Risk

3

I was lying, I realised, on a bunk. The tight net across the open side on my right was to prevent me from falling off. The rushing noises were from the waves washing against the hull. The creaks and rattles were the result of a solid body being pushed by an engine through the resistance of water.

To have made at least some sense of my surroundings was an enormous relief. I could relate myself to space again, and visualise my condition. On the other hand, sorting out the most disorientating part of the mystery left me feeling more acutely the physical discomforts. Cold. Hands tied to legs. Muscles stiff from immobility: and knowing I was on a boat, and knowing boats always made me sick, was definitely making me feel a lot sicker.

Ignorance was a great tranquilliser, I thought. The intensity of a pain depended on the amount of attention one gave it, and one never felt half as bad talking to people in daylight as alone in the dark. If someone would come and talk to me I might feel less cold and less miserable and less quite horribly sick.

No one came for a century or so.

The motion of the boat increased, and my queasiness with it. I could feel my weight rolling slightly from side to side, and had an all too distinct impression that I was also pitching lengthwise, first toe down, then head down, as the bows lifted and fell with the waves.

Out at sea, I thought helplessly. It wouldn’t be so rough on a river.

I tried for a while with witticisms like ‘Press-ganged, by God’, and ‘Shanghaied!’ and ‘Jim lad, Long John Silver’s got you’, to put a twist of lightness into the situation. Not a deafening success.

In time also I gave up trying to work out why I was there. I gave up feeling apprehensive. I gave up feeling cold and uncomfortable. Finally I was concentrating only on not actually vomiting, and the fact that I’d eaten nothing since breakfast was all that helped.

Breakfast...? I had lost all idea of time. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, or even how long I’d lain awake in the dark. Unconscious long enough to be shipped from Cheltenham to the coast, and to be carried on board. Awake long enough to long for sleep.

The engine stopped.

The sudden quiet was so marvellous that I only fully realised then how exhausting had been the assault of noise. I actively feared that it would start again. And was this, I wondered, the basis of brainwashing?

There was a new noise, suddenly, from overhead. Dragging sounds, and then metallic sounds, and then, devastatingly, a shaft of daylight.

I shut my dark-adjusted eyes, wincing, and opened them again slowly. Above my head the shaft had grown to a square. Someone had opened a hatch.

Fresh air blew in like a shower, cold and damp. Without much enthusiasm I glanced around, seeing a small world through a wide meshed white net.

I was in what one might call the sharp end. In the bows. The bunk where I lay grew narrower at my feet, the side walls of the cabin angling to meet in the centre, like an arrowhead.

The bunk was about two feet wide, and had another bunk above it. I was lying on a cloth-covered mattress; navy blue.

Most of the rest of the cabin was taken up by two large open-topped built-in varnished wooden bins. For stowing sails, I thought. I was in the sail locker of a sailing boat.

Behind my right shoulder a door, now firmly shut, presumably led back to warmth, life, the galley and the saloon.

The matter of my wrists, too, became clear. They were indeed tied to my trousers, one on each side. From what I could see, someone had punched a couple of holes through the material in the region of each side pocket, threaded something which looked like bandage through the holes, and effectively tied each of my wrists to a bunch of cloth.

A good pair of trousers ruined: but then all disasters were relative.

A head appeared above me, framed by the hatch. Indistinctly, seeing him through the net and silhouetted against the grey sky, I got the impression he was fairly young and uncompromisingly tough.

‘Are you awake?’ he said, peering down.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Right.’

He went away, but presently returned, leaning head and shoulders into the hatch.

‘If you act sensible, I’ll untie you,’ he said.

His voice had the bossy strength of one accustomed to dictate, not cajole. A voice which had come up the hard way, gathering aggression on the journey.

‘Have you got any dramamine?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s a toilet in the cabin. You can throw up into that. You’re going to have to agree you’ll act quiet if I come down and untie you. Otherwise I won’t. Right?’

‘I agree,’ I said.

‘Right.’

Without more ado he lowered himself easily through the hatch and stood six feet three in his canvas shoes, practically filling all available space. His body moved in effortless balance in the boat’s tossing.

‘Here,’ he said, lifting the lid of what had looked like a built-in varnished box. ‘Here’s the head. You open the stop-cock and pump sea water through with that lever. Turn the water off when you’ve done, or you’ll have a flood.’ He shut the lid and opened a locker door on the wall above. ‘In here there’s a bottle of drinking water and some paper cups. You’ll get your meals when we get ours.’ He fished deep into one of the sail bins, which otherwise seemed empty. ‘Here’s a blanket. And a pillow.’ He lifted them out, showed them to me, both dark blue, dropped them back.

He looked upwards to the generous square of open sky above him.

‘I’ll fix you the hatch so you’ll have air and light. You won’t be able to get out. And there’s nothing to get out for. We’re out of sight of land.’

He stood for a moment, considering, then began to unfasten the net, which was held simply by chrome hooks slotted into eyelets on the bunk above.

‘You can hook the net up if it gets rough,’ he said.

Seen without intervening white meshes, he was not reassuring. A strong face with vigorous bones. Smallish eyes, narrow-lipped mouth, open air skin and straight brown floppy hair. My own sort of age: no natural kinship, though. He looked down at me without any hint of sadistic enjoyment, for which I was grateful, but also without apology or compassion.

‘Where am I?’ I said. ‘Why am I here? Where are we going? And who are you?’

He said, ‘If I untie your hands and you try anything, I’ll bash you.’

You must be joking, I thought. Six foot three of healthy muscle against a cold stiff seasick five foot ten. No thank you very much.

‘What is this all about?’ I said. Even to my ears, it sounded pretty weak. But then, pretty weak was exactly how I felt.

He didn’t answer. He merely bent down, leaned in and over me, and unknotted the bandage from my left wrist. Extracting himself from the small space between the bunks, he repeated the process on the right.

‘Stay lying down until I’m out of here,’ he said.

‘Tell me what’s going on.’

He put a foot on the edge of the sail bins, and his hands on the sides of the hatch, and pulled himself halfway up into the outside world.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said unemotionally, looking down, ‘that you’re a bloody nuisance to me. I’m having to stow all the sails on deck.’

He gave a heave, a wriggle, and a kick, and hauled himself out.

‘Tell me,’ I shouted urgently. ‘Why am I here?’

He didn’t answer. He was fiddling with the hatch. I swung my feet over the side of the bunk and rolled in an exceedingly wobbly fashion to my feet. The pitching of the boat promptly threw me off balance and I ended in a heap on the floor.

‘Tell me,’ I shouted, pulling myself up again and holding onto things. ‘Tell me, God dammit.’

The hatch cover slid over and shut out most of the sky. This time, though, it was not clamped down tight, but rested on metal stays, which left a three inch gap all round: like a lid held three inches above a box.

I put a hand up through the gap and yelled again ‘Tell me.’

The only reply I got was the sound of the hatch being made secure against any attempt of mine to dislodge it. Then even those sounds ceased, and I knew he’d gone away; and a minute or two later the engine started again.

The boat rolled and tossed wildly, and the sickness won with a rush. I knelt on the floor with my head over the lavatory bowl and heaved and retched as if trying to rid myself of my stomach itself. I hadn’t eaten for so long that all that actually came up was bright yellow bile, but that made nothing any better. The misery of seasickness was that one’s body never seemed to realise that there was nothing left to vomit.

I dragged myself onto the bunk and lay there both sweating and shivering, wanting to die.

Blanket and pillow, I thought. In the sail bin.

A terrible effort to get up and get them. I leaned down to pick them up, and my head whirled alarmingly.

Another frightful session over the bowl. Curse the blanket and pillow. But I was so cold.

I got them at the second attempt. Wrapped myself closely in the thick navy wool and put my head thankfully on the navy pillow. There was mercy somewhere, it seemed. I had a bed and a blanket and light and air and a water closet, and a lot of shipboard prisoners before me would have given their souls for all that. It seemed unreasonable to want an explanation as well.

The day passed with increasing awfulness. Anyone who has been comprehensively seasick won’t need telling. Head ached and swam, skin sweated, stomach heaved, entire system felt unbelievably ill. If I opened my eyes it was worse.

How long, I thought, will this be going on? Were we crossing the Channel? Surely this relentless churning would soon end. Wherever we were going, it couldn’t be far.

At some point he came back and undid the hatch.

‘Food,’ he said, shouting to be heard against the engine’s din.

I didn’t answer; couldn’t be bothered.

‘Food,’ he shouted again.

I flapped a weak hand in the air, making go away signals.

I could swear he laughed. Extraordinary how funny seasickness is to those who don’t have it. He pushed the hatch into place again and left me to it.

The light faded to dark. I slid in and out of dreams which were a good deal more comforting than reality; and during one of those brief sleeps someone came and fastened the hatch. I didn’t care very much. If the boat had sunk, I would have looked upon drowning as a blessed release.

The next time the engine stopped it was only a minor relief compared with the general level of misery. I had supposed it was only in my imagination that the boat was tossing in a storm, but when the engine stopped I rolled clean off the bunk.

Climbing clumsily to my feet, holding on with one hand to the upper bunk, I felt for the door and the light switch beside it. Found the switch, and pressed it. No light. No damned light. Bloody stinking sods, giving me no light.

I fumbled my way back to the lower bunk in the blackness. Tripped over the blanket. Rolled it around me and lay down, feeling most insecure. Felt around for the net: fastened a couple of the hooks, groaning and grunting; not tidily, but enough to do the job.

From the next lot of noises from the outside world, I gathered that someone was putting up sails. On a sailing boat, that merely made sense. There were rattlings and flappings and indistinct shouts, about none of which I cared a drip. It seemed vaguely strange that someone should be sluicing the decks with buckets of water at such a time, until it dawned on me that the heavy intermittent splashes were made by waves breaking over the bows. The tight-closed hatch made sense. I had never wished for anything more passionately than to get my feet on warm steady dry land.

I entirely lost touch of time. Life became merely a matter of total wretchedness, seemingly without end. I would quite have liked a drink of water, but partly couldn’t raise the energy to search for it, and partly feared to spill it in the dark, but mostly I didn’t bother because every time I lifted my head the whirling bouts of sickness sent me retching to my knees. Water would be no sooner down than up.

He came and undid the hatch: not wide, but enough to let in some grey daylight and a flood of fresh air. He did not, it seemed, intend me to die of suffocation.

It was raining hard outside: or maybe it was spray. I saw the bright shine of his yellow oilskins as a shower of heavy drops spattered in through the narrow gap.

His voice came to me, shouting. ‘Do you want food?’

I lay apathetically, not answering.

He shouted again. ‘Wave your hand if you are all right.’

I reckoned all right was a relative term, but raised a faint flap.

He said something which sounded like ‘Gale’, and shut the hatch again.

Bloody hell, I thought bitterly. Where were we going that we should run into gales? Out into the Atlantic? And what for?

The old jingle about seasickness ran through my head: ‘one minute you’re afraid you’re dying, next minute you’re afraid you’re not’. For hours through the storm I groaned miserably into the pillow, incredibly ill from nothing but motion.

I woke from a sunny dream, the umpteenth awakening into total darkness.

Something different, I thought hazily. Same wild weather outside, the bows crashing against the seas and shipping heavy waves over the deck. Same creaking and slapping of wind-strained rigging. But inside, in me, something quite different.

I breathed deeply from relief. The sickness was going, subsiding slowly like an ebb tide, leaving me acclimatized to an alien environment. I lay for a while in simple contentment, while normality crept back like a forgotten luxury: but then, insistently, other troubles began to surface instead. Thirst, hunger, exhaustion, and an oppressive headache which I eventually put down to dehydration and a dearth of fresh air. A sour taste. An itching stubble of beard. A sweaty feeling of having worn the same clothes for a month. But worse than physical pinpricks, the mental rocks.

Confusion had had its points. Clarity brought no comfort at all. The more I was able to think straight, the less I liked the prospects.

There had to be a reason for any abduction, but the most usual reason made least sense. Ransom... it couldn’t be. There was no one to pay a million for my release: no parents, rich or poor. Hostage... but hostages were mostly taken at random, not elaborately, from a public place. I had no political significance and no special knowledge: I couldn’t be bartered, didn’t know any secrets, had no access to Government papers or defence plans or scientific discoveries. No one would care more than a passing pang whether I lived or died, except perhaps Trevor, who would count it a nuisance to have to find a replacement.

I considered as dispassionately as possible the thought of death, but eventually discarded it. If I was there to be murdered, it would already have been done. The cabin had been made ready for a living prisoner, not a prospective corpse. Once out at sea, a weighted heave-ho would have done the trick. So, with luck, I was going to live.

However unrealistic it seemed to me, the only reason I could raise which made any sense at all was that I was there for revenge.

Although the majority of mankind think of auditing accountants as dry-as-dust creatures burrowing dimly into columns of boring figures, the dishonest regard them as deadly enemies.

I had had my share of uncovering frauds. I’d lost a dozen people their jobs and set the Revenue onto others, and seen five embezzlers go to prison, and the spite in some of those eyes had been like acid.

If Connaught Powys, for instance, had arranged this trip, my troubles had hardly started. Four years ago, when I’d last seen him, in court and newly convicted, he’d sworn to get even. He would be out of Leyhill about now. If by getting even he meant the full four years in a sail locker... well, it couldn’t be that. It couldn’t. I swallowed, convincing myself that from the solely practical viewpoint, it was impossible.

My throat was dry. From thirst, I told myself firmly: not from fear. Fear would get me nowhere.

I eased myself out of the bunk and onto the small patch of floor, holding on tight to the upper bunk. The black world went on corkscrewing around, but the vertigo had really gone. The fluid in my ears’ semi-circular canals had finally got used to sloshing about chaotically: a pity it hadn’t done it with less fuss.

I found the catch of the wall locker, opened it, and felt around inside. Paper cups, as promised. Bottle of water, ditto. Big plastic bottle with a screw cap. It was hopeless in the dark to use one of the cups: I wedged myself on the only available seat, which was the lowered lid of the loo, and drank straight from the bottle. Even then, with the violent rolling and pitching, a good deal of it ran down my neck.

I screwed the cap on again carefully and groped my way back to the bunk, taking the bottle with me. Hooked up the net again. Lay on my back with my head propped up on the pillow, holding the water on my chest and whistling ‘Oh Susanna’ to prove I was alive.

A long time passed during which I drank a good deal and whistled every tune I could think of.

After that I stood up and banged on the cabin door with my fists and the bottle, and shouted at the top of my voice that I was awake and hungry and furious at the whole bloody charade. I used a good deal of energy and the results were an absolute zero.

Back in the bunk I took to swearing instead of whistling. It made a change.

The elements went on giving the boat a bad time. I speculated fruitlessly about where we were, and how big the boat was, and how many people were sailing it, and whether they were any good. I thought about hot sausages and crusty bread and red wine, and for a fairly cheerful hour I thought about winning the Gold Cup.

At about the time that I began to wonder seriously if everyone except me had been washed overboard, the hatch-opening noises returned. He was there, still in his oilskins. I gulped in the refreshing blast of cold air and wondered just how much of a stinking fug was rushing out to meet him.

I unhooked the net and stood up, holding on and swaying. The wind outside shrieked like starlings.

He shouted, ‘Do you want food?’

‘Yes,’ I yelled. ‘And more water.’ I held the nearly empty bottle up to him, and he reached down for it.

‘Right.’

He shut the hatch and went away, but not before I had a terrifying glimpse of the outside world. The boat rolled heavily as usual to one side, to the left, and before it rolled back to the right I saw the sea. A huge uneven wave, towering to obliterate the sky, charcoal grey, shining, swept with dusts of spray. The next heavy crash of water over the hatch made me think happier thoughts of my dry cabin.

He came back, opened the hatch a few inches, and lowered in a plastic carrier bag on a loop of rope. He shouted down at me.

‘Next time I bring you food, you give me back this carrier. Understand?’

‘Yes,’ I shouted back, untying the rope. ‘What time is it?’

‘Five o’clock. Afternoon.’

‘What day?’

‘Sunday.’ He pulled the rope up and began to shut the hatch.

‘Give me some light,’ I yelled.

He shouted something which sounded like ‘Batteries’ and put me back among the blind. Yes, well... one could live perfectly well without sight. I slid back onto the bunk, fastened the net, and investigated the carrier bag.

The water bottle, full; an apple; and a packet of two thick sandwiches, faintly warm. They turned out to be hamburgers in bread, not buns; and very good too. I ate the lot.

Five o’clock on Sunday. Three whole damned days since I’d stepped into the white van.

I wondered if anyone had missed me seriously enough to go to the police. I had disappeared abruptly from the weighing room, but no one would think it sinister. The changing room valet might be surprised that I hadn’t collected from him my wallet and keys and watch, which he’d been holding as usual in safe keeping while I raced, and that I hadn’t in fact paid him, either: but he would have put my absentmindedness down to excitement. My car would still, I supposed, be standing in the jockeys’ car park, but no one yet would have begun to worry about it.

I lived alone in a cottage three miles outside Newbury: my next-door neighbour would merely think I was away celebrating for the weekend. Our two office assistants, one boy, one girl, would have made indulgent allowances, or caustic allowances perhaps, when I hadn’t turned up for work on Friday. The clients I had been supposed to see would have been irritated, but no more.

Trevor was away on his holidays. So no one, I concluded, would be looking for me.

On Monday morning, the bankrupt Mr Wells might make a fuss. But even if people began to realise I had vanished, how would they ever find me? The fact had to be faced that they wouldn’t. Rescue was unlikely. Unless I escaped, I would be staying in the sail locker until someone chose to let me out.

Sunday to Monday was a long cold, wild, depressing night.