Sea Lord

Part One

I didn’t want to go home. I’d once sworn I’d never go home, yet here I was, plugging across the Western Approaches on a flooding tide in a filthy night.

In seven years I had been home just once. That first return had been a family duty and had turned into a family disaster. I had endured as long as I could; then, overwhelmed by responsibilities and harried by lawyers, I had sailed away. It was then that I had sworn never to return to England.

Now, four years later, I was going home.

And again it was duty which drew me back; family duty.

It certainly wasn’t homesickness, for in seven years of ocean wandering I had never missed England. I tried to persuade myself it was curiosity that took me north into the cold Channel waters, but curiosity needs the provocation of affection or hate, and I felt neither for my family. Yet now, if the message was true, my family wanted my return and so, dutifully, perhaps guiltily, I was going home.

The message had reached me in English Harbour, Antigua. It came from my family’s lawyers who had left the message with my London bank. I’d telexed the bank, hoping some dividends had taken me out of the red, but instead of money the bank had sent me news that my mother was sick and wanted to see me. It was the first time in four years that my mother had noticed my existence or, to be fair, that I had remembered hers. I didn’t want to go, but there was a pathetic appeal in the message and so I slipped my mooring and turned Sunflower’s bows to the eastern sea.

I didn’t hurry home. Indeed, and it might have been my fancy, it seemed to me that Sunflower sailed sluggishly right across the Atlantic. We spent a week becalmed in the horse latitudes and afterwards, when we made the westerlies, she developed a weather-helm I’d never known in her before. For the first time in her life, my boat became a pig to sail and I wondered if this new stubborn waywardness was some reflection of my own reluctance to reach England. Somehow we made it to the Azores, but then, a week out of Horta, a foul toothache erupted in the back of my upper right jaw, and I was tempted to believe that this new pain, like Sunflower’s weather-helm, was a mute protest against the voyage. The toothache got worse as I endured a long beat north before the west winds drove me hard towards the English Channel. I sailed alone.

Just Sunflower and me. Sunflower was a French-built steel-hulled cutter, thirty-eight foot long, with an angular hull that banged in a moderate sea and sounded like a demented field gun in a big one. She was twenty years old that springtime, and showed it. The mainsail on a modern yacht has about as much cloth as a bikini bottom, but Sunflower had a proper mainsail with some guts in it; a big bellying brute of a driver-sail. She had a proper boom too: a real skull-cracking spar instead of a stubby high-tech afterthought. She hadn’t been built with the modern refinements of in-mast reefing or headsail roller reefing; instead she had old-fashioned reef points that needed to be tied down by hand. On a cold wet night that can be a murderous job, but better to have fingers scraped raw and bloody than a mainsail jammed in its slot and threatening a capsize in a rising gale. Her foresails had to be dragged on to the foredeck in their stiff bags, piston-hanked on to their stays, then hauled into the wind’s face. She was never a fast boat, not compared to the gossamer-light multihulled speed-sleds that take all the ocean-sailing records these days, but Sunflower would have sailed you to hell and back, and that’s all a proper seaman should ever want in a yacht.

It was all I ever wanted, for Sunflower was my home. She and I had done a lot of miles. We’d sailed the southern ocean, rounded the Horn, run the Agulhas Current, smelt the African jungle, anchored off Indian coral; and now, because of a message from my family’s lawyers, we were pounding a Western Approaches sea; a short, grey, unfriendly sea that hammered the hull’s angular chines and shredded white into a stinging cold shrapnel that slashed over Sunflower’s gunwales to spatter me in the cockpit.

It was night-time and the wind was rising. It was England’s homecoming wind, a southwesterly, but there was nothing welcoming in this malevolent cold force. At dusk the wind had been force three or four, by midnight it was five and rising, by three in the morning I’d taken in the first reef, and now, an hour before dawn, Sunflower was riding a hard force seven. I’d dropped the main and was running on a working jib alone. That sounds cautious, but I did not shorten sail out of fear, only because I was dog tired. I dared not sleep, for we were near the shipping lanes, and you don’t take risks with the one-hundred-thousand-ton tankers that slam oblivious through the darkness. I’d seen one such supertanker just after midnight, or rather I’d seen the great block of her bridge beneath her steaming lights, but I hadn’t seen the tanker’s hull because the wind was shredding the wavetops into a grey devil-drizzle that danced above the sea. Sunflower and I had been racing the whitecaps then, just spits of light in the darkness, and I’d known the tanker would be ignorant of our presence. She’d passed a half-mile to our south, heading towards Biscay.

The sight of the tanker had jarred me into a new alertness, but the wakefulness didn’t last. Despite the foul pain in my tooth, I dozed. I sat on the port side of the cockpit, one knee crooked over Sunflower’s tiller, and leaned my head against the guardrails. The banging of the sea against the hull was hypnotic. I’d sleep for a few minutes then start awake to stare in sudden, uncomprehending alarm at the compass. Once or twice I rubbed my eyes to help my vision, but mostly succeeded only in grinding dried, accreted and stinging salt into my eyeballs. The pain in my tooth was a throbbing agony, but even that was not sufficient to keep me awake. But I knew I had to stay awake. Sometimes I would stand to let the spray hit me, hoping that its forceful discomfort would keep me alert, but as soon as I sat again the sleep would insidiously steal over me. I was in a half-gale, in short steep seas, in a small boat pitching like a demented rocking-horse, sailing into the world’s most dangerous seaway, with an aching tooth and stinging eyes, and all I could do was sleep. And hallucinate.

I was used to the tired hallucinations of a night sail, yet familiarity did nothing to convince me of their falsehood. The hallucinations are half-dreams of an uncanny reality. That night I distinctly saw the loom of a lighthouse guiding me home and, later, a coastline. If the hallucinations had been of fantastic things, say of women or hot food, then my mind would have dismissed them as apparitions; yet that night’s visions were of the things I most wanted to see – signs of a safe landfall – and so I saw a gentle twilit coast backed with church towers, trees and cliffs, and the coast even had half-obscured leading lights showing the way home. One part of my brain knew that I was seeing an elaborate illusion, but still I would indulge it. It was only when something shattered Sunflower’s rhythm that the mind would sluggishly tear itself away from the comforting fantasy to accept that we were indeed slamming through a shortening sea in a half-gale with no leading lights to guide us home. Those were the moments of wakefulness.

Eventually I stopped fighting the sleep. Somehow my wet clothes so arranged themselves that I had the illusion of comfort, and to move was to bring cold wet cloth against a sore chafed skin. So I stayed still, I dreamed, and Sunflower flew up-channel to where the big ships thumped and the black rocks waited.

And still I did not know why I came home, or what waited for me in England.

I’d fled England four years before. I’d gone home because my brother had died and I had become the new head of the family. They looked to me to solve their problems, but instead I had bought Sunflower, victualled her, then run away to sea. I’d scraped round Ushant against this very same southwesterly wind and had felt an immense liberty unfold before my bows. I had gone, I was safe and I was free. The unwanted responsibilities and my family’s spitting accusations had dropped astern like sea-anchors cut adrift.

I’d never regretted that leaving. I’d stepped on far beaches, sailed into distant nights and made friends with people who knew nothing of my past. To them I was merely John Rossendale, master under God of the good ship Sunflower, and a welcome mechanic, carpenter, welder and rigger. I was anonymous. I was free.

And now I was coming home. Alone.

I hadn’t always sailed alone. When I’d first left England, seven years before, Charlie Barratt had sailed with me. We had three good years together, sailing the southern oceans; then, when my family demanded my return, Charlie had gone with me. We had been in Australia when the news of my brother’s death arrived and we had been forced to sell our boat to raise the money for the air fares. We promised ourselves we’d buy another yacht in England and go back to the Pacific, but Charlie had married instead and that put paid to his dreams of far blue seas. I had struggled with my brother’s legacy for as long as I could; then, in desperation, I bought Sunflower and went back to sea alone. I didn’t sail alone for long. A German girl came aboard at Belize and stayed as far as the Marquesas where she abandoned Sunflower to join a ramshackle commune that shared a vast catamaran skippered by a moody Pole. I’d heard that the catamaran had broken up off the Trobriands, drowning everyone aboard, but the sea lanes are full of such rumours, so perhaps the German girl was still alive. In the Solomons I’d met an Australian who sailed with me one whole year, but she discovered who I was and wanted to marry me and, when I adamantly refused, she jumped ship in California. There had been others. The oceans are littered with hitch-hikers, struggling from one coast to another, bartering rides on battered yachts, and all believing that their freedom from bureaucracy will last for ever. Some of the hitch-hikers drown, some get murdered, some disappear, a lot become whores, and a few, a very few, go home.

Now I was going home, and I didn’t want to. I hallucinated, I slept, and I dreamed of far southern seas.

I was woken sharply in the dawn. It was not the feral grey light that woke me, nor my toothache, but rather because the wind had shifted abruptly to the south and Sunflower went over. It could only have taken a few seconds, a blink of a dream, no more, but the tiller slipped under my knee’s grip, and she broached. For a moment she was speeding along the hissing crest of a wave, then the sea smacked her over, the wavetop broke, and she was falling, tipping, slamming down on to her starboard side. Water poured like Niagara over the port gunwale. For two seconds I was standing in sudden amazement on the far thwart, then I was pitched forward into the maelstrom of white water. Just before my head went under I saw the mast-tip drop into the water, then I was thrashing in sudden panic until the safety line jerked me hard and fast. The wave was still seething round me and breaking high over Sunflower’s hull that was lying flat on the sea. I despaired for a moment, until the inexorable laws of physics began their work and the deep heavy keel began to drag Sunflower upright. No law of physics would save me. I would have to drag my waterlogged weight to the high gunwale and somehow climb back aboard, but then a merciful and freakish backwash of water flung me against a starboard guardrail stanchion. I felt a sharp blow against my ribs, but all I could think of was to cling like grim death to the guardrail as the boat righted. She came up sluggishly at first, then tore herself free of the sea’s grip, and I rolled up with her to haul myself unceremoniously over the rails into the swamped cockpit.

That was the sea’s alarm call. Good morning and welcome to the Channel. I crouched in the swirling cockpit and gasped for breath. The pain in my ribs stabbed at me, but there was no time to worry if anything was broken. The jib was flogging and another steep sea was charging at our beam. I rammed the tiller hard to port and dragged the jib sheet in to catch the wind. Sunflower sluggishly turned her quarter to the waves. Water was still streaming off the foredeck and coachroof, cascading green and grey into the white-flecked, heaving sea.

The drains were emptying the cockpit. I doubted any water had got into the boat. Sunflower’s washboards are of one inch teak and, like the companionway hatch, I keep them bolted shut in dirty weather. I had been lucky. The knockdown had been my own fault, but, thanks to the safety line, I was alive. I gingerly felt my ribs and, though the pain was sharp, nothing seemed to be broken.

I was soaked through after my ducking, but Sunflower was moving again in the broken seas. I lashed the tiller, then stripped myself stark shivering naked. It was springtime, but the Channel air still had a cutting edge and the sea was as cold as an opened grave. I unlocked the companionway, waited until Sunflower had been overtaken by a hissing sea, then clambered over the washboards to drop into the cabin.

I had very few dry clothes left, but I found two pairs of jeans, one pair of socks, and three sweaters. I pulled them all on. They felt warm, but I knew they were full of dry salt crystals which, exposed to even the smallest dampness, would attract the moisture and swell to make me chill and damp again. I scrubbed my hair half dry with a mildewed towel, then wedged myself into the galley and slid the Thermos out of its padded clips. I poured a big mug of tea and, though Sunflower was pitching and corkscrewing, I didn’t spill a drop of the precious hot liquid. Practice in such small things makes for perfection. A tanker could have turned me into scrap steel in the time it took to drink the tea, but I needed something warm inside and I was craving for a pipeful of dry tobacco.

Those creature comforts gained, I went back to the cockpit and disentangled my oilskins from the wet mess on the bottom grating. I grimaced, knowing that the water inside the oilies would soak my new dry clothes, but there was no choice. I kitted up, pulled on drenched boots, then hauled up the mainsail that had three reefs already tied to the boom. Sunflower liked the extra canvas and became steadier. We were on a beam reach, and my boat was sailing the gale’s wrath like a dream. I was wide awake now, my hallucinations had vanished with the dawn, and I was going home.

But why, and to what, I did not know.

I should have sought shelter in Falmouth, or at any of the Cornish ports, but I had a sudden reluctance to exchange my damp clothes for a landfall. The wind, still in the south, was gusting towards gale force and flensing the wavetops into a stinging white mist that obscured the grey sea. The waves were thundering from the southwest, but being crossed by the new wind that filled their troughs with confusion. Sunflower did not mind. She was a tough beast and had taken far worse. She had a steel hull and, over the years, I’d doubled the strength of all her rigging. She’d ridden the edge of a typhoon once, and all that had been broken was some crockery in her galley. Now, in a filthy new day, she sailed up-channel. The daylight was grey, churned with spray, and cold. I was curbing Sunflower, not wanting a following sea to poop her, but, though she was pitching hard, she was in no danger. All that could have killed her now was a bigger ship or my own carelessness.

My first sight of home was a glimpse of the Eddystone lighthouse. It was then I turned for Salcombe. I suppose I’d always known I was going to Salcombe because Charlie lived there. Charlie and I had grown up together, chased our first girls together, got drunk together, were arrested together, then sailed the far seas together. Whatever else waited for me in England, Charlie was there, and his friendship alone made this voyage home worth its while; so, in the hard dawn wind, I turned for Charlie’s home port: Salcombe.

On a chart Salcombe seems like one of the most sheltered havens of England’s south coast, and so it is if you’re safe inside its steep-sided web of flooded river valleys. Many a yacht has waited out Channel storms in Salcombe, and the very harrowing of hell would find it hard to disturb the innermost lakes, but in an onshore wind against a falling tide the entrance to Salcombe is a death-trap. Salcombe means safety, but reaching that safety in a southern gale is suicidal folly. A bar lies athwart the harbour entrance like a hidden barricade. The wind-driven waves are toppled by the sudden ridge on the sea bottom to make a churning turmoil of breaking seas that crash white and are made even steeper and more dangerous when an ebbing tide tries to challenge them. Only a fool chooses Salcombe in a southern gale. Dartmouth, which can be entered in any weather, is just a short distance to the east, and Plymouth, even safer than Dartmouth, is not so far to the west. Torbay, the classic shelter in a southern or westerly gale, is an easy sail up-channel, but I chose Salcombe.

Perhaps, I thought, if I was not meant to be coming home, then the bar at the estuary’s mouth would tell me. I would tempt the devil and, if I lost, Sunflower and I would die on the bar, rolled and swamped and broken up within the very smell of home. That reasoning was the stupid bravado of tiredness, made worse by a lethal mix of self-pity and arrogance. The self-pity came from my reluctance to see my family again, the arrogance from a determination to show off my seamanship as I came home.

Sunflower’s boom was hard out on the port side as we ran towards Bolt Head. We were crossing the seas now, sliding diagonally over their eastwards flow. One moment we would be on the crest of a wave, triumphant and flying, then we would plunge deeper and deeper into the watery darkness and I would see the next wave threatening astern, its top sleeked and whipping with the wind’s force. The glassy dark heart of death would rear up Sunflower’s port quarter and, just as I thought she would never rise again, so we would be heaved up to the next crest from where I would stare ahead for a sight of land. The tiredness was gone, I did not even care that I was cold and wet. Now I was elated by the thrill of daring a sea to do its worst.

Yet the gale-driven sea was not our enemy. Our enemy was the steep rise of the bar, silent and hidden, beneath Salcombe’s entrance. Charlie and I had once watched a yacht crash down into a wave trough on Salcombe’s bar. The boat had come up again, but in the trough her keel had struck bottom and the compression of the blow had smashed every bulkhead inside her hull and fractured the skull of a man sitting at her chart table. Even a lifeboat had been lost on Salcombe’s bar, and lifeboats make Sunflower look fragile. Scores of widows cursed Salcombe’s bar, and now we were racing towards it, driven by a southern gale and madness.

There was a moment, early in the afternoon, when I knew I could turn east and still make Prawle Point to reach Dartmouth in safety. For a second I hesitated, tempted by sanity, then the greater temptation of tweaking the devil’s tail took over. I was a Rossendale, the last of the line, and I would come home with all the savage flair of that unpleasant family’s blood.

Bolt Head came up like a grey threat on the port bow. The land was blurred and soaking, the wind had a noise like an eldritch death shriek, and the sea was harrying me on to the lee shore. The waves were huge, steep and made tumultuous by the land’s proximity. At the top of each breaking crest I stared forward and I knew what I would see and, when I saw it, the fear came. I saw whiteness. It’s one thing to imagine a danger, but quite another to see its true malevolence, and to realise that the imagination does not have sufficient horror to match reality. The bar was frantic with shattering seas. I had a glimpse of breaking wavetops, spuming a mist of white, and beneath that mist the weight of water would be a churning maelstrom. Men ashore would have seen my sails by now. They would be knowledgeable men, and they would damn me for a fool and pray that my boat lived despite my foolishness. Doubtless the inshore lifeboat would already have been called, but only to pluck my corpse from the incoming waves.

I kept to the western side of the entrance. The water’s deeper there, though the Bass Rock is waiting just in case the bar fails to kill. I saw an explosion of white spew up as a wave broke into fragments on the Little Mew Stone, then Sunflower dipped her bows as a wave lifted her stern, but this time, instead of riding up over the wave’s crest, the great steel hull began to plane on the tons of rolling water. Now we were no different to the surfers of the Pacific. We were no longer a boat, but a scrap of material being carried aloft on a wave’s violence to where the bar made a white turmoil of the sea. We were also just where I wanted to be: hard under the western cliffs. I was braced in the cockpit with the tiller between my thighs and with both hands on the mainsheet for I knew what was about to happen.

Sunflower’s hard-reefed mainsail was still out to port. At any second the wind would bounce and curl off the cliffs and she would gybe. I should have furled the main and let the small jib and the big sea take us in, but to furl the main would have been to show cowardice. Let the bar do its worst. I’d chosen to play the sea’s game, and I wouldn’t give in.

The leech of the mainsail shivered. It wasn’t much, just a tiny flicker of the heavy grey material, but it was the sign I had been waiting for and, before the cliff-turned wind could dismast me, I hauled the sheet in with both hands. I braced the tiller hard, knowing how Sunflower would be knocked to port when the gybe came.

It came.

Unless you’re pointing dead into the wind and happy to go nowhere, the sails of a boat are always stretched either to port or starboard. There are two ways to bring them across from one side to the other. One, to tack, is to turn the boat into the wind, so that the wind slides decorously across the bows and the sails, like flags streaming from flagpoles, obediently change their direction. The other way, to gybe, is to turn the boat in front of the wind. Then it’s as if the wind has sneaked fast round the flagpole and the flag is crushed up against the pole before it smacks out in its new flight. Gybing is dangerous and violent. Instead of a flag I was letting a gale rip round behind a heavy sail that was lashed to a skull-crushing wooden boom. The weight of all that gear hammering across the wind’s eye could easily tear my shrouds free of their chain-plates and pluck the mast clean out at its root. Except that I had just enough of the mainsheet gathered in to act as a spring and, as the great sail and boom slammed across, I used the sheet to soak its force and tame its threat. I skinned my right palm bloody doing it, but it was a proper job. That’s what Charlie would have called it. ‘A proper job’ was Charlie’s biggest approbation. He offered it rarely, and only to practical achievements like a well-scarfed piece of wood or a neatly welded seam, or for a maniacal gybe off the bar at Salcombe.

Not that I had time to admire my own manoeuvre. We had survived the gybe, but as soon as the sail settled I felt Sunflower’s bows drop and I knew the bar was straight beneath the boat’s stem. I whooped a crazy challenge. I was staring down into the trough where mud and sand discoloured the water. Scummy strings of foam whipped across that dull patch. I was running into the killing trough and, for a few seconds, the howl of the wind was muted by the towering wave behind me. I could only hear the seething of the water. This sea had perhaps a hundred yards left in which to kill me, no more, but they were the worst hundred yards. If I broached now then nothing would save me because Sunflower would be turned over, her mast would snap, and the sea would pounce on us to tear man and hull into dented steel and bloody scraps. I was holding the tiller with both hands, muscles rigid, as the crest behind shattered to cascade like spilt ice down the wave’s dark face. Christ, I thought, but why had I done this?

The jib was flogging, shielded by the main. We were veering to port, I dragged her back. The wave that was carrying us collapsed, its underpinning sheared off by the rising bar, and Sunflower was suddenly nothing but a scrap of steel in the heart of a broken tidal wave. Water bounced halfway up her mast. A new wave reared behind and Sunflower’s keel began to drop, crashing down through an incoherent sea towards the hidden land that could fracture her steel hull as though it was an egg. Down we went, and still down, and behind me the new wave curled at its top and I saw the glassy black beneath the fractured white, and still we dropped and I saw that I would be crushed between the bar and the following wave, but then Sunflower, good Sunflower, began to rise. She fought her death inch by damned inch. The peak of the reefed sail was drawing, forcing her on. She had way on her still and she was cutting her steel through the water. She would not give up, but still that toppling wave threatened to poop us and I knew it could kill with a blow as easily as it could drown us.

The wave broke. The dark black glossy heart of the wave was blown apart as if by dynamite. It turned white as it tumbled and as it broke into a million fragments. It fell, and it would have killed me, except that it fell a foot behind Sunflower’s transom and the force of the sea’s fall was bounced up from the bar to lift and drive her on. On across the bar’s broken water, on past the Wolf Rock and the Bass Rock, and then, just short of the Poundstone, I gybed her again, and I knew I was showing off to the people who were standing ashore to watch my death. I was proving that I had mastered one thing and, in demonstration of that mastery, I had come home in style. So I gybed Sunflower again, turned her, and suddenly we were sailing into calmer waters as Limebury Point stole the wind’s brute force. I looked back. The bar was a mass of churning white, as bad as I’d ever seen it, but Sunflower had come through.

And I, in a proper job, had come home.

Charlie wasn’t at home. His wife, who had grudgingly taken my reverse-charge call, said he was in Hertfordshire on business. I could tell she was not pleased that I had returned. She believed I was a rakehell who might yet take her husband back to the sea. “When will he be back, Yvonne?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was guarded. Somewhere in the background a child whined.

“Tell him I called, and tell him I’m moored in Salcombe.” Yvonne promised she would pass on the news, though I doubted if she would be in any hurry. I wondered why it was that Charlie, my best, closest, and oldest friend, should marry someone who so disliked me.

I said goodbye; then, ignoring the impatient people who waited to use the public phone, I tried to reverse the charges to my mother’s house. There was no answer, so I had the operator call my twin sister in Gloucestershire. Elizabeth was not at home either, but her husband grudgingly agreed to accept the charges. He had once been a friend of mine, but he had chosen his wife’s side in our family battle. “Do you think we’re made of money?” was his greeting.

I didn’t bother to explain that I’d only just landed in England and had no small change other than American, Antiguan and Portuguese coins. “Is Elizabeth there?” I asked instead.

“No she’s not.” He sounded drunk.

“I tried to reach Mother.”

“She’s in hospital.”

I waited to see if he’d offer more information. He didn’t. “Which hospital?” I asked.

“South Devon General. They took her in last week. She’s in a private ward, which we’re paying for.”

The inference was that I should help with the cost, but I ignored the hint. “What’s the ward called?” I asked instead.

“The Edith Cavell Ward. It’s on the third floor.”

“Do you know what the visiting hours are?”

“I am not an information service for the National Health Service,” he said irritably; then, relenting, “you can go any time. They don’t seem to mind. Bloody silly, I call it. If I was running a hospital I wouldn’t want visitors traipsing about at all hours of the day or night, but I suppose they know their own business.”

“Perhaps I’ll see Elizabeth there?”

“I don’t know where she is.” There was a long pause as though he was about to add some comment, but then, without another word, he put down the receiver.

There was no one else to telephone. I knew I couldn’t reach my younger sister, who was the only person beside Charlie who might be glad to hear I had come home, so instead I rowed myself back to Sunflower and dug out a tin of baked beans which I mashed with a can of stew and heated over the galley stove. The pain in my tooth had miraculously subsided, which was a blessing as I’d run out of both aspirins and Irish whiskey.

It had begun to rain hard. The water drummed on Sunflower’s coachroof and gurgled down her scuppers. The wind howled above the moorings to slap halliards against noisy masts. I spooned down my meal and thought how I might even now be six seas away and running free.

But had come home instead.

The toothache had entirely disappeared by morning. For the first time in weeks I woke up without pain, except for the bruise on my ribs where I’d been thrown against the stanchion, but that kind of pain was an occupational hazard, and therefore to be ignored. Yet the tooth, astonishingly, felt fine. I bit down hard on it and did not even feel a twinge. The spontaneous cure and a good night’s sleep combined to fill me with optimism.

The bus journey soon dissipated that happy mood.

It wasn’t the Devon countryside which, though damp, looked soft and welcoming. Rather it was my fellow passengers. The bus was filled with young mothers and their squalling children. The sound of screaming babies is blessedly absent at sea and, suddenly exposed to it, I felt as if I was listening to nails scratching on slate. I stared through a misted window at the cars slopping through puddles and wondered how Charlie endured being a father.

The bus dropped me a mile from the hospital. I could have waited for another bus which would have taken me up the hill, but the thought of more screaming infants persuaded me to walk. I was wearing my heavy oilskin jacket, so only my jeans got soaked with rain. The oily was smeared with grease and dirt, but it was the only coat or jacket I possessed so it had to serve as formal wear. I climbed through the pelting rain and cut across the hospital’s waterlogged lawns. The big entrance hall was loud with more squalling children. I ignored the lifts, climbed three flights of stairs, and wondered just why I had sailed for six weeks across three and a half thousand nautical miles.

I had been half expecting and half dreading that my sister Elizabeth would be visiting the hospital. She was not. Except for the patients, the Edith Cavell ward was empty. On the wall opposite the ward’s two beds a silent television was showing a frenetic children’s cartoon. An elderly woman lay in the nearest bed with a pair of earphones over her grey hair. She eyed my sodden jeans and sneakers with distaste, and her face betrayed relief that I had not come to visit her. “She’s asleep,” she said reprovingly, at the same time jerking her head towards the second bed which was still surrounded by drawn curtains.

I crossed the rubber-tiled floor and gently pulled back the pale curtains.

My mother was sleeping.

At first I did not recognise her. In the last four years her gold hair had turned a dirty grey. Even in sleep she looked exhausted. She lay, wan and emaciated, with her grey hair straggling untidily from her pale forehead. She had always been a woman of great pride, foully excessive pride, but now she was reduced to this drawn creature. Her great beauty was gone, vanished like a dream. Her breath rasped in her throat. Every heave of her lungs was an effort. Once she had worn a king’s ransom of diamonds, but now she struggled for life. She was only fifty-nine, but looked at least a decade older.

“She had a bad night,” the grey-haired woman volunteered.

I said nothing.

The woman took off her earphones. “She won’t have the oxygen tent, you see. Stupid, I call it. I’ve told her, I have. I told her she should listen to the doctors, but she won’t take a blind bit of notice. She says she’s got to smoke. Smoke! That’s what’s killing her, but she won’t listen. She says she can’t smoke if she’s in an oxygen tent. Stupid, I call it.”

I dropped the curtain behind me which had the happy effect of shutting the woman up. The sound of my mother’s breathing was horrid.

A cylinder of oxygen stood by her bed. A packet of cigarettes and her gold lighter lay close to an oxygen mask. I picked up the mask and heard the hiss of escaping gas. I turned off the tap, then lay the mask back on the thin blanket. I had moved very gently, but something must have disturbed my mother for her eyes opened and she stared up at me. At first there was no recognition in her face – the sun had bleached my pale hair almost white and turned my face the colour of old varnish – but then, with a palpable start, realisation came to her eyes. I was her living son, and I had come home.

“Hello, Mother,” I said.

She said nothing. Instead she groped for her cigarettes, but, before she could find them, a dreadful cough convulsed her body. It was a foul, grating and harsh cough, as rough as broken glass being crushed by stone. It came from deep in her chest and it would not stop. I turned on the oxygen and put the mask over her face. Somehow she fought the cough to draw a desperate breath and, as if she was fearful that I would take the mask away, she clamped her right hand over mine. Her crooked thin fingers were like claws. It was the first time she had touched me in fourteen years. I had been twenty that last time, and she had briefly embraced me beside the grave into which my father was being lowered. Since then we had never touched, not till now as she fought for life. She put her hand on mine and gripped so tight that it felt like a scaly bird’s claw clinging to refuge. Her eyes were closed again. Her palm was warm on the back of my hand, her fingers were contracting, and her nails were digging into my skin.

Then, very slowly, her breathing became easier. I could feel the relief course through her body as her grip relaxed. She had left two flecks of blood where her nails had driven into my fingers. She opened her eyes and stared at me, then, almost irritably, she twitched her hand as if to say that I should take the mask away.

Slowly, not certain if that was what she really wanted, I lifted the oxygen mask away. The paroxysm of coughing had left flecks of blood on my mother’s lips, while the plump rubber mask had printed a red mark on her white cheeks. Her eyes, against her skin’s chalky paleness, seemed very dark and glinting as she stared up at me.

“Hello, Mother,” I said again. She tried to say something in reply, but the effort threatened to turn into another racking cough. “It’s all right,” I said soothingly, “you don’t have to speak.” I moved the oxygen mask towards her mouth, but she shook her head, then closed her eyes as though she was concentrating on preventing another coughing fit. It took an immense effort of will, but she succeeded and, instead of coughing again, she opened her eyes and looked straight up into my face.

“You bastard,” she said.

Then she began to cough again, and no amount of oxygen could help this time and, though I pressed the emergency call button, and though nurses and doctors thrust me aside to bring her relief, there was nothing anyone could do. Within twenty minutes of my arrival at her bedside, my mother was dead.

When it was all over a young doctor joined me in the corridor. He wanted to know if I was a relative and, though I said I was, I did not say I was the dead woman’s son. “I’m just a distant relation,” I said instead.

“She smoked too much,” the doctor said hopelessly.

“I know.” I guiltily fingered the pipe in my oilskin pocket. I kept meaning to give up smoking. I’d succeeded once, but only because I’d run out of tobacco a thousand miles out of Auckland. After three weeks I’d been experimenting with sun-dried seaweed which tasted foul, but was better than abstinence. I dragged my attention back to the doctor.

“She was very keen to see her son.” The doctor peered dubiously at my gaudy oilskin jacket. “He’s supposed to be at sea, isn’t he?”

“I think so,” I said unhelpfully.

The doctor looked like a man who’d just sailed through a force twelve storm, but he was gallantly fighting the weariness in an effort to be kind. “She received the last rites yesterday,” he told me, “and it seemed to calm her.”

“I’m sure it did.”

The doctor stifled a yawn. “Would you like to meet the hospital chaplain? Sometimes, after a death, it can be helpful.”

“I wasn’t that close a relative,” I said defensively.

“So I suppose we should telephone the eldest daughter about the arrangements?”

“That would be best,” I said, “much the best.” Two men pushed a trolley into the ward. I didn’t want to see the shrouded body wheeled away, so I walked back to the Devon rain.

You’re supposed to feel something, I thought. You’re not supposed to see your mother die and feel nothing. At the very least you’re supposed to weep. My God, but a mother’s flawed love and a son’s reluctant duty should add up to one miserable tear, but I could find no appropriate response. I could feel neither joy nor sorrow nor surprise nor anything. All I felt was an irritation for a wasted trip, and an aggravation that I was forced to wait two hours in the rain for a bus back to Salcombe.

Once back at the harbour I phoned Charlie’s house, but there was no answer. So I rowed myself out to Sunflower and spliced a new rope-tail on to the staysail’s wire halliard.

I’d come home and I’d felt nothing. Not even a tear.

Five days later, at ten o’clock in the morning, the family assembled at Stowey.

Stowey was the family home. Pevsner, in one of his books, called it ‘perhaps the finest late mediaeval dwelling house in England’, which really meant that the family had been too poor to trick it out with eighteenth-century gallimaufry or nineteenth-century gingerbread. Yet, in all truth, Stowey is pretty. It’s a low stone building, just two storeys high, with a battlemented tower at the east end. Halfway through building the house there came the happy realisation that Devon was at peace, so the western wing was left unfortified. Instead it was given cosy mullioned windows which now look out on gardens that bring hundreds of visitors each summer weekend. Today Stowey is a country house hotel, but it was part of the sale agreement that my mother’s funeral party could gather in the old state rooms, and that the funeral service could be held in Stowey’s chapel. The chapel was no longer consecrated, but the hotel had kept it unchanged and the local priest was happy to indulge my mother’s wish. She was to be buried in the family’s vault beneath the chapel, perhaps the last of the family to be so interred, for I could not imagine the hotel’s owners wanting any more such macabre ceremonies. Indeed, they only endured this funeral because they had no legal alternative, but I noted the distaste with which they received the scattered and decaying remnants of the Rossendale family.

That family received me with an equal distaste. “I’m surprised to see you here, John,” one of my least decrepit uncles said.

“Why?”

“Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” I challenged him.

He backed down, muttering something about the weather being dreadful and how it always seemed to rain when a Rossendale was buried. “It rained on Frederick,” he said, “and on poor Michael.” Frederick had been my father, Michael my elder brother. He was always ‘poor Michael’ to the family; he’d blown his brains out with two barrels of number six shot and the Rossendales had been lumbered with me instead. My brother Michael had been a dull, worried man, hiding his chronic indecisions behind a bad-tempered mask, but ever since his death he had been something of a hero to the family, perhaps because they preferred him to me. If only Michael had lived, they seemed to be saying with their reproachful glances, none of this unhappiness would have happened.

One member of the family was glad to see me. That was my younger sister who smiled with innocent joy as I walked towards her chair. “Johnny?” She held both hands towards me in delighted greeting. “Johnny!”

“Hello, my darling.” I held Georgina’s hands and bent to kiss her cheeks.

She smiled happily into my face. This had to be one of her good days, for she had recognised me. She had a young plump nun with her, one of the nursing sisters who looked after her in a private Catholic hospital in the Channel Islands. “How is she?” I asked the nun.

“We’re all very proud of her,” the sister said, which might simply have meant that my younger sister was at last toilet trained.

“And Sister Felicity?” I asked. Sister Felicity was Georgina’s usual companion.

“She’s not well,” the nun said in a soft Irish voice, “she’d have liked to have come today, so she would, but she’s not a well woman. We’re all praying for her.”

“Sister Felicity is going to heaven soon,” Georgina said happily. She is twenty-six and has the mind of a backward two-year-old. No one knows why. Charlie put it best when he simply said that God left out the yeast when he made Georgina’s loaf. She’s beautiful, with an innocent face as heart-breaking as an angel’s, and a head as nutty as a squirrel’s larder.

“Sister Felicity’s not going to die,” I said, but Georgina had already forgotten the comment.

“I like it here.” She was still holding my hands.

“You look well,” I told her.

“I want to live here again, Johnny. With you,” Georgina said with a touching and hopeless appeal.

“I wish you could, my darling. But you’re happy at the convent, aren’t you?” The convent hospital specialised in the care of the mentally subnormal. Before my father’s death, and the subsequent collapse of the Rossendale estates, a trust had been established which would provide for the rest of Georgina’s life. It was ironic to think that the only family member who did not have money problems was the mad one.

“I like it here,” Georgina said again with a cruel lucidity. “With you.”

For the first time since my mother had died, tears threatened me. We were a rotten family, but Georgina and I had always been close. When she was a little child I used to make her laugh, and I sometimes thought that it would only take a small miracle to jar the sense out of the place where it was locked so deep inside her head. That miracle had never happened. Instead my mother had found Georgina’s presence oppressive, and so my younger sister had been put safely away, out of sight and out of mind, in her convent home. I crouched in front of her chair. “Are you unhappy?” I asked.

She did not answer. The bubble of sense had burst and now she just stared vacantly into my eyes. I doubted she even knew why she had been brought back to Stowey.

“People are very kind,” she said dully, then looked up as someone came to stand beside me. It was my other sister, my twin Elizabeth, but there was no recognition in Georgina’s eyes.

Elizabeth did not acknowledge Georgina’s presence. Like my mother, she had always been offended by having a mental defective in the family. Whatever, she ignored Georgina and waited for me to disengage my hands gently and stand upright. Elizabeth carried a glass of the hotel’s sherry. Her husband Peter, once my sailing companion, but now a failing Cotswold landowner, glowered at me across the room. I was the ghost at the funeral feast. They all blamed me for losing the family’s money and for bringing the disgrace of poverty on a lineage that had owned this patch of England since the first Rossendale had taken it with his bloody-edged sword. That man had come to Devon in the twelfth century, while now his twentieth-century descendants shuffled with embarrassment in an hotel’s drawing room. All except for Elizabeth, who had a superb if rancorous poise. She drew me away from Georgina’s chair. “I don’t know why she’s here,” Elizabeth said irritably.

“Why shouldn’t she be?”

“She doesn’t know what’s going on.” Elizabeth sipped her sherry, then gave me a long, disapproving examination. “I don’t know why you’re here either.”

“A vestige of filial duty,” I said, a little too lightly.

“You look disgustingly healthy.” Her words were grudging. It was an effort to be polite, to pretend that we were not bitter enemies.

“Sun and sea.” I was glib. “You look well yourself. Are you still riding?”

“Of course.” Elizabeth had very nearly made Britain’s Olympic team as a horsewoman. Perhaps, if that success had come to her, she would have been less bitter with life since.

A flurry at the door announced the arrival of Father Maltravers from London. Father Maltravers had been Mother’s favourite confessor and would now bury her. The sight of the priest made Elizabeth drop her small pretence of politeness. “Will you be taking Mass?” she challenged me.

“I don’t think so.”

“Mother would have liked it if you did.” She paused to look into my eyes as if she expected to read some message there. Elizabeth is very tall, just two inches beneath my own six feet. She has our family’s bright gold hair and more than her fair share of the Rossendale good looks. “Of course,” she went on with a very poisoned indirectness, “you’ll have to make your confession first. Have you made confession in the last four years, John?”

“Have you?” I countered feebly. The Rossendales are one of the ancient Catholic families. We’d been persecuted by the Tudor fanatics, but had tenaciously clung to our land and put the five oyster shells beside Stowey’s front door. That was the source of the line in the nursery song: ‘Five for the symbols at your door’; the five marks being a sign that the old religion was practised inside and that a priest could therefore be found to say Mass. Today the hotel delights in showing its guests a priest hole where the illicit clergymen had hidden from Elizabeth I’s searchers. The hotel’s priest hole was in what had been my father’s bedroom, and the guests were told that a Jesuit had starved to death in the hole in the 1580s, but that was a nonsense. The real priest hole was in Stowey’s stables, because a Rossendale would never have let a priest into the private rooms. The so-called priest hole was actually the low cupboard in which my grandfather had kept his riding boots, but the invention keeps the tourists happy.

“Did you see Mother before she died?” Elizabeth now asked.

“Yes.”

“And?” she prompted me.

I shrugged and decided the truth of Mother’s last words had better stay my secret. “She wasn’t in a fit state to talk.”

Elizabeth paused, evidently suspecting an evasion. “But you know why she wanted to see you?” she asked after a few seconds.

“I can guess.”

Elizabeth did not pursue the topic. I noticed how the other family members kept deliberately clear of us, as though making an arena for a fight. They must have guessed that Elizabeth would tackle me and consequently there was a sense of expectancy in the panelled room. They pretended to ignore us, fussing around Father Maltravers, but I knew they were all keenly alert to my confrontation with Elizabeth.

“Have you seen Mother’s will?” The question, like her earlier questions, was yet another probing attack.

“No.”

“There’s nothing in it for you.”

“I didn’t expect anything.” I spoke gently because I could sense the danger in Elizabeth’s mood. She had the Rossendale temper. I had it too, but I think the sea had taught me to control mine. Yet now, in Elizabeth’s bright eyes, I could see the anger brimming.

“She left you nothing, because you betrayed her.” My sister’s voice was loud enough to make the nearest relatives turn to watch us. All but Georgina who was solemnly counting her fingers. “She hated you,” Elizabeth went on, “which is why she left me the painting.”

The statement showed that Elizabeth had been unable to resist a full-scale assault. “Good,” I said carelessly, which only annoyed her more.

“So where is it?” she asked with a savage bitterness.

We’re twins, born eight minutes apart, and we hate each other. I can’t explain that. Charlie often said we were too much alike, as if that was the answer, but I can’t find the venom in my own soul to explain Elizabeth’s obsessive dislike of me. Nor do I think we are so much alike; I lack Elizabeth’s driving ambition. It was an astonishing ambition; so nakedly obvious as to be almost pitiful. She craved after a status in life which would reflect the past glories of our family; she wanted wealth, admiration and success, yet, like me, she had a knack of failure. I had accepted my lack of ambition, turning it into a wanderer’s life at sea, while Elizabeth just grew more bitter with every twist of malevolent fate. She had married well, and the marriage had soured. She had been born wealthy, and now she was poor, and that failure seemed to hurt her most of all.

“Where’s the painting?” she asked me again, and this time so loudly that everyone else in the room, even the uncomprehending Georgina, turned to watch us. Elizabeth’s husband, leaning against the far wall, seemed to sneer at me. Father Maltravers took a step forward, as though tempted to be a peacemaker, but the intensity in Elizabeth’s voice checked him. “Where’s the painting?” she asked me again.

“I’ll tell you once more,” I said, “and for the very last time, I do not know.”

“You’re a liar, John. You’re a snivelling little liar. You always were.” Elizabeth’s anger had snapped, torn from its mooring by my presence. She would be hating herself for thus losing her temper in public, but she was quite unable to control it. My silence in the face of her attack only made her anger more fierce. “I know you’re lying, John. I have proof.”

I still kept silent. So did the rest of the family. I doubt if any of them had expected to see me at the funeral and, when they did, they had doubtless half feared and half relished that this skeleton from the family’s crowded bone cupboard would make its ghoulish appearance. Now it had, and none of them wanted to stop its display. Elizabeth, sensing their support and my discomfiture, attacked once more. “You’d better run away again, John, before the police discover you’re back.”

“You’re hysterical.” My anger was like a gnawing bitch in my belly, but I was determined not to show it; yet, try as I might, I could not keep its venom from my voice. “Why don’t you go and lie down, or take a pill?”

“Damn you.” She twitched her wrist and the sticky sherry splashed up on to my face and on to the cheap black suit I’d bought in honour of the occasion. “Damn you,” she said again. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

Sherry dripped from my chin on to my black tie. None of the relatives moved. They all agreed with Elizabeth. They thought I was the bastard who had made them poor. If it wasn’t for me then Stowey would still be in the family, the port would flow at Christmas, and there would be no importunate bank managers and no genteel shame of an old family driven into penury. I had not played their game, I wasn’t one of them, and so they all hated me.

So I didn’t stay for the funeral. I glanced at Georgina, but she was in a world of her own. Father Maltravers tried to detain me, but I brushed him aside and walked out, leaving the family in an embittered silence. I washed the sherry from my face in the hotel’s loo, collected my filthy oilskin jacket from its peg, then walked through the Devon rain to the village street. I dialled Charlie’s number on the public phone outside the Rossendale Arms, but there was no reply. I threw my sticky black tie into the gutter, then lit a pipe as I waited for the bus. The tooth suddenly began to ache again. I explored the pain with my tongue, wondering whether it truly was psychosomatic, but decided that no such sharp agony could be purely mental, not even if it was provoked by a lacerating homecoming.

Damn the family. I’d come home, and they did not want me. Above the thatched roofs of the village the green pastures curled up to the thick woods where, as a child, I’d learned the skills of stalking and killing. Charlie had taught me those skills. He’d grown up in one of my family’s tied cottages, but we had still become friends. We had become the best of friends. My mother, of course, had hated Charlie. She had called him a piece of village muck, a dirty little boy from an infamous family, but he had still become my best friend. He was still my closest friend; four years away had not changed that. I wanted to see him, but I wouldn’t wait for him. I wanted to be back at sea, riding the long winds in Sunflower. My family would accuse me of running away again, and in a sense they were right, but I wasn’t running from fear, just from them; my family.

And all because of a bloody painting.

It was a good painting, a very good painting. So good that it could have saved the family fortune.

My father’s death had been a financial disaster to the family, but my mother, with a single-minded fury, had fought to save Stowey and its estates. Her legal battles had been waged for ten years, and at the end she had won her campaign and the key to it was the painting.

The house had once been filled with fine pictures. The National Gallery in Washington DC has a slew of our Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses, while a gallery in California has the pick of our Dutch interiors and the two good Constables that London’s National Gallery had been desperate to acquire, but too poor to pay for. One by one the walls of Stowey had been stripped to pay gambling debts or death duties, but on my father’s death there had been nothing of any value left.

Or hardly anything of value. There was a canvas which my mother swore was a Stubbs, but which Sothebys could not bring to auction as such. There was a Poussin, which probably wasn’t, but if it was then the old master had been having a bad day. There was a Constable drawing, which was undoubtedly genuine, but a Constable drawing doesn’t pay the revenue. The only recourse was to sell Stowey and its lands, but that was something my mother would not contemplate. Stowey had been in our family since the twelfth century.

But there was one undoubted treasure. An odd treasure for a house like Stowey, and a treasure which, strictly speaking, did not belong to the family, but rather to my mother. It was a Van Gogh.

The painting should have looked all wrong in the old house, as out of place as a drunken punk ensconced in a library, yet somehow it seemed perfect. It was a glorious, superb, demented canvas; one of the early sunflower paintings. It showed eight blossoms topping a half-glazed jar; an explosion of yellow paint touched by blue with poor Vincent’s childlike signature painted on the vase itself. On a summer’s day, when the sun blazoned Stowey’s mediaeval gardens with light, the painting seemed like a fragment of that brightness trapped and caught inside the house.

The painting had been brought to the family by my mother. She had been left it by her father. She had hung the Van Gogh on the linenfold panelling of her bedroom at Stowey. My mother refused to lend the picture to any exhibition, though once in a while an art historian or a reputable painter would seek permission to visit Stowey, and I remember the awe with which they gazed at the lovely canvas.

It was well protected. My mother’s bedroom had been in Stowey’s crenellated east tower, built for defence, and the mediaeval bastion had been supplemented with the most sophisticated alarms. No one had even tried to penetrate those defences, until the end.

That end came ten years after my father’s death. My mother had fought every month of those years. She had cursed and kicked and clawed at the taxmen. She had challenged their assessments and fobbed them off with small payments torn from the sale of our outlying pastures. She had fought a good fight, but then my brother had gone into the gun room and ripped her fight to shreds.

My brother’s suicide gave the taxmen a new carcass of juicy death duties to chew. My mother, recognising the inevitable, knew that either Stowey or the Van Gogh had to go. Stowey won. She agreed a price of four million pounds for the Van Gogh, but on the very day before it should have left the house, it was stolen. It transpired that my brother had let the insurance lapse one month before his death. The police were certain that only a person with intimate knowledge of the alarms could have penetrated to the gun room where the crated painting had been waiting for the security van. The police were also certain that I was that person.

I had put the painting in the gun room to await collection. I had the key to the room and to the alarm systems. Only I was supposed to know where the painting was. My fingerprints were on the door’s lockplates. On the day after the painting was stolen I sailed across the Channel in a friend’s boat, presumably carrying my loot away. The evidence was all circumstantial, and utterly damning. I was never charged, because my guilt could not be proved, but the whole family was nevertheless certain that I was guilty. I had done it, they said, to spite my mother and because I didn’t want to give the taxmen their ton of flesh. My relatives said I was a rogue, that I’d always been a rogue, and that now I’d broken the Rossendale family with my selfish greed.

The painting was never found. My mother’s fight, and four million pounds, was lost, yet the taxmen and the lawyers still had to be paid, and so Stowey was sold and now caters to well-heeled tourists who gape at a boot cupboard in the belief that a priest starved to death inside. My mother moved into an old rectory on the edge of the moor, and there she slowly died. The family had made me an outcast. And I had fled to sea.

In a yacht called Sunflower.

There wasn’t much I had to do in Salcombe because I didn’t plan on a full provisioning in England. I would fill up with fresh water, put diesel in the tanks and spare cans, and stock enough food to reach Vigo or Lisbon. I wanted an estimate for a new trysail, but even if I could afford it, I would not wait for delivery, but rather have Charlie send the sail to Tenerife. There were a slew of small problems. One of the winches had worn gearing, a bow fairlead needed replacing, and Sunflower’s bottom was filthy with weed and barnacles. I planned to strand her at low tide on the mud of one of Salcombe’s lakes, then spend a filthy time scraping her clean before giving her a new coat of anti-fouling. She needed a good cleaning inside and out, and my clothes needed a rinse in fresh water. I would have liked to have found a fibreglass dinghy to replace the inflatable, which in turn had replaced a rigid dinghy that had been stolen in Antigua, but that could wait. I wanted a small outboard so I didn’t have to row the tender. The folding bicycle needed brake pads. I needed grease for the stern-gland. There were a couple of rust spots inside the hull which needed quick attention, and there was the bloody tooth which was now flaring up again with all its old intensity.

At first I ignored the tooth on the principle that a pain ignored will go away. It didn’t. Instead it got worse, so, three days after the funeral, I rowed ashore and telephoned dentists until I found one who could see me straightaway. That meant another bus ride, only to be lectured by a pompous little twerp who told me I didn’t brush my gums properly. He said I’d need to make a series of visits while he first drained the abscess, then scraped out the root canal to save the tooth.

“I don’t want it saved,” I said irritably, “just take the damned thing out.”

“But it can be saved, Mr Rossendale.”

“Take it out,” I insisted. Teeth are a human design fault, like appendixes, and all design faults are life-threatening at sea. This tooth wasn’t one of my front ones, so the lack of it wouldn’t make me ugly. Besides, it would be far cheaper for me to have the tooth drawn in England than giving me trouble across the Atlantic where you need to take out a mortgage before you dare see a dentist. The pompous little twerp was unhappy, but finally did what I demanded, grunting and heaving with his pliers. The Novocaine must have been from a weak batch because the extraction hurt like hell, but that was better than drawing the tooth myself a thousand miles to sea. A friend of mine did that once. It took him half a day and the best part of a bottle of Scotch, and when it was done he found he’d pulled the wrong one.

I consoled my pain with a large whiskey in the pub, then went down to the town pontoon where I’d left Sunflower’s inflatable. No one had stolen her, perhaps because I’d pasted a score of false repair patches on her faded black skin so that she looked as though she was ready to give her last gasp and sink. Her oars were underwater, weighted with a length of chain and tethered by a tatty piece of fraying rope. I retrieved them, then rowed myself slowly out through the murk. It was still raining. Grey clouds were scurrying low over Goodshelter, then depositing a misty and obscuring rain on the moorings. A crabber engine choked into life, but otherwise the estuary seemed as empty as winter. I planned to motor Sunflower up to the drying mud of Callapit Creek. I would spend a few days scrubbing her hull, then go back to sea. I made a mental list of things I needed to buy: galvanised shackles, valve springs, welding rods, an angle grinder, fuses. My face felt swollen, numb and tender.

I stopped rowing and turned to see if I was aiming the unwieldy dinghy in the right direction. I was a quarter-mile from Sunflower and way off course, blown there by the wind which was carrying the dinghy too far to the north. That’s one reason I hate inflatable dinghies; they’re prey to every gust of wind and current.

But if the dinghy was an unwieldy brute, Sunflower looked magnificent. I rested on the oars, admiring her. She looked drab and scuffed among the smart yachts on the other moorings, but her drabness was the result of long sea miles and it gave her the battered beauty of functionalism. She was weather-beaten, tough and practical. Then, as I gazed at her, a man’s head appeared in her companionway. He stared around the moorings, glanced at me for a second, then ducked back into the cabin.

For a moment I was shocked into immobility. I even doubted what I’d seen. Somehow all the years of ocean travel had not diluted the prejudice that blatant thievery is more common abroad than in an English harbour; certainly not in genteel, yellow-wellied Salcombe.

And the intruder, if I had not imagined the whole thing, had to be a thief. I’d left Sunflower’s companionway locked tight, so he must have broken the big padlock to get inside the cabin. The intruder had not been Charlie, for the man I’d seen had black hair, and Charlie’s thatch was as fair as mine. I wouldn’t have cared if Charlie had broken the cabin lock, then drunk all the whiskey on board, but I was damned if some stranger would steal from me. I began rowing again. As I did so the dark head appeared again in the companionway. I rowed steadily, aiming well away from her, and the man must have decided that I posed no threat for he ducked back down into the cabin. I rowed on, keeping well to Sunflower’s beam. I knew the intruder might still be watching me through one of the thick cabin ports so I pretended to be going to a mooring north and east of the boat. I didn’t hurry. I did nothing to make him suspicious.

I wanted to trap him. He was thieving from my boat, and I wanted to make him regret it. I knew I would have to be cunning, for he was surely alert to the possibility of the owner returning. So I kept rowing away from Sunflower, though now, because I was past her, I was able to watch her constantly. The man did not reappear in the companionway, so he must have felt safe.

I went a good two hundred yards past Sunflower’s mooring, then turned south amongst a gaggle of moored Salcombe yawls. I rowed until Sunflower’s bows were pointing directly towards me, then I let the ebbing tide carry me down towards her. I steered with a single oar over the dinghy’s transom. I noticed there was no tender tied to Sunflower, which was odd, but, when I was just twenty yards away, I forgot the oddity because I heard voices. There were evidently two intruders aboard, a man and a woman. The woman’s voice, sharp and penetrating, seemed to make a protest, but the man’s voice overrode her.

I put out a hand and caught the rail of Sunflower’s pulpit. The tide was trying to take the dinghy down Sunflower’s starboard flank to where I would have been visible through the cabin ports, but I held the dinghy back, took a breath, then slowly hauled myself over the bows. The big hull rocked gently under my weight, but not enough to warn the intruders of my presence. I’d kept the inflatable’s painter in my left hand and I quickly hitched it to the pulpit rail. The inflatable would bump softly against the steel hull, and I prayed the tiny thumping would not alert them. The man was speaking again, low and urgently, but I could not hear his exact words.

I crouched over the forehatch. I guessed that the man and woman would be in the main cabin. I could just see the twisted remains where they had forced the hasp of the main companionway. I briefly thought of making my entrance there, but my footsteps could have alerted them as I negotiated the cabin roof and I wanted to surprise them. I took the bunch of keys from my pocket and, taking exquisite care not to make them jangle, found the small key for the forehatch padlock. The dinghy, driven by the wind, thumped softly and persistently against the hull. Rain slicked Sunflower’s teak-planked deck.

The key went unwillingly into the lock, resisted, then turned. I eased the padlock out of the steel hasp, laid it with the keys on the deck, then took hold of both latches.

Then a bellowing roar made me twist round. I should have realised that the man and woman must have used another boat to reach Sunflower, which boat, to prevent suspicion, had left them aboard before going a safe distance away. Their accomplice on board that other boat had belatedly seen me, and now he was accelerating towards the rescue of his companions. The rescuer was a huge man, built like a prizefighter, who conned his small boat with a noticeable clumsiness. That boat was a small aluminium dory, flat bottomed and driven by a big outboard which was flinging water white to either side. The noise must have alerted the intruders, for the man’s head reappeared in the companionway. I saw sleek black hair lying close to a narrow skull, then the man turned and stared in astonishment at me.

I had snatched a boathook from its rack on the cabin roof. I kept two boathooks there. One was for hooking boats or moorings, but the other, the one I seized, had a more specialised purpose. I had sharpened its spike to sail-needle sharpness, then ground a blade edge down the outer curve of the hook. That done I had hollowed out the head of the shaft and weighted the weapon with lead. In effect I had made myself a miniature boarding pike that had proved its worth more than once. Any yacht in far waters is fair game for a thief, and a lone sailor had better take precautions or else he or she will end up as crabmeat. Now, in Salcombe’s supposedly peaceful harbour, I swung the weighted blade, blunt side forward, at the black-haired man. He turned away from the blow, which nevertheless caught him on the back of his neck. It half felled him, or else he was already falling, for he disappeared down the companionway.

I was shouting, part in rage that the intruders had dared to break into Sunflower, and in part to scare the man. I scrambled over the liferaft and coachroof, then jumped down into the cockpit where I turned and held the boathook like a poised harpoon. The dory was slewing round, spraying water in a great curved sheet. The big man at its controls shouted incoherently at his companions on Sunflower. I could see the woman’s legs in my cabin. She was sitting on the starboard bunk, but I could not see her male companion. “Stay there, you bastards!” I shouted. I planned to trap my intruders inside Sunflower, cow them into docility, then use the VHF to call the police. The man in the dory was having trouble controlling his boat, which was a blessing because I didn’t fancy fighting a man of his height and weight.

I was about to go down into the cabin when the unlocked forehatch swung open and the black-haired man pulled himself lithely up on to the foredeck. He was thin. He had a suntanned countryman’s face and was wearing a check shirt beneath a waxed cotton coat. He had a yellow waistcoat, brogues, and cavalry twill trousers. He was dressed for the racecourse rather than the water. The dory thumped alongside, ringing like a cracked bell on Sunflower’s steel hull. “Come on!” the helmsman shouted at his companion, “jump!”

I ran forward. The thin black-haired man did not jump into the dory, but turned to face me instead. He brushed at his tweed jacket, and somehow the commonplace gesture slowed my attack. Then he looked up at me. He had very confident eyes. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his late thirties, with a sardonic, knowing look about his narrow features. It was a face which suggested a long acquaintanceship with human fallibilities, but it was also a face with an intrinsic air of command. “There’s really no need to get excited,” he said to me in a very condescending voice.

“What the hell are you doing on my boat?” I still advanced on him, but slowly now and with the boathook held out like a pike.

“I want to talk to you, of course.” He had a very crisp voice; an unashamedly upper-class voice honed by public school and effortless confidence. “Shall we go below?”

“Only after you’ve paid for the damage you’ve done.”

He smiled wearily. “We’re going to be tedious, are we? And for God’s sake stop pointing that hook at me.”

The dory’s helmsman, a much coarser creature than the thin man, still held on to Sunflower’s guardrails. He was bald, big, and was staring with concern at the threatening boathook, but the other had already dismissed the weapon’s menace. He reached out with his right hand to fend off the hook. I resisted his gesture and, in sudden anger, he gripped the boathook’s head to wrest it out of my hand.

He was surprisingly strong for such a thin man, but, a second after he had seized the hook, and while he was still pulling, his brain registered a stinging pain where he had expected none. I added to the pain by twisting the haft. Blood was spilling out of his hand now, dripping on to Sunflower’s deck. I saw the sudden agony on his face. He snatched his right hand away, dripping blood, then groped his left hand beneath his jacket to find a slim, long-bladed knife that had been sheathed at his belt. His larger companion was evidently uncertain whether to come to the thin man’s aid or keep the dory alongside, so did nothing. I lunged, skewering the boathook’s sharpened point into the thin man’s upper arm. He swore, tried to fend the hook away with his knife, but I had swung it away and now hefted it hard back.

He had taken enough and scrambled desperately over the guardrails. He was too slow to escape my swing and the weighted boathook caught him on the back of his head as he jumped. Blood was bright in his black sleek hair. He fell against the big man who let go of Sunflower. The dory rocked alarmingly. I ran forward, raised the hook, and slammed it down, hoping to ram it clean through the aluminium hull. Instead I punctured a spare petrol can which began adding its fuel to the blood in the dory’s scuppers.

The thin man, whom I’d wounded, was much more alert than his big companion. He threw himself at the dory’s controls and rammed the throttle into reverse. The engine roared, the boat scuttled backwards like a frightened crab, and the big man nearly fell overboard.

“Bastards!” I shouted. The thin man just stared at me. Blood glistened on his waxed coat. I had hurt him, and his eyes told me that he was not a man to forget or forgive a defeat. But let him hate, I thought, because in a week’s time I’d be sailing south and he could whistle his enmity at the waning moon. I watched as he pushed the dory’s motor into forward gear. He was a better helmsman than his companion, and I suspected that the thin man was capable at most things he turned his hands to. He had that kind of confidence about him, but he had failed with me. I raised two fingers at him as the small boat accelerated away between the moored yachts, then the two men vanished among the moorings, leaving behind only a haze of blue exhaust smoke and a smear of bright blood on a boathook’s head.

And a woman. They had left the woman behind.

So now I went to find her.

“Bloody hell.” For a second I was too shocked to move, then I swung myself down the companionway.

The girl lay on my starboard bunk where the thin man had evidently gone to work on her. There was blood on her face, chest, and hands. She was wearing a woollen skirt, a blouse, and a sweater. The sweater was in remnants and the blouse bloodstained and torn. On the companionway were the tattered fragments of her raincoat which looked as if it had been torn apart by dogs. She stared at me with whimpering, scared eyes.

The bastard had also gone to work on Sunflower. He’d ripped her cabin to shreds, but that could wait.

“Who are you?” I was pumping water from the freshwater tank into an unbroken cup.

The girl did not answer. Her hands tried to pull the scraps of her torn sweater together.

I knelt beside her and she flinched away.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “I’m trying to help you. Now stay still.”

I don’t think I reassured her, instead I think the abruptness of my tone merely scared her into compliance. Whatever, she did not move as I used a cleanish scrap of rag to wipe the blood from her face. She shuddered when the rag first touched her skin, then seemed to accept that I was helping her.

“Nothing’s broken,” I said, which meant that her nose was still in one piece. The blood had come from a nosebleed, but that had stopped. One of her cheekbones was badly grazed, but the damage was really very slight, except to her nerves. I did not know about her ribs, nor was I about to investigate. The thin man had half stripped her to the waist, but I was not going to inflict a similar indignity on her. “What did he do to you?” I asked.

“He threatened me with a knife,” she managed to say, “then hit me.” Her voice was wavering and scared, and no wonder for she was still rigid with shock.

“Only hit you?” I asked. “Nothing else?”

She nodded firmly. “Nothing else.” Meaning she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. “He said I’d come to make an arrangement with you, and when I wouldn’t tell him more, he tore my clothes.” She had barely been able to articulate the last words, which came out as sobs. “There was nothing to tell!” she protested to me, to the whole boat, then began to shiver violently. I pulled a sleeping bag from the mess on the cabin floor and draped it round her shoulders. She shrank away from my touch. I was almost as shocked as the girl. The violence of the thin man was so gratuitous and unexpected, but any explanations would have to wait till the girl had recovered some of her composure.

“Go into the forward cabin,” I said firmly, “and clean yourself up. You’ll find some sweaters in the drawers. They’re not very clean, they’re a bit damp, but they’re better than nothing.”

She nodded again, but did not move. She was clutching the sleeping bag round her body with her bloodstained left hand. She was still sobbing, each exhalation a tiny whimper of pain.

“It’s all right,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” I deliberately backed away and sat on what was left of my portside bunk.

Still she did not move. She was struggling to subdue the sobs which slowly died away. She took some deep breaths and finally, when she felt she was once again in control of her voice, she asked if I was the Earl of Stowey.

The question was so unexpected, and so out of place, that I just gaped at her. She frowned at me. “Are you the Earl?” she asked me again, but this time with a tone of desperation as if her recovery from the ordeal depended on my answer.

“Yes, I am.” Since my brother died I’ve been the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, but I prefer the anonymity of plain John Rossendale because a title isn’t any damn use at sea. “But I don’t use the title,” I explained to her, “so just call me John, OK?” I rummaged through the mess on the cabin sole and found a bottle of antiseptic and a half-clean towel which I held out to her. “Why don’t you go forward and clean yourself up? I’ll make some tea.” She went on staring at me. “Go on,” I encouraged her.

She took the bottle and towel, but still did not move, so I climbed up the companionway steps into the cockpit as though I was making sure that the two men had gone. Nothing stirred in the harbour except the rain slithering across the grey water. Smoke rose from chimneys in the town. I heard the girl moving in the cabin below, then the click as she locked herself into the forecabin. I took my binoculars from their clip in the cockpit cave-locker and stared towards the town, but I could see no sign of the small aluminium dory. My intruder had disappeared.

I went below again and swore under my breath. The thin man had turned Sunflower inside out. He had forced locked doors open, then spilt the locker contents on to the sole. He’d torn up the sole and rummaged through the bilges. He’d broken the VHF. The radio’s case looked as if it had been prised apart with a jemmy. I switched the set on, but nothing happened. The damage to the boat was not immense, but the cost of making the repairs would be painful. I cursed the bastard again; then, because I could not contemplate starting to clean up, I went topsides once more, turned on the gas at the aft locker, then went below and lit the gas hob. The small galley was about the only place on the boat which had escaped the thin man’s attention, presumably because I had disturbed him before he could start its destruction. The chart table had been wrenched off its piano hinge and all my precious, rare charts were torn and crumpled. The sextant was safe, which was a blessing. It didn’t seem as if anything had been stolen, but I could not be certain till I had searched the boat properly.

I made a strong pot of tea, mixed some powdered milk, and jammed up a leaf of the cabin table. I packed a pipe, lit it, then waited.

It was ten minutes before the girl came nervously out of the forecabin. She was wearing one of my Aran sweaters, which suited her. She had short black hair, dark eyes, and honey-brown skin. She had also, so far as I could tell, recovered her composure, though there was still a wariness in her expression.

“Tea,” I greeted her. “The milk’s reconstituted. Sugar?”

“No sugar.” She picked her way across the wreckage of the cabin and nervously sat opposite me. “No milk either, please.”

“Rum instead of milk?”

She shook her head, then brushed her fingers through her hair. I saw that she was pretty. Even with a cut face, frightened eyes, and a mucky damp sweater she was pretty.

“Did that bastard take the forecabin apart?” I asked.

“Not as badly as this cabin.” She shuddered suddenly. “I was waiting for you in the cockpit when they arrived. There were two of them, but only one came aboard. I thought he was a friend of yours.” She shivered again and momentarily closed her eyes. “Thank you for frightening him away.”

“My pleasure.” I put a mug of tea in front of her. “Sorry there’s no lemon. Does the pipe smoke bother you?”

“No.” She cradled the tin mug in both hands, found it too hot, and quickly put it down. She glanced around the ransacked cabin, and grimaced. In the cold damp air Sunflower’s accommodation seemed dispiriting and drab. The girl took a deep breath, then looked across the table at me. “I’m Jennifer Pallavicini.”

I did not respond. I had been half expecting her to tell me more about the thin man, but instead she had offered me the formal introduction, so I just smiled an acknowledgement.

“Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?” There was a trace of indignation in her voice.

“Should it?”

“We’ve been writing to you for three years!”

I shrugged to show that none of her letters had reached me, then sipped my tea which I’d generously laced with rum. The heat of the liquid scalded the tender patch where the tooth had been drawn, and I winced. “Your letters are probably mouldering in General Deliveries all over the world. I’m sorry.”

“We wrote care of your mother.”

I half smiled. “I wasn’t the favourite child. She never even sent me a birthday card, let alone other people’s letters.”

“So then we heard you’d come home for your mother’s funeral,” she continued, “and because you never replied to our letters, I was sent down to find you.”

To her it all made sense; to me, none. My mother had never forwarded a letter to me, I had never heard of Jennifer Pallavicini, and I wondered how she had discovered that Sunflower was moored in Salcombe. I had also noted that she had been sent to find me, implying that she was merely a messenger. “Who sent you?” I asked.

She gave me an almost hostile look. It was clear that Miss Jennifer Pallavicini was recovering very swiftly from her encounter with the thin man. This was a tough girl, I suspected, and that realisation made me look more closely at her. There was a lot of character in my visitor’s face; a face blended of intelligence, beauty and determination. A formidable girl, I thought, and not one to take lightly. “So?” I prompted her.

“I work for Sir Leon Buzzacott.”

“Ah,” I said neutrally, though in truth her answer made complete sense. Buzzacott was the rich man who had almost bought Stowey’s Van Gogh, then been denied it. He had never hidden his bitter disappointment. Buzzacott, one of the City’s most glittering financiers, had established his own art collection, the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, at his country house. He believed that too many of Britain’s art treasures were crossing the Atlantic or going to the Japanese, and he had sworn to stop the haemorrhaging flow of paint. The Van Gogh had been his proudest acquisition, filling a great gap in his collection, and it evidently still rankled that the painting did not hang on his museum’s wall.

“What exactly do you do for Sir Leon?” I asked.

“I’m the curator of nineteenth-century Europe.” It seemed either a large task or an excessive boast; anyway, it made me smile, which annoyed her. “Damn you,” she said.

“Damn me?” I was taken aback by the sudden hostility. I’d saved her from a worse beating, lent her clothes, made her tea, and now she was treating me like a piece of scum.

She closed her eyes in exasperation. “Sir Leon has never relinquished his hopes of acquiring the painting. Naturally a new price will have to be negotiated, but Sir Leon will match any offer you may receive. Indeed, my lord…”

“John,” I interrupted her.

“Indeed, Mr Rossendale,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Sir Leon will accept any reasonable valuation which, in present market terms, must make the painting worth at least twenty million pounds.”

It’s easy to pretend not to care about money, to say that a blue-water sailor only needs enough cash to keep the rust out of the hull and to patch up the sails and to buy a few bottles of hooch and tins of stew. That derision of money is the chorus of the sea-gypsies; how we’ve escaped the vulgar greed of the world, how we even feel sorry for the pin-striped business executives rushing towards their bypass surgery because of the stress of making money, and we’re so proud that we’ve escaped the love of the filthy stuff, and we profess not to care about it and even to despise it, but then along comes a dark-haired girl who casually says her employer is willing to lay out twenty of the big ones, and so I gaped at her and wondered if she was mad, or if I was going deaf. “Twenty?” I asked weakly.

“Millions,” she said firmly.

“Wow.” I grinned. I told myself that I didn’t care about money, but twenty million smackeroos? The art world must have gone mad in the last four years. My mother had thought she had done well to negotiate a price of four million, and she’d been assured that was at least one million above the highest auction price. But twenty? At least twenty, Jennifer Pallavicini had said. “You could buy a lot of boat for twenty big ones,” I said wistfully.

“You could indeed,” she said icily.

“There’s just one snag,” I went on, “which is that I don’t have the painting.”

“But you know who does.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. This girl, just like my sister and the rest of my family, was convinced of my guilt.

“No,” I said gently, “I don’t.”

Jennifer Pallavicini sighed, as though I wilfully exasperated her. “Before she died,” she said flatly, “your mother found evidence of your guilt. She told us as much. One of your accomplices confessed.”

“Whoopee,” I said, “except it isn’t true.”

“Your mother wished to confront you with that evidence” – she ignored my denial – “and to make one last appeal to you.”

I leaned back. The washboards were out of their slots and rain was flicking down into the cabin. I rubbed my face and winced as I put pressure on my sore gum. I looked up at the barometer, which happily wasn’t broken, and saw that the air pressure was rising. Too soon for me. I needed a few days to make my repairs, but as soon as the next depression had passed up-channel I’d use the backwash of northerly winds to take me away from England.

“And that man” – Jennifer Pallavicini shivered at the memory of the thin man – “told me you’d come home to sell the painting.”

That caught my attention. “He said what?”

“That you’d come home to sell the painting. But he said it wasn’t yours to sell.”

I stabbed at the faltering tobacco in my pipe with a shackle-spike. “So if his argument was with me,” I asked, “why go to work on you?”

She seemed to consider whether or not to answer, then gave a small shrug. “When he first came aboard he asked me if I knew anything about the painting and I was foolish enough to say I did. When I told him I worked for Sir Leon he wanted to know how much we were paying you for the painting, and just when you were going to produce it. I said we had no agreement, and he didn’t believe me.”

“So he beat you up?”

She paused, then nodded stiffly. “And I think he rather enjoyed doing it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but my sympathy only irritated her.

“The important thing,” she said distantly, “is that at last we’ve succeeded in making contact with you. All that we now ask is that you deal with us rather than with anyone else.”

I shook my head. “But I can’t deal with you because I didn’t steal the painting, and I don’t know where it is.”

“So you say.”

That churlish answer tempted me to anger. It would have been easy to give in to the impulse, for I was tired and irritated, but on the other hand I was beginning to see that Jennifer Pallavicini was a very beautiful girl indeed, and it’s astonishing how pretty girls can make men’s manners. So I hid the anger.

Jennifer Pallavicini was collecting together the contents of her handbag, which the thin man had spilt across the bunk. “You should know,” she said as she restowed her bag, “that the painting is legally your possession. Your mother’s will can’t change that.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t even read the will.”

“She left the painting to your twin sister, but as your mother had already transferred its ownership to the Stowey Trust before your brother’s death, then the legacy is unenforceable.” She looked up at me. “In effect, my lord, you stole your own property.”

I could feel a pulse throbbing in the pulpy place where my tooth had been prised out. Jennifer Pallavicini’s words were reminding me of the dull responsibilities I had fled after the disappearance of the painting. The Stowey Trust was, in effect, the wealth of the Rossendale family, but formed into a trust to minimise taxes and death duties. These days the Trust was bankrupt, made so by the loss of the painting. However, the chief beneficiary of the Trust had always been the Earl of Stowey, which meant that if I had stolen the Van Gogh then I had indeed robbed myself. No one seemed to think that was an odd thing for me to do, probably because they were all convinced I was stupid as well as guilty.

“Sir Leon is willing to overlook any complicity of yours in the painting’s disappearance if you’ll now assist in its recovery,” Jennifer Pallavicini told me.

“How very kind of him,” I said.

She heard the scorn in my voice, and shrugged. “We’re only trying to help you, my lord.”

“Don’t call me that!” Despite her looks, anger had snapped into my voice. I heard the sudden emotion and did not like it. “Listen,” I said patiently, “my mother never had any proof that I stole the painting, because I didn’t. If she did have such proof, then she should have gone to the police. I assume she didn’t, because no policemen have paid me a call since I returned to England, so I suspect her proof was all imaginary. So go back to Buzzacott and tell him I didn’t nick the painting, that I don’t know where the thing is, and that I can’t help him. Tell him that four years ago the police questioned me for two days, and didn’t charge me because they knew they couldn’t make a charge stick. In short I know nothing about the painting, and that’s the end of the matter.”

Jennifer Pallavicini didn’t blink an eye at my denial. “Sir Leon is offering twenty million pounds for the painting, Mr Rossendale, payable in any currency you desire and in any country you choose.” She paused for a response and, when I made none, went on. “You may take that as a negotiating position rather than as a final offer, Mr Rossendale.”

In other words I could name my price for returning the painting, and the price would be paid far away from the prying eyes of the taxmen. The only fly in that ointment was that I hadn’t stolen the Van Gogh in the first place and didn’t know where it was. I was also angry at the continued accusations. Four years had not lessened anyone’s greed for the canvas, nor their conviction that I had stolen it. Doubtless my mother had thought a deathbed appeal would make me reveal its whereabouts, while now Sir Leon Buzzacott had sent this attractive messenger to try and bribe the information from me. But I did not share their obsession with the picture, and I was offended by their accusations. I was also offended by Jennifer Pallavicini’s patronising assumption of my guilt and, to show my irritation, I picked up her mug of tea and poured it down the sink drain. “Goodbye, Miss Pallavicini.”

If she was startled by my action, she was too proud to show it. She gathered up her handbag. “You expect me to swim ashore, my lord?”

I rowed her. There was no sign of the aluminium dory nor of the two men. Jennifer Pallavicini said nothing during the journey, but it was clear she was not enjoying the ride. She had gone out to Sunflower in one of Salcombe’s water taxis, but, without a VHF radio, I could not summon one for her return journey. Instead we rowed through the drizzle in sullen silence. She didn’t speak until I had safely delivered her to the town’s pontoon where, once she had clambered safely out of the inflatable, she turned back to me. “Where shall I return your sweater?”

“Take it to an Oxfam shop. I’m going back to sea.”

For a second she was tempted to take off the Aran sweater and throw it contemptuously into the dinghy, but modesty and the rain prevailed. She turned away; then, surprisingly, turned back. “One last question, Mr Rossendale?”

“Try me.”

Her dark eyes challenged me. “Why is your boat called Sunflower?”

“I bought her from a Frenchman. He called her Tournesol. It’s bad luck to change a boat’s name, so I simply translated it. In other words, Miss Pallavicini, the name is pure coincidence.”

She stared down at me, evidently unsure whether to believe my explanation; then, without another word, turned away towards the town while I rowed back to Sunflower.

I sat in my wrecked cabin and tried to string a few explanations together. Sir Leon Buzzacott still wanted the painting; Sir Leon was convinced I had stolen it and could, therefore, betray its present whereabouts. My family had convinced him of that error by claiming to have proof of my guilt.

Fine, except I wasn’t guilty. No accomplice of mine could have confessed, because there had been no accomplices. I suspected that my mother, convinced of my guilt, had invented the tale.

Which didn’t explain the two men, or why the well-spoken thin man had wrecked Sunflower’s cabin. From what he had told Jennifer Pallavicini he clearly believed that I had the painting and was about to sell it. Had he believed I had the thing concealed in Sunflower? Did he think I’d hide twenty million quid’s worth of paint and canvas in a sea-locker? And who had told him I might have it? And what had he meant by saying that the painting wasn’t mine to sell? Jennifer Pallavicini had said the painting was mine, but Mother’s will evidently tried to deny me the ownership. The disagreement had all the makings of a fine lawyer’s stew, which meant that I should get the hell out of it. I’ve learned a few good lessons in life: always shorten sail when the first impulse occurs, never sail upwind unless desperate, and never, never, never give a lawyer a fingerhold on your affairs.

And this wasn’t my affair. I didn’t have the painting, didn’t want the painting, and didn’t care about my mother’s will. The thin man, Jennifer Pallavicini, and anyone else who believed I had the Van Gogh, was mistaken. So the best thing I could do was forget I’d ever been offered twenty million pounds and sail away to the blue waters.

But first there was work to do. I did a crude clean-up in the cabin, and began an inventory of what had been broken and what had not. Most of my tools and clothes, which had been stored with the spare sails in the forecabin, had been scattered about, though, blessedly, my visitor had not used his knives to search my sailbags. Undoubtedly he would have torn the sails to shreds, given time, but my unexpected return had frustrated him. The thin man had found no evidence of the Van Gogh, because there wasn’t any to find, nor, thank God, had he found my subsistence money. The cash, in a variety of different countries’ banknotes, was stored in a grease tin which, in turn, lay with other such battered and filthy tins in the tool tray next to the engine. No one would give the tin a second glance. But then, the thin man hadn’t been after money, just a twenty million pound painting, and he hadn’t found it.

But nor had he finished his search, and if he really did believe the Van Gogh was on board, then he might very well return to Sunflower. That thought gave me pause.

I decided that hunger was a great feeder of fear, so I found a tin of stew, a tin of new potatoes, and a tin of corned beef. I mashed the whole lot together, then heated the mixture over the stove. I sat in the cockpit and wolfed the meal down. It tasted wonderful. My gum was still tender, but the pain of the tooth was blessedly absent.

Yet the meal hardly diminished the scale of my problems. First, I had only a limited amount of money, and the repairs to Sunflower would take a great deal of that reserve. I’d be lucky to be left with fifty pounds, and that was not nearly sufficient to victual her for the long journey south. So, I needed a place where I could do most of the repairs myself and I needed a job to make some quick cash. I also wanted to hide from the two men; not because I feared them, but because I wanted no part of their hunt for the missing picture. Four years ago I had sailed away from all those complications, and I would be damned if I would let myself be sucked back into that maelstrom of greed and suspicion.

No one tried to board Sunflower that night. Which did not mean that either I or she was safe. I needed a hiding place, a job, and somewhere to make my repairs and, with the expedient neatness that sometimes characterises our unexpected needs, I knew just where I might find all three. I slept uneasily, woke early, and sailed in the dawn.

The weather had cleared overnight. The estuary, even at dawn, was filled with sails. Three Salcombe yawls, pretty little wooden boats, hissed past me as I hanked on the jib and staysail. A big French sloop, loaded to the gunwales with what seemed to be a dozen fecund families, made a noisily joyful exit. The sun was making the sails open on the water like unfolding white petals. My grey battered sails joined them.

The wind was back in the southwest. I motored Sunflower as far as the bar which, this morning, was a pussy cat. There was scarcely a ripple where, just a few days before, I’d plunged suicidally through the cascading white water. Once in the outer channel I turned off the motor and let Sunflower fall on to a starboard tack. The sea glittered under the rising sun. After the sordid events of the previous day it felt wonderful to be at sea again. A big white catamaran with a cabin the size of a townhouse passed me. A bearded man at her wheel shouted a genial “Good morning!” He had a startlingly pretty long-haired girl with him. She waved at me, and her friendly greeting suddenly curdled my high spirits like water poured into oil.

I like my life. I like the moment when, after departure, I can turn back and see nothing but the empty sea. Perhaps a ridge of cloud marks where the retreating land lies, but soon, I know, there will be nothing. From that moment on I am beholden to no one, responsible only to myself, and dependent only on my own boat and my own strength. There are no lawyers at sea; no accountants, no estate office, no family, no expectations, no tenants, no creditors, no tax assessors, no bank managers, no stockbrokers, no land agents. Those were the dark-suited creatures I had fled. After my brother’s death I had been called home to become head of the family and Earl and Lord of Stowey, but instead I had found myself trapped between my mother’s grinding ambitions and the dull, dull strictures of the men in suits. His lordship must sign this document, and his lordship should consider the tax advantages of deferring this dividend, and his lordship must meet urgently with the revenue or the bank manager, and on it went until his lordship told them that he didn’t give a monkey’s. To this day, when some petty bureaucrat gives me grief, I tell him to go to hell. The first Earl of Stowey was a Norman who took the land with the edge of his sword, and I would be damned if I would be hagridden to death by a pin-striped army of bores. I went back to sea to escape them.

And, till this return, I had avoided them. But there had been a price for that evasion, and the price was loneliness. I watched the pretty girl in the big catamaran and I felt a stab of self-pity. I hated that sensation. My God, but I’d chosen my path, and I had better stick to it, or else the world would mock my failure. That was pride, but I was a proud man. I might not like being called ‘my lord’, but the blood in my veins had been old when England was young. So damn the loneliness. It could always be assuaged. There would always be some empty-eyed girl, bag slung on her shoulder, waiting at a tropical quayside. It only took a nod, the girl would climb on board, and that was that till boredom or irritation dissolved the liaison. There were no ties in such relationships; no mortgages, no screaming children, no slow grinding tedium; just company.

I tacked. We were well off Bolt Head now. The sea was spattered with yachts; many, like me, heading westwards. I was not going far; just down the Devon coast. Nor was I hurrying. I lashed the tiller, then went below where I buttered a piece of bread and made a flask of tea. I breakfasted in the cockpit as terns dive-bombed the sea. There was a gentle swell, a small chop, and a steady wind. Sunflower was fairly tight on the breeze, but she held her course well. She bridled sometimes, threatening to luff, and occasionally, as a steeper chop slapped the hull, some of the wreckage would rattle down below.

Once clear of Bolt Tail I turned a few points to the north and Sunflower seemed to ease up. She was enjoying herself now, and I felt the urge to turn her bows towards the open ocean and let her sail far far away. But first I had to repair her, because only then could the two of us go back where we belonged.

By midday, under a brassy brilliant sun, we were sailing into Plymouth Sound. We passed Drake’s Island, heading for the Hamoaze. This was naval and commercial water, slicked with oil, as romantic as a sludge pump, yet out of here had sailed all the ships of English history; the Victory and the Mayflower, the Revenge and the Golden Hind.

Yet the place I sought had neither grandeur nor history, but only the hopelessness of decay. It was a boatyard consisting of a slip, a grubby dock, an empty grid, a filthy quay, a workshop, a warehouse, and a forlorn office. A few workboats were tied at the quay, but all looked ready for the scrapyard. No work seemed to be going on in the yard, though I saw an old green Jaguar parked by the offices which suggested that someone was minding the shop. After four years I’d half expected to find the old yard sold, but it was still here; a monument to sloth and carelessness.

I moored Sunflower to a decrepit fishing boat, then climbed a rusting ladder to the dock. A woman’s bicycle leaned beside the office door which had a piece of hardboard nailed across the space where a pane of glass had evidently been broken. A similar repair disfigured the door at the top of the stairs. I pushed the door open, astonishing the secretary who sat behind the ancient desk. I blew her a kiss. “You’re still here, Rita?”

“God love me!” Rita was a dim, good-natured girl who spent her days reading True Romance magazines. There was no other work for her to do in the yard except make the tea and answer the phone. “Johnny? Is it really you?”

“It’s really me.” I took her hand, made an elaborate bow, and kissed a painted fingernail. “Is the old sod in?”

“He’s probably asleep.” She stared at me. “You haven’t half got a suntan!” Then, remembering something, she dutifully frowned. “I saw it in the papers about your mother. I am sorry, John.”

I shrugged, as though I was unable to articulate my own sorrow, then pushed open the door to the inner office.

George Cullen started awake with a splutter. He tried to pretend that he had been working, and at the same time offered me a hurt look as though I’d offended him by not knocking, then, blinking fully awake, he recognised me. He smiled, decided a smile was not appropriate, and stood to offer me a hand. “My lord!”

“It’s Johnny to you,” I said, “and how are you, you old fraud?”

He shook my hand. “Johnny.” He said it tentatively, as though trying the name out, though he’d known me as nothing else since I’d been thirteen. Still, George was one of those men who liked to know a peer. “Johnny,” he said again, this time with pleasure as though he truly was glad to see me. “Quite a surprise! You’ll have a glass of something with an old friend, won’t you?”

He produced a bottle of Scotch which had a label I’d never seen before and hope never to see again. In Mozambique, which is a destination I would not recommend to passing yachtsmen, I had drunk from a bottle which purported to be Scotch. It was called ‘Sbell’, and bore a very poor copy of a Bells label. Sbell whisky was a drink for a desperate man, though it made an excellent all-purpose solvent. George’s Scotch was of the same order. I took a sip, then grimaced. “Where on earth did you get this muck, George?”

“It was a business gift, Johnny. From an associate.”

“Bloody hell.” I drank it anyway, then held out my glass for more.

George refilled my glass. He’s an affable crook. He looks as bent as any front-bench politician, what with his beer belly, jowly face, and small suspicious eyes, but he has a great taste for gossip and a healthy fear of the prison yard. He had inherited this Hamoaze boatyard from his father, but the yard didn’t do real business any more. George’s income came from fencing items thieved from boats. The police must have known about him, so the only explanation for his continued liberty must have been that he was grassing on someone. I’d known George for twenty-one years. I used to spend my holidays working in the yard. Back then there had still been a semblance of industry at Cullen’s Boats, but that pretence seemed to have been long dropped.

He waddled to the window and stared down at Sunflower. “Been far in her, Johnny?”

“Round the world, George.”

“Have you now?” He gazed at her as he stuffed his pipe with tobacco. “I’ve always fancied sailing round the world. Never had the chance, of course. Too busy.”

George couldn’t make it past Plymouth Breakwater in a gin palace, let alone sail round the world, but I smiled politely. He shrugged, then hospitably offered me his tobacco pouch. “Just visiting, are you, Johnny?”

I shook my head. “I want your grid for a couple of days, and what’s left of your workshop.”

“Of course, Johnny, of course. I’ll have to check that no one’s booked in, of course, but…”

“Shut up, George. Of course no one’s booked in. And don’t worry, I’ll earn my keep.”

“Ah.” George frowned. I suppose he had been expecting me to offer him cash, while now I was suggesting that he paid me for odd jobs, but his cupidity was beaten by his snobbishness. A lord was a lord, even if he was penniless. George lit his pipe, then went back to his littered desk. “We’ll work something out, Johnny.”

“And I want something else, George.”

He heard the wariness in my voice and matched it with his own. “Something else?”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

George might be a sluggish old toad, but he has a nose for mischief. He slumped down in his padded chair. “The police again, Johnny?”

“Not the police. A couple of bastards think I’ve got something. They came looking for it yesterday, and they might come looking again. So I don’t want them to know where I am.”

“Anyone I know?”

I described the two men as I filled my pipe with George’s black shag. I couldn’t give much of a description of the big balding man who had helmed the dory, but I offered an excellent description of the thin man who had such a crisp public school accent.

“Garrard,” George interrupted me when I mentioned the thin man’s voice.

“Garrard?”

“Trevor Garrard. Used to be in the army. A right posh villain, he is. Was he carrying a knife?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Garrard, then. You don’t have to worry about his mate, he’s just a thick lump of muscle, nothing more, but you should watch Garrard. He’s nasty.” I was not in the least surprised that George knew the two men because there was very little villainy in the Southwest that George did not know about. “Garrard was cashiered out the army,” George went on, “then he got snared by the Fraud Squad, so now he’s a winkler. He did a bit of bookie’s business at one time, but I don’t suppose he dares show his face on a racecourse these days. He was too violent, you see, and the coppers got a line on him, so nowadays he’s mostly a winkler.”

“A Winkler?” I asked, wondering if the Winklers were a notorious family of criminals.

George poured himself more whisky. “A winkler,” he said with plump dignity, “is a rent-control operative.”

“Come again, George?”

He sighed. “Suppose you’ve got a property, Johnny, and there’s a sitting tenant in it, paying you a lousy rent, and the law won’t let you turf the useless bugger out. But you’re losing money on the property and you want to put another tenant inside who’ll pay you a proper rent. So what do you do? You can’t hire another bleeding lawyer, because you’ll get the same answer, so you hire yourself a winkler. Things begin to happen to your tenant. Nasty things. The water gets shut off, rats take up residence, and perhaps half the roof falls in. Their pussy cats get strangled and their car tyres get slashed. The tenant eventually gets fed up, moves out, and you pay the winkler for his services. He’s winkled them out, you see.” He added this last explanation helpfully.

“You know this fellow, Garrard?” I asked.

“Not personally” – George was being evasive now – “but I know he’s done some jobs for local businessmen. He comes from Bristol, I think. Ronny’s from London, but he’s not such a bad lot.”

“Ronny’s the bald one?”

George nodded. “Ronny Peel. He’d beat you into pulp if he was told to, but he’s not an animal, know what I mean? But that Garrard” – George shook his head worriedly – “I wouldn’t touch him, Johnny. He’s trouble.”

“I don’t want to touch him. I just don’t want him to know where I am.”

“I’ll keep quiet,” he promised, and I believed the promise because George’s criminality does not extend to violence; in fact he probably hates the sight of blood. Besides, George and I go back a long way. In the faraway past he’d given me a refuge from my family and, in his lackadaisical way, he had introduced me to boats. It was in this shabby yard that I’d learned to weld steel and work wood. It was here that I’d found my first proper job as a crew member on an oceangoing yacht. George had known me a long time, which by itself did not guarantee any favours, but I was also John Frederick Albert Rossendale, the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, and that helped. It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. So now, because of George’s aristocratic tastes, Sunflower and I were safe.

I had been wrong about needing George’s grid for a couple of days. More like a couple of weeks. Once I got Sunflower out of the water I saw just how sorry her hull was: the poor thing looked more like a floating compost heap than a yacht. It was no wonder she’d been so sluggish crossing the Atlantic. I should have anti-fouled her in America or the Caribbean, but I’d been reluctant to pay American prices for anti-fouling paint.

But, by waiting, I had forced myself to do more than just anti-foul Sunflower. In places the old paint had abraded right back to its epoxy pitch base. What I really needed to do was strip the whole hull back to bright steel, then start again. I should have craned her out of the water, screened her off, and done what Charlie would have called a proper job, except I had neither the time nor the money to be so thorough.

Instead I would have to do the best I could on George’s grid. A grid is simply a raised platform on which a boat can be stranded as the tide falls. At mean low tide, in George’s yard, Sunflower would be perched about eight feet above the water and, between tides, I would have around seven hours to work on her before the rising flood forced me to stop. I’d thus be needing a whole series of low tides. She was well berthed to the quay, but to stop her toppling sideways into George’s mucky dock I took a half-inch line from her upper spreaders and tied it to a ringbolt on the outside wall of his workshop. I knotted red rags round the rope and put a large sign by the ringbolt: ‘Leave this rope alone!’ I’d once watched a beautiful Danish ketch fall twelve feet off a grid in Brittany. It wasn’t pretty.

I fired up George’s ancient compressor, stripped myself to the waist, and hitched up his sand-blaster. Or rather sludge-blaster, for I couldn’t afford to buy the proper sand so had to make do with a miserable pile that mouldered damply behind the warehouse. The diesel fuel which fired the compressor also came from George’s stock, and was fouled. Even when I managed to make the compressor work, the damp sand clotted and jammed the hopper’s throat every few minutes, so progress, at best, was fitful. I used the enforced pauses to slap a rust-preventing resin on to the newly cleaned patches of Sunflower’s hull. Between later tides I would strip the resin, then slap on a holding primer, four coats of epoxy tar, one coat of anti-fouling primer and two coats of the anti-fouling. It would be mind-numbing work, but if I did it well enough then the hull would be protected from rust for the next ten years. When the rising tide forced me to abandon work on the hull I went inside the cabin where I was beginning to rebuild the damaged lockers. I made good progress, but still my grease tin of money was taking a beating.

I needed cash. That was ironic, considering Jennifer Pallavicini had been dangling twenty million pounds in front of me, while now my hopes of earning a few quid from George were clearly ill-founded for his yard was utterly bare of work. “Why do you keep it on?” I asked him.

“Gives me something to do, Johnny. Gets me away from the wife,” he chuckled. He was standing beside the compressor, watching me work. The hopper’s throat had just choked up and, before I dug the soggy sand free, I was wiping resin on to the bright steel of Sunflower’s hull. “And there’s the other side of it,” George went on.

“I hadn’t forgotten.” The other side of it was the stolen merchandise that went through his warehouse. George specialised in bent chandlery; forcibly retired Decca sets or radios.

“Mind you,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of selling out. The leisure market’s on the way up, and someone could make a nice little bundle by turning the yard into a yacht-servicing business.”

“Why not you, George?”

“I’m not a well man, Johnny.” I’d forgotten how George was always suffering from some new and undiagnosable ailment.

“So the yard’s for sale?”

He shrugged. “For the right price. It’s prime riverside property, after all.” He gestured about the yard as though he was selling a stretch of the St Tropez waterfront rather than a scabby junk heap mouldering around a smelly dock. “Are you interested, Johnny?”

“Me?” I laughed. “Just painting Sunflower will clean me out, not to mention rebuilding your equipment.” I scrambled up to the dock and tried to restart the compressor, but the water in George’s diesel fuel wouldn’t drive the engine. I swore, knowing I would have to siphon the fuel and clean the system. It was my own fault, of course, for using George’s yard. If I’d had the money I’d have paid to have Sunflower properly shot-blasted, but instead this old sand-blaster would have to suffice.

George watched me bleed the compressor’s fuel line. “Johnny,” he said after a bit.

“George?” I spat watery diesel into the dock.

“That painting…” He paused. He must have known that my trouble with Garrard had been caused by the Van Gogh, but this was the first time he had mentioned it. “Did they ever pin it on you?”

“If they had, George, do you think I’d be here? I’d be in the Scrubs, slopping out shit pails.”

He considered that answer and evidently found it convincing. “Of course,” he said, “now that your mother’s dead, I suppose the painting belongs to you?”

“Not according to her will. She left it to my sister.” I said it to discourage George’s speculation, though I suspected that Jennifer Pallavicini was right and that the painting, if it could ever be recovered, was probably mine. Twenty million pounds, and all mine, except, of course, that if the painting ever did reappear there would be a salivating horde of lawyers and taxmen scrabbling to get their slices of the money. But even those rapacious bastards would find it hard to destroy all of twenty million.

“It must be worth a penny or two.” George must have been guessing my thoughts.

“Several million pennies, George.”

“How much?”

I straightened up from the engine. “Sir Leon Buzzacott offered twenty million quid the other day, which means it’s probably worth a bit more.”

George puffed at his pipe. He clearly wasn’t certain whether to believe me. In his line of business a good night’s work yielded a few thousand, not millions. “I don’t like paintings,” he said eventually. “I used to deal in a few. Rubbish, most of them. Seascapes, that sort of thing, but it was never worth the bother.” He shrugged, evidently regretting some past escapade. “Those two fellows,” George went on, “do you think they’re after the painting?”

“Of course they’re after the painting. So is Sir Leon Buzzacott. So is my twin sister. Half the damn world wants the thing, but all I want is some clean diesel fuel. Have you got any?”

He shook his head, dismissing the problem of the contaminated fuel. “So you could be a millionaire, Johnny?”

“I told you. It belongs to my sister. Now bugger off, George, I’m trying to work.”

He buggered off and I worked on the compressor till five o’clock when I climbed to Rita’s office where a cup of tea waited for me. I telephoned Charlie’s house, but he still hadn’t returned from Hertfordshire. “Is there a number in Hertfordshire?” I asked Yvonne. She said there was, but that Charlie was never there. She said he telephoned her when he needed to, but she gave me the number anyway. She sounded desperately tired. I asked her to tell Charlie that I was now at George Cullen’s boatyard. She promised she would, but she didn’t sound very friendly as she made the promise.

I tried the Hertfordshire number. It was the site office of a construction company and a gruff man said he hadn’t seen Charlie Barratt for two days. I put the phone down. “What the hell’s Charlie doing in Hertfordshire?” I asked Rita, more in frustration than in any hope of fetching an answer.

She blew on her newly-painted fingernails. “He’s a big man now, Charlie is. He’s ever so rich.”

“And I’m the Pope.” I knew Charlie had done well since he’d settled back home, but Rita’s awed tones seemed to be over-egging the pudding.

“He is,” she insisted. “Plant hire. You name it and Charlie’s got it. Artics, tippers, cranes, earth-movers, bulldozers.” Rita shrugged. “He’s got ever such a nice boat, too.”

“A yacht?”

She shook her head. “A big cabin cruiser. It’s got one of those thingummyjigs on the front.”

I tried to guess what a thingummyjig was. “A radar aerial?”

“A hot tub,” she remembered. “It’s ever so smart. He brought it down here last year.”

Charlie clearly had done well. When I’d left England he had been the owner-operator of an ancient Commer lorry; yet now, if Rita hadn’t confused him with anyone else, his business had flourished. I was pleased for, if any man deserved success, it was Charlie. He had always been a hard worker, and had a slew of practical skills to work with. When we had been boys, he and I had worked together in George Cullen’s yard and even at fourteen Charlie had shown the practical skills of an adult. His schoolteachers, naturally, had written him off as a dumb peasant, but Charlie had always been too smart to let any teacher meddle with his ambitions.

I finished my tea, went back downstairs, and stripped down the compressor’s fuel system. By nightfall I had it working, ready for the morning. It was what Charlie would have called a proper job and, to celebrate it, I poured a glass of George’s ghastly whisky, made myself a mushy stew, then slept.

I woke at one o’clock.

At first I thought it was the ebbing tide dropping Sunflower’s keel on to the grid that had woken me; then, in the tiny light leaking through the companionway, I saw the time and realised it was only twenty-three minutes away from low tide which meant that Sunflower must have been stranded on the grid for at least four hours. I listened for whatever had woken me. I could only hear the halliards slapping the mast, the wind sighing at the spreaders, and the slop of river water in George’s dock. Everything seemed normal, but nevertheless something had disturbed me. In a night watch, in the middle of an ocean, the slightest change of Sunflower’s sound or motion would bring me to wakefulness, and something, even in the safe haven of George’s dock, had just triggered that alarm system. I reached out for the light switch, then froze.

The gate to George’s yard squealed. I realised that it had been that same creak of unoiled hinges that had woken me. It was a sound that always made me alert, even in daytime. I wanted to be left alone in George’s yard, and whenever I heard the squeal of the hinges I would warily make sure that the visitor was not some unwelcome person from my past. Now, in the depths of the night, I had been woken by the warning sound. I left the cabin unlit, rolled out of the bunk, and pulled on a pair of jeans.

I had been sleeping with the companionway open, so I made no noise as I slipped up to the cockpit. By standing on a thwart I could just see over the sill of the quayside.

A dark-painted van, with no lights, was being driven slowly into George’s yard. I did not move. It was possible, even likely, that these were some of George’s friends who had permission to use his warehouse. The van was probably loaded with stolen goods. The only reason I was suspicious was that George had not given me any warning. Usually, when some mayhem was imminent, he would tell me not to worry if I heard something go bump in the night.

The van braked to a halt. Its motor was cut.

I slid my special boathook out of its brackets.

The van’s front doors opened quietly. Two men climbed out. George always left a light burning outside his office door and, in its glow, I could see that one of the men was burly and bald, the other thin, commanding, and black-haired. It was Garrard and Peel, who now stood beside the van staring to where Sunflower’s masts reared above the grid. And how the hell, I wondered, had they found me? It had to be George. Doubtless he had done a favour to someone by betraying my whereabouts, and I promised myself that I’d kick his fat hide to kingdom come when I had the chance. I supposed it was my own fault for telling George that the painting was worth at least twenty million quid. George’s cupidity must have overwhelmed his love of a lord.

The two men would have seen me if I’d tried to climb up over the quay. I did not want them to see me. They thought I was fast asleep, and I wanted them to continue in that blissful ignorance. I glanced towards Sunflower’s dark cabin, wondering whether I had time to fetch my rigging knife, but knew I dared not waste a second.

For to hesitate would be to trap myself. The two men were already walking softly towards Sunflower as I slid over her stern and lowered myself to the grid. The water was black beneath me. I could hear the men’s footsteps as I lowered myself again, this time into the black, filthy, and freezing water. I shivered, then pushed away from the grid’s piles towards one of the decrepit fishing boats at the end of the small dock. The weighted boathook tried to drag me down, but I did not have far to go, and the impetus of my push carried me to the dock’s side wall where a rusty ring gave me a handhold. I pushed on again, this time hiding in the impenetrable shadow between the fishing boat and the wall.

A torch beam slashed down into the dock, flicked across the water, then settled on Sunflower. The beam was dazzling for a few seconds, then was switched off. I was struggling forward, ducking under the thick tyres which George used as fenders. I needed to round the dock’s corner to the river wall where an iron ladder climbed to the quayside.

I heard one of the men drop down on to Sunflower’s deck. The torch was switched on again. They had abandoned stealth by now, but their bird was flown, planning his own ambush. I was hurrying for I did not want to give the two men time to search Sunflower, and thus undo all my repair work. I cleared the fishing boat, hauled myself forward on its bow mooring rope and turned the corner into the tug of the tide’s current. For a second I feared I would be swept downstream by this last feeble ebb, but I lunged the boathook forward and managed to snag one of the ladder’s rungs. The hook made a dull clunking noise, but the two men were making enough noise of their own, and did not hear me. They were talking. The noise I feared was the splintering sound as they began to search Sunflower’s half-repaired cabin, but so far they only talked.

I climbed the ladder’s rusted rungs. The torch beam slashed over my head like the loom of a lighthouse. I froze.

“The bastard’s gone.” That was Garrard’s distinctive voice. I heard him grunt as he hauled himself back to the quay’s top. “Try the office.”

I heard the office door rattle, but it was locked and the big bald man made no attempt to force it. The torch beam began circling the yard again. I climbed to the top of the ladder, waited till the light was probing the rubbish tip behind the warehouse, then rolled into the shadow of one of the many junk piles which littered George’s yard.

I would have preferred it if the two men had been on board Sunflower, for then, given the advantage of the quayside, I would have been above them. I’d contemplated trapping them there and, using the boathook as a weapon, forcing some answers from them. Instead both men were roaming the yard. I thought that if I stayed motionless they might abandon the search and leave me in peace. It wasn’t that I was scared of a fight, but there’s no point in fighting superior odds unless it’s really necessary, and so I stayed still.

Garrard stayed by Sunflower and told Peel where to search. The bald man thus clambered futilely about George’s yard while Garrard idled on the quay above my boat. And while he idled he discovered the rope that I’d tied from the upper spreaders to the ringbolt.

Garrard had a smaller torch and, in its light, he examined the bow and stern ropes and the spring lines, then flashed the beam up to trace the rope that was taut at the spreaders. He walked to the workshop wall and tugged on the rope and he saw how the added tension dragged the mast towards him. He tested the rope again, and I knew what was passing through his evil mind. Without that tether, Sunflower’s balance would be very precarious. She was resting on her long, deep keel and, though she weighed a good few tons, it would not take much effort to unbalance her. It was just about low tide and, with one good push, she would fall like a truck into the shallow waters eight feet below her. Her mast would break and God knew what other damage would be done.

Garrard plucked down my notice which warned no one to touch the rope and tore it into two. I tensed, ready to charge at him, but instead of drawing his knife and slashing the rope he lit a cigarette and leaned against the workshop wall. It seemed he had no intention of destroying Sunflower, just as, strangely, he showed no sign of wanting to search her. It appeared the two men had only one interest this night: finding me.

“Bugger’s gone.” Peel trudged disconsolately into view.

They spoke softly for a minute or two, too softly for me to hear anything they said. Both their torches raked once more round the yard, the beams scything over my head, but for some reason neither man searched the low heap öf metal behind which I was hidden. They did shine their torches down into the moored boats, but it was clear they had given up any hope of finding me.

“Fetch the van,” Garrard said.

Peel started the van and switched on its headlights. In the strong light I could see Garrard was dressed in his horsy cavalry twill, waistcoat and tweed jacket. I could also see that his right hand was bandaged from the savaging I’d given it with the boathook. He looked like the kind of man I used to know well: loud-voiced and confident, always to be found at a racecourse where he’d have known the stable lad of an unfancied horse in the third race which was worth a bob or two on the nose. Such men had knowing eyes and bitter resentments. They could be good companions for an afternoon, but not for longer.

Peel put the van into gear. The bandage on Garrard’s right hand was not inconveniencing him for, almost casually, he drew his knife and reached up to Sunflower’s tethering rope. The knife must have been razor sharp, for it sliced through the half-inch rope without any apparent effort.

I tensed again in sudden flaring panic.

I could see, in the van’s headlights, that Sunflower had not moved. I had her leaning towards the dock, which offered a margin of safety, but my heart was flogging like a wet sail in a headwind all the same. Garrard watched her, half expecting to see the yacht crash down into the Stygian blackness beneath, but she stayed upright. He crushed his cigarette under his right shoe, opened the passenger door, and the van drove away.

I waited. The van disappeared behind the workshop. I heard the yard gates open, the van growl through, then the gates crash shut. I listened as the van drove up the street, paused at the main road junction, then accelerated away.

Silence.

The wind was lifting the cut rope into the night, but Sunflower, good Sunflower, was stable and solid.

I stood up slowly. I was freezing cold. I was wearing nothing but one pair of sodden jeans and my muscles were stiff as boards. I took the wet jeans off, walked to the quayside, and tossed them down into Sunflower’s cockpit. This was no time to be worrying about being naked, my priority was to retrieve that flying rope and rerig it, and that, I knew, would take some careful work.

The rope was cut, so I needed some more to make its length good. George had some old rope lying in the yard, but I did not trust it. Instead, and taking exquisite care not to upset Sunflower’s precarious balance, I lowered myself into her cockpit. I stayed on the dockside gunwales, adding my weight to her stability. In a cave-locker in the cockpit I had some spare warps. I found one and tossed it up to the quay, then, still staying hard by the dock wall, I groped with the boathook for the rope’s bitter end.

The wind was carrying the cut rope away from me, out over the dark waters of the dock. I reached for the errant line with the boathook’s full length, but the weighted head made the implement much too unwieldy for such a delicate job. I slotted the heavy boathook back into place and pulled out the other one. That did the job quickly, snagging the wind-whipped rope-end that I drew towards me. I held on to it as I climbed back to the quayside.

It took five minutes to disentangle the rope from where it had blown itself about the shrouds. The wind dried me as I worked, but I was still bitterly cold.

I tied the cut rope to my spare warp with a sheet bend, then made a lorryman’s hitch in the warp. I threaded the loose end through the ringbolt, back through the hitch’s loop, then hauled it tight. I felt Sunflower’s mast come towards me as the rope took her weight. I made two turns and hitches to make the whole thing fast, then let out my breath. Sunflower was secure again.

“Clever boy,” said Trevor Garrard.

I turned.

He was no more than five paces from me. He held the knife loosely in his bandaged right hand, but it wasn’t the long blade which disturbed me, rather his face, which was lit by the bulb outside George’s office. He was utterly confident. Whatever happened now, and it was bound to be violent, this man had no fear.

“But you’re not so clever as you think,” he went on in a mocking tone, “because it was really rather obvious that you’d make your boat safe as soon as we’d gone, so all I had to do was stay in the yard.” He smiled in tribute of his own cleverness, then gave me a small mocking bow. “Good evening, my lord.”

I said nothing. Being naked made me feel horribly vulnerable. I had no weapon, and this man’s calm assurance was very frightening. He might smile at me, but his eyes were feral, suggesting a man who knew neither pity nor remorse. A bitter man, fallen from grace and resentful. I backed away from him, but there was nowhere to flee to, except the river, and Garrard had carefully placed himself between me and that refuge.

I backed round the workshop corner in time to hear the main gate creak open again.

“That’s Peel coming back,” Garrard said. “You haven’t met Peel properly, have you? I’ll introduce you in a moment.”

My right foot jarred against a loose metal stanchion. I stooped quickly and picked it up. It was a two-foot length of rusting angle-iron sharpened to a crude point. The weapon gave me some confidence, but it did not seem to worry Garrard. “Peel!” he shouted.

“I’m here, Mr Garrard.”

“Find a tarpaulin, Peel.” Garrard gave his orders as though he was still in the army. He looked back to me. “Peel is not the brightest luminary to emerge from the state-school system, but he has the gross virtue of huge bodily strength. He used to be a professional wrestler. If you attack me with that crude piece of iron, my lord, I shall be forced to hurt you rather nastily.”

“I don’t have the painting,” I said in a futile hope that the denial would give him pause.

“Of course you don’t. My task is simply to make certain that you don’t get it back.”

He was so foully sure of himself, and he was confusing me. Why was he so confident that I didn’t have the painting? He had surely suspected me when he had searched Sunflower, but tonight he had not even bothered to go into her cabin. I was trying to snatch answers from a fog, and the fog was shot through with rank fear. “Do you have the painting?” I asked him.

He laughed, but said nothing.

“Do you know who’s got it?” I tried. I did not expect an answer now; I was merely trying to keep him talking while I looked for an opportunity to attack him. I was holding the angle-iron low, like a knife. I guessed I could get in one nasty blow before Garrard could use his blade. I was apprehensive, but it wasn’t my first fight, and I knew these next few moments had to be carefully planned, then efficiently executed. It’s like sailing in filthy weather; the better prepared you are, the more likely your survival is. I was outnumbered, and plainly Garrard was chillingly confident of his skills, but I still had an excellent chance. I only needed to reach the river and, because I was naked and they were fully dressed, I knew neither man could outswim me. In the meantime I must behave as they expected me to behave: timidly. “Do you know who’s got the painting?” I asked again.

“Let us say, my lord, that I know you don’t have it.”

“Then why the hell did you search my boat?” I almost charged him then, but I saw a wariness in his eye that kept me still.

“I searched your boat,” he said, “to see if I could discover any correspondence. But clearly, if you are planning to retrieve the painting, you’ve made the arrangements by phone.”

“You’re crazy! I haven’t made any arrangements!”

“But you’re negotiating with Buzzacott. We have to stop that, my lord.”

“Got it!” Peel had found the filthy sheet of old canvas which had half protected George’s pile of sand. He dragged it into the yard, then grinned when he saw I was bare-arsed naked. I had turned to face him, but kept glancing back to make sure Garrard did not move. He didn’t.

“His lordship appears to be shivering with the cold,” Garrard called to his partner, “so wrap him up. But don’t mark him!”

Peel advanced on me. He had spread the canvas out like a matador’s cloak. I was frightened, so much so that I could feel the goose-bumps on my naked flesh and I could hear the blood thumping at my ear-drums, but I was still confident that I might yet outwit these two and reach the river. I feared for what might happen to Sunflower, but at least I would escape a filleting. Then the import of what Garrard had just said dawned on me. He didn’t want me marked. Which surely meant he wouldn’t use the knife?

“Easy now, guv.” Peel had a raw east London voice. He had lumbered to within a few paces of me and now spread the canvas wide to engulf me.

I turned and charged at Garrard. I shouted as I charged. The knife in his bandaged right hand was a sliver of mirror-bright light. I planned to shoulder-charge him and to drive the angle-iron like a rusting stake into his belly. He seemed frozen by astonishment at my sudden attack, and I felt the brief fierce joy of imminent victory. I drew the stake back for the single crippling blow, then struck.

And he moved. One second he was a sitting duck, and the next he had leaped aside like a hare. He merely put out a foot.

I tripped on his foot and sprawled on to the yard’s cobbles. The angle-iron clattered away.

It had all been so shamefully easy for Garrard, who now stood over me with his knife. “Does your lordship wish to offer us any further amusement?”

I struck up at him with my fist, but Garrard avoided the blow easily. He reached down with his left hand, I flailed at it, but he simply jabbed his fingers at my neck and a sudden, searing pain paralysed me. I gasped for breath, couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, and had to lie there, wide-eyed, as Peel swathed me in the canvas. He wrapped the clammy material round me with movements that were almost tender. “There,” he said soothingly, “that didn’t hurt, did it?”

Anger and fear and pain flared in me. I was angry at being so easily humiliated, and suddenly terrified because I was now at their mercy. The pain receded, and I found I could move again, but the canvas restricted me as tightly as a strait-jacket. “I promised not to mark you, my lord, but I said nothing about not hurting you.” The sardonic Garrard stood above me. “So kindly co-operate with us.”

I stared up at him, resenting and hating him, but utterly helpless. I’d been taught a lesson: that Garrard was an expert in violence and pain. The army had trained him to it, but had been unable to discipline him, so now he was a dangerous animal, loose and vicious. He sheathed his knife. “I always believe some explanation is a courtesy, so I will merely say, my lord, that your sin consisted in inheriting the painting.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Truth and desperation gave my words vehemence, but they left Garrard quite unmoved.

“So the time has come for you to pay for your sin. We must all do it, some of us sooner rather than later. Bring his lordship, Peel.”

Peel lifted me as if I’d been a child. I was trying to free one hand to stab my fingers at his eyes, but he sensed what I was doing and just gripped my canvas-wrapped body in a crushing bear hug. He carried me across the yard, then lowered me on to the quay’s parapet where he knelt beside me to stop any attempt I might make to free myself of the sodden and clinging material.

“The object of the exercise,” Garrard announced confidently, “is to make it appear as though you drowned in your sleep.” He swung himself down to Sunflower’s deck and, a moment later, reappeared with my sleeping bag which he brought back up to the quayside. “It has frequently occurred to me, my lord, that the well-educated should take to violent crime more often. Has it ever occurred to you that the success of the police is almost always due to the low average intelligence of the criminal? I intend your death to be entirely above suspicion, which is why I, and not Peel, am in charge of this operation. Is that not right, Peel?”

“Yes, Mr Garrard.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said. The fear was making me sob. I hadn’t been over-fearful of the fight, I could even contemplate being hurt, but now I knew I was going to die and there was an implacability in these two men which told me there would be no escape. I was frightened. I was more frightened than I have ever been. “For Christ’s sake…” I began.

“Shut the fuck up,” Garrard said, and for the first time there was a real savagery in his voice. Till now he had been amusing himself by playing with me, but now the real evening’s business must begin. “Hold him tight, Peel.”

Peel dutifully kept the canvas gripped tight. I lurched suddenly, attempting to break free, but it was hopeless. I tried again, twisting and thrusting and straining, but the huge man held me down with a dismissive ease. He had doubtless taken on far bigger men than I in the wrestling ring.

I was going to die, but first I must watch Sunflower’s downfall. Garrard was carefully untying the knot which held her hard against the quay. There was to be no clean slash of the rope this time, for doubtless a cut rope would invite suspicion. Instead it would look as though the rope had undone itself, Sunflower had toppled, and I had been trapped in her canted and flooded hull.

“For God’s sake, Garrard!” I shouted. “I don’t know what the hell this is about!”

Garrard ignored me, but his bigger companion seemed genuinely concerned at my distress. “Calm down” – Peel patted my shoulder – “all this hollering won’t help.” He sounded like a kindly parent soothing a nervous child at a dentist’s.

“For Christ’s sake!” The fear was like bile in my throat. I was staring down death’s gullet and I was helpless. I was crying, and I was ashamed of crying, and I was trying vainly to twist my way out of the swathing canvas.

“Calm down,” Peel said again. “It won’t last long. Do you want me to ask Mr Garrard for a ciggy?”

Garrard had freed the rope and now walked with it up one side of the dock, out towards the river, so that when he pulled he would be dragging Sunflower away from the dock’s end wall. “No!” I shouted.

“It’s all right.” Peel seemed very worried for me. “Are you sure you don’t want a ciggy?”

“No!”

The cry was despairing.

Sunflower was moving.

It took all the strength in Garrard’s wiry body. At first he could not move the big boat, but then he began to pull rhythmically and, inch by inch, the hull responded. I heard the fenders shifting against the dock’s wall. I was trying to protest. I was half blinded by tears of rage, but I could still see the mast-tip moving against the night’s clouds.

“No!” I wailed the protest.

The mast-tip moved a full foot, returned, then moved again, and this time it did not oscillate back. Sunflower was teetering on the knife edge of her long keel. Garrard grunted, strained, and I saw the mast move away from me.

“No!” But this time the cry was a sob. I twisted to the dock edge so I could watch my boat fall.

Sunflower fell. The springs momentarily checked her fall, but the weight of her steel hull was too great and I heard the cleats rip clean out of her deck. She gathered speed. Garrard switched on his torch.

Sunflower’s chines crashed on to the edge of the grid. The whole boat bounced and shook. I saw the splash of water as her mast slashed down into the dock, then heard the grinding and splintering as the falling hull drove the tall mast down into the dock’s bottom. Her keel was still lodged on the grid. For a second I thought the whole hull would turn over, but then the keel scraped free of the timbers and the steel hull crashed down into the shallow water. A small tidal wave creamed white to rock the moored fishing boats. The wave crashed against the dock’s sides, then flowed back. I half expected the liferaft canister to explode its pneumatic contents, but the canister stayed shut as the water in the dock splashed, gurgled and subsided.

“Most successful,” Garrard said happily as he shone his torch into the dock.

Sunflower lay on her port side, half sunk in the black disturbed water. Her mast was torn off in a tangle of shrouds and halliards. From this angle the hull looked relatively unscathed, but I knew that her portside guardrails would certainly have sheared, and that her scuttles were probably broken. As the tide rose she would fill, then be sunk.

“What we do now” – Garrard had walked back to where Peel guarded me – “is to drown you, my lord.”

“Do I put him in the sleeping bag first?” Peel asked.

“He will be easier to manage when he is dead. Just like all the others. So take him down there, Peel, and give him a very good baptism. Total immersion, I think.” Garrard mockingly touched his forelock to me. “Goodnight, my lord.”

“For God’s sake!” I had no fight left in me, nothing now but an abject, bowel-loosening terror. I really was going to die in this miserable dock, and I didn’t even know why. “For God’s sake! I haven’t done anything!”

“You inherited, my lord, that is what you did wrong.” Garrard laughed. He was pleased with himself, and well he might be. The stratagem he had devised for my death was nothing short of brilliant. I could not guess what means of my murder he had planned, but once he had discovered the condition of my boat he had improvised this apparent accident. In the morning, when Rita or George found Sunflower, it would be assumed that I had drowned in the night because I had not tethered my boat properly.

And I still did not know why my death was sought, except that it must be connected with the Van Gogh. “Who sent you?” I pleaded.

But Garrard was finished with me. He pushed back his cuff to look at his watch. “Let’s get on with it, Peel!”

Peel hesitated. Not out of any sudden pity for me, but because he was trying to work out how best to carry my wrapped body down the sheer dock wall to the water.

“Tie him up!” Garrard sounded exasperated. “For God’s sake, Peel, use what few bloody brains you’ve got!”

“But I haven’t got any rope.”

“God spare me from employing cretins.” Garrard strode away to find a length of rope.

“Who sent you?” I asked Peel.

“You know we can’t tell you that. Are you sure you don’t want a ciggy?”

“Who?” I pleaded.

“Jesus Christ!”

This was not the answer to my question, but rather a symptom of fear. Peel, who had been pinioning me, abruptly straightened up. “Mr Garrard! The police!” He hardly needed to shout the warning, for headlights were suddenly brilliant in the yard, throwing a bright light on to Garrard who was trying to shield his eyes. A car’s engine roared loudly. Peel, when he drove the van back to the yard, must have left the gate open, for I’d heard nothing.

A single car accelerated into the yard. Garrard fled into the alley behind the warehouse. I was shouting. The driver of the car must have locked his handbrake for the back wheels skidded around to slash the headlights past me.

The car stopped. Peel had already abandoned me and was running for dear life into the shadows behind the workshop. I rolled over and over, trying to free myself of the constricting canvas. I could hear Peel scrambling away, then I saw Garrard sprinting across the yard towards the open gate. “Stop him!” I shouted.

I freed myself of the canvas and lurched to my feet. The car’s lights were dazzling me now. I saw a tall man’s silhouette. He was ignoring my attackers, and instead just walked slowly towards me. “You should have stopped them,” I protested feebly.

“Bloody hell fire.” The man stopped a few paces from me. He was still standing in the headlights’ full glare, so all I could see of him was his shape. He laughed. “Just look at the state of you, boy! You’re as naked as the day I found you in Sally Salter’s caravan. Except you were having a deal more fun that day.”

“Oh, my God.” It wasn’t the police. It was Charlie Barratt. My knees began to shake. I was staggering with weakness and relief and happiness and the sheer backwash of a terrible and unnerving fear. “Oh, my God.”

“Hello, Johnny.” He ran forward because I was collapsing.

“I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t.

“It’s OK, Johnny.” His arms caught me, held me, then leaned me gently against the workshop wall.

“Oh, my God.” My eyes were tight closed, but I could still see the dark water into which, in another moment, I’d have been plunged head first. I imagined the filthy cold water forcing itself down my gullet and so real was the feeling that I suddenly gagged. I dropped to my knees and vomited. I didn’t think I had ever been so near death. I was shaking, shivering, weeping, spewing.

Charlie fetched a rug from his car and draped it round my shoulders. I was trying to apologise. I felt ashamed. I was crying helplessly. I was shivering and crying and vomiting, yet Charlie crouched beside me and pushed a flask to my lips. “Drink up, Johnny.”

It was Scotch. I gagged on it, spat, then seized the flask to drink it properly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

“Shut up, you bloody fool. Drink.”

And suddenly I knew everything would be all right, because I had found my friend. Or rather he had found me. And saved me.