A Fine Night for Dying

CHAPTER 8

“Nice people,” Darcy Preston said quietly. “Now what do we do?”

There was a sudden hiss, as if gas were escaping, and a cloud of steam billowed from the engine-room hatch. The stern was already low in the water and the Leopard wallowed sluggishly, hardly lifting as the swell undulated across the sea.

There was a sudden exclamation from the companionway, and when Chavasse turned, Old Hamid was standing there. In the diffused yellow light from the masthead lamp, he looked about a hundred years old. He didn’t seem afraid in the slightest when he spoke.

“They have gone, Mr. Chavasse? They have left us to drown?”

“Not if I can help it,” Chavasse told him. “How’s Mrs. Campbell?”

“Not too good, I’m afraid.”

Chavasse turned to Preston. “Get her up on deck and see if you can find some liquor. Jacaud liked his rum, so there must be a few bottles around. Make her drink as much as you possibly can. Anything to calm her down. I’ll see what I can find up here. And hurry, for God’s sake. We haven’t got long.”

He found three life jackets in a locker in the wheelhouse and passed one to Hamid. The old man started to unbutton his overcoat and Chavasse shook his head.

“Keep that on, whatever you do. It’s going to be cold out there.”

The old man pushed his arms through the straps and Chavasse did a final deck check. The only movable item that might support a person’s weight was the aft hatch cover. He got it off and eased it toward the rail, as Preston appeared with Mrs. Campbell.

She looked ghastly in the yellow light, eyes dark and fearful, her body shrunken with terror. Chavasse could smell the rum. Preston was holding one bottle in his hand and there were two more under his arm.

He passed one across to Chavasse. “Stick that in your pocket. It might come in handy.”

Chavasse gave him the two life jackets. “The best I can do.”

“And what about you?”

“There’s an old cork life belt here that will keep me going. Now hurry it up. We’ve only got a few minutes.”

Suddenly it seemed very quiet, the rain falling in dull steel lances through the light, and they stood by the rail together, ready to go. The sea was already over the stern and slopped in across the deck in a green curtain.

Chavasse glanced at his watch. “Dawn in another hour. We’re between five and six miles off the coast, possibly less, but the tide will start to go in fast soon and we’ll go with it. Don’t try to swim-you’ll tire quickly that way and lose body heat-and don’t try to take any clothes off. That would be the worst thing you could do. Mrs. Campbell, we’re going to put you on the hatch. I want you to just lie still, even if the water breaks over you. The rest of us will hang on to the sides. It’s important we try to stay together-any questions?”

The Leopard gave a sudden lurch to one side, and Preston lost his balance and went into the water. He surfaced and grabbed for the rail. He even managed a smile.

“We should do this more often. Better get the hatch over fast. Somehow I don’t think the boat has much longer to live.”

Strange how one always thought of a boat as a living creature with a soul of its own. Swimming awkwardly, the cork life belt under his armpits bumping the side of the hatch as he pushed hard, Chavasse glanced back and watched the Leopard slide smoothly under the surface. For a brief moment, the green-and-red navigation lights gleamed above the swell at the masthead, and then they too were dimmed.

IT was the darkness that was the real enemy, not the cold, though that was bad enough to begin with. But after a while, the body temperature adapted itself and the fact that they were all fully clothed helped considerably, as Chavasse knew it would.

But the darkness remained for quite some time, and Mrs. Campbell moaned continuously, breaking into terrible fits of crying every so often that no one could do anything about.

Gradually the dawn came with a kind of gray luminosity because of the mist. Visibility was no more than a hundred yards, and Chavasse noticed with some unease the freshening breeze cold on his left cheek and the whitecaps that were starting to appear all about them.

He turned to Hamid, who hung on to the hatch beside him. The old man was well out of the water because of his life jacket, but his turban was soaked, his skin shrunken so that every bone showed.

“Are you all right? Can you hang on?”

Hamid nodded without replying and Chavasse pulled his way round to the other side to Darcy Preston, who gave him a tired grin.

“Give me Montego Bay any time. This is no joke.”

“The wind is picking up,” Chavasse said. “Can you feel it? It’ll push us inshore that much faster, but things are going to get rough, so watch out.”

Preston’s mouth opened in a soundless cry. Chavasse turned and saw a gray-green wall of water coming in fast, blocking out the sky. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, nothing anyone could do. This time Mrs. Campbell, God help her, didn’t even get time to scream. The wave lifted the hatch like a cork chip, turned it over and smashed it down.

Chavasse surfaced in a maelstrom of white water, struggling for breath, still buoyant, thanks to the old life belt. Mrs. Campbell was twenty or thirty feet away, Darcy Preston swimming after her. Hamid was over to the right, and Chavasse kicked out toward him.

The old man looked badly shaken. He had lost his turban and his long iron-gray hair had come loose and floated on the water as he lay back, obviously exhausted. As Chavasse reached him, the wind tore a gap in the curtain of mist and he saw land low down on the horizon, no more than a mile away at most.

So Jacaud had been overcautious in his estimate? Either that or they had come in a damned sight faster than he had realized. He turned toward Preston, who was still swimming after Mrs. Campbell, and shouted, “Land! No more than a mile!”

Preston raised an arm to signify that he understood and continued to swim after Mrs. Campbell. The curtain of mist dropped back into place. Chavasse reached the old man and pulled him close.

“Not much longer now. I saw land.”

Hamid smiled wanly, but seemed unable to speak. Chavasse got the bottle of rum out of his pocket and pulled the cork out with his teeth. “Drink some of this.”

He forced the old man’s mouth open and poured. Hamid coughed, half-choked and pulled his head away. “It is against my religion,” he said with a gasp.

Chavasse grinned. “Allah will forgive you this once, old man,” he said in Urdu, and swallowed the rest of the rum.

Strangely enough, the old man’s only reaction to being addressed in his own language was to reply in the same tongue. “If I live, it is because Allah wills it. If I am to die-so be it.”

Another half-hour and Chavasse was really beginning to feel the cold. He had taken off the belt of his raincoat and had used it to secure himself to Hamid, who floated beside him. There was no sign of Darcy Preston or Mrs. Campbell-hadn’t been for some time now.

Old Hamid was still, eyes closed, his face a death mask, blue with cold. Chavasse slapped him a couple of times and the eyes opened to stare blankly. A kind of recognition dawned. The lips moved, the words were only a whisper.

“Ali-Ali, is it you, my son?” he asked in Urdu.

“Yes, my father.” It took everything Chavasse had to make the correct reply. “Not long now. Soon we will be home.”

The old man smiled, his eyes closed, and suddenly a wave took them high into a sky of lead, holding them above the water long enough for Chavasse to see cliffs through driving rain no more than a couple of hundred yards away. Between them and the land lay wave after wave and white water crashing in to meet the distant shore.

From that moment, they moved fast, helpless in the grip of the current that carried them before it. Chavasse gripped the old man tightly as water broke over them, and then another great wall of water, green as bottle glass, smashed down on them.

Chavasse went deep, too deep, and found himself alone, fighting for life like a hooked fish. His life belt was gone, Old Hamid was gone, but strangely, no panic touched him. If he was to die, he would die fighting.

There is a behavior pattern common to all animals and known to psychologists as the critical reaction, a phrase that describes the fury with which any living creature will fight for survival when there is no other way, either backed into a corner by his enemies or alone in a sea of white water, as Paul Chavasse was now.

He broke surface, sucked air into his lungs and went under again, tearing at the buttons of his trench coat. He got it off, and then the jacket, and came up for more air. The shoes took a little longer, probably because his feet were swollen from their long immersion in cold salt water, but suddenly he was free of those, too, and swimming again, his rage to live giving him strength drawn from that hidden reserve that lies dormant in every man.

And then his foot kicked sand and he went under again. A wave took him forward across a great rounded boulder streaming with water and he found himself knee-deep in seaweed.

Another wave bowled him over. His fingers hooked across a rib of rock, and he held on as the waters washed over him. As they receded, he staggered to his feet and stumbled across the rocks to the safety of a strip of white sand at the base of the cliffs.

He lay on his face, gasping for air, then forced himself to his feet. Hamid-he had to find Hamid. The sea was in his mouth, his ears, his throat; it seemed to sing inside his head as he turned and picked his way through the rocks to the main beach.

He saw Hamid at once, thirty or forty yards away, lying in the shallows, the water breaking over him. Chavasse started to run, calling out in Urdu, “I’m coming. Hold on! Hold on!”

Stupid, really. The old man would be dead, he knew that. He dragged the body clear of the water, turned it over and, greatest of all miracles, the old eyes opened.

Hamid smiled, all fatigue and pain washed from his face. “Ali, my son, I knew you would come,” he whispered. “Bless me now.”

“You are blessed, old man, hold my hand,” Chavasse said in Urdu. “Blessed and thrice blessed. Go with Allah.”

The old man smiled contentedly, his eyes closed, and the life went out of him.

Chavasse crouched there beside him for quite a while, unaware of the cold, staring blindly into space. When he finally stood up, Darcy Preston was waiting a few yards away, watching him gravely.

Like Chavasse, he was down to shirt and pants and his life jacket was gone. There was a cut on his face, another on his left arm.

“What about Mrs. Campbell?” Chavasse asked.

Preston shrugged. “I tried to catch her when that big wave split us all up, but the current was too strong for me. She was still floating when I last saw her. She could still make it.”

Not that he believed that-neither of them did, and Chavasse said wearily, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

“Aren’t we going to move him?”

“Let’s put it like this,” Chavasse said. “The way things are at the moment, it would make a lot more sense if you and I didn’t hang around to be found with him. If we take him higher up the beach, they’ll know someone put him there.”

“But what in the hell are we going to do?” Preston demanded.

Chavasse looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter to five. We find the road and the nearest phone box. I put through a call to my people, then we get behind the nearest hedge and wait. You’ll be on the way to London in an hour.”

Darcy Preston shook his head. “Well, one thing’s certain. Whatever else you are, you can’t be the police.”

“Full marks,” Chavasse said. “Now let’s get out of here,” and he turned and moved toward the cliffs through the gray morning.