Crackdown

PART TWO

We beat southwards all that first day, slicing through a glittering sea, and propelled by an apparently changeless south-easterly trade wind. We hardly saw the Crowninshield twins. They briefly appeared on deck for lunch; a meal which Rickie hardly touched, while Robin-Anne, despite her apparent frailty, attacked the sandwiches and salad with the savagery of a starving bear. Afterwards, incongruously dressed in a raincoat, she went to the bows and stared briefly down at the mesmerising onrush of sea where it split and foamed at Wavebreaker’s cutwater. She did not stay there long, but retreated from the fierce sun to the stern-cabin that she would be sharing with Ellen. The contrast between the two American girls was almost painful; Ellen was so healthy and strong, while the waif-like Robin-Anne was pathetically wan and listless. “What do you think of her?” I asked Ellen that afternoon.

Ellen gave me an amused glance. “Little Orphan Annie? It’s hard to believe she’s about to be worth six million dollars. Still, she’s got precious little else going for her.”

I smiled at the severity of Ellen’s judgment. “Is she that bad?”

“She has a distressingly simple mind, with only room for a single idea at any one time. Presently that idea is cocaine, and nothing but cocaine. She has an obsession with the drug that verges on monomania. She tells me she needs to understand it if she’s going to defeat it.”

“Don’t you approve of that?”

“I think she’d do better to understand herself,” Ellen said tartly. “She allowed a man to persuade her into taking the drug, so she can only blame herself for her predicament. She’d find it more useful to understand her own character shortcomings than to take an elementary course in drug chemistry.”

“What do you make of Rickie?” I asked.

“He’s precisely what anyone would expect of a drop-out Phys Ed basketball-playing retard,” Ellen said scornfully, “by which I mean that he’s a jock with the brains of a dung beetle. He reminds me of your Neanderthal friend, the Maggot, except Rickie is a great deal more handsome.”

“Is he?”

She laughed at the suspicion of jealousy in my voice. “Yes, Nicholas, he is. But he’s not cute.”

At supper, as at lunch, Robin-Anne ate with the appetite of a horse, though her brother hardly touched his chicken and pasta salad. “Don’t you like pasta?” Ellen, who was perversely proud of her skills in the salad department, asked Rickie with just a touch of asperity.

“It’s great. Really awesome.” Rickie lit a cigarette. “I just guess I’m not hungry.”

Robin-Anne reached over and tipped her brother’s food on to her own plate. “Kind of starving,” she justified her theft, then poured herself some diet soda. For once we were carrying neither wine nor spirits on Wavebreaker, for Jackson Chatterton’s drug clinic had utterly forbidden us to offer the twins any alcohol, saying that any mood-altering drug could hamper the success of a detoxification programme. We were thus officially a dry boat, though I had hidden some Irish whiskey in the engine room, and I was sure that Ellen would have similarly salted away some vodka.

It seemed that Ellen and I were not the only ones to take such a precaution, for late that night Jackson Chatterton lumbered on deck with a bottle in one huge hand. “Bourbon,” he explained laconically. “Want some?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He chuckled, produced two cardboard cups, and poured me a generous slug of the whiskey. We were alone on deck, though not the only ones awake for I could hear Rickie and Ellen’s voices coming from the open skylight of the main saloon. I hoped Thessy was fast asleep for he would be taking the morning watch.

“Cheers,” I said.

Chatterton raised his cardboard cup in silent acknowledgement, then stared ahead to where a great beam swept around the sky. “A lighthouse?” he asked in a voice which suggested that a prudent man avoided such things.

I nodded. “It’s called the Hole in the Wall. Once we’re past it we can turn out to the open ocean. Things will be a bit livelier then.”

“Livelier?”

“We’ll have a bit more sea, kick up some spray.”

I had spoken enthusiastically, but Jackson Chatterton seemed unmoved by the prospect. “What are your plans?” he asked me.

I had nothing particular planned, merely an idea that it might be interesting to thrash our way out into the open ocean, though, mindful of the danger of tropical storms, I had no intention of going too far from the safe shelter of a Bahamian hurricane hole. But I fancied feeling the long hard pressure of ocean waves against our hull and, though we were short-handed, I reckoned that a few days out of sight of land would shake us all down quickly. I explained all that to Chatterton, but stressed that we would run for cover at the first sign of trouble.

He must have assumed that I meant trouble from the twins, for he suddenly became surprisingly loquacious. “They won’t give you any grief in the next few days,” he said. “Now that they can’t get hold of cocaine they’ll just crash out.”

I grimaced. “Does that mean they’ll be seeing green monkeys and blue snakes up the rigging?”

Chatterton poured himself more bourbon, then put the bottle within my reach on the binnacle shelf. “Coming off cocaine isn’t like that. At first they’ll just want to do nothing but eat and sleep. It’s the opposite of a cocaine high, you see.” He paused. “The difficult bit starts two or three days later. That’s when the real hell begins.”

“For all of us?”

“It won’t be easy,” he said grimly, and I was suddenly rather glad to have the taciturn Chatterton aboard. The big man had obviously come on deck to warn me what to expect from the twins, and for that I was grateful.

“I noticed that Rickie wasn’t eating today,” I said, “but Robin-Anne was?”

Chatterton nodded. “Rickie may have stopped his cocaine a day or two ago, which means he’s probably already over the crash period. I promise you one thing; he’s brought none of it on board. I searched him and his luggage, and he was clean.” The big man thought for a few seconds, then laughed. “He’d better be clean! That turkey has got one chance of avoiding jail, just one, and that chance is by proving to the judge that he’s cleaned up his act. And if he doesn’t do that, then the man will send Rickie’s plump young ass down to the gang-rape squad in the county jail.” Chatterton did not sound unduly worried at that prospect.

“Can we be sure Robin-Anne didn’t bring any of the drug aboard?” I asked.

“She won’t have done that,” Chatterton said with conviction. “That girl is serious about giving it up, real serious, heavy serious! That girl is really trying! She studies the drug, you know? Like it was her enemy.” Chatterton had spoken with genuine admiration.

I glanced up at the sails, down at the compass, then ahead to where the lighthouse loom arced powerfully through the night. “So what are the twins’ chances?”

“Depends on their will power, ’cause nothing else will do it for them. There ain’t no pill to get you off the powder, Mr Breakspear, only will power. And let me tell you, coming off coke is the hardest damn thing in the world, and you’re real lucky if you have a rich daddy who pays for people to hold your hand while you go through the hell of it. The twins’ daddy has paid for you and me, Mr Breakspear, and for everyone else on board this boat, but even with all that money and all this boat, we still might not succeed with them.”

“It’s that hard?”

“It is that hard,” he said ominously, and I thought of John Maggovertski’s sadness for a pretty girl who had whored herself to pay for the white powder. “And it’s even harder,” Jackson Chatterton’s voice was suddenly sinister, “for a poor person who has no one to help them.”

I stared at Jackson Chatterton, and at last sensed the drama that lay behind his big calm presence. “Why did you leave the army, Mr Chatterton?” I asked after a long pause.

“I guess you can guess,” he said.

I guessed, but did not make him confirm my guess. Instead I asked whether the American army had helped him to kick his drug habit.

“Sure they tried, they tried real hard, but back then I didn’t want to be helped.”

“But you still got off cocaine? On your own?”

“Eventually.” The light inside the binnacle glossed his black face with a sheen of red, sparking his eyes like fire. He was not looking at me, but staring doggedly ahead into the turning white light of the Hole in the Wall. “And I had to lose a good, good woman before I came to my senses. But I did kick the drug, Mr Breakspear, and it was probably the hardest damned thing I ever did in all my life. But once I’d done it, I swore I’d help others do it.”

“Even the very rich?” I asked provocatively.

“The rich trash pay the bills, Mr Breakspear, which lets me give my spare time away to the poor trash.”

I looked at the tough, impressive face. “Are the twins trash?”

He paused before replying, then gave the smallest shake of his head. “She’s OK, but him?” This time the pause was almost eloquent, then he gave a richly contagious laugh. “I’d have liked to have had Rickie Crowninshield in my platoon for just five minutes.”

I laughed too. “Good to have you aboard.”

“It ain’t bad being aboard,” he said, and held out his hand and, not before time, we shook.

By midnight I was alone on deck, and happy to be alone. I like sailing alone at night. I like to watch the phosphorescence curling away from the hull and I like to watch the brilliant specks of light fade in the black deep water far in the ship’s wake. I like to be alone under the careless profusion of the stars, and alone on a moon-glossed sea.

I like the sounds of a boat sailing at night. The sounds are the same as those of daylight, yet somehow the night magnifies and sharpens the creak of a yielding block, the sigh of air over a shroud, the stretching of a sail, the hiss of water sliding sleek against the hull, the curl of a quarter-wave falling away, and the thump as a wave strikes the cutwater to be sheared into two bright slices of whiteness. I like the purposefulness of a boat at night as it slits a path across an empty planet. I like the secretiveness of a boat in the blackness, when the only thing to dislike is the prospect of dawn, which seems like a betrayal because, at night, in a boat under sail, it is easy to feel very close to God—for eternity is all around.

I tacked the ship shortly after midnight, doing the job by myself and enjoying the work. Ellen was still awake, talking in the stateroom with Rickie, but everyone else seemed asleep. I wished that Ellen and Rickie would go to their beds, for the soft mutter of their voices was an intrusion on the dark and star-studded infinity through which I steered Wavebreaker.

I had just winched in the staysail’s port sheet when the explosion sounded, or something so like an explosion that I instinctively cowered by Wavebreaker’s rail as my mind whipped back to the crash of practice shells ripping through the sleet in Norway.

The sound of the explosion melded into a terrible noise that was like an animal dying in awful, bellowing pain, but beneath that sound of agony was a harsh metallic scrape and clash that punched at my belly and eardrums. If anything the sound seemed to become louder as I ran down the deck. The noise was a foul but apt accompaniment to the schooner’s fitful motion for, with her wheel lashed and her sails only half trimmed, Wavebreaker was bridling and jerking into the short hard seas that were driving through the North-East Providence Channel.

The noise rose to a scream; like the sound that a beast would make while being disembowelled. I stepped over the coaming and down into the cockpit where I cannoned off the binnacle before snatching open the companionway hatch. I put both hands on the rails and vaulted down to the accommodation deck. I slipped as I landed and fell against the bulkhead. I scrambled up and reached for the eject button on the cassette deck. I punched the button and was rewarded with a blessed, ear-ringing silence as the offending cassette slid out.

“Shit! What is this?” Rickie, apparently still vibrating to the music, sprang up from the stateroom couch. “Hey! That was my tape, man! I was listening to that!”

Ellen was grinning from the other couch, but I was in no mood to humour her amusement. “Thessy’s sleeping for the morning watch, for Christ’s sake!” I accused her, wondering why she had let Rickie play such an appalling din at such volume at such a late hour.

“We’re just listening to music!” Rickie was suddenly truculent, twisting off the sofa and dancing towards me on the balls of his feet. An inch of ash spilt from his cigarette as he raised his hands in a threat to hit me.

“Rickie!” Ellen called warningly.

Some grain of self-preserving sense must have penetrated Rickie’s skull, for he suddenly dropped on to his heels and offered me a placatory grin. “You should like that sound, Nick!” he said happily. “It’s really heavy English music.”

I looked at the cassette which claimed to be music recorded by the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band. “New shipboard rule,” I said, “no English music on this boat, unless played very softly or through earphones.” I tossed the cassette to Rickie who, turning away and thus leaving his blind eye facing me, fumbled the catch.

He stooped to pick up the tape. “Are you saying I can’t play my music?” He was suddenly spoiling for a fight again.

“The man is saying that you keep the noise down, and I am saying that you do what the man says.” Jackson Chatterton had appeared in canary yellow pyjamas at the far end of the stateroom. His looming presence utterly cowed Rickie who whined something about only wanting to play Ellen a little night music, and that he had not meant any harm, and what was a guy supposed to be doing on this boat anyway? It wasn’t the goddamn navy, really, and he went on muttering all the way past Chatterton’s impassive gaze and so into the cabin that the two of them shared. Thessy’s scared face appeared at the other cabin door, but I shook my head at him, mimicked sleep, and he ducked back inside.

“Sorry, Nick,” Ellen said, though not with any great contrition.

“Forget it.” I was still angry, but there was no point in pursuing what was over, so I went back topsides to trim the ship, and five minutes later I saw the stateroom lights go out, and half an hour after that the lights in Ellen and Robin-Anne’s cabin were doused, leaving only a light in the forward starboard cabin to show that either Rickie or Jackson Chatterton was still awake. I wondered if they had simply forgotten to turn off the bulb which annoyingly cast its brightness through a porthole and on to the swirl and rush of white water, and I was half tempted to pull the fuse out of the circuit and thus surround Wavebreaker with darkness, but resisted the impulse.

The night became quiet again. Wavebreaker settled on her new course and, by the time the small hours were growing, we had left the island’s lights well behind and I was cutting her prow hard into real ocean waves. We were on the starboard tack, fighting into the trades as we clawed our way out from the Bahamian shoals into the deep waters of the Atlantic. The difference in Wavebreaker’s motion was extraordinary. She had disdained the smaller waves in the shelter of the islands, but now she seemed to tremble as her hull soaked up the ponderous force of the ocean. This was proper sailing.

And, as if to celebrate her freedom, she dipped her cutwater into a sudden trough of the sea and then sprayed white water high over her bows. The shudder of the bigger wave sent a shock wave through the long hull, and I laughed aloud with the pleasure of it. Then, as I often did when I was alone at sea, I began to recite Shakespeare. I knew reams of the stuff, yards and yards of it, learned from my father; the one absolutely true gift of my childhood. I liked to hear the verse, and enjoyed declaiming it, but only if there was no one to hear me, for I knew that my voice held all the fine cadences of Sir Tom himself.

That night I belted out one of my favourite speeches, the one from the second part of Henry IV in which the new king, Henry V, rejects the friendship of Falstaff.I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

I stopped abruptly. A movement had startled me and I turned to see Robin-Anne Crowninshield, dressed only in a white nightdress, standing in the main companionway.

“That was really great,” she said. She was shivering violently.

“You’ll find an oilskin jacket in the locker at the foot of the stairs,” I said, “and you’ll also discover that Ellen has left a Thermos of coffee on the stove, and I like mine without sugar but with milk. You may have to unscrew the stove-fiddles to release the Thermos, and you’ll find the milk in the fridge to the right of the stove.”

She nodded grave acknowledgement of all my instructions, then disappeared below for five minutes, eventually returning swathed in one of the vast, padded and multi-layered foul-weather coats, and carrying a mug of coffee. “I assume it’s caffeinated?” she asked in her thin voice.

“It is indeed proper coffee,” I confirmed, “but if you insist on the wimpish unleaded kind then you will find a jar in the locker above the sink. Are you hungry?”

“I’m OK.” She sat at the edge of the cockpit, curled her legs into the warm shelter of the jacket, then hunched down into the thick collar so that all I could see of her face was her enormous, moon-silvered and lemur-like eyes beneath the pale gleam of her short bright hair. She yawned. “How long till dawn?”

“An hour. Couldn’t you sleep?”

“I set an alarm. I wanted to be up. Mom said I shouldn’t miss the dawn at sea, she said it’s kind of beautiful.” She rested her head against a cushion so that she could stare straight up through the network of rigging and past the light-blanched sails to where the stars wheeled their cold fire beyond the mastheads. “Where are we?”

“We’ve just left the North-East Providence Channel and we’re in the open sea now. Did your brother’s music wake you earlier?”

She shook her head, then seemed to shrink even lower inside the enveloping jacket. “You look happy,” she said, almost accusingly.

“That’s me. Just a dim, shallow and happy Brit.”

I had meant her to laugh, but instead she frowned as though my happiness was a puzzle that needed to be understood. “Are you going to recite any more of that poetry?”

“No.”

“It was Shakespeare, right?”

“Right.”

“It was good,” she said.

“He was a great poet,” I said, as if she needed to be told.

“I mean your voice and delivery,” Robin-Anne said fervently. “It was good.”

“It was imitation,” I said in self-disparagement, “just imitation.” I suddenly heard my father’s voice telling me that all acting is mere imitation. “That’s all it is, dear Nick! Only imitation, mere mummery. Why do people take it so seriously?” The wheel suddenly pushed into my left palm and I could feel all the thudding pressure of the sea and the wind concentrated into that one polished spoke. I eased the wheel up, drawing Wavebreaker’s bows harder into the sea and wind, and I was rewarded with another shattering of white spray that exploded prettily about our bows before I let the hull fall away once more. I laughed for the sheer pleasure of playing such games with God’s strong world, then remembered the senator had told me that Robin-Anne liked to sail. I asked her if she wanted to take the wheel.

She seemed to shudder at the very thought. “I’d be frightened.”

“But you can sail a boat, can’t you?”

“I used to sail a little cat-boat in Penobscot Bay, but that was a long time ago. Grandmother lived there in a house that looked over the water, but she’s dead now.” She spoke sadly, as though to a twenty-four-year-old there really was a time of lost innocence, and I suppose, if the twenty-four-year-old was a cocaine addict, then there was indeed such a time.

“I’ve never understood the appeal of a cat-boat,” I said, “all that great big undivided sail and weather helm and barn-door rudder. It must be like going to sea in a haystack.”

Robin-Anne nodded very earnestly as though she truly cared about my opinion, but her next question showed that she was paying no attention to my inanities. “What do you think of us?” she asked instead.

I glanced at her, trying to hide my embarrassment with a swift and flippant response, but I could think of nothing to say and so I looked back at the binnacle, then up to the long moon-burnished sea ahead.

“I feel really awkward, you see,” Robin-Anne explained her question, “and ashamed.”

“I’m just the skipper of this barge,” I said, “so you don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“I feel like a circus animal”—Robin-Anne ignored my disclaimer—“because you’re all expecting me to perform my antics, and I’m not sure I can do it.”

“What antics?”

“To stop using cocaine, of course.” She frowned at me. “You’re all watching me, waiting to applaud.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s patronising, and it’s my own fault that you can all patronise me, and I hate myself for it.”

“Come on!” I said chidingly. “We all like you!”

“That’s what I mean.” She fell silent for a moment and I saw she was watching the long heaving waves slip past our flanks. Then, with a rustle of the stiff jacket, she looked back to me. “Did you ever try cocaine?”

“No.”

“You’ve not even been tempted by it?”

“No.”

For a moment she was silent, staring at the sheen of night on the crinkled sea, then she smiled. “You’re lucky. You’re a cocaine virgin. Stay that way, because it’s the most addictive substance on the planet.”

Her last words had been spoken very portentously, and I rewarded them with a dubious shrug. “Heroin? Alcohol? Nicotine?”

“You have to persuade a laboratory animal to become addicted to any of those drugs, but you only need to give an animal one dose of cocaine and it’s hooked.”

The luff of the flying jib had begun to back and fill and so I let the ship’s head fall away.

“But the real danger of cocaine,” Robin-Anne continued softly, “is that it provides ecstasy, Mr Breakspear.”

“Call me Nick.”

“What cocaine does, you see, is to make the brain produce a thing called dopamine. That and a whole lot of other chemicals, but dopamine is the main one.” Her voice was very earnest, as though it was desperately important that I understood what she said. “I know it’s weird,” she went on, “but pleasure is merely the result of naturally occurring chemicals secreted in the brain, and cocaine can turn those chemicals on like a faucet. Can you imagine a day of pure pleasure, Mr Breakspear?”

I did not need to imagine such a day, I could remember plenty. I remembered lying in bed with a pretty girl while the rain fell on a Devon river outside our window. I remembered the honesty of Masquerade in a force five wind, and then I thought of all the good days to come; days of Ellen and me and Masquerade in far seas, and I must have smiled, for Robin-Anne nodded approval of whatever silent answer I was framing to her question. “Think of all that happiness,” she said, “and understand that a single hit of cocaine, just a single hit, will produce a hundred times as much pleasure-making dopamine as that one happy day. A hundred times! It’s like making love to God. It’s euphoria.”

I looked at her, but said nothing, and she must have mistaken my silence for disbelief for she hurried to explain her evident knowledge about the drug. “I studied cocaine, you see. I had to. I wanted Rickie to stop using it, and I wanted a friend to stop using it as well, and so I learned everything I could.”

“And did learning about it mean trying it?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And thus you discovered euphoria?”

She nodded again. “And it’s the euphoria that’s so addictive, because you’ve been to heaven, and the real world seems a very dull place afterwards. So you begin to take more cocaine, and quite soon you need more and more cocaine to unlock the gates of heaven, and once you reach heaven you don’t want to leave it and so you take still more cocaine, but by then it isn’t working.”

She stopped abruptly, perhaps fearing that she was boring me. I turned the wheel a fraction, waiting for her.

“The catch in this heaven,” she went on, “is that the brain has only got so much dopamine to offer, and once the cocaine has used it all up, then that’s the end of the pleasure. Except the brain is screaming for more dopamine, so you overdose because you can’t accept that the drug isn’t working any longer, and it’s then that cocaine starts doing its other things to you. It shrinks the arteries, and that’s what blinded Rickie’s left eye.”

I really had nothing useful to say, so I responded with a sympathetic noise that only made Robin-Anne shake her head impatiently. “There’s worse,” she said, “far worse.”

“You mean a heart attack?”

“No…” She drew the word out, so that I heard in its simple syllable all the pain and hurt of the drug. Robin-Anne had been staring at the dark sea, but now she turned her big eyes back to me. “The worst thing about cocaine is that once it has exhausted all the dopamine from the brain, then what’s left is a black hole of depression so big and so awful that not all the misery in the world can fill it. People try to beat that misery with barbiturates, but nothing can cure it because you’ve taken away from yourself all chance of feeling pleasure. The doctors have a word for that misery; they call it anhedonia, which only means an inability to feel enjoyment, and that’s what it is, but it feels like hell, like true hell, and it’s a hell you can’t even escape from in sleep because overdosing on cocaine gives you chronic insomnia.”

Hell was being without God, I thought, but I said nothing, just stared instead at the white wash of cabin light on the rushing water, and I wondered why some people could take cocaine and just walk away from it, while others ended up in hell, or in a peep-show which was probably the same thing.

“Of course,” Robin-Anne went on, “the brain eventually manufactures more dopamine, so after a day or two the cocaine can work again, and you go soaring up from hell into heaven. It’s a roller-coaster, Mr Breakspear, up and down, up and down”—her thin white hand suited the action to her words—“from heaven to hell and back again, and if heaven is euphoria then let me assure you that hell is a terrible place.”

“So remember the hell,” I said, as though I really could help her with my tuppence worth of cheerful encouragement, “and perhaps that will stop you ever going back to it!”

“But there’s another kind of hell,” Robin-Anne’s voice was dulled, as though my cheap optimism had depressed her, “which is remembering the euphoria, and having to surrender the means of creating it. That hell is giving up cocaine. I’m in the easy stage, the first few days when you just sleep and eat, but quite soon I’ll be in the hell of denial, Mr Breakspear.”

I looked past Robin-Anne to where the moon’s path gleamed on the long waves, and then I glanced forward and saw another belt of silver, but this one diffuse and hazy, showing where the first crepuscular light seeped over the world’s grey edge. “Dawn,” I said in a hopeful voice.

But Robin-Anne did not react, and I looked down to see that she was not watching for the new day, but was crying. I did not know what to say or do. I should have knelt beside her and put my arms around her and promised her that she would be freed from the hell of anhedonia, and that there really was a God and that she did have the strength to tear herself free from cocaine, as others had freed themselves, and I should have assured her that there was true happiness without a drug, but I did not know her well enough to embrace her, so I just let her weep as the sun streaked up in glory from the east.

Thus Wavebreaker sailed towards the light, carrying her passengers to hell.

I rousted Thessy out of his bed with a cup of tea, then went to my own bed as he took over the wheel. I slept, dreaming of Masquerade sinking through waves of steel into torrents of fire.

I woke just before lunchtime to find Wavebreaker still sailing eastwards. Ellen was showing Rickie Crowninshield all the elaborate electronic toys that only Ellen wholly understood; the radios, radars, weatherfaxes and satellite receivers, and Rickie was being surprisingly attentive, but as soon as he saw me he scowled and clamped a pair of headphones over his ears as though to make sure that he did not have to hold any kind of conversation with me. Ellen shrugged at his rudeness.

“How’s the weather?” I asked her.

“No change.”

I squinted through a porthole and saw the sky was scraped blue and bright above an empty sea. “You faxed a chart?” I asked Ellen.

“Sure did.” She handed me the sheet of grey paper with its synoptic chart which had been transmitted from Florida just a few moments before. I pretended to despise such modern aids, but that was really a defensive reaction because I knew I could never afford such frills for Masquerade. I saw that there was not even a ripple of low pressure off to the east, which was the reassurance I wanted, for a depression to the east could swiftly twist itself into a full-blooded storm.

“Good morning, Rickie,” I said loudly, wanting to demonstrate that I held no grudge for his behaviour in the night.

“Yo.” His voice was surly, but suddenly he twisted round to face me and took off the headphones, and I thought he was going to apologise for his rudeness of the previous night, but instead he demanded to know if it was true that we were out in the open ocean and were not planning to make a landfall for some days.

“That’s true,” I said.

“But I wanted to do some scuba!” he said in outrage.

“There’ll be a chance, I promise.”

“Jesus!” he said in exasperation, then turned abruptly away. I waited to see if he would say any more, but he evidently did not want my company. I grimaced at Ellen, then went topsides where I found the ship being steered by its automatic pilot and Thessy and Jackson Chatterton perched halfway up the mainmast with reels of rigging wire from which Thessy was fashioning a parallel set of starboard shrouds. I wanted to double up all Wavebreaker’s standing rigging, just in case we did try to take her across the ocean. There was no sign of Robin-Anne who was presumably asleep. Chatterton climbed down to the deck and told me that Robin-Anne had eaten a huge breakfast.

“What about Rickie?”

“He just played with his food,” Chatterton frowned, “and that means he must be over the crash period, which means his behaviour’s going to be difficult.”

“Even more difficult?” I asked with dread.

The big man laughed. “Nick, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

It seemed that Jackson Chatterton was right, for we were all witnesses to a dreadful metamorphosis in Rickie. When he had joined the ship he had been nothing but eagerness and smiles, romping about like a new puppy, but now he had turned unrelentingly morose. At lunchtime he scowled at his sister who, wrapped in a dressing gown, fell on the sandwiches as though she had not eaten in weeks. “I’m famished!”

Rickie would not even try a sandwich, but instead pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. He sipped at his can of diet soda and grimaced at the taste. “Have we got any beer on this boat?” he suddenly asked.

“No,” Ellen said placidly. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Fuck the doctors.” No one responded, which merely annoyed Rickie. He stared at his sister whose pale face was made even paler by the sun-block ointment she had liberally smeared on her skin. “You like this shit-for-drink, Robbie?”

Robin-Anne nodded, but was too busy eating to take much notice of her brother, though she did manage to mumble that she thought the diet soda was really kind of good.

“I think it’s really kind of crap.” Rickie turned his truculent gaze on me. “You must have some liquor aboard, Nick?”

“Not a drop,” I lied.

“That’s very un-British of you.” He attempted an atrocious imitation of my English accent. “I thought all British ships were fuelled by rum, sodomy and the lash. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.” I kept my voice friendly, for I was determined not to be drawn by his provocation.

“Are you gay, Nick?” Rickie suddenly asked me in what purported to be a tone of serious enquiry. I did not answer, while everyone but Robin-Anne, who was too busy eating, seemed embarrassed. Once again the lack of response infuriated Rickie who, seeking some other means of provocation, hurled his can of soda across the deck. “Shit-juice!” he shouted.

Ellen caught my eye, and we stared at each other for a sympathetic fraction of a second, then I looked away to see that the sticky liquid had sprayed across the teak planks. “Clean it up,” I said mildly.

“Rum, sodomy and the lash!” Rickie chanted at me with a sudden and extraordinary vindictiveness.

Jackson Chatterton stirred as though he proposed to clean up the mess himself, but I waved him down and kept my eyes on Rickie. “Clean it up,” I said again.

“You clean it up. This is our vacation! I didn’t suggest coming on this heap of a boat to work like a house-servant, isn’t that right, Robbie?”

Robin-Anne just went on eating.

“Clean it up,” I told Rickie again.

Rickie seized Thessy’s can, pulled open its top, and hurled it messily after the first. “Now what are you going to do? Flog me?” He suddenly laughed, then looked at Ellen whom he perceived as a possible ally. “You can never tell with a Brit, can you? It’s either a flog or a fuck.”

Ellen said nothing to encourage him. Robin-Anne ate stolidly on, while poor Thessy looked terrified. Only Jackson Chatterton seemed comfortable with Rickie’s display of petulant temper. “The man said clean it up,” Chatterton said calmly, “so clean it up!”

But Rickie was long beyond sense. “This is a vacation!” he screamed at me, “so why are we out here? I want to see a beach! A beach, you know what a beach is? Sand? Surf? I want to go board-sailing, maybe do a little water skiing. I want to do some scuba, for Christ’s sake!”

I ignored him, fetching instead a mop and bucket from one of the big stern lockers. The bucket had a rope attached to its handle and I skimmed it over the stern to haul up a gallon or so of sea-water which I slammed down in front of Rickie. “The deck needs cleaning, Rickie, so do it.” I threw the mop at him.

He ignored the mop, just staring at me, and I saw him take a breath ready to defy me so I spoke before he could. “Either you clean the deck, Rickie, or I’ll scrub it with your hair.”

He began to weep. Robin-Anne glanced at him, then smeared mustard on a roast beef sandwich. “It’s real good food,” she said enthusiastically.

“I’ll help you,” Ellen said to Rickie, then she took his hand and placed it on the mop handle. “Come on,” she said gently.

Thus, as Rickie feebly dabbed at the deck and as his sister ate, our happy ship sailed on.

When, before we had sailed, I had tried to anticipate the cruise-cure, I had naïvely foreseen it as a difficult but intrinsically rewarding experience. I had fondly imagined that the Crowninshield twins, repentant and eager, would work about the ship by day and, exhausted by sea air and honest labour, would sleep all night. I had imagined them as willing partners in our efforts to help them, and I had been encouraged in that optimism by the knowledge that Rickie himself had suggested this drastic therapy of isolation from drugs by going to sea.

Yet, in the event, I was right about only one thing; it was difficult. We spent aimless days beating up and down the endless wind, carrying our cargo of resentment and despair, and though I worked to strengthen Wavebreaker’s rigging for a notional crossing of the Atlantic, in truth I was rehearsing the arguments I would use to convince Senator Crowninshield that the cruise-cure could not ever work.

At least not for Rickie, for Rickie was my problem. The cruise-cure might have been his idea, but now that he had embarked on the experience he had no wish to co-operate with it, and instead his moods veered between a cringing self-pity and a vituperative defiance. His weapon of choice became the tape deck on which he played an appalling cacophony of rock music at a level well judged to be loud enough to annoy, but not quite loud enough to provoke me into open hostility. Jackson Chatterton asked me why I simply did not disconnect the tape deck from the boat’s electrical supply, but I suspected that such a move would merely persuade Rickie to transfer his battle to another piece of the boat’s equipment, and one which, unlike the tape deck, might be necessary to Wavebreaker’s survival. I asked Chatterton how long we could expect Rickie’s anti-social behaviour to last, and the big man smiled. “For ever, Nick.”

“For ever?” I sounded appalled.

“I think he’s just being himself,” Jackson Chatterton said sourly, “an eternal jerk.”

“And his father might become President,” I said sourly.

“Glory be!” Chatterton said mockingly, and began to laugh. “I tell you, Nick, if that man’s serious about winning the jackpot, then the sooner he puts Rickie in a straitjacket, the better.”

Yet Rickie did have better moments when he seemed to realise just what a jerk he truly was, and in those moments he would ineptly try to help with the working of the ship, and he would even apologise for his obnoxious behaviour, though the apologies were usually addressed to Ellen, Chatterton or Thessy, and rarely to me. I suspected that there was something inherent in my character or appearance that irritated Rickie, because I noted how even in his lucid and calmer moments he took care to avoid me. Only once did he deliberately seek out my company, and that was when he fetched a chart up to the cockpit and asked me to show him where we were. I pencilled a cross to mark our estimated position and showed him how we had been beating up and down in the open ocean, parallel with the islands but always out of their sight.

“What’s the point of that?” he asked, with only a trace of his usual hostility.

“It’s a good way of shaking everyone down,” I said. “If we were constantly anchoring and going ashore then no one would fall into a shipboard routine.” I hesitated, wondering how much truth he could bear, and decided he might as well hear it all. “I thought the whole idea of the cruise-cure was to isolate you. How can I do that if we’re in and out of anchorages?”

“Yeah, sure, sure.” He brushed off my explanation and stared at the pencilled cross I had made on the chart. “But we will go back to the islands?”

“Of course.” I should probably already have taken Wavebreaker back to the islands, for our hopelessly inadequate watch-keeping arrangements were making Thessy and me more and more tired. Yet, if I was honest with myself, I knew my weapon of choice against Rickie was to keep him out at sea. He used the cassette player and I used navigation. It takes two to fight.

“So when do we go back to the islands?” he demanded.

“In a few days?” I was deliberately vague.

“I want to do some scuba, right? Have some fun!” He said the last three words in an outraged voice, as though ‘fun’ was the birthright of a rich American youth, and I was being unnaturally cruel in denying it to him. I said nothing, which only annoyed him. “Or do you think I’ll run away if we go ashore?”

“Would you?” I asked.

“I just want to do some scuba!” He was still outraged. “OK?”

“OK,” I said placatingly.

“And soon, you know?” He snatched the chart away from me and roughly folded it. “I mean, like before next year?”

“A week at the very most,” I promised him.

He bad-temperedly chucked his cigarette end towards the sea, but it fell into the scuppers and I saw the flicker of pride cross his face as he was tempted to leave the smoking and glowing butt to make a scorch mark on the wood, but then he saw my expression and, behaving as though he had never intended to do anything else, he stalked to the gunwale and contemptuously flicked the cigarette over the side. He went below without another word and two minutes later I heard the nauseating sound of the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band crashing through the boat.

Robin-Anne had the capacity to be entirely more pleasant company, except that she had fallen into a torpor of careless inactivity. She abandoned her heavy eating, picking listlessly at her meals instead. She seemed self-absorbed and almost as short-tempered as her brother, yet she made far more effort to be sociable, and when a half-dozen dolphins one day decided to keep Wavebreaker company I thought I saw Robin-Anne enjoy a moment of pure innocent pleasure as she watched the lovely creatures dive and leap in our quarter-wave. She took a particular liking for Thessy, and the two of them would often sit close together, talking and talking, and there was something curiously touching about the sight. I asked Thessy what they spoke about, and he told me that he was trying to lead her to Christ, then complained that Robin-Anne would never listen to his evangelism because all she ever wanted to do was talk about cocaine.

I smiled. “I know.”

I knew because it had become Robin-Anne’s habit to come on deck each night and there to use me as a sounding-board for her obsession with the drug. I heard how, in the dark hell of anhedonia, an addict took alcohol or barbiturates or any other thing that might alleviate that terrible Godless empty black hole of dopamine exhaustion. She told me about the seething paranoia of the addict; how they feared that someone else might be cheating them of their supply. She told me how the addicts fought and stole and lied and whored to find the money to feed their habit. “And in their sane moments,” she said, “they hate themselves for what they’re doing, but the only sure escape from that self-loathing is to use still more cocaine.”

I had wanted to ask her if she had ever been driven to desperate measures to find cocaine herself, but I did not like to put the question which, in any case, her next words implicitly answered. “Rickie and I were always kind of popular,” she said wryly.

“Because you had money?”

“We’ve always had lots of that,” she said with attractive deprecation. She was staring to starboard, where gargantuan clouds shrouded the stars and cast a black pall across the sea. Despite the massing clouds the wind was still steady from the south-east, the seas were long and smooth, and the weather forecast untroubling. Robin-Anne smiled. “You always have plenty of friends if you’ve got lots of money to buy them cocaine.”

That smile was one of the last she gave me for, night by night, she had been plunging ever deeper into what Jackson Chatterton called the abstinence phase. Robin-Anne tried to explain what he meant as she sat curled in the swathing oilskin jacket. She looked very calm and her voice was softly placid, but I could see her pale, long-fingered hands flexing and twisting as she spoke. She had, as usual, brought me a cup of coffee that I was letting cool on the binnacle shelf as she told me that the first stage of withdrawal was marked by the anaesthesia of sleep and the pleasures of food, but that easy first phase was replaced by the torture of abstinence; a time of wakefulness and torment. Robin-Anne’s torment was the memory of the blissful drenching of her soul with sudden euphoria, the glorious dependability of a chemically induced heaven. It was a memory, Robin-Anne said, that prowled and snarled and clawed at her resolve, begging her to give it the blessing of just one more sniff of cocaine, wheedling to her that one small hit of the magic powder could not possibly hurt.

“And how long,” I asked, “is the abstinence phase?”

“If I’m real lucky, three months. Two years if not.” Her huge eyes looked almost liquid in the small light glinting from the binnacle. “And very soon,” she went on sadly, “I’ll begin to hallucinate about the drug, to dream about it, and to lust after it more strongly than I’ve ever wanted anything in all my life. Nothing will matter to me except the drug. If I was in love I would forget my lover, and if I was a mother I’d forget my children, because all I would think about was the drug.” She stared forward, to where one bright star showed under the canopy of dark cloud. Earlier I had tried to get her interested in the sextant, challenging her to catch that one lonely star in its mirrors, but she had been too lackadaisical to make the attempt. Now she shuddered suddenly. “I hate being ill.”

“Ill?”

“I’ve got a chemical dependency, Nick. That’s an illness. It isn’t a character weakness, but an illness.”

I sipped the coffee and grimaced as I realised she had added gobs of sugar and forgotten the milk. “What happens when the abstinence phase is over?” I asked.

She spread her hands in a simple gesture of benison. “It will be over when my brain no longer resurrects the memory of the drug’s effect, and when that happens I shall be properly alive again, like you and Ellen and Thessy.”

“May it be soon,” I said, but Robin-Anne did not respond to that dutiful scrap of piety. Instead she went below and a few minutes later, as I went down to fetch a proper coffee, I saw her sitting in front of the tape deck, a set of earphones clamped over her short and so very pale hair; she was rocking obsessively back and forth, back and forth as though she could drive the clawing scrabbling hateful demon out of her soul with a scorching blast of her brother’s fearsome music. I was watching someone I liked slip into a poisonous hell, and I was helpless.

An hour later Thessy relieved me. I gave him the course, shared a bacon sandwich with him, then went below to sleep.

Ellen woke me an hour after dawn. I was groggy with sleep and fumbled for the light switch, but instead Ellen swept back the curtains to flood grey daylight into the small cabin. “Trouble, O Captain, my Captain!” she said cheerfully.

“Oh, no.” I sat up. Ellen held out a grey weatherfax sheet which showed that the isobars had shrunk and wrapped themselves into a depression during the night. The low pressure was far away east in the Atlantic, but Ellen had been right to wake me for we both knew how swiftly such depressions could develop into storms that could move with lightning speed across the sea. I pushed hair out of my face and frowned at the chart which, I saw, had been transmitted just moments before. “Oh, bugger.” I said.

“Two syllables even!” Ellen mocked me. “Wow!”

I scowled at her, tried to find some crushing retort, but yawned hugely instead.

“I must say,” Ellen adopted a southern accent, “that you are just the prettiest sight in the morning, Nick Breakspear. Is that what I have to look forward to all the way across the South Pacific?”

“You’re not exactly a ball of fun yourself first thing in the morning,” I reminded her, then looked up at the wind-gauge repeater that was mounted on the cabin bulkhead. I saw that the wind speed had dropped a fraction, hovering now on the cusp between force three and four, but there was little comfort to be taken from that reading for the wind direction had moved a fraction southerly and the barometer mounted next to the wind-gauge betrayed that the pressure had dropped even since I’d gone to sleep. I leaned across the bed and tapped the glass and watched the needle fall even further. “We’ll have to run for it,” I said.

“Bad as that?” Ellen asked with what I suspected was a tinge of enthusiasm for a taste of rough weather.

“It isn’t a hurricane,” I said dismissively. It was too early in the season for a hurricane, but the small depression could quickly grow into a tropical storm and, under the lash of such a storm, it was hard to tell how it differed from a hurricane. Nor did I want to take any chances with a tired and short-handed crew, and, as shelter was not so very far away, prudence dictated that I should turn our bows westwards and find a hurricane hole where we could safely ride out whatever nastiness the weather brought. I swung my legs to the floor and reached for my shorts. “Is there any coffee?”

“On the stove, great leader.”

“Would you tell Thessy to run due west? And tell him I’ll bring a proper course in a moment.”

“Your every wish is my command,” Ellen said, then took good care to leave before I had time to articulate one of those wishes. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then pulled on one of my old army shirts before picking up Thessy’s much battered Bible that lay on the small table between our beds. It was an ancient Mission Bible, given to Thessy by his father, and bound in stiff black boards that had been discoloured by salt spray and creased with too much use, but the binding was still sound and its red-edged pages intact. Thessy had been instructed by his father to read his way through the whole book, ploughing indiscriminately through the dirty bits, boring bits and bloody bits alike, but he was finding it hard going and had shyly told me that he was much looking forward to reaching the Gospels. So far he had only managed to reach a very minor and remarkably gloomy Old Testament prophet. I kept a finger to mark the particular doom-laden passage that Thessy was now reading, and turned back to Psalm 55. ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord,’ I read, ‘and he shall sustain thee.’ I read the familiar psalm for comfort, and felt the ship wear round as I did so. There was a smack as a wave caught her on the beam, and a crack of the sails, then Thessy had her running hard and strong, and I smiled as I thought how good a sailor Thessy was, and how good a person he was too, then I went to fetch myself a coffee and to work out a course that would lead us to shelter.

“What’s happening?” Rickie had been sitting at the single sideband radio, perhaps eavesdropping on traffic.

“It’s your lucky day,” I said. “By dusk we’ll be at anchor.”

“Yeah, man!” His face showed some of the delight he had demonstrated on the morning he had first joined the ship. He snapped his fingers in celebration, then turned away to probe the radio waves still further.

I plotted a bearing for San Salvador, then went topsides and gave the new course to Thessy. The wind, which had fallen away, was piping up again, and I suspected the day would soon be lively. The sky was clouding fast, and the sea was rising, reminders of just how quickly a depression could twist into a storm. Not that we were in storm conditions now, and we were nowhere close to shortening sail, but the long wave crests were flecking white and Wavebreaker was beginning to roll as she ran in front of the freshening breeze.

I braced my legs against the roll. Thessy slackened the mainsheet, and grinned as our bows chopped into a chunk of water that exploded into white fragments and spattered back down the deck. Two hours later the same motion drove the bows under and I felt the long hull shudder as she tore herself free, then I watched as a great sweep of green water rolled down the deck to shatter at the cockpit coaming before pouring thick out of Wavebreaker’s scuppers. Thessy whooped for sheer joy as the main boom touched the starboard-side waves to draw its own miniature and water-splintering wake through the darkening sea. I shared his happiness, for it was a marvellous day’s sailing; exhilarating and quick.

By mid-afternoon the sky was darkly overcast and the seas had built into great crinkled monsters that looked far more threatening than they actually were. They were big enough to impress Jackson Chatterton who brought a camera on deck and asked me to take his picture against a backdrop of the looming grey waves. “Photographs always make the waves look smaller!” I shouted to him over the rush of wind in the rigging.

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter, Jacko. Stand there! Smile!”

The water thundered past, but we were safe, running miles ahead of the storm. The whitecaps spilt angry tangles of foam down the waves’ faces, but the wind was no more than force seven, gusting eight, and we still did not need to shorten any sail. Ellen made a big plate of sandwiches, but only Chatterton, Thessy and I were tempted. The twins seemed as oblivious to the food as they were to the magnificent seas. At one point I went below to fetch the radio direction finder and saw Robin-Anne glance out of the stateroom window to where a shaft of sunlight briefly glinted through a rent in the clouds to cast a wash of silver brilliance on the crumpled water as it heaped and rushed on past the hull, but for all the notice Robin-Anne took of the sight she might as well have been blind. Her face was blank, and her thin body was slumped on the stateroom sofa with a discarded book beside her. Rickie had disappeared and I had an unworthy wish that perhaps he was spewing up his belly with seasickness.

I took a mug of tea to Thessy who did not want to be spelled at the wheel because he was finding too much pleasure in steering the schooner through the great onrush of wind and wave. “How long till landfall, Nick?” he asked.

“Maybe a half-hour?”

In fact it was nearer forty-five minutes for, as we closed on the islands, a rainstorm blotted out our visibility. The sea surged up behind, lifting and carrying Wavebreaker forward. Thessy, his face shining from the rain, grinned with delight. He saw the land first, or rather he saw the great white stone tower of the Dixon Hill light high over San Salvador.

The rain became harder, bouncing off the deck and cascading thick off the sails. “Do you want a slicker?” I shouted at Thessy.

He shook his head. I was more tired, or else older, or perhaps more feeble, and decided that I wanted to change into dry clothes and so I left Thessy at the wheel and dropped quickly down the main companionway into the incongruous luxury of our main stateroom where Robin-Anne, stirred from her lethargy, was trying to tune the television to a Bahamian transmitter.

She nodded a distracted greeting to me, then, turning away, screamed with fright.

She screamed because her brother had suddenly appeared in the companionway that led from the forward cabins. Blood was pouring from his nose.

“Jackson!” I shouted, then ran forward to where Rickie was reeling back against the bulkhead. “What happened? Did you fall?”

“Get lost.” His one good eye was glazed, and its pupil huge. He must have come from the heads, for the door was swinging and I could see a smear of blood on the edge of the toilet bowl, and I guessed he must have been vomiting into the bowl when a lurch of the ship cracked his nose against the edge.

“Come on, Rickie!” I tried to ease him away from the bulkhead towards one of the chairs, but he thrust me away.

“Fuck you.” His voice was extraordinarily hoarse, a dry and croaking voice like some cartoon monster. Blood dripped from his chin on to the stateroom carpet. His forehead was greasy with sweat.

Jackson Chatterton came running from the galley, then slowed as he saw Rickie’s face. “What have you done?” he asked Rickie, but in an oddly accusatory tone.

“All of you,” Rickie encompassed the whole world with a wave of his hand, “fuck off. Really.” He had begun to weep, his thin shoulders heaving with enormous sobs.

“I think he must have fallen,” I said.

Chatterton shot me a look of withering scorn. “He never fell! Look at him! He’s high! He ain’t even bruised! He’s just burst a blood vessel, that’s all!” He twined a big hand in Rickie’s hair and thrust the boy’s head towards me. “Look!” Chatterton’s voice was harsh and ugly, full of hatred.

I looked to see tears streaming down Rickie’s slack face to mingle with the blood that was dribbling on to the sole. He was grizzling like a small child, and staggering as the big seas rolled Wavebreaker’s long hull.

“Look at the turkey’s nostrils!” Chatterton shouted, and I realised his anger was not directed at me, but at Rickie.

I looked. Blood was filling and welling from Rickie’s nasal cavities, but at either side, on the very edges of his nostrils, there were traces of white powder.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Fucking jerk!” Chatterton pulled Rickie away towards their cabin. “You miserable poxy jerk! You’ve got it, haven’t you? You smuggled your stuff on board!”

“He’s got cocaine on board?” I asked naïvely.

“He’s been fooling us!” Chatterton laid Rickie on the bed, but not roughly, and I began to see that much of the black man’s rage was aimed at himself for not being more alert to Rickie’s condition. He had assumed that Rickie was going through the turmoil of the abstinence phase, when in fact Rickie had just been oscillating up and down the euphoric scale between heaven and hell.

Robin-Anne shrank back into the sofa, abandoning the television that hissed an untuned signal at us. She looked scared. She had been struggling against her abstinence phase all week, and even perhaps daring to hope that she was winning her battle, but Rickie had not tried at all. Somewhere on board Wavebreaker there was a supply of his cocaine. “Oh, damn,” I said tiredly, then went to stand in the door of Rickie’s cabin. I watched as Jackson Chatterton staunched the blood and began probing Rickie’s nose with a paintbrush. The big man worked with an extraordinary gentleness. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Why don’t you put on dry clothes?” Chatterton asked me in return, but when I did not move, he held up the small bottle of oily liquid into which he had been dipping the paintbrush. “It’s an anaesthetic. You sniff enough cocaine, Nick, and the stuff eats away your nasal septum and your vocal cords till you don’t have a nose or a voice any more, do you?” This last question was snapped at the weeping Rickie. “Instead you’ll look like a leper, with a saddle-nose that’s nothing but a rotted cavity full of snot and stupidity!” He spat the words at Rickie, yet his hands were still very tender. “So where are you hiding your nose-candy, Rickie?”

“Fuck off,” Rickie shrieked at Chatterton. I remembered Robin-Anne telling me how the threat of deprivation drove cocaine users into a bitter paranoia, and I was seeing that madness now in Rickie’s frenetic reaction to Chatterton’s questions. More than frenetic, for Rickie suddenly lashed out at the big man.

That was a mistake. Chatterton rammed Rickie back on to the bed and thrust his face close to the screaming boy. “Oh, baby, you in trouble! You are in trouble! You nothin’ but white meat in a bad jail, Sweetpea. You ain’t got the brains of a tick! You go on like this, you be a big, dumb, blind motherfucker with your brains trickling out a hole in your dumb face!” Chatterton’s voice, honed to savagery by years of the army, utterly cowed Rickie who could only stare in shocked horror at the face so close above him. “You be such a dumb-ugly piece of shit, boy, that not even the blind prisoners want to rape you! You hear me?” Chatterton waited till Rickie, sobbing, nodded softly.

Ellen, puzzled by the commotion, had appeared in the doorway beside me. She frowned, still not understanding. Rickie, oblivious to her presence, was racked with tears.

I told Ellen the good news; that we had an overdosed Rickie and some hidden cocaine aboard.

“I searched the turkey’s luggage!” Chatterton complained to us as he went back to working on Rickie’s nose, “and I did a good search, a real good search! I know he couldn’t have smuggled enough stuff aboard to do this to himself, I know!”

“He probably didn’t.” Ellen stared dispassionately at Rickie, and then, in a very commonplace voice, suggested the obvious solution to our mystery. “But I suspect someone else did.”

“Oh, God!” I spoke to myself. I was remembering a tall, handsome and laconic man, a southerner who wore a badge saying ‘Just Say No!’ I had asked Ellen to search the ship after Jesse Isambard Sweetman had trespassed on Wavebreaker, but that search had been to discover whether any item might have been stolen and it had not occurred to either of us that perhaps Sweetman had come to hide something aboard the schooner. But who else could it be?

“Sweetman,” I said aloud.

I felt like an idiot. We had gone to sea in such innocence, with such high hopes, and with such good intentions, and all the time Rickie had been laughing at us because his friend Jesse Sweetman had salted away the candy before Rickie even came on board.

So now all we had to do was find it.

We anchored that evening in the good shelter of Sea Rat Cay’s lagoon. Sea Rat Cay is a flat, nondescript and uninhabited patch of land where palms, casuarinas, slash pines and sea-grape grow. The lagoon has a sandy sea-bed that lets an anchor dig in hard, and is deep enough for a boat of Wavebreaker’s draught. The Cay itself is never more than ten feet above sea-level, but shaped like the letter C to give wonderful shelter from every wind except a rare westerly. By nightfall Thessy and I were content that our three anchors were well bedded against the rising wind that was tossing and clattering the palm fronds. Scraps of broken palm were whipping across the lagoon water that was rippling like a miniature angry sea, but at least the rain had stopped, though the dusk sky was foully black. I watched the wind tearing at the vegetation, then went below and saw that the pressure had stopped its steep fall.

I copied the barometer reading into Wavebreaker’s log, then went back to the main stateroom where Jackson Chatterton was systematically taking apart every scrap of furniture. He was finding nothing. He had already combed the cabin he shared with Rickie and had discovered nothing except a few black and glossy pills that he said were Methedrine. “Better known as speed,” Chatterton told me. “The turkey probably had them in case he ran out of cocaine. And those are Dexamyl.” He showed me yet more pills he had since found in the main-cabin, but what he had not yet discovered was any cocaine. He searched diligently. Ellen watched him with folded arms. She seemed embarrassed by the proceedings, while Robin-Anne was dully oblivious to the whole drama. Rickie, his eyes still wet with tears, vociferously protested that the search was unnecessary. “I haven’t got any! None! Jesus! Why won’t you believe me?” He lit a cigarette, even though another was trickling smoke, barely lit, in the ashtray beside him.

“Where did you meet Jesse Sweetman?” I asked him.

“Get lost,” he said; then, in a reversion to an earlier insult, began to chant at me in a singsong voice. “Rum, sodomy and the lash. Rum, sodomy and the lash.”

Thessy crouched at the foot of the companionway stairs, his eyes showing white and scared, so I went back to stand beside him and thus to give him encouragement.

“You like a bit of black bum, do you?” Rickie jeered at me.

“Oh, shut your silly face!” Ellen suddenly snapped at him.

Rickie was astonished at Ellen’s hostility, and he turned to defend his point of view. “He’s a Brit!” He explained to Ellen but pointing at me. “Rum, sodomy and lash. Black bums and buggery!” He began to laugh, and I started walking towards him, my anger ready to explode in appalling force, but Ellen, just as she had averted my violence when Sweetman was aboard, now did so once again.

“If I was hiding drugs aboard this boat,” she said in a very reasonable tone of voice, “I’d hide them in the one place where a person can be alone.”

Chatterton frowned at her, then looked to me for amplification.

“Try the heads,” I said, wondering why I had not thought of it earlier.

“Oh, damn you all,” Rickie said despairingly, and thus confirming where we should look.

We all seemed to meet in the doorway of the heads, all but Rickie who had gone the other way. He was still crying. He went to the radio desk where he clamped a set of earphones over his skull as though he could blot out the whole world and all its misery. And misery it would be, for we had found his cocaine.

Chatterton found the first bag inserted in the toilet-roll holder, threaded inside the spring which tensioned the holder in its bracket. Another bag was taped deep behind the drain outflow under the small washbasin, while a third was concealed behind the panelling where it was attached to Wavebreaker’s steel hull. We could find no more of the drug, though Chatterton warned us of the addicts’ cunning. “I’ll keep looking,” he offered.

I carried the three plastic bags into the stateroom. It was the first time I had ever seen cocaine at close quarters and it looked so very innocent. It was more crystalline than I had expected, with a glint like rock-salt, but it took an effort of the imagination to realise just what pure evil I held in my hands. Robin-Anne stared at the bags, then what little colour was in her face seemed to drain away as she recognised the powder. She licked her lips.

I walked past her and tapped Rickie’s shoulder. He was hunched furtively over the microphone of the VHF, its headset tight over his ears. He flinched away from me, so I roughly pulled the headset away from his ears. “I want you.”

“Go play with your black boy, Breakspear.”

I hit him hard across the head; a smacking ringing bang of a blow that rocked him violently sideways. He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could utter a sound I had seized his shirt and pulled him harshly out of his chair and then, still one-handed, I spun him round and hurled him against the bulkhead. He crashed into the panelling, his black hair flopping with the whiplash of the impact. His nose had begun to pour blood again, and his eyes were wide with terror. I was holding the cocaine in my left hand, so I used my right to hit him in the belly. He uttered a moaning gasp and folded over. I grabbed his hair and forced him to stand upright against the bulkhead. “Make one more sound,” I hissed into his astonished and terrified face, “and I’ll beat you so hard that you’ll wish you had never been born.”

“Nick?” Ellen said tentatively, then louder and with a note of warning in her voice, “Nick!”

“Leave us alone,” I warned her. Ellen was clearly hating the violence, while Robin-Anne seemed not even to have noticed that it was happening. Jackson Chatterton, watching from the door of the heads, made a circle with his thumb and middle finger and offered it to me as a gesture of approval.

Rickie’s breath was coming in huge lung-hurting gasps. Blood bubbled at his nostrils and trickled down to his chin. His blind eye was sheened by the lights, while his good eye was bloodshot and scared. He made not a sound, not even a sob, as I gripped his shirt and pulled his face towards me. “You’re coming on deck with me.”

He nodded. I doubted that anyone had ever used physical violence against Rickie Crowninshield, and he was stunned by it. He was also as meek as a milksop now, and eager to please by hurrying after me up the companionway stairs. His nose dripped blood on to the non-skid treads, then on to the teak deck as I led him to the portside rail. Spits of rain were being carried on the wind that was hissing across the sheltered lagoon now ragged with scraps of vegetation torn from the trees and bushes on the darkening Sea Rat Cay. The wind was shrieking in Wavebreaker’s high rigging, trembling the masts and making the long hull tug against her anchor rodes.

“Watch me,” I said.

Rickie whimpered as, one by one, I tore the three bags open and tossed their contents to the wind. The keys of heaven’s gates were scattered to the sea and the angry wind and the malevolent sting of rain. God knows how much that cocaine was worth, but enough to make even Rickie Crowninshield cry as he watched the powder vanish into the dusk. When all three plastic bags were empty I washed them in a bucket of sea-water, tossed the fouled water overboard, then stuffed the clean bags into the gash bucket. “Is there any more on board?” I asked Rickie.

“No,” he said quickly, eager to please me. “None. Really.”

“If I find any more,” I told him, “I’ll hurt you properly.” At that moment I hated him. I hated his weakness, his tears, his money, his misused privilege, his deceit, and his utter uselessness. “So tell me about Sweetman,” I said. “He put that stuff aboard?”

“Yes, he did. Yes.”

“So who is he?”

Rickie seemed puzzled by the question, as though he expected everyone to know who Sweetman was. “He’s our supplier,” he said at last.

“Your supplier? You mean at home?”

“Yes, sure.”

“But you’re two thousand miles from home. What the hell is he doing here?”

“I don’t know.” Rickie was crying harder now. “I just don’t know.”

“Why the hell did you want to come on this boat if you weren’t going to make any effort to give up?” I asked angrily.

“I do want to give up! I do, I do, I do!” He was grizzling pathetically; a tall crumpled broken boy.

“Go away.” I could not hide my revulsion, but I don’t suppose he noticed. He just crept below.

I stayed on deck as night fell, and I told myself that I stayed there to make sure that the anchors were holding, while the truth was that I simply did not want to go down and look at Rickie’s tearful, bloody face or at Robin-Anne’s soulless vacuity. So instead I sat in the cockpit, hunched against the splashes of rain, and watched the night fall black across the fretting lagoon. I sensed that the storm had either passed us to the south, or else that it had not worked itself into its full frenzy.

“So just what did you expect of Rickie?” Ellen’s voice interrupted me. She had silently appeared in the companionway, holding a spare oilskin jacket that she now tossed at me.

“I don’t know.” I pulled the jacket round my shoulders as a protection against the small rain that was falling, then shifted down the thwart to make room for her.

Ellen sat and brought a bottle of my Irish whiskey out of her oilskin’s pocket. “You didn’t hide the bottles as well as Rickie hid his cocaine.” She poured three fingers into a glass. “So just what did you expect of him?” She handed me the glass.

“A little effort,” I said. “This whole goddamn mess was his idea.”

Ellen groaned. “Come on, Nick! This isn’t a Boy Scout cruise! He’s a very sick boy!”

“Then he should be in a hospital!” I spoke very bitterly. “He shouldn’t be here. We’re not trained to deal with Rickie’s kind of crap.”

Ellen poured herself some whiskey, then stared across the break in the lagoon towards the open sea. It was almost full dark, but we could just see how the wind was whipping the exposed waves into a churning mass of whitecaps. “I suppose,” Ellen said after a while, “that you’re planning to tell the senator that we can’t cope with Rickie?”

“Something like that,” I confirmed her guess.

She gave me a rueful look. “I could really use the three months’ money, Nick.”

It had not been so very long since Ellen had savaged me for lumbering her with the company of rich junkies, yet now she was arguing for continuing with the cruise-cure. “I just can’t take three months of Rickie,” I said very fervently.

“What you really hate in him,” Ellen said in a most prosaic voice, “is that he reminds you of yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, and meant obnoxious as well.

“He’s just like you,” Ellen said flatly. “He’s rejected the world of his famous father. I’ve often thought that the real silver spoon in this world is not how much money you’re born to, but how good an address book you inherit. I can’t really believe that all those second-generation actors and politicians and writers are born with natural talent, they’re just born knowing the right people, and familiarity means they’re not afraid of their parents’ trade, while the rest of us poor saps have to work our way up the hard way. But you rejected your father’s world, just as Rickie is rejecting his father’s world. I admit the rejections take different forms, but rejection is almost always graceless. I doubt your father enjoyed you being a marine, any more than the senator likes Rickie smoking crack.”

“I am nothing like Rickie,” I said very clearly.

“You’re a rebel,” Ellen said, “only your rebellion took the perverse form of seeking out respectability. Why did you become a marine?”

I sought for a flippant answer, but none came, so I offered Ellen the truth. “Because my father marched to the American Embassy to protest against Vietnam, and he was in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the one thing he always professed to hate was militarism. So.” I shrugged, as though the rest was obvious.

Ellen smiled. “Sweet, handsome Nick.” She said it very fondly and with what seemed to be some pity. “Could you have been an actor?”

“No.”

“But you probably wanted to be, and you probably felt horribly inadequate against your father’s excellence, and that’s just what Rickie is feeling now. Rickie has probably felt inadequate all his life, and right now, when he’s been given into our care, all he finds is this horribly competent Brit who scowls at him, and makes him feel useless, and shouts at him not to tread on the sailcloth or to wind a line the other way round a winch, and is it any wonder that he’s as miserable as a cat in a rainstorm?”

I growled, reluctant to accept the criticism.

Ellen smiled. “Be nice to him. Find something to praise!”

“What am I supposed to do?” I bridled. “Tell him his hair looks nice?”

“At least he has a comb and makes an effort,” Ellen said pointedly. “No, but you have to start somewhere. He’s fascinated by the boat’s electronics, so why don’t you praise him for that? He spent two hours experimenting with the radios today, and perhaps he’d like to hear you say how clever he is for having mastered the equipment?” She smiled encouragingly at me. “The journey might be a thousand miles, Nick, but it begins with a single step.”

I said a few very rude words to show what I thought of such sententious rubbish. Ellen, for all her sour wit, had moments when she tried to swamp the boat in American niceness.

She sighed. “Just give him a chance, Nick.”

“Sod him.”

“So eloquent, you English, so very eloquent.” She stared briefly into the sky as though seeking inspiration, then looked back to me. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”

“Why not? He deserved it.”

“No one deserves to be hit. Violence has never solved anything, it merely suppresses and disguises truth. Your father, whatever else he might or might not be, is surely right in his hatred of militarists.”

“My father”—I wearily leaned my head against the cockpit’s coaming—“would march to support the Movement to Burn Babies if he thought it was fashionable. I didn’t rebel against his beliefs, because he doesn’t have any. I rebelled against his lack of truth.”

Ellen sighed. “How very strict you are, Nick. That’s probably why Robin-Anne is so besotted with you.”

That made me snap my head upright. “Besotted?”

“She’s in love with you,” Ellen saw my astonishment and laughed at it. “She thinks you’re the strong man who’ll protect her from the demon drug. You’ve become her solution now, her magic potion.” Ellen mocked me with a smile. “Congratulations, Nick, you can marry six million bucks! You can be son-in-law to the President! Wow! You can invite me to the White House for a plastic chicken dinner! All you need do is pop the question.”

“It isn’t like that,” I said feelingly. “Robin-Anne talks to me about cocaine, but not about anything else. If she’s in love with anyone, it’s Thessy! They’re inseparable. She’s certainly not in love with me!”

“Oh, but she is. What do you think she talks about with Thessy?”

“Jesus and cocaine. He told me.”

“Jesus, cocaine and you,” Ellen corrected me with a smile. “Ask Thessy if you don’t believe me. She pumps him for information about you; what your star sign is, your favourite colour, what you like to eat, that sort of thing.” Ellen grinned, but I could see she was being deadly serious.

“Oh God.” I leaned my head back again to let the spitting rain strike my face. “Then that’s all the more reason,” I said softly, “to abandon the cruise. Robin-Anne has to learn to beat drugs without me.”

“Oh, that’s very pious!” Ellen poured me more whiskey. “But very callous, too. This kid is trusting you, Nick!”

“Oh, shit.” I did not want the responsibility.

Ellen laughed. “Three months, Nick, that’s all you have to give them, and at the end of three months we’ll pick up our big fat cheques and we’ll sail your boat across the Pacific. Is it a deal?”

I turned my head and smiled at her. Somehow, after the last few days, that dream of the South Seas had faded almost to unreality. “Are you really going to sail with me?” Ellen had already said as much, but I wanted to hear her say it again.

She pretended to think about it, then nodded. “I like you, Nick Breakspear, because you reinforce my convictions about men.”

I smiled. “I take it that isn’t a compliment?”

“No,” she returned the smile. “They say a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, but I guess I’m just the odd fish out, and I have a hankering for bicycles, and especially for old-fashioned, upright and honest bicycles.” She paused. “And do you want me to be really honest?”

“Of course.”

“Your father was the most handsome Hamlet that ever was.” She let that one sink in, then laughed, blew me a kiss, and was gone.

Ellen had made me feel better, and she had also left me the Irish whiskey, though I did not drink any more that night. Instead I waited till I was completely certain our three anchors were holding, then I went to bed, but via the forward hatchway so that I need not see either Rickie or Robin-Anne who were slumped in front of the television in the main stateroom.

I took one last look through the cabin port. The wind had slackened, so that the anchor rodes were no longer thrumming like harp strings. The rain seemed to have stopped altogether. A rift opened in the clouds beyond Sea Rat Cay and a weak shaft of moonlight touched the island so that the nearest pines looked as though they had been dipped in molten silver. “The worst of the storm’s gone,” I told Thessy, “so we’ll be off first thing in the morning.”

“God villing.” He looked up from reading his gloomy minor prophet.

“Tell me”—I tried to make my voice very casual—“but does Robin-Anne talk about me to you?”

The poor boy had obviously not wanted to tell me before, and now looked horribly embarrassed, but he could not tell a lie so he nodded. “All the time, Nick. She says you say poetry in the dark.”

I laughed, then shook my head to show Thessy that he should not take Robin-Anne seriously. “Ellen says we should persevere for the full three months.” I wanted to know how Thessy would react to such a prospect.

He frowned in serious thought, then nodded. “I think if God vanted us to give up, Nick, he vould not have let us begin.”

I supposed that made sense. “Thank you, Thessy.”

“Sleep vell, Nick.”

And, surprisingly, I did. To dream of Masquerade, and cleanness, and of far-off northern seas as cold as steel. I dreamed of home.

I woke early to hear the wind sighing in Wavebreaker’s shrouds and clattering the palm fronds on Sea Rat Cay, but I could tell, even without looking at the wind-gauge, that the storm was dying. Thessy was snoring gently in the other bed, so I rolled quietly out from under the sheet, pulled on a pair of shorts and went on deck. It was the break of day and a wan watery light was leaching into a sky that was ragged with clouds touched leprous yellow by the rising sun. Wavebreaker fretted to her anchor rodes, but with no great force. The foetid stink of wet vegetation was wafting from the island on a wind that was still blowing the open sea ragged, yet the barometer was rising and I saw no reason why we should not be under way within a couple of hours.

I went below and made myself an instant coffee and used the rest of the hot water to fill a shaving bowl that I carried back to the deck. I propped a mirror against the binnacle, and scraped happily away. I tunelessly sang myself some cheerful song as the wind snatched the foam off the razor’s edge and whirled it quivering into the scuppers. The same wind was thrashing the trees ashore and crashing the seas against the outer coral so that the waves shredded white into airborne foam, yet, and despite the wind’s remaining strength and my own rendition of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,’ the dawn suddenly struck me as strangely quiet. That thought made me pause, razor poised by my throat, so that for an instant I must have looked uncannily like a man contemplating suicide.

Why was the morning so quiet?

I straightened up as I realised what was missing from Wavebreaker’s usual dawn chorus; it was the hollow clatter of the wire halliards tapping against our metal masts. For a second or two I wondered whether Ellen or Thessy had woken in the night to stretch the halliards away from the masts to silence their insistent racket, but that was not the answer. Instead, when I looked, I saw that we had no halliards any more.

There had been halliards the night before, now there were none.

I stared stupidly into the rigging, the cut-throat razor forgotten in my hand. There were no halliards left, none. Not on either mast. I went to the foot of the mainmast and worked the sailcover back from the gooseneck and found a stub of wire protruding from the sail’s peak. The wire had been sheared clean so that its severed end shone with the brightness of newly exposed metal.

I turned, still gaping. All the halliards were gone, every single one. The halliards were the lines used to hoist the sails and, once hoisted, to hold the sails aloft, and they had all disappeared. At the bows, where I had left the jib, staysail and storm jib halliards snaphooked on to the pulpit rail, there was now nothing except a pair of bolt-cutters that were a part of Wavebreaker’s rigging kit and which had no business lying abandoned by the hawse hole. I picked up the bolt-cutters, reasoning that Rickie must have used them in the dark as he worked his way round the deck to cripple Wavebreaker. It had to be Rickie.

I swore. None of the other rigging seemed to have been touched; only the halliards. It was a piece of mindless stupid vandalism. I had hurt Rickie, so he had hurt the boat to gain his puerile revenge. Playing the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band too loud was not enough, now he had to creep about in the night, cutting the wire halliards from the sails then casting the bitter ends off their winches before, presumably, dropping them overboard. I imagined him laughing at the chaos he knew he would cause.

Then damn him, I thought, because if his desire was to stay in the lagoon and wait for the sun, then I would disappoint him by taking Wavebreaker out to sea on her twin motors. Before leaving the lagoon I would thread lightweight lines through the masthead sheeves so that we could easily haul replacement halliards through the blocks. I knew we had coils of spare wire stowed away below so that, even though Rickie’s vandalism was a nuisance, it was not fatal to the boat. By the day’s end, I thought, we should have made good all the damage and be once again safely under sail.

I went forward and started the diesel generator which not only powered the ship’s heavy electrical equipment like the air conditioners, anchor windlass, sail-furlers and bow thrusters, but also performed the daily chore of charging the ship’s batteries. My anger at Rickie had settled into a grim determination that he would not beat me. Instead I would give him an uncomfortable day at sea by driving Wavebreaker hard into the wind and waves, and I would threaten him with ten kinds of horror if he dared lay a harmful finger on the boat again.

Thessy, woken by the throbbing of the generator, came yawning from the companionway. “I need you,” I startled him by the sudden energy in my voice. “I want messenger lines put through every halliard block. You find some lightweight line and I’ll dig out the spare halliard wires. We’ve got work to do!” Poor Thessy stared at me as though I was mad. “We should look on the bright side, Thessy,” I went on, “and be grateful for a chance to replace all the halliards before we take this tub across the ocean.”

“Halliards?” He looked at the mainmast, then back to me. “Vot happened?”

I showed him one of the cut stubs. “I suspect it’s our friend Rickie. But if he thinks he can beat me, Thessy, then he will have to think again!”

Thessy frowned. “You think Mr. Crowninshield did this?”

“Can you think of anyone else?”

Thessy looked sad at such evidence of human sinfulness, then glanced up at the ragged clouds that scudded over the lagoon. “It’ll be brisk out there today!” He spoke with relish.

“The brisker the better!” I wanted to take Rickie out into my element; out into the great heaping wilderness of an ocean after storm, and once there I would keep him on deck and make him work. He might not be fit for the intricate jobs like splicing the rope tails on to the new wire halliards, but he could do his share of hauling and lifting, and I did not care how sick he might feel or how much his nose bled. I would make him do some real work for a change. I would sweat him. “That’s where I’ve been wrong,” I told a bemused Thessy, “I’ve let the twins laze about as though this was a holiday cruise. It isn’t. They should be working! They’ve got to take some responsibility for their own lives instead of flopping around like lap-dogs. We’ll give Rickie a proper watch to keep as a deckhand, and Robin-Anne can help Ellen with the cooking, and…” My voice tailed away to nothing because the generator had missed a beat, then it missed another, and I turned and stared forrard as the small engine gave a horrible groaning sound, then seized to a dead halt. It suddenly seemed very quiet on Wavebreaker’s deck. “Oh, no!” I walked forrard.

“The fuel?” Thessy suggested.

I prayed he was right, but I doubted that a mere fuel blockage would have created that terrible groan. I opened the hatch and dropped down into the steel-walled generator compartment. The fuel came from the main tanks which were deep amidships and the feed-line was equipped with a glass-bowl trap designed to float out any water that might have contaminated the diesel fuel. The trap was full of the reddish oil, showing that there was no blockage upstream of the glass bowl, yet, strangely, I could see some odd whitish specks suspended in the fuel.

I unscrewed the trap, dipped my finger into the diesel oil and brought out one of the specks. It had a white crystalline appearance, not unlike the cocaine I had scattered to the winds the previous night, and for a mad second I wondered if Rickie had hidden yet more of his drug in the fuel tanks, but then I tasted the speck and knew this was not cocaine. I fished another crystal speck out of the bowl and offered it on my fingertip to Thessy whose anxious face peered down from the hatchway. “Taste that,” I suggested.

He gingerly licked my finger, then instinctively screwed up his face until he realised what he had just tasted. “Sugar?”

“The bastard,” I said. “Oh, the bastard.”

The generator was useless now. Rickie had poured sugar into our main tanks, and the engine, sucking the sugar down the fuel lines, had super-heated the sweet granules into a burnt and sticky treacle that was now blocking the engine solid. Wavebreaker needed to be taken to a dockyard where the generator could be stripped and cleaned, and her fuel tanks and lines scoured of the last traces of sugar.

“Oh, hell,” I said bitterly and unhelpfully.

“At least it isn’t the main engines.” Thessy was trying to look on the bright side.

“I’ll kill him!” I hauled myself out of the hatch and gave an entirely useless and somewhat painful kick to a ventilator hood.

Thessy was holding out my cup of cold coffee, as though that would placate me. “But the main engines are all right,” Thessy insisted, and of course he was right, but the main engines were useless without fuel and all of our fuel, so far as I could tell, was fouled with the sugar. I could probably siphon some clean diesel off the top of the tanks, filter it, then rig up a jury supply to run the main engines, but it would all take time, as would re-rigging the halliards. I swore again, knowing that we were stuck in Sea Rat Cay’s lagoon for at least the next twenty-four hours.

“There’s only one thing that consoles me,” I told Thessy as I stumped down the deck and pulled open a locker. “We’re stuck here now, and he’ll have to go cold turkey, and I hope he suffers the pains of hell. I hope it hurts!” I had taken a length of one inch rope from the locker. It was one of the lines we sometimes used as a spring when mooring alongside a dock, and now, to Thessy’s puzzlement, I quickly tied an intricate and rarely used knot at one end of the line. I tossed the rope to Thessy. “Hang that from the lower spreaders, Thessy, then we’ll make ourselves a proper breakfast before we start work.”

Thessy stared dubiously at the rope I’d thrown him, but climbed the ratlines to the mainmast’s lower crosstrees where he obediently suspended the hangman’s noose. It lifted to the now useless wind and I half wished that I dared to use it.

But instead I fried myself some eggs, and I fried Thessy his favourite breakfast which was a mash of bread and bananas, after which, much fortified, we both got down to work.

We did not see Rickie all day. Robin-Anne took him some sandwiches late in the afternoon, and he must have eaten them, for later on I saw the empty plate in the stateroom, but we had no other evidence of his continued existence—except from Jackson Chatterton who offered to drag Rickie on deck so that I could make use of the hangman’s noose. Chatterton confirmed that Rickie had admitted the vandalism, but had offered no reason for it other than a general complaint that shipboard life sucked, and that I sucked in particular. I let the little swine suffer in the uncooled humidity of his dark cabin, for, in an effort to save electricity on a boat that now had no means of recharging its batteries, I had played merry hell with the fuse locker. I had disconnected everything except the VHF radio. We had no television, no hair dryers, no electric razors, no cabin lights, no air conditioners, no refrigerator, and, most blessed of all, no Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band.

Robin-Anne was embarrassed by her brother’s actions and even offered me an apology. She asked me what would happen now, and I told her we would have to sail Wavebreaker back to her home port to have her fuel lines cleaned and generator repaired.

Robin-Anne frowned. “So you’re abandoning the cruise?”

“I don’t have much choice.”

“So Rickie will go to jail?” she asked me, as though that decision was in my gift, but I could offer her no answer other than a shrug. “But what about me?” she wailed.

“You’re doing just fine,” I tried to reassure her. “You don’t need us or this boat, you’re doing wonderfully!”

“I’m only succeeding because of the boat! Because of you!” Her solemn face threatened tears. I saw Ellen watching us, and I did not know what to say, so I just turned away and muttered that I had to get on with the repairs.

I might not be able to offer Robin-Anne what she wanted, but at least I could take refuge in hard work. By mid-afternoon all the halliards were replaced, and each was properly equipped with a neatly spliced rope tail, and I celebrated that achievement by hoisting the mainsail and letting it flap impotently in the wind that had become little more than a strong breeze.

Thessy had done most of the work on the halliards, while I had fitfully made progress on rigging a new fuel supply system. The spare fuel tanks I had installed while docked in McIllvanney’s yard were a godsend, and I succeeded in siphoning the best part of sixty gallons of filtered diesel oil out of the contaminated tanks and into the new tanks before the first traces of sugar appeared. Thessy and I then spent the rest of the afternoon and the best part of the early evening rigging new feed lines through Wavebreaker’s bilges. The last connection had to be made under the engine room, and Thessy held a flashlight while I wriggled under the gratings to manoeuvre the final jubilee clip into place. Ellen, standing in the engine-room door, was pleading with me to restore power to the microwave so she could heat up some defrosted lasagne. She had to shout at me because the bilge was surprisingly noisy with the sound of waves throbbing beyond the steel hull.

“If this system works,” I called back to her, “and the engines start, then you can have all the power you want.” The ship’s batteries could be charged from either the generator or the main engines. “But not lasagne, for God’s sake. You must have something edible in that damned freezer?”

“I’ll put you in the damned freezer,” Ellen threatened. “There is nothing wrong with my lasagne!”

I decided not to pursue that argument. Instead I gingerly worked the screwdriver towards the jubilee clip. “If I drop the screwdriver,” I said to no one in particular, “then I will know there is no God.”

Something clanged on the hull. Ellen, believing it was the sound of the screwdriver falling, laughed.

“That wasn’t me,” I said. The screwdriver’s blade was in place now, and the clip was tightening nicely. “Did either of you launch the power skiff?” To me the clang had sounded like a metallic object striking Wavebreaker’s hull from the outside, and the aluminium skiff was the likeliest contender, except that both Thessy and Ellen assured me that the skiff had still been hanging from its davits when they last looked. “It must have been a floating log,” Ellen suggested. “The lagoon’s full of flotsam.”

“Probably.” I finished tightening the clip. “That’s done, so it seems there must be a God after all.” I wriggled backwards and suddenly the whole hull rang like a giant bell, then, through the bell’s lingering and deafening echo, I heard something heavy scrape harshly down the ship’s side, and I realised that the throbbing I had noticed earlier had not been the sound of waves, but rather the underwater sound of a propeller. “We’ve got visitors.” I sounded surprised.

Thessy was still holding the torch, so Ellen ran back to the companionway steps. I began to ease myself up through the hatch in the engine-room gratings when suddenly I heard the clatter of footsteps on the deck above my head. I grimaced at Thessy, suspecting that we were about to be the victims of a US Coastguard search, but as I pulled myself free of the hatch I heard a man’s voice shouting in urgent Spanish. Ellen, halfway up the main stairs, seemed to sink back with a look of sad resignation on her face. Then she gave a small scream.

“What the hell…” I began, but then a man appeared on the companionway steps, driving Ellen backwards, and I understood why Ellen had screamed. The man was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle.

And Rickie, I realised, had been cleverer than I. Rickie, I suddenly knew, had won.

I realised, too, that it was my own fault. I should have known that an addict like Rickie would not have risked days of deprivation by disabling a ship. Instead he had crippled Wavebreaker because he had known that his supplies were coming to Sea Rat Cay and, in that knowledge, he dared not let the ship move away from the rendezvous. And I also understood now why Rickie had taken such an interest in the ship’s radio equipment, for he had always planned to use the radios to summon his friends to his side.

“Oh, God.” I picked up a two-foot-long steel wrench, but it was a forlorn gesture in the face of a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The gunman had already reached the foot of the stairs. He was wearing jet-black fatigues and had a blue scarf about his neck. He was a young man, whose darkly tanned face had a scarred chin and dumb animal eyes that made his gaze terrifying. He jerked the Kalashnikov’s barrel upwards, indicating that he wanted all three of us on deck. When we hesitated he shouted at us in Spanish.

“Ve have to do vot he says, Nick.” Thessy was resigned to the defeat and was sensibly trying to accustom me to its reality.

The man shouted again, presumably ordering Thessy to be quiet and to move quickly, then he looked at me and gestured that I should drop the wrench. I let it go, and the sound of its fall was the humiliating knell of surrender.

The gunman stepped back as I walked out of the engine room. He was giving me no room to attack him, but instead kept the gun’s wicked-looking barrel aimed firmly at my belly. He jerked the gun again, indicating that I should follow Ellen and Thessy up to the deck.

I obeyed, to find that the evening sun was slanting prettily across Sea Rat Cay. The wind was almost gentle now and the sea beyond the lagoon’s narrow entrance had calmed to a long and shivered swell. A frigate bird, its wide wings and forked tail silhouetted handsomely against the wash of red sunlight, swooped above the island. An osprey was fishing the far end of the lagoon, its talons scraping a white line of foam across the darkening still water. All that remained of the storm were a few high scraps of cloud which, touched red on their undersides, flew west as though they fled the night.

And there, on Wavebreaker’s deck, like the pirate-conqueror of a captured ship, was the white-coated, black-dressed and ponytailed Jesse Sweetman who bowed with pleasure as Ellen appeared from the companionway. “My sweet soul’s rare delight,” he greeted her, “my dearest lady. The last time we met, you lit such a blaze in my soul that you were forced to extinguish it, but with what, my delicious one, will you extinguish my ardour now?”

Ellen said nothing.

Behind Sweetman two armed men watched us with wary, hostile eyes while alongside Wavebreaker, and grinding against her hull, was the dazzle-painted boat that bore the number of the Beast on her sharp-nosed prow. Dream Baby had fetched us into nightmare, and Rickie, emerging in triumph from his cabin, crowed with delight.

There were four of them, including Sweetman, and all four were armed. I saw two Kalashnikov rifles, one with a wooden stock and the other with a metal folding stock, an American M16 rifle, two pistols, a pump-action shotgun, and an Israeli made Uzi equipped with the 64-round magazine. For all I knew there might have been other weapons aboard Dream Baby, or in the sea-bags that the gunmen had dumped amidships on Wavebreaker’s deck, but what I saw was more than enough. Two of the gunmen were evidently peons; mere thugs brought along as muscle; while the third, whom Sweetman addressed as Miguel, visibly carried some authority. He gave orders to the peons and was treated with evident respect by Sweetman. Miguel had a merciless slash of a mouth, a steeply receding forehead that suggested something simian and unfeeling, and oddly blank eyes. He carried the pump-action shotgun.

There were four of them and there were four of us. Ellen, Chatterton, Thessy and myself were made to stand in the cockpit with one of the peons on the deck in front, and the other by the mainmast behind us. I had spent much of my adult life close to guns, I had fired them in anger and been fired on in return, but I had never before known the sheer bowel-watering fear of standing unarmed in the face of weapons held by men who, so far as any of us could tell, had no scruples about using them. If I was scared, and if Jackson Chatterton, who had known war, was also scared, then I could only guess at the terror which Thessy and Ellen must have been enduring.

There were four gunmen, four of us, and then there were the twins. At first they both stood close to Sweetman, and I saw Rickie explaining to his sister just what was happening and why, or rather I assumed that was what he was doing for he spoke too softly for any of us to overhear his words, but suddenly Robin-Anne broke away from her brother and ran to our group where she impulsively threw herself against me and wrapped her arms around me. I put a protective hand about her thin shoulders. “I’m not going!” Robin-Anne turned and shouted at her brother. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!”

Sweetman laughed at her defiance, while Rickie was gibbering with delight at the sheer drama of the moment. The first thing he had demanded when he reached the deck was a hit of cocaine, which Sweetman had happily provided from a black leather pouch that was strapped to his belt. I had watched Rickie snort the powder, then, moments later, I had watched the extraordinary change of mood sweep over him. He was suddenly manic, on top of the world, able to do anything.

What he really wanted to do was to hurt me, but Sweetman and Miguel restrained him. “There’ll be time, dear Rickie,” Sweetman said, then gave Rickie the Uzi to hold. Rickie pointed it across the darkening lagoon towards the palms and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon was not cocked and would not fire. Sweetman ignored him, and I watched, terrified, as Rickie tried to work out how to make the sub-machine-gun function.

Miguel had gone below to search the boat, and he must have found the missing fuses for suddenly the deck-lights, mounted just beneath the lower spreaders on both masts, came on to flood Wavebreaker’s long deck in a brilliant pool of yellow brightness. Rickie, the gun now slung on his shoulder like a totem, was boasting to Sweetman of his cleverness in disabling the schooner, but Sweetman was only half listening; he was staring at Robin-Anne who, quivering and hunched, was still holding me tight. “Come here,” Sweetman suddenly said to her.

“No.” Robin-Anne gulped the word, then repeated it more strongly as though each repetition reinforced her desire to stay away from Sweetman’s evil. “No, no, no, no!”

“Poor Robin-Anne.” Sweetman smiled at her, then he took from his pouch the shining black flask from which he had dispensed cocaine to Rickie. Elegantly, unhurriedly, he stepped over the cockpit coaming and thus down to our level. He kept his mocking eyes on Robin-Anne as he unscrewed the cap of the flask, then he stooped and laid a trail of white powder along the cockpit floor, and he continued it across the cushioned thwart, then he climbed back to the deck and, after streaking a line of cocaine across the cockpit’s teak coaming, he trickled the powder across the deck and all the way back to where Rickie was standing. Sweetman must have used a small fortune in cocaine to lay that beguiling trail.

Sweetman capped the flask, then took from his pouch a small white straw that he scornfully tossed at Robin-Anne’s feet. “Come, sweet one,” he crooned in his deep attractive voice, “come to me, Robin-Anne, you know you want it, you know you’ve been missing it, loving it, wanting it, and it’s here! Free!”

I held her tight, clasping her to me, but I felt her twitch as she looked down at the white trail.

“Robin-Anne!” Ellen was beside us, and spoke warningly. “Don’t!”

“You hold fast, girl!” Jackson Chatterton said.

“Dreams are made of this, Robin-Anne.” Sweetman, like some evil Prospero, passed his hand across the trail of cocaine. “It’s the best Bolivian rock, pure as ice and with a taste of paradise. And that is where we are going, my darling Robin-Anne, your brother and I are going to the land of heavenly plenty, where there is always abundant joy, and where you will never be alone again and where you will never be bored again and where you will never need worry again. But if you stay here, who will look after poor Robin-Anne when we’re gone? So come, my darling, come.”

“No!” I said.

“Don’t listen to him!” Sweetman’s handsome strong face smiled on Robin-Anne who had twisted her head to look into his dark eyes. “Come to me,” Sweetman went on, “because you’re one of us, Robin-Anne. You’re not a dull mud-person; you’re better than that, you’re finer than that, you’re purer than that! People like us are not tied by convention, we’re not hampered by caution. We have dreams, and we have daring, and we fly to the heavens while the mud-people disapprove of us and hate us because we are so very beautiful and they are so very, very dull.”

“No, Robin-Anne,” I said, but she shook my hand away from her shoulders and stared huge-eyed at the trail of powder; staring at it as though she had never seen such a substance before. She seemed mesmerised by Sweetman’s crooning voice, and I moved forward to hold her again, but immediately the thug in front of me jerked his Kalashnikov round and raised it to his shoulder so that I was staring dead into its threat. I froze.

Robin-Anne had not even noticed the gun or its movement. She was transfixed by the powder, lusting after it and hating it, and I heard her give a very faint moan, then suddenly she dropped to her knees and seized the straw and grovelled down to sniff a three-inch section of Sweetman’s long line.

He laughed.

Robin-Anne was on her knees, head on the deck, her bony backbone clearly visible through her thin shirt. She seemed to be crying. I stooped to pick her up, but the gunman fired, making Ellen cry aloud and Thessy gasp. The bullet whined overhead; a mere warning, but sufficient to make me straighten up, leaving Robin-Anne on her knees.

“So very simple,” Sweetman said scornfully. The wind fluttered the end of his ponytail’s black ribbon. If it had not been for his round metal badge with its anti-drug slogan ‘Just Say No!,’ he could have been an adventurer from the days of swashbuckling swordsmen and Spanish treasures.

Robin-Anne took a huge breath, as though she was coming to life, and suddenly her head jerked up and I saw that, though her eyes were wet with tears, she was laughing. She seemed hugely relieved, as if some terrible ordeal was at last over. She stood and, her feet inadvertently scuffing the powder, she climbed to where her brother waited for her under the harsh yellow deck-lights.

“Robin?” Ellen called sadly.

“It’s OK, Ellen”—Robin-Anne turned her sweet face towards us—“it’s really OK now.” She smiled at me. “It’s OK, Nick, I promise. Everything’s going to be OK!”

Sweetman gestured at the rest of the cocaine, his hand describing an arc of courteous invitation. “Would anyone else care to try my dream potion? Darling?” This was to Ellen.

Ellen said nothing.

“Why don’t you come here,” Sweetman tried to entice Ellen, “come to me.”

“This is ridiculous,” Ellen said in her most practical voice; the voice of a sensible liberal who knows that reason and good sense will always prevail, “you must know that you can’t maltreat us.”

Sweetman was delighted with the word. “Maltreat? My darling sweet treasure, I shall never maltreat you. I may make you moan with passion, and I may entice you to taste heaven in my arms, but maltreat you? Never.”

“You jerk.” Ellen’s liberalism evaporated somewhat, then she screamed in fear because the shotgun had suddenly blasted below decks. I heard Miguel pump the action, then the gun fired again.

“The radios, I expect,” Sweetman said helpfully. He took the Uzi from Rickie and, with a confident familiarity, cocked its bolt. I thought, for a horrid moment, that he was going to give the prepared gun back to Rickie, but instead he slung it on his shoulder and lit one of his pale blue cigarettes. “We shall lock you up,” he said, as though he had finished having his fun with us, “and in the morning we shall leave you. Rickie, of course, will come with me. That way he won’t have to endure the tedium of standing trial, will you, dear boy?”

It had clearly all been arranged. Rickie had suggested the cruise-cure because it would secure him the return of his passport and bring him to the Bahamas where his friend Sweetman would ‘rescue’ him from the courts. The only snag to Rickie’s plans had been my insistence on going out to sea, where even Sweetman could not find us, but even that inconvenience had been mitigated by Sweetman’s secret cache of cocaine. Rickie had never wanted to give up the drug, he had never wanted to face reality and he had certainly not wanted to face a judge; all he had ever wanted was to swamp himself in cocaine’s euphoria and Sweetman was arranging it. Doubtless, in return, Rickie had promised Sweetman a portion of his inheritance—perhaps he had promised the whole legacy, for six million dollars could buy a lot of chemical heaven. And twelve million dollars—I looked at Robin-Anne who now smiled on us with a vacuous benignity—could buy an awful lot more.

“But before I dispose of you for the night—” Sweetman drew on his cigarette, “will someone tell me what that is?” He pointed to the hangman’s noose that I had forgotten to take down and which now hung foolish and limp in the bright glare of the deck-lamps. “Well?” he insisted.

“I was expecting you,” I said with a very feeble defiance.

“Oh, you are so very droll.” Sweetman turned his thin handsome face to Rickie. “Reward him for being so very droll, Rickie.”

Rickie laughed, then jumped down into the cockpit. He approached me very slowly, betraying his nervousness, but he must have felt confident that I would not fight back so long as the guns were pointed at me.

I saw the scorn on Sweetman’s face and knew that he was inviting Rickie to make a fool of himself, but Sweetman’s amusement did not mean that I would be allowed to make a fool of Rickie.

“Go on, dear boy!” Sweetman encouraged Rickie, “hit him.”

Rickie hit me. He put all his strength into that first blow, but I rocked my head to meet the punch and it hardly hurt. He began flailing at me, fist after fist, but he had no skill and cocaine had sapped his young strength, and as it dawned on him that he was neither hurting nor harming me he became even more desperate to do both. He spat at my face, thumped a feeble fist into my belly, and when I smiled at his impotence he launched a massive kick at my groin, but missed altogether and ignominiously thumped down to the cockpit floor.

He sat there, panting. The gunman facing us was grinning with gold-capped teeth as Sweetman shook his head with mock despair. “I shall have to show you how it’s done, Rickie.”

“No!” Ellen protested. “No!”

Robin-Anne giggled. “It’s OK, Nick!” she called, and I did not believe that she knew where she was or what was happening. She looked like some wan relic of flower-power stranded twenty years out of her time on Wavebreaker’s deck.

Sweetman, the gun still dangling from his shoulder, jumped down into the cockpit where, with scant courtesy, he dragged Rickie away from my feet. Rickie, out of breath and with grazed knuckles, stayed on the cockpit’s floor from which he took a pinch of cocaine that he inhaled as though it were snuff. I heard an air conditioner come on below decks, its current surge momentarily dimming the deck-lights, and I supposed that Miguel was going from cabin to cabin to see what he could find, explore or destroy.

Sweetman stood close to me, and raised the Uzi in his right hand so that its short barrel was pointing at my belly. He stared into my eyes, and smiled. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead and smell the tobacco on his breath. I thought he was going to drive the Uzi into my solar plexus, then the look in his eyes suggested he would pull the trigger and empty the magazine into my stomach. Rickie, who was still on the cockpit’s decking, must have thought the same for he froze to watch the effect of the small bullets ripping into me, but instead, and with the force of a striking snake, Sweetman reached out his left hand and seized Ellen. He stepped back swiftly, dragging her off balance and putting her in front of himself like a shield.

I had instinctively moved to help her, but Rickie was in my way and Sweetman’s Uzi still threatened me. Ellen was gasping with pain or shock, while Sweetman, pleased with his cleverness at thus surprising her, was smiling over her shoulder. He was keeping her body in front of him like a shield. She strained against his arm that was tight about her, but he merely backed another step away from me, and effortlessly took Ellen with him.

“You don’t want to spend the night in a chain locker, do you, my sweet one?” Sweetman asked Ellen. “Wouldn’t you be happier in my arms?”

“God damn you!” She struggled again, this time with enough force to make him use both hands to restrain her. He was forced to let the Uzi dangle from its sling as he put his right arm about her torso. He hugged her into stillness, then, with a malicious smile and to show how helpless she was, he ran his hand across her breasts.

“Do you want to have her, Rickie?” Sweetman asked. Rickie grinned, but said nothing. Sweetman undid the top button of Ellen’s shirt. “If you’re very good to me, my darling”—he slid his right hand inside the shirt and I saw Ellen’s eyes widen either with fear or outrage—“then I’ll keep you to myself, instead of sharing you with my friends. Poor Miguel won’t like that, but he can be so vilely horrid with girls. He makes them bleed.”

Ellen, enraged by the threat, moved with sudden and astonishing effect. She slammed her right elbow back into Sweetman’s ribs, then raked her heel down his left shin and on to his instep. Sweetman’s threat of rape had unleashed a demonic force in her. She was crying with frustration, but she was also hurting her captor. She rammed her elbow back again, and lunged forward to escape him, dragging him a step forward as he clung on to her. The gunman in front of us was moving to help Sweetman, while the one behind was laughing at the sight of the girl’s frantic struggles. Sweetman was snarling and swearing at Ellen, and still trying to pull her backwards.

She screamed and wrenched at him once more, and this time she managed to unbalance and half turn Sweetman who shouted, not because she had hurt him, but because he had seen me moving forward. Jackson Chatterton was also moving, and he was doing the right thing by moving away from Ellen and me, thus dividing the enemy’s aim. Chatterton was also taking care of Thessy by dragging the boy away from the guard who was standing behind us.

The gunman in front of us swung his Kalashnikov towards me, but Rickie blocked the man’s aim by reaching up to obstruct me. I slammed a knee into Rickie’s skull, driving him down, but his feeble lunge had tripped me and I fell on top of him, but not before I had succeeded in reaching out to snatch at the Uzi which still dangled from Sweetman’s shoulder.

I caught the gun’s webbing sling and tugged. Rickie screamed as I fell on him. Chatterton was shouting. A gun fired. God knows I had not wanted to start a fight against such overpowering odds, but we were committed now. Sweetman tried to snatch the gun back, then bellowed because Ellen had kicked him in the groin, and suddenly the Uzi was free and in my hands and all my old training took over. I was terrified, my mind was cringing away from the expected bullets, but at the same time I was rolling and turning, my right hand was groping for the trigger, and I was seeking targets. I saw the gunman to my right, the one who had been moving to help Sweetman but who had not dared fire for fear of hitting Sweetman or Rickie and I rolled up to my knees, pulled the trigger and saw the pale muzzle flames and felt the stuttering and astonishingly light recoil of the small gun.

The Uzi seemed to make very little noise, or perhaps its sound was drowned by Ellen’s screaming. Robin-Anne was gasping and sobbing with terror. Another gun fired from behind me and it seemed as though a sheet of blood whipped up over my head like a great wing of scarlet horror. The gunman I had shot was down and sliding across the deck, his feet kicking with involuntary spasms. I twisted towards the gunshot I had heard. Rickie, frozen by terror, lay curled beside me.

“Nick!” Chatterton shouted. There was something frantic in his voice, but I could neither see nor help him.

“Nick! Run!” That was Ellen, who was free again, and though she must have been shouting at me it was Sweetman who obeyed her and who zig-zagged away from me to take refuge in the companionway. He held one hand clasped to his groin and his face was contorted with pain.

A Kalashnikov fired and I heard the bullet whiplash over my head. The second gunman had found cover at Wavebreaker’s stern and I suspected he was sheltering on the swimming platform and using the deck as a firing step. I guessed he could not see me because of the cockpit coaming, but he was probably just trying to keep my head down until Miguel or Sweetman finished me off.

I saw Ellen off to my left. She had run to the ship’s rail. She looked briefly back, then jumped a split second before a burst of bullets splintered the rail where she had been standing.

“Nick! Hurry!” That was Jackson Chatterton again. He was free and running, a shadow somewhere at Wavebreaker’s bows beyond the bright deck-lights. I saw him jump overboard and heard the splash as he hit the sea.

I looked for Thessy, but could not see him, and I guessed he must have gone with Chatterton. Sweetman had disappeared below decks and I had not seen Miguel for minutes. Rickie was whimpering under me while Robin-Anne was cowering and screaming by the mainmast. The first gunman was taking a long time to die in the starboard scuppers; his blood was draining overboard and his feet were twitching. He was gasping and sometimes uttering small despairing cries, but it was his shoes that caught my attention for they were an incongruous pair of black leather brogues that looked as if they should have been worn with a pinstripe suit. The shoes were tapping the deck to mark the man’s death spasms. He was a long time dying, and he was the first man I had ever shot, and I was feeling sick. I was trained to this, I had even been reckoned a weapons specialist in the Marines, but to the best of my knowledge I had never shot anyone.

I swallowed hard, then looked at the sight-holes in the Uzi’s magazine to see I had about thirty rounds left. Enough for three seconds of fire, and enough, I hoped, to get me safely off the ship. “Thessy!” I shouted. Before abandoning Wavebreaker I wanted to make sure I was not abandoning Thessy.

The only answer was the tap tap of the dying man’s shoes. I heard a noise in the companionway and fired a half-second burst in its direction. The noise stopped. The shoes still tapped. I wished the man would die. In films men died so easily, but this man was jerking in his long death throes. I heard a swimmer splashing beside the boat, then the distinctive sound of an assault rifle being cocked below decks. “Thessy!” I shouted again, but the only answer was a single shot fired by the gunman at the stern. The bullet whipped overhead, struck the anchor stock at the bows and ricocheted up into the dusk.

Rickie tried to jerk away from me, so I slammed an elbow down on his skull and told him to shut up unless he wanted half a magazine of bullets emptied down his gullet. He whimpered, but stayed still and silent. Moths flew thick about the bright yellow floodlamps that lit the deck so garishly and showed me that the cockpit floor was awash with cocaine and slick with blood. The blood was not mine, and I did not think it was Rickie’s. I heard voices below decks and knew I had to break the stalemate. I pulled off one of Rickie’s shoes and tossed it on deck, and sure enough the gunman aft took the bait and fired as he heard the sound.

I stood up, snarling, and saw the muzzle flashes sparking beside the life-raft container. The gunman was standing on the swimming platform so that only his head and shoulders were visible above the main deck. He was the man in black with the blue scarf. He saw me and began to swing the Kalashnikov towards me, but I was already firing, using my left hand to check the Uzi’s swing, and I forgot my nausea as I watched the Uzi’s bullets snatch across his chest to colour his blue scarf red, then my bullets splintered his gritted teeth, and suddenly the gunman was gone, hurled backwards, and all that I could see of him was a lightning pulse of blood that fountained high in the night sky to splatter Wavebreaker’s ensign with a new and redder dye, then I heard the stateroom skylight shatter behind me and I swivelled to see Miguel’s shotgun thrusting up from the broken panes and I squeezed the Uzi’s trigger one last time, but only to hear the bolt clatter on an empty chamber.

I heard Sweetman shout to give himself courage, and I suspected he was charging up the companionway with the M16 and so, abandoning valour for safety, I ran as fast as I could for the rail, and the shotgun crashed at me and I felt the lash and sting of pellets hitting my arm and back, but then I was at the gunwale and I half fell and half folded myself over the varnished rail and let myself and the empty gun drop into the astonishingly warm water.

In which, suddenly and blessedly, I found silence.

Jackson Chatterton’s hand seized me and dragged me hard into the shelter of Wavebreaker’s steel hull. Ellen was already there. We were safe enough for the moment because neither Miguel nor Sweetman, leaning over Wavebreaker’s rail, could fire past the hull’s convexity, but nor could we swim away from the hull for, within seconds, we would become the easiest of targets. Yet I knew we had to swim away from the schooner for surely Miguel or Sweetman would soon come hunting us in Dream Baby.

“Where’s Thessy?” I asked.

Ellen was treading water beside me, and Chatterton, who had pulled me to safety, was staring up into the glare cast by the deck-lights.

“Where’s Thessy?” I insisted.

“He was with me,” Chatterton replied irritably, as though I annoyed him with an irrelevant question. “We’ve got to get out of here! Shit!” A burst of automatic rifle fire smacked water not twelve inches from Chatterton’s face. The sound of the gun was obscenely loud. I heard the magazine being ejected and a new one slapping into place, then the gun fired again and I saw a stream of cartridges tumbling towards us through the yellow light, and I knew that whoever fired the weapon must be holding it far out from the ship’s side and angling its barrel back in, thus making the bullets come perilously close to us.

“Go forward!” I told Ellen and Chatterton. “Take a big breath, then dive for one of the anchor chains, understand? Use the chain to pull yourselves away from the ship. Get well out into the dark before you break the surface and you should be safe.”

The automatic weapon fired again, spraying bullets at the sea in an indiscriminate pattern. Some struck the hull just above our heads and whined away to leave scars in the paint. The shotgun crashed as well, forming an instant and miniature maelstrom above which I could see the cartridge’s faint smoke residue drifting away in the bright cast of Wavebreaker’s deck-lights.

“You’re coming as well?” Ellen wanted my reassurance.

“I want to look for Thessy.”

“I told you! He’s all right!” Chatterton spoke too loud and the rifle’s bullets swerved towards us. We all ducked under and I saw, astonishingly, the stitch of air bubbles where each bullet drove into the water to be immediately cushioned into impotence. The water had been turned yellow by the floodlamps.

We swam forward, keeping close to the ship’s side, and once under the steep overhang of the bows we took turns to dive for the nearest anchor rode. Sweetman and Miguel seemed to have lost track of us, for they kept firing at the water amidships, and the noise of their guns covered the smaller sounds we made as we pushed hard away from Wavebreaker’s side.

I dived last, kicking away from the ship and swimming deep so that the anchor chain was a silhouetted black streak against the shimmering yellow mirror-bright surface of the water. I panicked that I would miss the chain and that my head would break surface close to where the gunman stood on Wavebreaker’s deck, but then I clasped one of the slippery links and desperately hauled myself hand over hand away from Wavebreaker until my lungs were bursting, and only then did I let go of the chain and swim up to break the lagoon’s black surface. I gasped for breath and flinched against the bullets I expected, but then discovered that I had surfaced well beyond the pool of light thrown by the schooner’s deck-lamps, and that our enemies were still firing down by the ship’s side. I turned towards the closest shore and decided not to think about sharks. I saw Ellen’s gleaming head close by, and Chatterton’s further inshore.

The lights on Wavebreaker were suddenly doused. Robin-Anne had begun screaming in a sustained shriek of terror that was abruptly cut short as though someone had slapped her face. I saw that the daylight had not entirely faded; and that it had only been the brightness of the deck-lights that had made it seem as though night had fallen.

We swam for the shore. Our heads must already have melded with the encroaching blackness of the dusk, for we were not seen. The Kalashnikov and the sharper-toned M16 fired a few random bursts and their bullets flicked wildly and uselessly across the lagoon, but none came close to us. It was only when the three of us crawled up on land and blundered noisily into the dark bushes that the bullets became threatening.

Yet still none of us was hit, and after full dark the shooting became much wilder and more sporadic. Wavebreaker’s deck-lights came on again, doubtless as a precaution against our trying to recapture the ship, while Dream Baby, hitherto moored on the far side of Wavebreaker, briefly cruised the lagoon with its searchlight raking the bushes and palms, but whoever was on board did not see us, nor did they try and come ashore, and I realised that Sweetman and Miguel must be scared half to death of us. They, after all, had gone into the fight with an arsenal of weapons, while we had none, yet we had killed both their gunmen and then got clean away; and, so far as they knew, I still had the sub-machine-gun, and their imaginations must have been worried that I still had a bullet or two left in its magazine. In fact the empty Uzi lay on the lagoon bed beneath Wavebreaker, but our enemies would not know that we were unarmed. We were also blessedly uninjured except for the shotgun pellets in my back and arm, and the myriad of bites from the mosquitoes that began to plague us as soon as we crawled up on to the beach.

We crossed the tail of Sea Rat Cay, pushing through spiny dark bushes until we reached a small beach on the ocean side of the island where a reassuring lump of limestone lay between us and the weapons still on board Wavebreaker. We crouched in the boulder’s comforting protection, catching our breath and listening to the surf’s monotonous grumble. A palm arched above us like a great sheltering arm, and it was there, beneath that tree and staring at the restless and shining sea, that I learned how grievous our injuries truly were; far more grievous than a few mosquito bites or shotgun pellets.

For Thessy was dead.

Ellen half gasped and half screamed when she heard the news. She was suddenly in shock; crying and shivering and I held her very tight while Jackson Chatterton told us what had happened.

Thessy had died in the very first seconds of the fight. He had died quickly, with a Kalashnikov bullet in his skull. I closed my eyes, knowing that it must have been the blood of Thessy’s dying that had sheeted over me like a great red wing in the dusk.

Jackson Chatterton had tried to save him. He had dragged Thessy away from the threat of the gunman at the back of the boat, running forward to join Robin-Anne in the belief that the gunman would not open fire for fear of hitting her, but the gunman had fired all the same, and his bullets had hit Thessy. Chatterton, wiser in the ways of man’s brutality, had twisted down to the scant cover of the scuppers, and had pulled Thessy down with him, but by then the boy was already dead.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“God, man, he was dead. He got two in the spine and one here.” Chatterton spread a huge hand on his own skull to demonstrate the size of Thessy’s wound. Ellen did not see the gesture. She was sobbing, while I, for all my horror and grief, was obstinately dry-eyed. Thessy had been my friend, and still I could not weep. “He felt nothing,” Chatterton said bleakly, and at least we could be grateful for that.

Chatterton blamed himself for Thessy’s death, saying he should have thrown the boy overboard in the very first second of the violence, but Ellen, between sobs, said that it was her responsibility because she had begun the fight, but I told them that if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, for I had encouraged Ellen’s fight by joining in, and it had been I who had taken the gun from Sweetman and escalated the horror. “I killed the bastard who killed Thessy,” I said softly, as if that was some consolation, but there could be no solace for such a death. Thessy had been so very innocent, and his passing had torn a great hole in my universe; a great damned stupid Godless waste of a hole.

So I sat there, unable to shed a tear, yet unable to imagine Thessy dead. I kept thinking that every rustle of leaves or clatter of palm fronds was the sound of his coming to join us, and so I kept looking round, expecting to see his face or hear his anxious voice, but the movements were just the night shadows being wind-stirred among the leaves and the sounds were only the crash of the sea falling on the reefs and the sigh of the warm uncaring wind.

I told myself that if I had fired the gun quicker, or moved faster, then Thessy would still be alive. And why Thessy, of all of us? Thessy, so earnest and so good, so unworthy of this death, and I closed my eyes and prayed that there truly was a heaven where an honest boy from Straker’s Cay would find eternal happiness.

And I prayed that there was a hell, too, a real hell, worse even than the cocaine addict’s anhedonia; a place of demons for Sweetman and his kind.

“He hadn’t even reached the Gospels,” I said suddenly, and somehow the thought of Thessy’s serious face frowning over his ancient Bible broke the dam of my tears and I began to sob like a child. I was also shaking with the delayed terror of the fight, and Ellen reached for my hand and pulled my head down to her shoulder.

Above us were a million stars, stretching for all eternity, their light coming from the time before history and perhaps, I told myself, beneath those stars, Thessy’s soul was arrowing towards the happiness his faith had promised him. There could be no such happiness for us. We snatched a few moments’ sleep, but not much, for the guns on Wavebreaker fired intermittently throughout the darkness, and we were galled, not just by the threat of Sweetman and his crew, but by our responsibility for Thessy’s death. In the rare minutes of sleep I dreamed of guns, of snatching up the sub-machine gun and finding it empty in the face of the Kalashnikovs, and I woke shaking and sweating and with Ellen scratching and cursing at the sand flies.

I dozed again just before dawn, but was startled into full wakefulness by the cacophonous din of Wavebreaker’s sound system. Rickie was playing one of his ‘English music’ tapes at full blast and Sea Rat Cay’s birds screamed in protest from the trees. Nature’s storm had passed, leaving the world calm. Beyond the reefs the sea was a gun-metal grey, hammered flat and waiting for the sun’s annealing light.

“I’m going to kill them,” I greeted the new day.

“Amen,” Jackson Chatterton growled, “amen.”

And the sun came up on an empty sea.

Wavebreaker looked very pretty that morning as she lay in the encircling arms of Sea Rat Cay. The three of us crept across the island to keep a watch on our enemies, and we lay hidden under the palms and stared at the glory of a tropical lagoon in which the schooner’s long white hull and slender masts were reflected as cleanly as though the water was a sheet of polished glass.

Rickie came on deck, carrying the Kalashnikov. He unfolded its stock and began firing randomly, sending bullet after bullet into the palm trees. He fired a whole magazine at a lumbering pelican, and missed. Robin-Anne brought him a mug of tea or coffee and flinched away from the gun’s noise before taking her own mug to the bows where she sat looking hunched and miserable. Rickie obsessively fired on, exhausting magazine after magazine. The noise was obscene. “I hate guns,” Ellen said beside me, “I do so hate guns.”

An hour after dawn Miguel fired up Dream Baby’s motors. The powerboat was still tethered to the schooner. The blue smoke of her twin exhausts drifted across the water. It was evident that they were leaving, for Rickie and Sweetman dragged plunder from Wavebreaker and lowered it to Miguel on Dream Baby. Some of what they stole was practical, like the outboard motor from the skiff, but mostly they just collected whatever glittered or took their fancy; the television, lamps, pictures, and even the rugs from the stateroom. Robin-Anne ignored them.

Rickie climbed down on to the powerboat’s deck as Sweetman dragged the body of the gunman across to Wavebreaker’s gunwale. The body was that of the man whose shoes had beaten a dying tattoo in the scuppers, and now his corpse was unceremoniously tipped down into Dream Baby. Rickie leaped away from the dead man, but I saw Miguel apparently push the corpse into a locker. It seemed they were taking their own dead away, but I saw nothing of Thessy’s corpse and I felt again the idiot, wonderful, helpless hope that he might yet be alive.

Sweetman took the Kalashnikov from Rickie, then went and stirred Robin-Anne by nudging the small of her back with the gun’s flash-suppressor. She looked round and he pointed her towards the waiting Dream Baby, clearly indicating that it was time for her to leave. For an instant I hoped Robin-Anne would show some reluctance, and that she might even call my name to let us know that she left Wavebreaker against her will, but she jumped to her feet and strolled back down the deck with Sweetman, and she even held the Kalashnikov for a moment while he lowered the last of McIllvanney’s scuba sets over Wavebreaker’s gunwale and on to Dream Baby’s after-deck. Robin-Anne returned Sweetman the gun, then climbed gingerly down into the sports-fisherman. I saw Miguel turn and speak to her, then heard her laughter come clean and clear across the water. Overnight, it seemed, Robin-Anne’s resolve to say no had been melted in the fierce heat of cocaine’s euphoria.

Sweetman alone stayed on board Wavebreaker. He went below decks and stayed out of sight for about five minutes, then he reappeared and swung his long legs over the rail. He lit a cigarette, then unslung the Kalashnikov and began firing burst after burst into the island’s shoreline.

“Jesus!” Jackson Chatterton swore. This firing was far more purposeful and far more dangerous than Rickie’s earlier random shooting. Sweetman was methodically raking the shadowed edge of the beach, guessing that we would be hidden somewhere just above the high water line, and his bullets ripped like saws through the leaves as, burst by burst, the rounds came nearer to us. I heard Sweetman change the magazine, then I put my arm over Ellen’s shoulder and held her down low as the next burst cracked wickedly above our heads. Scraps of brittle palm rained down on us. Bullets smacked and whined off a limestone outcrop while a thousand birds were screeching their objection to the sky.

The firing suddenly stopped. I hardly dared lift my head for fear Sweetman would see the movement, but then I heard Dream Baby’s engines thud into gear and I looked up to see the gaudily camouflaged powerboat accelerating away from Wavebreaker.

Which was sinking.

For a second or two I thought I must be dreaming, then I realised Sweetman must have opened Wavebreaker’s seacocks while he was below decks. The schooner was delicately heeling towards us, and I could see she was already settling at the stern, and I knew that within a very few minutes she would lurch down to the lagoon’s sandy bed. The big sea-water inlets that fed the engine’s cooling pipes must have been wrenched away and the water would be gulping up into the bilges and over the engine-room gratings.

“Oh, the bastards,” I breathed.

Dream Baby, the 666 of the Anti-Christ dark on her bows, slowly circled the lagoon; Miguel was at her wheel, while Sweetman had climbed to her flybridge from where he was peering into the green shadows on shore. Chatterton wriggled backwards as I forced Ellen’s head down again. I think we all stopped breathing. I heard the throb of the powerboat’s motors come very close to us, and I waited for the ripsaw sound of the assault rifle’s automatic fire, but we must have been too well hidden for there were no shots. Instead, Miguel took the boat very slowly and very gingerly towards the rocky beach sixty yards to our left. I was certain that Sweetman planned to come ashore, and I was wondering how the three of us were to escape his execution when I saw that Sweetman had exchanged the Kalashnikov for a boathook and, standing now at Dream Baby’s bows, he was fishing in the water for the body of the second gunman; the one I had blasted off the swimming platform.

It took all Miguel and Sweetman’s strength to haul the body on board. Rickie refused to help, and Robin-Anne must have stayed below in Dream Baby’s cabin. I still half expected Sweetman to land and try to hunt us down, but he must have feared what could happen to him in the dark tangle of steamy vegetation that covered Sea Rat Cay for, once the second corpse was securely aboard, Sweetman ordered Miguel to reverse Dream Baby away from the shore. Jackson Chatterton breathed a sigh, while Ellen was crying softly with relief at our escape.

Miguel steered Dream Baby under the schooner’s canting stern and Sweetman, a cigarette in his mouth, raised the rifle and fired a long burst into the belly of the power skiff that was still hanging from its davits, then he raised the barrel and fired another derisive burst to riddle the red ensign with bullet holes.

“The bastard,” I said.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” Ellen said, “it’s only a flag.”

Then, with one last derisive burst of bullets that were sprayed indiscriminately into the trees, Dream Baby’s engines were given full power and she seemed to stand on her stern as she accelerated into the lagoon’s narrow entrance. The motors screamed as her stern drives churned the sea to spray, then she was gone.

Wavebreaker creaked as she settled further over, while the waves of Dream Baby’s wash foamed and broke in the lagoon entrance. I stood and walked to the water’s edge.

“Mind those turkeys don’t come back, Nick,” Chatterton sensibly warned me. If Dream Baby had suddenly reappeared at the lagoon entrance then I would have made an easy target, but I could hear the receding beat of the boat’s engines going further and further away from Sea Rat Cay. I stood at the water’s edge and watched Wavebreaker sink.

She took twenty minutes, but then, with one last graceful fall, her masts canted over until they were pointing towards the tops of the island’s tallest palm trees. A wave of blue water pulsed away from the hull to break on the lagoon’s shore.

Thessy and I had rerigged her well. Even when she finally toppled, her topmasts did not break. She settled on her starboard flank, her port side just out of the water and her long masts reaching out across the lagoon. I waited till I was sure she had settled firm, then I swam out to her, hauling myself up her almost vertical deck to perch on her rail that was just four feet above the lagoon’s rippled surface. I sat there, feeling the misery of a man who has lost a boat. I had never been very fond of Wavebreaker, but she had still been mine to command, and now she was a sad sunken wreck.

Ellen and Chatterton followed me. “We can’t refloat her,” I greeted them. Doubtless Wavebreaker would be salvaged, for she was hardly damaged, but we had none of the equipment that was needed to rescue her. “So we’ll have to call for help.”

Ellen gingerly climbed up to sit beside me. She looked nervously around, and I guessed she was frightened of seeing Thessy’s body, but there was no sign of it. There was a big streak of blood on the patch of exposed deck beneath us, but no corpses.

“What do we do?” Ellen asked dully.

“First we find some fresh water and food, then we get the hell out of here.” I was trying to sound optimistic, but Chatterton and Ellen seemed sunk in gloom. I left them, slipping off the rail and swimming down the deck, past the cockpit, then down to the huge lockers which opened on to the swim platform. Beneath me, in the astonishingly clear water, I could see a Kalashnikov lying on the sand. Near the gun were the piles of cut halliard wires that Rickie had dumped overboard. A ray flapped its wings to swim across the heap of wires as I opened the portside locker where Rickie’s scuba equipment had all been stored. All three sets had been stolen, but Sweetman had left the old face masks that Thessy and I had sometimes used when we dived to check that our anchors had bitten into uncertain ground. I pulled one of the masks free and fitted it over my eyes.

I swam back to the sunken companionway above which I took a deep breath, then kicked my way down to the galley. It was dark as Hades inside the sunken boat and I lost my bearings and began to panic. I flailed to find an exit, hurt my arm on the stove’s edge, then saw a dim green light filtering from the companionway stairs. My chest was bursting, but I kicked my way to the stairs and shot back to the surface where I gasped for breath and found myself shaking.

Ellen had donned the other mask. She took a breath, jack-knifed, and dived elegantly down. I followed more clumsily, this time pushing back the hatchway’s sliding coaming to allow more light into the galley area. I sank down to join Ellen and saw that she was already opening the supply lockers. Air bubbles dribbled from her mouth to join the mess of cornflakes and flour that floated around her. She turned with two bottles of Perrier, and I thrust myself back out of the way so as not to obstruct her.

The three of us sat on the rail and breakfasted on Perrier. We were thirsty as hell. Afterwards I swam to the stern and pulled the lanyard on the life-raft’s canister, which opened like a fibreglass clamshell to expose the expanding orange-coloured raft which began to unfold as its gas canisters automatically discharged into the inflatable tubes. The raft had a canopy, so would offer us shelter from the sun, and it also had some iron rations and two flasks of bitter-tasting water. Best of all, though, it had an Epirb.

Sweetman and Rickie had forgotten the Epirb, or perhaps neither had known that it existed. “What the hell is an Epirb?” Jackson Chatterton asked as I towed the raft towards the exposed patch of Wavebreaker’s hull.

“An emergency position indicating radio beacon.” I offered him the full name, then unfolded the device’s radio aerial and simply tossed the buoy into the water. It floated there, already transmitting its distress signal to any passing satellite or aircraft. “Within about five minutes,” I told Chatterton, “the US Coastguard in Nassau will know we’re here, and they may think we set the beacon off by mistake, but they’ll still send someone to take a look.”

Two hours later, as we still waited for rescue, Ellen suddenly remembered her notebooks. “I’ve got to have them,” she insisted.

I knew she kept her precious writer’s notes in the stern-cabin that she had shared with Robin-Anne, but I did not want her to risk her life by swimming back to that cabin where she could so easily be trapped underwater. I tried to dissuade her by saying that the notebooks would surely be soaked and illegible by now.

“I’m not a complete idiot,” she said with a touch of her old asperity. “At sea I keep the notebooks in a waterproof plastic case.” Even so, she saw the danger of trying to swim from the companionway back to the stern-cabin, so instead suggested that we break the big stern windows.

“It’ll take something very heavy to smash them,” I said dubiously, then I remembered the heavy bolt-cutters that I had found on deck just twenty-four hours before, and which I had put back in one of the lockers built into the cockpit coaming. I donned the face mask again, dropped down deep into the water, then tugged back the locker’s heavy metal lid.

And Thessy floated out.

I gagged, swallowed water, retched, then kicked desperately to the surface where I choked and gasped on the warm air. Beneath me, with an obscene sluggishness, Thessy’s body bumped over the locker’s sill and floated slowly upwards. The sea-water had washed the huge hole in his skull clean and bloodless. I swam frantically clear, as though the corpse was somehow threatening.

Ellen screamed.

Overhead, suddenly clattering and driving the sea into a frenzy, was a US Coastguard helicopter. The Epirb had done its magic, but too late for justice, for Dream Baby had long vanished among far islands.

So we rescued Thessy’s body, found Ellen’s notebooks, salvaged the bullet-ridden ensign, and flew away.

Thessy was buried on Straker’s Cay, close to the small church where he had worshipped all his short life and the small seapool in which he had been baptised. The little church had a red-painted corrugated tin roof and a white wooden belfry and blue-painted walls in which huge unglazed windows were covered with palm-leaf blinds. Lizards clung to the walls and to the tar-soaked beams that held up the roof. The pews were old park benches made of wooden slats slotted into cast-iron frames, and every seat was taken and still more islanders crowded in to line the walls and fill the aisle. Ellen and I were the only white faces, and there was no face with dry eyes. We sang till we were hoarse, and then Bonefish wanted to sing some more, and so the congregation rocked back and forth as though the very strength of our voices and the rhythm of our clapping could propel Thessy to his better place beyond the river where one day we would all gather to be dressed in glowing silks and to live for ever in the place where there would be no more crying and no more sin and no more grief and no more death, but only sweet joy eternal.

Flowers were piled by Thessy’s coffin, and more were heaped on the Mercy Seat above which the preacher stood to promise us the Resurrection, and the congregation shouted Hallelujah, before—still singing, and with the feet of the islanders stamping dust from the path that led from the church to the graveyard—we carried Thessy’s coffin to the sandy cemetery with its painted wooden crosses and cheap jars of wilted flowers and its herd of goats and its view of the long, long sea beating eternally from the east; the sea that Thessy had loved and sailed so well. Jackson Chatterton helped carry the flowers, while Bonefish insisted that I helped carry his son’s coffin. Bonefish still called me ‘sir’, and his son’s coffin weighed so very little. Thessy’s head was resting on the defaced and bullet-torn ensign that I had rescued from Wavebreaker. It was not the flag of the Bahamas, but it was the flag that Thessy had sailed under, and he had been proud of it.

Bonefish spoke by the grave. We would meet Thessalonians again, he promised, in that blessed land above, and we should not mourn for his son, for he had been translated into glory, gone to be with Jesus, and all the voices called Hallelujah—or rather all the voices except for that of Denise Harriman, George Crowninshield’s black aide from Washington, who had arrived late to represent the senator at the funeral, but who now looked desperately embarrassed by the ritual as though the primitive faith that now entrusted Thessy’s soul to God was an affront to her Washington sophistication.

We lowered the box into the scrabbling dry soil, and we threw handfuls of sand that rattled on its lid, and then the minister read the twenty-third psalm as the flowers were heaped at the foot of the slowly filling grave. The senator had sent a wreath of white lilies and a handwritten note that expressed his deepest regret that he could not be present, but he promised Bonefish that he would visit Straker’s Cay soon, and he would try to make some sense, if any could be made, of Thessy’s death.

Bonefish and Sarah, Thessy’s mother, were on their knees beside the grave, weeping and rocking, and I knelt beside Bonefish and tried to say how sorry I was, but I could not speak because my throat was hoarse and lumpish. The sun beat on my bowed shoulders as Bonefish put his arm across my back and said how grateful he was that I had been a friend to Thessy, and how I had been a hero to Thessy, and all I could think of was that I had let Thessy die and I began to cry. I could hear the sea crashing and scraping at the nearby beach, and I was glad that Thessy would have that noise in his ears for all eternity, or at least till the graves were opened and the dead flew up to meet their Lord.

We piled the last of the flowers on the new dry mound of sandy soil. John Maggovertski, who hardly knew Thessy, had sent a wreath, but nothing had come from Matthew McIllvanney, and, more surprisingly, nothing from the owners of Cutwater Charters. McIllvanney had cursed me when I told him of the boat’s loss, then he had gone to fight his battles with the insurers. I had been told that Wavebreaker was being salvaged and she would probably soon be back at her dockside, but I would not sail on her again, and neither would Ellen for McIllvanney had fired her. He did not actually have the power to fire me, but he hardly needed to, for I had lost any chance of a job when Wavebreaker sank. Instead of flowers, McIllvanney had sent a message demanding that I visit his office to sign the necessary forms for the loss adjuster and salvage company. I had thrown the message away.

When the funeral was over and the mourners were making their slow way back to Bonefish’s house where the singing would go on all day, Ellen gently steered me in the opposite direction. “I just want to talk with you,” she said. I had not seen Ellen since the morning we had been rescued from Wavebreaker, after which I had become entangled with the police. As soon as the police had reluctantly released me, I had come straight to see Bonefish, and thus Ellen and I had not seen each other until today when she and Jackson Chatterton had arrived on the morning ferry. When she had first disembarked I had not recognised her for she was wearing a dress. The dress was a very dark wine-red colour with a long full skirt and it made her look oddly unfamiliar and wondrously beautiful.

If Ellen wanted to talk to me in private she was to be disappointed. Jackson Chatterton, suspecting we wanted to be alone, had the tact to walk away, but Ellen and I had hardly been ten seconds together before we were waylaid by Denise Harriman. The senator’s aide had been joined by a tall, short-haired man who had not been in the church, and whom I had not spotted at the graveside. He was in his early middle-age and had a tanned hatchet face with gunfighter eyes. “This is Warren Smedley,” Denise Harriman introduced us, “Mr Smedley is an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington DC.”

Smedley nodded, but did not offer to shake hands. There was something very sharklike in the economy of his movements and in his silence. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a starched white shirt and a sober grey tie.

“The senator asked Mr Smedley to talk with you,” Denise Harriman explained the agent’s presence, then paused as though to let Smedley speak, but the DEA agent just stared out across the long shoaling lines of foam that ran white and ragged from north to east. We had all stopped at the shoreline and were standing in awkward proximity. Ellen, her eyes red from too much crying, took my hand and pulled me a pace backwards.

“Did you know that Robin-Anne telephoned her father’s office?” Denise Harriman suddenly asked me, as though to break the embarrassing silence.

“No,” I said. “Did she want him to rescue her?”

“The very opposite. She called to say that she and her brother are entirely safe and happy, but are not coming home.” Denise Harriman took a pair of sunglasses from her handbag. “She refused to tell us where they were hiding. They’re very stupid children.”

“It was all planned,” I said tiredly.

“We imagine so, yes.” Denise Harriman did not sound very interested, or perhaps she was just nervous of the silent and glowering Warren Smedley who was listening to our conversation but contributing nothing towards it.

“I think Rickie only suggested the cruise-cure so he could get his passport back and join his drug friends,” I said. “He fooled us all, didn’t he?”

“Especially the senator,” Denise Harriman said very tartly, as though any inconvenience that the rest of us might have experienced as a result of Rickie’s machinations were as nothing compared to the senator’s sufferings. “Senator Crowninshield personally put up the half-million dollars cash for his son’s bail.”

Ellen made a scornful noise, and I suspected she was about to compare the level of bail with the millions of dollars that the senator spent on his own election campaigns. “Damn Rickie,” I blurted out before Ellen could say anything. I was thinking of Bonefish’s loss, which was so much greater than any the senator had suffered.

Smedley turned on me suddenly, as though my words had alarmed or intrigued him. “Are you apprised of Rickie Crowninshield’s present whereabouts?” he asked in a very nasal but oddly toneless voice.

“Of course I’m bloody not.” I was annoyed with Smedley for being so rude to us, and I had no intention of making his life easy or my answers to him pleasant.

“At this time we are searching for the senator’s children”—Smedley was quite unmoved by my anger—“and our best indications of their whereabouts will surely come from tracing Jesse Sweetman. What can you tell me about Sweetman?”

I said I merely knew Sweetman was an American, a southerner, and that Rickie had claimed him as his drug dealer.

“He’s a very fashionable dresser.” Ellen added the detail sarcastically, but Warren Smedley took out a notebook and solemnly wrote down the sartorial information before continuing with his questions. Had either of us heard the dead gunmen’s names mentioned on board Wavebreaker?

No.

And Miguel. Could we add to the description we had given of Miguel to the Bahamian Police?

No.

And Dream Baby?

“You can’t miss Dream Baby,” I said bitterly. “It must be the most over-painted boat in the islands!”

Smedley dutifully wrote the words ‘over-painted’ in his notebook, but I sensed that the DEA agent was merely going through the motions and did not really expect to learn anything new or useful from us. “Do you have anything to add to the statement you made to the Bahamian Police, Mr Breakspear?” He asked. “Or you, Dr Skandinsky?”

“No,” Ellen and I answered at the same time. Like me, Ellen had made a very full statement to the police, and we had both tried to identify the men who had boarded Wavebreaker by searching through huge piles of photographs, but neither of us, nor Jackson Chatterton, had recognised Miguel or the two gunmen I had shot. The police had shown most interest in my story, and for two days they had kept me locked up in ‘protective custody’. I had confidently believed that the baleful Deacon Billingsley was behind my incarceration and I had spent the whole two days expecting to be charged with murder when, quite suddenly, the entire affair had evaporated. No one was to be charged with any killing; indeed the police had dismissed the two dead gunmen as my fantasy for, they said, no bodies had been found and no complaints had been received. Thessy’s murder, which was indisputably real, was written off as being caused ‘by a person or persons unknown’.

It was suddenly as if nothing untoward had ever happened in the lagoon of Sea Rat Cay. Nor had any newspaper taken any interest. No journalist had known that the famous Senator Crowninshield’s children were aboard the schooner, so the senator had been spared that embarrassment. No American citizens had died so no mainland newspaper was curious about the boat’s sinking, and the island papers could not get exercised over the death of one teenager from Straker’s Cay. Thessy was not the first innocent islander to be murdered by drug-runners, nor would he be the last, and the only newspaper which had even mentioned his death had shown no indignation at his murder.

The whole matter had thus magically subsided. I had been released from jail and given back my damp passport which had been among the items already rescued from the stranded Wavebreaker, and now it was evident that the senator, or at least his aide, was welcoming that utter lack of interest. “We would appreciate it if the two of you would exercise some reticence about these events?” Denise Harriman said to Ellen and me. “We’ve been most fortunate in the lack of media interest so far, and we would prefer it if none was provoked until the senator can satisfactorily resolve the situation. I hope you understand me?”

“Entirely,” I said bitterly. “You want us to shut up.”

“Exactly so.” Denise Harriman rewarded me with a cold smile.

“Tell me,” I said, “was it pressure from the senator that had me released from custody?” It suddenly made sense that George Crowninshield would try to avoid any publicity about his children’s escapades. The events at Sea Rat Cay could have denied him the presidency, and I wondered just how he planned to recover from their effect for, though there had been no publicity yet, there would surely be a flurry of press interest when Rickie Crowninshield did not turn up for his court appearance.

Denise Harriman was not interested in discussing it with me. Instead she looked at her watch, then made some pious and predictable remarks about the day’s sad duty. I began to repeat my question about whether the senator had been responsible for hushing up the whole business, but Ellen nudged me into silence, implying that I wasted my breath because the answer was obvious.

Denise Harriman stepped away, and I thought our business was done, but Warren Smedley still had a surprise for us. “At this time”—he was clearly one of those Americans who thought that using the word ‘now’ betrayed a lack of education—“we have a duty to alert you against the possibilities of reprisal activities.”

I gaped at him. Ellen frowned. “I’m sorry?” she asked.

“It is probable that the men who accompanied Jesse Sweetman will wish to exact a revenge for the deaths of their companions. The drug-trafficking business is mostly conducted by families who take a particular pride in avenging the deaths of any family members. The best advice of the DEA at this time is that you both leave the islands forthwith. I trust I make myself clear?”

“You mean they’ll try and kill us?” I asked, not because I had failed to understand Smedley’s warning, but because it seemed so fantastic.

“Precisely that, Mr Breakspear. And not only will they be seeking revenge, but you are the only witnesses who can testify against them in a murder trial.” Smedley gestured towards Thessy’s grave.

I felt no particular fear because Smedley’s warning seemed merely dutiful; a warning that the Drug Enforcement Administration would give to anyone who happened to find themselves on the outskirts of the drug trade’s savagery. My own feeling was that Sweetman and Rickie, having got what they wanted, would not provoke further trouble by another display of violence. “I’ll keep a watchful eye open,” I said lightly.

“You’d do better to leave the islands,” Smedley said, but without any real force, then he stepped back and turned away without another word. Denise Harriman nodded icily at us, then fell into step beside the DEA agent. The two suited each other; they were as spare and cold as two scalpels lying on a surgeon’s tray.

“God damn them!” Ellen glared after the retreating couple. “Do you get the feeling that Thessy died for nothing?” There could be no satisfactory answer and, in hopeless resignation, Ellen put her hands on my shoulders and rested her head against my chest. I could smell the scent of shampoo in her hair. “Oh, God,” she suddenly said, “I never knew there were so many hymns,” then she began to cry. I held her and tried to soothe her. At the far side of the graveyard, uncomfortable in a black suit, Jackson Chatterton had been trying to stop the goats from eating the flowers on Thessy’s grave, but was now being questioned by Warren Smedley.

“Walk with me.” Ellen sniffed back her tears, took my hand and led me along the shore where the small lagoon waves broke amidst a rubble of dead coral and broken limestone. “Do you think they’ll really try to take revenge on us?” she asked, not with any fear in her voice, but rather with a note of almost academic curiosity.

I shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“So what will you do?”

“I won’t run away. I’ve got a boat to mend.” I had never finished the fortnight’s shakedown cruise, so the senator had not needed to assume responsibility for Masquerade which was still propped up in Bonefish’s yard.

Ellen and I walked on in silence until we reached the deep rock pool where Thessy had been baptised. Two lizards stared at us from the pool’s stony margin, then darted away as we came too close. We stopped by the pool and I stared out to sea where the white bridge stack of a bulk carrier showed just above the horizon. “You should leave the islands,” I said.

Ellen smiled. “Male chauvinist Nick. I’ll never change you, will I? You’ll stay, but I should run away.”

“I’m not the one with intellectual reservations against the use of violence,” I said, “but you are.”

“But evidently not when I was threatened with rape.” She spoke grimly, then let go of my hand to crouch beside the baptistry pool into which she idly flicked small scraps of broken shell that sideslipped through the clear water to the sandy bottom. “I’m probably leaving Freeport anyway,” she said.

“You are?” I could not hide the note of disappointment in my voice. I did not want to believe that the loss of Wavebreaker would mean the end of our friendship. I had already lost Thessy, and now Ellen?

“The Project wants someone to do some field research on Great Inagua”—she spoke of the Literacy Project—“and I’d really like to do it. And I’d be safe there. No one will look for me on Great Inagua.”

“You’ll hate it,” I said fervently. “It’s nothing but salt works and mosquitoes as big as seagulls.”

She made a face at the thought of the mosquitoes. “My other alternative is to boat-sit for Marge and Barry.” Marge and Barry Steinway were a married couple who had both lectured at Ellen’s university, and who, on retirement, had bought a thirty-six-foot catamaran called Addendum which they sailed between the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. “They want to visit their new grandchild in Vermont,” Ellen explained, “and Marge is lecturing at a summer school in New Hampshire, so they asked me to look after Addendum for a few weeks. I thought I might even sail her to the Keys? It would be good practice, wouldn’t it?”

“For crossing the Pacific?” I asked with a ridiculous surge of anticipation.

“I can’t think what else it would be good practice for, can you?” Ellen twisted to smile up at me. “I know I can’t use the sextant properly yet, but I’ll use the Loran, and it will be my first night all alone at sea. And I’ll be safe in the Keys, because no one will know where I am, and perhaps I’ll go and explore the Dry Tortugas because I’ve always wanted to see them.” Ellen seemed to be talking to stop herself from crying. “To be honest I’d rather have a job that paid real money, and Marge and Barry said I mustn’t worry if one was offered to me, because Addendum will be safe enough in its marina, but I’d like to do it. I’d like to prove I can do a voyage on my own.”

“You’ll do fine.”

“At present it’s either Addendum or Great Inagua.” She stood and brushed shell scraps from her hands. “I’ll probably make up my mind on the ferry tonight. I’d really like to earn some money, but no one seems to be hiring.”

“You could stay here,” I said hopefully.

She smiled at me, but said nothing. Instead she began walking back towards the graveyard.

“Couldn’t you?” I pressed her.

“There’s no work for me here, Nick.” She held out her hand, inviting me to catch up with her. “So what will you do?”

“I’ll work on Masquerade.”

She frowned. “Won’t they look for you here?”

“I’ll be careful.” We walked slowly beside the sea. A plane took off from the airstrip, drowning the island in its noise, and I supposed that it was taking Denise Harriman and Warren Smedley back to the mainland. The din of the aircraft temporarily scared the goats away from Thessy’s grave.

“Where shall we meet?” Ellen asked suddenly. “I mean for our voyage?”

“Miami? Fort Lauderdale? Key West? I’ll write to you if you give me an address.”

“And when shall we leave?” she asked.

“Sometime in late September,” I guessed. “Maybe October.”

She stopped and cradled my face in her dry warm hands. “Till then, Nick, take care.”

“Of course.”

“Because we’re going to sail away for ever and a day.” She smiled, and I suddenly realised just how much in love with her I was, and the knowledge almost broke my heart because a ferry was taking her away from me this very evening.

“You take care, too,” I told her.

“I shall, of course I shall,” she said, then she took her hands from my face because Jackson Chatterton was coming to join us. “I suppose we’d all better go and sing some more hymns,” Ellen said sadly, and so we did.