Wildtrack

WILDTRACK

A Novel of Suspense

BERNARD CORNWELL

Wildtrack is dedicated

to the memory of

David Watt

PROLOGUE

They said I’d never walk again.

They said I’d be in a wheelchair till they lifted me into the box and screwed down my lid. I should learn a trade, they said. Something cripple-friendly, like computers.

They’d had me for damn nearly a year. They’d put a metal rod into my right thigh, and grafted skin where my thighs and arse had been burned. They did a mixture of rough carpentry and micro-surgery on my spine and, when it half worked—which meant I could twitch the toes on my left foot—they opened me up again and did a bit more. It had all taken months and still I could not walk.

You must get used to it, they said, because you’re never going to walk again. You’re never going to sail again. You’re a paraplegic now, Nick, so kiss it all goodbye. I told them to get stuffed.

“That’s not the spirit, Nick!” Doctor Maitland said in his no-nonsense voice. “There’s no stigma involved, you know. Quite the opposite!” He flipped the pages of a yachting magazine that lay on a pile of similar magazines beside my bed. “And you’ll be afloat again.

You can go sailing this very spring!”

It was the first sign of hope he’d given me, and I responded eagerly. “Can I?”

“My dear Nick, of course you can. There’s a motor sailor on the Solent that’s specially adapted for your sort of case.” My eagerness ebbed. “My sort of case?”

“Ramps for the chairs and a trained volunteer staff on board.” Maitland always spoke of these things in a matter-of-fact voice, as if everyone in the real world went around on wheels with tubes sticking into their bladders. “And perhaps you’d let the press go along?” he added hopefully. “They all want to interview you.”

“Tell them to go to hell. No press. That’s the rule, remember? I don’t want to see a bloody reporter.”

“No press, then.” Maitland could not hide his disappointment.

He loved publicity for his paraplegic paradise. “Perhaps I’ll come along. It’s been many a long year since I went sailing.”

“You can go on your own,” I said sullenly.

“That isn’t the right spirit, Nick.” He twitched at my curtains, which didn’t need twitching.

I closed my eyes. “I’m going to walk out of this bloody place on my own two feet.”

“That won’t stop you going sailing in the spring, will it now?” Maitland, like all his staff, specialized in that bright interrogatory inflection at the end of statements; an inflection designed to elicit our agreement. Once they had us accepting that we were doomed, then half their battle was won. “Will it?” he asked again.

I opened my eyes. “The last time I went sailing, Doc, I was in a friend’s forty-footer coming back from Iceland. She was knocked down near the Faeroes and lost all her mast above the spreaders.

We hacked off the broken stuff, rigged jury hounds, and brought her into North Uist five days later. That was a neat piece of work, Doc.” I didn’t add that the friend had broken his arm when the boat had broached, or that it had happened in the depths of a bloody awful night. What mattered was that we took on that bitch of a northern sea and brought our boat home.

Maitland had listened very patiently. “That was before, Nick, wasn’t it?”

“So there’s no bloody way, Doc, that I’m going to sit on your cripple barge and watch the pretty boats go by.” I knew I was being churlish and ungrateful, but I didn’t care. I was going to walk again.

“If you insist, Nick, if you insist.” Maitland’s voice intimated that I was my own worst enemy. He went to the door, then stopped to glance back into my room. A look of utter astonishment dawned on his round pink face. “You haven’t got a television!”

“I hate bloody television.”

“We find it an extremely effective instrument for therapy, Nick.”

“I don’t need bloody therapy. I want a pair of walking shoes.”

“You really don’t want a television?” Maitland asked in utter disbelief.

“I don’t want a television.”

So that afternoon they sent the new psychiatrist to see me.

“Hello, Mr Sandman,” she said brightly. “I’m Doctor Janet Plant.

I’ve just joined the orientation staff.”

She had a nice voice, but I couldn’t see her because I had my back to the door. “You’re the new shrink?”

“I’m the new orientation therapist,” she agreed. “What are you doing?”

I was holding on to the bedrail with my right hand and edging my right foot down to the floor. “I’m teaching myself to walk.”

“I thought we had a physio department to do that?”

“They only want to teach me how to pee in a wheelchair. They promise me that if I’m a good boy we’ll go on to number two in the spring.” I flinched from the excruciating pain. Even to put a small amount of pressure on my leg was enough to twist a fleshhook in the small of my back. I supposed the psychiatrist would say I was a masochist because, as soon as the pain struck, I put more weight on the leg.

God, I was weak. My right leg was shaking. The nerves of the leg were supposed to be severed, but I’d discovered that if I locked the knee with my hands it would stay locked. So now I thrust the knee down and very gingerly pushed myself away from the bed. I was still holding on to the rail. My left leg took some of the weight, and the pain slid down those tendons like fire. I had no balance and no strength, but I forced myself away from the bed until I was standing half bent, with my right hand gripped so hard about the bedrail that my knuckles were white. I could not breathe. Literally. The pain was so bad that my body could not find the breathing instructions. The pain coursed up into my chest, my neck, then flared red in my skull.

I fell backwards on to the bed. The pain began to ebb out of me as my breath came back, but I kept my eyes closed so the tears would not show. “The first thing I have to do”—I tried to sound nonchalant—“is learn to straighten up. Then how to put one foot in front of the other. The rest will come easily.” I wished I had not spoken, for the words came out as sobs.

I heard Doctor Plant draw up the chair and sit down. I’d noted that she’d made no attempt to help me, which was all part of the hospital’s treatment. We had to fail in order to discover our new limits, which we would then meekly accept. “Tell me about your boat,” she said in the statutory matter-of-fact voice. It was the same voice she would have used if I’d claimed to be Napoleon Bonaparte.

“Tell me how you won the battle of Austerlitz, Your Imperial Highness?”

“It’s a boat,” I said sullenly. My breathing was easier now, but my eyes were still closed.

“We sail a Contessa 32,” Doctor Plant said.

I opened my eyes and saw a sensible, short-haired and motherly woman. “Where’s your Contessa moored?” I asked.

“Itchenor.”

I smiled. “I once went aground on the East Pole sands.”

“Careless.”

“It was at night,” I defended myself, “and there was a blizzard blowing so I couldn’t see the marks. And a dirty great flood tide. I was only fifteen. I shouldn’t have tried to make the Channel, but I thought my old man would tan the hide off me if I stayed out all night.”

“Would he have done?” she asked.

“Probably not. He didn’t like using the cane. I deserved it often enough, but he’s a soft bugger really.”

She smiled, as if to indicate that I was at last entering a territory she could understand; a channel well marked by the perches and buoys of the clinical studies of parenthood. “Your mother had left you by the time you were fifteen. Isn’t that so?”

“I’m a right bloody monkeypuzzle tree for you, aren’t I?”

“Is that what you think?” she asked.

“What I think,” I said, “is that I hate it when bloody shrinks ask me what I think. My father’s a grease-coated crook, my mother did a bolt, my brother’s a prick, my sister’s worse, and my wife has left me and married a bloody MP. But I’m not here for any of that, Doctor. I’m here because I got a bullet in my back and the National Health Service has undertaken to put me together again. Doing that does not, repeat not, involve poking about in my doubtlessly addled brain.” I stared up at the ceiling. I’d spent nearly a year staring at that bloody ceiling. It was cream-coloured and it had a hairline crack that looked something like the silhouette of a naked woman seen from behind. At least, it looked like that to me, but I thought I’d better not say as much to Doctor Plant or else I’d be strapped on to a couch with the electrodes glued to my scalp.

“I delivered a Contessa 32 to Holland once,” I said. “Nice boats.”

“They are,” she said enthusiastically. “Tell me about your boat.” I suppose it was because she was a sailor herself that I told her.

The trick of surviving the National Torture Service is to have one dream they can’t meddle with, one thing that gives you hope, and mine was Sycorax.

“She’s called Sycorax,” I said. “Thirty-eight feet, mahogany on oak, with teak decks. Built in 1922 as a gaff-rigged ketch. She was built for a rich man, so no expense was spared. Her usual rig is jib, staysail, main, topsail and mizzen; all heavy cotton. She’s got brass scuttles, gimballed oil-lamps in the cabin.” My eyes were closed again. “And the prettiest lines this side of paradise. She’s dark blue, with white sails. She’s got a long keel, is built like a Sherman tank, and can be as cantankerous as the bloody witch she’s named after.” I smiled, remembering Sycorax’s stiffness in a freshening wind.

“The witch Sycorax.” Doctor Plant frowned with the effort of placing the name. “From Shakespeare?”

“From The Tempest. Sycorax was Caliban’s mother and she imprisoned her enemies in timber. It’s a joke, you see, because a timber boat imprisons you with debts.”

Doctor Plant offered a dutiful smile. “I hope you’ve had her ashore since you’ve been in here?”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t given time to take her out of the water, but she’s sheathed in copper and berthed on a private wharf. She’s been battered about a bit, but I can repair her.”

“You’re a carpenter?” There was a touch of surprise in her voice.

I rolled my head to look at her. “Just because I was an Army officer, Doctor Plant, doesn’t mean I’m totally bloody useless.”

“You’re good at carpentry?” she insisted.

I held up my hands that were calloused from the exercises I did, but, though the callouses were hard, the fingertips were white and soft. “I used to be. And I was a good mechanic.”

“So you see yourself as a practical man, do you?” she asked with the professional inflection.

“You’re meddling again,” I warned her. “You’ve come here to sing Doctor Maitland’s song. Get a skill, Nick. Learn to be an account-ant or a computer programmer. Talk to the newspapers, Nick. They’ll pay you for the interview and you can buy a nice little electrically-driven wheelchair with the cash. In short, give up, Nick, surrender.

But if I’d wanted to do that, Doctor, I’d have stayed in the Army.

They offered me a desk job.”

She stood and went to the window. A cold wind drove spits of winter rain against the glass. “You’re a very stubborn man, Mr Sandman.”

“It’s true.”

“But how will your stubbornness cope when you discover that you can’t walk?” She turned from the window with a quizzical look on her motherly face. “When you discover that you’ll never sail your Sycorax again?”

“Next year”—I ignored her blunt questions—“I’m going to take her south. I’m going to New Zealand. There’s no particular reason for New Zealand, so don’t ask.” At least, there was no particular reason I could think of. I knew no one in New Zealand, had never been there, but somehow the place had become my Promised Land.

I knew they played good rugby and cricket, had splendid sailing waters, and it seemed like a place where an honest man could spend honest days unencumbered by the pomposities of self-important fools. Doubtless, if I ever reached New Zealand, I would discover I’d deceived myself, but that disappointment could wait till my boat made its far landfall. “I’ll sail to the Azores first,” I went on dreamily,

“then across to Barbados, south to Panama, across to the Marque-sas…”

“Not round the Horn?” Doctor Plant interrupted sharply.

I gave her a warning look. “More meddling?”

“It isn’t an unfair question.”

“You think I don’t want to go to the South Atlantic again?” She paused. “That thought did cross my mind, yes.”

“I don’t have nightmares, Doctor, only dreams.” That wasn’t true.

I still woke up shivering and thinking of an island in the South Atlantic, but that was my business, not hers.

Doctor Plant smiled. “Dreams can come true, Nick.”

“Don’t patronize me, Doctor.”

She laughed and suddenly sounded much more like a sailor than a psychiatrist. “You really are a stubborn bastard, aren’t you?” I was, and two weeks later, though I told no one, I managed to hobble, hop and shuffle as far as the window. It took three minutes, much pain, and my breath was rasping like glasspaper in my throat when I finally clutched the sill and rested my forehead against the cold glass. It was a cloudless winter night and there was a full moon over the hospital grounds where the bare trees were frosting black and silver. A car turned a corner in the neighbouring housing estate and its headlights dazzled me for an instant, then were gone. When my night vision returned I searched for Aldebaran among the stars.

There had been a time when I would bring that far sun sweetly down to the dawn’s horizon, mastering it with the miracle of a sextant’s mirror. Now I was a shivering cripple, but somewhere far to the west and south my boat waited. She would be plucking at her warps, rubbing her rope fenders against the stone quay, and waiting, like me, to be released to the long long winds under Aldebaran’s cold light.

Because one day, whatever the bloody doctors said, Sycorax would take me to New Zealand. Just the two of us in great waters, sailing south, and free.

PART ONE

I walked out of the hospital fourteen months later.

I knew Doctor Maitland would have told the press that I was leaving, so I discharged myself two days early. I didn’t want any fuss. I just wanted to get back to Devon and walk into the pub and pretend I’d been away for a week or two, nothing more.

So I limped down the hospital drive and told myself that the pain in my back was bearable, and that the hobbling walk was not too grotesque. I caught a bus at the hospital gate, then a train to Totnes, and another bus that twisted its way into the steep river-cut hills of the South Hams. It was winter’s end and there were snowdrops in the hedgerows. I wanted to cry, which was why I’d told no one that I was coming home, for I had known just how glad I would be to see the hills of Devon.

I asked the bus-driver to drop me at the top of Ferry Lane. He watched me limp down the vehicle’s steps and heard me gasp with the effort of the last, deep drop to the road. “Are you all right, mate?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “I just want to walk.”

The door hissed shut and the bus grumbled away towards the village while I went haltingly down the lane which led to the old ferry slip. From there I would be able to stare across the river at Sycorax.

To stare at my home, for, however battered she might be by the winter’s ice and gales, Sycorax was home. She was the only home I had, or wanted any more, and it had been thoughts of her that had steered me through the long months to this moment when I walked towards her.

Or rather limped. It hurt to walk, but I knew it would hurt for the rest of my life. I’d simply have to live with the pain, and I’d decided that the best way to do that was to forget it, and that the best way to forget it was to think of something else.

That was suddenly easy, for, as I turned the steep corner halfway to the river, a watery sunlight reflected with surprising brilliance from the windows of my father’s old house which stood high on the far bank.

I stopped. The new owner of the house had extended the river façade, making a great sweep of plate glass that looked down the wide expanse of sloping lawns to the water. The towering mast my father had put on the terrace still stood complete with its crosstree, shrouds and angled yard. No flag hung from the mast, suggesting that the house was empty. To me, as I gazed across the river, the house seemed like a foreign place for which my visa had long been cancelled.

I picked up my small bag and hobbled on. In summer this lane was busy with dinghy-sailors who trailed their craft to the water’s edge, but now, in the wake of winter’s cold, there was just one car parked at the head of the old slip. It was a big shooting-brake filled with paint and tools and warps and all the other gear needed to ready a boat for the season. A middle-aged man was stowing cans and brushes into a bag. “Morning! It’s a bright one, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I agreed. There were a dozen boats moored out—only a handful compared to the scores that would use the anchorage in summer, but just enough to hide Sycorax from me. She was on the wharf by the deep cut that led to my father’s old boathouse on the far bank.

The tide was ebbing. I hoped the middle-aged man would ignore me now, for this was the moment that had kept me alive through all the months of hospital and pain. This was the dream; to see the boat that would sail me to New Zealand. I was prepared for the worst, expecting to see her topsides shabby and her hull clawed by the ice of two winters. Jimmy Nicholls had written in the autumn and said she needed work, and I’d read between the lines that it would be a lot of work, but I had persuaded myself that it would be a pleasure to mend Sycorax as the days lengthened and as my own strength seeped back.

Now, like a child wanting to prolong a treat, I did not look up as I limped to the slip’s end. Only when my shoes were almost touching the swirl of falling water did I at last raise my eyes.

I was holding my breath. I had come home.

And Sycorax was gone.

“Is something wrong?”

My right leg was shaking uncontrollably. Sycorax was gone. In her place, tied to the ancient wall that was my private berth, was a box-like houseboat.

“Excuse me?” It was the middle-aged man who had approached me on soft-soled sea-boots. He was embarrassed by needing to ask the question. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I said it abruptly, not wanting to betray the dismay I felt.

I looked into the big upstream pool where another handful of boats was moored, but Sycorax was not there. I looked downstream towards the bend which hid the village, but no boats were moored in the reach. She was gone.

I turned round. The middle-aged man had gone back to loading his inflatable dinghy with supplies. “Were you moored out through the winter?” I asked.

“’Fraid so.” He said it sheepishly, as though I was accusing him of maltreating his boat.

“You don’t know what’s happened to Sycorax, do you?”

“Sycorax? ” He straightened up, puzzled, then clicked his fingers as he remembered the name. “Tommy Sandman’s old boat?”

“Yes.” It was hardly the moment to say that my father had long ago sold me the yacht.

“Sad,” he said. “Shame, really. She’s up there.” He pointed across the river; I turned, and at last saw her.

She had not disappeared, but rather had been dragged on her flank up the wooded hill to the south of the boathouse. I could just see her stern in the undergrowth. A deep-keeled hull like Sycorax’s should be propped on a cradle or held by sheer-legs if she’s out of the water, but whoever had beached my boat had simply hauled her like dead meat and abandoned her in the undergrowth.

“A bloody shame,” the man said ruefully. “She was a pretty thing.”

“Can you take me across?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Isn’t it private?”

“Not the woods, I think.” I was sure, but I did not want to betray my connections with this stretch of river. I wanted to be anonymous.

I wanted no one to share my feelings this day, because, even if the dream was broken, it was still my private dream.

The man did not want to help, but the freemasonry of the river would not let him turn me down. He watched my awkward manoeuvres that were necessary because I could not simply step down into the dinghy, but instead had to sit on the stones at the slip’s edge and transfer myself as though I was going from bed to wheelchair.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Car accident. Front tyre blew out.”

“Bad luck.” He handed down the bags of paint and brushes, then climbed in himself and pulled the outboard into noisy life. He told me he was a dentist with a practice in Devizes. His wife hated the sea. He pointed out his boat, a Westerly Fulmar, and said he thought he was getting too old for it, which probably meant his wife’s nagging was wearing him down. In a season or two, he said, he would put his Westerly on the market and spend the rest of his life regretting it.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

“She wants to see Disneyworld.”

We fell into companionable gloom. I looked up at Sycorax. The gold lettering on her transom caught a shaft of sunlight and winked at me. “Who beached her?” I asked.

“Lord knows. It isn’t the sort of thing Bannister would do.”

“Bannister?” I asked.

“Tony Bannister.” He saw with some astonishment that I did not immediately place the name. “Tony Bannister? The Tony Bannister?

He owns the property now. He keeps his boat down in the town marina.”

It was my turn to be astonished. Anthony Bannister was a television presenter who had become the darling of the British public, though his fame had spread far beyond the glow of the idiot box.

His face appeared on magazine covers and his endorsement was sought for products as diverse as cars and suntan lotions. He was also a yachtsman, one of the gilded amateurs whose big boats grace the world’s most expensive regattas. But Bannister, I recalled, had also known the sea’s horror; his wife had died the previous year in an accident at sea while Bannister had been on course to win the St Pierre trophy. The tragedy had prompted nationwide sympathy, for Bannister was a true celebrity.

So much of a celebrity, indeed, that I felt oddly complimented that he now lived in my father’s old house.

“Perhaps it’s an unlucky house, eh?” The dentist stared up at the expanse of windows.

“Because of his wife, you mean?”

“Tommy Sandman lived there, too.”

“I remember.” I kept my voice neutral.

The dentist chuckled. “I wonder how he likes his new home?” The chuckle held a distinct British pleasure at a rich man’s downfall. My father, who had once been so brilliantly successful, was now in jail. “I imagine he’ll survive,” I said drily.

“More than his poor bloody son. Crippled for life, I hear.” I kept silent, pretending an interest in the ugly houseboat moored at my wharf. She had once been a working boat, perhaps a trawler, but her upperworks had been sliced off and a hut built there instead.

There was no other word for it: a hut that was as ugly as a container on a barge. The hut had a sloping roof covered with tarpaper. A stainless steel chimney protruded amidships. At the stern there was a railing which enclosed an afterdeck on which two deckchairs drooped. Washing was pegged to the railings. “Who lives in that?” I asked the question with some distaste.

“Bannister’s racing crew. Bloody apes, they are.” The presence of the houseboat on my wharf suggested that it had been Bannister himself who had removed Sycorax, but I did not want that to be true. Anthony Bannister’s public image was that of a strong and considerate man; the kind of person any of us might turn to for advice or help, and I was reluctant to abandon that imaginary friend.

Besides, he was a yachtsman who had lost his wife, which made me feel sympathetic towards him. Someone else, I was sure, must have moved Sycorax.

We were in line with the cut now and I could see a second Bannister craft in the boathouse: this boat was a low, crouching, twin-engined speedboat with a polished hull and a flashy radar arch. I could see her name, Wildtrack II, and I remembered that Bannister’s yacht which had so nearly won the St Pierre had been called Wildtrack.

There was a sign hanging in the roof arch above the powerboat:

“Private. Keep Out”.

“Are you sure we should be here?” The dentist throttled back, worried by other strident signs which had been posted along the river’s bank: “Private”, “No Mooring”, “Private”. The lettering was bright red on white; glaring prohibitions that jarred the landscape and seemed inappropriate from such a well-loved man as Bannister.

“The broker said it was OK.” I jerked my head towards Sycorax.

“He said anyone could view her.”

“You’re buying her?”

“I was thinking of it,” I answered guardedly.

The explanation seemed to satisfy the dentist that I was not a burglar, and my accent was presumably reassuring, but he still looked dubious. “She’ll take a bit of work.”

“I need the therapy.” I was staring at Sycorax, seeing how she had been dragged a full twenty feet above the high-water mark. There were stones in that slope which would have gouged and torn at her planking as she was scraped uphill. Her stern was towards me and her keel was pointing down the hill. I could see that her propellor had gone, and it seemed obvious that she’d been dragged into the trees and left to die. “Why didn’t they just let her rot on the water?” I said angrily.

“Harbour Authority wouldn’t allow that, would they?” The dentist span the dinghy expertly and let its stern nudge against the end of the wharf where a flight of stone steps climbed towards the woods. He held the dinghy fast as I clambered awkwardly ashore.

“Wave if you want a lift back,” he said.

I was forced to sit on the steps while the pain receded from my back. I watched the dentist take his dinghy to the upstream moorings.

When his motor cut there were only the gentle noises of the river, but I was in no mood to enjoy the peace. My back hurt, my boat was wrecked, and I wondered why Jimmy Nicholls had allowed Sycorax to be moved. God damn it, that was why I had paid Jimmy a fee. The money had not been much, but to earn it Jimmy had merely to keep an eye on Sycorax. Instead, I’d returned to find her high and dry.

The climb was hard. The first few feet were the most difficult, for there were no trees to hold on to and the ground had been scraped smooth by Sycorax’s passage. I had to stop after a few feet and, bent double, catch the breath in my lungs. There were low branches and undergrowth that gave handholds for the last few feet, but by the time I reached Sycorax the pain was like white-hot steel burrowing into my spine. I held on to her rudder, closed my eyes, and forced myself to believe that the pain was bearable. It must have been all of two minutes before I could straighten up and examine my boat.

She lay on her side, dappled with the wintry sun. At least a third of the copper sheathing had been torn away. Floating ice had gouged, but not opened, her planking. The keel had been jemmied open and the lead ballast stolen. Both her masts and her bowsprit were gone.

The masts had not been unstepped, but sawn off flush with the deck.

The teak grating in the cockpit, the washboards, and both hatch covers were missing. The compasses had disappeared.

The brass scuttles had been ripped out. The fairleads and blocks were gone. Anything of value had been taken. The coachroof must have snagged on a tree-stump halfway up the slope for it had been laid open as if by a tin-opener. I leaned on the broken roof and peered into the cabin.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. At first all I could see was the black gleam of still water lying deep in her canted hull, then I saw what I expected: nothing. The radios were gone, the stoves had been stolen and all the lamps were missing. The main cabin’s panelling had been stripped. A mattress lay in the rain water.

There would be rot in the boat by now. Seawater pickles wood, but fresh water destroys it. The engine, revealed because the cabin steps had been tossed aside, was a mass of rust.

I was feeling oddly calm. At least Sycorax was here. She had not disappeared, not sunk, and she could be rebuilt, and all it would take would be my time and the money of the bastard who had done this to her. The damage was heart-rending, but, rather than anger, I felt guilt. When I had been eight years old my dog, a fox terrier, had been hit by a milk lorry. I had found the bitch dying in the grass beside the lane. She’d wagged her tail to see me and I’d wept beside her and felt guilty that all her innocent trust in me had been betrayed.

I felt that way now. I felt that I had let Sycorax down. At sea she looked after me, but back in the place where men lived I was her protector, and I heard myself talking to her just as I used to talk to her when we were at sea. I patted her ripped coachroof and said everything would be all right. It was just her turn to be mended, that was all.

I stumbled back down the hill. I planned to cross the river, then walk to the pub and give Jimmy Nicholls a few hard moments. Why the devil hadn’t he done something? The freehold of the wharf was mine and there was no law on God’s earth by which anyone could take it. The wharf had been built two hundred years before when lime was exported from the river, but now the sixty feet of old stone wall were mine. Even the Harbour Authority had no rights over the wharf, which I’d bought from my father because it would provide a haven for Sycorax and a place I could call home. It was my address, God damn it, my only address: the Lime Wharf, Tidesham, South Devon, and now Anthony Bannister had his ugly houseboat moored to it. I still found it hard to believe that a man as celebrated as Bannister had stolen the wharf by moving Sycorax, but someone had stranded my boat and I swore I would find them and sue them for every penny my broken ship needed.

I stepped over one of the springs which held the houseboat safe against my wharf. I was going to hail the dentist for a lift across the river, but glanced first into the boathouse.

And saw my dinghy there. She lay snugly moored against Wildtrack II’s starboard quarter. My ownership was proclaimed in flaking paint on her transom: ‘Tender to Sycorax’. She was a clinker-built wooden dinghy, my dinghy, and she was tied alongside Bannister’s flash speedboat.

I think perhaps it was the ugliness of that speedboat which convinced me of Bannister’s guilt. Anyone who owned a boat so flash and sharp could not be as considerate as his decent image suggested.

To me, suddenly, he became just another rich bastard who thought his money gave him privileges beyond the law.

So sod the bastard. He’d wrecked my boat, stolen my wharf, but I was damned if he would steal my dinghy. I decided I would take the tender back into my ownership, then row myself on the ebb tide to the village pub. “Hello!” I shouted aloud. No one answered. I thumped on the side of the houseboat, but no one was on board.

The boathouse could either be entered by water or by a single door which led from the garden. I had to use the garden door which was padlocked. I paused for a moment, balancing the legalities in my mind, but decided against the possibility that Bannister had rescued the dinghy and was keeping it against my return. The presence of his filthy houseboat on my wharf suggested otherwise, and so I decided to break in.

My back ripped with pain as I lifted a heavy stone and hammered at the brass lock. The sound of my attack echoed dully from the manicured grass slope beneath my father’s old house. It took six sharp blows before the hasp came away from the wood and the door splintered open.

I stepped inside to find Wildtrack II rocking gently to the falling tide. She had a green tarpaulin cover which stretched from her forward windscreens back to the massive twin engines on her stern.

Her bows, sharp as a jet fighter’s nosecone, were slicked with chrome.

She was a monster, spawned by greed on vulgarity, and my father would have loved every inch of her.

I walked round the boathouse’s internal dock. My cotton sails, still in their bags, were heaped against one wall next to my fisherman’s anchor. The name Sycorax was stencilled on the canvas sailbags. I stooped, hissing with the pain, and felt the treacherous dampness in the bags. God damn Bannister, I thought. God damn his greed.

I found two oars and tossed them into my dinghy, then climbed gingerly over Wildtrack II’s stainless steel guardrail. She shivered as I stepped on her deck. I saw that the two springs which held my dinghy close to the speedboat’s flank were cleated somewhere beneath the tarpaulin, so I began by unlacing the stiff material and peeling it away from the windscreens. Once the cover was folded back, I stepped down on to the helmsman’s black leather chair.

And found my brass scuttles.

And my radios. The VHF and the short-wave were both there, and both with their aerial and power connections snipped short.

The radios were among heaps of similar items that were piled in two tea-chests which had been hidden beneath the tarpaulin. Most of the items had come from other yachts. There were echo-sounders, electronic logs, VHF sets, compasses, and even Lewmar winches that must have been unbolted from the decks of moored boats.

There’s little profit in stealing boats in England, not when the registration is so good, but there has always been a profit in plundering them of valuables. I stared down into the chests, guessing that the value of their contents must be three or four thousand pounds at black-market prices. Why in God’s name would a man as rich as Bannister meddle with bent chandlery?

“Don’t move.”

The voice came from the door which I’d broken open.

I turned.

“I said don’t move, bastard!” The man shouted it, just as we used to shout when we went rifle-butt first into a backstreet house in Northern Ireland. The first command always made the people inside jump in alarm and we would then scream the second order to freeze them tight.

I froze tight.

The man was silhouetted in the doorway. The sun was bright on the pale lawn behind him while the boathouse was in deep shadow, so I couldn’t see his face; only that he was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with muscle-humped shoulders and a cropped skull. It certainly wasn’t Bannister who faced me. The man carried a double-barrelled shotgun that was pointed at my chest.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He had a harsh and grating voice which clipped his words very short. The accent was born of that bastard offspring of the Dutch language, Afrikaans.

“I’m taking my property,” I said.

“Breaking and entering,” the South African said. “You’re a fucking thief, man. Come here.” He jerked the gun to reinforce his command.

“Why don’t you piss off?” I shouldn’t have been belligerent, not in my weakened state, but I was feeling mad as hell because of what had happened to Sycorax. I stooped to my tender’s bowspring and jerked it off the stainless-steel cleat.

Wildtrack II rocked violently as the man jumped on to her bows.

The movement made me stagger, and I had to clutch the radar arch for support just as he reached over the windscreen with his left hand.

I caught his hand with my own, instinctively trying to unbalance him by hauling him towards me.

I’d forgotten how little strength there was in my legs. I pulled him so far, then my right knee gave way and I staggered back into the tea-chests. The South African laughed and I saw the gun, brass-butt towards me, coming forward.

I was off balance, I could not parry, and the butt thumped like a piledriver into my ribs. I jabbed fingers at his eyes, but my co-ordin-ation was lost. The gun came again, throwing me back, then he contemptuously reached for my jacket to haul me out of the speedboat’s cockpit.

I heard myself scream as he scraped my spine over the windscreen’s top edge. I hit at him, and he must have found that amusing for he gave an oddly feminine, high-pitched chuckle before he threw me like offal on to the dock. I sprawled on my own sailbags which were not soft enough to prevent the pain forking down my legs like blazing phosphorus. The gun slammed down again into my ribs.

He stood over me and, confident that I had been battered into submission, discarded the gun. “Get up,” he said curtly.

“Listen, you bastard…” I tried to push myself upright, but the pain in my spine struck like a bullet and I gasped and fell again.

I had been going to insist, not necessarily politely, that the South African help me remove my property from the boathouse, but the pain was gagging me.

He must have been worried by my twitching and gasping body.

“Get up!” he paused. “You’re faking it, fairy.” There was worry in his voice. “You’re not hurt, man. I hardly touched you.” He was trying to convince himself.

He must have leaned down to me, because I remember his hands under my shoulders, and I remember him yanking me upright. He let go of me and I tried to put my weight on to my right leg, but it buckled like jelly. I fell again, and this time my wounded back must have speared down on to the upturned fluke of the fisherman’s anchor.

And I screamed myself into blessed unconsciousness.

When I woke up I could see a cream-coloured ceiling. There was no hairline crack, instead there were two brilliant fluorescent tubes which were switched on even though daylight seemed to be coming from a big window to my right. I could hear the pip of a cardiograph.

To my left there was a chrome stand with a saline drip suspended from its hook. There was a tube in my left nostril that went thick and gagging down my windpipe. Two earnest faces were bent over the bed. One was framed in a nurse’s white hat, the other belonged to a doctor who had a stethoscope at my chest.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Don’t talk.” The doctor unhooked the stethoscope and began to feel my ribs.

“Christ!” I suddenly felt the pain. Not the old pain, but a new one in my chest.

“I said don’t talk.” The doctor had half-moon spectacles. “Can you move the fingers of your right hand?” I tried and must have succeeded for he nodded with satisfaction. “Now the left? That’s good, that’s good.” His face did not reflect the optimism of his words.

“If you speak,” he warned, “do it very gently. Can you tell us your name?”

“My name?” I was confused.

“You were found without any identification. You’re now in the South Devon General Hospital. Can you remember your name?”

“Sandman,” I said. “Nick Sandman.”

He showed no sign of recognizing the name. “That’s good, Nick.” He had been feeling my ribs as I spoke, but now he leaned forward to shine a light into my eyes. “Where do you live?”

“Here,” I said, knowing it was not a helpful answer, but suddenly the new pain was melding with the old, washing through me, making me arch my back, and I saw the doctor’s hand dart to the hanging drip and I knew what would happen, but I did not want to sleep yet. I wanted to know how badly I was hurt, and so I tried to protest, but no words came. I saw the nurse frowning at me and I wanted to reassure her that I’d been through worse than this, much worse, but I could not speak for I was once again falling down the soft, dark and familiar tunnel of chemical sleep.

Where I dreamed of Sycorax. At night, when the phosphorescence sparkles thick in the turned water of her wake, I like to peg her tiller and go forward. I go right forward, past the pulpit, until I’m standing on the bowsprit and holding on to the forestay. I turn there and stare back at her. That’s what I dreamed I was doing, only in my dream I had two good legs. I dreamed I was standing on the bowsprit, as I had so often stood, and staring at the slim beauty of an empty hull driving through dark seas to leave an arrow’s path of light beneath the stars.

Thus should Sycorax sail for eternity; breaking the glittering seas and, driven by the endless winds of night, free.

Sycorax had been built on my river as a rich man’s toy, but built by men who only knew how to make a fisherman’s workboat. She had the lines of a fishing smack, a Brixham mule, with a straight bow, a raked stern and a gaffed main. The design was old, and proven by generations of men who had worked the dangerous Western Approaches. She was an honest boat, sturdy and functional, but made pretty by her elegantly overhanging counter and by the workmanship of her fittings. Her first owner, uninterested in speed, had commissioned a safe cruising boat that would doggedly plunge through the worst of seas.

Sycorax had known five good years until the Depression had struck. Her rich owner sold her, and, until 1932, she was resold every season by a succession of owners who must have found her either too slow or too expensive to maintain. So summer by summer Sycorax had faded. Her brightwork had become tarnished, her sails had blown out, and her paint had peeled. Yet the copper sheathing had kept her hull-planks as sound and dry as the day they were laid.

By the mid-thirties she had become a working boat. Her cabin was stripped of luxuries and her coachroof ripped out to leave only a tiny cuddy aft of the mainmast. Her long raking stern was cut short and squared off, while her mizzen was thrown away, which must have made her an unbalanced brute at sea, but she took the mistreat-ment like the stubborn witch that she was. Her name was changed, which should have brought her bad luck, but as The Girl Pauline she did five safe seasons longlining and potting off the Devon headlands.

The war ended that. She was abandoned; canted on her side in the sands of Dawlish Warren where the oxidised copper was ripped off her hull and the lead torn from her keel. Soldiers training for D-Day shot at her, her planks were sprung, and the rain seeped in to rot her oak frame.

My father found her on the Warren in the sixties. He was making his money then, pots of bloody money, more money than he knew what to do with. His leaseback deals on London’s property market had brought him a Rolls, two Jaguars, three Maseratis, and two Nicholson racing cruisers that were moored in the river beside our house. That was the Devon house where I’d been born. There was also a London house, a Berkshire house, and a flat by the harbour in San Tropez. For some reason my father fancied an antique yacht to add to his fleet. He loved flash things like fast cars and painted women and a son at Eton. My elder brother wore a fancy waistcoat at Eton, but, to my relief, the College wouldn’t even look at me. I was too dumb, too slow, and had to be sent to a dullards’ boarding school where I rotted happily in ignorance.

I only cared about boats, and in that long summer holiday before I went to my dullards’ school, I helped rebuild Sycorax in the yard where she’d been born. My father, like the first owner, ordered that no expense was to be spared. She was to be restored to her old and splendid beauty.

Her hull was repaired with a loving and almost forgotten skill. I helped caulk the planks and became used to the ancient sea sound of mallet blows echoing from harbour walls. We tarred and papered her, then laid new copper so that she gleamed like a boat of gold.

We lengthened the truncated stern to accommodate the new mizzen mast’s twin backstays. Teak decks were joggled home, and a new cabin was made where all the brass fittings my father had collected could be lovingly installed.

New masts were cut, carefully chosen from the north side of a spruce forest so that the trunk’s heartwood would be central, and not drawn to one side by the sun on the southern forest flank. I helped the boatbuilders adze the spruce down, corner by corner, until two treetrunks had become smooth and shining masts. We soaked the new spars in linseed oil and paraffin, then put on coat after coat of varnish. I can still close my eyes and see that finished mainmast lying on its trestles; straight as a clothyard arrow and gleaming in the sunlight.

Sails were made, sheets were rove, oil-lamps polished, and a dead boat came to life on the slips of a Devon yard. Her old name was deeply incised into her new transom, then painted with gold: Sycorax. A diesel engine was put in her aft belly, and the day came when she was lifted by slings into the mucky water of the yard’s dock. She still had to be rigged, but I watched that hull float in the tide’s wrack, and swore that so long as I lived she would be my boat.

My father saw my devotion, and was amused by it. Once she was launched, though, he lost interest in Sycorax. She was as beautiful as he had imagined, but she was not the slow docile craft he had dreamed of. He wanted a boat for long sunsets with gin and melting girls, but Sycorax could be a hard-mouthed bitch when she set her mind to it. She was a stiff sailor in sea winds, and too long-keeled for easy river cruising. My father would have sold her, but he could never bear to part with pretty things, and Sycorax was dazzlingly pretty with her gleaming brass and shining varnish. He moored her below the house like a garden ornament.

Once in a long while he would motor her upriver, but I was the only person who bothered to hoist her sails. Jimmy Nicholls and I would take her out to sea and set her bows to the vast waves that came in from the Atlantic. She could be stubborn, but Jimmy said she was as fine a seaboat as any that had sailed from Devon. “She only be stubborn when you wrestle her, boy,” he would say to me in his deep Devon brogue. “Let her be and she’ll look after you.” Six years after Sycorax was relaunched I joined the Army. I had rarely seen my father so angry. “For Christ’s bloody sake!” he had shouted. “The Army?” There was a pause, then a warily hopeful note. “The Guards?”

Not the Guards.

“Why not the bloody Navy? You like sailing, don’t you? It’s about the only bloody thing you do like. That and skirt.”

“I don’t like sailing in big ships.”

“You’re throwing your bloody life away!”

I might not have been bright, but my father thought I could hack a living at banking or broking, or one of the other pin-striped forms of thievery at which he and my elder brother so excelled.

I joined the Army, but I would still go down to Devon and take the stiff cotton sails out of the boathouse loft so that Sycorax could go to sea. I married. Melissa and I would motor down to the Devon house for long weekends, but, as time passed, my father was rarely there to entertain us. Later I discovered why. He was borrowing money he could not repay on the strength of promises he could not keep. He was even ready to sell me both Sycorax and the wharf to raise some money. His battle became ever more desperate and flamboyant; and he lost it. He was sent down for seven years; a savage sentence, but the judge wanted to make it plain that just because a crime was committed in an office by a businessman it was no less a crime for that. But by then I was sailing to the South Atlantic and everything was changing.

Except for Sycorax. Because she was now all that I had and all that I wanted.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” A tall, cadaverous man in a shabby grey suit appeared at my bedside. He was in his fifties and looked older. He had yellow teeth, bloodshot eyes, thin grey hair and a lugubrious face nicked with shaving cuts.

“Of course I remember you,” I said. “Detective Sergeant Harry Abbott. As toothsome as ever was.”

“Inspector Abbott now.” He was pleased I’d remembered him.

“How are you, Nick?”

“I’m bloody well.” I found it hard to speak clearly because the pain in my chest made breathing difficult. “I might go for a bike ride if the rain holds off.”

“It isn’t raining,” Abbott said gloomily. “It’s actually quite spring-like, for a change. Mind if I smoke?” He lit up anyway. Abbott used to play golf with my father who loved to be friendly with the local law. My father had encouraged their gossip and relied on their help when he drank and drove. He gave wonderful parties, my father.

You could hear them a mile upriver, but there were never any complaints, not while the local police were so fond of him. “Seen Wednesday’s papers?” Abbott asked me now.

“No.”

He held a tabloid over the bed. ‘Falklands VC Hero Assaulted at TV Tony’s Hideaway,’ it read. Front page. There was a photograph of me in uniform, a big picture of Anthony Bannister, and a photograph of the house. “Bloody hell,” I said.

“Mr Bannister was in London.” Abbott folded the paper away.

“So it wasn’t him that beat the shit out of you.”

“It was a South African.”

“Figured it was.” Abbott showed no surprise, nor much interest.

He picked a grape from the bunch beside my bed and spat the pips on to the floor. “A big sod?”

“Built like a barge.”

Abbott nodded. “Fanny Mulder. He’s Mr Bannister’s professional skipper.” There was an infinite derision in the last two words.

“Fanny?”

“Francis, but always known as Fanny. He’s pissed off, of course.

Probably in France by now. Or Spain. Or gone back to the Fatherland.

Whatever, he’s waiting for things to quieten down before he comes back.” Abbott stared at my face. “He certainly took care of you, didn’t he?”

“He nicked my wallet. And my bag. And everything off my boat.”

“He bloody tried to murder you, didn’t he?” Abbott did not sound very concerned. “He dumped you on the foreshore and probably hoped the tide would wash you away. Some dentist found you. Mr Bannister says you broke into his boathouse?”

“He had my bloody dinghy in there!” I protested too forcibly, and the pain in my chest whipped at me like the recoil of a frayed wire cable. I coughed foully. There were tears in my eyes.

Abbott waited till I was silent. “Mr Bannister wants it all hushed up. He would, of course.”

“He would?”

“Not good for the image, is it? He doesn’t want the scum papers saying that a war hero was scuffed over by one of his pet gorillas.

Image is very important to Mr Bannister. He’s one of those blokes who straps himself into a fighting chair just to catch a bloody mackerel.” Abbott laughed scornfully. “You know the kind, Nick, a bloody Londoner who comes down at weekends to show us dumb locals how it’s all done.”

“Isn’t he meant to be a brilliant sailor?” I asked.

“His wife was. She insisted on buying the Devon house. She was here a lot, but then she was always bloody sailing.” Abbott pulled open the drawer of the bedside cabinet and tapped a long drooping piece of ash into its emptiness. “I didn’t like her so much. American.” He added the last word as though it explained his distaste, then blew a plume of smoke towards my drip. “I miss your old man, Nick.”

“Not surprising, is it, when you consider how generously he gave to the police orphan and champagne fund?”

Abbott sniffed disapproval. “Have you been to see your dad, Nick?”

“I haven’t had time,” I said, then, to change the subject, “When did Bannister buy the house?”

“Couple of years back. It took the courts that long to sort out your old man’s mess.”

“Did Bannister take my boat out of the water?”

“Lord knows.” Abbott did not seem to care. “Could have been anyone. There was some mischief on the river this winter. Usual thing. Radios and depth-sounders nicked.”

“That was Mulder,” I said. “There were crates of stuff in the boathouse. Including my gear.”

“Won’t be there any longer, will it?” Abbott said carelessly. “He’ll have shipped it all off to George Cullen. Remember George?”

“Of course I remember George.”

“He’s still as bent as a pig’s tail. We reckon Mulder’s been doing business with Georgie, but it’s hard to prove.”

“I thought we taxpayers paid you to prove hard things.”

“Not my job, Nick, not my job.” Abbott went to the window and frowned his disapproval at the cloudless sky. “I’m off crime now.”

“What are you? Traffic? Giving parking tickets to the grockles?” Grockles were tourists.

Abbott ignored the gibe. “I’ll tell CID about the stolen stuff, Nick, of course I will. But I doubt they’ll do anything. I mean rich fellows whose shiny yachts get ripped off aren’t exactly the highest priority on our list. Not while we’ve got orphans and widows being robbed.

Orphans and widows tend not to have insurance, you see, unlike the floating rich.”

“My boat wasn’t insured. My ex-wife didn’t forward the renewal notice.”

“You are a bloody fool,” Abbott said.

“It was hard for Melissa to remember everything when she was having fun. Besides,” I shrugged, “Jimmy Nicholls was supposed to be looking after Sycorax.”

“Jimmy’s been in hospital since November,” Abbott said, thus explaining why Sycorax had been abandoned. “Emphysema. He smokes too much.” He looked down at his cigarette, shrugged, and stole another grape. “Seen your kids, have you?”

“They visited me in the other hospital.” I wondered why Abbott was so deliberately sheering away from more pressing matters. “Are you going to charge Mulder?” I demanded.

“I doubt it, Nick, I doubt it. Wouldn’t do much bloody good, would it?”

“For Christ’s sake! He stole all my stuff!”

“Difficult to prove. You can prefer a charge of assault against him, if you like.” Abbott did not sound enthusiastic.

“Why don’t you arrest him?”

“You’re the one who got clocked,” Abbott pointed out reasonably,

“not me.”

“Aren’t you supposed to charge him?”

“I told you. I’m not crime. I just volunteered to come and have a chat with you. For old times’ sake.”

“Thank you, Harry,” I said mockingly.

“But if I was you, I wouldn’t bother pressing charges,” Abbott said airily. “Bannister looks after Fanny, he does. He’ll hire him a top lawyer who’ll muddy the waters, and you’ll end up with the court’s sympathy because of the medal, but they’ll still pin a bloody great bill for costs on to you.” He shook his head. “Not worth it, Nick. Forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it. I’ve got to sue someone if I’m going to find the money to repair Sycorax.”

Abbott jerked his head towards the door. “There’s a whole lot of bloody lowlife out there who’d gladly write you a cheque. The press, Nick. They’ve been trying to see you for days.”

“Keep them out, Harry, for Christ’s sake. And I want to press charges against Mulder.”

Abbott sighed at my stubbornness. “If you insist, Nick. If you insist. I’ll arrange for a bloody lawyer to come and see you.” He went to the door, pausing there. “You know your old man was proud of you, Nick? Really proud.” He waited, and when I made no response, he explained, “The VC.”

“The other two earned it,” I said. “I just disobeyed orders.”

“It’s still a Victoria Cross, Nick. It can change your life, earning a thing like that.”

“I don’t want it to change my life. I just want to get it back.” Abbott frowned. “Get what back?”

“The medal, Harry. Bloody Mulder stole it with everything else.

It was in my bag.”

Abbott flinched as if, at last, he recognized that I’d suffered a misfortune. “I am sorry, Nick.”

“Now do you see why I need to sue the bugger?”

“If it’s any consolation to you, he’ll have the devil’s own job to sell it. Any collector will know it’s stolen, and I can’t think Fanny knows the right fence. He usually only deals with George Cullen, and Georgie wouldn’t touch your medal.”

“Put the word out, will you, Harry?”

“I’ll do that, Nick.” Abbott nodded a farewell.

The next day I swore out a complaint against Francis Mulder, accusing him of assault and theft. The lawyer was sympathetic, but pessimistic. Mulder, he said, had disappeared and was unlikely to return to England so long as the writ threatened. He thought my chances of recovering the medal were slight, and my chances of successfully recouping the costs of repairing Sycorax even slighter.

“Suppose we sue Bannister for the boat damage?” I asked.

“We’d need to prove that Mulder was acting on his behalf.” The lawyer shook his head to show how little hope he placed on that idea.

After the lawyer was gone I lay back and stared at the ceiling and wished it had a hairline crack. The pain was insidious. By holding my breath and lying very still I could trick myself into thinking that it was going away, but as soon as I breathed again it would surge back. I felt at rock bottom. An ambulance siren wailed and a trolley rattled in the hall outside. I wondered how long I would have to stay here. The doctor had said I might limp again, but he had not prophesied how long it would take.

I closed my eyes and thought of Sycorax broken and beached, lying dismasted on a hill, with her hull rotting. The damage would be blamed on Fanny Mulder, and he was gone. I’d lashed out at him with the law, but that was a puny weapon, and there was no certainty that he would ever be found or that, even if he was, he would have funds that could rebuild Sycorax. The repairs, I knew, would be up to me. I thought of my small bank account. I could patch the hull with salvaged iroko and slap marine ply on the coachroof. I could make new masts if someone would give me the trees. I could replace the stolen lead with pig iron, but it would all take time, so much time, and the sailing season would slip by and Sycorax would not be ready for the water till the winter gales were filling the channel.

And even then she would not be ready. I knew I could not afford the blocks and lamps and propellor and sails and sheets and wire and instruments. She would take a fortune and I knew I was trying to stretch a few hundred pounds to fill a bottomless pit. The crane fees to lift her on to legs would half break me. I couldn’t even afford a new VHF radio, let alone the seasoned oak for her rotted frames.

I’d have to sell her for scrap value and I’d be lucky if I saw five hundred pounds. Or else I could whore to the newspapers and sell my story. I wouldn’t do that.

So if I wouldn’t whore I would have to sell Sycorax. I knew it, and I tried to fight the knowledge. She was a rich man’s toy, not a penniless man’s dream. I could not afford her, so she would have to go.

The door creaked and I opened my eyes.

A tall man stood watching me. I did not recognize him immediately. I should have done, but his long jaw was slightly jowlier than it appeared in photographs, his blond hair less glossy, and his tanned skin more pitted. It took a second or two before I realized this really was the famous Anthony Bannister, but Anthony Bannister without either television make-up or the kindly, flattering attention of a photographer’s airbrush. He looked older than I had expected, but then he smiled, and instantly the imperfections were overwhelmed by an obvious and beguiling charm. “Captain Sandman?” His familiar voice suggested dependability and kindliness.

“Who the hell are you?” I wanted to resist his charm and shatter his confident assumption that I would instantly recognize and trust him.

“My name’s Bannister. Tony Bannister.” There were nurses standing behind him with silly looks on their faces; they were excited because the great Tony Bannister was in their hospital.

It was like a royal visit, and the staff seemed struck mindless by the occasion. Bannister smiled on them in gentle apology, then closed the door, leaving the two of us alone. He looked fit and trim in his superbly tailored tweed jacket, but as he turned from the door I noticed how his shirt bulged over his waistband. “I think we have a mutual problem,” he said.

I was surprised to detect a nervousness in him. I’d expected a man like Bannister to stalk through life with an insouciant and unconquer-able confidence. “My only problem is a boat”—I could feel the insidious seduction of his fame and wealth, and I fought against it—“which your Boer wrecked.”

He nodded in immediate acceptance of the responsibility. “My fault, but I was assured the boat was abandoned. I was wrong and I apologize. Now, I imagine, you want it restored to perfection?” He’d stolen the wind clean from my sails. I stared up at the famous face and, despite my reluctance to join the world’s uncritical admir-ation of the man, I found myself feeling sympathetic towards Bannister. He had shown honesty, which was the quality I admired above all things, but I also felt flattered that such a famous man was here in my room. My belligerence faded. “I can do the work on her myself,” I said, “but I can’t buy the materials. I’m a bit skint, you see.”

“I, fortunately, am not skint.” He smiled and held out his right hand. He wore a gold bracelet, a gold wristwatch and two heavy gold rings.

For some reason I thought of one of my father’s favourite sayings: that principles are very fine things, but are soluble in cash. But for Sycorax’s sake, only for Sycorax, I shook the golden hand.

“You have to understand,” Matthew Cooper said, “that it’s a rough cut.”

“A rough what?”

He gestured energetically with a right hand that was so stained with nicotine that it looked as if it had been dipped in ochre paint.

“It’s just scraps of film we’ve assembled.” He frowned, seeking an image I might understand. “We’ve hammered it together instead of dovetailing it.” Matthew, a nervous man in his mid-thirties, was a film director sent to visit me by Anthony Bannister. He had chain-smoked ever since he’d walked into the house.

“And the film isn’t dubbed,” Angela Westmacott said flatly.

“Dubbed?” I asked.

“The sound isn’t polished,” Matthew answered for her, “and there’s only ten minutes. The final film will probably run at sixty.”

“Or ninety,” Angela Westmacott said, “but it’s a risk.” She did not look at me as she spoke, which gave me the chance to look at her. Bannister, when he had telephoned me from London to tell me that Matthew was coming, had not mentioned this girl. If he had I might have looked forward to the meeting with more enthusiasm.

Angela was a tall, ethereal blonde, so slender and seemingly fragile that my protective instincts had been immediately roused when she had walked in. Her hair was gathered by combs and pins from which it escaped in cirrus wisps of lightest gold. Her jacket was a shapeless white and pink padded confection from which loops and belts and fasteners stuck like burrs, while her trousers were baggy white and stuffed into pink ankle-length boots. She was fashionably unkempt and devastatingly, even disturbingly, beautiful.

Two years in hospital had sharpened that particular appetite into a ravenous hunger. I could not resist watching her, thinking how vulnerable and delicate her face was in its cloud of gold untidiness.

She wore, I noted, neither wedding nor engagement ring. Her clothes, so deliberately casual, were clearly expensive and I had decided, when she first came into the house, that she must have been a television presenter. I had said as much and she had shaken her head dismissively. I now wondered whether Anthony Bannister’s television company had sent her as bait. She made good bait.

“It’s a risk,” she said again, “because without your agreement then the footage we’ve already shot is wasted.”

“Already shot?” I was puzzled.

“The rough cut,” Matthew explained. “Tony thought you would feel happier if you could see what we had in mind.”

We were in the new front room of Bannister’s house. The house had all changed, and how my father would have loved it. This new room must have been seventy-five feet long and every foot of it offered a splendid panoramic view of the river which curled about the garden beneath. Three carpeted steps climbed to the top half of the room where, rippling gently, there was now sixty feet of indoor swimming pool. Between the steps and the windows was a raised fireplace built as an island in the centre and topped with a massive copper hood. White leather sofas were scattered to either side of the fire while at the northern end of the room there was a space-age array of sound and vision equipment. There were radios, cassette players, CDs, record-players, speakers, video-disc players, VCRs and a massive television; the largest TV in a house filled with TVs.

On to which television screens Anthony Bannister now planned to put me. He wanted to make a film of my life, my injury and my recovery, and he had sent Matthew and Angela to seek my co-operation. Matthew Cooper took the video cassette from his briefcase.

“Shall we watch it now?” he asked.

I had gone to stand at the window and was gazing at an aluminium-hulled yacht which was running under main and jib to the moorings in the upper pool. The only person on deck was a man in a black woollen hat and I admired the exquisite skill with which he picked up his mooring buoy. It looked easy from up here, but there was a deceptively gusting wind blowing against a flooding spring tide and I knew I had just witnessed a marvellous piece of seamanship. I watched the boat rather than betray my self-torturing interest in Angela Westmacott. It was unfair, I thought, to be tantalized by such careless beauty.

“Are you ready?” Matthew insisted.

“That’s a French boat.” I spoke as if I had not heard his question.

“First I’ve seen this year. He’s probably run over from Cherbourg.

He’s good, very good.”

“The video tape?” Angela said. I assumed now that she was Matthew’s assistant, and I wondered if she was also his lover. That thought made me jealous.

Matthew pushed the video tape into the slot. “It’s a very rough cut indeed,” he said apologetically.

“Fine.” I spoke as if I was content, but in truth I was struggling not to show my annoyance. I’d spent months avoiding the press, and now Bannister was trying to make me the subject of a television film, and I could only blame myself. Bannister, coming to the hospital, had offered me everything I wanted. A refuge, security and the means to repair Sycorax. No legal tangles, no unpleasantness, just peace and forgiveness. I should have known what the price would be when, the next day, the papers trumpeted Bannister’s generosity.

‘TV Tony Rescues VC Hero’. There had been no mention of Fanny Mulder. One paper claimed I had been attacked by vandals who had been damaging my boat, while the others blandly reported that my attackers were unknown.

None of the papers had connected the attacker with Anthony Bannister. Bannister had come out of the stories like driven snow; odourless and white. Something nasty had happened in his boathouse while he was in London, and he was now putting it right. I’d left the hospital to come to Bannister’s house where, in these last three weeks, I had mended fast. I was attended by Bannister’s doctors, swam in Bannister’s pool and was fed by Bannister’s housekeeper. Sycorax had been lifted out of the trees and stood in cradles on Bannister’s lawn. The materials for her repair were on order, and they were nothing but the best; mahogany, teak, mature oak, copper, spruce and Oregon pine. TV Tony had worked his magic, but now the price for all that kindness was being exacted.

“Here it is,” Angela said sharply, chiding me for being insufficiently attentive to the television screen on which numbers counted down, then the picture changed to show a wild and bleak landscape darkened by dusk and edged by a pink-washed sky. Plangent music played as the title appeared: ‘ A Soldier’s Story, a film by Angela Westmacott’. I glanced at her with surprise. Clearly I had appraised my visitors wrongly, imagining Matthew to be in charge.

“It’s only a working title.” Matthew seemed to think my glance was critical.

“It’s just to give you an idea.” Angela was irritated by Matthew’s interruption.

The titles went and the picture changed to a night skyline. Tracer bullets flicked left to right, arcing in their distinctive and deceptive slowness. There was an explosion in the far distance and I recognized the sudden flare of white phosphorus. Our 105s, I remembered, firing from Mount Vernet. Or was it a cocktail round? High explosive and phosphorus lobbed through a mortar. They were nasty bloody things.

I looked away.

“The Falklands”—Anthony Bannister’s distinctive and warm voice was redolent with a grave sincerity—“fourteenth of June, 1982.

British troops were closing on Stanley, the battles of Goose Green and the mountains were behind them, and there was a sense of imminent victory in the cold South Atlantic air. Captain Nick Sandman was one of the men who—”

I stood up. “Do you mind if I don’t watch this?” There was not much they could say. I limped to the window and stared down at the cradled Sycorax. She’d been drained of water, cleaned out, and the patches of rot had been cut out of her hull. The old copper sheathing, oxidised to the thickness of rice-paper, had been stripped off and the nail holes plugged with pine. The stumps of her masts had been lifted out like rotten teeth and her coachroof stripped off. Now she lay swathed in a tarpaulin and waiting for the new timber that would be patched and scarfed into her old hull.

I looked upstream to the French yacht just in time to see the skipper take off his hat. He was a she, shaking out her black hair.

She went to the foredeck to bag the jib and I envied her the simple task. I remembered the sweet luxury of arriving on a mooring and knowing that once the small chores were done there would be time for a drink as the tide ebbed. Behind me Bannister’s famous and sonorous voice was telling my story. I tried to block it out, but failed.

I turned despite myself, to see my own photograph on the screen.

It was a photograph taken five years before and had once stood on my wife’s dressing-table. I wondered how the television people had come by a copy. It did not look like me, at least I did not think so.

My rattail mouse-coloured hair was unnaturally tidy, suggesting that a cheap wig was perched on my ugly, long-jawed face. “We’ll replace the caption with film, of course.” Angela saw I had turned from the window.

“Caption?”

“The photograph. We’ll have film of you instead.” My face was replaced by Sergeant Terry Farebrother who looked nasty, brutish and short in his combat smock. He had been filmed at one of the Surrey exercise grounds where thunderflashes smoked in the far distance to lend the screen a suitably warlike background.

Farebrother had cleaned up his accent and language for the camera and the result was a bland and predictable tribute to a wounded officer. It was as unreal as reading one’s own obituary. I remembered that Terry still had my kit in his house. Some day I should go and fetch it. He described the moment I was wounded; the same moment that had led to the medal. I did not recognize the description. I had not felt heroic, only bloody foolish, and instead of expecting a medal I thought I would be reprimanded for breaking orders.

Doctor Maitland’s pink and plump face filled the screen. “Frankly we were surprised he hadn’t died. The body can only stand so much shock, and Nick had been very badly mauled. But that’s our specialization here, you see. We make the lame to walk.” The picture changed to one of the physiotherapy rooms.

“We’ll cover these pictures with wildtrack,” Angela said, “describing how they treated you.”

“Wildtrack,” Matthew helpfully explained, “is an unseen voice.”

“Like God?”

“Exactly.”

Doctor Plant appeared and said I had an unnaturally high quotient of bellicosity that was more usual in a criminal than in a soldier.

Most army officers, she said, were conformists, but it was undoubtedly my pugnacious traits that had forced me to prove the hospital wrong by making myself walk. Somehow it did not sound like a compliment. She added that my bellicosity was tempered with very old-fashioned conceptions of honour and truth, which did not sound like a compliment either. I saw how Matthew and Angela were intent on the film, staring at it like acolytes before an altar. This was their work; a rough-cut film which told how I had been written off as a hopeless casualty of a bitter little war in a lost corner of the Atlantic. A West Indian nurse described how galling it had been to watch me trying to walk. “Nice to have the ethnic input,” Matthew murmured to Angela, who nodded.

“He’d be bent over,” the nurse said. “I know he was hurting himself, but he wouldn’t give up.”

“Nick Sandman wouldn’t give up,” Tony Bannister’s voice broke in, “because he had a dream.” The picture cut to Sycorax as she had been when I first saw her lying abandoned in the trees. “He had a boat, the Sycorax, and he dreamed of taking her back to the Falklands.

He would sail in peace where once he had marched in anger.”

“Oh, come on!” I protested. “Who makes up this garbage?”

“We can change anything,” Angela said dismissively. “We’re just trying to give you an idea of what the final film could look like.” The film described how the Sycorax had chafed her warps and been driven on to a mudbank in the river. “That’s a bloody lie!” I was angry. “Bannister wanted my berth! He had his bloody Boer move my boat.”

“But we can’t say that.” Angela pressed the pause button and her voice intimated that I was being unreasonably tiresome. “What happened was a regrettable accident, for which Tony is making amends.” She released the button and the film showed the caterpillar-tracked crane which had lifted Sycorax out of the trees and on to the front lawn. “Boat and man,” Bannister’s wildtrack intoned, “would be restored together, and this film follows their progress.” The screen went blank. They had been ten bad minutes, and now they wanted my co-operation to make the rest of the film.

“There,” Angela switched the set off. “That wasn’t too painful, was it?” She used the same patronising inflection that had so grated on me in hospital.

“What’s painful”—my anger made me forget just how attractive I found her—“is getting a bullet in the back. That’s not painful.” I waved at the set. “That’s rubbish. Bannister took my boat and my wharf. Now, because he doesn’t want the bad publicity, he’ll foist that gibberish on the public!”

“Tony rented Lime Wharf from your wife in good faith,” Angela said primly.

“My ex-wife,” I corrected her, “whose power of attorney expired when she walked out on me to marry that soggy MP.”

“Tony didn’t know that. And you have to admit he’s trying to put matters right, and very generously, I would say.”

“At least your bloody film didn’t mention my father,” I said.

“We wanted to talk to you about that.” Matthew, clearly made nervous by the animosity between Angela and myself, lit a new cigarette from the stub of his old.

“Bloody hell.” I turned to stare out of the window, but the French girl had gone down to her cabin. I limped to the far end of the room where Bannister had hung a whole slew of pictures of his dead wife, Nadeznha. The photographs showed Nadeznha at sea, Nadeznha in Rome, Nadeznha and her brother at Cape Cod, Nadeznha and Bannister in Sydney, Nadeznha in oilskins, Nadeznha at a fancy-dress ball. Nadeznha had been a very beautiful girl, with dark eyes and a happy smile which made me presume that no one had ever tried to coerce her into being an unwilling TV star. I turned back to Matthew and Angela. “Just out of interest,” I said, “who exactly is paying to repair Sycorax? ”

Angela was pouring herself some Perrier water. For a second I thought she was going to answer, then she gave me a very cold look.

“We are, naturally.”

My ribs hurt beneath the bandages. “We?”

“It’s a television production, Mr Sandman. If the programme wants to film the boat’s restoration then the programme budget will have to find the funds.”

So Bannister wasn’t even paying for Sycorax? He’d towed her ashore, then allowed his Boer brute to strip her of valuables, and the TV company would now pay to put it back together? It was astonishing. It was a venality that even my father would have admired, but not me. “No,” I said. “No way.”

“No?” Angela enquired delicately.

“Bannister wrecked my boat. Bannister can put it back together. Why the hell should I make a spectacle of myself for something he did?”

“You drink whisky, don’t you, Nick?” Angela asked.

I ignored her attempt at conciliation. “I’ve spent the last two years running away from publicity. Can you understand that? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being a man who won a medal. I’ve got other things to do and I want to be left alone. I am not a hero, I’m just a damn fool who got shot. I don’t want to be made into something I’m not, I don’t want to make money out of something that I didn’t deserve, and I’m not doing your film. So take the wretched thing back to London and tell Bannister to send me a big cheque.” There was silence for a few seconds, then Angela stood and walked to the window. “Look at it this way, love.” Her voice dropped nastily on the last word. “You accepted Tony’s hospitality. Your boat’s on his lawn. The first ten minutes of the film are already shot. Do you think any law court in the land will think you didn’t agree to all of that? Or to all of this?” She waved at the lavish room with its sunken pool and electronic gadgets and raised fireplace. “Of course you can fight the case, Mr Sandman. You can claim that you always planned to sue Tony, but that you first decided to rip off his hospitality.” She mocked me with a smile. “Do you think you’ll win?”

“He wrecked my boat!”

“Don’t be tedious! He was assured that it was abandoned!” I was beginning to see that this slender and beautiful creature had the sting of a scorpion. She looked at me with derision. “Your wife assured Tony it was abandoned. She assured him personally. Very personally.”

Sod you too, I thought, but didn’t say it. I wondered how Melissa and Bannister had met, then supposed it must have been when Bannister wanted to rent the wharf. And how Melissa would have loved to add a celebrity like Bannister to her conquests.

“Well?” Angela asked coldly.

“Well what?”

“What’s your answer, Nick?” She used my first name, not in friendliness, but with condescension. When I didn’t answer she went back to the table and took a cigarette from Matthew’s packet.

He lit it for her, and she blew smoke towards me. “We want to make a film, Nick. It will be a very truthful and very meaningful film. It will tell the story of a man who achieved something quite remarkable. It will also tell of triumph over pain, of ambition over despair.

It will give new hope to other people who are suffering.” Her voice was now sweet reason itself. “At the same time it will give you a peaceful convalescence and a beautifully rebuilt boat. I assume you do want Sycorax rebuilt?”

“You know damn well I do.”

“Then you should understand that none of the necessary materials for the repair will be delivered until you sign the contract.” She stared at me in cool challenge.

“And we’ll pay you an appearance fee,” Matthew said encouragingly.

“Shut up, Matthew.” Angela kept her eyes on me.

I turned and looked at Sycorax. I hated to see her out of the water.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Bannister took my boat out of the water because he thought it was abandoned?”

“He was told it was abandoned, yes,” Angela said.

“And Melissa rented him the wharf, even though it wasn’t hers to rent?”

“So you say.” Angela was guarded.

“And it was Bannister’s thug who beat the crap out of me.”

“That was not on Tony’s orders. Fanny believed you were stealing the powerboat, but we agree that he over-reacted.”

“I’d call two fractured ribs an over-reaction, too.” My irony was lost on her. “And where is Mulder, anyway?”

“We really don’t know,” Angela said. Bannister had promised me he would try and find Mulder, then persuade the South African to return the medal, but there had been no news. Bannister had also tried to persuade me to drop my charges against Mulder, arguing that Fanny would be more likely to reappear if no legal threat loomed, but I had refused. Mulder had wounded Sycorax and myself, and I wanted him nailed.

But nailing Mulder was a separate business from restoring Sycorax and it seemed, whether I liked it or not, that the only way to achieve that was to co-operate with Angela’s bloody film. I said as much, which irritated Angela. “I wouldn’t describe it as a bloody film,” she said tartly. “It will be a very truthful and very moving human story.”

“What control do I have?”

She frowned. “Control?”

“Over untruths. I can’t have you saying that I want to go back to the Falklands. It’s not that I’m frightened of going, it just doesn’t happen to be one of my ambitions. I want to sail to New Zealand.”

“You mean editorial control?” Angela said calmly. “Let me explain.

You were clearly a very good soldier, Nick, but you’re hardly a trained television producer. You’ll have to understand that our skill lies in the shaping and transmission of information. We’re very good at it, and we don’t surrender the control of those skills to anyone. If we did, then we’d be forced to bend to the whim of any politician or public-relations man who wanted to conceal the truth. And that’s what we tell, the truth. So you get no editorial control. You tell us your truth, and we tell it to the world.”

There did not seem to be much to say to that. “I see.” Angela stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. “So perhaps you’ll sign the contracts?” She opened her bag and took out a thick wad of documents. “Head contract.” She separated and dropped three copies of each document on to the table as she spoke. “The subcontract with Bannister Productions Ltd, who will actually make the film. An insurance indemnity form. Your undertaking not to talk with any other television company or newspaper while the film’s being made. And a medical form.” She dropped the last pieces of paper, then held a pen towards me. “Sign wherever I’ve pencilled a cross, then please initial every separate page of the two contracts.” I took the pen and sat. I tried to follow the good advice to read whatever I was signing, but the contracts were dense with sub-paragraphs about syndication rights and credits.

“They’re standard contracts.” Angela seemed frustrated by my hesitation. “And I’ll leave you copies.”

“Of course,” I said. The truth is that I’ve always found it embarrassing to keep people waiting while I read the small print. It seems so untrusting, and I never understand the legal language anyway. I signed in triplicate, then scribbled my initials on all the separate pages. “Now do I get the timber for Sycorax’s hull?”

“It will come next week.” Angela pushed the documents to Matthew, who witnessed them. “Your first call,” she said to me, “is next Tuesday, mid-day. The location will be the town marina. Do you know it?”

“I grew up in it.”

“And you do understand what you’ve signed, Captain Sandman?”

“To make your film,” I said.

“To make yourself available and co-operative for the successful completion of the film.” She separated my copies of the documents and handed them to me. “That means I’d appreciate it if you were to always let me know where you are.”

“I’ll be in London tomorrow,” I said, “to see my children. Is that permitted, ma’am?”

She ignored my clumsy sarcasm. “I’ll see you on Tuesday,” she said instead, “when we’ll be going to sea. Do you need us to provide waterproofs?”

“I have my own.”

“I hope our co-operation will be very constructive,” she said coldly, “and might I recommend that you watch Tony’s show tonight? Matthew and I will see ourselves out. Till Tuesday, Captain Sandman.”

“It’s Mister,” I said. “I left the Army.”

She paused. Her blue eyes appraised me for a second and did not seem to like what they saw. “Till Tuesday, Nick. Are you ready, Matthew?”

They left, and I began to understand how General Menendez must have felt in Port Stanley; slashed to bloody ribbons and with nowhere to turn.

And it was all my own fault.

I watched The Tony Bannister Show that night. I was hurting. For some reason the pain in my back had decided to tighten and flare, while my right leg, which I kept telling myself was almost healed, felt numb and flaccid. Alone in the lavish house, I felt the temptation of despair; of accepting that I would never walk properly.

I swallowed four aspirins that I helped down with two large glasses of Irish whiskey, none of which helped, then I diverted my self-pity by switching on Bannister’s programme.

It was a nightly programme, shown from autumn until spring, and transmitted after the late news. I’d watched more than a few of the programmes since I’d been a guest in Bannister’s house, and I hadn’t much enjoyed them.

That night’s show was the final programme in the present series.

It kept to Bannister’s usual formula: a handful of celebrity guests, a rock group and an excited audience. I watched the programme in Bannister’s big living-room where I lay on a sofa trying to persuade myself that the weakness of my right leg was only imaginary. I’d left the windows open to air the room of the lingering smell of cigarettes.

Bannister’s first guest was an American actress, then there was a British politician who seemed wittier than most practitioners of the evil trade. I turned the sound down while a rock group caterwauled, then turned it up again for a comedian who rattled off jokes at the speed of a light machine-gun.

It was a standard kind of television chat show, even an average show, yet there was one very special ingredient—Tony Bannister himself. I didn’t need to be an addict of the television to understand that he was very good indeed at his job. He had a natural and immediate charm, a quicksilver wit, and a very reassuring presence that made him an ideal intermediary between the audience and the gilt-edged celebrities that were his guests. He seemed so very trust-worthy, which made Angela Westmacott’s prickly-sour attitude so puzzling. I warmed to Bannister as I watched him, and was proud that I’d met him. Damn it, I liked him. I noticed how much younger he looked on television. When I’d met him in hospital I’d thought him in his mid-forties, while tonight he looked no older than thirty.

At the show’s end Bannister talked about the films he would be making during the coming summer months. I’d been told he always made films in the warm months, and nearly all the films contributed to his tough-but-tender image. They showed Bannister climbing mountains, or diving to wrecks, or training with the Foreign Legion. This year’s films, all of the same ilk, would be dominated by an account of his assault on the St Pierre. He spoke with real dignity of his dead wife, recalling her loss, but promising that this year he would sail Wildtrack to victory in her memory. The screen showed a film of Wildtrack as he spoke. She was a Farley 64, a British-made racing cruiser that appealed to wealthy customers about the world. I’d often sailed by the Farley yard and seen their sleek products being sea-tested. The 64-footer, Farley’s largest production model, was a typical modern boat; wedge-shaped, flat-arsed, and with a stabbing fin keel. They were undoubtedly quick, but I wouldn’t want to be in one when a real Atlantic storm struck. Give me a deep, heavy boat like Sycorax any day. Sycorax might not be fast, but she was built for the bad seas.

The picture cut back to Bannister in the studio. “And I’ll be making another, and very special, film this summer,” he was saying, “a film about bravery and recovery. A film about a man who has modestly refused to make any profit from his hard-won fame.” I knew now why Angela had told me to watch this show, and I cringed back in the sofa. “Indeed,” Bannister continued, “a man who has so far shunned the limelight, but who has finally agreed to tell his story as an encouragement to anyone else who finds themselves in ad-versity.” The screen showed a photograph of me. I was in uniform, sitting in a wheelchair, and it must have been taken on the day I received the medal. “In the autumn we’ll be bringing you the true story of Britain’s most reluctant Falklands hero, Captain Nicholas Sandman, VC.” The audience applauded.

Pain scoured my back as I wrenched myself off the sofa to turn the television off. I gasped from the vivid agony, then sat back in sullen silence. God damn it, but why had I agreed to their damned film? Only for Sycorax, of course, but I felt a fool; a damned, damned fool. I could hear the halliards slapping at the masts on the river, and the sound made me fretful and lonely. God damn it, God damn it. I unscrewed the cap of the whiskey bottle.

The telephone rang suddenly, forcing me to abandon the whiskey to pick up the handset.

“So that’s why you did it?” It was Inspector Harry Abbott chuckling at me.

I closed my eyes against the sullen and insistent throb of pain in my spine. “Why I did what, Harry?”

“I told you Bannister looked after his friends, and I suppose you’re a friend of the great man’s now. Going to be a telly star, are you?

But remember what they say about supping with the devil, Nick.”

“What have I done, Harry?”

He paused, evidently to gauge the innocence of my question.

“You’ve withdrawn your charges against Fanny Mulder, Nick, that’s what you’ve done.”

“I have not!”

“Then how come that a television company’s lawyer has been on the telephone to our office?”

“Saying what?”

“Saying you’ve withdrawn your charges, of course. He’s sending the paperwork down to us. He claims he’s got your signature, but are you telling me you don’t know anything about it?”

“Bloody hell,” I said softly, remembering all the pages I’d signed and initialled, but hadn’t read. “I know about it.”

“Long spoon, lad, long spoon.” Harry sighed. “Still got your gong, has he?”

“Yes.”

“If it’s any interest to you, Nick, the bugger’s staying at Bannister’s London house. We think he’s been there ever since he raked you over.”

“If you knew that,” I said irritably, “why hasn’t someone gone to arrest the bastard?”

Abbott paused. “I told you, Nick, I’m not crime any more.”

“What are you, Harry?”

“Good-night, Nick.”

I put the phone down, then found my copies of the contract documents and, sure enough, there was a clause which said that I unre-servedly relinquished any legal claims, actions, or proceedings that might be pending against any member of the production company. I turned yet more pages to find that Francis Mulder was named as boatmaster for the production; responsible for the supply and safe handling of all vessels needed for the filming.

And all the time Bannister had sworn he did not know where Mulder was. All the time.

I limped to the window, lurching my weight on to my right leg in an attempt to convince myself that it would not buckle and that I was strong enough to sail alone into emptiness. Once at the window I stared into the night and reflected on the art of committing a reluctant enemy to battle. You sucker them in, offering an easy victory, then you clobber them with all the nasties that you’ve kept well hidden.

And I’d just been clobbered.

It was easy to find Bannister’s London address by going through the papers in his study. I thought of phoning him, but an enemy warned was an enemy prepared.

Next morning I caught the first London train, but still did not reach Richmond Green until nearly eleven o’clock. I was supposed to collect my children from the tradesmen’s entrance of Melissa’s Kensington house at mid-day, so I was in a hurry. My back was hurting, but not so badly as on the previous night.

Perhaps it was the weather that made me feel better, for it was a lovely spring morning, warm and fragrant with blossom. A cherry tree shed petals in the front garden of Bannister’s house, which was expensive, and flamboyantly marked as such by the burglar alarm fitted high on its imposing façade. The downstairs windows were all barred and shuttered.

I climbed his steps and rang the bell. The milk and newspapers were still on the top step. I rang the bell again, this time holding my finger on the button so that the bell rang insistently.

I took my finger off when I heard the rattle of bolts and chains. A thin, balding man in black trousers and waistcoat opened the door.

He was evidently offended by my behaviour, but I gave him no time to protest. “Is Mr Bannister at home?” I demanded.

He looked me up and down before answering. I did not look very impressive; I was dressed in old jeans, torn deck-shoes and a frayed shooting jacket. “Mr Bannister is not yet up, sir.” He spoke with the haughty reserve of a trained servant and, though he called me ‘sir’, I saw his hand go towards the alarm system’s hidden panic button that would alert the police station that an intruder had bluffed his way past the front door.

“My name is Captain Nicholas Sandman, VC.” I used the full rigmarole and my crispest accent to reassure him, and it must have worked for he took his finger away from the button. “I really came to see Fanny Mulder.”

“Mr Mulder has a private entrance by the garage, sir.”

“I’ve arrived by this one now,” I said, “so send him up to me. Is there somewhere I can wait?”

“Indeed, sir.” He showed me into a lovely high-ceilinged room where he drew back the curtains and unfolded the shutters to let the morning sun stream on to an expensive pale carpet. “I believe Mr Mulder is also still sleeping, sir. Would you like some coffee while you wait?”

“A large pot of it, please. Milk, no sugar.”

“I shall inform Mr Mulder that you’re here, sir.” He gave a hint of a bow, and left.

I waited. The room was beautifully furnished, with a fine Impres-sionist painting over the mantelpiece and a profusion of watercolour landscapes on the opposite wall. A lovely photograph of Nadeznha Bannister stood on a side table. Behind it, and echoing the array in Bannister’s Devon house, was a bank of electronic equipment. In front of the fireplace was an expensive glass-topped coffee table at least twelve feet square. Its smoked glass had prettily bevelled edges.

The previous day’s paper lay there and I idly read it while I waited for the coffee. The miners’ strike was a month old and police and pitmen were fighting pitched battles outside coke depots and coalmines.

“Coffee, sir.” The manservant put a large silver Thermos jug on to the table. “I’ve informed Mr Mulder of your arrival, sir, and he will join you as soon as he can. Would you like today’s paper, sir?”

“No. Is there a back gate to the house?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. Which meant that if Mulder wanted to escape me then he would have to leave by the front gate and I would see him run for it. If he did, I planned to phone the police.

But Mulder did not run for it. He kept me waiting ten minutes, but finally appeared in jeans and a sweatshirt that carried the name Wildtrack in big letters. He stood sullen and huge. He had winch-grinder’s hands, a face battered by sun and sea, and the confidence of his giant size. “What is it?” he asked curtly.

“You heard that I withdrew my charges against you, Fanny?”

“I heard.” He was suspicious.

“But you still owe me an apology, Fanny.”

A look of hurt pride flicked over the big face, then he shrugged.

“I didn’t know you were a crip, man.”

I suppose that passed for a Boer apology, meaning that if he’d known I was crippled he’d have only broken one rib. I smiled. “And you’ve got something that I want, Fanny.”

He said nothing, but just glowered in the doorway.

“I said you’ve got something I want, Fanny. Or did you find a buyer for the medal?”

He tried to brazen it out. “What medal?”

I crossed to the glass table, picked up the silver Thermos jug, and smashed it hard down. The smoked glass was toughened, and all I managed to do was crack it. I lifted the dented jug higher, slammed it down again, and this time the precious glass splintered into crazed fragments. Magazines, dried flowers and ashtrays collapsed among the broken glass. I smiled pleasantly at Fanny again. “You’ve got two minutes to find my medal, you bastard, or I break up this house.” Fanny was staring aghast at the table’s wreckage. “You’re mad!”

“One minute and fifty seconds.”

“Jesus bloody wept!” For a second I thought he was going to attack me, but he stayed rigid at the door.

I unscrewed the jug’s lid and upturned it. A mixture of hot coffee and broken vacuum lining spilt on to the fine carpet. “One minute forty seconds, Fanny. The picture over the mantel will be next.”

“I’ll get it, man! I’ll get it!” He held his hands wardingly towards me. “Don’t do any more! I’ll get it!”

The medal arrived within one minute. Just seconds after Fanny had thrust the slim case towards me, Bannister himself appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a bathrobe of flamboyant silk. He stared appalled at the horrid mess where his table had stood, then looked at me in newly-woken astonishment. “Captain Sandman?”

“Good morning,” I said politely. “I came here to retrieve my medal. Mr Mulder was reluctant to admit that he still possessed it.” I opened the lid of the case and looked down at the dull cross of bronze with its claret ribbon. “I’m sorry I had to use unfair methods to persuade him, but clearly you were making no effort at all.”

“Ah.” Bannister appeared to be naked under his silk robe. He also seemed incapable of collecting his wits.

“You told me you didn’t know where Fanny was,” I accused him.

“I…” He stopped, trapped by his lie, helpless to know what to say.

“But, as you can see, I found him.” I put the medal into my pocket.

“I can explain everything, Nick.” Bannister had found his charm now, and deployed it hurriedly. “Fanny only arrived last night. I was going to talk to you about him, of course—”

“I’m in a hurry,” I cut him off. “But I also want to tell you that I’ve no intention of making your film, none. I’ll ask my lawyer to send you a bill for Sycorax’s restoration. Unless you’d prefer to write me a cheque now?”

“Nick!” Bannister’s hurt tone suggested he had been grievously wronged. “It’s going to be a very good film, very good!”

“I’d rather have a cheque,” I said.

“You’ve signed a contract.” Angela Westmacott stepped into the room. Until now I’d been in charge of the confrontation, but her sudden appearance flabbergasted and silenced me. “You’ve signed a contract,” she said again, “and I expect you to fulfil it.” Like Bannister she was in a silk robe and, like him, she seemed to be naked under the bright garment. Her hair was loose, cascading in a golden flood down her back. She had no make-up, yet she looked very beautiful. I understood now why she always behaved with such imperiousness; she had Anthony Bannister as a lover, and she had assumed his power along with his bed. She looked with disgust at the mess I’d made. “Are you telling us that you plan to withdraw from your contract, Mister Sandman?”

“I shall talk to my lawyer about it on Monday.”

“Do that. And once you’ve wasted his time and your money I shall still expect to see you at mid-day on Tuesday.” Her scorn was biting and her voice like a whip. “Get out, Fanny,” she snapped at Mulder, who fled.

“I need Fanny, Nick,” Bannister offered the feeble explanation.

“If I’m going to win the St Pierre, I shall need him.”

“Do you plan to vandalize anything else in the room?” Angela did not believe in explanation, only attack. “Or did I understand you to say that you were in a hurry, Mister Sandman?” She made me feel clumsy and boorish. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Then don’t let us detain you.” She stepped back from the door to let me pass. “If you’re not at the marina on Tuesday, I shall consider you in breach of contract. Your lawyer will doubtless inform you of our remedy. Good day, Mr Sandman.”

I went down the front steps into the sunlight, and I was suddenly jealous of Anthony Bannister. Angela might be a bitch incarnate, she was probably a liar, she was certainly a cheat, but I was the one who was jealous. Damn the glands, I thought, but I was jealous.

I delivered the children safely back to their Swedish nanny at teatime.

Melissa, hearing our voices in the kitchen, graciously accorded me an audience. She let me pour her a martini and myself a whiskey, then she grimaced at my clothes. “I do hope the children don’t resent being seen with you. Don’t passers-by think they’ve been kidnapped?” Melissa has a voice like a diamond gouging slate. I never liked that voice, but it hadn’t stopped me marrying her.

“I don’t want to spend money on clothes,” I said. “Not that I’ve got any money for clothes.”

“I do hope you’re not going to be frightfully boring and tell me you have money problems?”

“My money problems are no longer your concern.”

“They are very much my concern, darling,” she said. “School fees.

Or had you forgotten?”

“School fees.” I imitated her perfect enunciation.

“You can’t expect Mands and Pip to slum it in a state school. Be reasonable, Nick.” I flinched from Melissa’s nicknames for our children. Amanda was the eldest, six now, while Piers was four. I’d been in Belfast when Amanda was born and in Germany when Piers arrived; two postings that explained why I had been given no say in the choice of names. Melissa picked up an emery stick and lightly buffed the tip of a fingernail. “Or do you want them to become communist perverts, Nick? That’s all they teach children in London schools these days.”

“I’m already paying their school fees,” I said. “There’s a standing order at the bank.”

“But in a few years, Nick, Mands will want to be at a decent boarding school and Piers will go to the Dragon. Then Eton, of course, and you can’t expect Hon-John to pay. They’re not his children.”

“But the Honourable John’s filthy rich,” I said as though it was a most reasonable objection.

Melissa sighed. “And Mumsy and Dadsy won’t pay.” Melissa’s parents were always called that, Mumsy and Dadsy. I imagined how very relieved Mumsy and Dadsy were that Melissa had rid herself of the jailbird’s son and married the Honourable John instead.

Melissa was a most beautiful rat who had abandoned the sinking ship with immaculate timing. She was also, though it pleased her to disguise it, a most clever rat. Cleverer than I was. “Or Dadsy won’t pay unless you’re dead,” she said now.

I put two fingers to my head. “Bang.”

“So if you’re spending all your money on that silly boat, Nick, you won’t have the funds for the school fees, will you? And then I shall have to sue you again, which will be awfully boring.”

“Jesus wept.” I walked to the window. “You’ve got my bloody Army pension that I’ve hocked for their bloody school fees. You’ve got the God-damned tin handshake which paid for their bedrooms in this palace. What more would you like? A pint of my blood? Or would you like to fry one of my kidneys for their breakfast?”

“I see that being out of hospital hasn’t helped your temper.” Melissa frowned at her fingernail, then decided it came close enough to perfection. She smiled at me, evidently satisfied with victory in the opening skirmish and now prepared to offer a truce. “I saw you on the moving wallpaper device last night. I think it’ll be jolly nice to see a proper film about you. Do you think they’ll want to interview me?”

“Why don’t you ask your friend Tony. Your very close friend, Tony.”

Melissa looked at me dangerously. She is a most beautiful woman, and I, with the foolishness of lust, had married her only for those looks. She married me for my father’s wealth, and once that had gone Melissa went straight to the divorce courts. By that time I was on a hospital ship. “Do I hear jealousy?” She asked me sweetly.

“Yes.”

She smiled, liking that answer. “I know Tony quite well.” Her voice swooped judiciously on the word “quite”, investing it with special meaning. “He’s a bit rough trade, don’t you think? But of course he married frightfully well.”

“Rough trade? He seems bloody smooth to me.”

“I mean that he’s not top drawer, Nick. But then, nor are you. And of course he’s another sailor, isn’t he? Do you think I have a weakness for sailors?”

“All I know,” I said bitterly, “is that your friend Tony has a weakness for a bloody Boer brute.”

“That’s hardly surprising, is it? If you had that ghastly man threatening you, you’d have a Boer bodyguard too.” I stared in astonishment at her. I’d spoken in resentment of the trick Angela had played with the contracts, but my words had achieved the effect of tossing a grenade into an apparently empty foxhole and being rewarded with a body. The foxhole, in this case, was Melissa’s prodigious memory for gossip. “Who’s threatening him?” I asked.

The long lashes went up and the big blue eyes looked suspiciously at me. Gossip, for Melissa, was a precious coin that should not be squandered. Her first remark about someone threatening Bannister had been made on the casual assumption that I shared the knowledge, but now, upon discovering my ignorance, she was wondering what advantage there might be in revealing more.

“Who?” I insisted.

She put the emery board down and evidently decided there was no advantage in revealing her knowledge. “Did you have a lovely time with the children?”

“We went to Holland Park.”

“How very thrilling for you all, but I hope you didn’t fill them up with grease-burgers, Nick?”

“I gave them fish and chips. Piers had three helpings.”

“I think that’s very irresponsible of you.”

“What am I supposed to do? Feed them avocado mousse? Fish and chips is all I can afford.” I scowled out of the window at the mirror image of Melissa’s house across the street. The London home of the Honourable John and Mrs Makyns is one of those tall and beautiful stucco houses. The Honourable John complained that Kensington was far too far from the House of Commons, but I sensed how much Melissa loved this expensive home. Now, in spring, her road was thick with cherry blossom, in summer the stucco would reflect brightly white, while in winter the windows would reveal the soft gleam of wealth inside high-corniced living-rooms. “And talking of money,” I said, “when are you going to pay me the rent you’ve been taking for my wharf?”

The faintest note of alarm entered Melissa’s voice. “Don’t be ridiculous, Nick.”

I turned on her. “You rented my bloody wharf when you had no right to do it, no justification for doing it, and no need to do it.”

“I might have known that if I invited you up for a chat you’d become tiresome.” Melissa opened her hands like a cat stretching its claws. She inspected her nails critically. “Actually, Nick, I had to rent the wharf.”

“Why? Did the Hon-John misplace one of his millions?” The Honourable John had oiled himself on to the board of a merchant bank and had somehow persuaded the selection committee of a safe Shire seat to make him their candidate. The Honourable John, in short, was sitting pretty, was already tipped as a future minister, and, so long as he wasn’t caught dancing down Whitehall with a prostitute in either arm, he would inexorably rise to become Secretary of State for Pomposity, then a lord, and finally a Much-Respected Corpse. Whatever the Hon-John was, he wasn’t rough trade.

“They’re not Hon-John’s children, Nick,” Melissa said.

“Mands and Pip need ponies, and I really can’t use Hon-John’s private account for your children’s necessities.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me for some cash?”

“You had some?” The interest was immediate.

“I could have pawned the gong.” I protected my flank. I had a small amount of cash, but only enough to provision a repaired Sycorax and I did not want Melissa to fritter it away on a week’s supply of lip-gloss.

“Do you have the medal?” she asked eagerly.

“As a matter of fact I do.”

“May I see it, Nick. Please?”

I gave it to her. She turned the medal in her hands, then held it against her left breast as if judging its suitability as a brooch. “Is it worth a lot?” she asked.

“Only in scarcity value.” I held out my hand.

She wouldn’t give it back. “Pip should have it, Nick.”

“When I’m dead, he can.”

“If you’re going to lead a ragamuffin life, then perhaps it will be safer here?”

“May I have it, please?”

She closed her hand over it. “Think about it, Nick. In all fairness it ought to go to your son, shouldn’t it? I mean, you can always come back here and see it, but it will be much safer if I keep it for you.” I limped to a side table and lifted a porcelain statuette of a shep-herd girl surrounded by three soppy-looking lambs. For all I knew the ornament might have been bought in a reject shop, but it looked valuable. This tactic had worked in Richmond this morning, and a tactic that works should never be abandoned. I hefted the porcelain, aiming its dainty delicacy at one of the big window panes.

“Nick!” Melissa contritely held the medal out to me and I tenderly restored the statuette to its side table. “I was only asking,” she said in a hurt tone.

“And all I’m asking, Melissa dear”—I put the medal back into my pocket—“is why you rented Lime Wharf to Bannister.”

“You were crippled, weren’t you? That frightfully pudgy doctor said you’d never walk again, so it seemed hardly likely that you’d ever need the boat, let alone the smelly wharf. And your boat was nothing but scrap, Nick! It was a wreck! No one was looking after it.”

“Jimmy Nicholls was. Except he was ill.”

“He certainly wasn’t doing a very good job,” Melissa said tartly.

“And frankly, Nick, I thought you could do with the extra money.

For the children, of course, and I really think, Nick, that you should thank me. I was only doing what I thought right, and it took quite a lot of my time and a great deal of effort to arrange it.” The nerve of it was awe-inspiring. I reflected that if the boat’s registration papers had not been safe in my lawyer’s office Melissa would have sold Sycorax off to get herself a new hat for Royal Ascot.

“How much rent is loverboy paying you for the wharf?”

“Don’t be crude, Nicholas.”

I met her gaze and wondered how many times she’d been unfaithful to me during our marriage. “How much?” I asked again.

The door opened, saving Melissa the need to answer, and the Honourable John came into the room. He looks every inch as expensive as his wife. The Honourable John is tall, thin, very pin-striped, with sleek black hair that lies close to a narrow and handsome head.

He checked as he saw me. “Ah. Didn’t know you were here, Nick.

I hear you’re going to be a telly personality?”

“They want me to encourage the nation to its duty.”

“Splendid, splendid.” He hovered. “And are you recovering well?”

“Fine most of the time,” I said cheerfully, “but every now and then a fuse blows and I go berserk. I killed an investment broker last week. The doctors think the sight of a pin-striped suit makes me unstable.”

“Jolly good, jolly good.” The Honourable John was uncomfortable with me, and I don’t much blame him. It’s probably fitting that a man should be nervous around the ex-husband he cuckolded. “I just came in,” he explained to Melissa, “for the Common Market report on broccoli.”

“In the escritoire, darling, with your other thrillers. Nick was being tiresome about his wharf.”

“And quite right, too. I said you didn’t have any right to rent it out.” The Honourable John shot up in my estimation.

Melissa glared at her husband. “It was for Mands and Pip,” she said.

“Like auctioning my golf-clubs! I don’t suppose there’s a child born who’s worth a good iron, what?” He dug about in the papers on the desk and found whatever he wanted. “I’m off to see someone.

Will I see you for dinner, darling?”

“No,” I said. They ignored me, kissed, and the Honourable John left.

“Don’t take any notice of him,” Melissa said. “He’s really very fond of Mands and Pip.”

“Does he know about you and Anthony Bannister?” I asked.

She twisted like a disturbed cat. “Do not be more tiresome than you absolutely need to be, Nicholas.”

I stared into her face. A wedge-shaped face, narrowing from the broad clear brow to the delicate chin. It was, as my father had liked to say, a face where everything was wrong. Her nose was too long, her eyes too wide apart, her mouth was too small, yet altogether, with her pale, pale hair, it was a face that made men turn on the pavements as she went by. It was impossible, watching her now, to imagine that I had once been married to this pale and silky beauty.

“Who,” I said, returning to the earlier question that Melissa had avoided answering, “is threatening Anthony Bannister?” My previous question had been about Melissa’s relations with Bannister and she smelt blackmail. “My marriage is very happy, Nick. Hon-John and I are both grown up.” Melissa said it in a warning tone of voice.

“I hope it stays very happy,” I said, thus becoming a blackmailer, and at the same time curious to hear what would be churned up from Melissa’s remarkable memory.

“It’s only a story.” Melissa opened an onyx box, took out a cigarette and waited for me to hasten forward with a lighter.

I did not move so Melissa lit her own cigarette. “I mean, there are bound to be stories, Nick. There always are. About glamorous men like Tony.” She paused to blow out a stream of smoke. Her overmantel was thick with embossed invitation cards.

There was one, I saw, from my old mess. Good old loyalty. “You mustn’t repeat this, Nick,” she said dutifully.

“Of course not.”

“It’s all to do with Nadeznha, his late lamented. Awful name, isn’t it? Sounds like one of those Russian ballet dancers who defect to the West as soon as they discover pantyhose and underarm deodorants.

Anyway, you know she died last year?”

“I know.”

“People were full of sympathy for Tony, of course, but there is just the teensiest whim of suspicion that he might have wanted her out of the way.” Melissa watched me very carefully. “It’s the perfect murder, isn’t it? I mean, who’s to know?”

“Overboard,” I said.

“Exactly. One splash and you don’t even have to buy a coffin, do you? Perhaps that’s why I never went sailing with you?” She smiled to show she had not meant it. “Anyway, Nadeznha died at night and there was only one other person on deck.”

“The Boer?”

“Score a bull’s eye.”

“But why would Bannister want her dead?”

Melissa rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Because she was going to walk out on him, of course! That’s what everyone thinks, anyway.

And she’d have skinned him. Think of the alimony!” Melissa’s voice took on an unaccustomed enthusiasm. “And I’m sure Tony’s not exactly playing the taxman with a straight bat. He’s got endless offshore companies and shady little bank accounts. Nadeznha would have revealed all, wouldn’t she?”

“He must have good lawyers,” I said. “And divorce must be as common as tealeaves among TV people.”

“As common as cocaine, anyway,” Melissa corrected me. “But Nadeznha would have had much better lawyers. She was frightfully wealthy. And anyway, Tony’s pride couldn’t have endured losing a catch like Nadeznha.”

“Was she a catch?”

“Only Kassouli’s daughter.” Melissa’s tone showed how disgusted she was by my ignorance. “Oh, come on, Nick! Even you must have heard of Yassir Kassouli!”

I’d heard of him, of course. It was a name mentioned in the same breath as Getty, or Rockefeller, or Croesus. Yassir Kassouli owned ships, oil companies, finance houses and manufacturing industries around the globe. He had been born in the Levant, but had married an American wife and become an American citizen. He was rumoured to be richer than God.

“His money,” Melissa said, “will go to his son, but Nadeznha can’t have died poor, can she? She was the genuine American Princess.”

“She was certainly pretty.” I thought of the photographs in Bannister’s Devon house.

“If you like bouncing tanned flesh and Girl Guide eyes, yes.” Melissa shuddered. “Mind you, there was something quite eerie about all that mixed blood. She married Tony on the rebound, of course, and Kassouli never really approved. She was slumming in his eyes. And Yassir Kassouli has never forgiven Tony for her death.

I mean, at worst it was murder, and at best carelessness. And you can imagine how sinister someone like Kassouli can be if he decides he doesn’t like you. He’s hardly likely to send you a solicitor’s letter; much more likely to slip a cobra into your bed.” She laughed.

“Do you think Bannister murdered Nadeznha?” I asked.

“I never said any such thing!”

“You think the Boer pushed her overboard?” I pressed her.

Melissa adopted a look of hurt innocence. “I am merely telling you the faintest, most malicious, trace of gossip, and I will utterly deny ever mentioning Tony’s name to you.” She tapped ash into a crystal bowl. “But the answer to your question, Nick, as to who might have threatened Tony, is Yassir Kassouli. The current whisper is that Yassir’s sworn that Tony’s not going to win the St Pierre.”

“Which is why Bannister keeps that Boer brute around?”

“You’re very slow, Nick, but you do eventually grasp the point.

Exactly.” Melissa stubbed out her cigarette to show that the subject was closed. “So what are you going to do now, Nick?”

“I’ll see the kids in two weeks.”

“I don’t mean that, Nick. I mean with what passes for the rest of your life?”

“Ah! I’m going to repair Sycorax, then sail her to New Zealand.

I’ll fly back to see the kids when I can.”

“You think money grows on trees?”

“My affair.”

She picked up the emery board again. “Get a job, Nick. I mean, it’s frightfully brave of you to think you can sail round the world, but you really can’t. Hon-John will help you. He has oodles of friends who’d be jolly pleased to hire a VC. You can buy a grown-up suit and call yourself a public-relations man.”

“I’m going to sail round the world.”

She shrugged. “I shall need security from you, Nick. I mean, you can’t just abandon your children in destitution while you gallivant in the South Seas, can you?”

“Why ever not?”

“I shall have to tell my lawyers that you’re planning to run away, Nick. I hate to do it, you know that, but I really don’t have any choice.

None.”

I smiled. “Dear Melissa. Money, money money.”

“Who’ll look after the children if I don’t?”

“Their nanny?” I kissed her upturned cheeck. “I’ll see you in two weeks?”

“Goodbye, Nicholas. The maid will see you out.” She pulled the bellrope.

I left Melissa empty-handed, but in truth I had not expected to get any of Bannister’s rent money.

But nor had I expected to hear the sibilant whisper of a rumoured crime. Was that what Inspector Abbott had meant when he spoke of using the long spoon? I limped through the drifts of fallen blossom and remembered Nadeznha Bannister’s face from her photographs; she had been so pretty and happy, and now she lay thousands of feet deep with her body rotted by gas and drifting in the sluggish darkness.

And there was a whisper, nothing more than a catspaw of wind rippling a perfect ocean calm, that she had been murdered.

And Bannister was clearly protecting the Boer.

And, I told myself, it was none of my damned business. None.

It was none of my business, but I couldn’t shake it out of my head.

When I got back to Devon I searched amongst the yachting magazines in Bannister’s study for an account of the accident that had killed Nadeznha. I found something even better; in a brown folder on his desk there was a transcript of the inquest into Nadeznha’s death.

It told a simple story. Wildtrack had been on the return leg of the St Pierre, some five hundred miles off the Canadian coast, and sailing hard in a night watch. The seas were heavy, and the following wind was force six to seven, but gusting to eight. At two in the morning Nadeznha Bannister had been the watch captain. The only other person on deck was Fanny Mulder, described in the inquest papers as the boat’s navigator. That seemed odd. I’d been told Fanny was the professional skipper, and anyway, why would a navigator be standing a night watch as crew?

Mulder’s evidence stated that the wind had risen after midnight, but that Nadeznha Bannister had decided against reducing sail. In the old days a yacht always shortened sail to ride out gales, but in today’s races they went hell for leather to win. The boat, Mulder testified, had been going fast. At about two in the morning Nadeznha noticed that the boom was riding high and she had asked Fanny to go forward and check that the kicking strap hadn’t loosened. He went forward. He wore a safety harness. He testified that Nadeznha, who was at the wheel in the aft cockpit, was similarly harnessed.

He remembered, as he went through the centre cockpit, thinking that the seas were becoming higher and more dangerous. He found the kicking strap’s anchor had snapped. Just as he was re-rigging the strap to a D-ring at the mainmast’s base, Wildtrack was pooped.

A great sea, larger than any other in that dark night, broke on to the yacht’s stern. She shuddered, half-swamped, and Fanny told how he had been thrust forward by the rush of the cold water. His harness held, but by the time he had recovered himself, and by the time that Wildtrack had juddered free of the heavy seas, he found that Nadeznha was gone. The yacht’s jackstaff, danbuoys, guardrails and lifebelts had been swept from the stern by the violence of the breaking wave.

Bannister, who was named as skipper of Wildtrack, was the first man on deck. The rest of the crew quickly followed. They dropped sail, started the engine and used white flares to search the sea. At daybreak they were still searching, though by then there could have been no hope, for Nadeznha Bannister had not been wearing a lifejacket, trusting instead to her safety harness. An American search plane had scoured the area at dawn, but by mid-day any hopes of a miracle had long been abandoned. Nadeznha Bannister’s body had never been found.

The coroner remarked that Wildtrack had not shortened sail, and he criticized the attitude of yachtsmen who believed that risks should be taken for the ephemeral rewards of victory. That was the only criticism. He noted that the decision not to shorten sail had been taken by the deceased, whose skill at sailing and whose bravery at sea were not in question. It was a tragic accident, and the sympathy of the court was extended to Mr Anthony Bannister and to Nadeznha’s father, Mr Yassir Kassouli, who had flown from America to attend the inquest.

The verdict was accidental death, and the matter was closed.

“Force six or seven?” Jimmy Nicholls said. “I wouldn’t shorten sail either.”

“You think it was an accident?” I asked.

“I weren’t there, boy. Nor were you. But it just shows you, don’t it? Always unlucky if you take a maid to sea. Maids should stay ashore, they should.”

It was Tuesday. My lawyer had advised me that, if I wanted Sycorax restored, I should make the film, and so Jimmy was taking me to the marina in his thirty-foot fishing boat. It was a warm day, very warm, but Jimmy was dressed in his usual woollen vest, flannel shirt, serge waistcoat and shapeless tweed jacket that hung over thick tar-stained trousers which were tucked into fleece-lined sea-boots. Ne’er cast a clout till May be out, they say in England, but Jimmy did not intend discarding any clothing until he was stripped for his coffin.

He had almost found the coffin this last winter. “Buggers put me in hospital, Nick.” He had told me this twenty times already, but Jimmy never liked to let a point drop until he was convinced it had been well understood. “T’weren’t my fault, nor was it. Bloody social workers! Told me I were living in a slum, they did. Told me it were the Government’s doing. I told’ em it were my home.” He coughed vilely and spat towards the houseboat that was still moored on my wharf. Mulder was supposed to live in the ugly floating hut, but I had not seen the South African since my visit to Bannister’s house in Richmond.

“You should give up smoking, Jimmy,” I said.

“Buggers would like that, wouldn’t they? There was a time when an Englishman were free, Nick, but we ain’t free now. They’ll be stopping our ale next. They’ll have us all on milk and lettuce next, like the Chinese.” The Chinese diet was one of the many matters on which Jimmy was seriously misinformed. The one subject of which he was a complete master was seamanship.

He was seventy-three now. In his twenties he had sailed in a J-class racing yacht; one of the twenty hired hands who lived in the scuttleless fo’c’sle of a rich man’s racer with a single bucket for all their waste. Jimmy’s job had been mastheadman, spending his days a hundred feet high on the crosstrees to ensure that the big sails did not tangle with the standing rigging. He had been paid three pounds and five shillings a week, with two shillings added for food and an extra pound for every race won. During the war he’d served in destroyers and been torpedoed twice. In 1947 he had become a deckhand on a small coaster that shuttled china clay and fertilizers about the Channel. Later he’d worked in trawlers, while now, no-tionally retired, he owned this clinker-built boat that hunted bass, crab and lobsters off the jagged headlands. Jimmy was a Devon seaman, tough as the granite cliffs that tried to suck his boat into their grinding undertow. I suspected that when his time came Jimmy would arrange his own death in those dark waters rather than surrender to the hospital’s oxygen tent.

Now, as we chugged downstream, I again probed Jimmy’s opin-ions of Nadeznha Bannister’s death. “I don’t reckon she’d have taken a risk,” Jimmy said. “She could sail a boat right enough, I’ll say that for the maid.”

That was like Socrates admitting that someone was a reasonably clear thinker. “Right enough to fall overboard?” I asked.

“Ah!” It was half cough and half spit. “You’re all the same, you youngsters. You think you know what you’re doing out there! I’ve seen men who knew the sea like a hound knows its master, and they still went oversides. There isn’t a law, Nick, not about the water.

How long you been sailing, now?”

“Since I was twelve.”

“How long’s that?”

I had to think. “Twenty-two years.”

Jimmy nodded happily. “And in another twenty-two, boy, you just might have learned a thing or two.”

I kept trawling for gossip. “Did you ever hear anything about Mrs Bannister?”

He shook his head. “Not that would surprise you, no.”

“I heard she might have been having an affair.”

“T’weren’t with me!” He roared with laughter, and the laugh turned into a hacking cough.

I waited for the coughing to finish. “I’ve heard rumours, Jimmy, that it wasn’t an accident.”

“Rumours.” He spat over the side. “There are always rumours.

They say she was pushed, don’t they? I heard that. And they say as how it wasn’t that Mulder fellow on deck with her, but Mr Bannister.”

“That’s new to me.”

“Just pub talk, Nick, just pub talk. The maid be dead, and nothing’ll bring her back to harbour now.”

I tried another tack. “Why does Bannister keep Mulder with him?”

“Buggered if I know. He don’t talk to me, Mr Bannister don’t. I ain’t high and mighty enough. But I don’t like that other bloke. Keeps bad company, he do. Drinks with Georgie Cullen. Remember George?”

“Of course I remember George.”

Jimmy lit one of his stubby pipes. We were turning into the wide sea-reach that was edged by the town and he stared across the river to where two Dutch pair trawlers were being scraped and painted by the old battleship buoys. The Dutch government subsidized their fishermen who could therefore afford a new trawler every other year. Their rejects were sold to us. Just short of the trawlers a motor-cruiser was trying to pick up a mooring buoy.

The skipper was bellowing at his crew, a woman, who reached vainly with a boathook, but the skipper had misjudged the tide which made the woman’s task hopeless. “You useless bloody cow!” the man shouted.

Jimmy chuckled. “Most of ’em couldn’t float an eggbox round a bloody bathtub. Call themselves sailors! It would be easier to train a bloody chimp.”

A French aluminium-hulled boat was motoring in from the sea.

I recognized the same yacht that had been moored in the pool beneath Bannister’s house the previous week. The same black-haired girl was at the tiller and I nodded towards her. “She’s a good sailor.”

“Boat comes from Cherbourg. Called Mystique.” There was very little Jimmy did not know about the river. Tourists, seeing his filthy clothes and smelling his ancient pipe, might avoid him, but his old rheumy eyes saw everything and he picked up news in the river’s small pubs with the merciless efficiency of a monofilament net. “The maid ain’t a Froggy, though,” he added.

“She isn’t?”

“American. Her father were here in the War, see. She be seeing his old haunts.” The Americans who had landed in Normandy had trained on the Devon beaches. “And she be writing a book, she do say.”

“A book?” I tried to hide my interest in the girl.

Jimmy cackled. “Reckoned you’d be hungry when you came out.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

“She say she be writing a pilot book. I thought there were plenty enough pilot books for the channel, but she do say there ain’t one for Americans. ’Spose that means we’ll be swamped by Yankee boats next.” He span his wheel to turn his boat towards the entrance of the town boatyard. It no longer made boats, but instead was a marina for the wealthy who wanted protected berthing for their yachts. I could see Wildtrack waiting for me at one of the floating pontoons. She was long, very sleek, with a wide blue flash decorating her gleaming white hull.

“Have you heard anything about someone wanting to stop Bannister from winning the St Pierre?” I asked Jimmy.

“The Froggies, of course. They’d do anything to keep him from winning it, wouldn’t they?” Jimmy had a true Devon man’s distrust of the French. He admired them as seamen, probably preferred them to any other nation, but was dubiously aware that they were not English.

Jimmy brought the heavy fishing boat alongside the pontoon with a delicacy that was as astonishing as it was unthinking. He looked over at Wildtrack and grimaced at the small crowd that waited for me. Mulder was in Wildtrack’s cockpit. Matthew Cooper was on the pontoon with his film crew, and Anthony Bannister waited to one side with Angela beside him. Angela was wearing shorts and Jimmy growled in appreciation of her long legs. “That be nice, Nick.”

“She’d bite your head off as soon as look at you.”

“I like a maid with a bit of spirit in her.” He held out a hand to check me as I went to step on to the pontoon. “You never did have any sense, Nick Sandman, so you listen to me. You takes their damned money and you mends your boat. You let them make their daft film, and then you go off to sea. You hear me? And you don’t mess about with the dead, boy. It won’t get you nowhere.”

“I hear you, Jimmy.”

“But you never were one to listen, were you? Go on with you, boy. I’ll see you in the pub tonight.” He glanced at the waiting film crew. “Do you have to wear lipstick, Nick?”

“Piss off, Jimmy.”

He laughed, and I went to make a film.

I can’t say that we went to sea as a happy ship. Mulder did not speak to me, his crew were surly, while Matthew and his camera team stayed out of everybody’s way. Angela retired to the after cockpit.

Tony Bannister grasped the nettle, though. “I’m glad you’ve come, Nick.”

“Somewhat under protest,” I said stiffly.

“I’m sure.” We were motoring across the bar, between the rocky headlands where the breakers smashed white. To starboard I could see the waves breaking on the Calfstone Shoal. “I think,” Bannister said awkwardly, “that we’d better let bygones be bygones. We behaved badly, but I would have told you about Fanny, and you would have got your medal back.”

“I just don’t like dishonesty.”

“I think you’ve made that very plain. Let’s just agree that we’ll try harder?”

For the sake of peace, and because we seemed stuck with each other’s company, I agreed.

We had bucked our way across the bar and Mulder now ordered the sails hoisted. He killed the engine, folded the propellor blades, and instantly Wildtrack became a creature in her element. She was no longer defying the sea with her diesel fuel and churning blades, now she was caught in the balance of wind and water. The sails were vast and white, swooping her gracefully southwards into the face of a brisk south-westerly wind.

Bannister and I sat in the central cockpit. Mulder must have known I was watching him and he must have guessed how I wanted to despise his seamanship.

But he was good.

I wanted him to be a butcher of a helmsman. I wanted him to be as crude as his physical appearance suggested. But instead he displayed a confident and rare skill. I’d expected him to be that most hateful of creatures, the loud and strident skipper, but his orders were given without fuss. His crew of seven men, identically dressed in blue and white kit, were drilled to a quiet efficiency, but the star of the boat was Fanny Mulder. He had an instinctive, almost gentle, touch and I knew, right from the beginning, that he was a natural.

He was good.

And I was suddenly, unexpectedly happy. Not because I’d made a precarious peace with Bannister, but because I was at sea. I was watching my dark Devon coast slip away. Already the small beaches were indistinct, hidden by the heave of grey waves. I could look back into the river’s mouth and I saw what I had forgotten; how the inland hills were so green and soft, while the sea-facing slopes were so wind battered and dark that it almost seemed as if the river was a wound cut into a crust of matter to reveal the softer flesh within.

I looked seaward. A Westerly was beating under full sail towards Dartmouth. A grey misshapen mass on the horizon betrayed a fleet auxiliary heading for Plymouth. A lobsterman coming from Start Point thudded past us in a stained boat heaped with pots and buoys and I thought I detected a derisive expression on the skipper’s face as he glanced at Bannister’s fancy boat. I would not have chosen a boat like Wildtrack to take me back to the ocean, but suddenly that did not matter. I was back where the hospital had said I would never be, and I could smell the sea and I could feel its lash in the spray and I could have cried for happiness when I saw the first ful-mar come arrowing down to flick its careless flight along a wave’s shifting face.

“You look happy.” Bannister had taken the wheel from Mulder.

“It’s good to be back.” There was an awkward moment when neither of us had anything to say. Mulder had disappeared, sent down to the main cabin while Bannister conned the boat. I suspected, and later confirmed by observation, that Mulder was not to be included in the film. The audience would have to understand that it was the beloved Tony Bannister who was rescuing me. He looked impressive as he stood at the big wheel. His legs were braced, his face tanned, and his hair wind-stirred. On film he would look marvellous, like a Viking in a designer floatcoat.

“What do you think of the boat?” he asked me.

“Impressive.” The truth was that I preferred my yachts to be old-fashioned. I’d never cared overmuch for speed, but Wildtrack cared so much that her digital log was accurate to one hundredth of a knot.

Yet, in her way, I suppose Wildtrack was an impressive boat. She was certainly expensive. The main cockpit was in the boat’s centre, but there was a rear cockpit, aft of the owner’s cabin, which would serve as a sundeck when the boat was in warmer seas.

She was a boat built for the world’s rich, complete with digital logs offering a ludicrous accuracy and motor-driven winches and weather faxes and satellite receivers and running hot water and air-conditioning and ice-making machinery and power-steering. The old seamen who had sailed from Devon, Raleigh and Drake, Howe and Nelson, would have understood Sycorax immediately, but they would have been flummoxed by the silicon-chip efficiency of this sleek creature.

They would have been flummoxed, too, by the extraordinary equipment which the film crew had deployed on the coachroof.

Bannister saw my nervousness and tried to reassure me. “The idea is to film a background interview today. How you learned to sail, where, who taught you, why. We’ll chop it all to ribbons, of course, and cut it in with some old home movies of you as a kid. Does that sound good to you?”

“It sounds bloody foul.”

“Let’s give it a whirl when we’re ready.”

The cameraman was filming general views of the boat, but was inexorably working his way aft to where Bannister and I waited in the central cockpit. I noticed how Bannister fidgeted with the boat.

He constantly checked the wind-direction indicator on the dash-board, then twitched the helm to keep the small liquid-crystal boat-shape constant on the tactical screen. Mulder had not needed the electronic aids to sail Wildtrack at her highest speed, but Mulder was a natural helmsman and Bannister was not. He suddenly seemed uncomfortably aware of my gaze. “Would you like to take her, Nick?”

“Sure.”

“We’re steering 195,” Bannister said as he stepped aside.

“195.” I glanced down at the compass. So long as the wind did not change, and this wind seemed set for eternity, I only had to keep one finger on the big stainless-steel and power-assisted wheel to compensate for Wildtrack’s touch of weatherhelm. The sea was not big enough to jolt the big yacht off her course. A few waves shuddered the hull, but I noted with relief how my balance seemed unaffected by them. I sensed a gust, luffed into it for speed, and then paid off with the extra half knot staying on the fancy speedometer. I did it without thinking and knew in that moment that nothing had changed.

It isn’t hard to sail a boat. The hard bit is the sea’s moods and the wind’s fretting. The hard bit is surviving shoals and squalls and tidal rips. The hard bit is navigating in a filthy night, or reefing down in a shrieking storm when your body is already so wet and cold and tired that all you want to do is die. But putting a boat into a wind’s grip and holding her there is as easy as falling off a cliff. Anyone can do it.

However, sailing a boat well takes practice that turns into instinct.

I had found, at that moment when I added the small pulse of speed to the long hull, that the instincts had not been abraded by the years of hospitals and pain. Nothing had changed, and I was back where I wanted to be.

The cameraman had appeared close in front of me. The clapper-board snapped, and I gritted my teeth and tried to forget the lens’s intrusive presence.

“Tell me when you first sailed, Nick?” Bannister asked.

“Long time ago.” I was watching the wind-kicked spray shredding from the rocks off Start Point. We were overtaking a big Moody that was idling along while its crew lunched in the cockpit. They waved.

“Tell me how you started?” Bannister insisted. The sound-recordist crouched at my feet and thrust a long grey phallus of a microphone up towards my face.

Bannister had to coax me, but suddenly I found it easy to talk. I spoke of Jimmy teaching me in a dipping-lug dinghy, and I talked of stealing my father’s boats to explore the Channel coast, and I described a bad night, much later on, when Sycorax had clawed me off the Roches Douvres, and I still swear that it was Sycorax who saved my life in that carnage of rock and rain. I should never have been under the lash of that northerly gale, but I’d promised to pick up a fellow lieutenant in St Malo and somehow Sycorax had kept the promise for me. I must have talked enthusiastically, for Bannister seemed pleased with what he heard.

“When you were wounded,” he asked, “did you ever think you’d be back in a boat?”

“I thought of nothing else.”

“But at the very first, in battle, didn’t you give up hope?”

“I wasn’t too aware of anything at that moment.” Now that he was talking about the Falklands I heard my answers becoming sullen and short.

“What actually happened,” he asked, “when you were wounded?”

“I got shot.”

He smiled as though to put me at my ease. “What actually happened, Nick, when you won the VC?”

“Do you want to cross the Skerries?” I nodded ahead to where the shallow bank off Start Point was making the tide turbulent.

“The VC, Nick?” he prompted me.

“You want to go inshore of the Skerries?” I asked. “We’ll get the help of the tidal current there.”

Bannister, realizing that he was not going to draw me on the medal, smiled. “How does it feel,” he asked instead, “to be in a boat again?”

I hesitated, searching for the right words. I wanted to say I’d let him know just as soon as I was in a proper boat, and not in some hyper-electronic Tupperware speed-machine, but that was unfair to the pleasure I was having, and the thought of that pleasure made me smile.

“Cut!” Matthew Cooper called to his cameraman.

“I didn’t answer!” I protested.

“The smile said everything, Nick.” Cooper looked back towards Angela in the aft cockpit and I saw him nod. The performing dog, it seemed, had done well.

Bannister, off camera now, crouched to light a cigarette with a gold-plated storm lighter. “You’re going to have to answer those unwelcome questions, Nick.”

“I am?” I let Wildtrack’s bows fall off the wind to take us east of the broken water.

“You can’t be coy about the medal, you know. The reason we’re making the film is because you’re a hero.”

“I thought we were making it because it was your thug who damaged my boat?”

He smiled. “Touché. But you will have to tell us. Not today, maybe, but one day.”

I shrugged. It seemed that this day’s filming was over because the camera crew began to pack up their equipment as Mulder took the wheel from me. To escape from the South African’s sullen company I explored Wildtrack. I’d been worried before I came aboard that my injuries might have made my balance treacherous, but I found no difficulty in keeping my footing as I went to the foredeck. There was pain in my back, though I fancied that the regular morning swimming in Bannister’s pool had done wonders to strengthen the muscles and dull the discomfort. I was more worried about my right leg which still shook uncontrollably and threatened to spill me like a drunk. That weakness was at its worst when I was tired, which was hardly an encouragement for single-handed sailing across the world, but at least my mobility on Wildtrack’s deck gave me optimism. I used the handrails and shrouds for support, but I would have done that even if I had never been wounded.

I dropped down a hatch and saw how the forepeak had been stripped empty to make the bows light. The main cabin showed the same dedication for speed. I’d expected a lavish comfort pit, but luxury had been sacrificed for lightness. What money had been spent had gone on navigational equipment; there was Loran, Decca, Satnav, even an Omega to trap very low frequency radio waves transmitted around the globe. The only thing I could not see was a sextant.

The rear cabin, approached through a narrow tunnel that ran abaft the centre cockpit, was more lavishly furnished and it was clear that these were Bannister’s quarters. There was an air-conditioner, a heater, even a television and a VCR built into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk.

Above the double bunk, framed and screwed to the bulkhead, was a photograph of Nadeznha. There was a line of print on the photograph’s vignette and I knelt on the bunk to read it: ‘Nadeznha Bannister, 1956–1983, 49° 18’ N, 41° 36’ W’.

I stared into the dead girl’s dark eyes that were now so familiar to me from all the other pictures I’d seen. She had been no attenuated blonde like Melissa or Angela, but a robust girl with dark skin and strong bones. It seemed a terrible waste that her bones were in the ocean’s deep darkness.

The cabin’s rear hatch slid forward and Bannister swung himself down. He seemed surprised to find me in his quarters, but made no protest. He nodded towards the photograph. “My wife.”

“She was very beautiful,” I said.

He pulled open the sliding door to the head and took something from a locker there. I saw it was a phial of seasickness capsules. He turned and stared at the photograph. “Greek, Arab, French, Persian and American blood. A wonderful mix. Mind you, it also gave her a fearful temper.” He somehow made the temper sound like one of his wife’s more endearing characteristics. “She could be very determined,” he went on, “especially about sailing. She was so damned sure she could win the St Pierre, which is why she was pushing the boat so hard.”

“Is that what killed her?” I asked brutally.

“We don’t know, not really.” He offered a theatrical pause as though speaking of his wife’s death was painful. “It was a dirty night,” he said at last, “a following sea, and Wildtrack was pooped.

That’s usually caused because you’re travelling too fast, isn’t it? And I think Nadeznha must have unclipped her safety harness for a few seconds.”

He’d told me nothing that I had not read in the inquest’s transcript.

“She was alone?” I prompted him.

“She was alone at the aft wheel.” He nodded towards the small rear cockpit. “The other person on watch had gone forward to tighten the vang.” He’d used the American term for the kicking strap. “The rest of us were sleeping. But she was a marvellous sailor.

Grew up in Massachusetts, you see, near the sea. She was sailing a boat when most of us are still learning to ride a tricycle. I used to tease her that she had Phoenician blood, and perhaps she did.” I looked back to the photograph.

“We searched, of course. Quartered the sea for the best part of a day.” Bannister’s voice was toneless now, as though the events had been numbed by repetition. “But in those waters?

She’d have been dead in minutes.” He clutched at a handrail as the boat lurched from the starboard on to the port tack. Mulder was putting the crew through their racing paces and Wildtrack’s motion was becoming rough. Bannister plucked a blanket from the foot of the bunk. “Will you forgive me? Angela’s not exactly a born sailor.” I followed him up the companionway to the aft cockpit where Angela, now with a heavy sweater over her shorts and shirt, lay sprawled in abject misery. She grimaced to see me, then heaved, twisted, and thrust her head through the guardrails. I looked at her tall body draped over the scuppers and I saw in her long bare legs part of the reason why Bannister kept company with this prickly and angry girl. She was truly beautiful. He saw me looking, and I felt his pride of possession like a small sting.

Angela came back inboard and curled herself into the crook of Bannister’s arm. He wrapped her in the blanket, then fed her two of the pills which, I knew, would do no good now. “There’s only one cure for seasickness,” I said heartlessly.

“Which is?” Bannister asked.

“Stand under a tree.”

“Very funny.” He held her tight. “What do you think of Fanny now?” he asked me.

“I think he’s a Boer brute.”

Bannister offered me an assured and tolerant smile. “I mean, what do you think of him as a helmsman?”

“He’s good.” I tried to sound ungrudging. Mulder was gybing the boat now, swinging her stern across the wind so that the boom slammed across the hull. It could be a dangerous manoeuvre, but his control was so certain that there was never a single jarring thud.

At the same time he had his foredeckmen changing jibs. As soon as one was made fast Mulder ordered it changed. “He’s very good,” I added truthfully.

“Nadeznha found him. He was running a charter service in the Seychelles. She nicknamed him Caliban. Don’t you find that a good omen?”

Caliban was the monstrous son of the witch, Sycorax. “No.” I looked at the prostrate Angela. “Is she your Ariel?” Bannister did not want to pursue the fancy. “Fanny’s good,” he said, “and very few people know just how good he is. Think of him as my secret weapon to win the St Pierre. That’s why I need him, Nick.”

I grunted. The hour and a half I’d spent on Wildtrack was not enough to tell me whether this boat and crew could lift the St Pierre off the French, but I allowed it was possible. The boat was fast, Fanny was clearly brilliant, and Bannister had the ambition.

And he would need it, for the St Pierre is the greatest prize of racing-cruisers.

The French organize it. There’s no big prize money, and it isn’t really a race at all because an entrant can choose his or her own starting time. The only rules are that a boat must be a production monohull and not some skinny one-off built for the event, that it must begin at Cherbourg, sail round the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, then, without touching land, run home to Cherbourg again. The course is around four and a half thousand nautical miles: a windward flog all the way out against currents and gales; a lottery with fog and ice at the turn; and a fast run back in heavy seas. At the end of the season, whoever has made the fastest voyage holds the prize.

Odd rules, but there’s wily method in the Gallic madness. For a start, there’s a political method. European rule of North America ended long ago, except in two tiny and forgotten islands, St Pierre and Miquelon. They’re French possessions, ruled from Paris, unconsidered island trifles that were never swept up by the British and were overlooked by the Canadians. The race is thus a constant reminder to the French that the Tricolour still flies on North American soil.

Then there’s a more hard-headed purpose to the rules. French boats are good. The Jeanneaus, Centurions and Beneteaus have dominated the St Pierre and each successive win has been an advertising triumph to sell more French boats around the globe. To win the St Pierre a boat has to be good, hardy and fast. Each year a score of factory-prepared boats from Britain, America, Holland, Germany and Finland try to crack the race, and each autumn, when the fog and ice sweep southwards to finally close the St Pierre season, the French are still the holders and a thousand more orders go to keep French boatyards busy. As a marketing tool, the St Pierre is a miracle, and if a foreigner could take the prize, even for a year, it would be seen in France as a disaster.

“I’m planning a late run,” Bannister said now, “and the far north route. With any luck I’ll come home just when the autumn programme schedule begins. That’ll start next season’s shows with a triumph.”

“Is that why you’re doing it?”

“I’m doing it to prove that a British boat can do it. And for Nadeznha’s memory. And because the television company are paying me to do it, and because my audience want me to win.” He rattled the reasons off as if by rote, then paused before adding the final justification, “And to prove that a TV star isn’t just a powder-puff in an overlit studio.”

He had given the final reason lightly, but I suspected it was the most important spur to his ambition. “Is that what people think?”

“Don’t you?” he challenged me.

“I wouldn’t choose the life,” I said, “but I suppose someone has to do it.”

He smiled. “Most of them are just powder-puffs in overlit studios, Nick. They think they’re so damned clever merely because they’re on the idiot box, while the truth is that the job demands a great deal less intelligence than people think. So if I want to make my mark properly then I have to achieve something rigorous, don’t I? Something like the St Pierre. It may not be the VC, but it will do.” It was a remarkable admission, even beguiling in its candour, and it explained why Bannister surrounded himself by strong men like Mulder and his loutish crew. Acceptance by such brutes made Bannister feel strong. He laughed suddenly, perhaps embarrassed because he had betrayed something personal.

Angela’s miserable eyes watched me over the edge of her blanket.

I put a hand on the small wheel that was linked to the larger helm in the central cockpit and I felt the rudder’s tremors vibrating the stainless-steel spokes. I was thinking of the night of Nadeznha’s death. If Wildtrack had been running before a heavy sea then why, in the name of God, would an experienced sailor con the ship from the aft cockpit? The centre cockpit would be far more comfortable, but perhaps Nadeznha Bannister had chosen this smaller cockpit as a vantage point to watch for the great waves looming from the darkness behind. I shivered as I imagined the tons of freezing water collapsing on to Wildtrack’s stern. It would be just like being hit by a truckload of cement dropped from two floors up.

Angela twisted round to throw up the seasickness pills and I politely looked away, past the danbuoys, to watch Wildtrack’s seething and curling wake. A cormorant flew low and fast across our stern.

“Do you think Wildtrack can win it?” Bannister asked abruptly.

“With luck, yes.”

“Would you like to be a part of it, Nick? As navigator?”

“Me?” I was astonished by the offer. “You don’t need a navigator, Bannister! You’ve got more bloody electronics on this thing than an Apollo mooncraft!”

“The race rules say we must carry a specialist navigator.”

“I thought Fanny was your navigator?”

“He was, but he’ll take Nadeznha’s place as a watch captain this year.” Bannister turned as his crew spilt the spinnaker from its chute.

The gaudily coloured sail blossomed as he turned back to me. “It’s really Angela’s thought, not mine, but I like the idea very much.

Why don’t we end your film by showing you leaving Cherbourg in Wildtrack? The film will be transmitted while we’re at sea, and it’ll help whip up some public enthusiasm for the film about the race itself.”

I didn’t think he’d asked me because of any affection for me, but it was still somewhat demeaning to realize that he only wanted my film to be a taster for his own greater triumph. “I thought the end of my film was Sycorax sailing into the sunset?”

“Maybe we’ll use that over the opening titles. But think of it, Nick!

Winning the St Pierre!” Bannister spoke with a sudden enthusiasm.

“Licking the Frogs at their own game!”

Angela watched me like a sick hawk. I shook my head. “I’ve never been a speed-merchant. I like going slow.”

“But do think about it,” he urged me. “In a couple of months I’ll be giving a big party to formally announce my bid for the trophy.

I’d like to say you’ll be a part of the effort, Nick. Will you think about it?”

“You need a specialist navigator,” I said. “Some guy who’s a race tactician as well. I’m really not going to be of any use to you.”

“Not in the race, maybe”—Angela forced the words out—“but you’ll help the ratings.”

“Ratings?” I somehow took the word to refer to the members of Mulder’s crew; as if they were naval ratings.

“The viewing figures,” Angela said with an acidity which implied that my misunderstanding betrayed an astonishing stupidity. “The VC makes you interesting, Mr Sandman, interesting enough to guarantee us more than twenty million viewers. Anticipating that kind of audience rating will mean we can increase the price of the advertising slots, and that’s how you’ll be useful to us.” At least she had been honest, though that did not soften the offence I felt. So my Victoria Cross was to become an advertiser’s weapon?

A means of selling more dogfood and baked beans? I was framing an outright and offended refusal when a violent lurch of Wildtrack’s hull ended the conversation. Angela jerked upright, vomiting, and I saw the mainsail’s shadow whip over us. There was a noise like a bass-string thumping the sky, and the boat was suddenly gybing, broaching and falling on her beam. I grabbed the small wheel for support. The tall mast was bending, breaking, then falling to leeward.

Broken water boiled up the scuppers and spilt cold into the self-draining cockpits. A shroud whipped skywards, flicking a broken spreader with it. The unleashed spinnaker billowed ahead as the mast fell. The slick hull rolled, recovered and slowed. The seas were low, no more than two or three feet, but even so Wildtrack’s bows were buried and the boat staggered as if she’d sailed into a sandbank.

Rigging was tangling and the mainsail was shredding with a noise like the fire of an automatic weapon.

Bannister stood, half fell, and shouted incoherently. A crew-member was overboard, tangled in the fallen shrouds. Angela was curled on the thwart, sobbing. Mulder’s voice bellowed above the din and chaos, inflicting order on the panic.

A port shroud had parted. The stainless-steel wire, made to carry all the weight of great winds on a towering mast, must have snapped.

The mast and sails had ripped overboard. It had taken no more than two or three seconds, and now Wildtrack lay wallowing and draining in the gentle seas. No one was hurt. The boat had pulled up short and it was a simple matter to pull the crewman who had gone overboard back to safety. The film crew, who had been staying out of the way in the main cabin, poured in panic up to the centre cockpit and were curtly told to get the hell out of the way.

“Fuck.” Bannister was staring helplessly at the shambles.

“Wire-cutters!” Mulder shouted.

I stayed out of the way. The crew knew what to do. The broken and fallen rigging was secured, then the remaining stays and shrouds were cut so that the wreckage could be dragged inboard. The engine was started. All in all it had been a mild accident, impressive to watch, but harmless except to Bannister’s purse.

And to his anger. He took me forward and showed me the turnbuckle that had taken up the tension of the broken shroud. It had not been the wire which snapped, but rather the turnbuckle that had simply let the shroud go. It was threaded inside, and someone had taken a circular file to the threads and worn them almost smooth.

The sabotage was clumsily obvious; there were even shards of filed metal still sticking to the grease which had been put on to the abraded threads. Just enough purchase had been left to grip the shroud but as soon as Mulder put the spinnaker’s extra weight on the mast the threads had given way. Once that shroud had gone, the others on the port side had snapped like cheesewire under strain.

“Fanny!” Bannister was livid with anger. “From now on you live in the boatyard. All of you!”

“Does that mean I get my wharf back?” I asked tactlessly.

For a second I thought Bannister was going to hit me, but then he nodded. “You get your damned wharf back.” His anger was showing as petulance, like a child losing a treat. He pushed past me, going back to the stern where his girlfriend was still slumped in the stomach-churning misery of the sea. For the moment Bannister appeared to have forgotten his offer that I should sail to St Pierre triumph as part of this boat’s crew.

But I hadn’t forgotten.

And I wouldn’t do it. There are lucky boats and unlucky boats.

That isn’t a fancy, nor a superstition, but a fact. Sycorax was a lucky boat, but I smelt the stench of disaster about Wildtrack. She had already killed Bannister’s first wife, and now someone had dismasted her. She was crewed by a surly pack and skippered by a kleptomani-ac. I did not care what fame or fortune might come to the crew of this boat if she won the St Pierre, but I would not share it, for I would not sail in a boat that so reeked of ill-luck.

Bannister could sail the Atlantic without me. I knew he’d repeat the offer again, but so far I’d given him too much for too little. This time the answer would be no. When I sailed my next ocean it would be in Sycorax and in no other boat, just Sycorax.

Mulder scowled at me, pushed the throttle hard open, and we motored ignominiously home.

PART TWO

Inspector Abbott came to the village pub three weeks after Wildtrack had been dismasted. He was wearing trousers made of a wide blue and pink check that looked like dismantled curtains.

“You’re looking better,” he said to me in a rather grudging voice.

“I’m fine, Harry.” I said it confidently, but it was not really true.

I was swimming two miles every morning in Bannister’s indoor pool and the exercise was laying new muscle beneath the scar tissue, but my leg could still betray me with a sudden and numbing weakness.

Only the day before, while walking down from the village post-office, I’d sprawled helplessly on the pavement. One minute my right leg had been doggedly reliable, the next, and for no apparent reason, it had just gone limp. But I would not admit to the weakness, lest I persuaded myself that I was not fit enough to sail across the world.

“I assume from the fancy dress that you’re not on duty?” Abbott plucked at the trousers. “Don’t you like them, Nick?”

“They’re bloody horrible.”

“They’re American golfer’s trousers,” he said with hurt dignity.

“They’re meant to improve the swing. Plenty of room in the crotch, you see? You want a lemonade, Nick? A bottle of cherry pop, perhaps?”

“A pint of best, Harry.”

He carefully carried the two full pints of beer to my table. It was early evening and the pub was still empty, though in a few weeks the crush of tourists would make the riverside bar uninhabitable.

Abbott sipped the top off his beer and sighed with pleasure. “Got your medal back, did you?”

“I did, and thank you.”

He acknowledged the thanks with a gracious wave of his cigarette lighter. “What do you think of the Boer now?”

“He’s a good sailor,” I said neutrally.

“So was Bluebeard.” Abbott lit a cigarette. “I haven’t seen Mr Bannister lately.”

“He’s on Capri with his girlfriend. They’re on holiday.”

“I wonder why he’s stopped going to America for his holidays,” Abbott said with an air of puzzled innocence, then shook his head.

“Me? I get a week with the wife’s sister in bloody Frinton. Who’s the girlfriend?”

“Girl called Angela Westmacott. She’s a producer on Bannister’s programme.”

Abbott frowned, then clicked his fingers. “Skinny bint, blonde hair?”

“Right.”

“Looks a bit like your ex-wife; starved. How is Melissa?”

“She struggles on.”

“I’ve never understood why men go for those skinny ones.” Abbott paused to drain his pint. “I nicked a bloke once who’d murdered a complete stranger. The victim’s wife asked him to do it, you see, so he bashed the bloke’s head in with a poker. Very messy. She’d promised him a bit of nooky, which is why he did it, and the woman was as scrawny as a plucked chicken. You know what he told me when he confessed?”

“No.”

“He said that it was probably the only chance he would ever get to go to bed with a pretty woman. Pretty? She was about as pretty as a toothpick. And to cap it all she didn’t even give it to him! Told him to sod off when he trotted round with his pecker sharpened.” Abbott stared ruefully across the river. “It was almost the perfect murder, wasn’t it? Having your best-beloved turned off by a stranger.”

The slight stress on ‘perfect murder’ was the second hint that Abbott was not here entirely because he was thirsty. His first hint had been the gentle query why Bannister no longer visited America.

“Perfect murder?” I prompted him.

“My beer glass is empty, Nick, and it’s your round.” I dutifully fetched two pints. “Perfect murder?” I asked again.

“The thing about a perfect murder, Nick, is that we’ll never even know it’s happened. So officially there’s no such thing as a perfect murder. So if you hear about one, Nick, don’t believe in it.” The comments were too pointed to ignore. “Does that mean,” I asked, “that it was an accident?”

“That what was an accident?” Abbott pretended innocence.

“Nadeznha Bannister?”

“I wasn’t there, Nick, I wasn’t there.” Abbott was obscurely pleased with himself. I’d been given a message, though I wasn’t at all sure what or why. Abbott fixed me with his hangdog look. “Have you heard these rumours that someone’s trying to scupper Bannister’s chances of winning the St Pierre?”

“I’ve heard them.”

“And you know what happened two nights ago in the marina?”

“I heard.” Wildtrack’s warps had been cut in the dead of the night.

There was a spring tide at the full and, if it had not been for a visiting French yachtsman, Bannister’s boat might have been carried out to sea. Mulder and his crew had been sleeping alongside in the houseboat that had been moved from my wharf and the Frenchman’s shout of warning had woken them just in time. It had all ended safely, and it might all have been dismissed as a trivial incident but for the fact that the warps had been cut. That made it into another attempt at sabotage.

“But clumsy,” Abbott now said. “Very clumsy. I mean, if you wanted to stop a bugger from winning the St Pierre, would you knock his mast off now? Or cut him adrift now? Why not wait till he’s in the race?”

“Does somebody want to stop Bannister winning the St Pierre?” I asked.

Abbott blithely ignored my question. “Kids could have climbed the marina fence and cut the mooring ropes, I suppose.”

“The mast wasn’t wrecked by kids,” I said. “I saw the turnbuckle, and it was sabotage.”

“Whatever a turnbuckle might be,” Abbott said gloomily. “It was probably buggered up by a crew member who just wanted a week off.”

That was a possible answer, I supposed. Certainly, if Melissa was right and Yassir Kassouli did want to end Bannister’s chances of winning the trophy, then the two incidents were very trivial, especially for a man of Kassouli’s reputed wealth. “Are you making enquiries?” I asked Abbott.

“Christ, no! I don’t want to get involved. Besides, as I told you, I’m not crime any more.”

“What are you, Harry?”

“Odds and sods, Nick. General dogsbody.” He sounded bored.

And I was confused. Abbott was sailing very close to the rumours I’d heard, but always sheering off before anything definite was said.

If a message was being given to me, then it was being delivered so elliptically that I was utterly at a loss. I also knew it would be no good demanding elucidation, for Abbott would simply say he was just having an idle chat. “Seen your old man lately?” he asked me now.

“I’ve been busy.”

“You and Jimmy Nicholls, I hear,” Abbott said. Jimmy was helping me to repair Sycorax. “How is he?”

“Coughing.”

“Not long for this world, poor old sod. He shouldn’t smoke so much, should he?” Abbott contemplated putting out his own cigarette, then decided to suck at it instead. He blew smoke at me.

“When’s the big party, Nick?”

He was referring to the party that was to be held at Bannister’s riverside house in the early summer. The party was not just a social affair, but also the occasion on which Bannister would formally announce his entry into the St Pierre. It did not matter that he had already broadcast his intention on nationwide television, he would do it again so that his bid would receive further attention in the newspapers and yachting magazines.

“I hear,” Abbott said, “that Bannister’s introducing his crew at the party?”

“I wouldn’t know, Harry.”

“I just wanted to say to you, Nick, that I do hope you won’t be one of them?”

He was not being elliptical now, far from it. “I won’t be,” I said.

“Because I did hear that Bannister asked you.” I wondered how Abbott had heard, but decided it was simply riverside gossip. I’d told Jimmy, which was the equivalent of printing the news on the front page of the local newspaper. “He did ask,” I said. “I said no, and I haven’t heard anything since.”

“Will he ask again?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“Then go on saying no.”

I finished my pint and leaned back. “Why, Harry?”

“Why? Because in an unperverted sort of way, Nick, I’m reasonably fond of you. For your father’s sake, you understand, and because you were stupid enough to win that bloody gong. I wouldn’t want to see you turned into sharkbait. And that boat of Bannister’s does seem to be,” he paused, “unlucky?”

“Unlucky,” I agreed, then wondered if the vague stress Abbott had laid on the word was yet another hint. I tried to force him into a straight answer. “Are you telling me that someone is trying to stop him?”

“Buggered if I know, Nick. Perhaps Bannister’s paranoid. I mean being on the fucking telly must make a man paranoid.” He drained his pint. “I know you’d like to buy me another one, Nick, but the wife has cooked some tripe and pig’s trotters as a special treat, so I’ll be on my way. Remember what I said.”

“I’ll remember.”

I heard his car start and labour up the hill. Out on the river a kid doggedly tacked a Mirror dinghy upstream. Behind it, motoring into the wind, came Mystique. The American girl stood at her tiller and I hoped she might swing across to the pub’s ramshackle pier for a drink, but she stayed on the far bank’s channel instead.

A heron flew past her aluminium-hulled boat and climbed to its nest. Three swans floated beneath the trees. It was a spring evening, full of innocence and charm.

“What did Harry want?” the landlord asked me.

“He was just having a chat.”

“He never does that. He’s a clever bugger, is Harry. Mind you, his golf swing’s lousy. But that’s the only thing Harry wastes time on, believe me.”

I did believe him, and it worried me.

As the days lengthened and warmed, I forgot my worries. I forgot Bannister and Mulder, I forgot the rumours about Nadeznha Bannister’s death and the whispers about sabotage, I even forgot the unpleasantness that had marked my introduction to the television business, because Sycorax mended.

Jimmy Nicholls and I mended her. They were weeks of hard work, and therefore of pleasure. We scarfed new timbers into Sycorax’s hull and caulked them home. We shaped new deck planks and joggled them into place. We raised the cockpit’s sole and put gutters out to the transom so that, for the first time, Sycorax had a self-draining cockpit.

Jimmy selected trunks of Norway spruce from the timber yard and fetched them upriver on his boat. He made me listen at one end of the trunks while he tapped the other with a wrench and I heard how the note came clear and sharp to prove the timber’s worth. We put the spruce on the wharf and adzed the trunks down; first we turned them into square sections, then we peeled away each corner, and each new corner, until they were rounded and we had our masts, gaff and booms. We used a hefty piece of pitch-pine for the bowsprit.

Each evening, when the work was done and before I went to the pub, I would treadle a grindstone to put an edge back on tools blunted by good wood.

They were good days. Sometimes a spring rain thundered on the tarpaulin that we’d rigged overhead, but mostly the sun shone in promise of summer. We made a new coachroof, but strengthened it with oak beams so that the cabin could resist a knock-down in heavy seas. A smith from the town put lead into Sycorax’s keel and forged me new hounds to take the rigging on her mast. As spring turned into summer Jimmy and I began to lay bright new copper sheets over the finished hull, bedding them on layers of tar and paper and fixing them with flat-headed nails of bronze. The copper was expensive, but superior to any anti-fouling paint, and I wanted its protection before I sailed my wooden boat to where the tropical worms could turn iron-hard mahogany into a porous sponge. Jimmy and I did a good, old-fashioned job. On our rare days off we went to boat auctions on the river and bought good second-hand gear—an outboard for the dinghy, warps, blocks, cleats, flares and smoke floats, fire-extinguishers—and all the receipts were sent to the television company who repaid the money without demur. They were even paying Jimmy a cash wage that the taxman would never hear about. Life in those days was good.

Wildtrack had moved to the Hamble where a larger marina offered uniformed guards and large dogs as security. There were no more incidents of sabotage. Anthony Bannister, when he returned from his holiday, stayed in Richmond and sailed out of the new marina, so I did not see him. Angela sometimes came to the house to oversee her film, but rarely. When she did come she was businesslike and brusque. She pretended no great interest in Sycorax’s progress, except to insist that the boat was moved off Bannister’s lawn before the party. I assured Angela the boat would be ready in time.

She frowned at the cradled hull that was still only half-coppered.

“How can it be ready? You haven’t finished the masts yet!” I ignored her sharp critical tone. “We don’t step the masts till she’s in the water. So all I have to do before we launch is finish the coppering and put in the engine.”

She snatched at a chance to hurry the process. “Can’t the engine wait till she’s afloat?”

“Not unless you want the river coming in where the propellor ought to be.”

“You know best, I suppose.” She sounded very grudging. I waited for her to mention Bannister’s invitation that I should sail on the St Pierre, but she said nothing and I assumed the invitation was forgotten. I was relieved when she stalked away; a cold girl with a clip-board. She went to the terrace of the house where she chivvied Matthew Cooper into making faster progress.

It seemed to me that it was Matthew who did the real work for the television company. He and his camera crew came down every other week to film Sycorax’s rebuilding. When Angela was absent they were relaxed, except about their expense sheets on which they spent hours of devoted work. Their union rules insisted that they travelled in a monstrous herd, which meant that most of them had no work to do, but one of the drivers and the assistant cameraman proved to be enthusiastic carpenters and happily helped with whatever work was on hand. Yet the film crew’s presence inevitably meant frustration and delay. A piece of work that Jimmy and I might have finished in an hour could take a whole day with Matthew fussing about camera angles and eyelines. Sometimes he’d arrive to find a job finished and would insist that we dismantle the careful joinery and recreate it for the camera. Then he would shoot it from every conceivable angle. “Nick? Your right arm’s in the camera’s way. Can you drop your elbow?”

“I can’t tighten a bolt if I’m screwed up like Quasimodo.”

“It won’t show on film.” He waited patiently till I’d finished my grotesque impression of the hunchback of Notre-Dame. “Thank you, Nick. Dropping the elbow will be enough. That’s better.” Then the sound-recordist would stop everything because a light aircraft was ruining his tape, and when the plane’s sound faded a cloud would arrive and the cameraman would insist on remeasuring the light. I perceived that film-making was very like soldiering in that it consisted of hours of idle waiting punctuated by moments of half-understood panic.

I was frustrated by the delays, but in turn inflicted frustration on Matthew. Often, while the camera rolled, he would spring questions on me. In the finished film, he told me, his own voice would be replaced by Bannister’s so that the viewers would think that the great man had been constantly present during the filming. The frustration occurred every time Matthew asked the one question that lay behind the film’s purpose. “Can you tell us how you won the medal, Nick?”

“Not right now. Anyone seen the tenon saw?”

“Nick?” Chidingly.

“I can’t remember what happened, Matthew, sorry.”

“Don’t call me Matthew. Remember I’m supposed to be Tony. So what happened, Nick?” Long pause. “Nick, please?” Another long pause. “What was the question, Matthew?”

“Nick!”

“Nothing to say, Matthew, sorry, Tony.”

“Oh, fuck it. Cut!”

Jimmy would chuckle, the film crew would grin, and Matthew would glare at me. I liked him, though. He had a shaggy black moustache, unruly hair, and a face which looked tough but which on closer inspection proved rather sad and dogged. He was hag-ridden with self-doubt and smoked more than a fouled engine, but, like his cameraman, Matthew cared desperately about the quality of his work. He did what Angela ordered him to do, but he invested those orders with a concern for the very best pictures. He would spend hours waiting for the light to touch the river in just the right way before he started shooting. He was an artist, but he was also the conduit for Angela Westmacott’s instructions and worries; the chief of which still remained that Sycorax would not disfigure Anthony Bannister’s lawn on the day of his big party.

Angela need not have worried, for Jimmy and I finished the hull ten days ahead of our schedule. The engine was still in pieces, the boat was unrigged, and the sails were still being repaired, but it was a great day when we could walk round the gleaming hull and see all the hard work come to a satisfying wholeness. I phoned Matthew and told him we could launch in a week’s time, just as soon as the engine was back in the boat’s belly, and he promised to bring the crew down for the event. Thus we would be in the water the day before the party.

I spent the next two days repairing the diesel and replacing the propellor. The new strength that the swimming had put into my back helped during the tedious hours of installing the engine. I rigged a jury crane with chains and blocks and spent frustrating hours settling the shims under the engine-block so that the propellor shaft ran true. It was probably the most difficult job of the whole repair, but eventually it was done. The self-starter would not work, but there was a handle and a flywheel, so I threw the damn thing away.

Melissa went to Paris for a fashion show and sent the children down to Devon for the next three days to get them off her hands, and I borrowed a Drascombe Dabber to potter about off the river’s mouth where we caught mackerel on hand lines. Their nanny came to fetch the children back to London in Melissa’s new Mercedes.

“Mrs Makyns says the children are in need of the summer clothes, Mr Sandman.” The nanny was a lolloping great Swede with a met-ronome voice.

“Tell Mrs Makyns that there are shops which sell the children’s clothes.”

“You are yoking, I think. She says you are to give me the money.”

“Tell her I will send her a cheque.”

“I will tell her. She will see you next week at Mr Bannister’s party, I think.” It sounded like a threat.

That same afternoon a crane arrived ready to lift Sycorax into the water. The launch was scheduled for the next morning and I had a bottle of champagne ready to break over the fairlead at her bows.

Preparations for Bannister’s party were also well advanced; caterers were setting up tables on the terrace, florists were delivering blooms, and gardeners were tidying up the lawns. Matthew arrived that evening and found me still working. The newly-laid copper reflected the dying sun so that Sycorax looked as if she had been cast in red-gold.

“She looks good, Nick,” Matthew said.

“She is.” I was dressed in swimming trunks and felt happily filthy with tar, paint and varnish stains. I was on Sycorax’s deck, varnishing the boom-gallows. “One month for rigging, then she’s finished.” Matthew lit a cigarette and helped himself to a beer from the crate I kept by the sheerlegs. “I’ve got bad news for you.” I peglegged down the ladder and took a beer. “Tell me.”

“Medusa wants you out of the house by tomorrow night.” We had nicknamed Angela ‘Medusa’—the snake-haired female with the basilisk gaze that turned her enemies to stone.

“That’s fine,” I said.

“She says it’s only till next Tuesday. Because they’ve got weekend guests staying, you see. I’m sorry, Nick.” Matthew sounded miserably embarrassed at having to make the request.

“I really don’t mind, Matthew.” I was getting too used to the luxury of Bannister’s house and would happily move into a relaunched Sycorax. She had no berths yet, no galley and no lavatory, but I had a sleeping bag, a primus stove and the river.

“And Medusa also asked me to tell you not to use the swimming pool till all the guests are gone.”

I laughed. “She doesn’t want a cripple to spoil the decor?”

“Something like that,” Matthew said unhappily. “But, of course,” he went on, “you’re invited to the party.”

“That’s nice.”

“Because Bannister wants to announce that you’ll navigate Wildtrack for him.”

For a second I did not respond. I was watching the shining-hulled Mystique that had suddenly appeared at Sansom’s Point. The boat had been absent for the last two months and I presumed the American girl had been exploring the harbours she would describe in her pilot book.

“Did you hear me?” Matthew asked.

“I heard.”

“And?”

“I’m not bloody doing it, Matthew.”

“Medusa wants you to do it,” Matthew said warningly.

“Sod her.” I was watching the American girl who was motoring Mystique against the tide with just a jib to stiffen her. She had chosen the eastern channel which was both narrower and shallower than the main channel, and which would bring her close to where Matthew and I stood.

“Medusa’s set her mind on it,” Matthew said.

“She never mentions it to me.”

“She will, though.”

“I’ll say no again.”

“Then she’ll probably refuse to pay for Sycorax’s rigging.”

“Sod her!” I said again. “I’ll buy the rigging wire out of the fee you’re paying me.”

“What fee?” Matthew said. “Medusa says you’ve been living in Bannister’s house, so he ought to get some rent out of you.”

“He wrecks my boat, now I’m paying him to mend it? You’re joking!”

The misery on Matthew’s face told me that he was not joking. He tried to soften the blow by saying that perhaps it was just a rumour, but he was not convincing. “It’s Medusa’s fault,” he said at last. “She was nothing till she started screwing Bannister. Now she virtually runs the bloody programme.” He sounded envious that such a route of advancement was denied to him. “Bannister insisted she was made a full producer before he signed his last contract. Never let it be said, Nick, that you can’t get to the top of British television by lying flat on your back. It is still the one certain, well-tried and infallible method of success.”

I felt somewhat uncomfortable with the criticism, even if it was true. “She seems good at her job?” I offered mildly.

“Of course she’s good at her job,” Matthew said irritably. “It doesn’t take much intelligence to be a good television producer. It’s not nearly so demanding a job as teaching. All that being a producer takes is a capacity for expense account lunches and the ability to pick the right director.” He shrugged. “What the hell. Perhaps she’ll marry Bannister and leave us all in peace?”

“Do you think that’s likely?” I asked.

“With all his money? She’d love to marry him.” He drew on his cigarette. “She’d like to get her hands on his production company.” Bannister’s company, as well as making his own summer films, also made rock videos and television adverts. It was, I gathered, a most lucrative business.

“Hi!” The voice startled both of us and we turned to see that it was the black-haired American girl who had hailed us from Mystique’s cockpit. She was standing by the tiller. She was only a stone’s throw away now, but the setting sun’s sheen on the rippling water made her face into an indistinct shadow. “Can I stay in this channel for the pool?”

“What do you draw?” I asked.

“Four foot three.” Her voice was businesslike and quick. As she glanced forward I had an impression of bright eyes and a tanned, lively face.

“When you get alongside the perch,” I pointed, “steer 310.”

“Thanks!”

“Been far?”

“Far enough.” She tossed the answer back. I stared at her silhouette and I suddenly very much wanted to be in love with a girl like her. It was a ridiculous wish; I hadn’t seen her face properly, I didn’t know her name, but she was a consummate sailor and she had nothing whatever to do with the writhing jealousies and greed of television.

I crouched for a bottle, noting how the pain in my back was almost bearable. “You want a welcome-home beer?”

Her black hair lifted as her head turned. “No, thanks. ’Preciate the help, though. Thanks again.” She stooped to push the throttle forward and Mystique’s exhaust blurred blue at the transom.

Matthew chuckled. “Not your day, Nick.”

“Take me to the pub,” I said. “We’ll get drunk.” So we did.

We got drunk the next day, too. We put Sycorax in the water at the tide’s height and we broke champagne across her bows, then we raided Bannister’s cellar for more champagne. The cameraman was ceremoniously thrown into the river, then Matthew, then me. The American girl watched from her cockpit, but, when Matthew shouted at her to join us, she just shook her head. An hour later she hoisted sails and went downstream on the tide.