Sea Lord

Part Three

I sailed away, but I didn’t go south. I went north. It was a bastard of a voyage into the teeth of a nasty wind, and a voyage made worse by a persistent equinoctial gale that tried to drive Sunflower into Biscay. Luckily we had enough westing to weather the two days and nights of wind, but it made the approach to the Channel a long fight against the northwesterlies that followed the storm. Once again I saw Sunflower’s reluctance to go to England: she blew out the clew of the storm jib, the topping lift broke, and a pin came out of a sheave in the self-steering gear. They were all simple enough repairs, but were best done in calmer weather. That weather came as we passed the Lizard. The wind died and there was only a long, long greasy swell from the west over which we crept on Sunflower’s motor.

I passed Salcombe by. I couldn’t face Charlie. He had repaired my boat, provisioned me, and I knew all that generosity had been a vicarious adventure for Charlie. He could not be a sea-gypsy any more, so he had made it possible for me to go back to the deep waters in his place; but now I was crawling back with my tail between my legs. The time would come when I’d explain everything to him, but for now I could not bear to see the disappointment on his face, so I sailed up the Devon coast to the anonymity of the River Exe where I moored Sunflower at a vacant buoy. The sky clouded over at dusk and, by nightfall, it was raining. Welcome to England.

I was woken at three in the morning by an irate man who had just motored from Guernsey and wanted his mooring buoy back. I obliged him, anchoring Sunflower in what seemed like a vacant patch of the river instead. At five in the morning I was woken again as the falling tide grounded me. By seven Sunflower was lying canted on her starboard chine in the middle of a drying sandbank. It was still raining.

It took me the rest of the day to find a pub that could point me towards a man who might just have a spare mooring that I could possibly rent. In the end I found such a man and he didn’t charge me a penny. He was a fisherman whose boat had stayed ashore since the winter. “It ain’t worth the bother,” he told me, “because there’s nothing left out there, not even scruff. They’ve fished it clean! You can spend a week out there and only get a wet arse for your trouble.” I consoled him with a pint, then told him I had to go to London for two days. “Your yacht’ll be safe, boy, never you mind. But put your oars behind my garden shed, otherwise they’ll be stolen, sure as eggs.” I’d rowed the dinghy ashore, because I didn’t want to risk using the outboard and it being stolen while the dinghy was marooned on the foreshore.

I caught a train next morning and, because there wasn’t a spare seat, stood all the way from Devon to London. By the time the train pulled into Paddington I was in a foul temper.

London didn’t help my mood. I’d just spent six weeks in the Atlantic where the greatest inconvenience had been listening to a yellow-bellied Swede, but London was nothing but inconvenience. It was crowded, stinking and self-important. The people had faces wan as curdled milk. They scurried like rats through their noisy tunnels, they littered, and all about them was noise. Noise, noise, Goddamned bloody noise. Trains clattering, taxis thumping, horns and voices and sirens and jackhammers battered the air. I had not visited London in over four years, and I hoped to God I would never have to visit the place again.

I caught a bus to the Strand, then walked to the solicitors’ office. Sir Oliver Bulstrode was not in the building, but would I like to leave a message? The girl at the reception desk was plainly intimating that scruffy men walking unannounced off the pavement were not welcome as clients at Bulstrode, Finch, Finch and McElroy. “I’ll wait,” I said curtly.

I sat down in an ancient leather chair and picked up a copy of The Field.

“Are you a client, sir?” The receptionist was looking understandably alarmed. I was wearing my cleanest jeans, my least dirty shirt, and a pair of fairly new tennis shoes, but I still didn’t look much like the usual class of gold-plated shit that did business with Bulstrode.

“I’m a client,” I said. “My name’s Rossendale.”

“Rossendale?”

“As in Stowey, Earl of,” I said.

There was a pause of two heartbeats. “Would you like coffee, my lord? Or something stronger, perhaps?”

I smiled back at her. It wasn’t her fault that British Rail couldn’t run a railroad, or that I was pissed off with London, or that I was angry at my twin sister, or that I was dressed like a vagabond. “What I’d really like,” I said, “is to take you out to lunch, but as I have to speak with Sir Oliver I’ll settle for a glass of his best Scotch instead.”

Sir Oliver arrived a half-hour later. He’s a plump man with a kindly face, a real Santa Claus of a face, but the benign look is utterly deceptive for, like all the top lawyers, he has a heart of flint and the morals of a rabid weasel. He raised plump hands in astonishment when he saw me. “My lord! I had no idea you were coming! Have I mislaid our appointment?”

“No, Oliver, you have not. This is by nature of a surprise visit.”

“And a very welcome surprise too! Upon my word, what a distinct pleasure this is. I shall cancel my luncheon engagement immediately.” Which was his way of telling me that he would double his hourly fees for this unannounced visit, which did not bother me because I had no intention of paying. Sir Oliver and his partners had sent their children to the best schools and their wives to the most expensive fat farms on the proceeds of the Stowey Estate, and I considered it was high time he did something for me. “I see you’ve been given some whisky,” he said. “Good! Good! Do come into my sanctum, John!” He always greeted me as ‘my lord’, and thereafter used my Christian name to show that he could assume intimate terms with the nobility. The man’s a creep, but a clever one.

He fussed me into his office which was stiff with leather chairs and ancient hunting prints. At weekends he plays the country squire, plodding round six damp Essex acres with a shotgun and a mangy spaniel. “Sit down, John, do! I shall just rearrange luncheon, if you’ll allow me.”

Ten minutes later we were served plates of salmon salad in his office. He opened a bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers. “I was so sorry not to have attended your mother’s funeral,” he told me as he poured the wine. “I had an unbreakable engagement that day, which was so very sad.” He lied, of course. If the Rossendale family had still had any flesh on their bones he’d have been down to the funeral like a shot, but as he thought he’d squeezed us dry then there had clearly been no profit for him in making the journey. “So sad,” he murmured.

“I missed the funeral too,” I said. “I walked out before it began.”

He must have known that already for he showed no reaction, not even to enquire why I had abandoned the ceremony. Instead he smiled beneficently. “I must say, John, you do look very well. Sun and sea, eh? And still as thin as ever! You do put the rest of us to shame.” He paused for a split second. “I thought you were even now sailing into the unknown? So very brave of you, I always think.” He bestowed me an admiring look. In fact Sir Oliver dislikes me intensely. He’s been our family’s solicitor for almost as long as I can remember and, when I inherited the title, he had thought that I would be naïve enough to do whatever he told me. In the end I told him to get stuffed and went off to sea. He’s never forgiven me and probably never will.

“I sailed back.”

“Evidently.” He smiled, then forked a chunk of salmon and mayonnaise into his mouth. “I assume you’re worried about your mother’s will?”

“I haven’t even seen the will.”

“Ah.” He clearly wished he hadn’t raised the matter, and swiftly moved the conversation on. “So to what, precisely, do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“I came to see you, Oliver, because of what that bitch Elizabeth is doing to Georgina.”

He dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin. “Dear Lady Elizabeth.”

“The answer is no.”

“No?” He smiled happily. “No one appreciates the merits of brevity more than I, my dear John, but I must confess that your meaning has momentarily eluded even me.”

“Georgina is not going to live with Elizabeth. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

“Eminently.” He sipped his wine. Somewhere beyond the heavily curtained window a piledriver began smacking insistently.

I raised my voice over the din. “If you want me to sign something, I will. As head of my benighted family, Oliver, I’m telling you that Georgina’s future is not up for grabs.”

“I don’t think we’re quite ready for signatures yet,” he said ominously. He poured each of us another glass of wine. “Might I ask why you’re so adamantly opposed?”

“Because Elizabeth is a money-grubbing witch who hates Georgina. She only wants her out of Jersey so she can get her hands on Georgina’s trust fund. You know all that, so why ask me?”

He swivelled his chair to stare at a print of Stowey that hung above a leather sofa. “I suppose,” he said airily, “that at sea you must learn to view the world in very simple terms. There’s no room for doubt in the ocean, is there? Yet on shore, my dear John, things can become so deucedly complicated.”

“Stop wrapping it up, Oliver. Tell me.”

He swivelled his chair to face me. “It’s all a question of options, John. So long as your dear mother was alive she wanted Georgina to stay in Jersey, but now things are changing. The good sisters of the convent are under a great deal of pressure to sell the property; indeed, it seems increasingly likely that the diocese will force the sale, which would mean that the sisters are most likely to retreat to their mother house at Nantes. Will the Lady Georgina be happy in France?” He spread his hands to show that he did not know the answer. “Then we must consider dear Sister Felicity. She’s not well, John, not at all, and all of us fear for dear Lady Georgina when Felicity dies. Imagine it, if you can: Georgina would be alone and bereft, in a strange country, with no solace but the sacraments.”

The weight of it crushed down on me. I could see what was in Sir Oliver Bulstrode’s evil mind. The last vestiges of my family’s cash were in Georgina’s trust fund. If Elizabeth took control of that money, then Oliver would get his fee. The trustees of the fund would need to be persuaded, but there were few men better at buttering parsnips than Sir Oliver Bloody Bulstrode. In short the pigs had found a honey trough and were ready to snuffle, and none of them cared a monkey’s toss for Georgina.

“She can be found a good institution in England, can’t she?” I tried.

“Oh, undoubtedly!” he said with fake enthusiasm. “There must be scores of institutions which would gladly care for your sister! Yet would any court of law, I ask you, prefer such an institution to the love and care of a family member? Not, I hope, that this matter will ever reach any court,” he added hastily. “I’m sure we can work it out most amicably.”

“You’d call Elizabeth loving and caring?” I asked incredulously.

“The Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth,” he said huffily, “has undertaken to provide the most proper care and attention for her sister. I note, with the deepest regrets, your reservations about the Lady Elizabeth’s suitability, yet I must tell you frankly, my lord, that I cannot see any court refusing her a supervision order. Not when you consider the alternatives.”

I had noted that he had called me ‘my lord’. That was a danger signal which told me Sir Oliver was on Elizabeth’s side. He was on her side because she had a prospect of scooping the cash. Sir Oliver is a venal bastard, but so are most top lawyers. That’s why so many of them become politicians.

“Supposing I offered Georgina a home?” I asked.

He feigned astonished pleasure. “My dear John! What a very splendid idea! And so typical of your generosity! Can you do it? Naturally, you would have to provide constant nursing care. The premises would have to be suitable, or were you thinking of making her a shipmate?” He chuckled at his own jest. “Seriously, John, such a responsibility will involve a great deal of money!”

“There’s Georgina’s trust fund.”

“Which would hardly be made available to someone with a police record.” The steel was in his voice now. “You would be asking the trustees to grant you authority over a great deal of money. Before they would even consider doing that, they would need to be satisfied that you have demonstrated some fiscal responsibility and domestic stability. I believe, unless I am entirely out of touch with your personal affairs, that you possess neither a house nor a wife?”

I stood up. I had not touched any of the salmon salad. “Georgina can stay where she is so long as Felicity is alive and the hospital remains unsold.”

I had not inflected it as a question, but Sir Oliver chose to treat it as such. “She can certainly remain where she is for a time, yes. The Lady Elizabeth has not, I understand, finished preparing her domestic arrangements.” He paused to shake his head sadly, as though I was disappointing him by my wilfulness. “I really do think you may be misjudging your sister. I grant you that Elizabeth can be tiresome, but I do assure you that she is making the most thorough preparations for Georgina’s welfare. Why don’t you inspect those arrangements? I’m quite sure the Lady Elizabeth would welcome such an inspection.”

“Have you inspected them?” I asked.

“Of course. I lunched at Perilly last week, where I found the Lady Elizabeth’s proposed arrangements entirely satisfactory.”

They had me boxed in. I’d just sailed twelve hundred horrid miles to find that I had been utterly outmanoeuvred. I left Sir Oliver’s office, ran down the stairs, and, once on the pavement, took a deep breath to rid my lungs of the leathery stench of his hypocrisy. The street air stank of fumes and filth. And Georgina, like me, was trapped.

I walked beside the embankment. I went there because there are boats moored to the wall, but they’re boats which are never again going to feel ocean waves on their cutwaters, or heel to a cold cold wind as clean as a rigging knife. The boats are trapped. They’re there to serve as pubs or museum pieces. London has taken their guts and their pride away from them, and reduced them to gewgaws.

And I was trapped. But, God help me, I had some guts and pride left; enough, I hoped, to fillet a twin sister and her fat lawyer.

I paced the river. It began to rain, but I was oblivious to both the rain and the passing time. Up and down I went, between Blackfriars and Westminster, thinking.

I was head of the Rossendale family, but my titular authority counted for nothing because I was poor, had a police record, and a reputation for being irresponsible.

Yet, truly, neither the police record nor the irresponsibility mattered because, when dealing with lawyers, only one thing carries real weight. It isn’t justice, or probity, or any other of their fine words; it’s cash. Lots of cash. Lawyers love cash. They grovel for it, swill in it, lie in it, cheat for it, flatter for it and dream of it.

So I needed cash. The trustees of Georgina’s fund might never entrust the money to me, but Georgina wasn’t tied to the trust. If I could replace the trust fund, then I could arrange her future, so the first question to be thrashed out along the embankment was where I could find a lot of money. There was an obvious answer, of course, but my pride wouldn’t let me grovel to Jennifer Pallavicini. So I had to find another way.

I could sell the few shares left in Uncle Thomas’s legacy and I could sell Sunflower. I’d probably raise about one hundred thousand pounds which would be enough to buy a small house in Devon. I could find a job. If no one needed a welder or carpenter, then I could sell my title to some idiot who wanted an aristocrat’s name on his firm’s letterhead. I could join the other clowns in the House of Lords and claim my attendance money. Perhaps I could write a book: Belting Round the World, an Earl’s Story. Perhaps the heavens would open and rain golden sovereigns on me. Perhaps pigs would fly.

It was hopeless. A small house in Devon and a job would not solve my problem because Elizabeth would still hold all the cards; she had a large house, a husband, and no record of being drunk and disorderly. What I needed was a lot of money, very fast; enough to buy a sharper lawyer than Sir Oliver.

Charlie.

That thought stopped my walking. The lights were coming on across the river and reflecting in shaking streaks on the darkening water.

Charlie would help. Charlie would throw himself into this battle with all his huge heart and soul and strength, but Charlie would be no match for a cunning bastard like Sir Oliver Bulstrode. Charlie would give me money, but the lawyers would soon drain that away and Charlie, despite his success and despite his flashy toys, was deeply in debt. Besides, this was family. This was my responsibility, and I had already taken too much money from Charlie. What I needed now was my own money; gobs of money, a lawyer’s wet dream of money. What I needed was a patch of canvas, two feet three inches wide by a shade over three feet long, on which some poor half-mad genius had once painted a vase of sunflowers.

In short I needed Sir Leon Buzzacott. He had known that, which was why he had sent Jennifer Pallavicini with the message that he would look after Georgina’s future.

But to secure that future I would have to crawl abjectly to Jennifer Pallavicini. Otherwise I was trapped by the short and curlies.

Unless, of course, Sir Oliver was right and I was being unfair in my judgment of Elizabeth. That was the last straw of hope I could cling to, and if that straw failed me then I would have to eat humble pie. I turned towards Westminster for the last time. It was late, fully dark, and I was soaked to the skin, so I phoned an old girlfriend and asked if I could have a bed for the night. She agreed, though she didn’t offer her own bed, but I hadn’t expected her to, because nothing was going right these days. Nothing.

In the morning I went to Gloucestershire. During the night I had half persuaded myself that Elizabeth was indeed doing the decent thing, and that I had been blinded to her decency by my own unreasonable dislike of her. It was nonsense, I told myself, to think that Elizabeth could cheat the trustees. She would need to satisfy them that she could provide Georgina with proper care and living-quarters, and so, by the time I caught the train, I was more than half convinced that my troubles would soon be over. Georgina would have a safe haven, and I would be free to return to my life and Sunflower.

Jennifer Pallavicini had called me uncaring and selfish. She was wrong about the first. I cared for Georgina; it was simply that, when Jennifer Pallavicini confronted me in Horta, I had been unwilling to dance to her insistent tune. Selfish? I thought about that as I stood in the crowded train going from London to the Cotswolds. Yes, I thought, she was probably right. I was selfish. I had always done what I wanted. I’d worked for it, if welding steel hulls in some humid tropical hell hole was called work, but I had still pursued my own desires. Yet not, I decided, to the detriment of others. I had never betrayed anyone to get what I wanted. I’d fought a few, but it takes two to fight.

So the Pallavicini, I decided, did not understand me half as well as she believed. She had believed that I would need her assistance to settle Georgina’s future, but now I was proving that I could look after my sister without Sir Leon’s help. I would do it quickly, then take myself back to Sunflower and the open sea.

I caught a bus from the station to Elizabeth’s village, then walked a lane between dry-stone walls to where the drive led to Lord Tredgarth’s farm. A big sign on the gate said ‘Entrance to Perilly House and Equestrian Centre Only. Private. No Trespassing’, while another sign ordered tradesmen to use the entrance on the Gloucester road. I decided I wasn’t a tradesman and pushed open the tall wrought-iron gates. The sun was trying to break through the clouds as I walked between the stumps of trees killed by Dutch elm disease. To my right was a thistle-rich paddock where a few fat ponies grazed between low jumps made from painted oil drums and striped poles. Elizabeth’s ‘Equestrian Centre’ was really a scabby riding-school which catered to the fat children of middle-class mothers who liked to boast they were acquainted with the Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth. It was a toss up which Elizabeth hated the most: the mothers or their children. She’d never had children herself, which I considered a blessing to the unborn.

The grandly named Perilly House was really just a large farmhouse. It was a very pleasant farmhouse built of Cotswold stone, with a big central gable and two large wings. Roses grew about the front door which had been tricked out with a white Georgian portico and an antique brass bell-pull.

A nervous cleaning woman answered the bell and told me her ladyship was not at home. Her ladyship had gone to a hospital charity committee meeting in Cirencester, which answer, despite my attempts to convince myself that Elizabeth was behaving well, triggered a rush of uncharitable thoughts. I imagined Elizabeth earning every brownie point she could so long as she saw Georgina’s trust fund in her sights. I imagined she would suddenly be active on the hospital charity, and the mental health fund-raising committee and even the flower rota at the parish church. “But his lordship’s at home,” the cleaning lady volunteered.

“Would you tell him John Rossendale’s here?”

“Is it business, sir?” She had clearly been trained to be wary of all strange visitors.

“No.” I was about to say I was a friend, but decided that would stretch the truth too far. “It’s a private matter.”

The woman looked dubious, but seemed reassured that I was not in a suit, which meant I was probably not serving a writ or otherwise adding to Peter Tredgarth’s troubles. “He’s at the camp, sir.”

I knew where that was. In the early days of my sister’s marriage, when Peter and I had still been friends, I had been a frequent visitor to Perilly, and I remembered the old camp which had been hastily built in the war to house Italian prisoners doing farm work on the surrounding estates. By the time I, first saw the camp it was already derelict. At one time Peter had thought to turn the old wooden huts into a chicken farm, but in the end he had done nothing and the timber had rotted away and the undergrowth had all but hidden the concrete foundations.

I walked down a tractor-rutted path, past a spinney of alders, then turned alongside the stream which would lead me to the low hill where the camp had been built. I saw Peter Tredgarth standing beside the stream, staring gloomily at the water. He had a shotgun under his arm, making him look uncommonly like a man contemplating the benefits of suicide. He jerked guiltily when I called his name, then stared with surprise as he recognised me. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. I could hardly expect him to be glad to see me after our last meeting in the Channel Islands.

“I’ve come to see you. And Elizabeth, of course, but I gather she’s not at home?”

“She never is, these days. I sometimes forget what she looks like.” He peered at me, evidently trying to decide whether to be grudgingly polite or dismissiyely nasty. He didn’t have the guts to be nasty, so offered me a grunt of welcome instead. “D’you see any heron?”

I looked up and down the stream. “No heron, Peter.”

“One of the labourers told me he saw a nesting couple up by the weir. Thought I’d shoot them.”

“Aren’t they a protected species?” I teased him.

“Bad for the fishing, you see. Bloody bad. Best thing to do is shoot them.” He broke the gun and took out the cartridges.

“Why don’t you have a water-bailiff to look after the fishing?” I asked.

“I did. Retired sergeant from my regiment. Nice chap, but I couldn’t afford to pay him.” He looked unhappily at his water, which was choking with weeds. “Needs a bit of work, eh?”

“A bit.”

“Must get down to it one day. You can get a lot for the fishing rights these days. And it’s good water, you know! No damn fish farms filling it up with trout-shit.”

“Why don’t you build your own fish farm,” I asked him, “and pollute it yourself?”

“I tried that, John, but they wouldn’t give me planning permission. Bastards. They’ll let some upstart grocer build a brick bungalow on a beauty spot, but they won’t let a landowner make a decent living. I should have bribed them, of course, but I couldn’t afford their fees.” He frowned at me, seemingly puzzled by my unexpected visit. “If I were you I wouldn’t be here when Elizabeth gets back. She had a telephone call from her lawyer chappie yesterday. The one in London? You must know who I mean. He lunched here last week and scoffed the best part of a brisket. Anyway, Elizabeth’s not exactly happy with you. Livid, in fact. Shouldn’t be talking to you myself, but…” He could not think quite why he was talking to me, so his voice tailed away.

“You don’t have Elizabeth’s capacity to hate?” I suggested.

“Yours is a ghastly family,” he said. “Always squabbling.”

“And yours isn’t?”

“They’re pretty ghastly too,” he admitted. Peter Tredgarth is big and heavy, with a permanently worried expression. He had not always been like that. When I first introduced him to Elizabeth he had been a trim Guards officer, lively and quick, who used to sail the Channel with me. He had long since given up sailing and was now weighed down with the world’s griefs. “I thought you’d gone back to sea?” he said irritably.

“I did. I came back.”

“Bloody silly of you. If I was you, I’d stay out there. That’s what I should have done. Gone off and stayed away.” He fell silent and, for a moment, neither of us could find anything to say.

“I hear you were up at the camp?” I said to fill the silence.

He gave me a fierce look. “Did you drive here?”

“I caught a bus from the station, then walked.”

“I don’t think I’ve been on a bus since I was at prep school.” He grimaced, either at the memory, or as he tried to decide what to do with my unwelcome presence. “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said at last, “I’ll drive you to the station. That way she won’t find you on the premises, and I won’t tell her you’ve visited. We can stop for a bite of lunch on the way. I know a decent little pub which does a good midday meal. Wait here!”

He didn’t let me respond, but just turned away and began walking towards the tree-fringed hill where the camp lay. I started after him. “I’ll come with you.”

“Wait!” He turned on me angrily, then, as if to explain his rudeness, tossed me the gun and its two cartridges. “Keep an eye out for the heron, there’s a good chap.”

I waited. The two heron flew past me. I ignored them. Instead I watched Peter plod up the hill and disappear into the undergrowth beyond the trees. There was a pause, then his mud-stained Land Rover appeared and bounced down the slope towards me.

“See the heron?” he asked as he braked beside me.

“Not a sign, Peter.” I climbed into the passenger seat and pushed the gun into the back.

“Steak and kidney pie and a decent pint, eh?” Peter was suddenly very jocular.

I put my hand over the gear lever to stop him driving away. “I don’t want to go to the pub yet, Peter. I’ve come here to see what preparations you’re making for Georgina. If I approve of them, then I won’t oppose Elizabeth and she can get her claws on Georgina’s money. So why don’t I just go up to the house and wait for Elizabeth?”

He stared at me, biting a strand of his moustache. “Georgina?” he finally said.

“Georgina,” I confirmed.

“You’re worried about her?” He seemed astonished at the thought.

“Of course I’m worried about her.”

“And you think Elizabeth’s going to cheat on the trust fund?”

“It occurred to me, yes,” I said bluntly.

For a few seconds I thought he was going to throw me out of the vehicle for insulting his wife, but instead he just pushed my hand away from the gear lever and crashed it into first. “Right!” He spoke angrily and decisively. “You’ve asked for it, so you’ll damn well get it. Operation Georgina.” We lurched forward, turned on to the rutted track, and accelerated up towards the farm. “Elizabeth won’t take kindly to you poking about the place, but Georgina’s your sister, so why the hell shouldn’t you see where she’s going to live?” He laughed, but at what I could not tell. He drove furiously. We went past the house, past the farmyard, and up a track edged with blackberry bushes. At the end of the track, and facing on to a quiet country lane, was a pretty stone cottage. Building work was evident from the scaffolding which reached up to the chimney and from the pile of plumber’s junk that lay outside the door, but no builders were actually visible.

“Primrose Cottage,” Peter Tredgarth announced as he stamped on the Land Rover’s brakes. “A horrible name, but it has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, living room, walled garden at the rear, and one garage. Central heating is being installed. A perfect residence, you will agree, for one loony sister and her live-in nurse?”

“Perfect,” I agreed. I was astonished and pleased. I might have persuaded myself that Elizabeth was going to do the decent thing, but I had not really believed it. Yet Primrose Cottage was indeed perfect. It offered privacy and comfort, as well as restfulness. I felt my worries dropping away. I would be free again.

“The live-in nurse” – Peter had left the motor running – “will be hired from an agency in Cheltenham. The agency specialises in cases like Georgina’s. Naturally the woman will have to be given time off, so the agency will supply weekend cover and supplementary nursing care for two nights a week as part of the contract price.” His voice became heavy with sarcasm. “Does that meet with your approval?”

“I think it sounds marvellous, Peter,” I said warmly.

He sneered at the humility in my voice. “Elizabeth has already shown the cottage to the trustees, and they agree with you. They’ve also interviewed the agency and found them entirely satisfactory.”

“Elizabeth’s been wonderful,” I ate more humble pie, “and I apologise for doubting her.”

He laughed, his victory over me complete. “You’ve got a nerve, John.” He took a silver flask from a pocket of his tweed jacket, unscrewed its cap, and took a long pull. He suddenly looked very morose. “And why the hell would you care about Georgina?”

“I just do.”

“You care about her money,” he said savagely, “but you won’t get it, John. You abdicated, you gave up, you bottled out, you pissed off to sea, and you probably screwed the family by nicking their bloody picture as well.” He began to laugh. I’d never realised before this moment that he was an alcoholic. He’d probably been drinking before I met him, and he would probably be drinking for the rest of the day. “Did you steal that picture?” he asked me suddenly.

“No.”

“She says you did. She says she’s met someone who helped you do it. You’re a fool, John. I suppose you threw the money away?”

“I didn’t steal the picture, Peter.”

He ignored that. “It was left to Elizabeth in your mother’s will.”

“I know.”

“And it ought to go to her,” he said heavily as though making a point I might not have considered before. “She’s got plans for the money, you see.”

“Plans?”

“Buy Stowey back. Run a proper equestrian centre.” He took a pull on the flask, then chuckled. “I think she imagines the Queen coming down to admire the horses, but the point of it is, John, that Elizabeth wants to use the money. She wants to restore the family’s position in society! You don’t, do you? All you want to do is arse around in a boat! If you had any decency at all you’d tell her where the picture is, then disappear.”

“I don’t know where it is, Peter.” I paused. “Who told her I’d stolen it?”

“Buggered if I know.” Nor did he care; it was enough that he shared Elizabeth’s belief in my guilt. He peered at his watch. “She might come home for lunch, so you’d best leave.” He leaned across me to open the door. “Go to the end of the lane and you can catch a bus at the crossroads.”

“No pub lunch?” I asked him.

“Out,” he ordered me. It was hard to believe we had once been friends. Now, whatever his unhappiness, he was on his wife’s side in our family’s civil war.

I climbed out and slammed the Land Rover’s door.

“And don’t tell her I’ve spoken to you!” Lord Tredgarth shouted at me.

“I won’t.”

He took another pull at his flask, then viciously wrenched the steering wheel to slew the Land Rover back towards the farm. I had to jump fast to save myself from being side-swiped by the skidding vehicle. Its rear wheels spattered me with mud as he drove away.

I waited till he had disappeared then walked up the path to Primrose Cottage. The new front door had still not been fitted with a lock, so I pushed into the big living room which was littered with builders’ scraps. The walls were newly painted. A wood stove had been fitted in the old hearth. It was a lovely cottage, its southern windows facing across the water meadows. I wandered into the kitchen where a new double sink had been fitted. There was a pile of builders’ brochures and invoices on the draining board. I sifted idly through them. Only one of the brochures was not about building materials, but was an invitation from a firm which specialised in letting holiday cottages: ‘Do you have an unused farm cottage? Let us turn your empty property into profit!’

I stared through the window. I could see the camp hill across the valley. Why had Peter not wanted me to walk to the Land-rover with him? I tried to dismiss the nagging worry. I wanted to walk away, to go to the crossroads and catch my bus, then to take Sunflower to the limitless freedom of the seas, but there was something wrong here. I looked down at the holiday cottage brochure. Was Elizabeth planning to renovate Primrose Cottage at the expense of Georgina’s fund, then let it to summer visitors?

I leafed through the stained and crumpled paperwork on the draining board. One sheet of paper was a carbon copy of an estimate from a plumbing firm. It was a hefty estimate, covering the installation of a new hot water tank, a central heating boiler, a shower room, and, at the very bottom, for the provision of a stand-pipe and two cold water connections to caravans. The estimate had evidently been successful, for the plumbers were using it as a checklist for work completed. I saw the stand-pipe had already been finished.

I swore very softly, not really believing what I was suspecting, but knowing that I would have to find out for myself. And knowing, too, that if I was right, then my troubles were only just beginning.

I didn’t cross Peter’s land. Instead I walked a mile up the lane, turned south on to the Gloucester road and crossed the stream by the new bridge. Trucks carrying chipboard and frozen chickens thundered past me. At the top of the hill there was a layby where a glum family picnicked within yards of the growling lorries. I walked past them and climbed over the gate on to Peter’s property. The mud track had been newly used. I followed it a hundred yards through the screen of dark trees, then through the tangled undergrowth to where a clearing had been hacked out in the old camp.

Two caravans stood on the concrete foundation slabs of the old huts. Around the slabs the undergrowth had been cleared away with a harrow, leaving scarred raw earth in which the first nettles were already growing. The caravans were quite large, but clearly second-hand. Both were locked. The stand-pipe was between them. Their windows were obscured by net curtains.

Two caravans. One for Georgina, and the other for whom? Girls from the west of Ireland, perhaps, inveigled by an advertisement in a Catholic newspaper? Such girls came cheap. My mother had used them as servants and I imagined Elizabeth would do the same. She would pretend that Primrose Cottage was to be Georgina’s home, and doubtless it would be for a few months, and doubtless the Cheltenham agency would provide the nursing care, but after a while it would all quietly change and Georgina would be shuttled up the hill to this dank tomb of a wood, and Primrose Cottage could be profitably let to appreciative holiday-makers. And all of it would be done with Georgina’s money.

“Bugger!” I shouted the curse aloud and thumped an impotent fist against the metal skin of the nearest caravan.

There was to be no freedom after all, but only duty, because it was time to catch a thief.

I went back to Devon that night, retrieved my oars, rowed myself out to Sunflower, and poured myself the dregs of my last bottle of whiskey. I felt an insidious temptation to let the ebbing tide take me to sea, but instead I slept and, in the morning, went ashore and found a public phone.

The bullet had to be bitten. Charlie must know that I was back in England and that all his generosity had not bought me the freedom he so envied. I phoned his yard, but he wasn’t in his office, so I called Yvonne. She sounded surprised to hear my voice, but did not ask where I was or what I wanted. She said Charlie was away from home.

“In Hertfordshire again?”

“Scotland, I think.” She didn’t sound as if it mattered very much. “He’s sub-contracting on a road-widening scheme.”

“Tell him I’m back, Yvonne. I’m moored in the Exe at the moment, but I don’t know how long I’ll stay here, but he can always try the Channel radio stations.”

She did not sound very pleased, but promised to tell Charlie when he called home. Perhaps she thought I’d come to take more money off him. I said goodbye to her, then called Directory Enquiries to find the number of the Buzzacott Museum Gallery. This was a harder bullet to bite, but it had to be done. I asked for Jennifer Pallavicini, but the man who answered the phone in her office said she was in New York. She was expected back soon, but, in the meantime, was there any message?

“Tell her that John Rossendale called and that I’m back in England. Tell her she can probably reach me by radio.” I gave him a list of coast radio stations and Sunflower’s call sign. The man was clearly bemused, but docilely took down the information. Then, because I had nothing better to do, I took Sunflower to sea.

I knocked about the Channel for a few days. I was tempted to visit Jersey, but I did not know what good it would do. Georgina might be pleased to see me, but I could offer her no reassurances, so I chickened out. I visited a friend in Lèzardrieux, and tried to persuade myself I was in love with a waitress in his riverfront cafe. Jacques drove me to the casino at Dinard where, despite my avowal that I couldn’t afford to gamble, I won three thousand francs. When the francs didn’t change the waitress’s mind I went downstream and anchored off the Ile Bréhat, where I stayed for two days. I listened to the traffic lists on the VHF, but neither Sunflower’s name nor her call sign were ever mentioned. I made one link call to the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, charging the cost to Elizabeth’s home number, but Jennifer Pallavicini had still not returned.

After two days I decided to sail to the Scilly Isles, which I’d never visited. The forecast had promised a southeast wind, but three hours off the Breton coast the wind veered round the compass which meant that I was faced by a devil of a windward flog. I held to it, lured by the unknown Scillies, which I reached just after dusk the next day. I anchored in Porth Cressa and spent a miserable night heaving and sheering in strong seas driven by a rising west wind. The morning was filthy with rain and blowing half a gale, so, without going ashore, I hauled up the anchor, let the foresails turn Sunflower, and took myself off. The wind was gusting to force eight, and the seas were heaping into thumping great monsters. White crests cascaded down the wave faces. Another yacht, a big Moody, left the Scillies at the same time, but by midday I had lost her in the misting squalls which were slithering up towards Cornwall. I was enjoying myself. Sunflower was running well, hard before the wind and rolling her boom under every few minutes. In the early afternoon I caught a glimpse of the Lizard, black in the grey murk, but then a rainstorm blotted it out. I heard thunder to the north, and saw one stabbing crack of lightning pierce the gloom. Sunflower slammed her stem into a wave, scattered white water twelve feet high, then dipped her nose as a following sea swept under her counter. This was Channel sailing at its best; hard, fast, wet and exhilarating.

Next morning, in Dartmouth, I rowed to the marina where Sunflower had been relaunched, but there was no sign of Barratry. I had not really expected to see her, so I went ashore, found a telephone, but could get no answer from Charlie’s house. I tried the yard, but he wasn’t there either. I called Jennifer Pallavicini, but she was evidently not back from America, for there was no answer from her office.

To hell with it, I thought. To hell with it. I walked in a gusting breeze among the tourists on the quayside and I wished I was far away. Except that two caravans in a corner of Elizabeth’s farm were holding me home. I needed to solve that problem, and I was achieving nothing by knocking about the Channel and brooding. I went back to the telephone box. Jennifer Pallavicini had told me in Horta that Harry Abbott was the policeman in charge of discovering the mutilated Van Gogh. Harry was a bastard, but he was a bastard who could be reached by telephone, so I called him.

He wasn’t in his Exeter office, but I held on while he was tracked down. He couldn’t come to the phone, but passed on a message that I should meet him next morning in the café on Dartmouth’s quay.

I spent the day drying out the boat and washing the salt out of my hair and clothes. Next morning I rowed ashore early and ordered a double helping of bacon, egg, sausages and chips. I had bought a tabloid and was amusing myself by reading about the vicar who’d run off with the organist’s husband when a hand tapped my shoulder.

I turned. Harry Abbott’s lugubrious and unhealthy face gazed solemnly down into mine. The face smiled, revealing long yellow teeth. “Oh, God,” I said.

“I haven’t been promoted that high yet. I’m only a Detective Inspector, but that is very close to being God.” He reached over my shoulder and stole one of my chips. “I like chips for breakfast.”

“If you want some chips, order your own.”

He stole another. “I’ve already had a plateful. Very nice they were, too, with a spot of vinegar.” He sat opposite me and sprinkled vinegar on his stolen chip. “You’re looking very well, Johnny,” he said. “If I’d had my way, you’d still be in prison now.”

“So you failed.”

“Justice is like the pox,” he said, “in the end it gets everyone.”

“Very funny, Harry.”

He ordered himself a coffee and spooned sugar into the cup. He then lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me. “Did you know Jimmy Nicholls?”

“No.”

“He died of smoking, just like your mother. Were you upset by her death, Johnny?”

“Piss off, Harry.”

Detective Inspector Harry Abbott looks like a joke. He’s cadaverous, tall, grey, and apparently always at death’s door, but he’s a cunning sod. When he had interrogated me about the stolen Van Gogh he had come foully close to persuading me to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. I’d been innocent, but Harry had been relentless, almost persuading me that I had to be guilty. He is not a man to underestimate.

“How do you feel about some nasty-minded bleeder taking the kitchen scissors to your mum’s painting?” he asked.

“It pisses me off.”

“You always did like the painting, didn’t you? You pretended not to, but I knew you liked it. Me, now, I don’t understand it. I like a proper painting.”

“Tits and bums?”

He ignored that. “It occurred to me once that you might have nicked it because you liked it so much. Oddly enough I’m not so very sure that you did nick it now, in fact I’d even go so far as to say that I believe in your innocence, Johnny. Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, or perhaps I’ve caught a nasty case of food poisoning from the milk of human kindness, but I really do believe that I did you an injustice all those years ago.”

“Then say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry, Johnny.” He bared his horse’s teeth at me. “So tell me, you bastard, why didn’t you report an attempt on your life? I know it’s a miserable life, and probably not worth preserving, but we are mildly interested in murder attempts.”

I abandoned the rest of my breakfast. “Who told you about that?”

“Who the hell do you think told me?” Harry took the last sausage from my plate. “The Contessa, of course.”

“The Contessa?” The only Contessa I could think of was a make of boat. A very nice make of boat. I’d nearly bought a Contessa 32 once.

Harry shook his head in grief for my sanity. “The Contessa Pallavicini. Who else?”

“Jennifer Pallavicini?”

“Oh, of course, I keep forgetting. You’re a nob as well. You probably don’t use titles amongst yourselves. I suppose you call her Jenny-baby or Passion-knickers. Yes, Johnny. I mean Jennifer Pallavicini.”

“Bloody hell fire,” I said softly. I had thought I was the one earning pennies from heaven by not using my title, and all the time Jennifer Pallavicini was hiding her own? I felt stupid and astonished. “I didn’t know she was a Contessa,” I said limply.

“Her mother married the title, but she’s Lady Buzzacott now, so the daughter uses the handle. Mind you, those Italians seem to give away titles with their cornflakes, so perhaps it doesn’t mean anything.”

I gaped at him. “She’s Buzzacott’s stepdaughter?”

“You didn’t know that either?”

“No.”

Abbott was pleased with himself. He leaned back in his chair. “Surprised you, did I?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Well you can stop fancying her, you evil-minded bastard. She’s engaged to some Swiss businessman.”

“She doesn’t wear a ring,” I protested a little too hastily.

“That’s the modern way, isn’t it? Equality and all that rubbish. Or else she keeps the ring in a bank vault. The Swiss bloke must be a zillionaire.” He looked at me closely, then gave an evil grin. “You do fancy her, don’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Then it’s your lucky day, Johnny, because she wants to see you.”

“I thought she was in New York?”

Abbott rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Not everyone crosses the ocean by hanging rags on sticks. She flew back yesterday in Concorde. We’re going to meet the family, you and I. It’ll be very la-di-da. Are you sure you don’t want to put on a suit?”

“I’m sure.” I hated the thought of meeting the Buzzacott family, for I was in no mood for social politeness, but, by phoning Harry Abbott, I had condemned myself to whatever inconvenience followed. For Georgina’s sake.

Harry swallowed the rest of his coffee and snapped his fingers for the waitress to bring the bill. “It’s nice to be back on crime again,” he said happily.

“They took you off it? What are you now? In charge of school crossings?”

“I’m just a dogsbody,” he said mysteriously. “They just gave me this case for old times’ sake, and to save some other poor sod from looking up the files. So shall we go, Johnny boy? I’ve got a car outside. But pay the bill first.”

I paid, then joined Harry in a clapped-out Rover that he proudly claimed as his own car. We drove north and I wondered about a Contessa and whether she knew that the Swiss are rotten sailors. They’re good at making cuckoo-clocks, and presumably they can ski, but they’re sod all use at anything else. Except making money. And that was a depressing thought, so I tried to forget Jennifer Pallavicini. Instead, at Harry’s insistence, I told him all about Garrard and Peel, and how Charlie had saved me in the nick of time, and then, when Harry had sucked all the juice out of that, he told me golf stories all the way to Wiltshire.

We parked on the airport-sized forecourt of Comerton Castle. Two footmen ran down the steps to open the car doors. Harry smirked, and said he could get used to this style of life. We were ceremoniously conducted to the entrance hall where a pin-striped butler waited to greet us. He already knew Harry, but didn’t bat an eyelid at my dirty jeans and crumpled shirt. “Welcome to Comerton Castle, your lordship. If you would care to follow me?”

We did so care, following his silent footfalls through rooms big enough to hold fully rigged schooners. The ceilings were painted with riotous gods and the walls fluted with marble columns. The furniture was worth a small fortune, while the pictures on the walls would not have disgraced any gallery, though clearly Sir Leon did not consider them worthy of his own. Harry Abbott wet his fingertips and tried to smear back his thinning grey hair. “Not a bad pad, is it?” he confided in me, then jerked at his jacket and straightened his tie.

“Uncomfortable, Harry?” I asked.

“Christ, no. We coppers are always slumming with the nobs.”

The nobs were waiting in a glazed terrace filled with potted palms and comfortable sofas. Sir Leon and Lady Buzzacott smiled a gracious welcome. There was no sign of Jennifer. I made polite small talk. I agreed it was a lovely day, and such a change after the recent stormy weather. Yes, I had been to Sir Leon’s gallery, and had been very impressed.

“My daughter told me she’d met you at the gallery,” Lady Buzzacott said very blandly, which suggested that her daughter had also told her that she had put the boot in as well. “I do wish she’d brought you to the house that day and introduced you.”

“That would have been very pleasant,” I said with insincere gallantry. I was being polite for Georgina’s sake, but I was feeling increasingly resentful. It was not that I felt out of place, for I didn’t, but I did feel patronised. Two days ago I had been racing a gale, and now I had to tiptoe through the conversational tulips.

“Jenny also told us about her visit to the Azores,” Lady Buzzacott went on. “She said you hit a veritable giant?”

“Only twice, Lady Buzzacott.”

“You must call me Helen, and I shall call you John. Leon, I think John could do with a drink. And I know Harry wants one. I suppose the loveliest thing about being a policeman is that you can drink and drive as much as you like?”

“Quite right, your ladyship.” Harry was being very obsequious, and I realised that he probably fancied Lady Buzzacott, which wasn’t surprising, for she was a beautiful woman. The beauty was genuine, not purchased in spas and health farms or on some surgeon’s operating table. Her hair, like her daughter’s, was dark, but just beginning to show grey, and clearly Lady Buzzacott had no intention of hiding the grey.

If she impressed me, her husband rather surprised me. Sir Leon was very small, very rotund, and seemingly rather timid. I had expected to meet a frightening tycoon, but instead he seemed very eager to please. He ordered drinks, then took Harry Abbott off to see some orchids.

“They’ll talk golf,” Lady Buzzacott said despairingly, and I began to like her.

“I’ve had little else but golf all the way from Devon.”

“You poor man. No wonder you need that drink.” I had just been served a very large whisky. “I must say I’m delighted to meet you,” she continued, “because I’ve heard a great deal about you. You’re probably a throwback, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“Of course you are. I’ve no doubt your ancestors went swanning off across the seas to find giant Swedes they could hit, but you’re not really supposed to do it nowadays. We’re all meant to be dull, like Hans.”

“Hans?”

“Jennifer’s intended. I’m afraid he’s having lunch with us. He does something in cheese, or I think he does, but he’s so crushingly tedious that I’ve never really listened.”

I was beginning to like Lady Buzzacott very much. “And you?” I asked. “How do you stave off dullness?”

“I watch Leon at work. It’s fascinating.”

“Is it?” I must have sounded dubious because I could not understand what the attractive Lady Buzzacott saw in the diminutive and myopic Sir Leon. Except that he was coining the loot like a bandit.

“A lot of people underestimate Leon,” she said with just a touch of warning in her voice. “He’s a pirate. I know he doesn’t look like one, but he is. He started in property, of course, most of the new money did. He still has some property interests, but mostly he deals in companies now. That’s how we met Hans. He owns some food conglomerate and Leon couldn’t take it over because the Swiss government is very protective of their firms, so now we’re all a big happy partnership. Hans plays golf, too.” She shuddered. “Is there anything more boring than golf? Now, come and sit down, and tell me why you’re so wretchedly unhelpful about recovering your own picture?”

I sat down. At the far end of the terrace Sir Leon was demonstrating a golf swing with a long-stemmed watering can.

“Well?” Lady Buzzacott prompted me.

“I’m still not at all sure it is my picture.”

“There’s no doubt about that!” Lady Buzzacott said dismissively, then, after a few seconds of reflection, she looked rather more sceptical. “Well, of course, there’s always doubt about things once the lawyers get involved, but Leon has taken counsel’s opinion, and it seems that the picture has to belong to your family’s Trust, and that means you. Your mother’s will shouldn’t be able to change that.”

I remembered how Sir Oliver had skated swiftly away from the subject of my mother’s will. “I haven’t seen the will,” I said, hoping for enlightenment.

I wasn’t disappointed. “There’s nothing in it for you,” Lady Buzzacott said, “apart from some bad-tempered advice which I’m sure you’d do best to ignore. Instead your mother left all her property to your sister Elizabeth, and specifically included the Van Gogh in that bequest, but it’s very doubtful whether she had the power to leave the painting to anyone. She’d already given it to the family Trust, you see, in an effort to avoid tax. Doubtless, when she made her will, she was hoping that the lawyers could somehow disentangle the mess. I don’t know why people believe that of lawyers. In my experience they almost always make things a great deal more complicated.”

“But Elizabeth probably believes the will has greater power than the original deed of gift to the Trust,” I said.

“I’m sure she does!” Lady Buzzacott said firmly; then, with a small prevaricating shrug, “or perhaps not. She and your mother did try to have the trust wound up two years ago.”

“They did?” That was news to me.

“But, of course, everyone needed your signature, and you were swanning off being unpleasant to Scandinavians, so the Trust still inconveniently exists. Though, of course, if you died without having any children, then Elizabeth becomes the Trust’s main beneficiary.”

“It’s very strange,” I said, “how this family knows so much more about my affairs than I do.”

“That’s because you don’t care. You have to be very dull to wade through all those tedious documents. Ah, and speaking of dullness, here’s Hans.” A young, tall and sleekly handsome man had come on to the terrace. He was one of those foreigners who dress in the English manner, which meant he was wearing the most expensive brogues and a tweed suit, but all the money had only succeeded in making him look like a tailor’s dummy. Hans had yet to learn that the shoes and suit should be worn by his gardener for a full year’s hard labour before they would look properly English. He seemed somewhat taken aback by my wardrobe, but looked reassured when I was introduced as an earl. Perhaps he thought I was one of the eccentric English aristocrats he had heard so much about. I asked him how the cheese was going.

“Cheese?” He sounded worried.

“Helen told me you were in cheese?”

“Ah! The processed cheese!” He brightened up. “Indeed. But it is only a very small part of our overall business, my lord. We would like to expand it, especially in the American market, but the American taste for cheese is not like our own. We have to develop brands with a flavour that can endure extreme refrigeration…”

“Oh, look at the time!” Lady Buzzacott smiled graciously at her prospective son-in-law. “Would you very much mind telephoning Jenny and telling her that if she’s lunching with us she should come soon?”

Hans, clearly confused by his reception, dutifully obeyed. Lady Buzzacott caught my eye, and I saw from her gaze that she was an altogether more formidable lady than I had at first supposed. “If you think I’m being especially nice to you, John, you are entirely right. I am trying to suborn you. I want Leon to have his Sunflowers, and I want you to have a good price for them.”

“I do hate the way this family patronises me,” I said, though without rancour.

She laughed delightedly, then glanced through the window. “Ah, I see that Jenny is already on her way from the gallery. We shall go through to luncheon and you can hear more about cheese. Then we shall have our council of war. But without Hans, because he isn’t family. Yet.” And, I suspected from her tone, she was not at all sure that she ever wanted Hans as family. I decided I liked this lady very much indeed, so I offered her my arm and took her through for luncheon.

Sir Leon and Lady Buzzacott, the Contessa Pallavicini, Inspector Harry Abbott and myself formed the council of war.

Harry did most of the talking and was actually rather impressive. Lady Buzzacott said very little, but listened acutely. Sir Leon spoke when necessary, and took notes. Jennifer Pallavicini was disdainfully cold. She had been cold throughout luncheon, almost ignoring me. I had noticed that, unlike our previous meetings, she was wearing an engagement ring; a great chunk of diamond which must have cost a lot of processed cheese.

Harry began by describing the world of stolen art. The lecture was clearly for my benefit, though it did not stop Sir Leon from making notes in a small leather-bound book. The stealing of art works, Harry said, was a most specialised occupation. Only a very few professional criminals were involved. Their qualifications were not the obvious ones of breaking and entering premises, even though those premises were usually superbly guarded with high technology alarms. The essential qualification was the knowledge of who would be willing to pay for the stolen picture. “The breaking and entering,” Harry said, “can be sub-contracted to run-of-the-mill villains. Naturally those villains seek an inside accomplice, which is why, when the Stowey Sunflowers was nicked, we thought Johnny here was their inside man.”

Lady Buzzacott offered me a dazzling smile, Sir Leon made a note in his tiny handwriting, while Jennifer stared at the ceiling. I stared at her. She really was very beautiful, and somehow the existence of Hans had made her even more desirable.

“Once the painting is successfully stolen,” Harry went on, “the contract labour is paid off. It’s a straight fee; no percentage and no contingencies…”

“His lordship may not know what contingencies you speak of, Inspector?” Sir Leon pointed out in his low voice.

“Like, if the painting isn’t sold, no cash. The contract labour gets its money as agreed whatever happens. Got that, my lord?” Harry hated calling me ‘my lord’, but clearly felt it was incumbent in these palatial surroundings.

“I understand you, Inspector. Please go on.”

He gave me a filthy look as a reward for my own punctiliousness, then heaped sugar into his coffee. “Once the painting’s nicked,” he went on, “it’s taken straight to whoever has agreed to buy it. And that’s the key, you see, because the buyer is usually lined up before the job’s ever done. I mean, no one wants ten million quid’s worth of Rembrandt hanging about their house while they try to find a bloke with a bit of unused space on his living-room wall.”

“Quite,” Sir Leon said in a disapproving tone.

“So the painting goes to the buyer, the final cash changes hands, and that’s the end of the matter. The new owner takes care to keep the picture hidden, and it may never be found until long after he’s dead.”

“And the buyers?” Sir Leon asked. “Who are they?”

“Increasingly, these days, sir, the Nips.”

“But why don’t they just buy at auction?” I asked.

“Because the particular painting they want may not be up for sale,” Harry said, “and because, if the deal’s successful, it’s a lot cheaper than buying at auction. You can probably get a top-flight Rembrandt for a straight million on the black market.”

I still didn’t understand why a man able to pay a million pounds could not satisfy himself at auctions. I said as much, prompting Sir Leon to lay down his gold pen and look at me. “You have to understand, my lord, the nature of a collector’s mind. It is, and I speak with some knowledge, a single-minded passion which is entirely consuming. It might apply to postage stamps, model railways, vintage cars, porcelain, cigarette cards, or” – he paused, and I thought he was going to say ‘women’ – “works of art. Whatever is the object of that passion becomes nothing short of obsession, even, if I might use the words, a form of unreasonable and uncontrollable lust. A man desires, say, a particular canvas by Picasso, and he will not be happy, he will not know any satisfaction, until that painting is in his possession. This form of lust is a disease, my lord, that distorts a man’s perception of reality until he believes that his happiness will be incomplete until he satisfies the desire. In all other respects he may seem a most normal man, but in that one area, so secret and deep, he is unreasonable. You will have noted, my lord, that I have constantly referred to the male gender. It seems that women are not subject to this particular affliction. Have I answered your question?”

He had, and I realised he had also been describing himself. He wanted the Van Gogh, and he would devote his life to finding it. Sir Leon was a collector, a very rich one, and though he might never stoop to criminality, he clearly understood the minds of those who did and was very sympathetic to them.

But he had no sympathy at all for men who would hold a painting to ransom by mutilating it. “And it now seems certain,” Sir Leon said, “that the fragment of canvas was cut from the Stowey Van Gogh.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

Jennifer answered, describing how she had carried the cut corner to New York where the Metropolitan Museum had subjected it to tests. “The pigment and canvas are identical to other compositions he painted in the late 1880s.” Her voice sounded rather despairing, and I realised how much she must have been hoping that the mutilated corner was not genuine. It was not that the painting had been irrevocably ruined by the small excision, but she was anguished by the implicit threat that yet more of the canvas could be cut. She spilt the scrap of canvas out of its envelope on to the table. I picked it up. The paint was rough and striated, like the texture of a sea blowing up in a brisk wind.

“We don’t even know,” Jennifer said, “whether this was the only corner they sent to a collector. Perhaps they’re trying to ransom the painting to a dozen rich men?”

“Maybe.” Harry sounded unconcerned. “But I’ll bet my next month’s wages that they only sent the one fragment. They know how badly Sir Leon wants the painting, which means they’re confident he’ll pay their ransom. Their biggest worry is exactly how to engineer that payment, because they’re frightened of getting caught red-handed. That’s why they’ve given us so much time. They know Sir Leon doesn’t need till the end of August to raise the money, but they need that time to work out a foolproof handover.” He plucked the scrap of precious canvas from my fingers and waved it like a small trophy. “In short,” he said happily, “we’re dealing with amateurs.”

“Amateurs?” I asked.

“We’re not dealing with professional art thieves, that’s for sure, or else the painting would have disappeared long ago. And no professional would ransom a painting, it’s too risky!”

“Do you mean,” I asked slowly, “that these people have kept the painting hidden all this time? Why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they have ransomed it four years ago?”

Harry was enjoying himself. He had his audience, and was relishing his careful reconstruction of an old crime. “Let’s go back four years, to when the painting was first stolen.” He thrust an accusing cigarette towards me. “I reckoned that you nicked the damn thing to stop your mother selling it.”

“Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because your mother would have spent the money on preserving Stowey, which you clearly didn’t want. So if you stole the painting, then hid it till she died, you could have kept all the proceeds for yourself. In other words, my lord, I believed you were defending the value of your inheritance by a nasty bit of theft. But I was wrong.”

Jennifer glanced at me, and I wondered if I saw the faintest blush of shame on her face. Probably not.

“So what makes you think I didn’t nick it?” I asked Harry.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? The painting belongs to you now, so why should you continue to hide it? If you had it, you could pretend that it had merely been mislaid all these years, discover it, sell it to Sir Leon, then go out and buy yourself a proper suit.”

Lady Buzzacott smiled. Jennifer, perhaps reluctant to discard her belief in my guilt, frowned. Sir Leon glanced from me to Harry, then asked the obvious question. “So who did steal it?”

“Johnny knows.” Harry, in his happiness, easily dropped my honorific. “Don’t you, Johnny?”

I think I did, but I wasn’t entirely ready to believe my suspicions, so I said nothing.

“Same motive, different villain.” Harry lit the cigarette he’d been holding for the last few minutes. He had clearly been nervous of offending Lady Buzzacott, but his craving for a smoke overcame his diffidence. He sucked gratefully at the smoke, then looked at me. “Who becomes the beneficiary of the family Trust if you die?”

“So long as I don’t have children,” I said softly, “Elizabeth.”

“The Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth,” Harry confirmed, “who is a bitter and disappointed lady. And a very ambitious one. And in her view you are a very unsuitable heir. You don’t care about the title, you never cared about Stowey, and you don’t seem to mind if the Rossendale family slides into poverty, yet those are things which your twin sister takes very seriously. It would suit her very well to inherit a Van Gogh which she could turn into ready cash. And who stood between Elizabeth and that tasty little fortune?”

“My mother and I,” I answered dutifully.

“Exactly. And now there’s just you. And if you died now, Johnny, your sister will simply claim to have found the painting in your baggage. That’s why she’s so busy telling everyone that she’s met your accomplice! She has to prove your guilt to establish her innocence.”

He was making Elizabeth into a very cold-blooded murderer, a West Country Lady Macbeth, and the portrait did not fit. Elizabeth was bitter, and she was proud, and she could be heartlessly ruthless, as the two caravans in a nettle patch proved, yet I could not see her as a murderess. “She’s no killer,” I protested to Harry.

“Women may not be collectors,” Lady Buzzacott observed mildly, “but they are not innocent of greed, and many have conceived of murder.”

“She’s an opportunist.” Harry took up the condemnation of my twin sister. “I don’t think she’s had this planned for ever. It was your mother’s death that sparked her. That and your return to England.” He paused to tap ash into his saucer. “And remember she has a partner, and he is a killer.”

“Garrard,” I said more to myself than to anyone else. I could understand Garrard being a killer, but that did not explain why he had beaten Jennifer Pallavicini on board Sunflower.

“That was fear!” Harry explained when I raised the objection. “I’ve no doubt Garrard went to Salcombe to kill you, but he discovered the Contessa instead. What was he to think?”

“That I was making a deal with her?” I ventured.

“Which implied,” Harry went on, “that your sister had made a deal with you. Garrard was scared that he was being double-crossed by a brother–sister agreement! He was frightened that Elizabeth would give you the painting to sell on condition that you shared the price with her. It wasn’t true, but I’ll bet my last brass farthing that’s what Garrard believed when he found the Contessa on your boat. Sometime in the next few days your sister must have reassured him, so he went to George’s yard to finish the job properly. Would your sister have guessed you might be at Cullen’s place?”

I nodded. Elizabeth would indeed have remembered my old association with Cullen’s yard. The pieces were falling into place, but I did not like the picture they made. It’s hard to see one’s twin as a killer.

“And when your friend Charlie Barratt stopped that second murder attempt,” Harry went on, “what happened?”

“I sailed away.”

“Which meant she and Garrard had failed,” Harry was pleased with his exposition. “You were still alive, you’d disappeared, so now Elizabeth has a problem. The painting is still not legally hers, but she’s desperate for the money. So she has to run the risk of a ransom. But she was a little too greedy. She tried to put the screws on to your little sister’s money as well, and that brought you home. Maybe she even wanted you to come home, because my belief is that she’d still rather have you dead.” He looked at Sir Leon. “The painting must be worth a great deal more than the amount demanded in the ransom note?”

Sir Leon hesitated, then nodded. “The value is around twenty million.”

“So there you are,” Harry looked back at me. “Your death is worth sixteen million quid to your sister. Not a bad profit.”

I stood and walked to the window. “But if she’s already got the painting” – I was seeking a loophole in Harry’s thesis – “why doesn’t she just fight me in the courts for possession? She’s got my mother’s will as ammunition?”

“Because she’ll lose,” Sir Leon said harshly.

“But she wasn’t even at Stowey when the painting was stolen.” I raised another objection.

“Garrard nicked it,” Harry said easily. “She must have given him keys and told him how to work the alarm system.”

“But Elizabeth wouldn’t know where to find men like Garrard and Peel,” I protested.

Harry dismissed that objection. “Horses. Garrard used to be a good amateur steeplechaser before he turned bad. And the racecourses are full of villains.” He looked happily at the Buzzacott family. “If you ever need a crook, that’s where to go: the racecourse.”

Lady Buzzacott smiled her thanks for the advice, while Sir Leon looked pained and Jennifer just frowned.

It all worked. I could see that. Harry had presented a wonderful concoction of greed, violence and inheritance, a very upper-class concoction indeed, but I still did not want to believe that my twin sister was a killer. That was not because I loved her, but rather because, just as Elizabeth feared the genetic taint of Georgina’s madness, so I feared the taint of Elizabeth’s murderous nature. I shook my head. “I don’t know, Harry, I just don’t know.”

“So let’s find out!” Harry said cheerfully. “You’re back now, so let’s see if she tries to knock you off again. After all, she’d much rather sell the painting legally than go through the risks of collecting a ransom. And if she and Garrard do try murder again, we’ll catch them red-handed.”

There was silence. So this was why they had wanted my return: to be a target? None of them looked at me, perhaps embarrassed by what they expected of me.

Sir Leon cleared his throat. “I fail to see why collecting a ransom should be riskier than committing murder?”

“Murder comes out of the dark, when you least expect it,” Harry said, “but if you want a ransom you have to specify a time and a place, which gives your enemies a chance to ambush you.”

Sir Leon shook his head impatiently. “For my part I find it hard to believe that the recovery of the painting is intrinsically bound up in an attempt at murder.” He shrugged, as though suggesting that his qualifications for making that judgment were not as good as Harry’s. “I do believe, however, in their willingness to exchange the painting for a ransom.” He turned his myopic gaze to me. “They have requested that we insert a coded message in the personal column of The Times, which message would indicate our willingness to pay the ransom of four million pounds. On receipt of that message, they will instruct us in the method to be used for making that payment.” I sensed that I was hearing the echoes of an old disagreement. Sir Leon was quite ready to pay any price for the painting, while Harry was more intent on trapping Elizabeth and Garrard. Sir Leon still looked at me. “I see no need for you to be a murder target, my lord. If you’re content, then I suggest you allow me to ransom the painting, then to negotiate a fair price with you.”

“No!” Harry, with a surprising asperity, slapped the suggestion down. “Once you’ve agreed to pay the ransom, you’ve no assurance they’ll give up the painting. They’ll just soak you for another four million.” He looked back to me. “I’d rather trick the bastards into showing themselves. If you’ll help.”

“Oh, I’ll help you,” I said easily, “but there is a condition for my help.”

“I do assure you” – Sir Leon, perhaps piqued by Harry’s strong opposition, spoke very irritably – “that I will pay you the highest imaginable price for the painting. Indeed, I’m quite certain your eventual price will be far too high. I have, after all, conducted negotiations with your family before.”

Those final words whipped at my pride like the recoiling slash of a broken wire-rope. Sir Leon’s voice had been smug and scornful, implying that my family, though broken and poor, had shown nothing but greed. The words told me that Sir Leon despised me, and he was showing that derision by letting me know that my greed could never match his fortune. He had the power of new money over old families, but I would be damned before I would let him patronise me. “Bugger your price,” I said. That shook all of them. “I don’t give a toss about your price. And don’t equate me with the rest of the family. If you negotiate with me, then you satisfy my terms, and those terms are very simple, Sir Leon. You take care of Georgina’s future, all of it.”

Sir Leon blinked at me. He had clearly been astonished by my vehemence, but not so astonished as to forget that he was at a negotiating table. “Your price, as I understand it, is your younger sister’s security?”

“And happiness.”

He gazed at me. He had very pale eyes, and I suddenly saw that he was not a timid little man at all, but a very hard one. “And your monetary price besides?” he asked in his most mocking voice.

He must have known he would get under my skin. “You can have the bloody painting!” I matched his scorn with my own. “Why the hell do you think I’m here? Because I care about being rich? For God’s sake, I inherited Stowey and the painting four years ago, and I didn’t want them then and I don’t want them now. I came here, Sir Leon, not to save a painting, but to save my sister from a squalid caravan in a dripping wood.”

Jennifer was staring at me. I knew I’d overreacted to her stepfather’s patronising tone. I’d lost my temper, said far more than I had wanted to say, and now found myself on the brink of giving up a fortune just to prove to this small bastard that not everyone would lick his arse to become rich. But at least I had succeeded in astonishing Jennifer, who was now staring at me as though she had never quite seen me before.

Sir Leon smiled. “I accept your terms, my lord. One painting in return for your sister’s lifelong security.” He held out his hand.

“Think carefully, John,” Lady Buzzacott warned me in a soft voice.

Jennifer shook her head slightly, as though disbelieving that I would take the offered hand. Sir Leon smiled at my hesitation. “So you’re not as pure as you’d have us believe, my lord? You wish to amend the terms of the agreement?”

“Bugger your amendments.” I shook his hand.

Which meant that to surprise a multimillionaire, and to impress his stepdaughter, who was engaged to a squillionaire and despised me anyway, I’d just given away a Van Gogh. And I knew just how my ancestor, the seventeenth Earl, must have felt when he lost all the family’s Irish estates and all our rich sugar plantations in the Caribbean on the single turn of the ace of diamonds; I felt like a proper fool.

Harry was almost doubled over with laughter. We had left the family and gone into the garden where we were hidden from the house by a big yew hedge. “What a berk you are! Sweet Jesus! What a bloody berk!”

“Shut up.” I was far more angry with myself than I was with Harry.

“Sweet suffering Christ!” He laughed again. “You gave it away! And you only did it to impress that bird! How much is it worth? Twenty million?” He shook his head in wonderment. “You gave away a Van Gogh worth twenty millions!”

“I don’t care about the bloody money,” I said bitterly.

“Of course you care, Johnny, you just don’t want to admit it.” Harry gave a final hoot of delighted laughter.

“I don’t care about the money,” I insisted, “I never have. I wouldn’t be a blue-water sailor if I cared about money.”

“A blue-water sailor,” he mocked me with cruel mimicry. “But you care about the Contessa, don’t you? And it’ll take more than a shabby boat to get into her knickers. She’s the kind that needs a diamond necklace before every tumble, and I reckon you’ve just blown away your chances, Johnny.”

“You’re a crude swine, Harry.”

“But let’s hope I’m a clever one, my son.” He lit a cigarette and stared at a statue of a half-naked nymph which graced an alcove in the hedge. “Clever enough to stop Sir Leon paying the ransom. That’s all he wants to do, pay up, because he thinks that’s the surest way to get his picture. He can’t wait. He’s like a kid locked out of the toyshop, but I don’t believe it’s as easy as he thinks. If they can winkle four million out of him now, what’s to stop them going back to the well with a bigger bucket? They can’t be fools, they must know it’s worth more than four million.”

I didn’t answer. I was still trying to accustom myself to a belief in Elizabeth’s guilt. I didn’t like her, I’d really never liked her, but it was hard to think of her as wanting my death. Yet Harry’s arguments had been persuasive. “Why don’t you just search Elizabeth’s house?” I asked him. “If you find the picture, then it will all be over.”

“Funnily enough my grandmother taught me to suck eggs before you were born, Johnny. Don’t be a cretin. She won’t have a bloody Van Gogh tucked away in the attic. It’s been hidden away for four years, and we’re going to have to be clever if we’re to get it back.”

“Then find Garrard,” I suggested.

“I’m looking for Mr Garrard,” Abbott said grimly, “but he’s done a bunk. So we have to persuade Mr Garrard to find us.” He still squinted up at the nymph’s mossy breasts. “A nasty piece of work, Mr Garrard.”

“You know him?”

“Of course I know him.” Harry abandoned the nymph to walk slowly up the newly cut grass to where a fountain sparkled prettily in the afternoon sunshine. He sat on the wall that circled the fountain’s pool and looked at me quizzically. “He got slung out of the Paras for nicking the mess funds, then, because the Fraud squad found him monkeying about with some dodgy bonds, he did a bunk and joined one of those mercenary groups in Southern Africa. About five years ago he came home on leave, and he never went back. He’s been small-time ever since, bookies and winkling, which is very puzzling.” Harry tapped cigarette ash into the fountain’s pool. “Why does a top-drawer bastard with a good brain scratch around with lowlife villains? He was making good money in Africa.”

“He must be making more here.”

“Not now, he isn’t.” Harry frowned. “But I reckon Garrard’s bought a share of that picture. He’s not hired labour, Johnny, but a full partner with your sister. And he’ll be coming after you with a knife because he smells several million quid at the end of the road. How do you feel about that?”

“I’m not ecstatic at the prospect.”

“But at least you’d die in the knowledge that you’d helped me solve an old crime.”

“Up yours, too.”

“Because if I’m right,” Harry went on, “they’d still rather have you out of the way. With you dead Elizabeth can sell the painting on the open market and she won’t have to answer any awkward questions about where her fortune came from; she’ll be free, rich, and laughing.”

“And I’ll be dead.”

“Not with your Uncle Harry looking after you” – he gave me an evil grin with his tombstone teeth – “and if I’m clever,” he went on, “I’ll have your sister and Garrard behind bars, Jenny-baby will be married to that Swiss cheese, Sir Leon will have his painting, and you’ll be as poor as a church mouse because you gave your family fortune away. So shall we start letting the evil ones know that you can’t wait to be knifed?”

I went to a gap in the hedge to see if Jennifer had followed us out to the gardens, but the empty lawns just shimmered in the day’s heat. Which meant I was alone, and poor, and about to be a target.

Five days later, on a summer’s day as beautiful as any that could be wished, I sailed Sunflower into Dartmouth. The sun shone benevolently and the wind was a well-behaved force three, just enough to shift Sunflower along nicely, yet not strong enough to jar the launches which carried the television news crews.

This was Harry’s malicious way of baiting his hook: publicity.

Sir Leon’s publicity department had made the arrangements. John, Earl of Stowey, once suspected of stealing his family’s Van Gogh, was returning to England to help the authorities find it. The press release carefully ignored the fact that I had twice visited England earlier in the year; instead it was implied that like a prodigal I had just sailed back from unknown waters. As I neared the river mouth more launches joined the procession till I began to feel like one of those record-breaking circumnavigators coming home. Questions were shouted across to my cockpit, but I waved them away. I wanted to berth safely first.

A berth had been reserved for me on the inner side of the town pontoon. I sailed Sunflower into the narrow space which was just, but only just, wide enough for me to turn her. I was showing off. Most people would have used the motor for the final approach and the turn into the tide, but I hoped Jennifer Pallavicini was waiting for me on the quay, so I sailed Sunflower into the confined water between pontoon and quay, swung her bows hard over, knew I’d misjudged the flooding tide, began to panic, and prayed desperately that Sunflower would keep way on her as we came up to wind and tide. She didn’t, but hung up, and I realised that in twenty seconds the wind and tide would drive my new mast against the bridge which led from the town quay to the pontoon. I didn’t have time to start the engine, so swore instead, but then Sunflower was saved by a quick-witted yachtsman who told me to heave him a line. I did, and was ignominiously hauled into the vacant berth where one of the waiting reporters sincerely congratulated me on a fine piece of seamanship.

The questions were unavoidable now. Had I heard about the damage done to the painting? Yes. What had made me change my mind and come home to help? That damage. Where had I been? Everywhere. Would I sell the painting if it was recovered? All the time I was trying to secure Sunflower properly, tensioning her warps and springs and sometimes cursing at a reporter who got in my way. Two of Sir Leon’s publicity men were trying to impose order on the chaos and only managed to make things worse. One photographer went down into Sunflower’s cabin and started taking flash photographs so I hauled him out and threw him on to the pontoon. Photographs were taken of that. Another photographer cheered me up by falling overboard.

I finally succeeded in locking the boat. The publicity men shepherded me towards a nearby hotel where a room had been reserved for a formal press conference. Jennifer Pallavicini was already there. I said good morning. She said good morning. The two of us then sat behind a table while the rabble arranged their lights and microphones. A full size reproduction of the Stowey Sunflowers was framed on the wall behind us. I noticed that Jennifer was not wearing her engagement ring, and decided that she must keep it for private occasions only. Or perhaps Harry Abbott was right, and most of the time it was kept in a bank vault.

Was it true, a woman reporter opened the proceedings, that the painting was being held to ransom?

“Yes,” I said.

Could I afford the price?

“You must be joking,” I said. “I’m skint.”

“So how will you save the painting?”

“By co-operating with Sir Leon Buzzacott.” Which was a cue for the questions to be directed to Jennifer who was present on behalf of the Buzzacott Museum Gallery. She coolly confirmed that her stepfather was taking full financial responsibility for the painting’s recovery.

“But if he pays the ransom,” the first woman asked, “will he then have to pay a purchase price to the Earl of Stowey?”

“That purchase price has already been agreed,” Jennifer said.

“How much?” That was about fifty voices.

I waited for quiet. “I’ve decided to donate the painting to Sir Leon’s gallery.”

That reply caused pandemonium. I patiently confirmed that they had not misheard me and that I had indeed given the painting to Sir Leon, and wanted nothing for myself.

“Why?” a dozen voices wanted to know.

“Because I want the painting to stay in Britain, and because Sir Leon’s gallery will provide the perfect home.”

But why had I given it away? Weren’t there galleries that would have paid me millions for the picture?

“I’m a philanthropist,” I said. “Ask the Contessa here. She can vouch for the benevolent side of my character.”

Jennifer’s lips tightened slightly. Not that any of the reporters noticed. How did I feel now, they asked instead, about my arrest four years before?

“I was never charged,” I said, “so I feel it was all a mistake.”

But I had been the chief suspect. How did I feel about that?

“Flattered.”

“Did you steal it?” one idiot asked.

“Of course I didn’t bloody steal it. Don’t be so bloody stupid.” Sir Leon’s publicity men had impressed on me that I must not be nasty to the press, but I didn’t really see why. They were nasty to me.

How had I heard about the damage done to the painting?

“The Contessa flew out to the Azores and told me.”

How did I think my presence in England would assist the police in finding the picture?

“I don’t know,” I said, “ask them.”

Had the police given me any indication of who they thought might have stolen the picture?

“Yes.”

That simple affirmative, as it was meant to, caused a flurry of further, eager questions and, just as Harry had instructed me, I qualified the answer. I hadn’t been given any names, I lied, but I had received the strong impression that the police weren’t entirely clueless. The reporters tried to suck more meat off that bone, but both Jennifer and I refused to elaborate.

Jennifer then confirmed that her stepfather was employing specialists in ransom psychology to back up the police effort. That was news to me, but I imagined it was all a part of panicking Elizabeth into rashness. Jennifer gave the impression that a vast organisation was about to descend on the thieves. She was very impressive.

After the press conference I went back to Sunflower and did four interviews for television reporters. They all asked the same questions and all got the same answers. I obliged the radio reporters afterwards, then posed like an idiot for some press photographers. By midday the fuss had died down, all but for one man who waited till the other reporters had gone, then told me his paper would pay me a six-figure sum if I’d dictate a candid account of how I’d nicked the painting from my mother. I told him to get lost.

“Think about it, my lord.”

“I told you to get lost.”

“Come up to London and chat to the editor. Why not? We’re not talking peanuts here.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and thumped him in the belly. His photographer took a picture of that, so I thumped the photographer as well. I didn’t hurt either man, which was a pity.

But at least my actions saw them off. Jennifer Pallavicini had watched the proceedings from the pontoon, and now she stepped down on to Sunflower’s foredeck. “You’re really trying to be popular, aren’t you?”

“I thought the object of the exercise was to announce my intention of retrieving the painting, not to win a beauty competition?”

She shrugged that answer off. “Do you always hit people who annoy you?” she asked.

“Only men.”

“Are you ever hit back?”

“Frequently. I once had the shit knocked out of me in Australia.”

She frowned. I thought she’d taken offence at my language, but it seemed there was something else on her mind. “What do you care about, Mr Rossendale?”

“Georgina.” Whom I had carefully not mentioned to any of the press.

“Why?” Jennifer asked.

I paused, wondering whether to answer. “Because,” I finally said, “she’s too loopy to worry about herself.”

“Does that concern apply to everyone who’s too weak to look after themselves?”

“Maybe.”

“Meaning it’s none of my business.” She looked at her watch. “I think that on the whole, and despite your hostility, that was a most successful exercise. I’ll see you in the morning, Mr Rossendale.” I knew she was spending the night with some relatives in Totnes, but I’d somehow hoped she might spend some small part of the day with me. Because, just as Sir Leon was obsessed with my Van Gogh, I was becoming obsessed with his stepdaughter. She was truly beautiful, but just too self-composed. She had become a challenge. Just like the bar at Salcombe.

“You wouldn’t like some lunch?” I asked as she walked away.

“No, thank you,” she called over her shoulder, “not today.”

And up yours, too, I thought, but didn’t say it.

The hook was well-baited now. Elizabeth knew where I was, and knew I was trying to retrieve the painting. Harry had warned me that from this moment on Garrard and Peel might pay me another visit.

They would be walking into an ambush. Two plain-clothes policemen were always on duty to watch me. Not quite always; Harry told me that he couldn’t find the manpower or the money to have me guarded throughout England, so my guardians would only be on duty when I was in Dartmouth itself. If I went away from the river, Harry reasoned, Garrard and Peel could not possibly know where I was going, so would have no chance of finding me. “Suppose they follow me?” I had asked him.

“You’d be dead, Johnny, but don’t worry. The force will send a nice wreath to your funeral.” After which grim jest he told me his men would work in shifts; by day idling with the tourists on the quay above the pontoon, while the night shift would keep watch from a cabin cruiser moored astern of Sunflower.

I didn’t entirely trust the watchfulness of Harry’s men so, once the pressmen had finally abandoned me, I took my dinghy upstream and found a boatyard that could sell me a couple of pounds of lead and a scrap piece of sheet aluminium.

I went back to Sunflower, took the head off my new boathook, and drilled a hollow into the top of the wooden shaft. I didn’t have a crucible or furnace so I used an oxyacetylene lamp to melt the lead. I dripped it piece by piece into the hollow space. I worked on Sunflower’s foredeck which I shielded with a sheet of scrap iron. When I’d finished melting the lead I wrapped the aluminium about the hollowed section of shaft to give it strength, then drilled a hole so that the metal hook could be bolted back into place. I used a file to sharpen the back edge of the hook and, when it was done, congratulated myself on a proper job.

Then, because I might not get a chance to use the hook, I prepared my other weapons. Some, like the rocket alarm flares, were potentially lethal, while others, like the fire-extinguishers, were merely nasty. If Garrard and Peel did appear, then at least I would have a reception for them.

And I knew I might need all the weapons. Garrard’s reputation was frightening: an officer gone bad, a trained killer, and a man in desperate need of money.

He did not come that first night. I slept nervously, but undisturbed. In the morning I shaved in Sunflower’s cockpit and watched the yachts motoring towards the sea. It promised to be a warm day. There was no sign of any plain-clothes policemen, but Harry had warned me that they would not be highly visible. “If you can see them,” he had told me, “then so can the nasties.”

I slung my shaving water overboard, then went below and fried myself a big pan of eggs and bacon. I made a Thermos flask of coffee, then carried the whole breakfast up to the cockpit just in time to see Jennifer Pallavicini walking down the pontoon.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “Coffee?”

She ignored the offer, telling me instead that we had both been asked to appear on an early evening television programme. “I’ve said yes for you,” she said.

“Coffee?” I asked again.

She looked at her watch. “Thank you,” she said in a rather grudging voice. She stepped down into the cockpit and sat opposite me. She was carrying a heavy bag that she gratefully dropped into the cockpit sole.

“Bacon and eggs?” I offered her my own plate.

She shuddered. “No, thank you.”

I fetched a mug and poured her some coffee. As she drank it she watched me wolf down the bacon and eggs. “Don’t you ever put on weight?” she asked at last.

“No.”

“Lucky you.” She flinched as I mopped up the egg yolk and brown sauce with a piece of well-buttered white bread. “Don’t you have any idea about healthy eating?” she was driven to ask.

“Well fried and lots of it,” I said enthusiastically.

“You like to shock people, don’t you?”

“What, me? Never. Tell me about this television programme I don’t want to appear on.”

“It’s in London.”

I groaned. “Tell me how I’m supposed to get to London for this television programme I don’t want to appear on?”

“We’ll arrange transport for you.”

“How are you getting there?” I asked hopefully.

“My stepfather’s helicopter,” she answered very distantly, letting me know that, even if politeness forced her to offer me a ride, I should be well-mannered enough to refuse. “I can give you a lift if you like, but I’m leaving very soon. Hans and I have to go to a lunch reception at the Hayward Gallery.”

“What are they showing this month?” I asked. “Collages of squashed cockroaches? Municipal litter baskets? Finger-painting by the Islington Lesbian Collective?”

“Late-eighteenth-century English landscapes, if you must know.”

I gave her a wink. “I’ll give it a miss.”

“Philistine,” she said, but not angrily. Indeed, it was said almost fondly, and the warm tone seemed to surprise her as much as it did me. We looked at each other. I think we were both taken aback by the affection she had unintentionally expressed. She half smiled, then hurried to cover that tiny moment of truth. “Well, you are!” she protested too hastily. “Only a Philistine would give away a Van Gogh!”

“I did it so you’d be hugely impressed by my generosity, not to mention my quixotic soul. I have this theory, you see, that women prefer irresponsible rogues to Swiss cheese merchants.”

“Rogues with twenty million pounds,” she pointed out, “are marginally more attractive than rogues without.”

I laughed. It was an odd moment. At one instant we had been at each other’s throats and suddenly, for no apparent reason that I could snatch from the air, we were smiling at each other.

“If you must know,” she said, “I thought you were an idiot to give it away.”

I nodded. “That’s probably a very fair assessment.”

“Do you regret doing it?” she asked in genuine interest.

I pretended to think about it. “If it didn’t impress you then it was clearly a wasted gesture.”

She smiled, and I thought how beautiful she was. “It impressed me,” she confessed, “but if you regret it, then I promise you my stepfather won’t keep you to it.”

“I don’t back out of contracts.”

She didn’t pursue the subject. “Did you see the television news last night?”

“I don’t have a television.”

“They gave our press conference a lot of time,” she said, “and they were especially kind to you. They didn’t show you hitting anyone and they didn’t let anyone hear you swearing.”

“Untruthful bastards, aren’t they?”

“And here are the morning papers.” She spilt the big bag at my feet. I picked up the papers one by one. The serious papers had given us a fair bit of space, but nothing compared to the tabloids, which had jumped all over the story. There were a lot of pictures of me, most of them in Sunflower, but a fair number also showed me sitting in the hotel with Jennifer Pallavicini. ‘Vagabond Earl Sails Home’, one caption said. “You will notice,” Jennifer said, “that your presence guaranteed us a heavy coverage.”

“My presence? Not yours?”

“I’m not newsworthy,” she said disparagingly. “No, it’s the vagabond earl who caught their fancy.”

I lifted a tabloid which had printed her picture larger than mine. She looked very sexy in the picture, perhaps because the photographer had been almost under the floorboards to aim his camera up her skirt. I thought again how good she’d look in a bikini. Or out of one.

“Do you ever go sailing?” I asked her suddenly.

“Sometimes.” She sounded defensive.

“With Hans?” I sounded defensive.

“Hans doesn’t have time for sailing. No, a friend of Mummy’s has a ketch.”

A friend of Mummy’s would, I thought. “A big ketch?” I asked instead.

“At least twice the size of Sunflower,” she said airily.

“You should try small boat sailing,” I said. “It’s wetter, and more intimate. Why don’t you come for a sail in Sunflower?”

I expected her usual refusal, especially after I’d used the word ‘intimate’, but surprisingly, and after a moment’s hesitation, she gave an abrupt nod. “All right. Maybe. One day.”

“Only maybe?” I asked.

She smiled. “A definite maybe.”

It was worth giving up a Van Gogh for that feeling. It really was. I must have smiled, for she smiled back at me, but then I had to look away because running footsteps were suddenly loud on the pontoon bridge and a voice was shouting for me. “Johnny! You bastard! Johnny!”

I twisted round, already reaching for the weighted boathook, but my importunate visitor was neither Garrard nor Peel, but Charlie. I noticed one of the plain-clothes policemen running along the quay towards the pontoon’s bridge, but when I stood with a welcoming expression on my face, my guardian angel relaxed. “Charlie!” I shouted.

“God Almighty!” He ran down the pontoon, leaped on to Sunflower’s counter, then jumped down on to the mass of newspapers in the cockpit. “You bastard!” He was clearly pleased to see me.

He slapped my back. I introduced him to Jennifer, who nodded very coolly. “Mr Barratt,” she said in acknowledgement of the introduction.

Charlie looked from Jennifer to me, then back to Jennifer. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

“No, Mr Barratt, you are not.” All her previous coolness had returned. She retrieved her bag. “I’ll see you this evening, my lord.”

“Where?”

“At the studios, of course. A car will pick you up here at one o’clock. You’re supposed to be in London by five-thirty, so that should give you more than enough time. It’s nice to have met you, Mr Barratt.”

Charlie watched her walk all the way down the pontoon, then sighed. “That is tasty, Johnny. That is very tasty.”

“And engaged to a Swiss cheese zillionaire.”

He snapped his fingers suddenly. “She’s the one who was on the telly with you last night?”

“That’s the one.”

“Hell fire.” He sat down heavily. “Tell me it isn’t true.”

“Tell you what isn’t true?”

He was staring up at me with a very worried expression. “You didn’t really give the picture away, did you?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes. “Christ on the cross. I saw you on the telly last night and I couldn’t believe what you were saying! He’s mad, I thought, off his poor little twist! You’re as bad as Georgina!”

“Come on, Charlie!” His accusation had angered me. “What the hell am I supposed to do with the bloody thing?”

“Sell it, you bloody fool,” he said, just as angrily.

I laughed. I couldn’t stay angry with Charlie. I sat opposite him and told him all about Georgina and Elizabeth, and how I’d visited Perilly House and seen the two caravans which I suspected were intended to be Georgina’s new home. I explained how Sir Leon had promised to take care of her future for me, and how that was more important than some damned picture, however glorious that picture might be.

Charlie leaned his head against the lower guardrail. “Elizabeth was going to shove Georgina into a caravan?”

“Yes.”

He uttered a crisp judgment of Elizabeth, then another, less crisp, on me. “But you still gave it away. I don’t believe it!”

He seemed extraordinarily worried, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps he had thought that, should I succeed in finding the picture, I would pay him back for all the thousands he had spent on Sunflower. “If it’s the money, Charlie,” I said, “then don’t worry. Sir Leon will give me enough to pay you. I might have given up the purchase money, but I don’t mind asking for a few thousand as a reward.”

“Bugger the money! I’m thinking about you!” He helped himself to the mug of coffee Jennifer had abandoned. “I suppose you realise that Elizabeth will probably take you to court and challenge your right to give it away?”

“Perhaps.” But not, I thought, if she was hiding it.

Charlie sighed. “You have a rare talent, Johnny, for going up shit-filled creeks and chucking away paddles.” He offered me a lit cigarette, then lit one for himself. “Who’s the copper on this one?”

“Harry Abbott again.”

“Jesus wept.” He was truly disgusted. “You’re not bunking up with bloody Harry, are you?” He frowned, evidently thinking of the press conference. “And Harry knows who’s got the painting?”

I smiled, knowing my next answer would amuse Charlie. “Elizabeth.”

Charlie stared at me in surprise, then scornfully rejected the idea. “Harry’s off his twist! He reckons Elizabeth stole the painting?”

“Or someone did it for her.”

“Bloody hell! But Elizabeth married money, didn’t she?”

“They’re skint.”

He thought about it for a few seconds, then tacitly conceded that his initial scornful rejection might have been mistaken. “She always liked money, didn’t she?” He stared at me, and I saw the penny drop. “Johnny! She tried to have you killed?”

“That’s what Harry thinks.”

“Which means she’ll try again…” Charlie was smart, very smart, and he twisted on the thwart to stare at the man who had chased him down the bridge on to the pontoon. He snapped his fingers at me. “You’re being guarded, Johnny!”

“You got it, Charlie. Not all the time, because Harry’s a cheapskate copper, but so long as I’m on the river I’ve got company.”

“You’re daft,” he said, “plain daft.” He had spoken ruefully. Now he stood up. “I don’t know, Johnny. I thought you’d be halfway to the West Indies by now! Hell, I was going to bring Joanna out there for a fortnight!”

“There’ll be other fortnights, Charlie.”

“Maybe.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a meeting up on the M5 extension. It’s a brand new motorway and it’s already crumbling to shreds. Still, I mustn’t complain. It’s all money. Look after yourself, Johnny.”

“I’m trying.”

“But if you want my advice,” he said morosely, “I’d bugger off. I wouldn’t trust Harry Abbott, and I certainly wouldn’t trust that Buzzacott mob. They’ve already conned a painting out of you, so what will they take next?” He climbed on to the pontoon. “Maybe I’ll drop by on my way home.”

“I won’t be here this afternoon, Charlie.”

“Oh, of course. You’re off to London with your girlfriend.” He paused on the pontoon. “You’re an idiot, Johnny.”

“Am I?”

“You’re getting involved.” He flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the river, then stared gloomily at me. “Do you know why I like you? Because from the very beginning, right from the beginning, you were always different. You never gave a damn. You didn’t give a monkey’s about a bloody thing. You’d do anything for a dare. But now? Now you’re letting those rich buggers call your tune. You’re joining them, Johnny, and they’ll use you.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “Go back to sea, Johnny. You’ll be happier there.”

“I’ll go back soon.”

“Go now, before they tame you.”

I smiled, then watched him walk away. Had Charlie been tamed? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had let down my friend. I had let him down by throwing in my lot with other people, and I abruptly realised that Charlie was upset because, till now, he had always seen himself as my protector. Now he felt betrayed, and I felt rotten, but I wouldn’t change my course, not yet, for Georgina’s future and my own stupid hopes depended on it. Not hopes of a painting, nor of a reward, but of Jennifer.

I chained the dinghy to the coachroof so that no thieving creep would steal it, locked Sunflower, told my police guards that I’d be going away and that I’d phone the local station before I returned, then went to London.

To my chagrin, Hans had accompanied Jennifer Pallavicini to the television studio. The happy couple were waiting for me in the hospitality room where Hans greeted me politely, then stood smiling by as Jennifer and I made small talk. Her friendliness of the morning had dissipated, though she did say that she liked Charlie.

“You did?” I sounded surprised, for she’d behaved very coolly when she met him.

“He looks a very capable sort of man.”

“He’s that, right enough.” I told her tales of our adventures together, and recounted the time when we had nearly died in the Tasman Sea storm, and how Charlie had sung all the way through the ordeal because, he said, he’d be buggered if he went to hell crying. “He’s a good man,” I said warmly.

“And you define a good man,” she observed icily, “as being someone who can sail small boats in big storms?”

I reflected that it was a more reliable definition than being a genius with the processed cheese, but managed to avoid saying as much. Instead I was buttonholed by the programme’s presenter who told me what he wanted me to say. It was evident that I’d been cast as the rogue aristocrat; unstable, unreliable, and somewhat mysterious; while Jennifer, I assumed, had been invited in case I proved to be tongue-tied, in which case she could be relied on to keep speaking.

We did our television programme. The interviewer treated me like a cretin, and I obliged by being suitably arrogant. When I was asked why I’d given away the Van Gogh, I simply replied that I didn’t want it. The audience seemed to like the interview. Jennifer was more loquacious, explaining the importance of the missing painting, then paying a very nice tribute to my generosity. The audience applauded me. The whole thing was quite painless, and all over within twenty minutes. We were shown back to the hospitality room where we were offered warm white wine and stale sandwiches. There was no sign of Hans.

“He had to catch a flight to Geneva,” Jennifer explained. She looked very excited, perhaps because she had enjoyed the interview more than she had expected. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?”

“Of course it was! Don’t be so boring. I think I’d like to be on telly more often.”

“You were very good,” I said loyally.

“Then we shall celebrate my success by having dinner.”

She was suddenly bouncing with happiness, and my own happiness was increasing because of it. We went to a restaurant where we could eat outside and, in the lantern-light, she told me about her childhood, and about the American university where she’d majored in Fine Arts, then about her apprenticeship at a London auction house and her first proper gallery job in Florence. I tried to put a time-span on various jobs, and decided she must be twenty-seven.

“And you,” she asked, “what about you?”

“I thought you’d done all that research on me?”

“Maybe it was wrong.” She caught my eye, and we said nothing for a moment, and I wondered if all the former hostility between us had been merely a disguise for what we had both been feeling. I think I already knew that this was a girl worth staying ashore for, and if that was an exciting thought, it was also somewhat frightening. Maybe she felt the same fear for she suddenly looked away and posed a brutal question. “Tell me about your brother. Why did he kill himself?”

“He couldn’t cope.”

“With what?”

“The problems of Stowey. Mother. Life. Debts. Disappointment.”

Jennifer frowned. “Disappointment?”

I lit a pipe, taking my time over the job. “It was very important to Michael that he was going to be an earl. He thought it would make him important. He couldn’t wait for Father to die. He wanted to see the forelocks twitching when he walked by, and he wanted to wear the ermine, and he fancied hobnobbing in the House of Lords, and when he finally inherited he suddenly discovered that it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. He was still just the same indecisive idiot that he’d always been. Mother kept pushing him to do things to the estate, which he didn’t have the guts to try, and she also wanted him to marry some monstrous creature from the Fens, which he couldn’t face, so in the end he just bunged a double-barrel into his mouth and put his big toe on the trigger.”

For a few seconds she didn’t speak, then she frowned. “You can be very flippant at times.”

“Can I?”

She didn’t reply, instead she just stared at me as though this was the very first time she had really taken notice of me. And I, suddenly, was frightened, because I knew I was being judged, and I wanted that judgment to be favourable.

“Listen,” I said. “Life can be very shitty, it can be tough, it can be the pits. So there’s only one rule, and that’s never to give in. Bad luck comes to all of us, so what must you do? You fight it, you claw at it, you kick the shit out of it, but you never, ever, ever give in. You only go through this vale of tears once, so for God’s sake make it a good voyage. So if I’m flippant, that’s only because it’s better to make light of a disaster than to cry over it.”

I had spoken with more vehemence than I had intended. Jennifer had looked away from me to stare down at the table, so I could not see what she had made of my words. “What do you think about when you’re out there?” she asked after a while, “on your own, at sea?”

“Survival.”

“Is that all?”

“It isn’t all,” I started, though I couldn’t explain the rest of it, so shrugged instead. “You have to be there to know.”

I knew my words had been inadequate. I looked round the small courtyard where diners sat at a dozen tables. They looked content, wealthy, attractive, happy. They also looked plump, self-important, and trapped. “Once,” I said awkwardly, “I watched a meteor fall past the Southern Cross. It was a big one, a great blazon of light across the darkness, and I can’t explain why that’s important, or what I felt, except that to see it even once, in all its glory, is worth an awful lot.”

“Were you alone?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t want to share it with anyone?”

“Oh, yes.”

She smiled at that answer, but kept silent.

“So tomorrow” – I took the plunge for happiness — “why don’t you come to Devon with me and we’ll have a day at sea?”

“To watch the stars fall?”

“Maybe.”

She raised her glass, waited for me to do the same, then touched her rim against mine. “OK,” she said simply.

And I was in heaven.

We stayed that night at Sir Leon’s house in Mayfair. I was given a guest room, and didn’t ask for more. We were up long before dawn and, while I made coffee and toast, Jennifer raided the freezers and kitchen cupboards for our lunch. We were much too early for a radio weather forecast, so I phoned the commercial service and listened to their tape recording. “What do they say?” Jennifer asked me when I put the phone down.

“Sounds good,” I said absent-mindedly, “a real skirt-lifter.”

“A real what?” She turned on me with mock fierceness.

“Force six, gusting seven,” I said contritely, then carried the bags down to the garage where she opened the door of a battered Ford Escort. “Yours?” I asked.

She heard the surprise in my voice. “What did you expect? A Lamborghini?”

“A Porsche at least.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” She dangled the keys above the car roof. “Do you want to drive?”

“No.”

“That’s good. I like driving.”

She raced the car through empty dark streets. Neither of us spoke much at first, it was too early in the morning, yet there was a distinct feeling of excitement. Just days before we had been snapping at each other like strange dogs; now, suddenly, we had the comfortable intimacy of friendship. There was also the anticipation of something more than friendship. It was that anticipation which touched our commonplace with excitement. We both felt it and we were both happy.

She drove like Charlie; fast, competently, and with a blithe confidence that the police would ignore her. They did.

We sped past Heathrow and Windsor, and only then did she break our silence. She talked about the books she was reading, and scorned me with laughter when I told her I thought four books sufficient for life. She described the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, calling it her stepfather’s fantasy and obsession. “That’s why he pursued money so ruthlessly,” she went on, “just so he could build his fantasy.”

“And he’s very rich,” I commented sourly.

“Very.” She ignored the jealousy in my voice. “It was the property world that started him off. It still pays well, I think, but he keeps Mummy and me a long way away from the seamier side of his activities.”

“Seamy?” I asked.

“A bit, I think.” She didn’t elaborate. The sun rose behind us, casting long shadows and promising a fine day, though I doubted, looking at the bare sky, whether the forecast of a skirt-lifting force six would prove correct. Not that it mattered, for this day was not really about sailing, but about exploring a friendship.

And we had plenty of time for that exploration, for we were in Dartmouth long before breakfast time. I hadn’t told Harry that I was returning, which meant my guardian angels were home in their own beds. Their absence made me feel oddly nervous, so I didn’t waste any time getting ready for sea. I cast off Sunflower’s springs, led the bow warp back to the cockpit, hanked on the big genoa and took off the mainsail cover.

“Aren’t you going to motor her out?” Jennifer asked me.

“I’m going to show off and sail us out.”

It was a happier experiment than my arrival on the pontoon. The breeze was from the east, an errant morning wind caused by the hills about the river. The tide was ebbing. I hoisted the jib, let it flap, released the bow warp, then hauled the jib flat to starboard. The wind swung our bows fast off the pontoon, just clearing the transom of the boat ahead. I slipped the stern warp, let the jib sheet run so that the sail was reaching, then hauled in all my loose warps. Sunflower ghosted out of the narrow space like magic.

Jennifer applauded. “I’m impressed.”

“Did you see my arrival?”

She shook her head. “Don’t tell me I missed another of the master mariner’s impressive displays?”

“Technically,” I said, “my arrival here was what we master mariners call a cock-up. I thought you might be watching, tried to impress you by doing it the hard way, and very nearly wrapped the mast round the bridge.”

She laughed. “Serves you right.”

I gave her the helm while I stowed the fenders, then hauled up the big main. The wind was fitful, backing north, but at least blowing us to sea. It was obvious the weathermen had got it wrong again. The wind was force two, sometimes three, but I sensed even that gentle breeze wouldn’t last. The sun was climbing to shimmer the sea and already there was a haze above the slowly receding coast. I watched the river entrance as we drew away. A gaff-rigged cutter had followed us out, but had now turned eastwards towards Torbay. A whale-decked Brixham trawler was plugging in the opposite direction, but, apart from a handful of dinghy sails in the river mouth, there was nothing else in sight. “Safe at last,” I said facetiously.

Jennifer looked back towards the coast. “I’d rather forgotten about those two men.”

“I hadn’t.”

She grimaced. “My stepfather thinks you’re being very foolish. He’d prefer to pay the ransom, but I suppose he can’t really argue with Inspector Abbott. He’s meant to be the expert.”

“Harry’s no fool,” I said. “I might be though, making myself a target. Still, we’re safe now.”

She frowned. “Suppose they saw us leaving? Suppose they’re following us?”

I shook my head. “They’re too late.” Already the river mouth was indistinct, and the land fading like a mirage. In a few minutes we would be alone in the empty sea. “Besides,” I went on to reassure her, “I’ve got a radio, so if we see anything suspicious I’ll scream blue murder to the coastguards.” It occurred to me that Harry would be the one screaming blue murder when he discovered that I’d returned without informing him, so I punctiliously called the Brixham Coastguard and gave them a routine passage report: yacht Sunflower day-sailing off Dartmouth, expecting to return to port sometime that evening. I asked them to relay that information to the Dartmouth police station. They must have been mildly surprised at the request, but promised to make the call.

Jennifer had installed herself in the navigator’s chair and was admiring the electronic display which Charlie had insisted on building over the chart table. “What’s this?” she asked.

“A Decca set.”

“What’s a Decca set?”

I explained the chain of coast radio transmitters which pulsed their signals to sea, and how the little black box translated the signals into a position. This was the first time I’d used Charlie’s gift, so I had to tell the machine roughly where we were, it paused, then the aerial found the signals and the display updated itself with our exact position. Jennifer was enthralled. I entered the latitude and longitude of St Helier in the Channel Islands and Jennifer read the course and distance off the display. “So all you have to do is follow that course and you’ll get there?”

“Not exactly.” I found a chart and showed her how the Decca course would take us straight across the islands of Guernsey and Jersey. “So what we’d have to do,” I said, “is put in another waypoint here,” I pointed to a patch of sea north of the Roches Douvres, “then make St Helier the second waypoint.”

“Waypoint?” she asked.

“Posh name for destination. You pick the waypoint and the machine tells you how to get there.”

She looked at the electronic display which was showing a small bent arrow and some apparently meaningless figures. “What’s it telling us now?”

“It’s assuming we’re trying to sail the direct line to St Helier, so it’s telling us that we’re a tenth of a nautical mile off course to port, travelling at 3.2 knots, on a heading of 162 true, and that we should be heading 137 true.”

She stared admiringly at the display. “I thought you master mariners did it all with sextants?”

“Most of the time we do,” I said, “because you run out of Decca range as soon as you leave Europe.”

So then she wanted to see the sextant. I took her up to the cockpit and showed her how to bring the sun down to the horizon. She wanted to try for herself, so I settled back and watched as she braced herself against the companionway. She was worth watching. She was wearing a shirt and jeans, and had her short black hair tied back with a band. “It’s green!” she exclaimed when she first saw the sun in the mirror, then frowned as a quiver of her right hand jarred the sun loose. A moment later she managed to hold the sun steady on the mirror, then bit her lower lip in fierce concentration as she moved the index arm. The trick of it was to move the index arm to bring the sun down, while holding the rest of the instrument absolutely steady so that the horizon stayed fixed in the sight glass. “Done it!” she said triumphantly.

“Read me the scale.”

She had done it, too. I checked by taking my own sight. “Is that all there is to it?” she asked mockingly.

“That and a lot of very tedious mathematics. It’s also a bit trickier to do when the boat’s heaving up and down in a rough sea, or if you’re trying to find one star among a million, but on the whole that’s all there is to it.”

The genoa slapped a protest at the fading wind. I switched off the Decca and put the sextant away. I let Jennifer steer, though there was little to do for the wind was dying on us. “Whistle,” I said to her.

“Whistle?”

“It’s supposed to bring the wind.”

She laughed, but didn’t try the old magic. I stretched myself lazily on the leeward thwart. “Shouldn’t you be working?” I teased her.

“Of course I should be working.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Because I’m rich and spoilt, and can take days off when I like. Isn’t that what you expected me to say?”

“Is it true?”

She made a face. “Partly. Which is why I usually work very hard.” She hauled in the mainsheet, but it didn’t make the boat go any faster. “I also wanted to be with you,” she added in a shy and surprising explanation. She had not looked at me as she spoke.

I said nothing, waiting till she caught my eye. “Mutual,” I said then. Happiness sometimes comes in cloudbursts.

There was a pause as we shared that happiness, then, in friendly warning, she deliberately broke the mood. “But don’t be too hopeful, John Rossendale. Hans has my heart, such as it is.”

“Lucky Hans.”

“Except this is work really,” she said hastily, perhaps wondering whether she had said too much and was now trying to draw a little of it back. “If we’re going to get the painting back, then I have to co-operate with you, don’t I?”

“Absolutely.”

We sailed on in companionable silence. The coast was nothing but a dark blur in the shimmering haze. A small workboat sped past a half-mile to starboard. I’d watched it approach from astern, but it had made no effort to come near us. I stared at it through the binoculars and saw that it carried a half-dozen hopeful men with sea-angling gear. I could not see Garrard on the boat, so I relaxed. It was getting warmer, so I stripped off my shirt, then lay back again and pillowed my head on the coiled genoa sheet.

“Sleepy?” Jennifer asked.

“Just lazy. I’m not used to being chauffeured.”

“Don’t you get bored with sailing alone?”

“I don’t always sail alone.”

She thought about that for a while. “Girls?”

“Thank God, yes.” I told her about the hitch-hikers who wandered the trade-wind routes; how they lived from island to island, boat to boat, and one summer’s day to the next.

“They make me feel very dull,” she said.

“I can’t think why. You seem very exotic to me.”

“Exotic?”

“Rich, beautiful and engaged to the King of Swiss processed cheese.”

She laughed. “I can’t think why you’re so nasty about Hans! You only met him twice, and he was perfectly pleasant to you.”

It was my turn to betray an intimacy; to offer her some vulnerability of my own. “I dislike him because he’s engaged to you. I’m jealous.”

She smiled acceptance. “How nice.”

It was that kind of morning. Flirtatious and happy, and the flirting sometimes veered very close to something deeper, but we both avoided it. I wasn’t going to hurry her. One learns patience at sea, and I would be patient.

By late morning we had entirely lost sight of land. The wind had died to nothing and the sea was slapping petulantly at Sunflower’s hull. We simply wallowed in a long, lazy swell. The small fishing boat was drifting a mile away. I guessed the men had abandoned hunting inshore for bass and had come out to the deeper water to find mackerel.

Jennifer stood up and, rather decisively, peeled off her jeans and shirt. The abruptness of the gesture somehow invested it with importance, as though she had taken another deliberate step on the road to intimacy. She was wearing a yellow bikini. I had been right: she did look good in a bikini. In fact she looked wonderful, and I said as much.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to resist a comment,” she said tartly.

“And I very much hoped I wouldn’t be able to resist one.”

The hull rocked in the small waves as the sails slatted from side to side. Jennifer abandoned trying to sail Sunflower, and instead stretched herself out on the opposite thwart. She lay with her head towards the stern, while mine was nearer the cabin so we could look at each other across the cockpit. “Daddy didn’t want me to go to the Azores,” she said suddenly.

I assumed Daddy was Sir Leon. “Why not?”

“He thought Inspector Abbott should go. I persuaded him that I stood a better chance of convincing you.”

“If you’d have dressed like that, you’d have succeeded.”

“If we become friends,” she said, “will you persist in making sexist remarks?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “You are a philistine.”

“So why did you go to the Azores?” I asked.

She paused for a heartbeat, wondering whether to offer the confession, then looked across at me. “Because I wanted to see you.”

“I thought that must have been it,” I said complacently.

“You are a bastard!”

I grinned. “For someone who wanted to see me, you weren’t very friendly.”

“What was I supposed to do? Jump into your boat singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’?”

“It might have broken the ice.” I sat up momentarily to check that no shipping threatened to run us down. Nothing did. The only vessel in sight was the mackerel boat which had drifted slightly closer. I lay down again. “I very nearly did go back to England with you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you made me feel like a puppet.”

“Something went right, then.”

I laughed. A gull floated above us, decided we weren’t a fishing boat, and slid away. Sunflower’s sails and her red ensign hung limp, while Charlie’s wind vane at the masthead lazily boxed the compass.

“Mummy likes you,” Jennifer said suddenly.

“I like Mummy.”

“Do you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Men always do.”

“I prefer her daughter.”

Jennifer treated that compliment as merely dutiful. “Did she talk to you about Hans?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“In the first place that he’s dull, in the second that he’s duller, and in the third that he’s very dull. She added later that he’s extremely dull.”

She laughed, but didn’t say anything.

“Is she right?” I asked.

“Mummy’s usually very acute about people.”

I digested that one. I’d left the VHF switched on to Channel 16 and I heard a squawk as someone called the coastguard to report their passage. I waited for the conversation to be switched to the working channel and, in the ensuing silence, looked across the cockpit. “Jennifer?”

“John?” She mocked my solemnity with her own.

Perhaps I wasn’t so patient after all, for I suddenly wanted to short-circuit the morning’s flirtatiousness. “I think I’m in love with you.”

She looked at me for a long time in silence. I wondered if I had spoilt the mood by being too serious, but then she smiled. “How very inconvenient.”

We smiled at each other. I knew then that everything was going to be all right. It really was. Hans had lost. I didn’t know how it had happened so quickly, or what would happen next, but I knew everything was wonderful. Happiness filled me like a great glow.

She sat up, pulled off her headband, and ran fingers through her hair. “I’m told,” she said happily, “that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

“There are alternative routes.”

She stood and gave my belly a reproving slap. “For now, John Rossendale, it will be the stomach. Lunch?”

“I’ll get it.”

“You stay there. I know what food I packed, and you don’t. Besides, you doubtless believe a woman’s place is in the galley, so why pretend otherwise?” She stooped and gave me a very swift kiss on the lips. I made a grab for her, but she was too fast for me. She laughed, and swung herself down the companionway steps.

I listened to her unpacking the food. I was happy, so very happy, transported to some new region of gold-touched, warm and loving contentment.

“Where’s the tin-opener?” she called.

“In the cave-locker behind the sink.”

“Wine glasses?”

“Hanging in a rack over your head.”

“Soup plates?”

“Use the big coffee mugs.”

She began singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’, and I wanted to laugh aloud because I knew she was as happy as I was. Sunflower rocked gently. Small waves slapped at her steel chines. The sky was pale blue, with just the faintest hint of high cloud wisping.

She stopped singing. “Matches?”

“In a waterproof plastic container beside the cutlery tray. You strike the match on the inside of the container lid.”

She started singing again, then stopped almost immediately. “Why won’t the gas turn on?”

“Because you have to switch on the gas feed tap which you’ll find by the engine bulkhead under the companionway steps, and I have to switch the main feed on back here.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“Aye aye, Captain.” I sat up. I saw that the skipper of the mackerel boat had started his engine and was going away from us into the heat haze. I opened the transom locker where I kept the cooking gas bottles. The locker had a drain to the open air, thus, if one of the bottles leaked, the lethal gas would drain harmlessly outboard.

I heard Jennifer grunt as she turned the feed tap which was uncomfortably stiff. She started singing again as she went back to the narrow galley which was midships on the starboard side. I reached into the locker and tried to turn on the main valve. It wouldn’t turn. I heard the rattle as Jennifer opened the matches, and I suddenly realised that the gas valve was already turned on and I had never, ever, left it turned on, not once in four years, which meant that someone else had been aboard Sunflower. I twisted desperately round.

“No!” I roared.

But she struck the match just as I shouted.

And the happiness vanished.

Ask any sailor what they fear most and they won’t cite the sea, or careless merchant ships, or rocks, but fire.

And almost every yacht afloat carries a fire-bomb aboard: the bottles of liquid gas they use for cooking. The gas is heavier than air. If it leaks it settles down to the bilges where it lies, hidden and deadly, waiting for the spark. Some yachts carry a gas detector, but I’d never thought to put one on Sunflower. Instead I relied on the taps: one on the bottle itself, one where the gas pipe enters the main cabin, and the usual taps on the galley stove. I was punctilious about keeping all the taps closed unless I was actually cooking, for there is nothing I fear so much as a gas leak. Most days I hand pumped the bilges, not for any water, but just in case a tiny amount of gas had leaked. The pump will carry it to the outside air, but it was a chore I usually performed in the evening. That day, wallowing in the swell off the hidden Devon coast, the bilge and the cabin sole were unpumped and lethal.

Because while I had been in London, and while the boat had been unguarded, someone had been aboard Sunflower and they had turned the taps and let the silent deadly gas seep into the cabin. The gas doesn’t smell. It just waits for a spark or a flame.

Jennifer struck the match.

And screamed.

It was not an ear-splitting explosion. It was a soft roar. Red flame filled the cabin. I could hear Jennifer screaming beyond the fire’s noise. Her scream seemed to go on and on and on. The fire was thickening with appalling swiftness; flame and smoke pouring out of the open companionway as if it was a chimney. The slatting mainsail was already scorched up to the third reef points.

The noise of the fire was like a seething hiss, beyond which Jennifer’s scream slowly faded.

I was shouting incoherently, merely making a noise to tell her that I was there, and shouting to give myself courage. There were a dozen things I maybe should have done. I should have turned off the main gas valve. I should have dragged one of the fire extinguishers out of the starboard cockpit locker. I should have darted a hand through the fire to grab the VHF microphone and send a Mayday. I did none of them. Instead, and without really thinking, I plunged down into the flame.

I had been turning and shouting in the cockpit as the explosion erupted out of the cabin and I did not pause to think that I was throwing myself down into the fire. I simply kept moving towards the sound of Jennifer’s fading scream. I put my hands on the coachroof either side of the companionway and swung myself down. I dropped into unimaginable pain. It was like falling into the jet-flame of an oxyacetylene lamp and I saw, as I dropped down, how a piercing lance of flame was seething into the cabin from the engine bulkhead. My ankle was on fire, bubbling and spitting. Even through the pain I realised that it was there, where the pipe came through the bulkhead, that the gas line had been cut. I scrambled away from the flame jet and fell against the cabin table. I had to take a breath and filled my lungs with burning gas. I was blinded by heat and smoke, choking and sobbing, and still trying to shout to Jennifer. I wanted to tell her to survive, to hold on, to live. Light flared to my right; a brilliant and searing light as the charts caught fire.

I didn’t feel the pain. I lunged through the smoke to the galley compartment where I felt Jennifer rather than saw her. She was crouched down and I simply scooped her up as if she was an unwieldy sailbag and kept on moving. I hit the forecabin’s door and smashed it down with our combined weight. Jennifer screamed with pain. The air was suddenly cool, then instantly heated as the fire found the new oxygen and slashed in after us. Jennifer was moaning. Black smoke writhed round us.

I dropped her against my small workbench, reached up, and undogged the forehatch. “Get out!” I was shouting at her, but at the same time pushing her upwards. Smoke poured past us. I realised she was beyond helping herself, so shoved her out. I followed her, then slammed the hatch shut.

The main cabin looked like a blast furnace as it belched a horror of flame and smoke out of the companionway. The mainsail was on fire. There was no chance of reaching the radio now. I could already feel the heat coming through the teak planks laid over the thin steel deck. I could see no other boats. I didn’t want to look at Jennifer. I had caught glimpses of her burned skin, and I had heard her screams.

The dinghy was still chained to the coachroof so I yanked the liferaft’s lanyard. The lanyard pulled out the split pin which held the metal container to its securing bolt. The container rolled towards me. I picked it up and hurled it over the guardrails. It splashed into the calm sea, tethered to Sunflower by its line and ripcord. I yanked the ripcord which was supposed to inflate the raft, but instead it just floated like a fat white keg of beer. I jerked the cord again, achieving nothing. I swore at the bloody thing. The deck was already burning the soles of my feet, and I knew the coachroof would already be red hot so I couldn’t reach the chained dinghy. A scrap of burning sail material landed in my hair. Something exploded in the cabin below, and I assumed the fire had reached the emergency flares. The hull lurched and I knew the fire must have burned through the plastic lavatory pipes and that the sea was already flooding through the seacocks into Sunflower. She was doomed.

I had two life-jackets, but they were aft, where the fire was hottest. So was my single lifebelt which was attached to the danbuoy on the stern. I began to dance on the deck, trying to cool my feet. Jennifer was twitching and moaning. Her scalp was smoking where her hair had burned away. Her legs looked as if they’d been skinned and blackened. She was going to die because the bloody liferaft wouldn’t work and because I didn’t have a radio any more and because some bastard had broken into my boat and made it into a death trap.

Jennifer suddenly screamed again because of the heat in the deck. She reached towards me with fingers turned into stiff dark claws. Further aft the teak deck planks were lifting and smoking. Burning scraps of sail were falling around us to hiss on the sea or flame on the deck. There was no choice left now, none. I picked Jennifer up in my arms, making her scream, and I knew she would scream more in a moment because of the salt water, but I would give her a few more minutes of life because there’s always a chance of a miracle so long as you don’t give up. Never give up. Never. I carried her to the port gunwale, put one foot over the guardrail, then jumped.

The sea was blessedly cold, but the salt must have been like acid on her burned skin. I held her body above mine so that her grotesquely blackened head was out of the water. I had one arm round her neck, the other about her waist, while I kicked with my legs to force us away from the burning boat. I could smell her roasted flesh. She was babbling, moaning, screaming, choking. I was talking to her; telling her she would live, that everything would be all right, that she mustn’t give in. Every few seconds the water would slop into my mouth, choking me.

I twisted my head to catch a glimpse of Sunflower. The fire had reached the aft locker where the spare gas bottle was kept. At first the fire merely melted the regulator valve so that a white spear of flame seared across the smoke in the cockpit, then the gas bottle exploded. The diesel fuel was making the flames deep red and the smoke even blacker. Her red ensign disappeared in a single flare of fire.

She was settling by the bows. Her mainsail was gone and her genoa was burning into ash. Somehow the mast stayed up. I could see the liferaft container bobbing merrily and uselessly alongside the blistering hull.

The bows dropped further. Everything flammable in the cabin must have been well aflame by now; lockers, foam, bedding, papers, clothes, cooking oil, table, chart table, my money, my passport, everything in the world I owned, all now an inferno that pumped flame and smoke out of the open companionway. Sunflower suddenly lurched sideways and I feared the mast would fall on us so I kicked with my feet again and the motion pushed my head underwater.

When I surfaced again I saw she had dipped her bows under. The sea reached the hawse-hole and filled the chain locker. She sank further. I was treading water desperately. I was tiring. I was beginning to feel the pain where my legs had been burned, and the moment I began to feel it, so the pain suddenly became excruciating and I knew that the anaesthetic effect of adrenalin was wearing off. It must have been worse for Jennifer, except she was only half conscious.

The sea reached Sunflower’s forehatch which, undogged, fell open and let the water surge in. The stern swung further up so that I could see her rudder and propeller. Steam was hissing and mingling with the smoke as the fire fought the sea. The sea would win, because it always does, and slowly, slowly, I saw my boat begin her long slide down to the sea bed. She’d taken me to far, far places. We’d sailed the blood-red sea off Cape Non and hove to off the cliffs at Cape Bojador, which the old navigators had thought was the place the world ended. We’d sailed the Whitsunday Islands, and dared the pirates in the Philippines. We’d anchored in mangrove swamps in Florida, and sailed the harbours of Maine. We’d rounded the Horn twice, but we’d never sail together again for now she was sinking and it seemed as if the fire was compressed, or else the steam was superheated for the jet of vapour and flames and smoke became a solid roaring plume that was being pumped three hundred feet into the summer sky. It seemed extraordinary that one small boat could make so much filth.

Then she went. The mast-tip went under, the cockpit reared up, then, with one last puff of flame and dark smoke, Sunflower dragged herself down. Something hissed on the sea’s bubbling surface. There was a pause, then the liferaft, still tied by its rope to the sinking hull, was pulled down and out of sight. Floating burnt wreckage was all that was left; that and a dirty smear of smoke that lingered in the summer air.

Jennifer was moaning and I knew she was dying. I also knew I was tiring and that soon I would be forced to let her go and she would roll over, her mouth would fill with water and she would drown. That realisation made me angry, so I cursed her for dying. I told her she would live. I told her she would bloody well live. I told her to stop her pathetic whimpering and to start kicking with her legs. I told her she was a spoilt damned rich bloody bitch who deserved to die if she didn’t wake up and swim. I cursed her in three languages and four letters, and I might as well have saved my breath for she did not recover consciousness and I was tiring and every swear word drained another scrap of precious energy.

In the end I stopped cursing her. I remember telling her that I loved her, but then I had no more energy to talk for all my strength was needed to keep us afloat. My legs were agony, and felt like lead. More and more often the water would slop into my mouth. I would choke and spit and struggle to gain an extra inch of airspace. I held Jennifer with one arm and paddled with the other.

But I was losing the battle. The hallucinations began. I saw a boat coming to pick us up: it was a great schooner, white-hulled with a reaching bowsprit. The illusion was so exact that I could see the chain bobstay beneath the bowsprit and the gilded wood carving where her figurehead might be. Men leaned over from the bows to pluck us from the water and I reached up to catch their hands and the act of reaching up plunged me underwater and the hallucination vanished in a blow of reality as sea water choked my gullet. I struggled up and pulled Jennifer’s burned head from the water. For all I knew, she was already dead, but I would not let her go. I was crying, not out of pity, but frustration. There was no schooner. There was nothing but the sea and Sunflower’s funeral smoke and one seagull gliding past.

I saw a beach. It was very close. The beach was long and sandy, backed by low grass-covered dunes. No one was on the beach, but a shingle roof rising above the dunes promised a refuge. I swam towards the beach. The hope of safety seemed to give me a new manic energy and I muttered in Jennifer’s ear that we were going to be all right now, that all we had to do was survive the surf and I’d go to the house and find help. “We’ve reached America,” I said, because now I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from a flagpole in front of the house. The illusion was so damned real that I was even wondering how to persuade an American hospital to treat us when we didn’t have any credit cards, but then a small wave splashed my face and when I opened my eyes again the beach was gone, and the flag and the house had vanished with it and there was only the empty sea and sky. Jennifer was heavy in my arm, the sea was seeping its fatal coldness into me, and the tiredness was filling me with a great weakness.

I almost let her go, but I made myself hold on to her burned flesh. I tried to keep her head above water, but my kicking was becoming more and more feeble so that more and more water broke over my face to sting my eyes and fill my throat. I told her once more that I loved her. She neither made a sound, nor moved.

A helicopter appeared in the sky. I cursed this new hallucination because now I only wanted to die in peace. The helicopter made a huge clattering noise, disturbing me, and I swam feebly away from it in the hope of finding a place of great quiet and slow gentle dying. Again the illusion was crystal clear, even to such details as the helicopter’s shadow sweeping over us and the water churning beneath the blade’s downdraught. I saw the winchman peering down, but I fought the illusion because I dared not cling to such imaginary hopes, yet the mind persisted, and I hallucinated the rope dropping down and touching the water to discharge the helicopter’s static electricity. I cursed the dream.

A wave swamped us. I choked, but this time there was no air to breathe. I had gone underwater. I still clung to Jennifer, but now I was drowning and she was drowning with me. I opened my eyes and found peace. The water’s surface was like a sheet of waving silver above me. No helicopter disturbed that pretty sight. My pain had gone, my ears were filled with the long, hollow booming of the sea, and there was peace and gentleness and a shot-silk silver sky of coalescing wonder.

Then the great shape hammered the silver black, and it seemed that a man was in the water, huge and thrashing and intrusive, and I closed my eyes to get rid of the dream and I let Jennifer go as I drifted away to nowhere and nothing, because it was all over now; it was all over and I was finished and everything was ended.