High Stand

2

That first night we spent on the barge I couldn’t stop shivering. It wasn’t so much the cold — the temperature was nowhere near freezing — but the damp ate into one’s bones. Fear had something to do with it, too. At times the whole thing seemed so utterly crazy that, remembering Wolchak seated in the client’s chair back in my office in Ditchling, I felt I had only to clamber up to the quay and walk across to his office and the whole thing could be resolved over a cup of coffee. But then the memory of Tom’s body cradled in Miriam’s arms, her blood-stained hands, and Olsen lying dead in the bunk up at the hut on the lake, and Miriam herself, shut in that room … it seemed so impossible, so utterly divorced from real life. My life, at any rate. I’d only read about such things. And now …

Listening to Miriam as she went over, slowly and painfully, the eighteen days she had spent in that hut — the loneliness, the fear, the visits from Wolchak, the threats, above all the loneliness, the feeling of being utterly at the mercy of the men who took it in turns to guard and feed her — and the way she told it, in that husky, very matter-of-fact voice of hers. Like us, she had taken a train from Whitehorse to join the ferry at Skagway, determined to have a look at the Cascades before going on to Vancouver. At Bella Bella she had planned to get one of the floatplanes to fly her in, but Lorient had been waiting for her with a boat, Tarasconi having apparently notified the camp of her intentions. He had booked a room for her at the Fisherman’s Inn over at Shearwater and would take her on to the Cascades in the morning. Everybody, she thought, was being so kind and thoughtful, but of course, she never reached the Fisherman’s Inn. Lorient had given her a drink as they had motored out into the dark waters that led towards Gunboat Passage and that was the last she remembered until she came to in that little room in the log hut on the lake above the Cascades.

As she talked the reality of her ordeal gradually sank in, and with it an acceptance of the fact that I had got myself caught up in something that few lawyers, even criminal lawyers, have to face, other than in the courts.

And for Brian, as well as for myself, what drove it home to us was the realization that a big search was being mounted and they hadn’t waited for daylight. Before it was fully dark Wolchak had brought one of the dogs down from the hut. From the wheelhouse we watched the men come out of the dining hut after their evening meal and gather outside the office, a dozen or more of them. Then Wolchak arrived in the pick-up with the dog and the two fellers. Lopez was also with him, which meant presumably that both of them had managed to swim ashore. It also meant that Camargo had been left up at the hut with Aleksis, so that any possibility of our making it down to the lower lake and Ocean Falls was blocked. The floodlights were on, the camp, the quay, the great tree trunk boom-crane, everything brilliantly lit and the hum of the big generator away to our right drowning all other sounds.

Oddly enough, it was the fact that Wolchak had left a wounded employee up at the hut with Camargo to plug that exit from the Cascades that finally convinced me of the urgency and deadly seriousness of the operation.

We watched as he briefed the men, all of them dispersing quickly, the dog and the handler with half a dozen of them being driven off in the truck, back to the spot where Tom had been killed. The rest got on with the job of loading the barge. There were now some twenty or more logs lying stacked at the back of the quay. These looked to be larger stems and they were the ones whose butts had been up-ended and drilled. Now, instead of holding them back to be chained together and launched into the inlet to act as a booming pen, they began to load them. I knew then that Wolchak was pulling out, that this barge would be the last load. To that extent Tom had won. High Stand was safe for the time being. No more trees would be felled.

With the recommencement of loading two men came on board to position the logs. Spiked boots gave them a secure stance on the stacked load as the boom-crane lifted the trunks from the quay and swung them down to be grappled by the curved steel spikes each man held like a deadly extension of the right arm. It was dangerous, difficult work requiring great concentration.

The clouds lifted and the stars showed; a wavering curtain of light above the black outline of the mountains might have been the northern lights. A seal or a whale, something big, splashed a great circle of ripples in the middle of the inlet. And then I saw the dog appear at the edge of the forest, at the very point where we had started our dash through the rain. I watched, appalled, as it sniffed around, searching for a continuation of our scent. But I suppose the rain had been so heavy it had washed away all trace of it once we were in the open. At any rate, after circling around for about ten minutes, sniffing inside and outside the timber, both dog and handler retreated back into the forest. ‘The dog knows, but the human doesn’t,’ Brian whispered in my ear. ‘He can’t believe we would have left the security of the trees and headed into the camp.’

It was the handler who had pulled the dog away, and after that we closed the hatch and went back down the ladder, to lie huddled together on the single berth, Miriam taking the only chair. It was Brian and I who were short of sleep and we left it to her to wake us just before dawn.

The loading went on most of the night. I must have slept some of the time, in spite of my shivering, for I woke just after four in the morning, no sound on board or ashore, only the hum of the generator. They had stopped loading. I switched my torch on, shielding it with my hand. Miriam was asleep in her chair. I pulled the blankets tight around my shoulders, enjoying the warmth, conscious that my clothes were almost dry against my skin and that I was no longer shivering. I would have been asleep again in seconds, but as I snuggled into a tight ball I suddenly realized Brian was no longer in the bunk with me.

I lay there for a moment, reluctant to leave the little oasis of warmth I had created, then I threw the blankets off, felt my way to the ladder and clambered up to peer cautiously out of the deckhouse window. The barge was now almost fully loaded, the logs stacked higher than the deck. The floodlights were still on, but the only sign of life was a man armed with a rifle walking slowly along the quay, the only sound the generator. Beyond the lights the black of the peaks at the head of the inlet stood sharp-etched against a sky that was paling to the approach of dawn, the moon set and the stars less bright.

I couldn’t see Brian anywhere. Had he gone up to the lake? The early hours is not a good time to find oneself alone. Did the silence and emptiness ashore mean the hunt had been called off?

I was just wondering what I would do if he didn’t turn up before dawn broke when his head appeared above the edge of the deck plates, peering cautiously out at the man patrolling the quay. He waited until he was well away from the barge, with his back towards it, then he scrambled onto the deck and dived quickly into the shelter of the wheelhouse. ‘It’s okay’ he said. ‘Iron rungs leading down into the hold and one or two quite sizeable gaps where the logs have been carelessly loaded. We can lay up between them.’

‘They could shift.’ My mind had a sudden terrible vision of what could happen to a human body if we were caught in a seaway on one of the open stretches and those logs started to move.

But he shook his head. ‘They’re too big, and they’re wedged too solid against the side.’

We went back down into the cuddy. Miriam was awake, her eyes wide, almost shocked in the light of my torch. ‘Where’ve you been? I thought — ‘ But then she got a grip on herself. ‘I’d have woken you. It’s not time yet.’

‘Better make the move now,’ Brian said. ‘It’ll get light early this morning.’

It took time to tidy up the place and leave it with no trace of our having occupied it. Dawn had, in fact, broken when all three of us finally made the transfer from wheelhouse to hold. Brian went first, moving slowly, his body no more than a shadow in the paling floodlights. Then Miriam. I followed her, lying sprawled on the deck plates, my legs swung over the edge, feeling for the rungs just under the overhang of the after deck.

It was to clear this overhang that the logs had been loaded so that there was a gap of almost two feet between the butts and the after bulkhead. And because they had been loaded with their tops interlaced in layers, the butts were slightly separated to present a honeycomb effect and, as Brian had said, some of the gaps were quite sizeable though the logs themselves were undoubtedly very firmly wedged.

Down in the hold it was dark and we had to use our torches, swinging our bodies out from the rungs onto the rounded bulk of the logs, each of us worming our way into a separate cavity. We had divided up the little food we had left. I don’t know what the others did, but I ate all of mine in one go. I felt a hearty breakfast would give me strength to cope with whatever the day might bring. But after I had finished it there was nothing else to do and I lay there watching the daylight gradually filter down into the cavernous hold until I could see the shape of the logs, the rough corrugation of the bark and the smooth steel of the rear bulkhead weeping drops of moisture over red flakes of rust.

Time passed slowly. The generator was switched off and after that it was so quiet I could hear water lapping at the hull, the slapping of the house flag on the short mast. Occasionally I thought I heard voices, but so indistinct that I couldn’t hear what was said. About eight a vehicle of some sort moved out of the camp. It sounded like the pick-up. Then all was quiet again.

They made no attempt to load more logs. After a while I saw a foot reach out to the rungs facing the gap where I had wedged myself. It was Brian, and about ten minutes later he climbed back down, leaning his head in towards me. ‘They’ve stopped felling by the look of it. The quay is empty. No logs anywhere. And nobody about. You all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about Miriam?’

His head disappeared and I heard her voice, very low and muffled.

‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘Two logs away to your right and a little higher. I’m two away from you on the starb’d side.’ And he added, ‘I suggest we all try and get some sleep. And we’d better not talk any more, not until the tug arrives and we get moving. It’s too quiet.’

We had over four hours to wait and in all that time we did not dare climb the rungs to peer out over the edge of the deck. Occasionally we heard voices. Once somebody came on board, moving aft to the wheelhouse and down into the cuddy. I could just hear the sounds of his movement through the after bulkhead. Presumably he was the man who would be on the barge during the tow. After what seemed an age his footsteps sounded on the deck again and he went ashore. I held my breath, but there was no shout of alarm. Apparently he was unaware that the place had been occupied during the night.

I think they were all at breakfast. It was very quiet and to ease my cramped limbs I crawled out as far as the rungs, peering up at the log butts. They had shiny little metal tags hammered into them and as I was trying to decipher the numbers Miriam poked her head out of the cavity to my right, her face very pale against the bark, sawdust clinging to her hair. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought I’d make certain they haven’t concealed anything between the logs,’ I told her.

She shook her head. ‘Brian and I checked when it was still dark. You were asleep.’

‘And you found nothing?’

‘No. If the drugs are on board, then they must have been put there before the barge was towed into the Halliday Arm. In which case they’re now in the bottom with the whole cargo of logs on top of them.’

But I thought it unlikely. The previous tow had been loaded and on its way down to Seattle when it had made contact with that other vessel, and anyway, drug enforcement officers would have supervised its unloading. If a consignment of cocaine had been exposed customs and police would have been swarming all over the camp here long before now. Brian joined in the discussion, and it was then, while all three of us were whispering together, that we heard the drone of an engine. It was reflected back from the logs above us, so that it seemed to come from the for’ard end of the barge, but it was increasing all the time and very soon we realized it was a plane flying low up the inlet. It landed quite close to the quay, the engine note dying and then the sudden splash as the floats hit the water.

My first thought was that it might be the police, or maybe Jim Edmundson had returned, but Brian, watching with his head close against the butt end of a log, reported nobody on board the floatplane, only the pilot, and it wasn’t anyone he knew. He was wearing a little round woollen cap knitted in bands of red and black, and when I suggested it made him too conspicuous he pulled it off and rubbed it against the butt of a log so that it became coated in sawdust. When he put it back on, head and face merged with the sawn log-ends behind him.

The plane tied up aft of the barge and almost immediately he whispered down to us that it seemed to have come for Wolchak. Wolchak was coming out of the office carrying a bulging briefcase as well as a suitcase and there were two men with a stretcher. It was the man who had killed Tom, the man he had shot. There was a shout and he suddenly ducked his head, clambering quickly down to us. ‘The tug,’ he said. ‘They’ve just sighted it coming up the inlet. And there’s some brash burning down in the clear-felled area.’

We clambered back into our log holes and shortly afterwards there was the resonant clump of feet on the steel decking. By then we could hear the thump of the tug’s screws transmitted through the water. The engine of the floatplane started up, the sound of it passing very close to us. Then it took off and some minutes later there were shouts and the thud of a rope hitting the deck, followed by a grinding noise as the tug scraped alongside. Feet clambered over the barge, somebody shouted to let go for’ard, the tug’s engines gathered speed, the screws thrashing, and suddenly there was movement as the towing hawser lifted taut out of the water.

The speed of that departure surprised me. I had expected the tug to moor up and the crew to stretch their legs, possibly to have a meal ashore in the camp diner. Instead, the turn-round had been immediate. This, coupled with Wolchak’s departure by plane, suggested a certain degree of panic, and there were at least four men on the barge so it had clearly been decided to evacuate everyone. We could hear them arguing in the wheelhouse, an undercurrent of excitement in their voices.

In the circumstances we kept our heads down, each of us holed up and lying flat between the logs, nothing to do but listen for some scrap of information that would indicate our progress down the inlet. The tow rate I guessed at around 6 knots and I lay there trying to recall as much as I could of the details of the Coastguard cutter’s chart I had been poring over on the voyage up to Ocean Falls, but there was no way I could even guess at our heading. Maybe at night, if it was clear and I was able to look out, I would be able to identify a star or two. I reckoned by then we should be past the entrance to Cousins Inlet and headed into the Fisher Channel. Presuming they followed the same course as before, midnight should see us approaching the point where we altered course to the westward to pass through Hakai Passage.

Working it out helped pass the time and I played a sort of game with myself, going over and over in my mind the names I could remember on the chart- the Pointers, Surf and Starfish Islands, and, north of them, an area littered with rocks and islets that had stamped itself on my mind because of the name and the way both the Captain and the Mate had referred to it.

Hemmed in by the canyon-like sides of first Cascade Inlet, then the Dean Channel, with the cloud-base like a ceiling above us, the amount of light filtering down into the hold was very limited. By four that afternoon it was practically dark. But then gusts of wind began to play tricks with the sound of the tug’s engines echoing off the rocks on either side and it grew perceptibly lighter. Sunset came as an orange glow that shone on the damp metal of the hull and turned the butts of the logs to a colour that was almost salmon pink. Half an hour later it was dark, the wind blattering down from the heights and ragged gaps in the clouds through which I was able to catch a glimpse of the stars.

‘Any chance we can reach somebody with this thing?’ Brian had joined me, a foot on one of the steel rungs and the walkie-talkie he had taken from the hatchet-faced tree feller slung from his shoulder.

‘Short wave?’ I shook my head. ‘The range is probably no more than five miles.’

‘That Coastguard cutter.’ We were both of us whispering. ‘Could he receive it? Did he have short wave?’

‘Yes, but he’d have to be switched on and tuned to the right frequency.’

He nodded. ‘So it’s the VHP set up in the wheelhouse. D’you know the standby frequency that cutter uses? I’ve only operated VHP on land with an agreed frequency.’

‘Channel 16,’ I told him. Trouble is it’s the standby channel for all ships.’

‘And if he’s thirty miles away or more, then he’s probably out of range, and we’re blocked off from any of the inside passages by the mountains, so if he’s there …’ He shrugged, smiling at me, his teeth showing in the pale light that had turned almost green. ‘We’ll just have to hope for the best.’

It wasn’t only that VHP is a direct radio wave, so that if the Coastguards were in another inlet they wouldn’t hear us, but something he didn’t seem to realize was that every ship within an unobstructed 30-mile radius of us would have the call coming through on their loudspeakers. ‘That tug,’ I said, ‘will be only a hawser-length away — they’ll pick us up clearer than any other vessel.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Wait till we’re a lot further south than we are now. In the narrows between Vancouver Island and the mainland there’ll be vessels of all sorts around, lots of fishing boats, more traffic coming in on VHP.’

There was movement on deck then. I think they were probably checking the towing lights. At any rate, nobody even shone a torch down into the hold. We were back in our log holes, and lying there I tried to work out what to say to Captain Cornish if we were able to get into the wheelhouse and raise him on the VHP set. There were other things on my mind too. I had to know whether or not we were taking the Hakai Passage. If we did, then inside of two hours we would be in the open sea, for it was not much more than five miles from Fitz Hugh Sound to the Pacific. The tug would turn south then, and once past Calvert Island we would be within range of the north end of Vancouver Island. If we didn’t go through the Hakai and kept straight on down the Fitz Hugh we would save at least a couple of hours.

We decided to wait until the early hours of the morning when the men aft would hopefully be sound asleep in the cuddy and watchkeeping on the tug would be at a low ebb. By then, at three-thirty say, I thought we would probably be in the open sea somewhere in the region of Calvert Island. But it was what I should say when I started calling the outside world on that VHP set that worried me. In the end I decided to sleep on it, having asked Miriam to wake me inside of four hours.

In fact, I woke of my own accord, for by then I was fairly rested. I was also very hungry. There was starlight in the gap between the logs and the steel rim of the afterdeck. I clambered up the rungs until I could see the Bear and had identified the North Star. It was straight above the wheelhouse, so we were still headed south, and it was not until an hour and a half later, when I had come to the conclusion that we were going to continue straight down the Fitz Hugh, that the position of the stars suddenly began to change. There was a light flashing straight over the bows, its reflection on the wheelhouse gradually changing as we turned. It was to port of us then and I stayed there until we were past it, the reflection of it showing the wheelhouse as a dark shape in silhouette, the stars steadying in their new alignment.

We had turned almost 90° to starb’d and were in the Hakai Passage.

Brian poked his head out. ‘We’ve turned, have we?’ He had felt the changed motion, something I had not noticed with my mind concentrated on the stars. I went back to sleep, planning to wake every hour and check our course. The time was then 01.12.

I woke again just before two and we were still headed south-west, then again a little after 02.30. I think it was the movement that woke me that time, and when I checked the stars, we seemed to be on a more westerly course. There was a flashing light away to port that intermittently illuminated the wheelhouse. That would be the beacon marking the southern side of the passage into the Pacific. No wonder the barge had started to roll quite noticeably, a lazy, slow, flat-bottomed roll which gradually changed to a corkscrew motion, an occasional jerk on the towing hawser sending shivers through the metal hull.

I checked the position of the stars again and there was no doubt about it, the southerly swell was on our port quarter. We were heading north-west away from Seattle.

I didn’t tell the others, and I didn’t go to sleep again. It could mean only one thing — that we were on a smuggling run and headed for a rendezvous with the South American carrier somewhere in the mass of islands between our present position and the point where the Inside Passage broke out into open water in Milbanke Sound. I remembered the Spider then, how the Mate had said Captain Cornish had gone in there just for the hell of it, mooring up to a red cedar that was half dead and had a bald-headed eagle’s nest in the upper branches. The whole area had been thick with small rock islands, but all of them steep-to, and deep water everywhere. ‘Looks much worse on the charts than it really is,’ he had said, and now I had this feeling we were being towed there.

That was when I climbed out onto the deck and peered in at the wheelhouse windows. There was nobody at the wheel, the place deserted. Slipping round the starb’d side, I gently slid open the door and went in. The trap door to the cuddy below was open. After listening for a moment and hearing no sound, I released the securing catch and lowered it quietly to the floor. Then I switched on the VHF set.

Even then, as I picked up the mike and pressed the button for Channel 16,I wasn’t sure how I was going to phrase my calls, except that I would use Pan, which is urgent but less so than the Mayday distress call. Tan. Pan. Pan. Are you there, Cornish? Calling Cornish. Cornish, Cornish, Cornish.’ I tried my best to imitate a Canadian accent, my lips’ close to the mike and speaking very quietly: ‘This is fishing boat Klewarney calling Cornish.’ I had talked to him a lot about the Kluane and Ice Cold — ‘Klewarney calling Cornish. Come in please Cornish. I got fish for you. Ice Cold. Cornish, Cornish, Cornish. Answer by that name only. Okay? Do you hear me, Cornish? Over.’

A fishing boat was the first to answer, the accent so strong I could hardly understand him: ‘Yu got fish? Yu tell me where. Where yu are, fella?’ And when I repeated my call, he shouted at me, ‘Who is this Cornish? Yu tell me where yu lying,’ and behind his words I caught the whisper of another voice: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey — state name of vessel and position. If you want to speak to — ‘

I slammed in then: ‘Get off the air, Coastguard. Shut up, both of you. I want Cornish. Cornish. Nobody else. Do you hear me? Cornish. Over.’

There was a pause, then Cornish’s voice came on the air, breathless and tinny out of the speaker as I bent my ear to it: ‘Cornish here. Switch to channel 16.’ I switched and his voice came up again, but still very faint, asking me what I wanted.

‘I have a big haul for you, and I’m keeping it ice cold. You understand? Over.’

There was a pause and I thought I had lost him. But then he said, ‘Yes, I think so. Where are you?’

‘North of where we were three nights ago,’ I told him. ‘About ten miles. Your Mate will know. He said you’d been there once. Tied to a tree with an eagle’s nest in it. You got that? Over.’

Again the pause, and the indistinct murmur of voices then: ‘Yeh, reckon we got the message. A big haul, you say…’

But I shut down on him then, for the tug had suddenly come on the air quite loud demanding to know what my position was and why I was putting out a Pan call. Then abruptly everything went quiet and I switched off, opening up the trap door again and slipping out of the wheelhouse, back to the hold. I had done all I could. It was now up to Cornish.

Just after four a change of movement warned me we were turning. The barge was rolling again, quite heavily, the wind catching us almost broadside and making a whining sound. A glance at the stars confirmed the alteration of course. We were headed almost due east, straight in towards the land, the speed of the tow falling away until we seemed to be barely moving. Then, suddenly, we were under the lee, the rolling abruptly ceased, no wind at all. We were in the Spider. I had no doubt of that, and shortly after that there was a dreadful grating sound, steel on rock as we ground to a halt against one of the islands; then feet pounding, lots of shouting, followed by a hollow thud and the sound of the tug’s engines close alongside.

‘We’ve left it too late,’ Brian hissed at me. And when I told him I had already contacted the cutter he could hardly believe me. ‘Christ! I was fast asleep. Where are we?’

‘At the rendezvous.’ And I explained where I thought we were.

Footsteps on the deck again, the sound of mooring lines being made fast, voices calling back and forth, then somebody in authority — it sounded like the Greek tugmaster — calling those on the barge to come aboard the tug for breakfast. ‘How longa’we got, Captain?’ And another voice answered him, ‘Bout an hour, that’s all.’ They were scrambling onto the tug, somebody asking where the supply ship was and a voice answering, ‘Holed up in Kildidt Sound.’

‘Tha’s not much more than coupla miles away.’

‘Sure. But they gotta go round — Fulton Passage or else Spider Channel. They ain’t gonna fly, that’s for sure. So Skip’s probably right. You got ‘bout an hour. Okay?’

The footsteps died away, everything suddenly quiet except for the slow grinding of the two hulls as they moved to the ghost of a swell coming in through the entrance. I went up the rungs then, peering cautiously out. We were in what appeared to be a lake, rock islets all covered in trees and merging into one another so that there was what appeared to be a continuous shoreline of green all round us. Glimmers of sunlight glinted on the water, the surface ruffled by a slight breeze, and the tug standing over us, funnel and deck housing higher than the logs on the deep-laden barge. The wheelhouse appeared to be deserted. I could actually see right through it to the mountains beyond and a mackerel sky, the scaling of the cloud all silver like a dusting of snow.

The radio had been left on and I could hear a voice, an Indian by the sound of it. He seemed to have got himself and his fishing boat hopelessly lost. ‘Bloody Indians.’ Somebody had entered the tug’s wheelhouse from below. ‘Drunk, I bet. Sleeps it off and when he wakes up don’t know where the fuck ‘is shit-bag of a boat is. Typical.’ And another voice said, ‘What about that Klewarney boat?’ It sounded like the tug’s Master. ‘He wasn’t lost and he seemed a lot nearer. Who was he calling?’

‘One of the fish company ships by the sound of it. Calling Pan like that. Raised the Coastguard cutter, didn’t he? Wonder where those buggers are?’

‘Wherever they are, they’ll be occupied now, presuming that Indian’s put out a search-and-rescue call.’

‘Sure. So why don’t you finish your meal. We’ll be busy ourselves soon.’

I didn’t hear the reply, for both of them went out by the other door and all was quiet again, only another fisherman jabbering away on the radio to a mate of his down around Egg Island at the entrance to Smith Sound. I climbed back down to my log hide, Brian whispering to me, ‘You reckon the captain of that cutter understood what you were telling him?’

‘I think so.’

‘How long before he gets here?’

But I couldn’t answer that. I’d been going to ask Cornish what his position was, but then the tug had come on the air and I had had to shut down.

‘They could radio for a helicopter.’ Miriam was rubbing at her left leg as though it had gone to sleep. ‘You said they had one on that night operation. If they called in a helicopter — ‘ But I had to tell her it was most unlikely. It would mean explaining the whole situation over the air to the Rescue Coordination Centre at Victoria and, presuming Cornish had understood my message, he would be afraid the tug might be monitoring his radio calls.

‘Then he may be too late.’ Miriam’s voice was strangely calm. ‘In which case Tom’s death …’ I detected a tremor then. ‘Isn’t there an airbase somewhere you can contact on VHP?’ But even as she said it she seemed to realize the impracticability of it — ‘No, of course … So we just wait.’

‘Yes,’ I said, wishing I had been able to get their position, or even a rough indication of it. Waiting is bad enough, but when you don’t know how long you’ve got to wait… ‘They won’t be long,’ I added, but she knew very well I was only saying that to bolster her courage, and mine too. Voices on the deck of the tug then, one of them cursing the cook for not having served steak for breakfast. ‘Bacon, sausages and mash — there’s better’n that served in the bloody army now.’

I crawled back in amongst the logs, cursing the man for drawing attention to the emptiness of my stomach. I had had nothing now for twenty-four hours and would have willingly settled for bangers and mash, or anything else I was offered. Other voices emerged from the tug’s bows, and then suddenly they were all over the after end of the barge, doing something to the upper layer of logs — what, I couldn’t gather. All I knew was that they seemed to be working their way downwards and there was a lot of straining and cursing. Soon feet came into view, boots braced on the steel rungs and sawdust raining down. A muttered curse and more straining. Something had been hammered in too tight. ‘Look at my bloody nails!’

What the hell were they up to? And then, when I saw a boot feeling for the rung right opposite where I lay, I thought it would only be minutes before they discovered us. But that was as low as they came, and after another ten minutes or so they all retreated on deck, the job, whatever it was, apparently done.

We had half an hour of quiet after that, and then somebody shouted, ‘Coming in through the entrance now.’ Soon the steady thump-thump of a single screw sounded through the metal hull of the barge.

After that everything became very confused. There was a sense of unreality almost, as though it was some radio play I was listening to, for there was nothing to see, only sounds, and these to be interpreted as best I could. As a result, I don’t think I was at all scared, my mind being concentrated in my ears, my imagination totally engrossed in trying to convert sounds into visual activity.

The tug’s engines started up. That was the first thing. I heard its hull scraping along the side of the barge as it-moved away, and then, after a little while, there were voices calling, different voices speaking some sort of Spanish patois, the sound of mooring lines hitting the deck, fenders rubbing and squeaking along the port side as the hull of the barge was thrust sideways, a violent movement that ground our plates against the rock. We were made fast to the new arrival, and as soon as that was done and the movement had subsided there were men all over us.

What they were doing I couldn’t make out, but they seemed concentrated at the for’ard and after ends of the barge and their movements suggested they were taking cargo on board. But where they were putting it I had no idea. It certainly didn’t come down past the ends of the logs where we were concealed. If it had, we should certainly have been discovered. As it was, I never saw any more of the men working above me than the occasional foot placed on the rung immediately outside my lair, and then only when they started hammering. It sounded like wood on wood, as though periodically one of them took up a mallet and started beating at a log.

The loading and periodical hammering went on for pre cisely twenty-seven minutes. I timed it, thinking perhaps it might be important to know how long it took to load the cargo. And all the time they were talking, a mixture of English and Spanish that at times was about as incomprehensible as pidgin English. Once I heard what sounded like an Irishman say, ‘Jeez, you’d never think there was that many junkies, would you now? Do you think they cleared this lot with St Peter?’ And they laughed.

That was the only time any of them referred to the cargo and the only clue I got from listening to their talk. But at least it confirmed what the Hallidays had been saying — this really was a drug run. At no time did I hear anything that indicated what they were doing with the stuff and I could only presume that it was in very durable bags that were being tamped into the interstices between the logs.

As soon as they had finished loading, the lines were let go and the vessel moved away, out into the open water between the islands, the thump of its screw gradually fading. By then the tug was backing up to us, the thresh of water from its stern getting louder, then dying away as men at the for’ard end of the barge made the towing hawser fast. A shout of ‘Let go ashore!’ then ‘Take her away’ was followed by renewed threshing that faded until the hawser was taut and the barge plucked sideways, juddering and scraping itself against rock.

The sound diminished, then ceased abruptly, and after a moment we could hear the swish and gurgle of water against the hull. We were under way, the tow’s next stop Seattle, unless Cornish had read between the lines of my message and had understood what I had been trying to tell him. I wasn’t at all certain he had, also I didn’t know how far away he had been. The range for VHP can be very variable, dependent on the terrain and the conditions, and the fact that his voice had sounded so faint that I could hardly decipher what he had been saying did not necessarily mean that he was outside the normal limits of very high frequency transmission.

He was, in fact, over forty miles away, just to the south of Hannah Rocks and heading east for the Alexandra Passage inside Egg Island in an effort to pick up the Indian fisherman who kept coming on the air to say he was lost somewhere in the region of Smith Sound. They had continued to search for him after I had radioed in, for forty miles to the south of us conditions were very different: the wind had dropped and with it the temperature. They were in thick fog, and with the entrance to Smith Sound littered with rocks and shoals they were concerned for the Indian’s safety.

There was, of course, a good deal of speculation in the cutter’s wheelhouse about the identity of the Kluane and whether there was a fish storage vessel of that name waiting to receive a large haul that was being kept frozen. Only gradually did the truth sink in as they argued about it, remembering how I had talked of Ice Cold as a mine and Edmundson had confirmed it as being in the Kluane. But they still didn’t see how I or Tom Halliday could be calling in on the VHP distress channel.

In court, Captain Cornish would read aloud the excerpt from his log recording the message I had transmitted. The time of that message, and the time entry recording his abandonment of the search for the lost fisherman and his alteration of course for Spider Island, would show a lapse of 181/2 minutes. That was the length of time they had spent discussing it before finally reaching the decision to abandon the Indian and alter course, and they had only made that decision because of the Mate’s insistence that I was the only person to whom he had mentioned the Kelsey’s navigation of the Spider in at least six months and that he had specifically referred to the cutter’s stern being made fast to a red cedar which was half-dead and had an eagle’s nest in the upper branches.

However, having made the decision to head north, Captain Cornish in his testimony declared that the more he thought about it, and about the failure of the customs operation when he had been taking Edmundson up to the Cascades, the more he began to appreciate the urgency. His log showed that he was proceeding north at maximum revs and, allowing for favourable tide, was making just on 20 knots over the ground.

We did not know this, of course. Huddled together in the narrow confines between timber and steel at the bottom of the hold, all we knew was that we were headed south at an estimated 6 knots and that another night would have passed before we were into the Narrows between Vancouver Island and the mainland. We knew we were heading south because the sun was shining on the port side of the wheelhouse and we assumed we would be going inside Vancouver Island because that was the normal towing route.

As we steamed south it gradually became colder, the sun’s brightness dimming, daylight fading. The tug’s siren began to blare at regular intervals. We were in fog, white trails of vapour drifting across the logs, the cold and the damp earing into us.

By then we were convinced that there was now only one man on the barge, for we had heard no sound of voices. Even from the top rung, with our heads in the open, we could hear nothing except the sound of the water rushing past. It seemed that the men from the logging camp, who had been on the barge when loading the cargo, had all been evacuated on the South American vessel. There might, of course, be two men on board, one of them sleeping. ‘We’ll have to presume that,’ I said. Brian didn’t say anything. He had heard the man at the wheelhouse singing to himself and thought it was to compensate for the boredom and loneliness of being on his own.

There seemed only two possibilities open to us, and these were discussed endlessly: we could keep watch until the tug was approaching a suitable ship, take over the wheelhouse, then cut the hawser and steer the barge alongside. Alternatively, we could wait until we were in the Narrows, passing really close to a jetty or some small boat, then slip over the side and swim for it. Of the two I favoured cutting the tow and going alongside a Canadian vessel, and in the end Brian agreed. That way it wouldn’t be our word alone; we would have the barge and its cargo as evidence, as well as one of the crew. Also it would be dark. I didn’t like the thought of swimming for it in broad daylight, nor did the others. Even if the fog did hold, and we were not spotted by the tug’s lookout, we would still have to contend with the strong tides running through the Narrows.

So finally it was settled. We would wait till the early hours, when it was still dark and we were somewhere off Port Hardy on the north end of Vancouver Island, then take over the barge. The only problem, of course, was whether we would be lucky enough to have a fairly slow vessel overtaking us at the right time. As soon as we had cut the tow, I would start transmitting a Mayday call in an effort to try and persuade the Rescue Coordination Centre at Victoria to take immediate action. The tug would know, of course, that it had lost its tow and I hoped my emergency call would discourage it from coming back for us.

It was a good idea, but alas, the best laid plans … what we didn’t know was that the tug was on a bearing west of south, heading for the open sea passage down Vancouver Island’s rugged and largely uninhabited west coast. The Coastguard cutter didn’t know it either. Nor did the RCC in Victoria. Cornish had contacted them, using his HF single sideband, and they in turn had contacted customs. As a result, the cutter was ordered to wait up for the tow behind Pearl Rocks at the eastern end of the Rankin Shoals. One of these rocks dries as much as sixteen feet, and since it would be low water about two hours after the cutter’s ETA, there would be little chance of the tug’s radar picking it up, any blip being merged with that of the above-water rock.

Cornish arrived there at 13.39 when the tug was seaward of the Hakai Passage on a course that diverged from the Calvert Island coastline. At 16.00 it was almost due west of Pearl Rocks. The fog was still very thick and Cornish, anticipating the speed and distance run by the tow correctly, had switched his radar scan to very close range, expecting tug and barge to appear in the North Passage between Pearl Rocks and Calvert Island, or just to the west of Watch Rock about five miles away at the other end of the Rankin Shoals.

In fact, at 16.00 we were almost twenty miles west of the shoals.

Two hours later, with the fog still thick, it was almost dark, and it wasn’t until then that the cutter came out from behind Pearl Rocks and began a long-distance radar scan. But it had missed the opportunity to pick us up and identify the tow, for by then we were approaching the offshore shipping lane for Prince Rupert and the North and had several vessels within a few miles of us.

That was the position as night fell and the cold increased. A wind had sprung up, waves slapping noisily at the bows, the tow line jerking and the three of us huddled together for warmth. I remember being conscious of Miriam’s body close against me, Brian’s too, and we were all of us shivering, the breeze and the damp cutting through our clothing, eating into our bones.

Some time shortly after midnight we must have passed Cape Scott at the north-eastern tip of Vancouver Island, nothing near us now except endless forest and the occasional logging camp. I thought we were in Queen Charlotte Strait, heading for Alert Bay and the start of the Narrows, and that we would soon be off Port Hardy. Puzzled by the barge’s increasing movement, I climbed the rungs and poked my head out above the line of the deck. There was a light in the wheelhouse, blurred with vaporized moisture, nothing else — nothing visible at all, the night intensely black. Once I slithered out onto the deck and crawled to the side, so that I could look for’ard, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t even see the bows, let alone the lights of the tug.

Wind and waves increased steadily until the barge developed a corkscrew motion interrupted periodically by the snatch of the towline. Cold and worried, we let time pass, uncertain what to do. No point in cutting the tow if there was no other vessel in sight and, though I poked my head out above the level of the deck at regular intervals, there was no sign of a coast, no lights, no other vessels, just utter blackness and the fog clinging to the barge’s towing lights in a blur of ectoplasmic white.

It was shortly after four that Miriam woke me to say she thought she saw a star. By the time I had sorted myself out and got my head above the level of the deck the fog had gone, the night sky diamond bright, everything very clear — the barge’s light, the tug’s too, I could even make out the line of the towing hawser dipping into the waves and the whole shape of the tug at the far end of it. But nothing else. No lights where the shore should be. It seemed as though we were being towed through a void. Yet the position of the North Star showed that we were steaming just east of south, the course we should be on for the Narrows.

Now the voyage took on a nightmare quality. We weren’t where we should be and I was completely lost. I had no means of knowing that we had altered course at least 45° to the eastward on reaching Cape Scott shortly after midnight, and that before that we had been heading west of south. Instead I began to feel as the Flying Dutchman must have felt, the voyage going on and on without end. I suppose at some point I reached the conclusion that we were on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island, but I wasn’t conscious of it as a decision, there was no calculation, it just suddenly became apparent to me, and for a time I kept the knowledge to myself.

When I finally told the others the sun was up, but still no sign of the coast and the only ship an empty ore carrier headed north and a long way past us. All to the east was shrouded in fog, a dense bank of it that presented a dark, lowering wall. Once, and once only, I thought I saw something — a darker shadow, high up like a mountain thrusting the wet blanket of the fog skyward. It was there for perhaps an hour, and then it was gone, and by midday we were in fog again, with nothing visible beyond the grey, enclosing walls of it, only the shadowy shape of the tug ahead.

By now the movement had become most unpleasant, a roll and a swoop that combined with the cold, the cramped space that confined our movements and the resinous cedar smell of the logs to produce a sickening sensation that was near to nausea. We weren’t actually seasick, thank God, though Brian’s face became very white and he yawned a lot. The truth was, I suppose, we had nothing to bring up. We hadn’t eaten anything at all for over two days, which was just as well perhaps since there was no way we could empty any movement of our bowels over the side. For myself, I felt constipated and no longer in the least hungry. But thirsty, yes. I presume it was the salt in the air, and nausea. My mouth felt dry and rough, my body at rimes breaking out into a cold sweat that had me shivering violently.

Miriam seemed the least affected. I think because her mind was locked in on her thoughts, and her memories. She might have slept around occasionally, in an effort to fill the vacuum of her marriage, but the deep affection she had for Tom had always been apparent. Most of the time she seemed asleep — at least, she lay very still, curled up in a foetal ball as though to protect herself — and when she was awake she sat with her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She didn’t talk, though her voice was firm and quite decisive when asked a direct question; when, for instance, we had been deciding whether to swim for it or not. Her answer to that had been quite simple: ‘You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a good swimmer and can probably last longer in the water than either of you. So whatever you decide …’ And she had left it to us.

That second day at sea, cooped up in the bottom of the barge under a vast weight of cedar logs, seemed interminable, time dragging, the cold unabated by occasional glimmers of sunshine.

Whenever these occurred I would climb the rungs and hang there, my face just above the cold, wet steel of the deck, my eyes desperately searching the opaque brilliance of the humidity, searching for the shadowy shape of a passing ship, and always my hopes dashed. I saw nothing, except once. Once I was lucky and caught a glimpse of the coast away to the east of us.

It was only a brief sighting, and at the time I had no means of knowing where it was. But now, looking at the chart, it is quite obvious it must have been the Brooks Peninsula, which sticks out from the mountainous bulk of Vancouver Island a good ten miles between Brooks Bay and Kyuquot Sound. It looked to be about three, maybe four miles off. The time was then 10.17 according to the entry in my diary.

It was almost ten hours later, at 20.04, that I had my first sight of a shore light. I had poked my head above deck because I had been woken by the deep bay of a big ship’s foghorn sounding off at intervals between the higher pitch of our tug’s warning note. I nearly missed the light ashore, my eyes fixed on the sudden sight of a vessel coming out of the fog into good visibility and passing so close I could hear the sound of her engines. She was all lit up, rows of portholes, and above them a blaze of lights that showed a great bow wave creaming back to the white water at her wake. She must have been a cruise ship thundering down from Alaska on her way back to California. She was going far too fast for our purpose, and anyway, she was past us.

And then, just as I was about to duck down to tell the others what it was, for the sound of her passage was loud against the hull and they were both peering up at me interrogatively — just at that moment I caught the powerful beam of a light swinging in an arc behind the brilliance of the vessel’s stern. After that there was nothing, my eyes following the stern of the big ship now well past us, still blazing with light. They would just be sitting down to dinner and there would be wine and jugs of iced water. I licked my lips, wondering for the umpteenth time what the hell I was doing here, why I had been fool enough…

And then, suddenly, there it was again, stabbing out of the blackness well astern of the cruise ship, a powerful beam reaching a white finger of light into a bank of fog, then coming clear as it swung steadily across the ship, reaching out and momentarily illuminating the tug, swinging past it and suddenly blinding me, then on to vanish into fog again. And with the light came the distant sound of what I thought at first was a diaphone, but later identified as a horn. It was a double blast at intervals of about forty seconds and I guessed, quite correctly, that it was sounding two every minute.

I must have watched the beam pass over us at least half a dozen times before I lost it, and the lights of the ship, as the fog rolled over us again. But I could still hear the foghorn. I had been counting the interval between the flashes. It was a powerful light, undoubtedly a lighthouse, and it was flashing white every fifteen seconds, perhaps a little more. If only I had had a chart I would have known where I was.

In fact, it was the San Rafael lighthouse at Friendly Cove in the south-eastern corner of Nootka Island, and Brian identified it as such. Having explored this part of the coast when visiting his grandfather’s old home, he reckoned we ought to be about halfway down it, probably opposite where Cook had landed on his third and fateful voyage, the first landing on the Canadian west coast by an Englishman. ‘If it’s the lighthouse I think,’ he said, ‘then it marks the entrance to Cook Channel and the fjords leading up to the forestry centres of Tahsis and Gold River. But better wait till we’re in the Juan de Fuca Strait.’ That was after I had suggested taking over the barge now and trying to raise the lighthouse on the VHF set. There was a bit of a wind and it was blowing onshore, variable, but quite strong in the gusts, and the ride should be making. ‘It’s about three miles off, maybe less, and we’ll be pushed into the land quite fast.’

But he shook his head. ‘Not fast enough. And apart from that one ship, and it’s past us now, I haven’t heard anything passing us close.’ He wanted us to wait until we were in the Juan de Fuca Strait. ‘There’ll be plenty of ships around us then.’

The logic of it was unanswerable and I would have agreed if it hadn’t been for Miriam. She had scrambled up the log butts and had seen the lights, had watched the fog roll in again, blotting out even the lights of the tug. ‘And suppose the fog holds. Suppose there’s fog all the way to Seattle, to the moment we tie up at the SVL Timber quay. We’ll never see another ship. And it’ll be daylight.’ And she added, her voice trembling with urgency: ‘We’ll never get a chance like this.’

Brian started to reason with her, but she wasn’t in a reasoning frame of mind. She was very close to hysteria and it was only then I began to realize what those eighteen days cooped up in that lonely lakeside hut had done to her. ‘You can wait if you like. Not me. There’s a lighthouse there. I saw it. There’ll be lighthouse keepers, a village, people — honest, straightforward, ordinary people.’ Her voice was quite wild, the words tumbling over themselves. ‘If you won’t cut the tow loose I’m going to swim for it.’ She was staring at Brian, her eyes very large as she looked into his face.

He wasn’t going to budge. I could see that. And so could she. ‘All right,’ she said and unzipped her anorak.

She was literally starting to strip off. ‘For God’s sake, Miriam!’ I had my hand on her arm, restraining her, my voice tense. ‘Don’t be silly. You’d never make it.’ I could feel her trembling.

Brian tried again, his tone gentler than I had ever heard it before, but it made no difference. Nothing he could say, no pleading from me, had any effect. Her mind was made up and nothing would budge it. She had seen a light ashore and developed a mental block, so that she didn’t seem to hear what we were saying, and it gradually dawned on us then that if we didn’t do what she wanted and cut the tow, we should have to restrain her physically.

Brian looked at me, a half smile and little shrug. ‘So we cut the tow. Agreed?’

I nodded slowly, thinking it wouldn’t take long for the men on the tug to realize the barge was no longer attached. Fog or no fog, their radar would soon pick us up, and then what? But when I tried to explain this to Miriam, she simply said, ‘You’ve still got that gun, Brian. You can hold them off for a rime, and every minute that passes, we’ll be closer to the shore. We won’t have to swim so far.’

She smiled then. She actually smiled, a look of triumph on her face as though what she had said was unanswerable. And in a way it was. Darkness and fog, with a lighthouse three miles away, or daylight in the Strait with some vessel passing us a lot nearer. You could toss a coin as to which was the best course of action. Neither was very sensible or necessarily offered much hope.

‘So we cut the tow,’ I said and Brian nodded.

‘Not much choice.’ That smile again. Then he turned to Miriam. ‘Two rifles, a walkie-talkie and VHF, but no ammunition and that tug a hawser length away. Better get out your prayer mat.’ He swung himself onto the steel rungs. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ And he began to hoist himself up to the deck.

The wheelhouse was empty and we closed the trap door on whoever was sleeping in the cuddy down below. ‘I’ll leave you to handle things this end,’ he said to me, and he laid his rifle on the shelf in front of the wheel. ‘Start calling on the radio as soon as I’ve slipped the tow and get that Coastguard here quick. I hope to God,’ he added as he pushed out through the leeward door into the night, ‘there’s a quick release on that hawser.’

The door slammed shut, his figure swallowed instantly in the black void of the fog, and we stood there, Miriam and I, waiting. I gave him two minutes by my watch to get up for’ard and work out how the release mechanism worked, then I switched on the VHP set and, with the mike close against my mouth, began calling on channel 16: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey. This is Redfern calling Kelsey. Come in please, Kelsey.’ To my surprise the Kelsey answered immediately and it was Cornish himself, his voice loud and clear. I gave him our position. ‘We are on the barge and cutting the tow. The tug won’t take long to pick us up and to hold them off we have only two rifles. Hurry, hurry, hurry. It could be a matter of life or death.’

There was a pause, and in that pause I sensed the barge faltering. Then Cornish’s voice again, not speaking to me, but to the tug, warning the Gabriello to heave to and await the Coastguard escort into Victoria. ‘I have you clear and very close on my radar. Do not attempt to make contact with your tow. I repeat — you are not to make contact with or attempt to board that barge. Any such attempt will be resisted by force.’

Fists began pounding at the under side of the trapdoor, a man shouting to be let out. The door to the deck slid open and Brian thrust his head in. ‘Tow released,’ he said. And he added, ‘It slipped away over the bows like a whiplash. Can you feel the difference?’

I actually could. The barge seemed to have gone dead, and I thought it had turned slightly to port, broadside to the wind and the waves. The wind force I estimated at about 4, the rate of drift possibly as much as 2 knots — an hour and a half, maybe two hours before we were blown onto the coast below that lighthouse. It was ridiculous. Long before then the tug would be alongside and ourselves overwhelmed, or else swimming for it.

‘Did you raise the cutter?’

‘Yes.’

‘How far away?’

‘He was wise enough not to say.’

In fact, the cutter was then about six miles seaward of us, steaming at the same speed and on a parallel course, but keeping several miles astern. When he had failed to pick us up on his radar at Pearl Rocks, or to identify us amongst the traffic west of the Rankin Shoals, he had headed south at full speed with the intention of intercepting and identifying the tow as it entered the Queen Charlotte Strait. Only after he had wasted most of the night lying in the fairway between the BC mainland and the top of Vancouver Island watching for us on his radar did he finally come to the conclusion that the Gabriello was taking the open sea route. It had then taken him almost eight hours to catch up with us so that it was well past midday before he had finally taken station to seaward waiting for the fog to clear so that a helicopter could fly in with police and customs.

Knowing it would take him at least twenty minutes to close with us, and having got no reply from the Gabriello, Cornish came back to me, asking who was on board beside myself. Then he wanted to know about Tom Halliday, and when I told him he had been killed and his wife had been held prisoner in a lakeside hut high in the mountains above High Stand, he didn’t waste time asking for details but began a series of calls, first to the lighthouse, then to any other vessel that might be close to us. As it happened a fisherman out of Friendly Cove was just clearing Yuquot Point heading south-west out of Nootka Sound. Cornish asked him to close us at all possible speed and monitor our drift. All this came out on the loudspeaker of our VHP set. What we didn’t know was that at the same time he was in radio-telephone communication with the RC Centre at Victoria and that, despite the fog, a helicopter was being scrambled.

It was at this point that the lights of the tug suddenly loomed out of the fog, her blunt bows thrusting towards us, her superstructure a dim outline. By then the barge was virtually stationary, wallowing in the wind with the waves slapping noisily at her rusty sides. The tug struck us amidships, thumping and scraping as the bows rose and fell, men scrambling for’ard to leap aboard us. Brian had retrieved the rifle and was standing in the open doorway of the wheelhouse so that they could see he was armed.

They paused. A voice shouted to them over a loudhailer and at the same instant a klaxon sounded very loud and just astern of us. A searchlight beam stabbed the shifting grey banks of fog, white bows and a wheelhouse with rods like antennae either side of a short mast festooned with aerials. It was the fishing vessel out of Friendly Cove. The radio was suddenly full of talk as the fisherman spoke to the skipper of the tug and Captain Cornish’s voice broke in with instructions to the tug: ‘You will stand off from the barge. I repeat, stand off from the barge.’

For a moment everything seemed to freeze as though in a picture, the tug with its bows thrusting against us and three men up for’ard with another coming out of the wheelhouse with a rifle in his hand, and just off our starb’d quarter the white shadow of the fishing boat hanging there in the fog.

It was like that for a moment, then the picture shattered, everything happening at once. We fell off the back of a wave into a deep hollow, the barge rolling and Miriam flung against me. The trap door broke open and was flung back to reveal the heaving shoulders of a powerfully built man in an open shirt with black hair and staring eyes. I kicked out at him, an instinctive reaction with Miriam clinging to me, her mouth open and her face gone white in a blazing beam of light. The fog rolled clear, a gap in the swirling mist and the lighthouse staring at us, one-eyed like a Cyclops, across a welter of breaking waves.

For an instant the scene was lit like a film set, the tug’s bows buried under water as they fell against us, the three men on its deck lying in a huddle of tangled limbs and the ghostly fishing boat rolling its gunnels under, mast and rods dipping towards us. ‘Philip! I’m going. Come with me. It’s so near.’

The grip on my arm loosened. She was turning, reaching for the door. I saw the fear on her face, had the odd experience of sensing her sudden uncontrollable terror transmitted right through me. Then the beam passed on. Twilight for an instant, then blackness. And in that abrupt dark I felt the barge roll back as it was lifted by an incoming comber, saw the top of it curl and break in a blur of grey foam that burst against the tug, slewing it round, then hit us with a crash, spray spattering the wheelhouse and the man I had kicked in the face falling back down the ladder with a cry, the trapdoor banging shut over his head.

Then we were sliding down the surf-flecked back of the wave, falling into the hollow of it to end up with a jarring crash that jabbed right through my body and shook every part of the barge. We were on rock, and until we lifted to the next breaker, we were grinding our bottom plates against its surface, the din appalling.

I don’t know whether it was because he realized the barge had struck, and that he was in shoaling water among the rocks, or whether it was the sense of being so abruptly exposed, a gap torn in the fog and all three vessels made visible to the shore by the beam of the lighthouse … Whatever it was, there was a sudden rumbling sound as the skipper of the tug put his engines full astern and backed off. Another crash, a splatter of breaking water and then we were lifting, the tug below us and ourselves looking down on it. The lighthouse beam was back, everything lit with blinding clarity, and the tug turning broadside-on to us. And as the beam passed on another light flashed out, this time from seaward.

The cutter was actually in sight. I think I went slightly mad at the sight of the tug hauling off from us and the cutter closing in; I was shouting my head off and doing a little dance. Brian, too — he was making strange war-whoop sounds deep in his throat. And Miriam suddenly burst into tears, clutching hold of me and sobbing, her head bent down as though in prayer, and I heard her say something about stars, and then quite distinctly, ‘If only he hadn’t taken that last snort — his luck was turning.’ Her head was up then and she was looking at Brian with an expression I didn’t understand. It wasn’t exactly hatred, more an accusation … I think if she had had the means she would have killed him then.