Sea Lord

Part Five

I think I’d known from the very start that I wouldn’t follow Harry’s advice. Once I had committed myself I would not pull back at the end. I wanted to go through with it. Just like that day when I’d plunged into the heart of a gale-broken sea above the bar at Salcombe, I would risk death because, if I did not, I would prove myself a coward. I didn’t want to do this thing, but once committed, I would go as far as I could. And not just to prove that I was brave, but because of a girl who lay in foul pain on a hospital bed. I wanted to find the bastards who had done that to her, and I wanted them to regret what they had done.

An ignoble motive, I know. These days a man is supposed to be above such stupidity. Today we’re supposed to exemplify the virtues of sympathetic understanding. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the criminal because it’s clearly his education, or his broken home, or just society itself that has driven him to crime. In short we’re supposed to eat lettuce instead of raw meat, but I’m a throwback. I’m the twenty-eighth Earl of nothing very much, but there’s still enough pride left in the nothingness to want to see my enemies wishing they hadn’t been born, and enough pride to want to tell my woman that I’d revenged her, and enough pride to go to the bitter end of a nasty little game in which I was naked and my enemies held all the cards.

I felt truly naked as I walked barefoot down that pontoon. I knew I was being watched, not just by the police, but by one of Elizabeth’s people. That person could have been any one of the loungers on the big moored yachts, or any of the idling holiday-makers who leaned on the railings to stare down into the marina’s pool. Who were these people whom Elizabeth had found? I’d met two of them, Garrard and Peel, but who else?

Then I saw Marianne.

She was a filthy little boat; a home-made French job glued together out of marine ply then painted ox-blood red. You see hundreds of boats like her throughout Europe; I’d even seen a couple in the Pacific, sailed there by French youngsters who couldn’t afford anything sturdier. This boat was about eighteen feet long with a small cabin, a single mast, and an outboard motor mounted in a stern well. There was a compass mounted on her cabin roof, a grubby mainsail was roughly lashed to her boom, and a single jib was hanked to her forestay. I looked at her masthead and saw neither a radar reflector nor a VHF aerial, but, oddly, a Decca aerial was bolted just behind the outboard well. Except for the Decca, the villains had clearly found the cheapest boat they could.

I stepped down into her cockpit. She might have been a scabby little boat, hardly fit to cross a park pond, but she was still a yacht and it felt good to be afloat again. I tried the companionway and found it unlocked. The interior of the boat had been stripped bare; there were no bunks, no galley, not even a cockpit sole. The bilges were exposed and, I noted, dry. They had been swept bare and clean; evidence that whoever had provided this boat had been intent on leaving no traces.

Yet, strangely out of place in such a bare boat, some high-tech aids had been put aboard. A Decca set was screwed to the after bulkhead and, to power it, a twelve-volt car battery rested on the ribs beside the centreboard case. There was also a hand-held VHF radio, and the existence of that radio cheered me up for it seemed to be the first mistake my enemies had made. Doubtless they had provided the radio so they could communicate with me, but it also meant that I could talk to Harry.

I crouched inside the empty cabin and stowed the thin case of bearer bonds beside the battery, then lowered the centreboard. I noticed the Decca was already switched on, registering the latitude and longitude of St Peter Port. I left it on and picked up the radio. It was the size of a telephone handset with a short rubber-sheathed aerial and powered by internal batteries. I carried the radio up to the cockpit and ostentatiously waved it so Harry could see it. I turned it on, tuned it to Channel 16, and laid it on the back cockpit thwart.

I opened the petrol tank of the outboard and saw I had a full tank. It was only a three-and-a-half horsepower engine, so it wouldn’t drive me more than six knots, but I guessed it would run for a long time on a full tank. The engine started on the first pull of the rope. I left it in neutral while I went forward to cast off the bow line. Marianne had not been given any springs, nor any fenders, just two warps. I cast off aft. We drifted backwards till I put the engine into gear.

Marianne and I puttered out of the marina into the harbour. I followed the buoys round the outer perimeter, past the fuel stage, and out to the lighthouse which marks the harbour entrance. A fast patrol boat of the Navy’s Fisheries Protection Squadron was moored close to the harbour entrance. An officer stared down from the grey-painted bridge with more than usual interest as Marianne passed, and I wondered whether Harry had succeeded in co-opting the patrol boat. It had huge speed, a splendid radar and a wicked-looking gun. It would be nice to have such a vessel on my side, but its presence would clearly upset the careful ransom arrangements, so I didn’t expect to see it again.

I gave the officer a wave, then Marianne was out of the harbour and in the Little Russel. We had no choice of which way to turn. The tide goes through the Little Russel with the force of a steam train so Marianne and I would go north, for we didn’t have the power to fight our way southwards.

I turned north, slowed the engine, and went forward to hoist the jib. It was a rough piece of sailcloth, but I guessed it had some life left in it. I pulled up the main. Even Sunflower, after crossing the Pacific and rounding the Horn, had not had a sail so dirty, but this one drew well enough, so I went back aft and switched off the motor to save fuel. I tilted the motor up so the propeller wouldn’t drag, then sat at the tiller. The wind was a light southwesterly. It wouldn’t have moved Sunflower very far, but the small light Marianne seemed to like it. She didn’t sail badly. She chopped a bit, and she could fall off the wind very fast, but her helm eased when I trimmed her sails. I opened the cockpit lockers to find them empty. There was nothing on board except the Decca, its battery, me, a compass, a radio and four million pounds. And, I remembered, the two mooring warps. I used one to lash the tiller and coiled the other on the cockpit sole. My enemies had taken care to leave me without weapons, but I had the two ropes and perhaps they would be useful.

A small plane was flying above St Peter Port towards Herm. It banked halfway across the Little Russel and swooped down low. The sun flashed harsh off its windscreen, then the plane was past me and climbing away. It seemed I had friends. I glanced at the radio, half expecting Harry to make contact, but it was silent. A fishing boat thumped past me. There were at least a dozen yachts in sight, one of the big hydroplane ferries was coming up from the south and a small coaster was moored off St Sampson’s. The coaster had just fired her boilers and I saw how the smoke from her funnel drooped in a sagging plume to drift low above the water. I wondered who watched me. I wondered what they had in store for me.

Then the radio startled me. It hissed suddenly, then a woman’s stilted voice sounded loud. “Fourteen,” the voice said.

I didn’t respond. I was tuned to Channel 16, the emergency and contact channel, so I could expect to hear a lot of stray traffic. The single word I’d heard seemed to have been broken from a longer transmission and I wondered if the radio was working properly. Then, perhaps a minute later, the voice sounded again. “Fourteen.”

Still I didn’t react. Another minute or so passed, then the single word was patiently transmitted again. “Fourteen.” The intonation was bland, not at all insistent, almost robotic.

It occurred to me that I’d heard no other traffic, and clearly the word meant something, so I picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button. “Station calling Marianne, station calling Marianne, identify yourself and say again. Over.” I suspected Harry would already have arranged for direction-finding gear to track down the source of any mysterious transmissions, and I wanted to make the caller speak longer to give that gear a chance. At least, I thought, the woman had used Channel 16, the emergency and calling channel, and the obvious wavelength for Harry to monitor, so all I had to do now was persuade the woman to speak for the two or three seconds it would need for the DF to spot her. “Station calling Marianne,” I transmitted again, “identify yourself and say again your message, over.”

The radio was silent, and I began to suspect that my enemies were not so foolish as I’d thought. I tested that assumption by pressing the transmitter button again. “St Peter Port Radio, St Peter Port Radio, this is yacht Marianne, yacht Marianne. Radio check please. Over.”

There was no answer. I switched to Channel 62, St Peter Port Radio’s working channel, and asked for a radio check again.

Nothing. Which meant the radio wasn’t transmitting. It could receive, but it wouldn’t transmit. The clever bastards, I thought, the clever, clever bastards, and I began to turn the dial back to Channel 16 when the radio, ignoring the fact that I was flicking the tuner across the channels, sounded once more. “Fourteen,” said the toneless voice.

So not only had the enemy made sure that I couldn’t transmit, but they had by-passed the tuner so that the radio was permanently fixed on an unidentifiable channel. It could have been any one of the fifty-five public channels, or one of a dozen private channels, or they might even have installed an American channel into the radio. Doubtless Harry was combing the VHF bands to find any transmissions that sounded suspect, but I was beginning to have a great respect for the people who had designed this voyage and I did not see Harry succeeding quickly.

“Fourteen,” the woman’s voice said a moment later.

So what the hell did that mean? It clearly wasn’t a course. A buoy perhaps? I looked around to see if there were any numbered buoys in sight, and then the solution struck me. Marianne had been stripped to functional bareness, yet someone had thought fit to install a very expensive Decca set. That wasn’t there for decoration. Whoever was transmitting to me was providing me with a waypoint. These people were not just clever; they were very clever. They had doubtless programmed the Decca with ninety-nine waypoints scattered randomly throughout the Channel Islands and they could use the waypoints to send me skittering about the sea while they made sure I was not being followed. Finally, when they were certain that I was alone, they would use the Decca to point me towards the rendezvous. Instead of public telephones, they were using invisible points in a vast sea.

I crouched in the low cabin. The instruction book for the Decca was jammed behind the power-lead, but it was the same brand of set as the one I’d possessed for such a brief time on Sunflower, and that made me remember Jennifer’s childish delight in the machine. I said a brief prayer that I would one day share that childish delight with her again, then punched the buttons for waypoint fourteen. The machine blinked, then ordered a course of 089 to reach a point 12.4 nautical miles away.

I went back to the cockpit. If I went more than a half-mile on a heading of 089 I’d pile Marianne on to the rocks of Herm, but I turned nevertheless. I let out the main sheet and Marianne picked up her dowdy skirts and fairly flew in front of the wind. I watched the shore approach.

“Twenty-five,” the girl’s voice said a few minutes before I would have struck rock.

I rammed the tiller hard over to bring Marianne swivelling round into the wind. I left her hove-to while I went down to the cabin and asked the Decca where to go. Waypoint twenty-five was ten miles due north. I wondered whether to compensate for magnetic north. The Decca could have been giving me a true course, pointing me at the North Pole, or perhaps it had the magnetic correction programmed in so that its instructions would match my compass. I decided my enemies had thought of everything else, so why should I guess the compass correction for them. I’d trust their machinery and see where it took me.

I eased Marianne’s head round, and settled back on a reach. The tide was with me, sweeping us north towards the open sea. I looked up and saw my attendant plane circling high above. And where, I wondered, was the girl who was transmitting the waypoint numbers? She had to be within my view, for a VHF will only work within line of sight, but it was hopeless to look, for she could have been on any of the score of boats within view, or on Guernsey, or on the smaller islands of Herm and Sark that lie to the east of the Little Russel.

I sailed on. The radio had gone silent, and I guessed that I had passed the first test by following the first instructions. I cleared the Platte Fougere light at the northern end of the Little Russel and felt the western swell lifting Marianne’s frail hull. The wind was light but steady, the air was warm.

“Thirty-six,” the voice said from the radio, and there was something oddly familiar and annoyingly complacent about that voice. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn’t obey, and a moment later the number was repeated, and this time I noticed that the intonation of the repeated message was exactly the same as when the number had first been transmitted. I also recognised the voice; it belonged to a girl who read out the marine forecasts on Radio Four. My opponents had taped her, chopped the numbers from her forecasts, and were now playing me those numbers over the air.

Damn their cleverness.

Waypoint thirty-six took me on a course fine into the southwesterly wind. Marianne was too light to head up into wind so I started the engine and let the sails hang while the propeller plugged me into the sea’s small chop. The new course would take me plumb through a score of boats which fished for bass off the island’s northern reefs. Any one of those boats could contain my enemies, yet I was helpless to determine which, if any, it might be. I deliberately steered close to some of the boats, yet all looked innocent. A woman waved to me from one boat, while a man on another called out that it was a fine day.

“Twenty-five,” the voice said.

I’d been given that waypoint before and knew it lay due north. I let Marianne’s head fall off the wind, hardened her into a reach, then stopped the engine. The waypoint number wasn’t repeated which meant they must have been watching me, for they only repeated the transmissions when I failed to obey. And that annoyed me. They were training me, programming me. I had become a rat in a maze of invisible electronic commands that spanned the sea, and their game was to spin me round the maze till I was tired, hungry and ready to be slaughtered.

“Six,” said the voice, which took me northwest.

“Eighteen.” Which took me a few points north of east.

“Thirteen.” An unlucky number, but which merely took me west.

“Eighty-four.” A brief curtsey to the southeast, then they gave me twenty-five again to send me reaching northwards once more.

They played with me for two hours. At first I could divine no pattern in the commands. I sailed towards every point of the compass, but was never given enough time to reach the invisible waypoint which lay at the end of the required course. Always, and usually within a mile of the last command, I would be made to change my heading. Gradually, though, I was being pushed northwards, zigzagging away from the fading coast. I was being sent into the empty sea, far from any help. My mouth was dry, but at least the humid air was warm on my naked skin.

“Forty-four.” The voice broke into my thoughts.

Well practised now, I pressed the Decca buttons. Waypoint forty-four lay fifty miles off on a bearing of 100, virtually due east, which would place it somewhere on the Cherbourg Peninsula, so clearly waypoint forty-four was not my rendezvous. Yet, for the first time since I had cleared the Little Russel, my controllers let me sail on undisturbed. By now they must have been confident that I presented no danger to their careful plans. They had made me sail in a random pattern, and they must have watched till they were satisfied that no ships followed my intricate manoeuvres, so now the real business of the day could begin. They must, I thought, be unaware of my shepherding plane which was far off to the west.

The radio stayed silent as Marianne held her eastwards course. To the north I could see the sails of two yachts running away from me towards the Alderney Race, while to the south the islands of Sark and Guernsey were a dark blur on a hazed horizon. Behind me, in the west, a plane droned aimlessly about the sky, while to the east was nothing but the game’s ending, death or revenge, and the waiting night.

I lost track of time, except for a rough estimate gained from the sun’s decline. I was thirsty as hell.

The tide was ebbing from the east. There had been a time when these waters had been a playground for Charlie and me, and, in those happy days, we’d learned the vagaries of the notorious Channel Island tides. Marianne and I were fighting a neap tide, the weakest, but it was still like trying to run up a down escalator. I knew I’d have a couple more hours of contrary tide before a period of slack, after which the set would come strong from the north.

So we just plugged on. Marianne wasn’t quick, and she wasn’t elegant, but I was beginning to feel fond of her. She was, after all, my boat, if only for this one day. We received no more waypoints, but just stemmed the tide, always heading east. By low water, when the tidal force subsided, we were quite alone. We had crossed the passage line for boats coming from Cherbourg down to Guernsey. We were also well out of sight of land, which suggested there would be no more radio transmissions for a while.

The wind was light, but the long western swell was carrying the spiteful remnants of an Atlantic storm. Sunflower would not have noticed such small waves, but Marianne was light and short enough to suffer. She slapped her way across the crests and plunged hard down into shallow troughs. I had lifted her centreboard to add a half-knot to her speed, but the higher centre of gravity also made her roll like a blue-water yacht running before the trade winds. After living on Sunflower so long it seemed odd to be in such a cramped and low cockpit. I’d never thought of Sunflower as a big yacht, but compared to Marianne she had been a leviathan.

My aerial escort stayed in fitful touch. The pilot did not stay close to me, but rather he would fly a course which crossed mine, disappear, then come back a few minutes later. It wasn’t always the same plane. Sometimes it was a single-engined high-winged model, and at other times it was a sleek machine with an engine nacelle on each wing. I imagined Harry Abbott plotting my course in the police station, the map-pins creeping east towards the French coast.

East and south, for the Decca betrayed the first twitch of the new tidal surge. From now until deep into the night the water would pour round the Cap de la Hague to fill the Channel Islands basin. I put our head to the north to compensate for the new drift, and knew that from now on I would be steering more and more northerly just to keep my easterly progress constant. Marianne’s speed over the sea bed slowed and, because we were now showing some beam to the ragged swell, we began to roll uncomfortably, so I sacrificed yet more speed by dropping the centreboard. The board damped the rolling a little, but Marianne was still tender, and every few minutes we would slam down into a trough and the water would come shattering back over the deck. If the game didn’t end soon, I thought, then I’d be in for a cold wet night.

But it wasn’t my game, it belonged to someone else, and they’d planned it well. Sometime in the early evening I saw the southern and eastern horizons misting. At first I dared to hope it was just a distant bank of cloud, but I soon knew the truth; that it was a rolling wall of fog. My enemies must have chosen today because the weather forecast had warned against fog, and it was somewhere inside that thick, shrouding, sea-hugging cloud that the game’s ending would be played out. I knew that once I was inside the fog my shepherding aircraft would be useless, and even the Navy’s radar would be fortunate to find such a tiny boat as Marianne.

Harry must have shared my fear for, when I was scarcely a mile from the fog bank, the twin-engined plane dropped out of the sky like a dive-bomber, levelled above the sea, and raced towards me. The pilot flashed bright landing lights as if I hadn’t already seen him. The machine roared so close above me that its backwash of air set Marianne’s sails aback. She was so light and tender that she threatened to heel right over, but somehow steadied herself.

He came back again, but this time he flew slower and well to one side of me. I looked up to catch a glimpse of Harry’s ugly face. He was gesturing westwards, indicating that he wanted me to turn back. The plane roared on, banked and turned again towards me. Once more Harry pointed westwards.

I looked back. A tiny grey smear broke the horizon, and I guessed that the Royal Navy patrol boat was, after all, keeping me company. The Navy must have been shadowing me from below the horizon, kept in touch by the aircraft reports, but now the fast patrol boat was accelerating towards me to make sure I obeyed Harry’s orders. He feared for my safety in that clinging, hiding fog, or perhaps, and this struck me as a more likely explanation, Sir Leon feared I’d use the fog to sail away with four million pounds’ worth of unregistered bonds.

I waved reassuringly to Harry, shoved Marianne’s tiller hard over, brought her into wind, and started the motor. The plane flew over me, waggled its wings in approval of my obedience in turning back, then climbed away. Marianne’s outboard pushed us west. The patrol boat seemed to come no closer. So far as Harry was concerned the day’s excitement was over and all we could do was lick our wounds and hope our enemies tried again.

Only I wasn’t buying that safe course. I had a girl to revenge and a curiosity to assuage, so I waited till I could hardly see the plane, then I turned Marianne again. I let the sails out to catch the faltering wind, and throttled the motor hard up. Now it was a race between me and the patrol boat, but I’d gained some precious time by my pretended compliance, and it would be some minutes before the Naval boat was certain that I really had turned back to the east. I pulled the centreboard up to add that precious ounce of speed and raced for the fog which was much closer now, scarcely a half-mile away, and rolling fast towards me from the south. It looked white and pretty, but I knew what waited inside.

I watched westwards rather than east. Sure enough, after a few minutes, I saw a bow wave flash beneath the distant grey dot. The race was on now: one crummy little French yacht made of plywood and glue against the turbines of a fast patrol boat. Except the crummy little yacht was already so close to the concealing fog.

The first tendrils of the fog wisped past me and I felt the instant drop in temperature. The fog had been formed by warm air over cold sea, but the vapour stole all the day’s warmth and it felt as if I had gone from summer into instant winter. I kept the motor at full throttle, banging Marianne’s light bows across the choppy waves. I looked behind to see the fog wrapping about me. I kept on my course, but, after a minute or so, I looked up and saw my mast-tip hidden in the vapour so I turned hard to port so that I was travelling behind the moving face of the fog bank and into the tide. I was hoping that my pursuers would presume that I had turned downtide to add the water’s speed to my own. The outboard motor suddenly seemed very loud. I counted the seconds. One minute passed, two, then I turned off the engine and let Marianne drift.

Silence.

Already my sails, boom and sheets were beaded with moisture. It was a grandfather of fogs, this one, a thick grey horror that restricted visibility to less than thirty yards. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees.

Marianne rocked in the waves. There was wind in the fog, enough to slap her wet sails about, so I sheeted her in and turned her bows northeast. I let most of the power slip from the sails so I could listen for the Naval vessel.

Silence again.

Then, apparently not far off my starboard bow, I heard the sound of engines idling. I knew the apparent closeness of the sound could be deceiving for noise does strange things in fog. The Naval crew might be a hundred yards to port or a mile to starboard. The only certainty was that they would be concentrating on their radar, but, without a reflector in Marianne’s rigging, my sails and wooden mast offered them lousy echoes that would be further confused by the water-soaked air. The wavetops were probably reflecting as much as Marianne.

It was dark, cold and dank in the fog. If it had not been for the compass I would have been lost in minutes, but I crept onwards. I was steering northeast, but the tide’s effect was to drive me almost due east. I imagined the patrol boat would be idling along on scarce-turning engines, making a box-search in the whiteness. My hope was that I’d decoyed them into going too far south, then I dared to hope that I might have escaped them altogether by crossing the invisible line which separated British waters from French. That was a happy thought which I celebrated by rubbing my hand along the underside of the boom, then licking the condensation off my palm. I was parched, and the fresh water tasted good.

The patrol boat’s engines suddenly roared, faded, roared again. I swivelled in alarm, but saw nothing. A moment later I thought I saw the patrol boat’s lean dark shape in the fog, but the dark shape was just a phantom of the fog which roiled and faded. A ship’s bell clanged, apparently from the port side. I heard a distant voice shouting and I wondered whether the game was over. Had they found Garrard and Peel? Was that it? Had Harry been cleverer than my opponents and already made his arrests? Was Elizabeth sitting in a police interview room, protesting her nobility? That thought almost tempted me to shout a reply, but there was only one way to be sure of this game’s ending, and that was to see it through, and so I kept silent and let my little boat sail on.

After a half hour or so I hauled in the sheets to power the sails, and Marianne began to slam her hollow bows. This was a fog such as Charlie had described that morning; a fog that did not blanket a wind, but was carried by it. The fogs on this coast could come with gale force; ship-killing winds cloaked in invisibility, and this light southwesterly air would never clear such a fog, but merely stir it. I judged from our wake that we were making close to three knots and knew Marianne would go no faster without her engine.

I heard nothing more of the patrol boat. Maybe an hour passed, maybe more. The only hint of time was the slow darkening of the fog as it went from pearl grey to dirty smoke. My evasive action had taken me too far to port and the Decca was telling me to steer a good fifteen points further south. I obeyed it. I still didn’t use the engine in case the patrol boat had not given up the chase. Another hour passed and the dirty grey turned into wet gloom. I didn’t see the patrol boat again, nor hear him. I was alone. There was neither radar nor human eye, neither boat nor aircraft to watch me, there was only the dumb instructions of the Decca beckoning me on into the darkening fog.

It was a lonely place. Lonely and cold and frightening. The sea had lost all colour to become a dull grey and black broken by a few feeble whitecaps. Sometimes I would sail into a less dense patch of fog, but always the wraith-like clouds wrapped around us again, and sometimes so thickly that I completely lost sight of Marianne’s stemhead. Once night came it was as if we sailed in a thick, black and silent limbo. There was no light in the compass, no moon could penetrate this fog, and the stars were hidden. It was dark, but not quite silent; waves slapped against my thin hull, the frayed ropes rasped in their blocks and the mast creaked, but there was none of the sea’s great noise because the fog absorbed it all. It also dampened my matches, but I managed to light a pipeful of tobacco with the last useful match.

I was cold, and beginning to think I was wasting my time. Perhaps Harry had won, and all I now did was sail blindly towards the treacherous coast north of Carteret. Surely by now, I reasoned, my enemies would have revealed themselves, but nothing untoward disturbed the thick, blank night. The pipe went out. I tried to light another match, but they were useless. For supper I scraped moisture off the boom, trickled it into my cupped palm, and lapped like a dog. I slapped my arms about my chest to keep warm, but still shivered.

“Fifteen,” said a voice on the radio, and the sudden word made me cry aloud in scared astonishment. It had been so long since I had been disturbed by a command, now suddenly the radio had sounded and I twitched on the thwart then stared about the darkness as though I might see my enemy. Nothing stirred in the night. It was so dark that I could not even see the fog. I was in an absolute darkness, the blackness of the blind. I could feel the fog cold on my skin, but I could see nothing.

“Fifteen,” the voice repeated again, only this command wasn’t being transmitted in the voice of the radio announcer, but was being given in a man’s voice. “Fifteen,” he said yet again, as though he did not trust the electronic wizardry at his command, and this time I recognised the clipped, savage tones of Garrard.

I slid into the cabin and pressed the Decca buttons. The small illuminated numerals instructed me to head southeast towards a waypoint that was just 6.4 miles distant. That was a mere two hours’ sailing away, less with the tide’s help, and I knew I was close to the game’s end, for my enemies had been forced to abandon their first radio, the one with the tape-cassette attached, and must be using a radio aboard a boat. My killers waited there, but they lacked the assurance of my first controller for they had repeated the number three times in quick succession. They didn’t trust their machinery, and that lack of trust told me they were nervous. Garrard was a confident and able man, but perhaps he was no seaman. And perhaps he was frightened by this utter blackness above a colourless sea, and that thought gave me a pulse of hope in the cold darkness.

Marianne’s motion was easier after we turned. Now, instead of fighting the tide set, we travelled with the water. The wind had edged southerly, so we were tight hauled, but I could hear the purposeful slap and hiss of the water at her bows that betrayed a quicker progress.

“Fifteen,” Garrard said again, and I felt a fierce joy. He was nervous. He’d been told what to do, and he didn’t really trust the instructions. He was making sure by repetition, and that repetition betrayed his uncertainty to me. He was not at home out here, but I had spent years of my life on the ocean. It was not much of an advantage, but it was all I had; that and two lengths of rope.

He did not transmit again. I had stopped noticing the cold because I was thinking hard, and the results of that thinking were helping my confidence. Till now, they had played with me. They had sent me on a variety of courses, but they had never once let me sail so far that I reached the waypoint to which they pointed me. They had used the courses alone and, when I had travelled far enough along any particular line, they had turned me in a new direction.

Yet this new waypoint was close, suggesting that I was being guided to the rendezvous itself. My enemies, I reasoned, would not trust the conjunction of two courses to define the rendezvous, for the crossing of two invisible lines drawn across the sea left too much room for error. Either of the boats could overshoot the mark, and the Decca would never betray that overshoot. Instead the careful, clever mind that had prepared this meeting would have made the rendezvous the waypoint itself, for the silicon chips inside the Decca were designed to take a boat to that exact spot. If I passed the waypoint the Decca would tell me, if I went too far to port or starboard, the Decca would tell me. The Decca was taking the four million pounds home, but the Decca was also telling me exactly where my enemies waited. They had set an ambush, but, to make their ambush foolproof, they had been forced to tell the victim just where it was placed. I knew where they were, and they did not know where I was. All they knew was that by some electronic trickery I should sail docilely into their grip.

So God damn their cleverness, because it might yet let me win.

I watched the Decca like a hawk. The tide was quickening, helping me. My speed over the ground inched up. Three knots, 3.1, 3.5. The distance decreased fast. I went too far to port and the Decca told me, so I took Marianne back until the little box said I was aiming true. Three point eight knots, then four, and I began looking about Marianne for a weapon. There was the Decca aerial itself, a whiplike thing, but it would be clumsy to carry, and I needed to keep it in place till the very last minute. I wondered if I could wrench the drive shaft from the outboard motor, but knew it would be a hopeless task without tools. So I had nothing but the two mooring ropes.

I also had cleverness, except that I wasn’t being very clever, for Garrard must have known roughly what time I should reach the waypoint. Thanks to the tide I had little choice but to approach from the north, but I could control the time of my arrival, yet now I was doing exactly what he had been told to expect. He was waiting for me, and I needed to stretch his nerves in this cold dark, so I turned Marianne on to a broad reach that took her eastwards. I knew Garrard wouldn’t give up; I was carrying four million good reasons why he wouldn’t give up.

And why, I wondered, was Garrard trusted to collect the money? I could understand why Elizabeth would not get close to the transaction herself, but why trust a crook? I would not have trusted Garrard with four pence, let alone four million pounds in bonds. The only answer I could devise was that Elizabeth was relying on Garrard’s lack of seamanship. He had a boat and, doubtless, a Decca like mine. If he followed the Decca’s pre-programmed instructions, he would be safe, but if he struck out on his own he would be lost in some of the world’s most dangerous waters. To the east lay a lee shore, to the west and south were the rocks about the islands and the savage rocks of the Minkies, while to the north lay the fearsome tidal races of Alderney and the Swinge. That thought gave me a new confidence; I was the seaman out here, and that had to be worth something.

“Fifteen,” Garrard said again, perhaps an hour after he transmitted the instruction. “Fifteen.”

So he was nervous, and he was wondering why the lamb hadn’t turned up at the slaughterhouse on time. He’d be fidgeting at the waypoint, staring northwest into the black void, and wondering if everything had gone wrong. I sailed on eastwards. Let the bastard worry.

The Decca continually updated the waypoint’s bearing. I went on sailing east long after the waypoint was due south from me. I sailed on for what I guessed was a further hour, and only then did I let Marianne run south and west. The Decca gave me the course, pointing an invisible line to my revenge.

Now, once more, the distance to the waypoint began shortening. The tide was helping me, and Marianne was making 4.5 knots over the ground. Two miles to go, 1.9. The wind had picked up. It was blowing against the tide with just enough force to make small bad-tempered waves over which Marianne’s light hull bounced sickeningly.

At one mile to go I dropped the mainsail. I let it fall roughly over the boom. My speed dropped. I let the jib sheet fly and waited till I was sure we were dead in the water, then, as the boat wallowed drunkenly, I crouched by the Decca. I wanted to know exactly how the tide was flowing. Marianne herself was not moving in relation to the water, but the sea itself was sweeping us south at half a knot. The drift was not exactly south. The Decca said our present course was 144, which was east of south. I needed to know that tidal direction if the half-plan in my head stood any chance of working. That half-plan also needed the luck of the devil.

I hauled in the jib so that we ghosted onwards. The Decca told me Marianne had one mile to sail, then her job was done. I stared into the black fog seeking a hint of shadow, a sharper edge of darkness amid the night, a light; anything that would betray my enemies.

I was looking, but I heard them first.

Classical music. Vivaldi, I thought.

I rammed the tiller hard to port so that Marianne came slowly round. I tied off the tiller. Marianne was sailing a point north of west now, and I crouched by the Decca again, waiting till the machine told me that the waypoint was bearing exactly 144 degrees from me. Once it did, I went topsides, unlashed the tiller, and let the jib fall on to the foredeck. I was a quarter-mile from my enemies, drifting towards their soft, betraying noise. Marianne rocked to the waves as the sweet sound came intermittently across the water. Now I was drifting to the ambush, carried there by the weakening tide. And still I stared southwards.

And saw the light, and knew where I was.

The light flashed fast, nothing but a pearled flicker in the fog.

The flicker was so hazed by the vapour that the quick flashes were reduced to mere dissipated blinks, but I could see it was a white light flashing nine times in quick succession.

A cardinal buoy. A buoy marking a hazard, and there was only one such buoy I could think of in this part of the sea. If I was right, we were four or five miles off the French coast, hard by the shoaling rocks called Les Trois Grunes which were marked by a single cardinal buoy which lay to the west of the dangerous bank. I was relying on my memory of the old days when Charlie and I had made these waters our hunting territory.

That the buoy was the rendezvous made absolute sense. Garrard, I suspected, was no seaman. For him to jockey a boat against wind and tide to hold it motionless at an exact point in the sea would be an impossible job, even with the Decca’s help. Instead he had been guided to this lonely buoy to which, doubtless, he had made his boat fast.

The light flickered again, and this time I saw the boat which was indeed moored illegally to the buoy. She was a low-sterned working boat with a wheelhouse behind a raised foredeck. She must have been close to thirty feet long; a substantial boat, well-engined, sturdy, and solid enough to give its unfamiliar crew a sense of safety. I blinked as another light showed, this one a searchlight that flickered out into the fog. So Garrard was risking his night vision as well as his hearing. Put not your trust in killers, I thought, unless they’re good seamen. I wouldn’t want to meet Garrard on land, but out here he was in my cold world, not his.

I closed Marianne’s companionway, leaving the money below. I took the coiled rope from the cockpit sole and wrapped it round my waist. We were drifting towards the workboat and even the night-blinded Garrard must see us soon, so it was time to go. I took a breath, then lowered myself over Marianne’s port side.

The water was very cold. It might have been late summer, but the Channel waters can still strike to the heart like an icepick. I shivered and shuddered, but I had to depend on unsettling my ambushers. I’d frayed their nerves by coming late, now I must fray them further by a vanishing act.

I breaststroked away from Marianne. The tide was carrying us both southwards, but perhaps a little to the east of the buoy. I couldn’t see the light now, not from the water, but I breaststroked southwards and hoped to God that I hadn’t misjudged the tides. I was trying to keep pace with the drifting Marianne, but staying far enough away from her so that I would not be seen when she was discovered. The rope about my waist was absorbing the water and threatening to drag me down.

A bank of fog closed round me, hiding even Marianne from me. I trod water. The rope was getting heavy and I felt a moment of panic that I had already been swept past the cardinal buoy, but then I saw the nine flashes hazing in the fog and heard the small waves slapping at the hull of the big waiting boat. The searchlight stabbed out again, its beam swallowed and scattered by the fog, but this time Marianne’s red hull reflected dimly and I heard a shout. The music was abruptly switched off. “Get up front!” The voice was Garrard’s, clear as a bell. I could see two men on board the workboat; clearly the old firm of Garrard and Peel had come to finish their work.

I swam southwards. I could hear Garrard shouting. He had assumed I was on board Marianne and now ordered me to steer for his boat. I was shivering. A drift of fog hid their boat from me, then I heard its motor choke into life and I feared being left in the cold water and turned desperately towards the noise and the now blinding flash of the cardinal buoy.

Garrard must have cast off from the buoy and was now edging his big boat towards the wallowing Marianne. My estimate of the tidal drift had been good, but not so accurate that the small yacht would have drifted directly on to the buoy, and thus Garrard had been forced to go to her. He only needed to travel about fifteen yards. The two boats were east of me and I swam hard, going close by the tall yellow-and-black buoy that heaved up on the short choppy seas. Its intermittent light strobed on the workboat’s stern that was now just a few yards ahead of me. I heard a splintering thump as Garrard misjudged his approach and laid his boat’s bows into Marianne’s hull, then his engine subsided into a soft thumping growl. A man – from his size and weight I guessed him to be Peel – was on the workboat’s foredeck with a boathook. Then, when he brought it to his shoulder, I saw it wasn’t a boathook, but a shotgun or rifle.

I swam a little closer. My teeth were chattering.

“Can’t see the bugger.” That was Peel.

“He’s inside.” Garrard was sheltering from the night’s cold in the workboat’s brightly lit wheelhouse. I saw him light a cigarette, then I swam under the workboat’s counter and lost sight of him. The cardinal buoy flashed behind and, in its quick light, I saw the workboat’s name painted above my head: Mist-Spinner of Poole.

Christ, but it was cold. The cold was slowing me. My wounded ankles were numb. I’d planned to climb aboard their boat somehow when they were busy with Marianne, but I doubted I would have the strength to make that climb. It sounds easy, climbing aboard a boat, but in a choppy sea it can take an immense effort without a helping hand or a boarding ladder. The workboat’s platform was long and low, an easy enough gunwale to climb, but not when you’re cold and weak.

“Get on board!” Garrard shouted. I guessed Peel was somehow clinging to Marianne’s shrouds, holding her alongside Mist-Spinner and fearful of making the jump between the unevenly moving hulls. “Tie her up first, for Christ’s sake!” Garrard’s temper was clearly at snapping point, but he must have turned on the searchlight to help his companion for I saw its reflection hazed in the fog all around me. “Drop the bloody gun, you fool! Tie her up, then get on board!”

They couldn’t see me. They were blinded by their searchlight, and too intent on trying to lash the two bumping boats together. “Now jump!” I heard Garrard shout from his warm wheelhouse.

I was under Mist-Spinner’s stern. She was bucking up and down and I feared that her transom might crush down on my head. A foot above her waterline was an empty outboard bracket which I tried to hold on to for support. I missed the first time and the hull grazed agonisingly down my left arm. I grabbed again, held it, and gasped for breath.

I had to work fast, but it was hard. Mist-Spinner’s pitching threatened to pull my left arm out of its socket, but I held on while, with my right hand, I untwisted the rope from my waist. It was a heavy piece of old-fashioned manila; really nothing but a discarded piece of junk, but perfect for my purposes. Except my fingers were now so numb that I did not know if I could do what I had planned. I fumbled the rope, almost dropped it once, but finally managed to drape the rope over the outboard bracket. I took a deep breath, kept hold of the rope’s end with my left hand, then ducked under the heaving stern.

I struggled forward, found nothing, took a numbing blew from the dropping hull on my left shoulder, and had to come back up for air. I took another deep breath, ducked again, and kicked my way forward under Mist-Spinner’s stern. The metal rudder scraped against my bruised and bleeding shoulder. It was black here, black and freezing and airless and frightening. Tons of thumping boat were rising and falling above me. I felt forward with my right hand and found what I wanted. A three-bladed propeller mounted amidships. Which meant just a single engine driving just this single prop. The engine was still in neutral and its throbbing seemed to fill the claustrophobic darkness with menace.

I dragged the rope behind me. I was holding on to the propeller which was vibrating with the rhythm of the idling motor. If Garrard put the boat into gear now I’d lose my hand.

I forced the rope into the narrow space between the propeller and the rudder. I was desperate for air, but I needed to fasten the rope first. I looped it over the upright blade, hitched it round once more, then dragged myself back and bobbed up to the surface where I gulped air into my lungs.

“He’s not here.” That was Peel’s voice. I was gasping for breath, sure I would be heard, but they were too intent on their own concerns.

“Of course he’s there!” Garrard snarled.

“He’s bloody not.”

“Then look for the damned money!”

I ducked down again, went forward, and this time, because I knew where the propeller was, I had more time to work. I had time, but fear and cold were making me clumsy. I remembered some old rules for bad moments at sea; don’t hurry and do one thing at a time. I might be freezing and terrified, but all I had to do was work the thick rope round and round Mist-Spinner’s propeller blades. Barnacles on her hull scraped my back bloody as I stuffed handfuls of the heavy manila into the blade gaps. I finished the job by putting two turns of the rope about the rudder’s stock, then, my lungs bursting with pain, I pushed myself back and upwards. Christ, I thought as I broke water, I must give up smoking.

“The money’s here, but he must have fallen off and drowned,” Peel shouted from Marianne.

“I don’t give a damn where he is,” Garrard said. “Just get back here!”

I was gripping the outboard bracket at Mist-Spinner’s stern. My lungs hurt, my back was stinging, and I was cold, but I knew I must push myself away from the hull before Garrard put his engine into gear. I knew he would probably use reverse gear to back away from Marianne and, if I had done a proper job, Mist-Spinner wouldn’t move, but I still didn’t want to risk the rope shredding, the propeller biting, and me being driven under her hull.

“Put it down and shut up,” Garrard shouted from above me, “and untie that boat! Hurry!”

I had already paddled three or four yards clear of Mist-Spinner’s stern. I heard Peel shout that the yacht was free and I saw Garrard glance behind, as if he was reversing a truck, then he pulled the gear lever back and I heard the motor roar.

Then stop dead.

It just stopped. The gearing had transferred the engine’s power to the shaft, but the propeller was held fast by the rope I had jammed about the blades, and the sudden resistance stopped the motor with a brutal abruptness. There was a second’s silence, then Garrard swore, put the gear lever into neutral, and turned the starting key. The engine backfired, then settled into life. A billow of black smoke drifted over me. Garrard pulled the lever back and again the motor was jarred dead.

“Fucking thing’s broke!” Peel offered helpfully.

Garrard cursed the engine and started it again. He left it in neutral while it settled into a steady rhythm. I had swum back to the stern and was once again holding on to the outboard bracket. I could see Marianne drifting away as Garrard raced the Mist-Spinner’s engine, achieving nothing except a cloud of burnt oil that added to the fog. Then, when the engine was racing, he shoved it into gear.

It stopped dead.

“Christ Al-bloody-mighty,” Garrard swore viciously.

I was praying he would not try to jar the motor into gear again, for, each time he did so, he put a killing strain on the engine. If he persisted, time and again, in forcing its brute power against the jammed propeller then he could shear the crankshaft. Then all of us would be stranded on this foggy lee shore. I glanced behind to see we had drifted a good two hundred yards from the cardinal buoy. Its light was again hazed by fog. I knew we could not be far from the rocks of Les Trois Grunes. I also knew the tide set was swinging and weakening, and, though the tide should take us south of the hazard, the wind was a counterforce that might just be driving us on to the danger. A seaman would have realised the danger, but Garrard and Peel were no seamen.

I heard the engine cover being lifted.

“All right, Mr Garrard!” Peel shouted.

The engine started. In neutral, without the obstructed propeller, it ran sweetly.

“Sounds all right,” Peel said hopefully.

Garrard rammed it into gear.

The engine stopped dead.

Garrard let loose a string of curses. They were amateurs, their engine was broken, and they didn’t know what to do. A seaman would have realised there was an outboard bracket on Mist-Spinner’s stern for just such emergencies and swum to retrieve Marianne so that her engine could be utilised, but Garrard and Peel didn’t think of that. They were already in the spiral of self-feeding panic that causes most disasters at sea: one apparently small thing goes wrong, then another, and slowly, inexorably, the tragedies mount up. On land neither man would have been so prey to fear, but out here the unfamiliar cold and dark and sea-danger had unbalanced their susceptibilities.

They were drifting in the night. They didn’t know it, but they were drifting towards Les Trois Grunes. I’d only seen those rocks once in my life, and then from a safe distance, but I well remembered the broken and turbulent water surrounding them.

I clung on to Mist-Spinner, shivering and weakening, waiting to add to their panic.

“It’s the shaft,” Garrard’s voice sounded very close above me, and I guessed he must have been leaning over the engine. “Go and take a look,” he said at last.

“I don’t know about engines.”

“I’m not talking about the engine, you fool! The engine works, doesn’t it? I’m talking about the bloody propeller.” Garrard had at last worked out what might be wrong. “Lean over the back, and tell me what you can see.”

“He might be there!” Peel, at least, had not forgotten the mystery of my absence.

Garrard swore. I pulled myself round Mist-Spinner’s counter so that I would be hidden when Peel leaned over the stern. I held on to a rubbing strake and prayed that the cold would not sap my last reserves of strength.

Then, despite the cold, I almost screamed in fear.

A gun fired. The flash of it was blinding and the sound of it deafening. Garrard had gone to the stern and blasted a shotgun into the water. If I had not moved round the counter, I would have taken that cartridge clean in the skull. Garrard fired again. “He’s not there now, Peel.” I heard the heavy gun drop on to the deck. “So bloody look while I try again.”

I was shivering with fear and cold, but made myself edge to the very corner of the stern. Peel was very close to me, but he wouldn’t have seen me if I’d been waving at him; his eyes were so light-blinded. “Give it a go!” he shouted.

Garrard started the engine, put it in gear, and it stopped. I shivered and said a small prayer of thanks that the crankshaft had not broken. “Well?” Garrard asked. I don’t know what they expected to see; they were just groping in the frightening dark searching for any straw to clutch.

“I can’t see nothing!” Peel shouted.

“Then lean over properly, you bastard!”

Peel leaned over. There was a single lifting derrick at Mist-Spinner’s stern, put there for hauling pots, and he held on to it as he craned far out over the transom. “Go on, then!”

Garrard started the engine again, Peel leaned out to look down into the blackness, and I pulled myself up on the outboard bracket. As I pulled, Mist-Spinner’s hull dropped on a wave so that I shot up from the black sea, shedding water, like a drowned man coming to life. Peel could not even call out before my cold hands had gripped the collar of his coat. I fell back, pulling. He was a huge man, far heavier than I, but terror and shock were on my side. He was already leaning outwards, and now I dragged him down. He lost his grip on the derrick, opened his mouth to shout, then hit the water. The motor roared, surrounding us with noise and smoke, then abruptly died as Garrard pushed it into gear. I let go of Peel and twisted desperately away so that he could not grab hold of me.

Garrard, looking from the lit wheelhouse into the foggy darkness, did not know what had happened. He shouted for Peel, who was splashing and spluttering two yards from Mist-Spinner’s stern. “Help!” Peel finally shouted, then spluttered as he went under again. I was working my way forward along the hull. I was cold and weak, but desperation was giving me a last surge of warming adrenalin.

“You fucking idiot!” Garrard twisted off the helmsman’s chair and ran aft.

“It was him!” Peel shouted; then, more urgently and pathetically, “I can’t swim!”

Garrard seized a lifebelt and hurled it towards his partner. I grabbed the gunwale, said a prayer, and pulled.

I had worked my way forward so that I was close to the open after-end of the wheelhouse. The freeboard was low here to give men room to work crab pots or long-lines. I grabbed and heaved, trusting that Garrard would still be confused by the panic.

He saw me as I rolled my right leg up to the gunwale. For a second he didn’t quite believe what he saw, then he ran towards me to kick me off the gunwale. He would have finished me there and then, but Les Trois Grunes saved me. We had been taken to where the sea bed rose to undercut the waves. The swell was breaking and lurching and Mist-Spinner suddenly heaved up to one such broken sea. Garrard staggered desperately away and almost went overboard, only steadying himself at the last moment with a despairing lunge for the derrick. The delay let me roll over the gunwale on to the deck. I needed a weapon, any weapon, and I saw an old rope fender by my hand so I picked it up and threw it blindly towards him.

Garrard ducked out of its way. The searchlight mounted on the wheelhouse roof was still pointing forward and I could see, in the pearly fog, where Marianne was rolling in water broken white about the shoals. I hadn’t been looking for that danger, but for another weapon. The only thing I could find was an empty plastic fish-box, the kind that are packed with ice and newly caught fish. I snatched it up, turned back, and saw that Garrard had drawn his long-bladed knife. He ignored the discarded shotgun; clearly it was empty and he had no cartridges in the pockets of his tweed jacket.

“Very clever, my lord.” He smiled at me. His confidence, so abraded by the night and the sea, was returning, for now he was in a situation he could master: one man against one man, with death as the finale.

“Very clever,” he said again, then he let go of the derrick and came towards me. I raised the heavy fish-box as a shield. Mist-Spinner heaved up, then thumped down. Garrard lost his balance, and I charged him. I was still cold and weak, but I was used to a pitching deck and he was not. I whirled the heavy box like a club, hoping to slam him overboard, but he dropped to one knee, under my wild swing, and lunged the knife like a poniard. I stepped back just in time, tried to crush him with the box, but a heave of the sea threw him back from my blow. I could hear Peel splashing at the stern. He had the lifebelt now, and it could only be a matter of time before he was back on board. All around us the sea was fretting white, while beneath us the sea bed was rising to shatter the waves into churning chaos.

“Now!” Garrard shouted, at the same time glancing over my shoulder towards the companionway that led to the forward cuddy. I fell for the trick, because I had still not convinced myself that Elizabeth would trust Garrard, and that she might therefore have been sheltering in the tiny cabin. I glanced back for a half-second, realised I’d been fooled, but by the time I looked back Garrard was already moving. He threw himself forward, knife reaching. I swung the fish-box, but he was past my defence and I felt a dull punch on my right side. The boat rocked to port, Garrard staggered, and I hit him hard in the face with the plastic box. The blow jarred him sideways so that he fell on to the open engine hatch. I was hurt. Blood was streaming down my wet shorts and dripping on to the deck. Garrard had fallen heavily across the engine. It was the moment for me to finish him off, but I was too weakened by the cold. All I could do was clumsily swing the plastic box at him. The blow achieved nothing. Garrard rolled off the engine towards the stern and picked himself up. Mist-Spinner was broaching to the waves, jerking and rolling.

Garrard braced himself against the stern gunwale, waiting for a wave to pass. When it did, and Mist-Spinner was momentarily stable, he came forward with short dancing steps, like a boxer approaching cautiously for a final attack. I was only just realising how much the cold sea had weakened me. I was shivering, bleeding, gasping for breath, and I think Garrard knew I was finished. He smiled. “Had enough?”

“Fuck off.” It was a feeble defiance.

He was still braced against the stern, one hand on the derrick, the other holding the knife. He gave the sea rapid glances, waiting for a calm trough of the waves to give himself a moment’s peace during which he could kill me. Peel was clinging to the stern, unable to haul his huge weight over the transom.

“You didn’t kill me before,” I tried to goad Garrard, “and you won’t now.”

He laughed. “We weren’t meant to kill you the first time, just scare the shit out of you.” He edged forward, but a surge of sea water made him stagger back to the derrick’s security.

I wondered if he’d been telling the truth, and that the attempt on my life in Cullen’s yard had been nothing but a scare tactic. “So why kill me now?”

“Why ever not?” He was amusing himself.

“Whatever Elizabeth’s paying you,” I said, “I’ll double.” I was not planning to make any deals, just to kill him, but I wanted to distract him for a few seconds.

Instead I had amused him. “Your sister’s paying me nothing. We’re partners!” He was mocking my ignorance, but behind the mockery I detected an odd tenderness.

“You’re lovers!” I said in astonishment, and understood at last why she trusted him with the money.

“And partners. It was I, after all, who discovered the picture, and it was I who graciously allowed your sister to invest in that discovery.” He glanced astern and I saw a smooth trough approaching behind a steep crest, and I knew that when that smooth water settled the pitching hull he would come for me.

“What do you mean,” I asked, “discovered it? Elizabeth and you stole it!”

He laughed. “Proclaim your innocence to the end, my lord, and much good may it do you.” He looked behind again, judging the wave’s approach, and, while he was looking away from me, I charged. He must have sensed the attack for he looked back quickly, saw me stagger as the wave heaved Mist-Spinner high, then, as her bows dropped, he let go of the derrick and came at me.

He lunged with the knife. I swung the fish-box, but his lunge had been a feint. He danced away, but I had released the box so that it hit him a glancing blow on the hip. Mist-Spinner tilted backwards on the wave’s crest and the violent motion together with my small blow gave me just enough time to twist away and scramble on to the narrow walkway beside the wheelhouse. Garrard followed me, but he wasn’t so nimble about a boat, and his desperate slash at my right thigh missed.

I was defeated and fleeing. I wanted to reach the foredeck from where I would dive overboard and swim after the drifting Marianne which I’d last seen off Mist-Spinner’s bows. I was too cold and weak to defeat Garrard, but I could leave him here, stranded and helpless, while I sailed away to fetch reinforcements. It wasn’t brave, but it was sensible.

Garrard clambered desperately after me. I limped forward. The searchlight was still switched on, aimed blindly forward to where the waves shattered about Les Trois Grunes. Marianne was thirty yards off the port bow and rolling violently in the shoal water. It would be a tough swim, perhaps a killing swim, but better to die in the sea’s cold cleanness than from Garrard’s knife. I took a breath, then, in the fogged beam of the searchlight, I saw the second shotgun. It was Peel’s shotgun; the weapon he must have discarded on the foredeck when he had first boarded Marianne. The gun now lay in Mist-Spinner’s bow scuppers, trapped there by the pulpit bars.

I threw myself at the weapon. A lurch of the sea made me trip on the forehatch rim; I fell, but the boat’s motion slid me on my blood-slicked belly to where the gun waited. A steel cleat ripped at my thigh. Garrard saw the weapon and jumped desperately from the small platform beside the wheelhouse. His knife was raised. Mist-Spinner corkscrewed in a sudden upsurge of the sea, then thumped down into a trough. My cold hands could not grip the weapon and, when the boat lurched to starboard, I almost let the gun fall into the water. I half slid off the deck after it, only saving myself by grabbing the pulpit rail with my left hand. White water seethed and broke under me. Garrard shouted as the deck heaved back up and I imagined his voice was shouting in triumph and I almost screamed because my imagination felt his blade’s deep slash. The gun was precarious in my nerveless right hand. The knife still didn’t strike. The shout had been Garrard’s protest as a roll of the deck jarred him back against the wheelhouse.

I twisted on to my back. Life was counted in fractions of seconds now. If Garrard could reach me, then I would be dead, but if the boat’s violence in the shoals made him clumsy and gave me time, then I would live. I turned to face him and could see nothing except the blinding white brilliance of the searchlight beam. I was still half overboard, clinging to the pulpit with my left hand. I tried to sit up, but an upward surge of the bows drove me down. I could not see Garrard. I was blinded by light, paralysed by weakness, and terrified. Mist-Spinner hammered off the wave crest and a spout of breaking water exploded up beside me.

I was tempted to let myself fall and to strike out for the drifting Marianne. I did not even know if this gun was loaded, let alone cocked, but then a slice of silver light dazzled from the great white blinding flood of the searchlight. It was the knife blade, raised to strike, and beside it was a ghost of a face, mouth open, teeth showing, shouting, then the light was blotted out by Garrard’s body as he hurled himself towards me.

My thumb groped for the gun’s hammers. No time. I was screaming defiance and fear. I barely had time to pull the triggers. My right hand was round the narrow part of the stock, the gun’s butt was against my ribs, and the barrels were pointing somewhere at the shadow above me.

I pulled both triggers. I was still screaming, now in anticipation of the knife’s strike.

The gun had been cocked. The butt drove into my ribs like a kicking horse. Noise filled the chaotic air.

Garrard’s head simply disappeared. Blood fountained in a halo about the searchlight beam. I watched, appalled, the first strong colour of this black night. His knife clattered down to the deck and lodged against my right ankle while his body twitched back as if plucked by strings. It slammed against the sloping wheelhouse windows, then slid down on to the foredeck.

I closed my eyes. I was still half overboard. My ribs hurt. I was cold and shaking. I pulled with my left hand and, slowly, very slowly, I inched myself aboard. White water broke at Mist-Spinner’s stem and drenched the foredeck and, when I opened my eyes, I saw Garrard’s diluted blood flooding the shallow scuppers. I rolled on to my side, safe now inside the pulpit rails and slowly, very slowly, knelt upright. I still clutched the gun.

Garrard’s expensive tweed jacket was soaked in blood. The cloth of the jacket had snagged on a cleat and the motion of the boat was twitching him from side to side in a sick parody of life, but he was dead. I’d blown away his knowing, confident face. All that was left of his head was a butcher’s mess of blood, brains and bone.

I just stared at him as if I expected the headless corpse somehow to stand and come back to the attack. I was shaking. I’d never killed a man before. I’d promised Jennifer to kill this one, but making the promise was one thing, fulfilling it was quite another. Blood gurgled in the scuppers and drained overboard.

“Help!” Peel shouted from the stern.

Very slowly, very stiffly, I picked myself up. I felt weak and sick and cold. Mist-Spinner heaved and fell. I took a huge breath, realised I wasn’t going to vomit, so picked a careful path through the offal on the deck. I edged past the wheelhouse to see Peel clinging to the stern. He’d used the lifebelt’s rope to reach the transom but he was too cold to pull himself aboard. I swivelled the searchlight to dazzle him.

His eyes became huge as I walked down the aft deck. I put the double barrels close to his left eye. “What was the signal you were supposed to send when you’d got the money?”

“Don’t shoot! For Christ’s sake, don’t shoot!” His teeth were chattering.

“What was the signal you were supposed to send when you’d got the money?” My voice was toneless. There had to be such a signal, I knew.

“Fingers,” he said.

I stared at him. Such a banal word. “Fingers?” I said incredulously.

“Honest! Don’t shoot, please!”

“And where were you taking the money?”

“I don’t know.”

I jerked the barrels to cut one of his eyebrows. “Where, Peel, where?”

“It’s on the little box. I can’t work it. I don’t know, mate.” He was sobbing with terror and cold now. “I don’t know. Mr Garrard worked the box, not me.”

The Decca, of course. I pulled the gun’s triggers, and the hammers fell on to the dead chambers. “Get in the boat if you can,” I said, “and if you can’t, drown.”

The boat slammed down into white water. So far as I could remember the rocks at Les Trois Grunes only dried out at the lowest tides, yet that was small consolation. A dip in the long swell could easily drop us on to one of the rock pinnacles and rip the bottom out of Mist-Spinner, so my first task was to clear Mist-Spinner away from the hazard, and only then look for the clever mind that had spun me through this electronic maze. The night wasn’t over yet, and maybe the killing wasn’t done, but at least I had evened the game.

If Garrard had known boats, he would still have been alive and I would have been dead, for Mist-Spinner had a prop plate. Most working boats have such a plate, put there against the eventuality of drifting across their towed lines. Because no fisherman wants to go overboard to clear a fouled prop, just aft of the stern-box they put a bolted plate which, lifted, gives access to the propeller.

I found some tools in the wheelhouse. It needed all my strength on the big wrench to shift the bolts. One of the old rusted bolts sheared, but the others came free and I swung the plate aside to reveal the small black well of cold water. I could have fetched Garrard’s knife from the foredeck, but I didn’t fancy the sight of his corpse, so instead I rummaged through the wheelhouse cave-lockers and found an old gutting knife. I reached down into the cold water and cut the rope free from the propeller blades. It took less than five minutes.

Peel whimpered at the stern, alternately calling for help and cursing. Once or twice he tried to climb aboard, but the cold had sapped his huge strength. I ignored him as I bolted the prop plate home and laid the deck planks back into place. Then I picked up Garrard’s discarded shotgun and tossed it overboard.

“Help. Please!” Peel whimpered.

I unshackled the pulley from the lifting derrick. “Hold on to that,” I told him.

He grasped the pulley’s hook with his right hand. I took the tackle’s strain, inching him up the transom. Mist-Spinner was thumping and lurching in the broken water. I couldn’t see any of the hidden rocks, but I knew where they were because their presence was betrayed by a swirling turmoil of water not far from the port bow. The water seemed to be sucked down towards the rock pinnacles, then to shatter upwards in a white misting spray. “Come on, you bastard!” I shouted at Peel, urging him to use some of his great strength to help himself. He must have sensed the danger, for he gave a great heave just as a surge of the swell tipped up the stern so that he fell, gasping and exhausted, into the boat.

I could hear the suck and rebound of the water about the rocks. We were close to the rock pinnacles, too close, and the suction of the white water was drawing us closer. I staggered forward, started the engine, and pushed the gear lever forward. For a second the engine faltered and I thought for a terrible second that I hadn’t cleared the propeller blades properly and that we would be drawn crashingly down into the rocks. I rammed the throttle forward, prayed, and somehow the engine recovered. The rocks were perilously close now, just off the port beam. We tipped towards them and I thought we were doomed to slide sideways down the smooth face of the indrawn water to hammer our gunwales on the black rock. I gave Mist-Spinner full rudder and raced the engine. A wave shattered to port, spewing water high over Mist-Spinner’s aerials. The propeller seemed to be spinning uselessly in the broken water, I felt a sideways lurch, then the blades bit the sea and the boat began to fight her way free. A rebound of water shoved us on our way. I spun the wheel amidships to lessen the resistance to the propeller’s thrust and, inch by inch, then foot by foot, Mist-Spinner gained speed. I turned her to starboard again, and this time there was no resistance and she went sweetly away towards safety. I said a prayer of thanks, pulled back the throttle, then turned to watch the broken sea recede.

Peel had not moved. Perhaps he had been too scared to move, or perhaps he had been too weakened by his long immersion. He just watched me. Beyond him was the rock-shattered swell, and beyond that, somehow safe in the turmoil, was Marianne. She had drifted north of the rising pinnacle. She was pitching and rolling, and I supposed she would drift onwards to be tumbled ashore on a French beach. Then the fog and the night hid her from me and I turned Mist-Spinner westwards.

I’d found four spare shotgun cartridges when I’d searched for the knife to free Mist-Spinner’s propellers. Now I took them from the cave-locker and let Peel watch me as I loaded the shotgun. He didn’t move, not even when I put the gun down while I checked the fuel. She had two extra tanks in side-lockers, plenty enough for whatever else this night might bring.

Peel watched me go back to the wheelhouse. “Where’s Mr Garrard?” he asked nervously.

“On the foredeck. He hasn’t got a head any more. If you move, you won’t have one either.” I lifted the shotgun on to my lap as I accelerated Mist-Spinner into the shredding fog. I saw the flash of the cardinal buoy, went past it, and only then did I let Mist-Spinner drift.

Because it was time to find my way out of the electronic maze.

The Decca had two waypoints only. We were already at the first so the mystery’s end must lie at the second. I summoned that second waypoint to the screen. It lay at fifty degrees, twelve minutes and forty seconds of arc north, by zero three degrees, forty-six minutes and sixty seconds of arc west. It was 87.2 miles away at a course of 311. So very precise, I thought, so very well planned.

“How were you supposed to kill me, Peel?” I didn’t turn round to ask the question. That wasn’t insouciance or bravery because I could see his reflection in the windscreen and he wasn’t moving.

He did not answer.

“How were you supposed to kill me, Peel?” I asked again.

He still did not answer so I whipped round on the helmsman’s chair and fired the right barrel two feet above his head. The pellets probably grazed his bald head, for he whimpered.

“How were you supposed to kill me, Peel?”

“We was just supposed to drown you,” he almost whispered in reply, “then sink the little boat. To make it look like you’d drowned and the money had sunk.”

“To make it look as if I’d stolen the money? As well as the painting?”

“Yes, guv.”

“Thank you, Peel,” I said very politely, then turned away from him. I found some old stained charts in a drawer, but I. didn’t really need them. I knew where fifty twelve zero three forty-six was. I could probably have got there blindfold, but I spread a passage chart out all the same, then reloaded the gun’s right barrel. “Did you turn the gas on in my boat, Peel?” I asked it very casually.

“No, guv, honest.”

“Did Mr Garrard?”

“No.” In the glass I could see he was shivering. A big shivering musclebound man. “Honest,” he added pathetically. He was trying to help me now.

I turned again and fired. The gun hammered at the night and Peel cowered and shivered.

I lowered the gun so that it was pointing into his face. “Did you or Mr Garrard turn the gas on in my boat, Peel?”

“No, guv, we didn’t. As God is my witness, we didn’t. I don’t know nothing about any gas! We’ve been in France, Mr Garrard and me, we ain’t been anywhere near your boat! Not since that night he tipped it over, and he wasn’t even supposed to do that! We weren’t even supposed to kill you that time, guv. We was only scaring you!” He was staring at me with doggish devotion now; I was his master and he would please me. “We was just supposed to scare you! And that first time, Mr Garrard was only going to talk to you, but he found the girl on your boat and he thought you was double-crossing us!” He was staring into the twin black holes of the gun barrels. “Honest, guv.” He paused, evidently remembering who I was. “Honest, my lord.”

I turned away from him. I reloaded the gun with the last cartridge, then laid the weapon down. The VHF was screwed to the wheelhouse roof and tuned to Channel 37; the private marina channel. That was the channel on which my instructions had been relayed, and presumably the channel on which my enemies were even now listening. They had to be close, within thirty or forty miles, which meant France or the islands. I thought France the likeliest answer. Perhaps it was Elizabeth keeping a radio watch, wondering what was happening out in the fog-shrouded waters, and it was time to put my sister out of her apprehensive misery. I unhooked the microphone, held it a little too far from my mouth, and said the single word. “Fingers.” I paused, then repeated the word before hanging up the microphone. There was no acknowledgement, but I’d expected none. This night’s trickery had been designed to keep the radio traffic to a minimum to avoid detection. It had all been so very clever.

And nothing, I thought, was cleverer than the way Elizabeth had used the Decca navigation system, for only a Decca set could have sent two landlubbers safely across the Channel. I doubted whether Garrard could have navigated his way through the shoals, tides and rocks of the Channel Islands, but any fool could read the little arrows on the Decca which told him to go left or right, forwards or backwards. Cleverest of all, I thought, was the selection of Les Trois Grunes; the only cardinal buoy in the islands which offered a straight course back to the second waypoint; a course that went arrow straight between the rocks of the Casquets and the northern reefs of Guernsey. No need to dog-leg, no need to read a chart, all that was required was to follow the little arrows. They had been clever, so very clever. Had Peter, in one of his soberer moments, told Elizabeth about the Decca? Or about the gas bottle she would find on any deep-sea yacht?

I turned. “Right, Peel!” I said enthusiastically. “On your feet and into the cuddy.”

“The what?”

“The cabin. There.” I pointed under the foredeck where a tiny space afforded two bunks and a galley. “Dry yourself off and make us some tea or coffee. No sugar for me, just milk. And hurry!”

He hurried. He saw his partner’s blood smeared across the windscreen as he passed me, but he didn’t react. I must have looked fearsome, half-naked and bloody, so he just ducked down and scuttled gratefully into the cuddy. “Throw me up a towel!” I shouted after him. “And any spare clothes down there.”

I pushed the throttle forward and felt the stern dig down into the water. Eighty-seven miles to go, then the last confrontation. And all for one picture.

Peel made tea. Mist-Spinner thumped happily through the waves. I had dried myself, wrapped the towel about the cut at my waist, then pulled on a thick sweater which Peel had brought up from the cuddy. He was eager for my approval now. “Good cup of tea?” he asked me.

“What you’re going to do now” – I ignored his friendliness – “is clear up the boat. You see that boxlike thing on the front?”

“Yes, guv. My lord.”

“It’s called a forehatch. Open it, then tip Garrard inside.”

“Tip…”

“Do it!”

He did it. Once I’d heard Garrard’s corpse thump down into the cuddy, I gave Peel a bucket and mop. “Now clean off the blood.”

He started work. I pulled the case of bearer bonds on to the chart table and left it there. The engine ran happily. I was making ten knots, a good enough speed.

The fog cleared when we were north of the Casquets. I turned off all the wheelhouse lights so I could see better. We were about to cross the traffic separation zones where the big tankers thumped oblivious in and out of the Atlantic. Mist-Spinner left a clean clear wake on the dark swell. Peel, his job done, crouched at the far side of the wheelhouse and stared in awe at the giant ships.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Peel.”

“Your first name, you idiot.”

“Ronny.”

I rewarded him with a smile. “Got any cigarettes, Ronny?”

“Don’t smoke, guv.”

“Garrard did, didn’t he?”

“He did, yes.”

“Any in his pockets, do you think?”

He stared in horror at me. “You want me to…” Then he realised that was precisely what I wanted him to do, so he opened the cuddy door, took a breath, and climbed down. I could hear his noises of disgust, but after a few minutes he reappeared with a half-empty packet and a lighter.

“Thank you, Ronny.”

He was pathetically grateful for a kind word. I lit a cigarette and dragged the smoke into my lungs.

“Am I in trouble?” Peel asked after a while.

“A lot.” I throttled back to let a bulk carrier slide a half-mile ahead of me. The beam from the Channel Light Vessel was reflected from the long waves to starboard.

“I only did what Mr Garrard told me to do,” Peel pleaded.

“And what else did Mr Garrard tell you, Ronny? Did he tell you about my sister?”

He nodded. “She was going to get the painting when you was dead, see? And then she was going to sell it, and she was going to give Mr Garrard his share of the money. Because he bought it, you see.”

“I don’t see, no.”

“Right back at the beginning. When he met your sister at the races. She asked him to help her find it, and she gave him money for the expenses, like, and he did find it, and he bought a third share off the bloke, because the bloke was short of readies and couldn’t find a proper buyer. It’s too hot, you see. Mr Garrard said you couldn’t sell really famous paintings, only the rubbish.”

I was staring ahead at the empty sea. Peel was worried by my silence, but for a long time I just steered the compass course and ignored him.

“A third share?” I asked him at last.

“That’s right. One for Mr Garrard, one for your sister, though of course she didn’t have to pay anything ’cos she was going to sell it, like, and the other third –”

“Shut up, Ronny.”

“But…”

“I said shut up!” Because I think I’d known ever since I’d keyed Mist-Spinner’s Decca. Only I didn’t believe it.

Dear God, I thought, but let me be wrong. I unhooked the microphone. I knew my enemies would be listening to Channel 37 and they would probably be monitoring Channel 16 as well, but unless they had two radios, each with a dual-watch capability, they could only monitor the two VHF channels. So I switched to 67, the coastguard’s working channel. I broke all the rules: I didn’t identify myself, I just broadcast a cryptic message to the whole English Channel. “This is a message for Inspector Abbott,” I said, “of the Devon and Cornwall Police. Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West. I say again. For Harry Abbott, Devon and Cornwall Police, Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West.”

The coastguards were on to me like a ton of bricks. Who was transmitting? Why? Would I identify myself? I told them to get off the air and pass on the message and to do it fast. “But listen for further transmissions on this channel,” I added before switching the radio off.

The first light was gilding the wavetops. “Fancy another cup of tea, Ronny?”

“Not really, guv.” He didn’t want to go below with the corpse.

“I do.” I really wanted to be alone for a few minutes. “So get it.”

An hour later I saw the English coast. I switched off the Decca because I didn’t need it any longer. I hadn’t really needed it at all, not once I’d known the final rendezvous, because these were my home waters, and here, in the dawn, was my last waypoint.

We came home in a lovely sunrise. It was all so ordinary, all so very ordinary.

The waypoint was outside the harbour, but even a helmsman as inexperienced as Garrard would have been able to negotiate the entrance: just keep well to the left-hand side of the channel, steer due north, and don’t try it in southern gales.

There was a slight swell on the bar, then Mist-Spinner moved smoothly into the outer channel. We turned northeast and I let her idle through the moored yachts. It promised to be a warm day. Some yachts had already left the moorings while others were shaking out their sails. There had been a mist earlier, but it was gone, all but from the deepest creeks where the trees grew so close above the water. Gulls screamed and wheeled, while far to the north a helicopter chopped the air.

I had found some rusting binoculars in a cave-locker and I used them to search the anchorages. I knew what I was looking for, but somehow hoped not to see it.

Then I did. A man and a woman standing together on the flying bridge of a big motor cruiser. They were waving. Behind them, far off beyond the fields, I could see Charlie’s house. The kids would be going off to nursery school and Yvonne would be wondering where Charlie was.

The man and woman waved again. They looked so happy together, like lovers at dream’s fulfilment. Their boat gleamed white in the rising sun; the same sun that was reflecting off Mist-Spinner’s windscreen, so the couple could not see me behind the gold-glossed glass. They only saw their fortune coming, their damned great fortune, brought from the Channel Islands to Salcombe by the magic of a Decca set.

“That’s them,” Peel said helpfully, but I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.

I waited till we were fifty yards from the waiting boat then turned on the VHF and unhooked the microphone. “Harry Abbott?”

He answered immediately. “Is that you, Johnny?”

“I’m off Frogmore Creek, Harry. My boat’s called Mist-Spinner, and the bastards you want are on a gin-palace called Barratry. Come and get them.”

I killed Mist-Spinner’s engine and I ran her gently down the side of my best friend’s boat. Charlie waited on Barratry’s afterdeck, boathook in hand. He hooked our pulpit rail. “Well done!” he called, “I told you it would be easy…” then his voice faded away as I stepped out from under the wheelhouse roof. I carried the shotgun and the attaché case.

“Hello, Charlie,” I said.

Elizabeth screamed. She was still on Barratry’s flying bridge. I looked up at her; then, with the shotgun in my right hand and the money in my left, I stepped over on to Barratry’s stern.

“Johnny!” Charlie was staring in shock, but still trying to smile as if this was a fortuitous meeting of friends.

“Shut up, Charlie,” I said; then, with a foul anger, “for Christ’s sake, shut up!” I looked up at Elizabeth. “Come down!” She climbed slowly down the chrome ladder. She was dressed in a silk bathrobe as though she had only just got up from the big bed in Barratry’s stateroom. I wondered how long they had been lovers. “You bastards,” I said.

Mist-Spinner and Peel drifted slowly away. Charlie and Elizabeth looked at the blood on my legs and at the gun in my hand and said nothing.

“Why?” I asked Charlie.

He didn’t answer, but I suddenly saw how it must seem to him to be the lover of Lordy’s daughter. That was the ultimate revenge, the sweetest revenge of all: when the despised labourer’s son makes the Earl’s daughter moan in his bed.

“And it was you,” I said to Charlie, “who nicked the bloody picture.”

He hesitated, then smiled. “It was just a joke, Johnny.” He waited, but for what, I couldn’t tell. For me to smile? To laugh? “It was only a joke!” he protested. “I did it for you!”

“For me, Charlie?”

“I did it for you! I thought that if your mother sold the painting then you’d never go back to sea! You’d become like your father! You’d have hated that, Johnny, because you never belonged in the big house. You belonged at sea, Johnny, at sea!” He paused again, but I said nothing, and Charlie made an expansive gesture as if to suggest that, with a little humour and understanding, the whole mess could be resolved. “It was only a joke,” he said again, but weakly.

And I wasn’t laughing.

I looked at Elizabeth. It’s hard to see your own sister as beautiful, but she looked beautiful that morning; beautiful and hurt. I think she was ashamed, not about the painting, but because I had found her with Charlie. That was a game she had played in secret, and now I had discovered her. “You knew,” I accused her. “You knew I didn’t steal it! You must have known that as soon as Garrard found Charlie!”

She shrugged, as if to suggest that my innocence was irrelevant.

“So why didn’t you go to the police when Garrard found Charlie?” I asked her.

“Because the money would still have been yours when Mother died, and she didn’t want you to have it. She hated you! You destroyed our family, and I was going to save it!” Elizabeth spat the words at me, and I saw that she, like my mother, hated me, and I saw, too, how much Elizabeth must have enjoyed betraying my closest friendship. She would win it all and leave me nothing, not even a friend.

I looked back to Charlie. It seemed so obvious now, and it must have seemed obvious to Garrard who, seeking the painting and still believing in my guilt, had gone straight to my oldest friend. “Why didn’t you just ransom the painting?” I asked Charlie. “Was it really worth a death?”

“It wasn’t like that, Johnny!” Charlie spoke energetically. He was still hoping that charm and friendship could ease him off this hook. “No one was supposed to die!”

“Garrard died,” I said brutally. “I blew his head away. What’s left of him is in that boat.” I jerked my head towards the drifting Mist-Spinner, but I had been looking at Elizabeth as I spoke and I saw that her face had shown no reaction to my news. “Don’t you care?” I asked her. “You were bedding him, just as you’re bedding Charlie. Did you know that, Charlie, that she was screwing Garrard as well?”

He didn’t reply, but all the charm and energy went from his face as if he’d been struck. He hadn’t known and he was hurt. He thought he had been using Elizabeth, and now, at last, he sensed that she had been using him.

Elizabeth’s face still did not show any emotion. My God, I thought, but how she had used her men. She’d used Garrard to kill, and Charlie to set up the clever rendezvous with the Decca sets. And Charlie, clever Charlie, had coolly gone to Guernsey and sent me off to my death, then spun me through the electronic maze before flying home for this rendezvous. Clever Charlie. I raised the muzzles of the gun.

Charlie shook his head desperately. “I tried to warn you, Johnny! How many times did I warn you? How many times did I tell you to bugger off!” Charlie saw no softening in my face. “For God’s sake, I even tried to stop you yesterday! I didn’t want you to die! That was her and Garrard! I just wanted to scare you back to sea, out of the way! Good God, Johnny, I even repaired your boat! I only wanted the ransom, it was Garrard who said we should kill you to get the price as well! It was all Garrard’s idea, not mine!”

It was a version of the truth, spoken passionately to carry conviction, and perhaps, at the beginning, he alone of the three had not wanted my death. And I thought how scared Elizabeth and Garrard must have been when I returned, when they found Jennifer on Sunflower, and how they must have believed that Charlie was betraying them, and how Charlie must have argued for my life, agreeing only that I should be scared away from England. And perhaps, I thought, he had only wanted the ransom, reckoning that I would share my good fortune with him if the painting was recovered and I sold it. But then I had given the painting away, and Charlie’s friendship for me had been corroded by the acid of lust and greed, and so he had gone aboard Sunflower and filled her bilges with gas. I looked into his eyes, trying to understand. “Tell me about the gas, Charlie.”

He found nothing to say. What was there to say? That he regretted it? I was sure he did, but he regretted the loss of all the money more. I looked past Charlie, far beyond Barratry’s bows, and saw two launches heading towards us. I looked back to my best friend, still trying to understand how he could try to kill me one day and smother me with his generosity the next. I’d slept in his house, but of course I had been safe there for he would never have wanted my death to seem like murder, but rather to have looked like an accident. That way he would have been safe. “My God, Charlie,” I said sadly, “but you are a bastard.” I remembered Jennifer and aimed the barrels at his eyes.

But I couldn’t kill him. He’d saved my life once, singing his way through a ship-killing storm in the Tasman Sea. I stared at him over the gun’s crude sights. “So where’s the painting, Charlie?”

He didn’t answer till I twitched the gun, then he shrugged. “In the cellar, Johnny. Wrapped up and safe.”

“And it’s mine!” Elizabeth almost screamed at me. “Mother left it to me! It’s mine!”

“Damn you,” I said, “damn you both.” Then the first launch bumped alongside, and big efficient men climbed aboard Barratry. I dropped gun and money on the deck, then turned away to face the rising sun.

Friendship. Was anything worth the betrayal of friendship? Except lovers take precedence over friendship, and Charlie had found his Lady and he would kill his friend to make her rich, and himself rich with her. I closed my eyes. Not because I was staring at the sun, but because I had come home, and was crying.