waiting for the crash and fall of a jackpot — which hadn’t happened.

In the night they would pass the town where Laura was sleeping. She wouldn’t know, or see them. He was sorry she had suffered such anxiety — if she had, and who could be sure? He wouldn’t go back, but can a blind man take to the road like the Wandering Jew? The wash of the sea made a comforting sound.

The German Numbers Woman came back, with her hectoring repetitive tone, coded instructions going to no one knew where or to whom, though most likely to say they would never make landfall.

‘NEUN — SECHS — FUNF — ACHT — VIER — EINS — NEUN — NEUN — SIEBEN — DREI — SECHS — VIER — DREI — EINS,’ remorselessly on and on.

He passed an earphone to Judy. ‘Take a listen.’

‘Who is she?’

‘I don’t know. What do you make of it?’

‘Sounds a nasty piece of work.’

He laughed. ‘I’m used to her. Heard her for years.’

‘You shivered, just then.’

He had, and not from the cold. Landfall blocked. His sins were too great, he had never atoned, not even thought of it, was responsible for all those members of mankind in all countries over the globe who hadn’t stopped evil and done good in the ages of the past. Landfall in the mind of the German Numbers Woman was a paradise no one deserved. He silenced her, by flipping the needle, unwilling to take on a burden that would always be there.

Routine weather synopses were typed and handed in, though anyone on board with a ghetto blaster could bring in local stations and hear the forecasts in spoken language. He must be sure that it matched his own, nothing more he could do for them, or wanted to, turned back to the radio nevertheless, invisible switches on which his nervous fingers found a kind of reality. She tapped his shoulder. ‘What would your wife say if she knew we were having an affair?’

The question was soothing, from a more human world. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Course you do! I mean, would she be jealous?’

‘I think so.’

‘You mean she doesn’t have lovers as well?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Well, maybe a man never does know — if she wants to hide it. It’s easy to hide it if you want to.’

‘I wouldn’t want to, though, with you.’ Everything was in the open, nothing hidden, on the boat, so it wouldn’t be when they got off it either.

‘What’s she like?’

‘It’s hard to tell.’

‘Flippin’ ’ell!’

‘Well, not just like that. But why do you want to know?’

She laughed. ‘You always do, I suppose.’

‘I’ll tell you when I can.’

‘Maybe I’ll see her, one day.’

That, he thought, would be a right meeting and, wanting to alter the topic, said: ‘I haven’t heard anymore from Carla.’

She leaned over him. ‘I don’t need her anymore. I’ve got you now.’

Impossible to know how true it was, but her words were honey nevertheless, though if Carla were to magically appear out of the blue and walk along the deck, he didn’t doubt Judy would run to her. He would expect no less. In any case, she might get in touch — who throughout months of listening had become real enough to him — after they had, landed, if and when they did.

Hope was in the crucible, the future chaos, as far as plans between him and Judy went. All was fantasy. His mind, the only means of sight, grew darker. Everyone on the boat believed in a future, for morale’s sake couldn’t afford not to. Cannister had shaved, smartened himself up for a spot of shore leave, as if still a young and careless rating in the Navy. Cleaver had stopped his jibes about the paucity of cucumber sandwiches, and said how much he was looking forward to: ‘Going down the gangway, with pouch, pipe, purse and prophylactics in my pocket!’

‘I wonder though, what’s going to happen to us,’ he said.

She lounged on the sofa opposite and, peeling an orange from the cloth bag she carried, leaned forward to pass him a segment. ‘I’ll tell you, if you like. We’ll get ashore, and I’ll take you to the nearest decent place for a meal. We’ll talk, and hold hands, and the men in the room will envy you, and wonder what you’ve got that they haven’t. I’ll moon over you to make them jealous. Then we’ll go to a hotel and have a proper sleep together. I’ll lead you by the hand.’

‘I’ll hold you to it.’

She passed another sliver of orange. ‘Eat it. We share. You brought me back to life, didn’t you? You made me feel like myself again, and I know it took a lot of doing.’

He laughed, drinking in the spirit of her still uncaring youth. ‘I didn’t even try.’

‘So what would happen if you did? Whizz bang! You’d never get rid of me.’

‘I’ll never want to.’

‘Oh, right. I don’t even have to think about what I’m going to say when I talk to you. I just say it and know it’ll be all right. With Carla it was different. I had to be careful. I could never be easy with her. She thought I was, but she was so selfish she could never know the tension I was under.’

Nor had he, because she’d sounded relaxed enough over the radio on all those nights he’d listened. She hadn’t known about his crafty eavesdropping, though perhaps he would be able to tell her, if such a time ever came. ‘What a life it’s been for you.’

‘Flippin’ amazing how you can love someone who’s not very nice. She didn’t even understand me, I’ll never know why. It should have been easy enough. But I’m keeping my man from his precious wireless. You’re the ears of the boat, and that’s more important than eyes. Everybody’s got eyes. They’re ten a penny. But ears are different. They’re special. Not as special as your hands, though. They’re brilliant. Still, you’d better get back to it, while I go and see what’s for our dinner.’

‘A kiss before you go.’

‘You don’t have to ask.’ He had to believe she had fallen in love with him, because a blind man had no right to be sceptical. He had kept the secret of his love from Laura, but she had been his nurse rather than that divine love which ever)’ member of the human species who had evolved out of the slime ought to experience once in life. He hadn’t been the love of her life, either, merely the purpose of her existence, that of keeping a safe house around him, to make a refuge for herself as well. On a walk in Malvern she had said a car had just passed with a logo in the window saying: ‘DARWIN WAS RIGHT’, and he was appalled that someone should flaunt such a daft statement, though now, the boat whacking its way through a following sea, he had to believe it.

The staccato rhythm of Portishead pumped out the weather forecast. Everyone on board would agree that Darwin was right, that only the fittest would survive, the fittest being those who saw nowhere to go after death but into blackness, and who behaved as instinct required for the ultimate good of self preservation.

A force five wind, in the North Sea, occasionally gale, but it would diminish and grow calm by tomorrow, a better telegram to hand Waistcoat, he thought, on knocking at his door. He took a few steps to where he smelled the steak being eaten for lunch, and gave him the paper, arm full out, as close as he could get without bumping the table. ‘The latest weather, Chief.’

Waistcoat snapped it away to read. ‘That’s good. We’ll need it good by then.’ His cutlery rattled. ‘Any other interesting stuff?’

‘Most of the waves are surprisingly quiet.’

‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’ He ate easily, at home in the serpentine mud walled tunnels of his mind. ‘What are you waiting for?’

Howard turned. ‘I was about to go.’

‘No, hang on a bit.’ His appetite was good, wine glass and eating irons moving in harmony. ‘I’ve got something to say to you, Howard.’

‘What might that be?’

‘Don’t get huffy with me. All I want to say is, just watch out for that Judy. She’s had more boyfriends than you’ve had hot dinners. Girlfriends, as well. A few things in between, I shouldn’t wonder.’

He punctuated Waistcoat’s laugh: ‘I’ll listen out during the night. Maybe I’ll hear something. I don’t need much sleep. You never can tell what I might pick up.’

‘Yeh, slog your guts out at that boffin’s gear. Work like the rest of us. I’ll tell you this, though: I rely on you as much as any of the others. Maybe even more — if I think about it.’

He shuffled along the deck, knowing he must stay wary in the maritime den he was trapped in, because Waistcoat’s remark was unusual, after the era of mistrust, as if he had hoped to lure him into a mistake plain for everyone to witness, even sending a message for unknown listeners to hear.

Scraps of talk from various places on the boat were joined by zones of darkness, but he found a cleanliness in the sea air which encouraged him in his design. Waistcoat’s foul remarks about Judy — made out of spite, hatred, and perhaps even envy — didn’t disturb him. Everybody on board knew he and Judy were in love, hard to hide it in such a place, and who would care to, in any case? They noted every move he made, and neither he nor Judy cared.

Three ships on the same frequency were calling different stations — Portishead, Gdynia, and Bahrein — and getting no answers. They would soon enough, so he spun the needle and tuned in to something else. Morse tinkled into space and was lost, and thus were the cries of humans likewise unmet. Even when two bodies were face to face the wrong signals could be sent, or none that were vital be transmitted, or the right ones that were misconstrued.

A Russian ship failed to get through, the same for one calling Algiers, as if a fearful ambush of atmospherics hovered over the coast stations, or the operators’ ears were for some reason stopped up. Communication could be uncertain at the best of times, and often there was nothing to do but wait for the sunspot to go, or hope for better conditions, or persist in your attempts until the blockage dissolved from whoever’s ears.

He copied the Mediterranean weather, to give the impression he still had his uses. Richard tapped him in passing: ‘Keep it up.’

‘I will.’

As long as he did he would come to no harm, Richard thought as he stood by the wheel. Being on watch took his tiredness away. When not working he craved sleep, for the trip to be over, to wake up in the luxury of isolation at home, but it was a perilous state of mind, looking so far ahead when the job was nowhere finished.

An engine sounded in the obscurity of low cloud. Aircraft could take photographs through any amount of precipitation, or plot them on their radar, but what was a large piston-engined plane doing out of the air traffic control zone? Gone, as eerily as it had come, but would it return?

He hadn’t felt a moment’s ease on the trip. So unexpectedly summed up, he knew it to be true. On other jobs his mind had been in neutral from start or finish, a couldn’t care less attitude which told him that good sense wasn’t buried too deeply and would come when needed. Confident and relaxed — but now he wasn’t, not anymore — now that he had told himself so. He wondered if he was the only one on board with forebodings, thought he was, because the others seemed normal enough. Normal however, was button-lipped at the best as well as at the worst of times. You couldn’t know what they were thinking even when you had sailed with them so often.

In improving visibility he tried to make out the Isle of Wight through binoculars, not sure whether he fixed on a bank of cloud, or a line of hills. Land played tricks, coy or perilous, scotch mist or fleeting image. Rain splattered the windows. The cloudscape had gaps, a line of sun either to bless or blemish. Cleaver, never one to shun work, recorded its wayward appearances with the sextant, while Killisick slaved to make ends meet in the galley. Food was running short, at least in variety, though nobody much cared since land was so close. Waistcoat paced his state room, aware more than anyone else that the test was coming.

The waves went on forever, they always did, a sight for sore eyes though not just now, each on the bump and slide, one over the other, fist into fist and here comes the next, an ongoing monotony. Cinnakle hoped his engines wouldn’t seize up for lack of fuel, lucky to be thinking of nothing else, no sense of threat from any quarter — as far as anyone could tell. Cannister and Scuddilaw kept watch on deck, three pairs of eyes better than one alone on the bridge. ‘More reliable,’ Waistcoat swore, ‘than your effing radar.’ So all were occupied in their allotted ways, except Judy who had been in to say she was getting her head down for an hour.

Time that dragged by the minute had to be endured. Luckily there was no such thing as forever. His course was steady, no shake at the compass, a dead-on zero-seven-five towards the narrowing mouth of Dover, old Cape Grey Nose to starboard.

A single engined low wing monoplane made a shadow over the water. Another inquisitive bastard, this time different. Maybe he was a private aviator coming from France, except that he should have been higher. One plane was fortuitous, a second definitely worrying.

Howard came in. ‘He was talking on VHF. Nearly popped my eardrums.’

‘Who to?’

‘Somebody on shore, I suppose. In English. La-di-da voice. Said numbers, which sounded like course and position.’

‘What did the others say back?’

‘They just acknowledged the signal. It could have been his coordinates, but the course sounded like ours.’

‘We’ll lose ’em in the night. A bit of zig-zagging ought to do it. It’s far from beyond us. I’ll tell the chief as soon as Cleaver takes over. No use worrying him too soon.’

‘Meanwhile I’ll do a stint on the Interpol frequencies.’

He wanted fog, a nice all-hiding cough-dropping fog, but the last way to get anything was to pray for it, though mist around the Foreland would also have its dangers — like bumping into the wall of a container ship or cross-Channel ferry. Even a fishing boat would mean a nasty smack. Bad luck to kill ourselves, or anyone else, come to that. Such blatant aerial shadowing hadn’t happened before.

Waistcoat would scream that they had been shopped, and who could deny it? Maybe the people in the Azores had set the trap. He would believe anything, except that Howard had had anything to do with stitching them up. In the drugs game everyone played dirty. The more stuff at the bottom of the sea, or burned behind a customs warehouse, the more the price of powder and weed went up, so all the better for those who found a chair when the music stopped. On the other hand it could mean a grudge was being settled, someone getting his own back on a bit of pique so ancient that he who had done the trickery — hardly thought of as such at the time — had lost all memory of it. The trouble was, half a dozen good men went down with whoever they were after, and none could be sure who had gone shopping with such a big trolley.

When anybody was caught it was always because of a tip-off, which those betrayed could never see the reason for. Yet even the South Americans — savages to a man — wouldn’t do anything to Waistcoat. Or so Richard hoped, a ripple of ice going into his blood. Of course they wouldn’t. Waistcoat knew too much, was too solidly embedded in the network. Such treachery on that level of the hierarchy was unthinkable, would ricochet too far upstairs, though never far enough if Waistcoat began to tell all he knew — which he surely would — to get a shorter sentence.

Morbid thoughts because he had heard a couple of aeroplanes, but every sign worried when close to the white cliffs. Keep a good lookout, and forget all else. He stood at the stern after Cleaver had taken the wheel. Pale grey cumulus, settled in the west, had decided to come after them, egged on by those behind flamed into orange by the setting sun. The wind diminished but the chase was on. Only a fool would deny it. The evening was peaceful enough, but a menace from both west and east was about to box them into a situation hard to avoid or get out of. He didn’t like it, tapped the pistol under his coat, and resisted the urge to throw it into the water.

THIRTY-THREE

Howard’s inner sight was for the time being of a blacker blackness than during the day. He only knew it was night because he was tired, yet the blacker the blackness the more he needed to see. In the sink of exhaustion he forced senses into sharpness, though for what end he found hard to say. Every shape on the boat haunted him: every person was on the hunt to get him. They were invisible in their prowling.

Hearing didn’t give enough proof as to whether they knew what was in his mind. He put fists to his ears, pressed at them painfully as if to get into his head and rearrange his brain. Sharper hearing was the only way, and he wondered whether anyone else would know when he achieved it.

He gave his attention to the radio. The crew had eaten their evening slop, and their vigilance seemed relaxed. Voices were tracking a boat which could only be theirs. Perhaps every small craft was likewise noted. He wouldn’t know, but in spite of the elliptical maritime lingo he knew they had found the position of the boat, divined its course and speed — a simple matter if they knew what to look for.

The boat was clogging fair and square into a trap, though Waistcoat might yet have a few sly moves in mind. Should they turn out to be too deviously on the way to succeeding, Howard would break radio silence and reveal the position to whoever was listening. His fingers had explored the face of the transmitter for a dummy run every day since leaving port. He knew how to set the frequency and the morse key in his bag would be plugged in to do its work.

The voices were circumspect, brief and self assured. A few clipped numerals, and they were off the air, confident at not being overheard, never imagining that Waistcoat’s yacht would be carrying a man whose only job was to listen at the radio. He would not tell Waistcoat what he had heard: no more cooperation, though it might make little difference.

‘Are we going to be all right?’

He felt his soul damned in lying to her. ‘Yes, I think so. No problem.’

‘Anything startling on shortwave?’

‘I listen. Not a word from Carla on any wave.’

‘Her boat’s done turnaround and gone back to the Med. The skipper she works for doesn’t lose any time.’

‘Nobody does, if they can help it.’

‘Not in this game they don’t. I’ve given her up, anyway.’

He switched on the shortwave transmitter, curbing his despondency. ‘Give her a call.’

‘Do you mean it?’

She failed the test — for which he was risking his life — yet he wanted her to go on knowing Carla, because if something happened to him she wouldn’t be without a friend. ‘This is the time she would listen.’

She picked up the microphone: ‘Daedalus calling Pontifex, how do you read me, over?’ No response, she tried once more, then pushed the microphone aside.

He noted the shaking of her hand. ‘She’s not there.’

‘That’s it, then,’ she said. ‘Thanks for letting me try. You know I only love you, don’t you?’

He felt for her. ‘I’m aware of that.’

She drew him into her arms, her words so close at his lips that he saw them as if written. ‘Don’t think I love you only because you let me use the radio. If I’d heard her I would have told her to get lost. I really mean it.’

‘Let’s go on deck.’ He would set no more tests. ‘You can tell me what stars are out.’

‘You want them to see us kissing?’

He felt the twenty-five he had never been. ‘Yes, and even more than that.’

She led him to the bows. ‘It’s cold. Real England weather.’

‘I like it. But you need your anorak.’

‘I don’t mind.’ She put an arm through his. ‘I see the Plough, so we must be heading east-north-east. When we turn north the fun will start. There’s tension on the boat, but I don’t care what happens now I have you.’ She kissed him, warm in his arms. ‘I don’t care about anything. I know we’ll make out. I don’t want to lose you, and I won’t.’

‘We’ll be together.’ He could hardly imagine it, but to question her hopes would smash his own. He was more than happy to welcome back the young man in him, only wishing he had new eyes to see. ‘Just as long as you like. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I should have met you when I was twenty. I don’t feel much use to you now.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I can be every use to you, if you’ll let me.’

‘I will, for as long as you like,’ though he didn’t want her to Laura him.

She laughed. ‘It’s wonderful what we agree on. We’re two of a kind. It’s like being with a brother, except it’s very sexy.’ She turned, head up he knew: ‘The Plough’s covered. Gone to watch another couple, though they won’t be as happy as us. Maybe you ought to get back to the radio. I’ll see if the chief needs anything from the galley. Be back later.’

Shortwave, lively in fine sunspot conditions, rippled with activity, Warsaw hammering out its messages, call sign before bubbles of sound, harsh yet rhythmical, pleasant, almost hypnotic to hear. Forecasts came from all corners promising good weather tomorrow. The German Numbers Woman strung him along, and all was right beneath the heaviside layer because he was in love with a woman who loved him.

Voices on VHF indicated that someone was in the know about their boat. His morse letter-tape must have been received. Perhaps even poor Jehu had landed with confirmation of their return. He was aware of Waistcoat standing close.

‘Any news, Sparks?’

Howard took off his earphones. ‘It’s quiet tonight.’

‘Even on VHF?’

‘There’s something in the distance. I think it’s in German. Can’t be anything to do with us.’

‘All right. But keep your ears pinned back.’

Such mateyness was disturbing though he imagined that a man of Waistcoat’s moods could occasionally crave ease and openness, unable to survive all the time in an unloved state. A friendly word or two, even a smile, sent him to bed happy. Good that he seemed halfway human now and again.

Something had happened. Waistcoat was villainous, as everyone found on coming into his employment, lived so much in his own mind he wasn’t aware of the attitudes of others, and didn’t care however much they knew it. Waistcoat assumed he didn’t need to know or care. Cocksure and brutal, he had been operated on a long time ago by the surgeon of circumstance, any trace of human feeling had been cut away leaving a contempt for everybody, which had led him into a labyrinth without exit.

Even so, Waistcoat must suspect that several stages were missing in his ability to deal with people, knew that he lacked the ability to get more out of them than could be paid for by money, which kept his temper on a fractious and violent level, and his body in permanent thrall to the worms. Because everyone put up with his high handedness he believed cunning to be the ultimate protection. The more he thought it true the more he let success deceive and lull him, unable to see the danger because he hadn’t gone through normal experiences of development that most people had as a matter of course. He had jumped, so Richard had implied, from being a battered infant to an accomplished and bitter thief who, as they often heard — from the horse’s mouth, no less — stood ‘no fucking nonsense’. Howard considered that the so-called nonsense such people were unable to tolerate commonly doomed them.

The rest of the crew members would stay loyal to Waistcoat, too much afraid of him not to do as they were told. They may despise and even hate him, but they worked with competent dedication because it was in their own interests that the enterprise succeeded.

Expecting no help from any quarter, the one man on board they should be wary of, Howard left the radio running, earphones on the table emitting faint noises, and went outside as silently as only a blind man could — as if tempted by the clean air of the breeze. The boat vibrated to its steadily humming engines, wind at the back of his head as he moved along, meeting no one because they were on the bridge or in their quarters. Judy had gone to hunt up a gin and tonic, promising one for him later. Waistcoat’s one gesture towards concern for his crew was to make sure the booze never ran dry. ‘The grub’s a bit short,’ Killisick had told them, ‘so maybe we’ll cast out the fishing lines before we get home, but we’ve got all the fags and bacca we need, so we can’t complain.’

Hands going from port hole to port hole, he felt his way along the deck, hardly knowing where he was heading but drawn on by instinct. A piece of wire that came out of an opening made little impression on his fingers. He passed it, but turned back, and followed its direction to the upper deck, a thin strong length of wire, probably copper, ideal for a radio independent of the main aerials.

He shuffled along the steps, as if out for as much of a stroll as could be got on such a vessel, convenient handrails everywhere. Ordinary men needed every assistance in rough weather, so boats were made as if for the blind.

At the top of the steps, and towards the main aerials, he trod over Waistcoat’s state room, taking care not to be heard, holding the rail, putting his heel soundlessly down followed by the rest of the foot, paces completed in silence and slow motion. The wire, almost invisibly laid, came from Waistcoat’s cabin. Howard stopped. Easy to snap the strand, though not so as to show that the wind had done it. Otherwise Waistcoat’s suspicions would become certainty, if they weren’t already. A warning disturbed his darkness, that Waistcoat knew he had been distorting his reports. He shivered in the more erratic gusts from one side and the other. The wire from below was attached to the main system, confirming that Waistcoat had a VHF receiver in his stateroom. He could check what Howard said he had heard, or know what items he had claimed not to hear.

‘Hey, I’ve been looking for you,’ she called from the stairway.

A finger to his mouth, he moved quickly down — at whatever risk. ‘Don’t say anything. I’ll follow you.’

She looked back. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘The chief doesn’t like anybody stepping over his quarters.’

‘Oh, right!’ she laughed. ‘They never do, especially if they’ve got the DTs. Take this, then. It’s the best gin and tonic between here and a pub in Boston. I made it especially for my lover.’ She kissed him, and put it into his hand as they stood by the rail. ‘I had mine back there. It wasn’t easy carrying two.’

He drank it with the speed of water, made tasteless by the peril he was in. ‘A kind thought.’

‘Is anything worrying you?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You look as if you’ve had a shock. I can feel everything that upsets you. You’ve got something on your mind, and won’t tell me. Is it that you can’t?’

He tried for the right uncaring tone. ‘It’s just the everyday anxiety I’ve had since birth. I’m wondering if everything will be all right when we reach land. Nothing more.’

Her lips must show disbelief, but she said: ‘It always goes better than you think. Maybe the gin will settle you. It works wonders for me.’

‘I feel all right, with you being here.’ A shade of dependence was coming back, as when he had been with Laura, which he didn’t like but knew was inevitable. ‘I’m better when you’re near me.’

She threw his empty glass into the sea, following it with her own, turning to hold him. ‘Same here. We’ll be OK, if we stick together.’

‘I love you,’ he said, ‘more than you can know.’

‘Love you, too, Sailor! But don’t look so serious. We’ll be all right. I’ve been through the worry of landing scores of times.’

Richard took his stance in the glowing pre-light of dawn. A fire in the east, stoked by some agency, seemed unsure it wanted the trouble of warming and illuminating another day. Might even put a damper on it and go back to sleep, except the day was impossible to stop, would get there maybe sooner than anyone wanted. He had been through too many to know that the blissful grey peace ever lasted long.

A series of courses to steer, handed out by Cleaver, and seconded in no uncertain terms by Waistcoat, were to be followed precisely. Clouds had overtaken them during the night, the red sky hovering as if to swallow the boat and everyone on her. Two large ships and a small coaster were safely ahead, both shorelines as dark and solidly outlined as if about to be rained on — a menacing straits to go through.

They had passed where Laura lay asleep, and she couldn’t have known how close her wayward husband had been. If she did maybe she also dreamed of me, he thought, though knew he would never see her again. After the trip, and the ceremony of paying off, he would call on his father and make sure he was all right.

From there he would go back to the house and put it on the market, and after it was sold move to where memories of Amanda could no longer cause him misery. As for Howard, he was too enamoured of Judy to find his way home, though Richard assumed it wouldn’t belong before she tired of the novelty of having a blind man in tow, and lit off with someone else, leaving Howard to tap his white stick up the steps to Laura after all.

Cleaver, looking over his shoulder, noted that the compass was spot on and steady. ‘We’re doing well, after that fine bit of speed during the night. I think the chief’s pleased. We’ll beat ’em yet.’

‘We always have. What’s the ETA?’

‘Tomorrow night, as close as dammit.’

‘I assumed so.’

‘No harm you knowing.’

Secrecy among thieves was unnecessary, though Waistcoat seemed to think so. ‘Nor for the others to know, either. Nothing they can do with the information.’

‘It’s that blind radio wizard,’ Cleaver said in his ear. ‘The chief seems to have a grudge against him. He’s the nigger in the woodpile.’

‘There’s always someone.’ He shrugged. ‘Howard’s straight enough.’

‘He’s got to be. But the chief wasn’t ranting when he said it, and that strikes me as being a tad different. Anyway, keep her going, I’m off for my cup of coffee.’

Ted never offered Cleaver tea or coffee in a mug, for fear of a dressing down. ‘Ask Judy to bring some for me, Richard, if you can unstick her from Howard’s bunk, that is. As long as he stays shacked up with her we should be all right.’

Cleaver grunted in disbelief as he walked away.

Richard didn’t know whether his sudden lightness of heart, so agreeable to the system, promised good or ill. A not-unfamiliar state when close to home, he was unable to care, because in spite of Waistcoat’s histrionics he had confidence in him as the eternal survivor, sometimes saw in his face the wilfulness of a little boy dead set on getting whatever was good for himself, which at this point meant for the crew as well. Not to pull off all his ventures was against the rules of the people he had come from, and sailing with someone who plotted but didn’t think — who put action before thought — guaranteed getting through to a successful unloading. All the same, Richard preferred not to assume that his mood owed more to hope than to reality.

Howard felt the boat turn north. They were far from land but the end was close. It had to be. He couldn’t figure out what the end would be because the darkness as he stood at the stern became so light he almost thought he could see the widening flail of the wake fanning towards the horizon, and the cauliflower-shaped tops of the crimson-tainted cumulonimbus rising behind the boat. The illusion that the invisible skin of a bubble was about to burst and show him the whole wide expanse of the sea was momentary and caused him to smile: he’d had such feelings before, usually at times of extreme tiredness and uncertainty.

The aerial from Waistcoat’s cabin, connected to the main mast, came from a spare VHF receiver. Of that he was certain. There were no flies on Waistcoat, as they used to say in the Air Force about some demon of a drill sergeant, invariably adding that marks could no doubt be found where the buggers had previously been. Nothing heard on the radio at the moment in any way concerned their boat, but the earlier exchanges, which he had denied intercepting, had obviously been heard by Waistcoat, who now realised what lies Howard had told, Howard knowing he was therefore marked down for vengeance, even if all went according to expectation, but he felt a placidity in himself, for the moment, that nothing could disturb. The bullet never struck you, always the next man — except that once it had, and if once, then why not twice? Even so, for reasons beyond his understanding, he felt in control of his own dark sphere, knowing he would not be deterred from his final move.

He was soothed even more by taking down the morning forecast, and Waistcoat in his cabin accepted without a thank-you the clutch of navigation warnings. He didn’t need eyes to realise the contemptuous expression of dismissal, Waistcoat taking even less care to hide it from someone who couldn’t see.

Howard rummaged in his bag for another sweater, as if an extra layer of protection might bring a glimmer of sight back when it was most needed.

‘It’s not that cold.’ Judy approached, as he was taking down the amount of a tanker’s oil. ‘They stop me getting close to your skin, so I don’t like them.’

‘Yes, it’s warm in here, but it’ll soon be a lot hotter all round.’

‘Why do you say that? I want you to be my man, not the ancient mariner prophesying doom.’

‘We’re close to home, that’s all.’

She sat by him. ‘You aren’t trying to frighten me, are you?’

‘That’s the last thing I want.’

‘Just think what we’ll do when we’re out of all this.’

‘I even dream about it during the day.’

‘I’ll show you around Boston. It’s pretty in the middle, lots of nice houses. And the church is fabulous. Beats all those Spanish ones. My aunt who lives there will let us stay a day or two. We’ll be given separate rooms, but I’ll sneak into your bed at night, you can bet. I’ll hire a car and drive us to Woodhall Spa. There’s a good hotel there. Then we’ll go to Lincoln. I know a pub called The Magna Carta, and they serve meals. It’s right by the cathedral. We could put up at The Bull across the way. That’s a very old place, and I’m sure they’ll have a big-four poster bed with curtains where even the stars can’t see us making love. Better than a damp old bunk we keep falling out of all the time!’

Her talk came from a dream. She was happy, open-minded, optimistic — youthful. He would walk like a jester in cap and bells, playing blind to make the dream his. She sometimes seemed more distant than when he had heard her voice loud and clear from the Dodecanese. But he could touch her now, felt the sting of tears about to break free, as if they were looking back on the joys she was proposing. ‘It sounds wonderful.’

‘It will be, darling. I know it will. I think about it all the time.’

‘I’m afraid to be too hopeful.’ There were difficulties in hinting that such happiness wouldn’t come about, however wrong to think so. ‘I can’t say why. Maybe it’s because I’m so much older.’

‘If I wasn’t optimistic,’ she said. ‘I’d stop living. It keeps me going.’

‘And so it will.’ He turned for a kiss. ‘You light up my life like the brightest lamp in the world. I didn’t exist before I met you. I really didn’t. I don’t even feel so blind anymore.’

‘I like to hear that. I can’t hear it too often. I want you next to me, with nobody else around. I want you in me all the time.’

He listened to himself talking over the airwaves. ‘That would be a bit awkward, you daft girl.’

‘Well, as often as possible.’ She laughed. ‘Even if you couldn’t do it. I won’t be disappointed. I love you too much to let such a thing bother me. I can always tell you what to do if you can’t, though you never need telling.’

She was talking the language of the young in love with the old. Or from infatuation. ‘I think I’ve known you forever.’

‘You have,’ she said, ‘but you always feel like that when you’re in love.’

‘I’ve never been in love before.’

‘Someone like you? I can’t believe it. I’ll never know why I let you seduce me, but I’m glad you did. I think you only came on this trip to waylay me. I hope so. I suppose I took to you because you made me feel like myself again. I was all in bits when I came on board, didn’t care whether I lived or died after that affair. It devastated me. Now I want to live more than I’ve ever done. Normally I’d think it strange, but I know it isn’t.’

Even in the beginning Laura hadn’t made so long a speech, nor spoken anything of such importance, either about him or herself. Nor had he. There had been no need. Hard to fix his past into a clear picture. ‘They’re changing course again. I feel it.’

‘It’s none of our business. They’ll probably go around in circles before shooting in tonight. Or they’ll rendezvous with another boat. They sometimes do. This is the time I close myself off from whatever goes on. It’ll soon be over.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘And we’ll hope for the best.’ Whatever he did there’d be no danger to her. He turned in his seat to stand. ‘Let’s go outside so you can tell me what the sky looks like,’ any ruse to hear the voice he now had to himself.

Life didn’t exist beyond the way he felt, no instrument able to sound the depths of his love. It couldn’t go on, no matter what he needed to feel, or whatever he said, because behind landfall there was nothing, and he tried not to let her think he could be in any way unhappy.

THIRTY-FOUR

Scraps of paper littered the state room: hard for Richard to say, as he stepped through the door, whether they were discarded notes reminding Waistcoat who to kill, or soiled tissues — though he didn’t seem to have a cold. Split capsules were scattered around, a crushed paper cup in a pottery ashtray with CARACAS block lettered along the side, and empty plastic water bottles underfoot. Waistcoat fingered a radio scanner on the table, sat upright and switched the set on, a finger buttoning the various channels.

‘You wanted to see me?’ Richard said.

‘Too right I did. I’m not happy with the way things are going.’

Any fool could see as much. The drink showed in bloodshot eyes, and more than a little breakfast hadn’t got beyond his shirt front. He also needed a shave. ‘In what way?’

‘Nothing serious as far as arrangements go — luckily. But that blind boffin’s about as reliable as an egg with a hole in it. I asked him what he’d been hearing on VHF, and he says not a word. He didn’t know I was tuned in as well, with this. I heard so much talking you’d think every ear in the Channel was cocked on us, waiting for us to drop a bollock and hit the nearest beach. So he was lying, wasn’t he? Is he an Interpol agent, or what? I can’t believe they’d put a blind man onto us, but you never know. They’ve been blind themselves for years. I’ll tell you one thing: the first sign of trouble, and he’s dead. I’d like to get him in here and crack every bone in his body, but I don’t want the others to hear the commotion. They might get nervous, and that would make things worse.’

‘So why tell me?’

Coffee steamed from his Thermos. ‘Because you’re the one I trust most on this tub. If you see any sign of him misbehaving I want you to top him. Get him overboard. No fucking nonsense. I’m relying on you.’

‘I’ll do as you say. This is my last trip, and nobody’s going to spoil it. I’m getting out of the game, and telling you now formally.’

The announcement was not to be disputed. He couldn’t care less whether Waistcoat wanted him to go on or not: he was going, and that was that.

‘You disappoint me. We’ll miss you.’ An uncommon smile. ‘We’ve been through a lot together.’

‘I know. I’ll miss the life as well. I’ve always had a real buzz out of it — as you know. Not to mention the money. But my father’s old and getting doddery. He’s going to need looking after.’

‘Oh, right, yeh, well, you’ve got to take care of the family. I accept that. I like a man who looks after his family. Cleaver don’t seem to have one. That’s why he’s such a dark horse. I might not use him again. Won’t have to with these navigational gimmicks coming in. My family, though, they’ve cost me a million or two, but I don’t regret a penny. They’ve all got pubs to run, or a hotel. I like a man who thinks of his family, but it’s an amazing thing how big mine got after I came into the money. I shelled out, didn’t I? There’s a reunion next week, and I’ve got to show my face. But anytime you want to come back on a job just let me know. Whatever trip you do with me you won’t be out of pocket. Just keep tabs on that blind lunatic. I really think he’s got a screw loose.’

‘Well, if he says he didn’t hear anything on the radio, he didn’t. But you know why, don’t you?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He spends too much time with Judy.’

The excuse seemed halfway convincing. ‘So that’s it?’

‘There aren’t any secrets on a boat like this. But I’d better go. It’s getting to be all hands on the bridge right now.’

‘Fuck off, then,’ he said amiably. ‘I’ll see you after I’ve cleaned myself up.’

Long hours at the radio had shown how to tune the medium wave transmitter. Fingers feeling their way over the equipment, he read each wheel and switch, interpreting buttons and plugs so as not to mistake anything or need to hurry when the moment came. He would plug the morse key into its appropriate slot, and send on the distress frequency, as promised in his tape letter, the longest fortnight ago in his life. It was obvious that the tape had been received, that a listener would pick up his message and take action. He saw little chance of escape after breaking radio silence but, boxed into his blindness, wouldn’t consider consequences — going again through the processed drill.

The engines droned, but otherwise there was a curious silence on the boat, everyone anxious and expectant. The single dot he sent as a test, the sort Vanya in Moscow used to tap in order to assess the alacrity of a listener’s response, sprang like the ping of a tuning fork into his ears and went unheard by everyone else into space. He unplugged the morse key and returned it to the hold-all, pushed out of sight under the table.

Course was altered, and he guessed they were steering in darkness towards the Suffolk coast, maybe to nose a way into one of the indentations recalled from low-level training flights, places in which to lay concealed and unload. On deck a light rain drizzled against his face. He would be a normal crew member till as close to the end as he could get. ‘Hello, Jack, how are we doing?’

‘Not bad,’ Cannister said. ‘This is just the night we need. We’ve got Long Sand Light to starboard, and we’ll soon have Sunk Light to port. Couldn’t be better. I’ve been in this way before.’

‘How far is Long Sand Light from land?’

‘Fifteen nautical miles. About an hour and a half, at this rate. Cleaver’s worked it out like a real artist. Never puts a foot wrong. I’d go to bed if I was you. Wake up when it’s over. I’d like to, but the chief wouldn’t approve. Might stop me wages. I saw him just now, all toffed up on the bridge, spick and span in his pea jacket and naval cap. Just like a gent back from a cruise. I’ll want to celebrate when this lot’s over.’

‘You don’t sound too cheerful about it.’

‘Well, you aren’t usually over the moon at this stage. I suppose it’s not the same for you as the rest of us. You ought to get more joy out of life, Howard, blind or not. I hope to be with my wife and kids this time tomorrow. You don’t have any kids?’

‘I’ve never thought it would do for somebody like me to have a family.’

‘Why not? It’s best to do it, and not think. Just get on with it.’

‘A bit late now.’

‘Go on, it never is, not for a man.’ He nudged Howard’s stomach. ‘Not with Judy, you dirty old swine! I’ll bet she’d be game.’

He didn’t answer. Maybe she was already pregnant. He felt the subterranean contest between him and Cannister, between optimism, come what the hell would come, and a despair stemming out of his weakness, a fight to which there was no resolution, unless he forgot his plan and let chance take him where it would. A possible future came so powerfully to mind that he clutched the rail to steady himself, glad when Jack went to his post.

The beacon of Sunk Light should be close enough to channel them in, and he wandered along the deck feeling like old Blind Pugh with the black spot stigmatised on the flesh of his palm. The mood of indecision left him, his course as fixed and mapped as if prearranged from before birth, and there was no going back, whatever paradise would be lost, though he thought it would be a kindness if amnesia took him or he was absolutely somewhere else, and felt cowardly for wishing it. At the bridge he stood outside, wanting to be as unseen by them as they were by him, though voices told him who was there.

‘Hold her on three-two-five,’ Cleaver said.

‘Three-two-five,’ Richard acknowledged.

‘Can’t see a fucking thing,’ Waistcoat complained. ‘Are you sure there’s a light?’

Cigarette smoke and raw breath thickened the air. ‘Howard’s nav warnings didn’t say otherwise. She’ll come up in a bit.’

‘She’s there now’ — from Richard.

‘I’ll get a running fix, and check our speed.’ Cleaver was always busy. ‘There was no difference at Long Sand, but I like to be certain.’

Richard saw him at the door, a lost soul, at this stage of the trip. ‘I’ll ask Howard if there’s any squeak out of the coastguards.’

‘I think he’ll be deaf to that one’ — from Waistcoat, who hadn’t seen him. ‘But we might as well give him something to do.’

‘When you thought he wasn’t listening on VHF,’ Richard said, ‘he was searching the Interpol channels. He can’t clock onto every wavelength at once, and the trouble is he doesn’t like to make excuses. An old Air-Force habit.’

‘Is that right?’

‘That’s what he told me. He wasn’t with Judy.’

‘I wish I could believe it. But he’d been told especially to listen to VHF, hadn’t he? And he didn’t, did he? Nobody told him to fanny around for Interpol at that particular time, did they? He’s got to learn to obey orders, so tell him here and now from me to check the coastguards or their boats, and to come straight here if he gets anything.’

Howard imagined Richard’s hand signalling him out of sight, so went unheard to the radio, sat bemused and unable to act, until he detected voices, adjusted the set to bring them in more clearly, and typed a short text which he took to Cleaver, who passed the signal to Waistcoat: ‘They’re watching something in the Thames Estuary. Nothing to do with us.’

Nor would it be for a while.

‘Listen out some more,’ Cleaver told him.

‘That’s good,’ Waistcoat called. ‘Let’s hope they’re busy rounding up some other bastards. Keep listening, Sparks, like Mr Cleaver said.’

The German Numbers Woman, on her interminable countdown to the Flying Dutchman, was talking to him alone, having nailed him at last, putting him to the test as he had known she would from the first moment of her discovery on the airwaves.

Reaching for his bag, he plugged the morse key into its socket, switched on the transmitter, imagining the energised parts but without seeing the fascia’s glow. Everyone was hard at it on the bridge or keeping a lookout on deck, so there could be no better moment as they closed with the shore.

Earphones firmly on, he ordered the long prepared message from his brain and, after a few dots for tone, and the easing finger exercise of ‘best-bent wire’ with its ending flourish, he tapped his first message since the war, in the most correct morse, machine morse, precise morse, the finest morse sent since ‘what God hath wrought’ was clicked by the great man himself, played like an artist at the game, a pianiste indeed, cool and exact in manner, perfect in rhythm, with no trace of nervousness:

‘DRUG SMUGGLERS BOAT APPROACHING DEBEN ON COURSE THREE-TWO-FIVE/TEN MILES APPROX.’

He was a resistance wireless operator in France winging out his final report before the Gestapo descended. He was a Marconi telegraphist on a sinking ship tapping a methodical and heroic SOS while lifeboats were being lowered. For better or worse, he couldn’t say, nor needed to, fixed in his inviolable sphere of living darkness, determination and rectitude of spirit being the order of the day and night.

He repeated the message, neither fast nor slow, a speed at which no mistake could be made by a listener writing onto his pad, words sent as if flying through the worst of flak, as if the rest of the crew’s lives depended on his getting the text away.

The code came through that his message was received and understood, his work done. He saw light instead of darkness for such effort as he pulled the key out, wrapped its flex around the earphones, and put them on top of the set, no more work left to do.

‘What were you up to?’ Waistcoat asked in an appalled tone. The click of his key had been unmistakable, the lit-up transmitter plain to see. ‘You were sending morse.’

An idiot smile would be no defence, too late, anyway, yet he put one on — much to his shame. ‘It was an exercise. I practise to keep my hand in.’

A light burst from his head, as vivid and wide as from the cannon shell which had blinded him. The blow at his temple and eyes pushed him up and back, all of Waistcoat’s body behind it. A homely and welcoming noise of four Merlin engines roared in from the olden days, keeping the kite aloft on a heading for home.

He fell against the bulkhead, pulling the morse key as a lifeline towards him, the last item to leave go of, as a soldier who must never be parted from his rifle for fear of the firing squad. Waistcoat’s metal weapon could have been a handgun and, no time to wonder more, grains of light like powder at last found the right chemical mix to settle Howard’s sight. He catapulted upwards, as if flying, caught the breathless and aghast body, and sent it back at the shock. A screech told that his boot found Waistcoat’s face, as if a beacon had guided him. He drove against the head with a sharp corner of his key, then pushed his way out to the deck.

Every part of the boat was known to his finger tips, but there were few hiding places. Excrescences of wood and metal were like parts of a body, all familiar, yet unable to help. Pain pushed out the boundaries of darkness, but he yearned to become smaller, gripping the rail for as long as he felt safe, hearing small waves chopping around at the slow speed of their blacked-out boat, which encouraged him and made it easy to find the stern. The choking in his lungs diminished, and he felt the approach of feet under him. A breeze turned his flesh into freezing liquid, which he knew to be blood.

‘Come away from there, you blind bat!’

He crouched, hoping his enemy was equally confused by the dark.

‘You’re dead! Where are you?’

Waistcoat’s hand was shaking, but pressure on the trigger packed a universe into the explosion. Light passed through Howard’s eyes into the beyond of the boat’s wake. The burn of the bullet’s track had been close, but he grimaced, almost a smile because the noise would be heard for miles, its echo attenuating to where help might be found. Beneath the umbrella of its sound he moved to the starboard quarter like a sleek-footed animal avoiding the hunter.

The explosion seemed to make a hole in Richard’s brain, but he stayed at the wheel, knowing that even without the whys and the wherefores something from the blackest night was on its way, a dread stalking them all. Waistcoat was the only other man on the boat who went armed, and the shot hadn’t been aimed at seagulls: if Howard had been caught doing mischief, and was to pay for it, no one could help or interfere, because there was a point beyond which treachery couldn’t be seen to pay.

Hearing the noise Cleaver stalked onto the bridge. ‘Who did that?’ The left fist slammed into his right palm. ‘Come on, who was it?’

‘It was me,’ Waistcoat said. ‘I’ve topped the blind bastard. Or hope I have. I couldn’t tell, in the dark.’

‘Another skipper up the zig-zags,’ Cleaver said, almost to himself.

‘No, not me,’ Waistcoat said. ‘Everything’ll be all right if you leave him to me. He might try and send again.’

Cleaver turned himself into the Master Mariner, back on his authoritarian stance. ‘If we go under it’ll be you that’s dead. I didn’t get us so close to home for you to pull a stunt like this.’

Waistcoat’s face was bloody, a crimson streak at one side. Nobody believed him, they had the wrong priorities, the stupidest prats you ever saw. ‘I caught him tapping a message out.’

‘Pull yourself together.’ Cleaver tried to reason, though with little hope in his tone. ‘We’ll vanish before they get here. Full speed ahead, and we’re out of the limit. Richard!’ he shouted, a slight tremor of panic nevertheless. ‘Let’s get this menagerie back to sea.’

‘We’re too close inshore. What do you think those lights are? Scotch mist?’

‘If you shoot again,’ Cleaver said, seeing Waistcoat walk from one side of the bridge to the other, the gun pressed against his stomach as if warming it for further action, ‘the bullet will land in somebody’s parlour.’

Richard refused to change course till his rightful chief said so, the one who paid him and whose boat it was. You obeyed to the end, come what may. His father would endorse such a rule, though maybe not in the present situation. He felt cold steel at his cheek. ‘I’ve a good mind to put one in you. You brought him on board,’ was all he got for his assumption of loyalty. ‘He’s an Interpol stooge, and he’s not even fucking blind. His eyes are as good as mine.’

‘You told me to bring him. I didn’t care one way or the other.’

Cleaver pulled Waistcoat clear, a grimace of disgust at having his face so close. ‘Any nonsense, and over the side you go. I’ve had it up to here on this trip. We get back to sea and dump the stuff.’ He pulled a pair of thin leather gloves from his pocket and put them on before taking the wheel, his six foot body braced for the turn from scattered shore lights showing left and right along the coast. ‘Steam those engines up, Paul. They won’t get me, but they can have the rest of you for a dog’s breakfast as far as I’m concerned.’

Lines furrowed Cinnakle’s forehead, but whether due to their peril, or because he might have to flog his beloved engines to nuts and bolts, no one could say. ‘There’s not all that much fuel left.’

‘Use what there is. Shake ’em out of their cradles and get the best cracking speed you can. It’s twenty years apiece if you don’t.’ He spoke firmly but quietly to Cannister: ‘You and the others, pull the stuff out of the hidey-holes and let the mermaids have a party.’

He wished he could imitate in fast forward the Incredible Shrinking Man, as in a movie Laura once told him about, but smaller he could not get. In making his way back to the stern, after hearing them trying to deal with their problems, he knew that the storm was yet to come. Doubts that his message had been received tormented him, as if sending the signal was part of an old dream; or those who had taken it down were so dilatory that help would only come when they had finished their tea.

Blood wetted his shoulders, but what could not be seen was easy to ignore. The rhythmically pulsing pain was pushed to one side. People walked on fire. Wounds possessed their built-in anodyne. A beleaguered animal weakened from loss of blood. To avoid losing consciousness he listened to a horse clopping down a village street by a public house, saw a Land Army woman riding as if having somewhere to go, the golden brush of the mare’s tail swinging at the trot. A collie dog followed, respecting the hooves. Hard to say why such a scene, but he scrubbed it when the pain went. The mind chucked up queer memories. A rope was loose somewhere.

Waistcoat was no crack shot, but the blow-by had been closer than he thought. A man was easy to miss in the dark. Coastguards, customs and police had been put on the qui vive. He hadn’t been afraid to do it, that’s all he knew, wanting no regrets. Training was everything, and though the drilling and instilling of moral fibre into the system happened so many years ago, the strength came through from it more than ever as he pressed a hand to the pain, and tried to recall in detail what had happened after the cannon shell hit the Lancaster.

All he saw were flowers on cigarette cards collected as a boy, celandine and ragwort, thistles and biting stonecrop in every colour of the spectrum, water lilies in harmony with the light he was beginning to see.

The swing of the boat wiped the soothing pictures clear, rolling him to the far side of the deck, his wound scraping against wood. He crushed back a groan, and aligned with fore and aft as the boat turned, gripped the rail to stay upright and look out to sea: no other boat but their own, steady on its track, a surge and chop of water before the new course stabilised.

Pain brought a light into half focus, showing him the darkness and a curling phosphorescence plainer because of the soft hiss. Inside or out, he couldn’t be sure but, wanting to tear at the skin and prove it one way or the other, unclamped his free hand to search the deck carefully, knowing it was better to move than box himself into a fortress anybody could pull him out of. Rubbing the wound to clear away blood made yellowy orange lights to dance, a weird picture which, like others of the mind’s eye, he wanted to live with.

Cleaver steadied the wheel at the surge of power, and Richard wondered how long before they stalled through lack of fuel. No subterfuge would save them, when the last drop spluttered into the engine. He took the wheel, hiding his fear. The night was too good for them, enough moon coming up to outline the boat like a metal cutout in an amusement arcade. ‘Visibility at least twenty-five miles,’ Cleaver said. ‘But at this rate we’ll lose ’em.’

Better to be halfway up river and ready to unload. Richard thought they should have gone straight in and taken a chance. Luck had always been theirs, and fortune favours the brave — as his father, a Meccano man of screws and flimsy girders, had too often said, the old bastard sometimes adding that ‘speed was of the essence’. But Cleaver had tested chance once too often, and lost his Master’s ticket. As for Howard, he should have waited till they were on shore, and gone to the nearest box where, for a few coins, he could have phoned whoever he thought would listen to his blind man’s babbling. Someone could have dealt with him even before he finished dialling.

‘Do you know how many millions this is going to cost us?’ Waistcoat said, as if at the moment it was more important to save his precious cargo than get at Howard. ‘It’s not all mine. If we lose it they’ll get me as well.’

‘I’d rather lose a billion than go inside again. I’ll have your guts for garters if we go up the spout. Your number will be well and truly up.’ Cleaver turned, put himself face to face. ‘It’s the luck of the draw, so shut your scabby box.’ Cork Light was coming up to’ starboard, meaning they were still less than three miles from shore. ‘Wait till we’re in the clear. The blind man won’t get away from me.’

‘Two boats coming up,’ Cannister called out. ‘They’re boxing us in left and right.’

‘When they’re closer, alter course dead north. We’ll get behind. I’ll tell you what to do after that.’

Richard knew that all conviction had gone, especially from Cleaver, who would do more than anyone to save himself. As for the rest of us, we might just as well shut ourselves in the state room for a few last drinks. ‘Here’s to you! It was good while it lasted — happy days! We’ll celebrate again when we get out! Oh yes, don’t worry, lads, it might not be as long as you think.’ No one had yet found the heart to throw the cargo into the water. ‘Take over,’ he told Cleaver. ‘I need some air.’

‘You can run like a rat, but they won’t get me.’

As he went along the deck Richard glanced at the boats bearing down, streaks of white light more powerful than any their clogging vessel could produce. All he had to do now was keep Waistcoat away from Howard. A promise was a promise, and though Laura might not thank him for it, Howard’s girlfriend doubtlessly would.

THIRTY-FIVE

The spin of the boat pulled her out of her dream: hard to remember the point, didn’t suppose there had been one: Howard and Carla among palm trees on an esplanade, white boxy houses scattered up a hill, black clouds coming together, a fur-covered round table ringed with bottles, no one willing to drink. All very awkward, right? The landscape was painful to let go of, but it vanished utterly, and going back to search for it would take the rest of the night.

She stood naked to throw a jersey over her chest, pulled on knickers and slacks, tied her shoelaces. Got to see the fun on shore, would coax Howard from his radio to a pew by the rail, and after the unloading they’d pack their bits and pieces, shake goodbye hands at everybody, and make for the nearest bus or train. However long and dark the road they could stop any time for a kiss and cuddle, and think what to do on their first day of freedom.

The boat swung again, no straight run so what last minute change of plan had flooded the skipper’s brain? St Vitus’ Dance wasn’t in it. Banging her shoulder against the bunk, she rubbed at the ache. Howard must be at his perch by the stern, as if watching all past life go by. What else could a blind man do? There’d be no more of that once they were on terra firma.

Shouts and more than the usual cursing from the bridge told that their arrangements had gone wrong. The boat was sheering away from the coast. She flashed her pocket torch at the deck, keeping the beam low. ‘So here’s my lover-boy!’

He whispered. ‘Put it out.’

‘The light? How did you know?’

Couldn’t unravel the microdot to explain the impossible. ‘I’m the Flying Dutchman, and you’re the German Numbers Woman.’

‘Oh yes, thank you very much, but what’s that supposed to mean?’

The shadow drifted. ‘A fantasy. A little joke.’

‘You saw something. Hey, are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m in trouble, and I don’t want you in on it.’

‘I’m mystified. You can’t stop me, though. Where you go, I go.’

‘Better not. The chief’s gone berserk. He’s out to kill me. But let’s not talk. Somebody’ll hear us.’

She knelt, fingers along his cheek before a kiss. ‘I don’t care. Only stop messing about. Your face is wet.’ She pressed the torch button, crying: ‘I don’t believe this. Who did it? Oh, I shouldn’t have gone to sleep, but how could I know?’

‘It’s nothing. We’re changing course again. North, by the feel of it. They won’t get away.’

‘You must have banged into something, but it’s not like you.’

‘I got into a fight with the chief. I alerted the coastguards. I’ll vouch for you when they come. He caught me sending morse.’

Everything was in her tone, from thinking him the world’s fool, to supposing that what he had done was beyond explanation. ‘Oh, why? What the hell for?’

‘It was the reason I did the trip.’ Yes it was and no it wasn’t. The truth was impossible to go into, a built-in yes and no to all questions, a cloud of wasps best to avoid. ‘I really came to meet you.’

‘I just don’t understand.’ She held him. ‘You’ve got me flummoxed. Has everyone gone crazy? You’re not blind after all. What is this?’

‘I can’t say.’ A break in the barrier of darkness came from one angle and then another, a shade here and a form there, her shadow for one thing, yet silhouetting by the moment, which had to be mostly in the mind, because why now? ‘Bits of my sight are breaking in. I didn’t lie about it.’

‘He’s down there somewhere,’ Waistcoat said. ‘But he won’t be for long. Root him out.’

‘Not me.’ Scuddilaw walked away. ‘Do your dirty work yourself.’

He couldn’t see more than anyone else on the blacked-out boat, but Howard smelled aftershave, whisky, and the rancid vegetation of a cigar, saw a flash of him as Judy moved in front.

‘Get out of the way, you tart. He’s mine.’

‘Leave him alone.’ She ran forward, but was thrown back. ‘I don’t care what he’s done.’

‘He’s sold us down the river, you stupid bitch.’ Braced against the rail, he was uncertain where to set his aim, a double murder not in the scale of things. ‘Fuck off out of the way, or you go with him.’

Paralysis stopped her running, wanted to but didn’t know how. ‘If you touch him, I’ll kill you,’ was all she could say. Waistcoat wrenched her arm. She cried out at the pain and kicked back — all right to hurt such a man — to gain time. Two shots splattered the air, a brilliant pyrotechnic clearance for his purpose, but under fire Howard saw his chance, as if the old aircrew energy had taken root again — tinsel and confetti though he supposed it might be.

He reached for her hand, pulled her forcefully along the deck. Dimly uprising steps seemed made out of knitted wool, solid enough on climbing, and at the top she said: ‘Two boats are heading this way. Do you see them?’

‘The lights? Yes, I can.’

‘Half a mile off. Less, maybe.’

‘So we’ll be all right.’ Lamps in the blackout were doubted for a moment, then he couldn’t deny they were real, two distinct top points of a V, a sight putting him in the spirit of what seemed to have been inexplicably given back. ‘Let’s have your torch.’

He buttoned out morse at the starboard boat, a steady and unmistakable SOS, the artful dots and dashes wonderfully sharp. Before dowsing the light he saw the cap and white face, a handgun circling the air. Fingers screwed into the injured eye brought clarity out of the moonlight. Waistcoat, taller than he had imagined, glanced at the boats, crying in a tone of hysterical despair: ‘See what you’ve done? The fucking boats have got us.’

Judy ran in front, but Howard elbowed her away. The Luger was steady in Richard’s hand: ‘Leave him alone, Chief.’

‘You can’t frighten me with your replica.’

‘It’s real enough. So step aside.’

She pulled Howard into the darkness, as if the lights of the incoming boats had switched off, or never been there. The flash of the first shot wiped out interior scenes of ragged robin, clover pinkish among the green, hound’s tongue, snake’s head, deadly nightshade and blood-red poppies. Light was opening, but the flowers went. He grasped at her, all he could do. Another shot, though not for him, and the returned sight wavered as he fell into her arms, ice of water after a long time covering, as if they were going down together, the skin of consciousness bursting under anaesthetic.

‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Love you!’

Richard’s reflex had been a wasted effort. He leaned over the rail, a stab in the ribs threatening to bring up vomit. Nothing to do but watch the boats closing, lights again showing the slumped body of a fool who couldn’t be saved, his own victim in the stupid game he had played. He pointed to Waistcoat’s body. ‘Get that over the side.’

‘Why did you have to kill him?’ Cannister said. ‘Wasn’t one enough? I take no more orders on this boat. And put that shooter away. You can’t frighten me.’

His will went into meltdown at Judy’s wailing. ‘He’s my boyfriend, don’t you know?’ She would yammer even more when the customs men came on board, babble till somebody (and it might well be me) smacked her in the chops to bring her right mind back. ‘He’s the one who put you wise,’ she would inform them. ‘He told me all about it. We planned it together but they shot him instead of me. Look though, he’s still breathing.’ Easy to know her thoughts, as she leaned against the rail to send a prayer over the water.

Not needing a weapon anymore he threw his Luger overboard, the first and last time he’d fired it. Let them drag the sea if they want evidence. Putting his shoe against Waistcoat’s body he rolled it over and, taking the weight with both hands, let the bag of rubbish rest a moment, then heard its satisfying plunge into the water. The fishes would swim in loathing from it.

Blood smeared his shirt. Should have kept the carcass on board, but it was too late to make good. Always too late to make good. It would be scummed up on some holiday beach, already rotting so that a little boy building a sandcastle runs horrified to daddy, and daddy goes pale at the creaming snot of the water hitting the sandcastle’s towers to bring them low, Waistcoat’s dull eyes at the battlements he finally failed to climb.

Searchlights from the cutters — a crowded wheelhouse bristling with aerials — pinpointed the boat. His binoculars were a pair of the best eight-by-thirty Barr and Stroud, given by the old man before Richard set off for his first job at sea. ‘They used to make range-finders as well, Barr and Stroud did, for the Royal Navy. This pair’s been with me on all my voyages, but now I’m handing them on to you, so take good care of them.’ Tears streaked his left cheek, recalling the death of his wife who hadn’t lived to see this solemn moment with their son — otherwise as if the whole fucking merchant marine was stood to attention and looking on.

A bow wave opened like the ill-omened wings of a giant bird, the law-enforcing vessel on its unstoppable track, the air so still he could hear the engines. No need to look at both, he turned away and settled the magnification on a Martello tower squat against the moonlight. Hardness of heart was the order of the day. Let the sky come down and the moon as well. Behind him, in Slaughterhouse Lane, Judy was raving as if to get Howard back to consciousness: ‘He isn’t dead. I know he isn’t. He can’t be.’

Another bullet to finish the job would cost little enough in will or treasure, but the gun had been jettisoned and he wouldn’t search for Waistcoat’s. Nothing to be done or that he wanted to, musing as he walked away that Howard might have a chance if left alone, though if he died he ought to be buried with Waistcoat, a bit of old England in the same posh box. No doubt the blind fool would get a medal, if he pulled through, for giving away the biggest drug haul in history. Promotions all round, and twenty years in a high security jail for the rest of them.

The police and customs launches had heard the shooting, and there must be someone on board who knew first aid. They would rush up the side with dogs and axes, as the boat under his feet slowed on the last pint of fuel.

‘I’m just the cook.’ Ted Killisick wrapped a red and white woolly scarf around his neck, as if going down to his local for a pint and a sling or two at darts. ‘They’ve got nothing on me. I was hired as a cook, that’s all I know.’

And so the shopping and squealing would go on, while he would be too exhausted not to answer everything. The others would tell what lies came, though not for long. Stuck pigs would have nothing on them. ‘Where’s Mr Cleaver?’

Cinnakle straightened his tie. ‘He went starkers over the side, a plastic bag with his precious sextant, and a length of rubber tube in his mouth. He must have more lives than a Siberian tomcat.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s the first time he’s made this sort of a getaway,’ Richard said. ‘But let’s say he was never on the boat, right?’

‘He kept the log’ — Cinnakle’s hands shook — ‘didn’t he?’

‘Go to the bridge then, Ted, and get shot of it. I don’t care how. One of us might as well go scot free.’

Killisick was glad to do something he was told. ‘Yeh, I reckon he was the only real man among the lot of us.’

Judy’s face, turned to the light as she cradled Howard, showed the tragic side of the moon. She keened like a banshee: ‘He’s losing all his blood.’

It had painted much of the deck. ‘I can see that,’ no help to give her, nor wanted to. Howard would be a hero if he lived, and have a good woman thrown in as a bonus.

‘We need a helicopter to get him to a hospital,’ she said. ‘Send a mayday. You’re a wireless man. Oh, please!’

The boats were as close as made little difference. A chopper would get lift off from the nearest base the moment they saw, because hadn’t Howard always said that the RAF looked after its own?

He put cigarettes, clean shirt and underwear into his bag. Having shaved an hour ago, the smoothness would take him till midday tomorrow, and experience told him where he would be by then. It was good to look your best — and feel it — when questions came as from a pump-action shotgun. A final polish of his shoes got rid of Waistcoat’s blood and, setting his cap at an angle proper to the occasion, he went out to welcome the boarding party. ‘Always do everything in style,’ was another axiom from the old man.

But what to say? Nothing to do with me. The skipper hired the boat, and took me on as one of the crew. How was I to know what the trip was all about? But such lies as the rest would tell wouldn’t wash, though it might give time to think up a better story. Nothing would come of that, either. They tangled you up in no time. No need to say anything, for as long as you had the gall to keep quiet. In any case they would tell you what they wanted to hear. Howard would be the prosecution’s witness, blind or not, and the stuff was there to find. It wasn’t brown sugar they had picked up in the Azores, though he would leave them to say that, if such was their wit, which it certainly would be, smiles at all corners of their mouths.

No need to look hangdog. Englishmen never did — or so he had heard. He put all lights on, three boats lit up like Guy Fawkes night. They were as caught as caught could be, and the bumping and shouting would start any moment. He went to welcome them aboard: ‘What’s all this about, then?’

Judy pushed by, making a plain enough statement: ‘We have someone wounded here on deck. Please be quick. He needs looking after. It’s serious.’

THIRTY-SIX

The stream was set apart from the village, though the map placed the small agglomeration of houses upon it. Even so, it wasn’t a long walk to the bridge where one could look down from the parapet at weeds on either side of the water divided by a low rock further down, furrowing thereafter on its self chosen route, a rural scene in a rarely visited part of the Wolds that he could look at forever. In its infant meandering from a spring up the hill the stream’s hypnotic power calmed whatever spinal shivers might disturb his peace, though there was little enough beyond the minor worries of domestic life.

He’d heard it said that old habits died hard, but those discarded due to altered times only waited to be brought out again when needed. Habits were precious because they defined you, so he carried a wolf-headed walking stick to roam the lanes and fields, sometimes as slowly as during those never forgotten decades in the dark.

He put on his cap at the first touch of rain, drops from heaven making small craters in the water, concentric circles colourless yet visible. When Arnold was a year or so older they would follow the stream as a playful friend to where another brook came sidling in, two arms of silvery water widening until they joined the Witham and flowed through Boston to the Wash.

Arnold would enjoy the stroll on a summer’s day, ceaselessly asking questions which Howard answered whether true or not so as to satisfy and not discourage. The miracle of his eye and heart would chase butterflies and beetles, take handbooks from his purple rucksack to identify flowers, adjust binoculars to magnify birds in flight.

No other spot to stand on than this little humpbacked bridge and watch the stream lapping its southerly way, no traffic beyond the leisurely come and go of the village, no better place for a quiet and anonymous life. Judy had fetched him from the hospital and driven around the county saying that somewhere in it there would be a place to live. ‘For the rest of our lives, right?’ She laughed. ‘I sometimes feel I’ve kidnapped you!’

‘Turn left here.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘At the next fork. I don’t know why. It was me who inveigled you, you know that.’

‘Yes, but we fell in love, didn’t we?’ She had driven from Lincoln along lanes between the bare Wolds seemingly remote, and slowed for him to check the map, by a pub and a low wooden meeting hall on a curve of the village street, crows arguing in a winter tree by the churchyard.

He pointed. ‘That’s a house for us.’

‘Oh, you beat me to it.’ She stopped the car. ‘The garden gate’s open. Let’s snoop around.’

The plain brick building had a slate roof, neat and square, about a century old, a wooden porch at the front door, tidy round about from whoever had recently left. An acceptable offer was put in the same afternoon, the For Sale sign adjusted to say so. ‘Isn’t it a bit sudden?’ he said on their way back to the hotel in Lincoln.

‘We like it, don’t we?’

‘You sound annoyed. But yes, we do.’

‘It’s just what we want.’

‘When I did something quickly before it usually turned out to be the wrong decision, but it won’t anymore, not now I’m with you.’

Such happiness could be worrying, whether deserved or not, yet everyone was worth the blessing when it came out of the blue, or emerged from a darkness so imperceptible that the lucky person hardly noticed. He smiled at his shivering reflection. She would scorn him if he confessed such nuances of unease, but how times had changed! What God hath wrought! Even the morse had all but died on him, such rhythmic discipline no longer necessary, though he occasionally turned on the radio so that Arnold could witness the writing down of a weather forecast from the Isles of Greece, a demonstration of more magic in the world than the boy yet knew about.

The stentorian enunciations of the German Numbers Woman had finally landed the Flying Dutchman: the vessel was impounded, rendered crewless and derelict. Now she was superannuated, and had more than enough to do governing her adolescent and rebellious children.

Vanya from his post in Moscow had gone up the hierarchy to administer the communications network of a whole region. Or he had emigrated to America and was halfway to making his first million. Arnold, drawing imaginary maps of the world, would have enjoyed playing ‘Spot the Bomber’ — but that too had come to an end.

These days embassies and the police used foolproof equipment which made it impossible to monitor their messages. The heroic hand-sent SOS’s of former decades were replaced by a global positioning system, and much of the space between earth and the heaviside layer had turned into a cobwebbed graveyard of atmospherics and dusty memorial stones. Even so, Howard didn’t doubt that arcane messages and revealing chatter were still there for the assiduous to alight on.

His old Marconi, plugged into the mains, buttressed a row of large print books, in the hidey-hole Judy allowed for his study. He remembered, when they called on Laura to collect his things, how Judy took his arm on getting close to the house where he’d lived for so long. ‘You mean to say you walked up and down these steps every day?’

‘I know them so well I could do them blindfold! They look so insignificant now.’

‘Is that the house?’

‘This is the first time I’ve seen it, but I’m sure it is.’ He also felt trepidation, and took her hand. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

‘She cut me dead when she saw me that time in the hospital and realised who I was. Not that it surprised me, but I was shocked at the look on her face.’

‘That was three months ago. We’re a bit older now.’

‘You’re always so matter of fact and optimistic.’

‘Well, one of us has to be. Anyway, the letter was quite friendly.’

A teatime meal was set out in the living room, of fruit cake, biscuits and scones, sliced ham and boiled eggs, jam and honey, a feast of plenty which promised ease, though the meeting was cold enough at the start. She looked from Howard to Judy, as if failing to see how any man could live with such a despicable lesbian.

Passing the food she told them of going to see Richard in prison, that he was writing to her. He’d asked her to call on his father who, at her first visit, had shouted from the window that he no longer had a son. ‘As you know,’ she said to Howard, ‘I’m never one to be put off, so I went up again, and this time he invited me in, and asked if it would be possible to go and see him.’

Judy wondered how Richard was.

‘Well, in my opinion he shouldn’t be there. He never complains, but the conditions are absolutely barbaric. That so-called trial was a travesty.’ She turned to Howard: ‘And you weren’t much help to him in court.’

‘I told them everything that happened.’

‘Not enough, apparently. But I’ll do all I can to get him paroled at the soonest possible moment. Fifteen years is a ridiculous sentence.’ Her face was flushed, and she spoke with more passion than he’d ever heard, and he wondered why. ‘I’ll harry MPs and editors, judges and lawyers — everyone I can. I’ll pester them till they can’t stand the sight of me.’

Ebony jumped onto his knee to be stroked, as if remembering him. He smiled, that Laura had another aim in life. ‘I hope you succeed.’

‘Oh, I shan’t rest till I do.’

He hadn’t thought Richard’s sentence undeserved, though decided that maybe it wasn’t when Judy agreed: ‘Yes, you should do all you can. He tried to save Howard, and me as well.’

Laura spoke whatever came to mind, in a way she hadn’t in the days when he had been blind. ‘I loved Richard,’ she went on, ‘and still do. Did you know — no, I suppose you couldn’t have — that I had an affair with him before you went on the trip?’

‘Oh, brilliant!’ Judy exclaimed.

The trace of shame in Laura’s smile was overridden by a glint of triumph in her eyes. Shock was printed on him, all the same. He hadn’t known, and admitted it. His feelings at the time should have told him, but there’d been no chance to sort them out because of his search for someone else. The three of them suddenly seemed together in an inextricable knot, and it didn’t seem unpleasant.

‘I only tell you,’ she laughed, ‘because it can’t matter any longer. The only thing I cared about, after Richard, was that you would be all right. It’s amazing how life has changed, but I suppose it had to, sooner or later,’ she went on, without bitterness he was glad to note, a sly aspect to her smile he could never have noticed before. ‘Oh yes, I’m as happy as anyone can be. I go out a lot these days. There’s always plenty to do.’

Judy followed her into the kitchen: ‘I couldn’t help it, you know.’

Laura, who had noticed the bulge in front, held her close, and placed a hand on her stomach as if wanting to feel the baby’s pulse, tears hot when they fell on her cheeks during the long kiss. ‘I’m glad about this.’

‘You’ll see whatever it is one day.’

She dried her face so as to collect the rest of the tea things, then talked as if wanting to tell whatever came to mind, though felt it too early to go into the story of her uncle. One day she would, because why not? Life was good when you had autonomy. Talking always made you feel better, and you could say what you liked, no need to hide anything anymore.

She helped them carry the radio and his old fold-up table to their big Peugeot Estate at the bottom of the steps. ‘If there’s anything else you want, take it now. I might not be in next time you call, though you can always give me a ring and I’ll have it sent up.’ Then she turned to Judy: ‘I don’t mean that: come and see me whenever you like.’

‘She was fantastic!’ Judy said on the drive uphill and out of town. ‘So natural and easygoing. I almost fell for her myself. But don’t worry, it’s you I love.’

All in the past, except that nothing was, since it made the present and never went out of mind. Stitching together a timetable of events to show what exactly happened at the various way-change stations along the way told how he had gone into a near-fatal adventure because of being blind. Such a reverence for the past had pushed him so fundamentally out of it as to change his life absolutely. ‘Maybe I imagined this sort of a future for us when I caught a packet on the deck of that morris-dancing boat.’

Judy shrugged. ‘It’s the way of the world. People go through worse.’ She demanded that he think so too. ‘Right?’

The spring never ran dry, rainy enough in the Wolds to keep the little river going. He wondered how much of Arnold’s growing up he would live to see, though he could, on demand, or giving in to a fatherly wish of his own, carry him this far on his shoulders, and let him down to zig-zag along the bank for tadpoles. Once he slipped into the stream and, as Howard told Judy when she was halfway to giving the darling of her life a punch for carelessness, went in up to his thighs and lifted him out, he laughed, with the speed of morse.

Judy now and again called on the midwife at Skegness who had brought Arnold into the world, and sometimes stayed the night because: ‘We have a few drinks, and I don’t feel it would be safe to drive back,’ knowing that Howard was well able to get Arnold on the school bus after a cooked breakfast and produce a hot meal when he came home. She seemed always to need a woman friend older than herself, but was usually in a vitriolic mood on getting back, against the two dogs whose jealousy, fussiness and habits she couldn’t stand.

Laura sent a scientific calculator for Arnold’s sixth birthday, and Judy had set the table with her old skill as a stewardess on yachts. Six candles for the cake, and Arnold in his place with hair combed and hands decisively at his fork and spoon. He had, as they had often marvelled, Judy’s features and his father’s mannerisms, Howard astonished at the similar timbre to Judy’s in his voice.

He had helped to serve Arnold and his friends from school, and now that he was in bed they collected the debris, Judy scooping up paper from the presents. ‘Look at the table. It’s a wreck.’

‘Just as it should be.’

‘I often think,’ she said, ‘about how we nearly went over the edge of doom on that bloody boat. Just amazing we got through it. No wonder nothing can ever part us.’

‘As long as we love each other. And we surely do.’

She dropped the armful of coloured papers to kiss him. ‘You talk like a birthday card. Or a Valentine. I love it.’

‘There’s no other way I know?’

Arnold stood in the doorway, fastening his dressing gown. ‘Oh dear, loving and kissing again! Brilliant!’

‘Out!’ Judy cried. ‘Out, out, out!’

‘I only wanted my calculator.’

‘Now you’ve got it, so out.’

‘Apart from which,’ she said, Arnold clumping up the stairs, ‘you’ll always be my hero, the way you handled that boat business, even though the customs and police had been tracking the crew for months.’

‘But the trip to the Azores was something they didn’t know about. I gave them all the gen on that. It was priceless information, and they were glad to hand over the reward.’

She took the birthday cards from the shelf, and slid them into a large envelope, to be put away for Arnold’s future. ‘You only did it for the money.’

He laughed, and unravelled the story of listening to her and Carla on their boats. ‘You were a dirty old devil!’ she said.

‘I know, but I fell in love with your voice, and knew it was our destiny to meet.’

‘Oh, that. Let’s not talk about destiny.’

‘Well, I had no idea it would happen. I was too timid to be optimistic, but something carried me along.’

‘That wasn’t timid at all — though I don’t believe anything you say.’ She pulled him down on the sofa, and they sat together. ‘Still, I like to hear the story over and over again, even if you did make it all up to amuse me. And if you didn’t it’s something else to love you for, so let’s go to bed. We’ll put the light out, and make hot love. I feel like it. As long as that little devil doesn’t hear us!’

He gave one more glance at the ribbon of water, before turning to go home.