Sea Lord

Part Four

Ulf, of all people, bloody Ulf, was telling me that Sunflower’s mast was too high and mounted too far aft. He was saying to wake up and move the thing. I tried to tell him to shut up, but his voice droned on. You’re all right, Johnny, he said, you’re not going to die because death is just a mentally induced self-deception, and I told him to stuff his opinions and then I saw that Ulf was dressed all in white and had a black face, and I wondered how the hell he’d ever got into heaven to become a white-robed angel, and I felt a vague surprise that everyone in heaven was black, though it did seem a fairly heavenly solution to an earthly problem, then I wondered how I’d ever got permission to enter heaven myself. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.

“You’re all right now,” said the hallucination of Ulf which resolved itself into a black-bespectacled doctor who was bending over me. “Move your hand,” he said, “that’s good.”

My left ankle and calf were a mass of pain, like the time I’d been stung by a jellyfish off the Malaysian coast. I hissed and jerked as the pain struck me, then tried to explain it. “Jellyfish,” I said.

“My name’s Mortimer,” the doctor said, “Doctor Mortimer. And you’re the Earl of Stowey, yes?”

“John,” I said, “call me John.” A siren was wailing somewhere, and the sound reminded me of Jennifer’s screaming. I turned my head to see I was in a small brightly lit room and there was no sign of Jennifer. “Is she alive?”

“She’s alive,” the doctor said, but I was already responding to the drugs that were sparing me pain. I slept.

It had been the mackerel boat which saved our lives. They had seen the smoke churning up, turned back to investigate, and seen Sunflower burning. They had called the coastguard on Channel 16, who had summoned the Royal Naval Air Service. It had taken just eight minutes from the time that the skipper of the mackerel boat had made his emergency call to the arrival of the helicopter. It had seemed like an hour. Even now, looking back, and having read the coastguard’s log, I cannot believe it was only eight minutes.

My legs were badly burned, I’d inhaled smoke, and my hands and forearms were scorched. It could have been much worse. For Jennifer it was, though just how bad, in those first days, I wasn’t told.

Harry Abbott was my first visitor. I was barely conscious or coherent. I gathered that as soon as the police heard of the burning boat they had feared it might be Sunflower, and had sent a man to the hospital to identify us. I tried to tell Harry it was attempted murder, but he must already have assumed that because I later learned that a police guard stayed in the corridor outside my ward all the time I was in the hospital. I do remember that Harry brought me some grapes that he ate himself. I asked about Jennifer and he just shrugged and said she’d been flown to a big London hospital that specialised in burn victims.

Charlie came the next day. I had never seen him so troubled. I tried to tell him that I was all right, that I would walk again, but Charlie seemed to think he had let me down. “I should have found those two blokes and fucking killed them.”

“You tried, Charlie.”

“Bastards.” He sat beside the bed. “Bastards.”

“I’m going to find them,” I said, “and I promise you they’ll wish they’d never been born.”

“Bastards.” He was too restless to stay seated and began pacing the floor. “What happened?”

I told him about the severed gas pipe. “They did a proper job, Charlie,” I said bitterly. “They must have cut the gas pipe in the engine compartment, then pushed the broken end into the hole in the bulkhead.” They had also done it without dislodging the feed tap inside the cabin, because otherwise Jennifer would have seen the break.

“Didn’t you lock the engine compartment?” Charlie asked.

“It was only a cheap padlock.”

“There you go,” he said hopelessly. It was Charlie who had first taught me how to open a locked padlock; you just brace the loop against something solid, then tap the keyhole end with a hammer. If the lock doesn’t jump open first time, tap harder. There are expensive makes that won’t respond to the treatment, but I’d lost my good padlock when the two men had pulled Sunflower off the grid and my replacement had been a run-of-the-mill lock.

“And the liferaft didn’t work,” I added.

“Jesus.” He was horribly depressed, but he forced himself to talk optimistically about the boat which would replace Sunflower. He said we’d pick her out together, equip her together, and make her maiden voyage together. “But this time we’ll make sure there’s a gas alarm in her.”

I shook my head. “There won’t be another boat, Charlie.”

“Of course there will!”

“I can’t afford one, and I won’t take your money. You’ve given me enough already.”

“You’ll take what you’re given, Johnny.” He stopped his pacing and stood staring out of the window. “Bastards,” he said softly, then he turned ruefully towards the bed. “I told you not to get involved.”

“I’m involved now. I’m going to kill those two. For Jennifer’s sake.”

He smiled. “Like that, is it?”

“It’s like that.”

He grimaced. “I often wondered when you’d fall, Johnny. I get Yvonne and you end up with a millionaire’s stepdaughter.”

“If she lives, and if she wants me.”

“You saved her life,” he said as though that gave me full rights over that life.

“No,” I said disparagingly. Yet I probably had saved her. The helicopter pilot came to tell me as much, and so did Harry Abbott on his second visit. He listened glumly as I described the fire, and to my conviction that the gas pipe had been deliberately cut.

“I didn’t think to guard the boat,” Harry said ruefully, “only you.” He seemed genuinely upset at what had happened.

“I want those two, Harry.”

“We’re looking for them, Johnny, we’re looking for them.”

“And Elizabeth, if she’s behind it.”

“Who else?” He lit a cigarette and stared moodily at the bandages on my ankle. “Mind you,” he went on, “she’s taking damned good care to keep a long way out of it.”

“Out of it?”

“She’s done a runner. I went to question her, see, but her husband says he thinks she’s in France. Thinks!” Harry said disgustedly. “I’ll not be able to nail her, Johnny, not unless I can find Garrard and persuade him to talk.”

“Then find him, Harry, and give me a few minutes alone with him when you do.”

“You know I can’t promise you that.”

I took a cigarette off him. My precious pipes were gone, as was everything else. Doctor Mortimer, my black angel, had forcibly suggested I use the opportunity to give up smoking, but I’d failed again. “How the hell does Elizabeth have the money to go to France?” I asked Harry.

“I asked her husband that. He says she sold your mother’s house.” Harry frowned pensively. “That Lord Tredgarth, he’s a miserable sod, isn’t he?”

I didn’t want to talk about Peter Tredgarth. “Tell me how Jennifer is, Harry.”

He didn’t answer for a long time, then he shrugged. “Bad.”

“How bad?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Don’t ask me, Johnny, because I don’t know.”

I found out the next day when Helen, Lady Buzzacott, came to visit me. I was sitting in an armchair by the bed and tried to stand when she came into the room. She told me not to be so silly and to stay seated. She put a bunch of grapes on the bedside table. “Why do the English always take grapes to hospital patients? It’s really a ridiculous habit, but quite unbreakable. I was getting quite frantic because I hadn’t bought you any, so I made Higgs drive through the town centre and stop outside a fruiterer. So there they are, and you’ll probably tell me you hate grapes.”

“I like grapes.”

She sat on the edge of my bed. “You’re looking better than I expected, John.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Whatever for?” She asked the question too lightly.

I opened my eyes. This was difficult. This was a meeting I had been dreading, but I had to say my piece and I had to let her know that I meant what I was saying. “I’m sorry for taking Jennifer out in the boat. I’m sorry that I didn’t check the gas line before we sailed. I’m sorry I didn’t pump the bilges. I’m just sorry about what happened.” I had begun to cry, so closed my eyes again. “I’m just sorry, Lady Buzzacott. It was my fault.”

“I’m sorry too,” she said, “but I don’t blame you.”

I couldn’t say anything. I was blubbing like a child. I felt entirely responsible for what had happened to Jennifer. I’d taken a lovely girl and I had turned her into burnt meat.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Helen Buzzacott said very clearly. “Of course you can look back and see a score of things you might have done to prevent it happening, but that isn’t the point, John. The point is that you did nothing to cause the accident. All you did was go for a day’s sailing, and I can’t think of anything more innocent than that.”

“Shit,” I said, and reached for a paper handkerchief.

“And Jennifer’s going to be all right,” Helen said.

I looked at her through a blur of tears, but said nothing.

“Or rather we hope she’ll be all right,” Helen amended the statement. “The burns are really quite frightful, but I’m told they’re very skilled at these things nowadays.” She spoke in a very matter-of-fact voice, but it was clear that she had suffered agonies for her daughter in the last few days. “Of course it will take a lot of time, and a horrible amount of surgery, but she’s got a very pompous doctor who says that in the end she’ll be as good as new. Of course one can’t tell if he’s just telling professional lies, but he’s certainly a very expensive liar if he is.” Tears were glinting on her cheeks. She tried to ignore them. “They’re starting the first skin grafts tomorrow, but I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I should be asking about you.”

I pushed the box of paper handkerchiefs towards her. She took one, then caught my eye. “Shit,” she said through the tears. She blew her nose, sniffed, and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know, John. I looked at her and I think it’s impossible that she’ll ever recover. She’s no hair left, but her face isn’t too bad. It seems she crouched down and put her face in her hands, you see. Her hands are quite shocking, and I gather they’re the most difficult to repair properly, but at least she can wear gloves, can’t she?” She was crying again. “Then her legs and her back are very bad. Her bottom is awful, but the pompous man says it really will be all right, and I can’t do anything but believe him. Hans says she should go to Switzerland, but I can’t see why.”

“Nor can I,” I said fervently.

“Hans says they’ve got very good cosmetic surgeons there, but I think he’s just being xenophobic. He did go to see Jennifer, but he found it rather upsetting. She’s been on one of those air beds like an upside-down hovercraft. It’s too silly, really.” She blew her nose again. “She’s not entirely compos mentis, but she did ask after you.”

“Tell her I’m fine, and very sorry.”

“I won’t tell her you’re sorry. You can do that yourself. And are you fine? Doctor Mortimer says you’re an appalling patient. He says you won’t give up smoking.”

“I can’t.”

“You should, but I didn’t think you would so I went to Dunhills and bought you some pipes. I don’t know anything about pipes so I’ve probably done the wrong thing, but here you are.” She gave me a big bag full of the most expensive pipes. “I chose some tobacco at random,” she went on, “the man in the shop said you’d probably be very particular, but I just bought what smelt the nicest.”

I took the tobacco. “You’re very kind.”

“You did save my daughter’s life.”

“And risked it,” I said bitterly.

“Don’t start all that again. Leon spoke with the helicopter crew and heard all about what you did. You’re a very brave man.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I won’t argue.” She took a deep breath. “I came here to cheer you up, and all I do is weep. Poor John.”

“Poor Jennifer.”

“She’s a tough creature. She takes after her father, I think. She’s certainly too good for that bloody Swiss man.”

“I agree with that.”

“But Leon doesn’t. He’s very keen on the marriage. He never had children of his own, you see, so he rather thinks of Jennifer as a daughter. I keep telling him that all Hans ever did was to inherit a vast business. Any fool can inherit money.”

“While it takes a sensible man to make it?” I asked, and reflected that I had made none.

Helen smiled mischievously. “A sensible man marries it, John, but I think you know that already. Now I won’t tire you any more. I know Leon wants to see you soon. He’s made some arrangements for your younger sister and I’m sure they’re perfect, but you need to take a look for yourself.” She balled up the scraps of paper tissues, then collected her handbag. “If you’ve got nowhere to go when you leave hospital, then you’ll be very welcome at Comerton.”

“I shall be fine, don’t worry. And give my love to Jennifer.”

“I already have.” She stood up. “Let us know where you are, and don’t hesitate to ask if you need somewhere to stay.”

I left the hospital a week later. I went with Charlie and, because I felt safe in his company, I told Harry to take away the police guard. Charlie drove me to his house where I limped upstairs and lay down on the bed. My legs still hurt like the devil, but, apart from the one ankle, the scarring would be minimal. I flinched when I thought of Jennifer, and the ordeal she faced, so that evening I phoned Comerton Castle and asked for Lady Buzzacott. Sir Leon came to the phone instead and told me his wife was with Jennifer in London. And where was I? he asked. I gave him Charlie’s number, there was a pause as I imagined him writing it down in his small leather-bound book, then he said he wanted to see me.

“Of course.”

“I want your approval for the arrangements I’m proposing for the Lady Georgina. Will tomorrow be convenient?”

I wasn’t certain I really felt fit enough, but nor did I think I could bear a day of Yvonne’s long face, so I said tomorrow would be fine.

“Shall I send a car?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to.” I was not only homeless, but penniless as well.

The car came in the morning. The driver took me to the Mendip Hills where, in a sheltered south-facing village, we turned into a long driveway which led to a large white-painted Victorian house. Sir Leon himself met me at the front door and introduced me to a fresh-faced man of about my age. “This is Doctor Grove,” Sir Leon said, “the medical doctor of Lovelace House.”

Sir Leon was touchingly anxious that I should approve of Lovelace House. “I had my staff do a great deal of research,” he told me, “and I assure you that Lovelace met our most stringent requirements.”

It was, so far as I could tell, ideal. Lovelace House was privately run, outrageously expensive, and self-evidently caring. Many such places, catering to the lunatic members of rich or titled families, are scarcely more than prisons, but at Lovelace each patient had a private suite, personal nurses, and as much freedom as their condition would allow them to receive. Whenever we met a patient in one of the airy corridors I was gravely and courteously introduced. A Marchioness enquired whether I had planted the banana tree yet, I replied no, and she told me my employment was in severe jeopardy. I bowed, then limped on to see the suite that had been reserved for Georgina. Wide French windows opened on to a terraced lawn, beyond which empty paddocks stretched to the wooded hillside. The view was not unlike that from the windows of Stowey, and I said as much. “Except for the horses, of course.”

“Is the Lady Georgina fond of horses?” Doctor Grove asked.

“She used to be. My sister wouldn’t let her ride, but a friend and I used to lead her round on a docile old mare. She was always very happy when we did that.”

Doctor Grove made a note. “I think perhaps we should explore that avenue. Thank you, my lord.”

“John,” I said automatically, “call me John.”

I dutifully inspected the kitchens, the drawing rooms, the communal dining room and the consultation rooms where, I was told, the best London psychiatrists came to weave their spells. If Georgina could be happy anywhere, I thought, then surely it was in this kindly place.

After the inspection, and after I had expressed my wholehearted approval to Doctor Grove, Sir Leon asked for a moment alone with me. He led me out to the southern gardens where a curious group of patients inspected his helicopter which stood with drooping rotors on the wide lawn. Sir Leon steered me away from the machine, preferring the solitude of a gravel walk. “My lawyers have already opened negotiations with the Lady Georgina’s trustees,” Sir Leon said in his precise and pedantic voice. “I think I can assure you that there will be no hindrance to her coming here.”

“Sir Oliver Bulstrode might not agree,” I suggested grimly.

“Sir Oliver, like all top London lawyers, will decide in favour of the richest party.”

I smiled to hear this dry little man confirm my own opinion of lawyers. I was beginning to feel quite fond of Sir Leon, which I thought was only appropriate considering how I felt about his stepdaughter. We paced on in silence for a few yards, then he shot me a very shrewd and rather unfriendly glance. “And what of your own future, my lord?”

Something in his tone alerted me. Perhaps I’d been too quick in my warm feelings. I’d thought it slightly strange that a man of his importance should see fit to show me round a high-class lunatic asylum, but now I sensed he had quite another reason for meeting me this day. “I haven’t thought much about my future,” I said casually, “and please do stop calling me ‘my lord’.”

“If you wish.” Sir Leon had noticed how walking pained me, even with the help of a walking stick that Charlie had found in his junk room, so now he stopped by an ornamental urn. “Forgive me asking, but was your boat insured?”

“No.”

He frowned severe disapproval. “That was imprudent, was it not?”

“Insurance companies won’t touch deep-water yachts. If you stick to cruising the Channel or the North Sea they’ll offer you a quotation, but if you sail beyond the sunset, and especially if you sail alone, they won’t look at you.”

“I see.” He stared down at the urn’s base, frowning slightly. “So, forgive me again, but what is the extent of your loss?”

“Ninety thousand pounds?” It was a guess.

He looked up sharply. “As much as that?”

“She was a good boat,” I said defensively. “She wasn’t a plastic tub tricked out with veneered chipboard. She was a deep-water steel boat with hardwood fittings. She was well equipped, Sir Leon. She was what a sailor would call a proper boat.” That, I supposed, was Sunflower’s obituary, and a good one too. She had been a proper boat, and I mourned her, but I don’t think the full extent of the loss had yet occurred to me. I might put a financial value on the hull and rigging and fittings, but there was an emotional loss that was incalculable. A boat becomes a companion, a person you talk to, a creature that shares the good times and helps you survive the bad. Sunflower had also been my home, and I’d lost her.

“I would take it as a great kindness if you would find yourself another yacht.” Sir Leon said it so softly that at first I thought I had misheard. “At my expense, of course,” he added just as softly.

“I’m sorry?” I said with incredulity. His manner in the last few minutes had been touched with a cold hostility, yet now he was offering me a boat? I warmed to him again.

“It’s quite simple.” He seemed irritated by my obtuseness. “I am offering to buy you another ocean-going yacht.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” I hoped to God he wouldn’t agree with me. Pride would make me protest, but not for long. I needed another boat desperately.

He offered me the ghost of a smile. “Not so ridiculous, my lord, as giving away a Van Gogh.” He was plainly determined to go on calling me ‘my lord’. “Of course,” he continued, “if you don’t want another boat, then I shall quite understand.”

“I do want one,” I said fervently. His equation of my gift of the Van Gogh with his present of a replacement boat made the transaction seem less astonishing and more acceptable. I had also decided that this was a man who liked to hide his kindnesses behind a pernickety façade.

Sir Leon stirred the gravel with a well-polished shoe. “I assume, my lord, that if you have another boat you will resume your wandering way of life?”

“I really don’t know.”

He had asked the question casually, and my reply had been just as offhand. Yet my careless answer provoked a very cold look indeed. “Does your uncertainty have anything to do with my stepdaughter?” The abruptness of the question, and its acuity, astonished me. I said nothing, and Sir Leon frowned. “My wife seems to think that the two of you might be suited, but I must tell you that I often find Lady Buzzacott’s ideas whimsical.”

Now the thing lay in the open; the boat wasn’t a recompense for the gift of a painting, but a bribe to take me away from Jennifer. This wasn’t a man who hid his kindnesses, but simply purchased what he wanted. Now he wanted my absence. I felt foolish for liking him, for it was suddenly plain that he detested me. “You’d prefer Hans to become Jennifer’s husband?” I asked forthrightly.

“Of course I would,” Sir Leon said blandly, as though we merely discussed our preferences for cars or boats. “Hans is a most steady and sensible man. It might take flair to build a financial empire, my lord, but it takes steadiness to maintain it, and Hans has succeeded very well at preserving and expanding his inheritance. So, you see” – and here he offered me the smallest of smiles – “I would be very well advised to help you find a suitable boat and thus tempt you to very distant waters.”

At least, I thought, the bastard was honest. He wanted me gone because I wasn’t suitable. I was a rogue and vagabond. I was a mongrel sniffing round his thoroughbred.

“And I assume,” he pressed me, “that if you are equipped with a suitable boat, you will indeed resume your previous way of life?”

“Not necessarily, no.” I would not give him that satisfaction, even if it meant that the bastard withdrew his offer.

“May I ask what other inducements might keep you ashore? Besides Jennifer?”

“I might go into business,” I said airily, then, despite my dislike of him, found myself articulating an idea which must have been simmering in my mind ever since I had returned to England. “I sometimes think it’s time to give myself a proper base. I live on a very narrow knife edge between poverty and bankruptcy, and that’s fine for a time, Sir Leon, but after a while it becomes tedious. I need something to make some money, something that will let me sail away when I want to, but something that will go on earning money while I’m away.”

“It sounds very desirable,” he was amused, “but rather a pipe dream, surely?”

“There’s a property on the Hamoaze,” I heard myself saying. “It belongs to a plump old crook called George Cullen, and if I could raise the money I could make it into one of the finest yacht-repair yards on the south coast. It’s no good looking to the banks, of course, so it is probably a pipe dream, but I’ve got a friend who might be interested. Except that he’s rather over-extended financially.”

“You have the necessary skills to run a yacht-repair business?”

“All of them,” I said proudly.

Sir Leon looked up at me. “If you had not given me the Van Gogh, my lord, you would doubtless have received all the capital you might need. But, alas, your own generosity seems to have condemned you to the wanderer’s life.” He gave me one of his very small smiles, as if to show that he had proved that my only chance of financial survival lay in accepting his offer, and thus leaving his stepdaughter alone. He glanced towards his helicopter and I assumed he was about to walk away, but instead he offered me an irritated frown. “I must admit that I am sorely disappointed in Inspector Abbott. His ploy of making you a target seems to have misfired very badly.”

“Indeed.” I could only agree.

“It now seems clear to me that Inspector Abbott has very small chance of finding these wretched people, so it seems I have no choice but to deal with them myself.”

“Pay the ransom, you mean?”

“What else?” Sir Leon did not sound dismayed at the prospect. “I have already inserted the coded advertisement in The Times indicating my willingness to do so. I now await their instructions which I will follow punctiliously. Inspector Abbott advises me that the criminals might renege on the arrangements, but that is a risk I must be willing to take. Following Inspector Abbott’s advice has so far only succeeded in putting my stepdaughter into hospital, so you may imagine that I am not enamoured with his ideas.”

He had spoken with unnatural venom when he mentioned Jennifer. I blushed. “I’m sorry –” I began.

“My wife has already assured you that there is no need for an apology,” he interrupted me. “I don’t entirely agree with her, but we shall nevertheless consider the matter closed. The important thing now is to provide Jennifer with the very finest medical attention. Hans has some very sound ideas, but I do assure you, my lord, that none of this any longer concerns you.” He looked up at me and I saw how deceptive were those myopic pale eyes. This was a very formidable man indeed, and one who disliked me intensely. “I believe in making things very plain in negotiations,” he went on, “so I am here to tell you, my lord, that your association with my affairs, and with my family, is concluded. Jennifer will be moved to a private clinic in Switzerland where, I assure you, her visitors will be strictly controlled. I hope you understand me?”

“Keep my dirty hands off her?” I said flippantly.

I annoyed him, as I’d meant to, but he controlled the annoyance. Instead he took a business card from his top pocket. “That is the name and address of my financial controller. He will henceforth make all the arrangements concerning the Lady Georgina, and he will also pay the bills contingent on your new boat. I shall instruct him that you are to be given credit of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Should you wish to have that money paid to you in cash, then feel free to ask, but I should advise you to arrange payment in some place where the taxman might not notice.” He handed me the business card, then took a long brown envelope from his inside pocket. “At the same time, my lord, I do not wish you to think that I am ungrateful for your efforts on my behalf, so perhaps you will also accept this small token of my thanks?”

I took the envelope. I didn’t open it. I was hoping he had been so generous that I would feel constrained to refuse the gift, and I knew I couldn’t afford that quixotic gesture, not since my own money had sunk to the bottom of the English Channel.

Sir Leon held his hand out to me. “Should your sister challenge your right to give me the painting, then I trust you will make yourself available to my lawyers? My driver is at your disposal for the rest of the day.” I shook his hand, then he turned away. I wondered how such a dry little sod had ever attracted a woman like Helen. Not a week before she had offered me a bedroom in Comerton Castle, now her husband was giving me the boot.

“Sir Leon!” I called out when he was a dozen paces away.

“My lord?” He turned back.

“I haven’t given up my hopes of Jennifer.”

He shrugged. “I cannot command your hopes, my lord. I can only make my own views very plain to you both. Good day to you.” He nodded coldly, then walked between the lunatics to where his pilot waited.

I opened the envelope. It had a thousand pounds in it, and I knew I probably would have felt obliged to hand it back. I wondered if he would have taken it. He wanted rid of me, and would happily pay a hundred and twenty-one thousand pounds for the privilege. I watched his helicopter take off and reflected on the fact that, for the first time in my life, I’d actually been fired. And that I was in love. And that I had a new enemy.

I had Sir Leon’s driver take me to Exeter where, in a shabby pub close to the police station, I found Harry Abbott. He watched me limp between the tables, then ordered me a pint of bitter. “I tried to telephone you today,” he said grumpily, as though I’d inconvenienced him by being away from Charlie’s house.

“I was with Sir Leon Buzzacott.” I took a first sip of the pint, and sighed with relief at the taste. “I’ve just been fired, Harry. It was very nicely done, and he even gave me a golden handshake, but it was still a firing.”

“Fired?” Harry asked in puzzlement.

“My services are no longer required for the retrieval of the painting.” In truth I was still rather dazed by the experience. Sir Leon had spent weeks seeking my help and, at the first stiff hurdle, had brushed me away like dirt. “He gave me the heave-ho, Harry, then warned me off his stepdaughter.”

“You can’t blame him for that,” Harry said reasonably. “Who wants a nice girl like Jennifer being mauled by some dirty-minded bastard like you?”

“I was beginning to like you in the last few days, Harry. I can see I was wrong.”

He grinned. “So what’s little Sir Leon going to do now? Pay the ransom?”

“Yes.”

Harry grimaced. “He was bound to do it in the end. He wants to get his paws on that picture, doesn’t he? God knows why. I know a fellow in Okehampton who could knock him up an identical fake in a couple of weeks. Who’d know the difference?”

“Beats me, Harry. So why were you trying to telephone me?”

“To tell you to bugger off, Johnny.” He spilt a packet of pork scratchings on to the bar and generously pushed one small sliver towards me. “I’ve drawn a blank, you see. Garrard’s gone, and so has his thick friend. I can’t find hide nor hair of them. I’m sorry, Johnny, but they’ve disappeared.”

“Just like Elizabeth,” I said grimly.

“Who’s probably still in France,” he said, “and I can’t issue a warrant for her because I’ve got damn-all evidence. I can’t even get a search warrant for her bloody house. Of course there’d be plenty enough evidence for a warrant if she was just some housewife, but as she’s the Lady la-di-da Tredgarth I can’t get near her.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t worth searching her house?”

“I don’t expect to find a Van Gogh hanging in the downstairs loo, Johnny, but I’m getting desperate now. I’ll settle for her private telephone book, or her diary, or anything.” He wiped beer off his lips. “You never know, we might find Garrard’s phone number written down in her book, but without a search warrant?” He shrugged, then flinched as a piece of scratching irritated a loose filling in his teeth.

“What about George Cullen?” I asked.

“What about George?”

“He knows Garrard.”

“Listen.” Harry tapped my forearm to emphasise his next words. “George Cullen is terrified of me. He’d fly to the moon rather than hold out on his Uncle Harry. I told you, I talked to him, and George doesn’t know a dicky-bird about it.”

“So who does?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Johnny. No one. Unless those bastards have another go at you, we’re done. And frankly I can’t get the manpower to look after you any more, so the best thing you can do is go. Get yourself another boat and piss off.”

Sir Leon had given me the same advice, though couched in politer and more practical terms. I scooped a handful of Harry’s pork scratchings off the bar. “Can you give me a lift to Charlie’s house?”

“All the way to Salcombe?” He sounded outraged.

“I’ll buy you a pint on the way.”

“You’ll buy my bloody supper, you miserable hound.”

So he gave me a lift, and I wondered just what I would do now. All I knew was that I didn’t want to run away to sea again, because this time I had someone worth staying for. Which meant that, despite the bastards who were trying to see me off, I would stay.

Charlie was not at home that night, which made staying at his house an awkward experience. Yvonne was watching television when I arrived, so I went straight to bed. At four in the morning I woke up in a muck sweat, panicking because I had been dreaming that I was drowning. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so as soon as I heard Yvonne up and moving, I went down to the kitchen and asked if she’d mind driving me to where I could catch a bus. She grudgingly agreed. “He should be home tonight,” she told me as she drew up at the bus stop in Kingsbridge, “but you can never tell.”

“I might be back, I might not. I’ve got a lot to do today.”

“You’re just like him, aren’t you?” She drove off before I could thank her for the lift.

I caught the first bus to Plymouth. The weather was warm and calm. The south coast seemed trapped in one of those rare bubbles of high pressure which would fill the beaches and becalm the yachts. Not that my concern this day was with the sea. Instead, and perhaps foolishly, I would retrace Harry Abbott’s steps.

I reached George Cullen’s yard a few minutes after nine. Rita was making the day’s first cup of tea. “Look at you!” she said in shocked sympathy. I was still using Charlie’s cane, for my left ankle was fearsomely painful. “You poor man. I saw it in the papers. How did it happen?”

“Like they said, an accident. Gas leak.” The papers had speculated about sabotage, but someone, presumably Harry, had killed that notion. The story had run for a day or two, then disappeared.

“You should take more care of yourself, Johnny.” Rita took down a third chipped mug into which she poured a dollop of milk. “He’s in there,” she said, “and I’ll bring your tea in.”

George half smiled when I limped into his office, then his face assumed a properly sympathetic look. “Johnny,” he said as greeting.

I didn’t say anything, but just limped over to the desk. He had a tabloid open at a page showing a naked girl with a pair of breasts like over-inflated lifebelts. Other similar pictures faded on his walls.

“Johnny,” he said again. “You had a spot of bother, I hear.”

I slammed the stick on to his newspaper so hard that everything on his desktop jumped a full inch into the air. “Listen, you fat swine, I’m going to ask you some questions, and your miserable life depends on the answers you give me. Do you understand that, George?”

He golloped at me like a dying fish, then nodded hastily. “Of course, my lord. Of course I do. Anything you want. Just ask.”

I shoved the metal ferrule of the stick into his fat gut. “You know who Garrard and Peel are, don’t you?”

“Course I do. Yes. I told you I did.” He was staring bug-eyed at me.

“So did you tell them where they could find me on the night when they tipped Sunflower into the dock?”

“No, Johnny. No, my lord. Honest! I didn’t!” I was driving the stick into his belly, making his waistcoat distend about the bulging and displaced flesh. “On my mother’s grave, Johnny, I didn’t!”

I believed him, because I was sure by now that it had been Elizabeth who had guessed that I’d make for George’s junk yard. That wasn’t the question I’d come to ask George, but it was a good way of softening him up for my real query. I released the stick and George scrabbled in a drawer for a bottle of pills and quickly swallowed two of them. “I didn’t say a word, Johnny, I wouldn’t. You’re a friend!”

“So where do I find them, George?”

He gaped at me. “I don’t know.” He flinched from the raised stick. “I mean, they could be anywhere! It depends who they’re working for!”

“So who do they work for, George?”

He shrugged. “Anyone, of course.”

I slammed the stick down again, spilling pills across the naked girl’s photograph. “Who, you bastard?”

“Anyone who’s got property troubles, of course.”

“Name them.”

He was saved the need to answer by the arrival of Rita carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. She must have overheard my angry voice and the noise of the walking stick hitting the desk, but she only beamed a happy smile and said it looked like being another fine day. I waited till she had left. “Who do they work for, George?”

He gave me the names of two men who owned discos and pubs in Union Street, but then warned me against those men. I had enough sense to heed his warning. Every maritime city has a Union Street, a place for homecoming sailors to get drunk and laid, and the men who ran such streets were harder than steel. If I limped down Union Street with naïve questions then I would be lucky to leave alive. Harry Abbott could have done it, but I guessed Harry had already exhausted the names George had just given me.

“I haven’t seen hide or hair of them in weeks,” George said miserably. “I’d tell you if I had, Johnny, you know that.”

“They tried to kill me,” I told George.

“Harry told me.” George tutted disapprovingly to show that his sympathies were with me.

“Not just that night in your yard, but last week. They filled my boat with gas, and like a fool I didn’t check.”

“Jesus.” He gaped at me.

“That’s why I want to find them, George, so I can cut out their livers.”

“I wish I could help you, Johnny. You know that! I’d help you if I could!”

I’d drawn a blank. I swore. I crossed to the window and stared down into the dock. It could make a very nice business, I thought, a most splendid business. I could store boats in the winter, have two covered repair shops, and a permanent berth for whatever boat I ended up buying for myself. Except to buy George’s yard would take more money than I was ever likely to have.

“Have a drink,” George said soothingly. “It might help.”

“Not this early.” I sounded annoyed.

“I’ll do anything to help,” George said pleadingly, “you know that, Johnny! I’ll do anything.”

“Then drive me to the train station.”

He drove me to the station, and I’d learned nothing.

I caught a train to London. I had a piece of personal business to transact before I resumed Harry’s trail. The business was with Jennifer. I wondered if I’d be refused entry into the hospital, but evidently Sir Leon’s prohibition either carried no weight or had yet to be pronounced.

Jennifer had been taken off the air bed, and now lay belly down on a high, metal-sided bed. I couldn’t see how badly she was burned for her body was covered with a kind of plastic tent. Tubes had been poked into her nostrils. Other tubes disappeared under the tent. Her scalp was smothered with a wig made of some pale liquid over which had been pasted small squares of cotton gauze. Lady Buzzacott had said her face had been spared, but it was patched with the same small squares of cotton. The truth was that she looked dreadful. “Hello, gorgeous,” I said.

“Hello.” Her voice was very hoarse.

“Where can I kiss you?”

“You can’t. Mummy kisses one of the drip bottles.”

I kissed one of the drip bottles.

“I hoped you’d come,” she said.

“I came to apologise.”

She made a tiny shaking motion with her head. “No need.”

“I feel like a shit, and everyone’s being so nice.” I could feel the tears pricking my eyes. “It was my fault. I should have checked the gas. I’m sorry.”

“But you’re all right?” she asked. “You look tired.”

“I’ve been sleeping badly. And I limp a bit, but it’ll pass. They tell me you’re going to be fine.”

“They say that.” Her voice was very laboured, the effect, I guessed, of all the fumes she’d inhaled. “But they would, wouldn’t they?”

“No,” I said. “They’ll tell the truth.”

Again there was the little shaking motion of the head. “It’s going to take a long time. My front isn’t too bad, but my back is pretty foul. My hands are the worst. My hair is beginning to grow again. The doctors say I was lucky, that the fire blew past me, but I don’t feel very lucky.” She gave another tiny shake of her head, almost in resignation. “It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did, but it’s still pretty bloody.”

“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

“They tell me it will be all right,” she went on, “but when it’s all done I know I’ll still look horrid.”

“No,” I said, though looking at her I could not see how they could possibly put her beauty back together. “I should have brought you some grapes.”

“You’d have had to mash them up and put them in a tube.”

“Actually,” I said, “I brought you something else.”

“What?”

“This.” I could not give it to her, so I opened the box and showed it to her. It was an engagement ring. It wasn’t a very fine ring, not a chunk of diamond like Hans had bought her, but it was the best I could find in the jewellery shop closest to the hospital.

“Oh, John,” she said, and sounded rather sad.

“It isn’t a very good ring,” I confessed, “but your stepfather is trying to buy me off and gave me a chunk of cash, so I blew most of it on the ring. I didn’t blow it all, because I need a bit for bus fares, but it isn’t a bad little ring. It glints in all the right places. Look!”

She smiled at me under the cotton pads. “You’re mad, John.”

“So marry me.” She didn’t say anything, so I burbled on. “Your stepfather disapproves. He thinks you should marry Hans because Hans is sensible and steady, and the Buzzacott millions will need a bore to run them. So I have to tell you that you’ll be upsetting your stepfather when you marry me, but I think he’ll get over it. I suspect your mother will approve, and I imagine she can usually get her own way with him?”

Jennifer nodded very slightly.

“Is that acceptance?” I asked.

“No, it isn’t. I can’t marry you.”

“Why not? I’m eligible.”

“I shall be ugly.”

“Good. I don’t want other men lusting after you. I shall do all the lusting you’ll ever need.”

She watched me with her dark eyes; the only recognisable things left of her. “You’re being foolish,” she said.

“I love you.”

“That’s what I mean.” She took a rasping breath. “Anyway, there’s Hans.”

“Bugger Hans,” I said. “He’ll just put you down as a bad business investment and find himself a little Swiss bird with big tits and skier’s thighs.”

She shook slightly, and I think she was laughing. “I can’t marry you,” she said after a while. “You’re just making a gesture.”

“Of course I’m making a gesture, you silly woman. I love you. For our honeymoon we’ll sail somewhere delicious.”

“John…” Again there was a sadness in her voice.

“Mind you,” I said, “I can’t marry you yet because I’ve got to find the two bastards who booby-trapped the boat, and when I do I’m going to kill them. I’ll bet Hans wouldn’t kill someone for you?”

“I don’t think he would, no.”

“That proves it, then. I’m a better man.”

“You’re a very impractical man. You’re just making a gesture because you pity me.”

“Balls. In fact I’m being very practical. I’m marrying an excessively rich girl, and it occurs to me that you’ll probably inherit the Van Gogh if we ever get it back, so I’m not really giving it away at all.” I smiled down at her. “Would you very much mind marrying me for your money?”

She paused. “You’ll hate me, John. I’ll be ugly.”

“I will love you” – I looked into her dark eyes – “and within a year you and I will be married, and two years from now we’ll have a child, and though I must confess I can’t stand the sound of a baby screaming, I will love him because he’s yours. So hold on, my love, because we have a lot of living to do.”

“Hold on,” she repeated my words. “You said that to me in the water.”

“You remember?”

“You were swearing,” she said, and I saw she was crying, and I was crying too, so I bent down and kissed one of her closed eyelids. Her tears tasted salty.

“You told me I was a pathetic bloody girl,” she said, “and that I was too feeble to live, and I thought I’ll show you. I’ll prove I’m not feeble.”

“Good for you,” I said. “So now prove that you can get better.”

She smiled, making the little gauze squares twitch. “I will, I promise. But it’s going to take a long time.”

“I’ll wait.”

The edge of the plastic tent shifted and I saw she was putting out her hand. I thought she wanted me to hold it, then I saw that her hand was nothing but black claws inside a plastic bag. She was watching me, and I sensed this was a test. She wanted to see if I’d flinch from the sight. Instead I bent down and, very gently, kissed the plastic bag. “It’s a bit difficult to put a ring on now,” I said, “but I will one day.”

“Maybe,” she said. She sounded tired so I placed the ring on the bedside table where she could see it. “I’ll come back,” I said.

“Please.” Her voice was a whisper.

I thought she was falling asleep so I tiptoed to the door. “John?” Her voice was very low.

I turned back. “My love?”

I waited a long time for her to speak, and when she did her voice was distorted because she was crying. “I love you,” she said, “but it all seems so bloody hopeless.”

“I love you too,” I replied, “and everything will be fine.” Then I left so she shouldn’t see my own tears.

I limped through dusty London streets. I was oblivious to the traffic or to the noise, oblivious to all the horrors of the city, blind to everything except the realisation that at last I had found someone to love, to cherish, but, first and most important of all, someone to avenge.

I reached Perilly House in the early evening. I had gone by train, bus, and foot, and my left ankle felt as if a white hot steel band was being slowly contracted about the bones. I wasn’t very sure how best to proceed for, despite my reputation, I was not a practised burglar, yet this evening I planned a burglary because, if Harry could not legally search Elizabeth’s house, then I would do it illegally. It was clear that I had arrived at an inopportune time for Elizabeth’s two stable girls were still busy giving riding lessons, and the presence of a car parked beside the Land Rover outside the front door suggested that Peter had a visitor, so I decided to wait till the house was either empty or Peter was alone and, presumably, drinking. I limped off the driveway to a copse of trees and settled down to wait.

By half past six the riding school pupils had been driven away by their mothers. Forty minutes later the stable girls locked up the yard and rode their bicycles down the tradesmen’s driveway. Peter’s visitor stayed another half-hour, then drove away. I stayed where I was, giving Peter time to start on his second or third bottle of the day, but it seemed my luck was in for, just a few moments after the visitor had left, Peter appeared at the front door, climbed into the Land Rover and accelerated down the drive.

I stood up, brushed the leaf mould off my jeans, and walked across the pastureland. I’d seen Peter lock the front door, so I went round the back where the house was an ugly clutter of gun room, dairy, sculleries, kitchen and coal stores. The doors were all locked, but I spotted a half-open window high up on the main scullery wall and, abandoning Charlie’s walking stick, I used an empty rain-butt to climb up to the window. It was a tight squeeze, and my left ankle threatened to spill me off the wobbly barrel, but I finally wriggled through the window on to a cobwebby shelf that creaked dangerously under my weight. There was a clatter of food tins hitting the floor as I pulled my legs through the window. I was proving to be a lousy burglar, but it was evident the house was deserted for no one came to investigate the noise.

I put the tins back on the shelf, wiped the cobwebs off my face, and opened the door. I knew the house from the old days. I was in the kitchen passage that was thickly hung with reins, bridles and whips. The kitchen was to the right and the family rooms to the left. I went left, through the baize-covered door, and paused in the hallway.

I knew Elizabeth had a small office behind the dining room, so I decided to begin there. I first unlocked the front door so that if anyone came home I could claim to have found the door open. The decor of the house had not been changed in the years I’d been barred from Perilly House. Peter’s gloomy pictures of long-forgotten battles and Elizabeth’s prints of spindly-legged racehorses jostled for position on the fading wallpaper. A dish of dusty cobnuts sat on the vast sideboard in the dining room. I opened one with the silver-gilt nutcrackers and ate it as I pushed open the unlocked door of Elizabeth’s office.

I knew within minutes that I would find nothing incriminating in the office. The only papers in the file drawers were records of her horses, receipts from the feed companies, vets’ bills, and details of forthcoming Pony Club events. It was plain that the stable girls also used the office, for Elizabeth had left them a message pinned to the top of the rolltop desk: ‘Mrs Peabody owes us £16 so her wretched child is NOT to be given any rides until the bill is paid in FULL.’

I scouted the living room, but found no place where any papers might be hidden. I went upstairs. It was obvious that Lord and Lady Tredgarth slept apart, for the large bedroom was filled with Peter’s things and held nothing whatever of Elizabeth’s. His clothes were strewn on the floor, suggesting that the cleaning woman never reached this dismal domain. A half-empty bottle of whisky stood on a side table with a copy of the Farmer’s Weekly. There was a blurred photograph of his old yacht hanging on the wall. I remembered the boat well, a fine old Vertue 25 that had been his pride and joy, but marriage and financial worries had scuppered that dream. Next to it was a framed photograph of Elizabeth, taken some years earlier at an exotic tropical resort. She was in a bikini top and wrapround skirt, smiling at the camera, and the photograph reminded me of just how attractive my sister was. I wondered if Peter kept the two pictures on his wall as a reminder of old and happier days. The present days were typified by a girly magazine that lay under the unmade bed. The room’s decrepitude reminded me of my brother’s bedroom and also made me feel dirty. There was something very distasteful in my prying, but there was something equally distasteful in a bilge filled with lethal gas.

I closed Peter’s door, then searched the four guest rooms and the two bathrooms, but they were all quite innocent. Which just left Elizabeth’s room. I tried the door, but as I’d feared, it was locked.

I had a choice now. So far, if I’d been found, I could righteously claim to be Lady Tredgarth’s brother who had come into an open house to wait for her, but if I broke down the door I would be committing an offence. I tested the lock by pushing on the door, but there was no play in it. It was an old-fashioned keyhole-type lock of the sort I had used to pick at Stowey, but I had no tools, nor did I know whether the skill was still with me.

I tried. I found some skewers in the kitchen, bent their tips, and tried to find the lock’s levers. After fifteen minutes I had achieved nothing other than a frayed temper. It also occurred to me that Peter might have gone no further than the local pub and could be home at any moment, so I gave up being delicate and just put my shoulder to the door. It took a half-dozen huge heaves, and one painful kick with my right foot, but finally the lockplate splintered off the jamb and the door swung open.

There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a dressing table, a vast wardrobe that had once been in my father’s room at Stowey and, to the left of her fireplace, a long table covered with papers. Above the table was a crucifix carved in ancient, hard wood, while beneath the table was a japanned tin trunk that was closed with a padlock.

I started with the papers on the table. There were letters from old schoolfriends, minutes of charity committee meetings, specimens of wallpaper, and overdue invoices from the builders who were renovating Primrose Cottage. I found the newspaper cuttings of the press conference I’d given with Jennifer, but that was the only matter relevant to my search and it neither confirmed Elizabeth’s guilt nor added to what I already knew.

I pulled open the drawers and found nothing but a tangle of underwear and stockings. I opened the wardrobe. Nothing. I looked under the high brass bed and found nothing but an old-fashioned chamber pot and a pair of furry slippers. I looked round the room for a hidden safe, but the lumpy plaster walls were covered with a fading wallpaper which clearly concealed nothing. I tested some of the floorboards, but they were nailed tight. There wasn’t a diary or a phone book and I supposed she must have taken such personal things to France. All that was left was the japanned tin trunk.

I pulled the trunk from under the table and used the brass handle of the poker as a hammer to open its padlock. It yielded to the third smart tap. I eased the shank out of the hasp and pushed back the lid. It was getting darker outside, but I dared not switch on a light, so instead I took the bundles of papers to the window.

They were letters. Packets and packets of letters held together with elastic bands. There were scores of packets holding hundreds of letters and all of them, so far as I could see, were love letters. They were addressed to Elizabeth at the riding school, and I supposed that the school’s mail came separately from that addressed to the main house. Some of the letters were ten years old, but others were very recent. I recognised none of the handwriting. Some of the packets had dried flowers trapped under their elastic bands, while others had photographs; small reminders of a stolen moment’s happiness.

I don’t know why I was so astonished. Elizabeth’s marriage was dead, yet presumably she was trapped in it by her ancestral attachment to the faith. I looked at the crucifix hanging on her wall, then back to the bundled evidence of her carnal sins and I suddenly felt sorry for her, and even guilty at having discovered the letters. Elizabeth herself appeared in some of the photographs, smiling and happy, holding on to the arm of her lover. She seemed to like tall athletic men. They were photographed on ski slopes or mounted on powerful horses. Seeing their strong confident faces made me realise how horribly unhappy Elizabeth must be.

Even the window light had now faded to a velvety gloom, so I risked turning on the small bedside lamp to look at the pictures. I was hoping to find a photograph of Garrard, but he was not there. There were only her hard-eyed, anonymous lovers. I dropped their letters back into the trunk and refastened the padlock.

I’d failed. There was nothing here for Harry Abbott, nothing at all. I sat on the bed, ran my fingers through my hair and stared up at the cold grate where spiders had made thick webs about the unburnt birch logs. Damn it, I thought. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Sir Leon would pay his ransom, he would get his picture, and I would never prove who had so nearly killed Jennifer and me.

A door creaked downstairs and, like a guilty thing, I jumped.

I should have run for it, but my ankle would not let me.

“Whoever you are,” Peter’s slurred voice shouted from the downstairs hallway, “stay there! I’ve got a gun, and I’m calling the police!”

“Don’t worry about the police, Peter.” I limped to the door, then out to the landing. “It’s me, John.”

He switched on the hall lights, then came a few suspicious feet up the stairs. He held a double-barrelled shotgun very menacingly. “It is you!” He sounded disappointed, as though he’d been looking forward to shooting an intruder. “You broke into her bedroom!”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“I thought I’d found a burglar.” He let the barrels drop. “I was driving back from the pub, you see, and saw a light in Liz’s room. That’s it, I thought, I’ll have the bugger. Left the motor at the end of the driveway and walked the rest of the way.”

“Very clever of you, Peter.”

He gave me an unfriendly look. “So what the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to see you and Elizabeth,” I said very nicely. “I thought it was time to make peace.” I was winging it, hoping that he wouldn’t use the shotgun. He was certainly well on his way to being drunk and I didn’t trust him.

“Make peace?” I’d puzzled him.

“Silly family squabbles,” I said vaguely.

I hobbled down the stairs. Peter let me pass, then followed me down to the hall. “So long as you’re here,” he said grudgingly, “you might as well have a drink.” He led me into the drawing room and poured two very stiff whiskies. “She won’t be back, not for a bit anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she phoned her bloody riding girls and told them. She wouldn’t telephone me. Cheers.” He drank that first glass of whisky as if he were a dying man coming out of the desert, then poured himself another, just as generous. “Funny thing, the telephone.”

He was drunk, morose, and lonely. I wondered how he managed to drive, but supposed the pub was nearby, the lanes empty, and the police a long way off.

“It rings sometimes,” he went on, “and I answer it, and there’s no one there! No one! Does that strike you as odd, John? I mean, you’re a man who’s knocked about the world a bit, so doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Very odd, Peter.”

“I’ll tell you something even odder! It never happens to Elizabeth.” He was peering at me with the fervent intensity of a drunken man holding on to a scrap of good sense. “It never happens to her. Do you think the telephone knows when a woman’s going to answer?”

“No, Peter, I don’t think that.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He had dropped the gun across an armchair. I wondered if it was loaded, and whether I should take it a safe distance away from him. He drank most of the second glass of whisky, then shuddered. “I can talk to you,” he said suddenly.

“Good.”

“You’re one of us, you see. I mean they’re a very nice set of fellows down the pub, all top drawer, but there’s always a bit of you know what.” I didn’t, but he explained for me anyway. “They know I’m a lord, and it makes them, what do you call it? Shy?”

“Shy,” I confirmed.

“You’re not shy.” He poured himself more whisky. “You’re quite right. Silly family squabbles. They shouldn’t be allowed. It’s her lovers, of course.” He didn’t sound drunk at all as he said the last words.

“Lovers?”

“Who telephone, you fool, and don’t say a word when I answer. I’m not an idiot, John. People think I am, but I’m not.”

“No, you’re not.”

“And she’s a good-looking woman,” he said sadly, “she’s a damn good-looking woman. All your family’s good-looking, blast you.” He stared at me balefully. “What were you doing in her room?”

“Looking for a Van Gogh.”

He stared at me for a few seconds, then guffawed. “That’s rich, John! Very good!”

“Seriously, Peter.”

He swallowed a gulp of whisky. “It’s your own bloody fault, John. I can understand why you did it! Truly I can.” He had become drunkenly earnest. “But what I don’t understand is why you don’t come clean! I’m sure Elizabeth doesn’t want to see you in jail. Why don’t you cough the damn thing up, and give Liz half the proceeds?”

“Because I don’t have the painting, Peter.”

He wagged a finger at me as though I was an irritating child. “Sold it, did you?”

“I never had it, Peter.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, old boy. Liz nailed you on that one three years ago. Found one of your partners in crime, you see?”

He was being entirely serious, even though he was as drunk as a judge. I gave him a rueful smile, as though I was playing along with his ideas. “How did she find me out?”

“She hired some private detective. Some slimy type she met at Newbury. Don’t know much about him, to be honest. Never met the fellow. Liz keeps herself to herself, you see.” He was beginning to make less sense as the whisky fractured his memories.

“Why didn’t she go to the police?”

“That’s what I said! I was told it was none of my business. Mind you, she went to that jumped-up little businessman, Buzzafuck or whatever he’s called.”

“Buzzacott?”

“He gave her money! I’m sure of it! Two of his henchmen came round with an attaché case. It’s my belief” – here he slumped down on to the arm of a sofa and pointed an unsteady finger at me – “that Liz wanted to wait till your mother was dead. No need to share the loot, what?”

“So why hasn’t she found the picture now?”

“Damned if I know. Perhaps you hid it too well?” He chuckled conspiratorially, and I smiled back. “So where is it, John?”

I spread innocent hands. “Beats me, Peter.”

He drained the whisky. “You can tell me.”

“Why did Buzzacott give her money?”

He walked unsteadily to the sideboard and poured himself another whisky. “To pay for the private detective chap, of course.”

Garrard. Maybe I was jumping to a conclusion, but somehow I reckoned the private detective had to be Garrard, which meant that, quite unknowingly, Sir Leon had bankrolled the bastard who had half killed his stepdaughter.

But if Elizabeth had stolen the painting, why would she need a private detective? Or perhaps there never had been a private detective. Perhaps that was just Elizabeth’s story, part of the necessary deception that I was guilty. And perhaps Buzzacott’s payments were a sweetener to make sure that Elizabeth did eventually sell him the painting. Whatever, the little bastard had clearly been backing both horses, Elizabeth and me. Or perhaps Peter’s drunken maunderings added up to sweet nothing.

“What I reckon” – Peter turned back to me – “is that you sold the painting to someone, Liz has found you out, and you’re protecting whoever it is.”

“It isn’t like that, Peter.”

“Then for God’s sake tell me the truth!” He was angry suddenly. “No one tells me a bloody thing!”

“I’ll tell you,” I said, “if you tell me which of the caravans you planned to put Georgina in.”

He stared at me with pretended outrage for a few seconds, then laughed. “You’re a fly one, John, I’ll give you that! Too fly for your own good, eh?”

I smiled, then glanced through the big window to where the bats flickered dark in the newly fallen night. “Was there a fellow named Garrard in your regiment, Peter?”

“Don’t remember him. What sort of fellow was he?”

“Thin, dark. Joined the Paras.”

He shook his head. “Never heard of him. Why?”

“Because he tried to kill me, that’s why.”

That answer was a mistake because Peter immediately thought I’d accused him of being an accomplice to attempted murder, and his face flushed with a sudden and dangerous anger. “Get the hell out of here!”

I held up a placatory hand. “Peter!” I said chidingly.

“I said get out!” He snatched up the gun. “I’ll use it! I bloody well used it on some Mormons last year!”

I left him. He didn’t follow me. I half expected him to fire a volley over my head, but he just stayed with his misery and the whisky decanter.

I limped to the village, but the last bus had already left. I knew I’d be lucky to reach the station in time for the last Exeter train, but I began to walk anyway. I’d left the walking stick in Peter’s back yard, and my ankle was hurting. I tried to hitch a lift, but it was over an hour before anyone took pity on my hobbling. I was too late for the train so I asked the driver to drop me near the motorway. I stood on the access road for what seemed like hours and, though I left my thumb stuck out, no one stopped. I probably looked too scruffy. The headlights flicked past me and I tried to make sense of Peter’s alcohol-sodden memories.

Elizabeth had probably been taking money from Buzzacott, and that money had been extracted on the promise that she had located one of my accomplices. That meant, I was certain, that Elizabeth had begun to cover her tracks very early in the game. She had spent at least three years spreading tales of my guilt so that, when she did produce the painting, no one would accuse her of stealing it. Yet, as I stood in the darkness beside the road, I realised just how little Peter had revealed. Perhaps, I hoped, one of the lovers whose letters lay hidden in the trunk was concealing the painting, and perhaps Harry could get a search warrant and go through the bundled letters, but it seemed like a very long shot. My day, I thought, had yielded nothing except an engagement ring.

I began to wonder if I should have to sleep rough, but finally a lorry driver took pity on me. He was carrying steel reinforcing rods to Plymouth, so took me all the way to Devon and dropped me off at the Kingsbridge turning.

It was two in the morning. I walked for another hour, but my ankle was making me sob with the pain. There was no traffic, thus no chance of a lift, so in the end I climbed a gate into a field, kicked a protesting sheep to its feet, then lay down on the warm dry patch of earth I’d uncovered. I slept badly for three hours, and woke shivering and wet to a limpid dawn. It occurred to me that I really was homeless; just another tramp on the southern summer roads. The first Earl of Stowey had ridden down these valleys with a retinue of steel-helmed men, and now the twenty-eighth Earl stumbled unshaven and filthy out of a sheep run.

I walked till I found a public telephone in a village. I phoned Charlie. I hesitated because it was early and I didn’t want to wake Yvonne, but she had said Charlie would probably be at home so I took the risk.

Charlie answered. I had woken him up, but he didn’t mind. Indeed, he seemed immensely relieved to hear my voice.

I shared his relief. “For Christ’s sake come and get me, Charlie. I’m all in.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Hitch-hiking. Sleeping rough.”

“For Christ’s sake, Johnny, they’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Who has? Harry Abbott?”

“Buzzacott. He started phoning yesterday afternoon. He’s desperate for you!”

“Why!”

“He wouldn’t tell me, mate, I’m not a bleeding earl. Christ Almighty, look at the time! Where the hell are you?”

I told him.

“Hang on there, Johnny, I’ll be with you in half an hour.”

So I hung on, and Charlie was as good as his word. I wondered how on earth I’d survive without a friend like him, then collapsed into his Japanese four-by-four and fell fast asleep.

Charlie woke Yvonne and demanded breakfast. She came downstairs in dressing gown and slippers, offered me one disgusted look, then banged the frying pan about the stove in noisy protest.

“I’m sorry to be a nuisance, Yvonne,” I said humbly.

She didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. I was about as welcome as a skunk.

“He’s only a bloody earl,” Charlie said in an attempt to placate her with humour, “and he’s been sleeping rough!”

“So have I.” Yvonne slapped a packet of bacon on to the counter.

Charlie gave me a wry look, then took me out to his kennels where we fed his terriers. He kept some of his dogs for ratting, and others, trained to bite less hard, for rabbiting. “Don’t get married,” he told me as he tossed raw meat into the troughs. It was a comment that didn’t require a response, so I made none. Charlie fondled one of his favourite dogs, then stared at the early morning mist shrouding the Salcombe lakes. “I don’t know if it matters,” he said casually, “but Buzzacott said you should telephone him. He doesn’t care how early you call.”

“Sod Buzzacott,” I said.

Charlie laughed. “Fallen out, have you?”

“He doesn’t want my help any more. He’s paid me off. He told me to buy myself a boat, disappear, and never talk to his stepdaughter again.”

“Buy yourself a boat?” Charlie was immediately interested.

I grinned. “You and I have got a hundred and twenty thousand quid to spend.”

Charlie didn’t believe me. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not. I promise you.” Back indoors we found some children’s crayons and drawing paper and I made Charlie a quick sketch of the hull that I was planning. “It’ll have to be steel, of course. Long keeled.” I drew in two masts. “I’m thinking of a ketch.”

“Why?”

“More flexible sail arrangements.”

“More to go wrong,” he said dubiously.

“I’ll double rig her.” We spent a happy breakfast planning the perfect ocean-going boat. Not that I intended going permanently to sea, not till I sailed with Jennifer, but planning the dream boat was a good way to start the day. Charlie and I had done almost everything to that boat except paint her name on the stern when the telephone rang.

It was Sir Leon Buzzacott, and he wanted me.

“Shall I tell the bugger you’re here?” Charlie didn’t bother to put a hand over the receiver as he asked me the question.

“I’ll speak to him.” I took the phone.

Sir Leon’s message in The Times had been answered. The kidnappers – that’s how he described them – had sent him their demands. The money was to be paid over by me. They would accept no one else; only the Earl of Stowey.

He finished speaking. I said nothing. It was so blindingly obvious why they wanted me to deliver the money; so they could kill me and thus bequeath the picture to Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, I thought, had been taking money from Sir Leon, money which had let her hire the thugs who would do her killing today. “How much did you pay my sister?” I asked Sir Leon.

There was a silence, then Sir Leon’s cautious voice. “My lord?”

“How much did you pay my sister three years ago?”

“An honorarium,” he said evasively, “merely an honorarium.”

“You bastard. Don’t you realise what she did with your damned honorarium? She hired Garrard. She hired the man who put Jennifer into hospital. You bankrolled this, Sir Leon. You gave her the money that let her wait till our mother died.”

“At that time I had no reason to believe in your sister’s guilt.” His voice was very stiff.

And what did it matter anyway? Of course Sir Leon would back both of us, because all he had ever wanted was the painting. He did not care who had stolen it, only that it came to him.

I had said nothing for a few seconds. “My lord?” Sir Leon prompted me.

“How did these people communicate with you?” I asked.

He paused, evidently finding the question irrelevant. “By letter. It was delivered by messenger yesterday.”

“Have you given it to the police?”

“I don’t intend to involve the police.”

“Damned if I’m going to be involved then. Those people have tried to kill me twice, and if you think I’ll wander into their trap just to get you a pretty picture, you’re wrong.”

“I beg you –” Sir Leon began.

“Call Harry Abbott.” I was tired, and I really didn’t care any more. I hung up the phone before he could say another word.

“What was all that about?” Charlie asked.

I told him. It was all so clear to me. If Elizabeth’s plans went well today she would receive a ransom of four million pounds. She would also receive the gift of my death, which would make her the beneficial owner of a Van Gogh. Sir Leon, if he wanted to hang that painting in his gallery, would be forced to negotiate a price with her, and I was damned sure the price would be greater than twenty million. Sir Leon would doubtless claim that I had given him the painting, but he had nothing on paper and Sir Oliver Bulstrode would chop him into shreds. In brief, Elizabeth was about to become a very rich woman. She could buy Stowey back and start an equestrian centre that would dazzle the world. She doubtless imagined Royalty coming to her stables and she foresaw winters in warm palaces and summers on the languorous beaches of the very rich.

And to make all that happen, to give my sister the fulfilment of all her dreams, I only had to deliver the ransom. “Don’t do it,” Charlie said earnestly.

“You heard me,” I said. “I told him to call Harry.” Except, I thought, my one last chance of revenging Jennifer was to co-operate with Sir Leon.

But I was not the best instrument of justice. Harry Abbott was, and if Sir Leon wouldn’t tell the police that the ransom was being paid, then I would. “Can I use the phone, Charlie?”

“Help yourself.”

The phone rang a half-second before I picked it up. It was Harry Abbott himself. “I was about to phone you,” I said.

“Don’t do a thing, Johnny.” He sounded excited. “I’m coming to get you.”

“What for?”

“Why do you bloody think? We’re off and running, of course. Buzzacott just phoned me. I’ve got a police chopper…”

“Harry!” I almost shouted his name to calm him down. “For Christ’s sake. They want to kill me!”

“Of course they want to kill you. Just stay there, Johnny, I’m coming to get you.” He slammed the phone down.

“Bloody hell,” I said to Charlie, “Harry’s bought the idea. They want me to pay the ransom!” I felt a chill crawl up my back.

Charlie pointed at me. “Don’t do it, Johnny. Don’t do it! They’ll push you up shit creek without a paddle!”

“I know.” But I’d also made a promise to a girl I wanted to marry, so perhaps the creek had to be risked and a paddle improvised. For revenge.

Harry arrived in a police helicopter. The thing thwacked across Salcombe harbour, reared up to flatten Charlie’s unmown grass, then settled down close to his kids’ sandpit. Harry jumped out and ran crouching across to the house. He was full of his own importance; they’d given him a chopper all of his own, and he felt like a policeman in a TV programme. “Are you ready?” he shouted at me.

“No, I’m bloody well not ready. Come in.”

He was clearly reluctant. Things were at last moving, and the villains were being forced to show their hand, and I was being obstreperous. But Harry needed me, so he had to come into Charlie’s kitchen where the double glazing cut down the thumping noise of the helicopter’s engine.

“So tell me what they want me to do,” I said.

Harry glanced at Charlie, then realised that I would insist on Charlie listening anyway. “We don’t know yet.”

“Oh, terrific!” I said. “You mean we’re skidding about the sky like a blue-arsed fly and we don’t know why?”

“We have to go to Exeter. There’s a plane waiting there to take us to Guernsey. We meet Sir Leon at St Peter Port and wait at the outdoors café at the Victoria Marina. That’s all we know.”

“Don’t go,” Charlie said to me.

“Piss off, Charlie.” Harry had known Charlie a long time.

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Just you, really,” Harry admitted. “The bastards insist they’ll only deal with you, but I’ve got a back-up team arranged.” To listen to him you’d have thought the SAS were on alert, but I suspected the ‘back-up team’ was an overweight squad of Harry’s usual dipsomaniacs.

“They’ve already tried to kill Johnny twice,” Charlie protested.

“I know that,” Harry said impatiently, “and of course it’s a trap. A demented four year old would know it’s a trap, but if you go slowly, Johnny, we’ll be with you all the way. You don’t have to go the whole way, not if you think it’s dangerous. We’ll be a half-step behind you, but if you lose us, then get the hell out of it. And if I think it’s becoming too risky, I’ll stop everything. The object of the exercise isn’t to give them the money, but to spot them, and once we’ve done that you can leave the rest to me.”

“Don’t do it,” Charlie said to me. “It’s only a bloody picture of some rotten flowers.”

The helicopter whined and pulsed beyond the window and Charlie’s dogs, safely kennelled, whined back. Harry waited for my decision and, when none came, tried a last appeal. “They’re showing themselves, Johnny. If we don’t respond then they might not risk it again. We’ve got to go! For God’s sake, don’t you want to know who tried to kill you?”

“I know who it is,” I said. “It’s Garrard and Peel. And if you lot were any good, Harry, you’d have had both of them wired up to a generator and singing their hearts out by now.”

“I’ll never have a chance of doing that if we don’t catch them.”

“Don’t do it,” Charlie said to me.

Except I knew Harry was right. By collecting the ransom, our enemies had to show themselves, which meant we had a chance, a very narrow chance, of trapping them. And it was Garrard, I was certain, who had condemned Jennifer to months of pain, and I had promised her to pay back that pain. I sighed, then I shrugged. “OK, Harry.”

Charlie’s face stiffened into an expression that I knew only too well. It was Charlie’s stubborn look, the face he wore when things were bad, and when the only solution lay in his own strength and abilities. He had worn that face in the Tasman Sea, and now he had it again. “If you’re going,” he said to me, “then I’m going too.”

“Hang on…” Harry began to protest, then realised it was no use. “You’ll be about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike,” he grumbled.

“Johnny needs someone to look after him, Harry, and that’s me.” Charlie grinned. His tiredness dropped away because there was a prospect of mischief and he was involved. The two of us were back in business together. He grabbed his coat, shouted to Yvonne that she shouldn’t wait up for him, then followed us out.

The helicopter took us to Exeter airport where a small plane waited to fly us to the Channel Islands. Two plain-clothes policemen waited by the plane, but one of them had to stay on the ground because Charlie claimed his seat. Harry, unhappy at losing one of his men, could only agree for he knew how unstoppable a determined Charlie could be.

Both Harry and his man had guns. They showed the weapons to us as we climbed up from the Devon coast. The sight of the black-handled automatics made my blood run chill. It reminded me that this was a very deadly game, and not just another adventure with Charlie. Harry sensed my change of mood. “Remember, Johnny, you don’t have to go through with it. Go as far as you can, but don’t risk your life.”

“I won’t let him,” Charlie said.

“The further you go” – Harry ignored Charlie – “the more chance you give us of spotting the bastards, but I don’t want to be scraping you off the floor, Johnny, so don’t push your luck.”

“Do I get a gun?” I asked.

Harry shook his head. “Not from me, Johnny. These are police issue. It would be more than my job’s worth to let you have one.”

I shrugged off his refusal. He was probably right to turn me down. I’d never fired a handgun in anger, and would probably make a mess of it. I stared down at the sea. It looked so very calm, all its treachery smoothed out by our height. I took a cigarette from Charlie. I was nervous. I was being enticed into danger, like making a night approach to an unlit coast without any charts. I suddenly wished I had not accepted so easily, then thought of Jennifer’s pain and knew I had no choice. “Why Guernsey?” I wondered aloud.

Harry could only guess at the answer. “Perhaps they think the island police are dozy? And think of all those tight little lanes. You could get lost there very easily.”

“Is that what they want?”

“They want to know they’re safe. The danger point of a ransom is the handover, because it’s possible the police will be watching. So the usual trick is to send the bagman from public phone to public phone. The route will appear to be random, but they’ll be watching somewhere and looking out for cars following you. If they see the same cars too often, then they’ll pull out.”

The pilot turned in his seat to interrupt Harry. “Fog,” he said laconically, and I twisted round to see that a milk-white fog bank was stretching across the sea ahead. The Channel Islands were notorious for their fogs, and the recent still weather had made such fogs more likely.

“Bugger,” Harry said viciously.

The pilot was radioing ahead. He listened on his earphones, then turned to give us the news. “Guernsey’s still clear. That lot’s over Alderney and the Casquets. But they think the larger islands may get socked in later.”

“Just get us there,” Harry said, “never mind what happens later.”

Charlie was peering down at the thick white cloud blanketing the sea. “Remember that night off the Casquets?”

I nodded. We’d been seventeen or eighteen years old and had made a night crossing to Cherbourg. Except that we misread the tides and had been swept much further west and south than we knew. The wind had piped up, the sea was kicking, and we were in our open dinghy. We’d turned east on to a broad reach, expecting to see the lights on the Cap de la Hague, and instead we’d found ourselves being driven on to the rocks about the Casquets’ light. It was one of our earlier lessons in seamanship. A tough lesson, too, for we damn nearly died on the vicious Casquets’ bank, but somehow we’d scraped round to the west and had run down to Guernsey where we’d gone ashore like half-drowned rats. It seemed funny now, but at the time we’d both been scared rigid.

The fog bank slipped away behind, revealing a calm sea, though more fog lingered towards the French coast. “The forecast says there could be wind later,” the pilot volunteered.

“That’ll get rid of the fog,” the plain-clothes policeman said.

“Not round here,” Charlie said with the satisfaction of superior knowledge. “I’ve seen these waters blowing a full gale and still shrouded in a fog as dense as a Frenchman’s armpit. Bloody dangerous place, this.”

“Cheer me up,” Harry said gloomily, then settled back to watch as we descended towards Guernsey. The island came nearer, a labyrinth of narrow roads, ugly bungalows, greenhouses and cars, then our wheels thumped on the tarmac, the smoke spurted from the protesting rubber, and we had arrived.

The local police met us and drove us to St Peter Port where Sir Leon Buzzacott waited at an outdoors table by the marina café. An untouched cup of coffee stood beside a very slim leather attache case on the table. Two very large and taciturn men flanked and dwarfed Sir Leon. If we were trying to be inconspicuous then we were failing hopelessly for, with Harry’s local reinforcements, we now numbered ten men, and all but Charlie and myself were dressed in heavy suits, while around us the holiday-makers and yacht crews lounged in shorts or jeans.

“I’ve got other chaps located round the marina,” the local policeman said. “They’re disguised, of course.”

Sir Leon greeted me. Considering that I was about to risk my life to get him a picture that I’d already given to him, I thought his greeting lacked warmth, but then my last conversation with him had not exactly been amicable. We didn’t mention Elizabeth, nor his dealings with her. I introduced Charlie. Sir Leon gave him a cold look and a bare acknowledgement. Charlie nodded happily back. “Nice morning for a bit of nonsense,” he said cheerfully.

Sir Leon ignored the remark. “The money,” he said, and nudged the thin leather case towards me.

“Four million?” I said disbelievingly. I’ve seen enough movies and television films to know that four million pounds would need a fair-sized suitcase rather than this slender and expensive case. For a second I even wondered whether Sir Leon had simply written them a cheque.

Sir Leon unzipped the bag and showed me its contents. “These are unregistered Municipal Bearer Bonds, my lord, from the United States. Safer than cash, just as anonymous, and negotiable anywhere in the world.”

“But traceable?” Harry Abbott asked hopefully.

“If you can persuade the authorities in various tropical tax havens to co-operate with you, yes,” Sir Leon said disparagingly, “but I wouldn’t pin your hopes on that cooperation. I assure you that our enemies won’t be using the bond coupons to claim their interest payments, which would betray them, but will simply sell the bonds themselves. Nor will they have any shortage of buyers. Unregistered bonds are becoming a rare and precious commodity.”

“So are Van Goghs,” I said helpfully.

Sir Leon ignored that. Harry zipped up the case and pushed it towards me. “Let’s hope we get the blackmailers before Johnny has to hand the stuff over.” Harry was in a fine mood again, relishing the chase. He looked round the marina as if he expected to see men with stocking masks over their faces.

I looked at Sir Leon. “You know they want to kill me?”

He nodded primly. “It had occurred to me, my lord.”

“And you set this up. You encouraged my sister. You gave her the money to hire the killers.”

The pale eyes didn’t blink. “I shall assume,” he said, “that the day’s events are making you overwrought. I trust that when the moment of crisis comes you will not allow that stress to affect your judgment.”

“And fuck you, too.” I doubted whether anyone had ever said that to Sir Leon Buzzacott, and he looked gratifyingly startled. I leaned over the table. “Tell me something. What will you put on my gravestone? That I wasn’t good enough to marry your stepdaughter, but I graciously died for your gallery?” He said nothing. One of the security guards moved closer to me, perhaps fearing that I would hit Buzzacott, but I ignored the man. “Do you know why I’m doing this, Sir Leon? I’m doing it for Jennifer. I don’t give a tinker’s cuss for your painting. But I’m going to find the man who burned Jennifer and I’m going to pull his guts out and shove them down his throat. And when I’ve done that, Sir Leon, I’m going back to Jennifer and I’ll marry her. And if you try to stop me, I’ll have your guts for dinner too.”

Charlie laughed. Sir Leon just blinked.

I turned away from him. My anger had cowed Sir Leon, but it had been nothing but bravado. My chances of taking revenge this day were very slight; the best I could hope for was that Harry would succeed in making an arrest. I looked around the marina complex, but I could see nothing untoward. The huge car park which served the town centre was full. If Harry was right then one of the parked cars would probably be the one in which I would spend the next few hours criss-crossing the island’s leafy and twisting lanes. The thought made me nervous.

I distracted myself by watching the boats. The Victoria Marina at St Peter Port is a stone-walled harbour filled with pontoons. The entrance has a raised sill to trap the falling tide, but we had arrived just after high tide, so the sill was invisible and the passage was still clear for yachts to leave or enter. I guessed there were a hundred yachts berthed at the pontoons. Most were French. The Channel Islands are a wonderful playground for French yachtsmen. Two girls in tiny shorts climbed one of the pontoon bridges and walked towards us. All of us, except Sir Leon, watched them. They put on a wiggle for our benefit, called bonjour, and strolled past us into the café.

“If we weren’t here on business,” Charlie said wistfully, “I’d be doing a spot of parley-voo by now.”

“Like old times, Charlie.”

Then the girls had to be forgotten because an ancient taxi, blue smoke pouring from its exhaust, braked close to the café tables. The driver, clearly puzzled by his errand, leaned out of his window. “Is one of you the Earl of Stowey?”

For a second none of us moved, then, plunged into unreality, I nodded. “I am.”

“I don’t know what this is about, but this is for you.” The driver held out a brown business envelope, then gasped as four policemen closed in on his car. “Hang on!” he protested, but the police had their first link with the villains, and the driver was hauled away to be questioned. “Not that we’ll learn anything,” Harry said complacently. “These people aren’t fools, but we have to go through the motions.”

Sir Leon wanted to open the envelope, as did Harry, but I was the addressee, and I insisted on the privilege. One of the local policemen had a pair of plastic tweezers which I used to extract the single page. After I had read the page it would be taken away to be finger-printed, though none of us really believed the senders would be so foolish as to leave such marks. I clumsily unfolded the sheet and read aloud its typed instructions. The instructions were very simple and very clear. I was to strip down to shorts, pick up the money, and go to the pontoon nearest to the marina café. I was to carry nothing except the money, and should I feel like disobeying that order, I should know that I would be watched all the way. At the end of the pontoon I would find a yacht named Marianne. I was to get on board alone. No one was even to walk down the pontoon with me. Once on board I should take Marianne to sea where further instructions would be provided. No boat should follow me, and if such a boat was detected the Van Gogh would be destroyed. But if the instructions were followed faithfully, and the money was safely handed over, a telephone call to Sir Leon’s gallery would reveal where the Van Gogh could be found.

“Damn it,” Harry said softly. Till that moment I don’t think any of us had imagined that the money might be handed over at sea, yet the insistence on me, because I was a sailor, and the choice of Guernsey, a yachtsmen’s paradise, should have told us that the handover might be made afloat.

“Right!” Harry was trying to regain the initiative. “Marianne! There must be a record of her. I want her photographed, and I want the registers searched. Who owns her? Who sold her? Where’s she normally berthed? Talk to the Frogs, the name sounds French. Go on! Move!”

“I’m coming with you,” Charlie said to me.

“No!” Sir Leon snapped.

Charlie leaned on the table so that his big shaggy head was very close to Sir Leon’s face. “He’s my friend, and if he’s going to risk his life, I’m going with him.”

Sir Leon was quite unmoved by Charlie’s physical proximity. “We are going to follow the instructions very precisely. I assume” – he turned to one of the Guernsey policemen – “that this boat can be followed with an aircraft?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Then be so good as to arrange it, but tell your people not to make the coverage obvious.” He looked down at the notes he had made. “Are there any naval forces on the island?”

One of the local policemen thought that a fisheries protection vessel was in the outer harbour. Sir Leon looked up at Harry. “I imagine a telephone call to London will secure their co-operation, but tell them they’re to stay out of sight of the yacht. They will have to follow directions from the covering aircraft.”

Harry pushed buttons on his mobile phone, while Sir Leon glanced down at his notebook. Sir Leon had taken over. He was showing an impressive, natural authority, but expressing it so calmly that he radiated an air of confidence. He ticked two items off his list of notes, then offered me a cold look. “I trust, my lord, that these precautions will convince you that I am not attempting your murder?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but just glanced at his notes again. “I imagine their insistence on your wearing nothing but shorts is to make certain that you carry no weapons on board.”

“Or a radio,” I said.

“I hadn’t thought of that.” He sounded surprised that I might have had a notion denied to him, and even made a small note to that effect. “Quite. Well, my lord, are you willing to follow these instructions?”

I supposed I was. I certainly hadn’t come this far to back down. The only immediate difficulty I could see was that we had four million pounds in funny money but not a single pair of shorts between us. “Give us your knife, Charlie.”

He gave me his pen-knife and I slashed at the legs of my jeans. Once the denim was cut, they tore easily. I ripped the legs off, stepped out of them, then pulled off my shirt and deck shoes. I saw Sir Leon look at the fresh scars on my legs and give a small grimace of distaste.

“I’m coming with you,” Charlie said stubbornly.

He couldn’t win that argument. Both Sir Leon and Harry Abbott were against it. If we broke the rules, both men insisted, then all might be lost, so our best hope was to follow the instructions exactly. “But remember” – Harry was trying to demonstrate his own authority in the face of Sir Leon’s formidable competition – “I’ll pull you out if it looks dangerous, Johnny.”

“I’m going to be OK, Harry.” I sounded a great deal more confident than I felt. All around me men were talking urgently into police radios, but I was the one who had to walk almost naked down the pontoon, which, I was sure, would lead me to two killers.

“I want everyone watching!” Harry said loudly. “They’ve got a lookout here, and I want him spotted!” He turned back to me, shrugged, and pushed the attaché case towards me. “We might as well do it, Johnny.”

I pushed my pipe, my pouch of tobacco and some matches into the seat of my sawn-off jeans, then picked up the attaché case of money. It was feather-light. “See you, Harry.”

“One minute!” Sir Leon frowned. “These people were particular that you carried nothing but the case. Leave your pipe here, my lord.”

I smiled very sweetly at him. “I might risk my life for your painting, Sir Leon, but I’m damned if I’ll do it without a smoke.”

He looked into my eyes, saw he would lose, so gave a cold nod of reluctant acceptance. Harry and his men wished me luck, then Charlie walked with me across the car park to the head of the pontoon. “Are you sure about this, Johnny?”

“Of course I’m not sure, Charlie, but what the hell else can I do?”

“Bugger off. Leave them. It’s only a rich man and his painting. It isn’t life or death!”

“But it is, Charlie. They tried to kill me and they damn nearly killed Jennifer. So it’s personal.”

“You’re a fool.” His solemnity surprised me, but then he shrugged away his unnatural gloom and forced a grin on to his broad face. “We could make a run with the money?”

“Why not?” I’d been waiting for him to make that suggestion. We both laughed, but there was suddenly nothing else to say, so I punched him on the shoulder. “Have a pint waiting for me, OK?”

“How about one of those French birds as well?” He slapped my bare arm in friendly farewell, then stepped back.

I knew he was watching me all the way down the pontoon, and I was touched by the worry I’d detected in him, but it was too late to turn back now. So I went on. Alone.