Western Approaches

Prelude

He awakes, as usual, at 03.55. For a second or two he lies in the clammy darkness, trying to work out what’s gone wrong.

The last couple of days a thick tongue of high pressure has pushed up from the Azores, exciting weather forecasters all over northern Europe. He’s listened to the headlines on the short-wave radio: 32 °C in Amsterdam; hotter still in Paris; 35° expected this afternoon in London.

Christ, he thinks. London.

He searches for the T-shirt he carefully folded two hours earlier, checks with his fingers that it’s not inside out. His mouth tastes of the tin of sardines they’d shared last night and he knows that his breath stinks. Sardines on Ryvita. Again.

He runs his tongue along his teeth and tries to pinch the darkness from his eyes. Something’s definitely wrong. He knows it is. But, still groggy, he can’t quite fathom what.

He pulls on the T-shirt. The last week or so, before the high pressure arrived, the weather and the ocean have been brutal. Sheer concentration has kept exhaustion at bay, but now, in the eerie calm, he feels totally wiped out. Yesterday he spent hour after hour checking their progress on the GPS, a habit — in Kate’s phrase — that has become a nervous tic. But he can’t help it. Without the suck and gurgle of a following sea, no matter how hard they pull, they seem to be going nowhere. He’s sure of nothing except the heat of the day, a thick blanket that presses down on them, bringing everything to a halt: conversation, energy, belief, even the small comfort of a decent horizon. The ocean, poster blue, shimmers in the heat. Everything has become a blur. And now, as dawn breaks, this.

He struggles into his shorts, wincing with the effort. He has a couple of boils on his arse, incredibly painful. He checks them with a mirror when Kate’s not watching. She’s squeezed them dry as best she can and made him start on the antibiotics against the infection but he can feel, or he thinks he can feel, another one coming.

He’s on his side now, up on one elbow, waiting for his arse to settle down. He can feel tangles of hair hanging round his shoulders and his head nudges against the roughness of the cabin roof. Ten days ago, riding out yet another storm, he’d popped a bottle of cooking oil in this khazi of a cave and everything still feels sticky to the touch. They lost a jar of coffee too, same storm, and the granules are everywhere. They melt in the sweat from his body and he’s yet to emerge from the cabin without the telltale smears of brown all over his face. Kate, who seems immune from Nescafé Gold, has taken to calling him Coco the Clown. He thinks she means it as a joke but there are moments, especially recently, when he’s not altogether sure.

The alarm on his wristwatch begins to ping. Four o’clock. He’s learned to hate this sound with a fierce passion, the way some people react to the whine of a nearby mosquito. It means he has to move, gather himself together, face another day.

His fingers find the stainless-steel latches that keep the hatch in place. At last, thicko, he’s realised what’s wrong. The boat isn’t moving. He can’t hear the regular splash-splash of the oars, can’t sense the faint tug as the boat inches forward. He feels nothing but the gentle sway of the ocean.

Anxious now, he fights to open the hatch. He knows how much Kate loves the slow drama of sunrise, that hour or so when the huge orange ball eases itself free of the ocean. Yesterday, she told him, was the best ever. Today, just maybe, might be better still.

Kate is keeping a record of everything. As the last latch comes free he can picture her squatting midships, her face to the rising sun, steadying her Nikon for yet another shot.

Daylight floods the chaos of the tiny cabin. He blinks at the familiar tableau of boat, of lashed-down gear, of sea, of the rich yellow spill of the new day. He wriggles his upper body through the hatch and rubs his eyes again, looking round, trying to find his wife.

But Kate has gone.

This, at least, was the way he explained it in the first of several interviews with Devon and Cornwall CID.