Wildtrack

The good times began then. Anthony Bannister was commuting between his London house and the Mediterranean where Wildtrack had been entered for a series of offshore races. Fanny Mulder was with the boat, so I had Devon to myself. I also had the non-sailing Angela.

Matthew and the film crew must have realized what had happened between Angela and me, but they said nothing, and they were happy for me that Sycorax could make such progress. Her rigging wire arrived and, for the price of a dozen pints of beer, we borrowed a buoy barge so that its onboard derrick could lower the varnished masts into their places. Before stepping the mainmast I carefully placed an antique penny in the keel chock where the mast’s heel hid and crushed the silver coin. It was a traditional specific to bring good luck to the ship, but love brought better fortune as Angela freed all the materials for Sycorax. Suddenly there were no more conditions, only co-operation. I even gave the camera a limping description of what had happened on the night I won the medal. I heard nothing from Jill-Beth, and I let myself think that Kassouli’s threat was a chimera. Micky Harding phoned me a few times, but I had nothing to report and so the phone calls stopped.

Day by day the rigging took shape. Wire, rope, timber and buckets of Stockholm tar were hoisted aloft and turned into the seemingly fragile concoction that could withstand the vast powers of ocean winds. It was slow work, for if any part of the rigging was to fail then I would rather it failed on the berth than in an Atlantic force eight. I cut the belaying pins out of lignum vitae and rammed them home in oaken fife rails that were bolted to the mast beneath cheek pieces. The film crew gave up trying to understand what was going on; they said I was becoming nautical, which just meant that the vocabulary had become technical as Jimmy and I worried about deadeyes and gantlines, robands and leader cringles, worming and parcelling. The cameraman retaliated by presenting me with a dic-tionary, while Angela made Sycorax a gift of some antique brass scuttles. She called them portholes.

“Scuttles,” I insisted. They were beautifully made, with thick greenish glass and heavy brass frames. They had hinged shutters that could be bolted down in bad weather.

I screwed and caulked the scuttles home. Beneath them I was rebuilding the cabin. I made two bunks, a big chart table and a galley.

I turned the forepeak into a workshop and sail locker. I built a space for a chemical loo and Angela wanted to know why I didn’t put in a proper flushing loo like the ones on Wildtrack and I said I didn’t want any unnecessary holes bored in Sycorax’s hull. Why bother with a loo at all, she asked tartly, why not just buy an extra bucket?

I said that the girls I planned to live with liked to have something more than a zinc bucket. She hit me.

The sails were repaired in a Dartmouth loft and came back to the boat on a day when the film crew was absent. Jimmy and I could not resist bending mizzen and main on to their new spars. The sails had to be fully hoisted if they were to be properly stowed on the booms and I felt the repaired hull shiver beneath me as the wind stirred the eight-ounce cotton. “We could take her out?” Jimmy suggested slyly.

I wound the gaff halliard off its belaying pin and lowered the big sail. “We’ll wait, Jimmy.”

“Put on staysails, boy. Let’s see how her runs, eh?” I was tempted. It was a lovely day with a south-westerly wind gusting to force five and Sycorax would have revelled in the sea, but I’d promised Angela I’d wait so that the film crew could record my first outing in the rebuilt boat. I lifted the boom and gaff so Jimmy could unclip the topping lift and thread the sail cover into place.

He hesitated. “Are you sure, boy?”

“I’m sure, Jimmy.”

He pushed the cover on to the stowed sail. “It’s that maid, isn’t it? Got you right under her thumb, she do.”

“I promised her I’d wait, Jimmy.”

“You keep your brains in your trousers, you do, Nick. When I was a boy, a proper man wouldn’t let a maid near his boat. It means bad luck, letting a woman run a boat.”

I straightened up from the belaying pin. “So what about Josie Woodward? Who put her in the club three miles off Start Point?” He laughed wickedly and dropped the subject. I promised him it would only be a day or two, no more, before we could film the sequence I had dreamed of for so long; the moment when Sycorax sailed again. Two months before, I reflected, I would have taken Jimmy’s hint and we would have taken the old boat out to sea and debated whether ever to come back again, but now I was as committed to the film as Angela herself. I had even begun to see it through her eyes, though I still refused to contemplate sailing on the St Pierre, and Angela had agreed that we’d devise a different ending for the film; one with Sycorax beating out to sea.

I telephoned Angela at her London office that afternoon. “She’s all ready,” I said. “Sails bent on, ma’am, ready to go.”

“Completely ready?”

“No radio, no navigation lights, no stove, no barometer, no chronometer, no compass, no bilge pumps, no anchors, no radar reflector, no…” I was listing all the things Fanny Mulder had stolen.

“They’re ordered, Nick,” Angela said impatiently.

“But she can sail,” I said warmly. “Sycorax is ready for sea. She awaits your bottle of champagne and your film crew.”

“That’s wonderful.” Angela did not sound very pleased, perhaps because I was finishing a boat that would take me away from her, which made my own enthusiasm tactless. There was a pause. “Nick?”

“There’s a train that leaves Totnes at twenty-six minutes past five this afternoon,” I said, “and it reaches London at—”

“Twenty-five minutes to nine,” she chimed in, and did sound pleased.

“I suppose I could just make it.” I made my voice dubious.

“You’d bloody well better make it,” she said, “or there’ll be no radio, no navigation lights and no stove.”

“Bilge pumps?”

She pretended to think about it. “Definitely no bilge pumps. Ever.” I made it.

Angela’s flat was a gloomy basement in Kensington. She only used it when Bannister was away, but the very fact that she had retained the flat spoke for her independence. At least I thought so. The flat had a somewhat abandoned feel. It was sparsely furnished, the plants had all long died of thirst, and dust was thick on shelves and mantelpiece. Papers and books lay in piles everywhere. It was the flat of a busy young woman who spent most of her time elsewhere.

“Next Tuesday,” she told me.

“What about it?”

“That’s when we’ll film Sycorax going to sea.”

“Not till then?”

She must have heard my disappointment. “Not till then.” She was sitting at her dressing-table wiping off her make-up. “We can’t do it till Tuesday because Monday’s the travelling day for the crew.”

“Why can’t they travel on Sunday?”

“You want to pay them triple time? Just be patient till Tuesday, OK?”

“High tide’s at ten forty-eight in the morning,” I said from memory, “and it’s a big one.”

“Does that matter?”

“That’s good. We’ll go out on a fast ebb.”

She leaned towards the mirror to do something particularly intricate to an eyelid. “There’s another reason it has to be Tuesday,” she said, and I heard the edge of strain in her voice.

“Go on.”

“Tony wants to be there.” She did not look at me as she spoke.

“It’s important that he’s there. I mean, the film is partly about how he helped you, isn’t it? And he wants to see Sycorax go to sea.”

“Does he want to be on board?”

“Probably.”

I lay in her bed, saying nothing, but feeling jealousy’s tug like a foul current threatening a day’s perfection. It was stupid to feel it, but natural. I knew that Angela’s prime loyalty was to Bannister, yet I resented it. I had lived these past weeks in a mist of happiness, revelling in the joys of a new love’s innocence, and now the real world was snapping shut on me. This present happiness was an il-lusion, and Bannister’s return was a reminder that Angela and I shared nothing but a bed and friendship.

She turned in her chair. She knew what I was thinking. “I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Don’t be.”

“It’s just that…” she shrugged, unable to finish.

“He has prior claim?”

“I suppose so.”

“And you have no choice?” I asked, and wished that I had not asked because I was betraying my jealousy.

“I’ve got choice.” Her voice was defiant.

“Then why don’t we sail Sycorax out on Sunday.” On Sunday Bannister would still be in France, even though Wildtrack had sailed for home three weeks before. “You come with me,” I said. “We’ll be in the Azores in a few days. After that we can make up our minds.

You want to see Australia again? You fancy exploring the Caribbean?”

She twisted her long hair into a hank that she laid up on her skull.

“I get sea-sick.”

“You’ll get over it in three days.”

“I never get over it.” She was staring into the mirror as she pinned up her hair. “I’m not a sailor, Nick.”

“People do get over it,” I said. “It takes time, but I promise it doesn’t last.”

“Nick!” I was pressing her too hard.

“I’m sorry.”

She stared at herself in the mirror. “Do you think I haven’t been tempted to get away from it all? No more of Tony’s insecurity, no more jealousy at work, no more sodding around with schedules and film stocks and worrying where the next good idea for a programme will come from? But I can’t do that, Nick, I can’t! If I was twenty years old I might do it. Isn’t that the age when people think the world will lap them in love and all they need do is show a little faith in it?

But I’m too old now.”

“Twenty-six is not old.”

“It’s too old to become a hippy.”

“I’m not a hippy.”

“What the hell else are you?” She shook a cigarette from its packet and lit it. “You think you’re going to drift around the world like a gypsy. Who’s going to pay you? What will you do when your leg collapses? What about your old age? It’s all right for you, Nick, you don’t seem to care. You think that it really will be all right, but I’m not like you.”

“You want to be safe.”

“Is that so bad?” she said belligerently.

“No. It’s just that I’m in love with you, and I don’t want to lose you.”

She stared at me. “Get a job, live in Devon. Can’t you parlay that medal into a job?”

“Maybe.”

She grimaced and stubbed out the cigarette she’d only just lit. She stood, walked round the bed, and dropped her bathrobe on to the floor. She stood naked, looking down on me. “Let’s make the film first, Nick, then worry about life?”

I threw back the bedclothes for her. “OK, boss.” She climbed in beside me. “You’ll stay tomorrow?” Tomorrow was Friday. “How about the whole weekend?”

“You know I can’t.” Bannister wanted her to go to France for the weekend. After Wildtrack’s successful series of races he had moved to the Riviera where he had been a judge at a television festival. That work was now completed and he wanted Angela to fly down for the festival’s closing celebrations. The plan was that she would fly to Nice on Friday evening, then return with Bannister on Monday morning and drive down to Devon that same afternoon.

We thus both sensed that this might be our last night of stolen freedom, for the old constraints would come back with Bannister’s return.

Angela left early next morning, going to the studios where she was rough-cutting the film that had been shot so far. I made myself coffee in her tiny kitchen, bathed in her tiny bathroom, then sat and made a list of the charts I wanted to buy. The list was very long, but the money was typically short so I cut the list down to the Azores and the Caribbean. Every fare to London denied Sycorax another clutch of charts, but I didn’t think Sycorax would deny me these visits. I looked at Angela’s few belongings; the untidy papers left over from the research of past programmes, a pretty watercolour on her wall, the old and decrepit teddy-bear that was the one thing she had brought from her childhood home.

The phone rang. I did not move. The telephone was connected to an answering machine and, when I was in the flat, I left the machine’s speaker turned up. If it was Angela calling me then I would hear her voice and know to pick up the telephone and switch off the machine. I hated the process, which struck me as a typical shift of adultery, but it was necessary. Sometimes Bannister called and I would listen to his peremptory voice delivering a curt message and the jealousy would spark in me.

This time I heard the usual tape of Angela’s voice apologizing that she could not answer the phone in person. Please speak after the tone, she said, and the tone dutifully blipped. There was a pause, and I thought the caller must have hung up, but then another familiar voice sounded. “Hi. You don’t know me. My name’s Jill-Beth Kirov. We met at Anthony Bannister’s house, remember? I’m kind of looking for Nick Sandman and I gathered you were filming him, and I wonder if you’d pass on a message to him? My number is—”

She broke off because I had switched off the answering machine and lifted the telephone. “Jill-Beth?”

“Nick! Hi!”

I was angry. “How the hell did you know I was here?”

“What’s the drama, Nick?” She sounded pained. “I was just trying to reach you. I didn’t know where you were. I was just going to leave messages everywhere. I need to talk with you, OK?” For a second I forgot my careful arrangements with Micky Harding. “I don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.” She paused. “You want to play hardball or softball, Nick?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, not understanding.

She sighed. “I once had to investigate a guy who had a boat pretty much like yours, Nick. His was a yawl, but it was really cute. He even had a figurehead, a mermaid with his wife’s face. He was real proud of that boat. It burned. It was a real tragedy. I mean the guy had put his life into that yawl, and one careless cigarette end and suddenly it’s the Fourth of July fireworks show.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Nick!” She sounded very hurt. “I just want to talk with you, OK?

What’s the harm in that?”

I remembered Micky Harding and his promise that the newspaper could ease me off Kassouli’s hook. “All right.” I spoke guardedly.

She suggested this very lunchtime and named a pub in Soho, but I didn’t know if I could find Micky that quickly. I didn’t even know if I could find him at all during the weekend. “I can’t meet till Monday,” I said, “and that’s the earliest, and I’ll be back in Devon by then.”

She paused, then sounded warily accepting. “OK, Nick.” She named a pub that I knew and a time.

I put the phone down. It seemed that Yassir Kassouli had not given up his pursuit of Bannister. The hounds of revenge were slipped and running, and I now had to head them into the light where they would be dazzled and confused by publicity. I telephoned Micky’s paper and tracked him down to the newsroom. I told him where and when I was supposed to meet Jill-Beth. “Can you make it?” I asked.

“I’ll make it.” I heard anticipation in his voice. He was already relishing the headlines: “Tycoon Plots Piracy!”, “Yank Billionaire Threatens UK Jobs,” or, more likely from Micky’s newspaper, “Piss Off Kassouli!”

Angela came home irritated because a film editor had taken off sick and she had needed him to cut a particular sequence and the replacement film editor was, she said, a butcher. She played the message tape on the phone. I’d rewound the spool after Jill-Beth’s call and the American girl’s voice had been overlaid with an invitation for lunch, a message about flights to Nice, and a call from an old acquaintance of Angela’s who just wanted to say hello.

“What she wants is a job,” Angela said scathingly. “What kind of a day did you have?”

“I bought two charts,” I said, “and discovered a million things I can’t afford.”

“Poor Nick.” She reached out a long thin hand and touched my cheek. “A friend has said I could borrow a cottage in Norfolk this weekend. There’s no phone there, and he’s got a dinghy in the creek.

A Heron dinghy? Does that makes sense?”

“A Heron makes much sense.” My joy at having Angela to myself all the weekend must have shown, but I still wanted to make certain of it. “And Nice?”

“Bugger Nice. I’ll tell Tony I’m too busy.” So we buggered Nice, and I did not tell Angela about Jill-Beth’s call. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to explain why I was meeting the American, nor did I care to say that I was only doing it because Micky would be there. Angela would have bridled at the thought of the bad publicity that would be flung at Bannister, and anyway I told myself I was only meeting Jill-Beth to end Kassouli’s interfer-ence. I thought I was taking care of the matter and I did not need Angela’s help, so I felt rather noble about it, and not in the least guilty, because, all things considered, and come Monday evening, Yassir Kassouli, just like Nice, would be buggered.

Micky Harding and I drove down to Devon on the Monday afternoon. I was nervous. “We’re taking on one of the richest men in the world, Micky. They threatened my bloody boat!”

“Ah.” Micky made the soothing noise sarcastically. “What we’re going to do, Nick, is screw the bastard.” He glanced at me as I twisted awkwardly to look through the back window. “You think we’re being followed?”

“No.” Instead I had been looking for Angela’s Porsche. She had gone to meet Bannister at Heathrow and, if they left directly for Devon, they could well overtake us on the road. I did not want to see them together. I was jealous. I’d just spent a weekend of gentle happiness with a small sailing boat and with Angela to myself. She had not even been sea-sick. But now, with the horrid crunch of a boat going aground, the real world was impinging on me.

Micky lit a cigarette. “You are bleeding nervous, mate, that’s what you are. I could do a story on that. VC revealed as a wimp.”

“I’m not used to this sort of thing.”

“Which is why you called in the reinforcements?”

“Exactly.”

The ‘reinforcements’ were waiting for us at a service area where the cafeteria offered an all-day breakfast and where Terry Farebrother was mopping up the remains of fried egg and brown sauce with a piece of white bread. I’ve never known a man eat so much as Sergeant Terry Farebrother; he wasn’t so much a human being as a cholesterol processor. Morning, noon and night he ate, and he never seemed to put an inch of fat on his stocky, hard body.

The one thing he’d hated about the Falklands was the uncertainty of meal times and I’d once watched him pick his way into an Argentinian minefield to salvage an enemy pack on the off chance that it might have contained a tin of corned beef. His moustached face was impassive as the two of us approached his table. “Bloody hell,” he greeted Micky Harding. “It’s the Mouse.”

The Mouse, who had known the Yorkshire sergeant in the Falklands, shook Terry’s hand. “You don’t improve with time, do you?”

“I’m just waiting till the Army takes over this country, Mouse, then I’m going to Fleet Street to beat up all the fucking fairies.”

“Not a chance,” Micky said. “We’ve got dolly-bird secretaries who’d crucify you pansies.”

Insults thus dutifully exchanged, Terry nodded a greeting to me and wondered aloud whether there was time to eat another plate of fried grease, but I said we should be moving on. “Shall I buy you a cheese sandwich?” I asked.

“Cheese gives me the wind something rotten. I’ll have a couple of bacon ones instead.” He half crushed my fingers with his handshake. “You’re looking better, boss. Sally said you looked like something the cat threw up.”

“How is Sally?”

“Same as ever, boss, same as ever. Bloody horrible.” Terry was in his civvies; a threadbare blue suit that was buttoned tight round his chest. He’d probably bought the suit the year before he entered the Army as a junior soldier and had never replaced it. He did not really need to, for Terry was one of those men who only look at home in camouflage or battledress. He was a bullock of a man; short, stubborn and utterly dependable. It was good to see him again. “No trouble,” he said when I asked if he’d had difficulties in getting away from the battalion. “They owed me leave after the bleeding exercise.”

“How was the exercise?”

“Same as ever, boss; a bloody cock-up. Got fucking soaked in a turnip field and then half sodding drowned in a river. And, of course, none of the bleeding officers knew where we were or what we were bloody doing. I tell you, mate”—this was to Micky—“if the Russkies ever do come, they’ll fuck through us like a red hot poker going up a pullet’s arse.”

“It’s not surprising, is it?” Micky asked, “when most of our soldiers are as delicate and fastidious as your good self?”

“There is that,” Terry laughed. “So what are we doing?”

“Nick’s nervous,” Micky said dismissively as we walked to the car.

I told Terry that I was indeed nervous, that I was meeting this American girl, and it was just possible, but extremely unlikely, that she might threaten my boat if I didn’t agree to do whatever she wanted, and so I would appreciate it if Terry sat on Sycorax until Micky and I got back to the river.

“Nothing’s going to happen.” Micky accelerated back on to the motorway. “You just get to sit on a bloody boat while it gets dark outside.”

Terry, eating the first of his cold bacon sandwiches, ignored Micky.

“So what will these buggers do? If they do anything?”

“Fire,” I said. Jill-Beth had hinted at arson, and it frightened me.

A hank of rags, soaked in petrol and tossed into the cockpit, would reduce Sycorax to floating ash in minutes. If I turned Jill-Beth’s pro-posal down, which I planned to do, Sycorax would be vulnerable, and never more so than in the hour it would take me to get back from our rendezvous to the river. That fear presupposed that Jill-Beth had already stationed men near the river; men whom she could alert by telephone. The whole scheme seemed very elaborate and fanciful now, but the fear had seemed very real as I had brooded on it during the weekend. Yassir Kassouli was a determined man, and a bitter one, and the fate of one small boat on a Devon river would be nothing to such a man. The fear had prompted me to phone the Sergeants’ Mess from the public phone in the Norfolk village. I’d left a message and Terry had phoned back an hour later. I’d told Angela I’d been talking to Jimmy Nicholls about anchor chains and, though I had hated telling her lies, they seemed preferable to explaining the complicated truth. Now, with Terry’s comforting solidity on my side, I wondered if I had over-reacted. “I don’t think anything will happen, Terry,” I confessed, “but I’m a bit nervous.”

“End of problem, boss. I’m here.” Terry slumped in the back seat and unwrapped another sandwich.

We reached the river two hours later and, as Micky waited on the road above Bannister’s house, I took Terry down through the woods and behind the boathouse to Sycorax. I saw two of Mulder’s crewmen preparing Wildtrack II in the boathouse, ready for tomorrow’s outing when she would be the camera platform for Sycorax’s maiden trip. I assumed, from their presence, that Mulder must have returned from his victorious Mediterranean foray, but I did not ask. I looked up at the house, but could see no one moving in the windows. I thought of Bannister sleeping with Angela tonight and an excruciating bite of jealousy gnawed at me.

The tide was low. Terry and I climbed down to Sycorax’s deck and I unlocked the cabin. I did not tell him about the hidden Colt, for I didn’t want his career ruined by an unlicensed firearm’s charge.

“Any food, boss?” he asked hopefully.

“There’s some digestive biscuits in the drawer by the sink, apples in the upper locker and beer under the port bunk.”

“Bloody hell.” He looked disgusted at the choice of food.

“And you might need these.” I dropped the two fire-extinguishers on the newly built chart table. Sycorax might lack a radio, pump, anchors, log, chronometer, compass, loo and a barometer, but I’d taken good care to buy fire-extinguishers. She was a wooden boat and her greatest enemy was not the sea but fire. “And if anyone asks you what you’re doing here, Terry, tell them you’re a mate of mine.”

“I’ll tell them to fuck off, boss.”

“I should be back by nine,” I said, “and we’ll go over the river for a pint.”

“And a baby’s head?” he asked hopefully.

“They do a very good steak and kidney pudding,” I confirmed.

If there was one certainty about this evening now, it was that Sycorax was safe. Kassouli would need an Exocet to take out Terry Farebrother, and even then I wasn’t sure the Exocet would win.

I limped back up through the woods and got into Micky’s car. We went north, threading the maze of deep lanes that led to Dartmoor.

I was silent, wondering just what we had got ourselves into, while Micky was ebullient, scenting a story that would splash itself across the headlines of two nations.

We climbed up to the moor. Low dark cloud was threatening from the west and I knew there would be lashing rain before the evening was done. We left the hedgerows behind, emerging on to the bare bleak upland where the wind sighed about the granite tors.

We were over an hour early reaching the village pub in the moor’s centre where Jill-Beth had said she would meet me. Micky took me into the pub’s toilet where he fitted me with the radio-microphone.

It was a small enough gadget. A plastic-coated wire aerial hung down one trouser leg, a small box the size of a pocket calculator was taped to the small of my back, and the tiny microphone was pinned under my shirt. “I’m going back to the bar,” Micky said, “so they don’t think we’re a couple of fruits, and you’re going to speak to me.” He had the receiver, together with a tape-recorder, in a big bag.

To hear what was being recorded he wore a thin wire which led to a hearing-aid.

The device worked. After the test we sat at a table and Micky gave me instructions. The transmitter was feeble and if I went more than fifty yards away from him he’d likely lose the signal. He said the microphone was undirectional and would pick up every sound nearby so I should try and lean as close to Jill-Beth as I could. “You won’t mind that, will you?” Micky said. “You fancy her, right?”

“I used to.”

“Fancy her again. Get in close, Nick. And keep an eye on me. If I can’t hear what she’s saying I’ll scratch my nose.”

“Is this how we trap one of the world’s richest men?” I asked.

“With nose-scratching and toy radios?”

“Remember Watergate. It all spilt out because some CIA-trained prick couldn’t tape up a door latch. You are suffering from the delu-sion that the world is run by efficient men. It isn’t, Nick. It’s run by constipated morons who couldn’t remember their own names if it wasn’t printed on their credit cards. Now, what are you going to say to her?”

“I’m going to tell her to get lost.”

“Nick! Nick! Nick!” he groaned. “If you tell the birdie to fuck off, she will. She’ll do a bunk and what will we have? Sweet FA, that’s what we’ll have. You have to chat her up! You have to go along with her, right? You’ve got to say all the things she wants you to say, so that she says all the things we want her to say. Especially, my son, you have to ask her just what Kassouli plans to do out there. Is he trying to knock Bannister off? Or is he just trying to scare the bastard? Got it?”

“Got it,” I said. “What about the money?”

Micky closed his eyes in mock despair. “God, you’re a berk, Nick.

You take the ruddy money! It’s proof!” He drained his whisky. “Are you ready for battle, my son?”

“I’m ready.”

“To war, then. And stop worrying. Nothing can go wrong.” He finished my whisky then took himself across the bar. I waited nervously. The pub slowly filled, mostly with hikers who shook water from their bright capes as they came through the door. It had begun to rain, though not heavily.

I switched from whisky to beer. I did not want to fuddle my wits, not with so much at stake. If I was successful this evening I would stop an obsessed millionaire from pulling thousands of jobs out of Britain. I would start a scandal in the newspapers. I would also drive Angela away from me, because I knew she would never forgive me for bringing Bannister’s name into the story. I had so often, and often unjustly, accused her of dishonesty, now she would say that I had been dishonest. She would say that I should have told her everything, and perhaps she was right.

But I was going to sea anyway, and that always meant an abandonment of loves left behind. I would render Kassouli’s threats impotent, then I would leave Bannister to make his attempt on the St Pierre and Angela to her ambitions. After tonight I would be free, and Sycorax and I would go to where the wind willed us.

I waited.

“Hi!” After Angela’s slender paleness, Jill-Beth looked tanned and healthy; a glowing tribute to vitamin tablets, exercise and native enthusiasm. I wondered why Americans were so often enthusiastic while we were so often drab. She was wearing a blue shirt, tight jeans and cowboy boots, as if she had expected a rodeo. She carried a raincoat and a handbag over her arm. She stooped to offer me a kiss, then sensed from my reaction that such a gesture was inappropriate. Instead she sat next to me. “How are you?” she asked. Her back was towards Micky who offered me a surreptitious thumbs-up to indicate that he could hear her through the concealed microphone.

“You’d like a beer?” I asked.

She shook her head. “How about going for a walk?”

“In this?” I gestured at the rain that was now blurring the window panes.

“I thought you were a soldier! Are you frightened of rain?” I was frightened of getting out of range of Micky’s radio, but Jill-Beth would not take a refusal, so I followed her on to the road where she pulled on the raincoat and tied a scarf over her hair. “Yassir says hi.”

“Great.”

She seemed not to notice my lack of enthusiasm; instead she opened the handbag and showed its contents to me. “One hundred thousand dollars, Nick. Tax-free.”

I stared at the tightly wadded notes, each wad bound in cello-phane. I’d never seen so much money in my life, but it didn’t seem real. I tried to look impressed, but in truth I found the situation ludicrous. Did Jill-Beth really believe I could be bought?

“It’s all yours.” She closed the bag. The rain was getting harder, but she seemed not to notice it as we crossed the bridge and headed towards Bellever Forest. I dared not look behind in case Jill-Beth also turned and saw Micky Harding’s ungainly figure following us.

My jacket was getting soaked and I hoped the microphone was not affected by damp. “Do we really have to walk in this muck?” I asked.

“We really do.” She said it very casually, then frowned with a sudden and genuine concern. “Are you hurting? Is that it?”

“A wee bit.”

She shrugged and took my arm, as though to help me walk. “I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t abide all that cigarette smoke in the pub.” She glanced up at the sky which was threatening an even heavier downpour. “Perhaps we’d better get into cover?” She led me into the pines of Bellever. The rain was too new to have dripped through the thick cover of needles and we walked in comparative dryness. I once heard a footfall behind us and knew that Micky had kept up. He’d be silently cursing me for dragging him out of the pub, but his sacrifice was small in comparison to the rewards that this evening would give him.

Jill-Beth let go of my arm and leaned against a tree trunk. For a moment neither of us spoke. I was awkward, and her self-assurance seemed strained. She offered me a quick smile. “It’s nice to see you again, Nick.”

“Is it?”

“You’re being hostile.”

She pronounced the word as ‘hostel’, and sounded so hurt that I could not resist smiling. “I’m not being hostile, it’s just that my back’s hurting.”

“You should see a doctor.”

“I did. She couldn’t help.”

“Then see an American doctor.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“They are expensive bastards,” she admitted.

We were both being wary, and I supposed that if I really was being

‘hostel’ then I was risking all the hard work that Micky had put into this meeting. I was here to convince this girl that I would help her, however reluctantly, and so I forced another smile. “Are you here to get me wet, or rich?”

She smiled back. “Does that mean you’re going to help us, Nick?” I was hopeless at telling lies, and did not think that an outright statement of compliance would be convincing. I shrugged, then began pacing beneath the trees as I spoke. “I don’t know, Jill-Beth.

I just don’t share your conviction that Bannister’s guilty. That worries me. I don’t like him, but I’m not sure that’s sufficient grounds for ruining his chances of the St Pierre.” I was making noises to cover my nervousness, then I realized that by pacing up and down I was constantly turning the microphone away from Jill-Beth. Not that she was saying much, except the odd acknowledgement, but I stopped and faced her.

She sighed, as though exasperated by my havering. “All you have to do, Nick, is sail on Bannister’s boat. You agree to do that, and you get one hundred thousand dollars now, and another three hundred thousand when it’s over.”

“I’ve already told him I won’t sail,” I said, as though it was an insuperable barrier to her ambitions.

She shrugged. “Would he believe you if you changed your mind?” It was very silent under the trees; the wind was muffled and the dead needles acted as insulation. It made our voices seem unnaturally loud.

“He’d believe me,” I said reluctantly.

“So tell him.”

“And if I don’t do it—” I was trying not to make my voice stilted, even though I was stating the obvious “—Kassouli will pull all his jobs out of Britain?”

She smiled. “You’ve got it. But not just his jobs, Nick. He’ll pull out his investments, and he’ll move his operations to the Continent.

And a slew of British firms can kiss their hopes of new contracts on American projects goodbye. It’ll be tough, Nick, but you’ve met him.

He’s a determined guy. Kassouli doesn’t care if he goes down for a few millions, he can spare them.”

I paused. It seemed to me that Micky must have struck his pure gold for, in a few sentences, Jill-Beth had described Kassouli’s threat and, with any luck, all that damning evidence must be spooling silently on to the take-up reel of Micky’s recorder. All I had to do now was cross the Ts and dot the Is. “And Kassouli won’t do that if I sail on Wildtrack? ”

“Right.” She said it encouragingly, as though I was a slightly dumb pupil who needed to be chivvied into achievement. “Because we need your help, Nick! You’re our one chance. Persuade Bannister to take you as Wildtrack’s navigator, and count your money!” It seemed odd to me that Yassir Kassouli, with all his millions, could only rely on me, but perhaps Jill-Beth was right. My arrival at Bannister’s house must have seemed fortuitous, so perhaps that explained her eagerness. I was a very convenient weapon to Bannister’s enemies, if I chose to be so. “And exactly what do I have to do?” I wanted her to spell it out for the microphone.

She showed no impatience at the pedantic question. “You just navigate a course that we’ll provide you.”

“What course?”

“Jesus! How do we know? That’ll depend on the weather, right?

All you have to do is keep a radio watch at the times we tell you, and that’s it. The easiest four hundred thousand you ever earned, right?”

I smiled. “Right.” That word, with its inflection of compliance, had been hard to say, yet I seemed to be convincing Jill-Beth with my act. And it was an act, a very amateur piece of acting in which I was struggling to invest each utterance with naturalness so that, consequently, my words sounded heavy and contrived. Yet, it occurred to me as I tried to seek my next line, Jill-Beth herself was just as mannered and awkward. I should have noted that with more interest, but instead I asked her what would happen when I had navigated Wildtrack to wherever I was supposed to take her.

“Nothing happens to you. Nothing happens to the crew.”

“But what happens to Bannister?”

“Whatever Yassir wants.” She said it slowly, almost as a challenge, then watched for my reaction.

I was silent for a few seconds. Jill-Beth’s words could be taken as an elliptical hint of murder, but I doubted whether she would be more explicit. I think she expected me to bridle at the hint, but instead I shrugged as though the machinations of Kassouli’s revenge were beyond me. “And all this,” I asked with what I thought was a convincing tone of reluctant agreement, “on the assumption that Bannister murdered his wife?”

“You got it, Nick. You want the hundred thousand now?” I should have said yes. I should have accepted it, but I baulked at the gesture. It might have been a necessary deception, but the entrapment was distasteful.

“For Christ’s sake, Nick! Are you going to help us or not?” Jill-Beth thrust the handbag towards me. “You want it? Or are you just wasting my time?”

I was about to accept, knowing the money was the final proof that Micky needed, when a strangled shout startled me. It was a man’s cry, full of pain.

I turned, but instantly, and treacherously, my right leg numbed and collapsed. I fell and Jill-Beth ran past me. I cursed my leg, knelt up, and forced myself to stand. I used my hands to straighten my right leg, then, half limping and half hopping, staggered on from tree to tree. I wondered whether my leg would always collapse at moments of stress.

I found Jill-Beth twenty yards further on, stooping, and I already knew what it was she crouched beside.

It was Micky. There was fresh vivid blood on his scalp, on his wet shirt, and on his hands. He was alive, but unconscious and breathing very shallowly. He was badly hurt. The bag lay spilt beside him and I saw the radio receiver but no sign of the small tape-recorder.

Whoever had hit Micky had also stolen the evidence.

“Did you bring him?” Jill-Beth looked at me accusingly.

“Get an ambulance.” I snapped it like a military order.

“Did you bring—”

“Run! Dial 999. Hurry!” She would be twice as fast as I could be.

“And bring blankets from the pub!”

She ran. I knelt beside Micky and draped my jacket over him. I tore a strip of cotton from my shirt-tail and padded it to staunch the blood that flowed from his scalp. Head wounds always bleed badly, but I feared this was more than a cut. He’d been hit with too much power, and I suspected a fractured skull. Blood had soaked into the dry brown needles that now looked black in the encroaching and damp twilight. I stroked his hand for, though he was unconscious, he would need the feel of human warmth and comfort.

I felt sick. I’d guarded Sycorax against Kassouli, but I had not thought to guard Micky. So who had done this? Kassouli? Had Jill-Beth brought reinforcements? Had she suspected that I might try to blow Kassouli’s scheme wide open? Those questions made me wonder whether she would phone an ambulance and, leaving Micky for a few seconds, I struggled to the edge of the trees and stared towards the village. My right leg was shaking and there was a vicious pulsing pain in my spine. I wasn’t sure I could limp all the way to the village, but if Jill-Beth let me down then I would have to try.

I cursed my leg, massaged it, then, as I straightened up, I saw headlights silhouetting running figures at the bridge. I limped back to Micky. He was still breathing, grunting slightly.

Footsteps trampled into the trees. Efficient men and women, trained to rescuing lost hikers from the moors, came to Micky’s rescue. There was no need to wait for an ambulance for there was a Rescue Land-Rover nearby which could take him to hospital. He was carefully lifted on to a stretcher, wrapped in a space blanket, and given a saline drip.

I limped beside him to the Land-Rover and watched it pull away towards the road. Someone had phoned the police and now asked me if I’d wait for their arrival. I said I wanted to go to the hospital, then remembered that Micky still had the car keys.

“I’ll drive you,” Jill-Beth said.

I hesitated.

“For Christ’s sake, Nick!” She was angry that I did not trust her.

She held out her car keys. “Do you want to take my car?” I let her drive me. “Who is he?” she asked.

“A newspaper reporter.”

“You’re a fool,” she said scornfully.

“Not me!” I snapped. “You’re the bloody fool! Just because Kassouli’s rich doesn’t mean that he’s right!”

“His daughter was murdered!”

“And who did that to Micky?” I waved towards the Land-Rover which was a mile ahead of us on the road. “You brought your thugs along, didn’t you?”

“No!” she protested.

“Then who, for Christ’s sake?”

She thought about it for a few seconds. “Did you drive straight here from London?”

“No. I went…” I paused. I’d gone to Bannister’s house and seen evidence that Fanny Mulder was there. I hadn’t thought, not once, to check that anyone had followed Micky and I to the moor. “Oh, Jesus,” I said hopelessly. “Mulder.”

Jill-Beth shrugged, as if to say that I’d fetched this disaster on myself. We drove in silence until we reached the hospital where the Land-Rover was standing at the entrance to the casualty department. An empty police car, its blue light still flashing, was parked in front of it.

Jill-Beth killed her engine. “I guess this means you’re not going to help us, Nick?”

“I won’t be the hangman for a kangaroo trial.”

“You don’t want the money?” she asked.

“No.”

Jill-Beth shrugged. “It wasn’t meant to be this way, Nick.”

“What wasn’t?”

“Americans against the Brits. Truly it wasn’t. Kassouli believes his daughter was murdered. If you shared that belief you’d be helping us.”

I opened the car door. “It isn’t America against us,” I said; “it’s just a conflict of old-fashioned honesty, that’s all. You don’t have proof. You don’t have anything but suspicion. You’re playing games to make a rich man happy, and if he was a poor man you wouldn’t be doing it at all.”

She watched me get out of the car. “Goodbye, Nick.” I didn’t reply. She started the motor, put it in gear and drove away.

The hospital smelt of disinfectant. It brought back memories I didn’t want. I waited beneath posters which told me to have my baby vaccinated and that VD was a contagious disease. I waited for news that, at last, was brought to me by a very young detective constable.

Mr Harding had a fractured skull and three broken ribs. He was unconscious. Why had I come to the hospital and asked after him?

Because he was a friend of mine.

Had I seen the accident? No.

Was I aware that Mr Harding was a newspaper reporter? Yes.

Was I a newspaper reporter? No.

Had we gone to the moor together? Yes.

Why had I not seen the incident? Because I’d gone into the trees for a piss.

Did I know who had assaulted Mr Harding? No. Privately I was certain it was Mulder, but I could not prove it, so I repeated my denial.

How had I reached the hospital? In a friend’s car.

Who was the friend? No one who mattered.

Would I go to the police station and give a statement? No, I would not.

I refused because it would be so utterly hopeless to explain. I was to accuse one of the world’s richest men of threatening economic blackmail against Britain? I felt suddenly tired. And scared. Mulder, if he had the tape, would already be on his way back to Bannister.

I needed to reach the river and stop Terry Farebrother murdering Mulder, because Mulder, as likely as not, would look for me on Sycorax. The last thing I needed to do now was sit in a police station and spin a tale that would most likely land me in the nearest mental hospital. “Mister Harding’s just an old friend,” I told the policeman.

“We went to the moor for a walk, nothing more.”

“In the rain?”

“In the rain.”

The policeman, professionally suspicious, looked at me with distaste. “Very close friends, you and him?”

“Fuck off, sonny boy.”

He closed his notebook. “I think you’re coming to the station whether you want to or not.”

“No,” I said. “I’m going home. And what you’re going to do is telephone Inspector Harry Abbott. You know him? Tell him I need a lift home bloody fast. Tell him the Boer War has broken out. So open your book and write down my name. Captain Nicholas Sandman. And remember the bit about the Boer War. Do it!” I snapped the last two words as if I was back in the battalion.

The policeman had read too many thrillers. “Is this special business, sir?” He stressed the word ‘special’.

“It isn’t your business. Phone him. Now.”

I knew Abbott would give me hell when he got the chance, but he came through like a trooper on the night. I got my lift home. I told the copper to stop the car at the top of the hill and that I’d walk the rest of the way.

I was scared. Mulder was on the warpath, and didn’t know just what an evil-minded bastard was minding the boat. Micky Harding was unconscious. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d screwed up.

Things had gone wrong.

I stopped halfway down the wooded slope. The tide was rising in the river. The rain was lessening now, but it was still driven by a brisk westerly wind that shook the branches above my head. I was soaked to the skin. There were lights in Bannister’s house, but none down by the boathouse or near my wharf.

I went like a wraith down that slope. It was hard, for I was out of practice and my limp made me awkward, but I went as though I was on night patrol and a trigger-happy bastard with a full magazine waited for me. I stared for a long time at the shadows behind the boathouse. Nothing moved there, and nothing moved when I flicked a piece of earth into the rhododendrons to stir a hidden watcher’s attention.

I crept down the last stretch of the hill and hid myself in the boathouse shadows. “Terry?”

“Been listening to you for the last ten minutes, boss. Bleeding noisy, aren’t you?”

Relief flooded me. “Any trouble?”

“Not a bloody flicker. How did you get on?”

“Bloody disaster. Mouse got stitched up. We should have had you there, not here.” I climbed down on to Sycorax’s deck. “Poor bugger’s in hospital. Lost the bloody tape, too. Anything happened here?”

“One car arrived ten minutes after you’d gone. Another came an hour ago.”

The first car would have been Bannister and Angela, the second Mulder. I suspected Mulder was in the house now with Micky’s tape. He was telling Bannister and Angela that I’d met Jill-Beth Kirov on the moor. The implication was that I had been plotting against Bannister all along. The tape would bear that interpretation, too, but it was also possible that it would serve to warn Bannister of the real dangers of attempting the St Pierre. At this moment, though, I cared more about what Angela might be thinking of me. I stared up the slope to where a dark figure flitted across a lit window of the house. “I’m going up there,” I said to Terry.

“Want me?”

“Yes, but keep out of sight.”

I was going to the house because I could not let Angela think that I had betrayed her. I wanted her to know what had happened, and why I had met Jill-Beth. I would explain everything, not only to her, but to Bannister as well. Things had become muddled, but now was the time to let truth untangle the mess. That’s the advantage of truth; it cuts through all the deception and muddle. I like truth.

Terry and I climbed the steep lawn and went on to the wide terrace. Terry whistled softly when he saw the luxury through the big windows. “Bleeding hell, boss. She’s tasty.” The tasty one was Angela, who looked expensive and beautiful in black trousers and a lilac shirt. She was sitting, head bowed, apparently listening, and I could see the spools of a big tape-recorder revolving. The machine was part of the bank of electronic gadgets that decorated one end of the room. Bannister stood behind Angela’s chair while Mulder and two of his crewmen stood respectfully to one side.

“Stay hidden, Terry,” I said.

The sliding doors were not locked and everyone in the room jumped as I pulled one of the great glass panes aside. I heard my own voice coming from the tape-recorder, then Angela leaned forward and used the remote control to switch it off.

They all stared at me and I had the ridiculous notion that this was a scene out of a detective play when, at the end of the last act, everyone is gathered in the drawing-room to hear the culprit revealed. They seemed frozen by my appearance, as if caught in a flash photograph, then the tableau broke as Mulder moved towards me.

“Leave him!” Bannister’s sudden command stopped Mulder, who contented himself with a threatening and derisive stare. Bannister shuddered as though he found it hard to even speak to me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came here to explain.” Rainwater dripped from my clothes on to the expensive carpet.

“You hardly need to explain.” Bannister clicked his fingers at Angela. “Rewind it, then play it to Captain Sandman.” He paused, then added with withering scorn, “VC.”

“I know what’s on the tape…” I began.

“Shut up!” Bannister shouted the command. Whatever courage he had lacked in the past was evident now; stung into the light by what he had heard on the tape.

But if Bannister was showing a new side to his character, Angela’s demeanour was as it used to be before the rainy day when we had come together in this same room. Her face was a cold, pale mask of dislike. I caught her eyes once and there was not even a flicker of recognition in them. She leaned forward and I listened to the scribbling squall of a tape going backwards, there was a click, then Jill-Beth’s eager, friendly, American voice filled the room. “Because we need your help, Nick! You’re our one chance. Persuade Bannister to take you as Wildtrack’s navigator, and count your money!”

“And exactly what do I have to do?” My voice was much louder than Jill-Beth’s, but the microphone had worked only too well and her words were quite distinct.

“You just navigate a course that we’ll provide you.”

“What course?”

“Jesus! How do we know? That’ll depend on the weather, right?

All you have to do is keep a radio watch at the times we tell you, and that’s it. The easiest four hundred thousand you ever earned, right?”

“Right.” There was a pause before my voice sounded again. “And what happens when we reach wherever it is that we’re going?”

“Nothing happens to you. Nothing happens to the crew.”

“But what happens to Bannister?”

“Whatever Yassir wants.”

“And all this on the assumption that Bannister murdered his wife?”

“You got it, Nick. You want the hundred thousand now?” Jill-Beth’s voice sounded eager; then there was nothing but the magnetic hiss of empty tape.

Angela leaned forward, turned off the tape-recorder, and stood up. “You bastard!” She turned away from me and stalked out of the room.

“It isn’t…” I had been going to say that the truth was not what they had heard on the tape, but Bannister, goaded to fury by hearing the damning evidence once more, shouted that I was to be quiet.

Mulder took one threatening step forward and rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. His two crewmen looked nervous, but willing.

Bannister flinched as the door slammed behind Angela, then repeated her insult. “You bastard.”

“I turned the offer down,” I said. “I only wanted to hear what they planned to do.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Don’t be such a bloody idiot!” I snapped back. “Ask the police about a poor bastard called Micky Harding who’s unconscious in hospital right now! He’s a newspaper reporter.”

“He’s lying,” Mulder said laconically.

“And how the hell did you get that tape?” I demanded.

“I followed you,” Mulder said coldly.

“Why?” I demanded. Mulder did not answer, and I pressed on in the belief that I had regained some of the initiative. “And why, for Christ’s sake, would I be wired for sound? Why in hell’s name would I risk doing that if I was on their side?”

“To make sure they wouldn’t double-cross you, of course.” Mulder’s staccato voice was bleak.

“Micky Harding’s a newspaper reporter,” I said to Bannister, “and your thug beat him half dead.” It was clear from Bannister’s face that I was wasting my words. He was a media man, and for him a tape could not tell a lie. His world lay on tape and film, and my betrayal was proven by the magnetic ribbon. He stood between me and the tape-recorder as though he feared I might try and snatch the damning spool. “I’m through with you, Sandman.”

“You know Harry Abbott,” I said to him. “Phone him up! Ask him!”

Mulder moved so that he stood between Bannister and myself.

“Why did you go to America?” Mulder challenged me.

I was surprised by the question and I hesitated. I’d told Angela the truth, but no one else.

My hesitation looked like guilt, and Mulder mocked it with a smile. “You said your mother was dying. So what about this, liar?” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded glossy newspaper that he tossed on to the carpet by my feet. “Front page, liar.”

It was an in-house news-sheet from Kassouli Enterprises, Inc. of New York, and on the front page, ringed in damning red ink, was the photograph of Jill-Beth and I which had been taken in Kassouli’s Cape Cod garden. At the time I’d told the photographer I was nobody, just John Brown, but the caption said that Miss Jill-Beth Kirov, daughter of Rear-Admiral Oscar Kirov, USN, had been squired to a reception at Mr Yassir Kassouli’s summer residence by Captain Nicholas Sandman, VC.

“Well?” Mulder’s voice reeked of victory.

“Who the hell sent this to you?”

“What does that matter? They sent two.” He took another copy of the news-sheet from his pocket and gave it to Bannister.

Bannister read it. I was at sea suddenly, my reasons swamped by this sudden twist. Mulder, in total control, stepped towards me.

“You’ve done nothing but lie. You saved the American girl that night and you’ve been playing her game ever since. What else have you done, Sandman? Filed down a turnbuckle? Cut some warps? I think you just lost yourself a boat, Sandman. How else is Mister Bannister to recoup his losses?”

Bannister looked up from the paper. “What were you planning to do? Kill us all at sea?”

“I was trying to save your miserable life!” I shouted past Mulder’s hulking figure.

“And where’s the hundred thousand?” Mulder demanded.

“There isn’t any money! I turned them down.”

“You pathetic little bastard.” Mulder was triumphant in his victory. “You scummy cripple. The money’s on your boat, isn’t it?”

“Get stuffed.” It was a feeble response. I tried to think of an argument that might convince Bannister of my honesty, but the evidence against me was too overwhelming.

“You want me to get the money?” Mulder asked Bannister.

“There isn’t any, you fool!” I backed towards the window.

“Stop him, Fanny!” Bannister said. “Then search his damned boat.” Fanny lunged towards me, and I twisted aside. “Now!” I snapped the word and Terry Farebrother appeared as if from nowhere. He made no sound. He must have been waiting just beside the window and he had been keyed up for this moment. If anyone in the room was astonished by his appearance they had no chance to display it before he crouched in front of Mulder who, dismissive of the much smaller man, went to push him aside.

Mulder stopped dead, then screamed. It was a horrid, almost feminine noise. Terry straightened up and I could not see what grip he was using, but I could see that Mulder was sinking to his knees.

The two crew members started forward and I snatched up a stone statuette that I swung like a short club. The threat checked them. I noted that Bannister made no move; he just gaped at the sudden violence which, with splintering speed, suddenly became more sickening as Terry swung his body, kicked with his right foot, and I heard a crunch as Mulder’s nose was broken. The South African was finished, but our regiment never believed in half measures, and Terry felled the big man with a blow to his sternum. Mulder collapsed in breathless pain and Terry turned on the two crew men.

“Come on, you fuckers.” He was moving towards them, beckoning them to him, but they, seeing Mulder’s agony, hung back. Bannister was white-faced and motionless.

“Come on!” That was me, shouting at Terry. I did not want to use his name, nor his rank, because by identifying him I could risk him having to face disciplinary proceedings. He had appeared like a small, very nasty force, and he had utterly cowed the room with his economical and swift violence. Now it was time to get him out before his face became memorable. “Come on!” I discarded my unused club. Mulder was writhing and gasping, his face bloodied, while Terry and I were doing the classic thing: shoot and scoot. Hit the bastards, then run like hell before they can muster reinforcements.

“Phone the police!” Bannister shouted.

Terry and I were already in the rainswept darkness. I was limping as fast as I could and Terry was staying with me, covering my retreat.

“Did I do the right thing, boss?”

“God, yes.” Why hadn’t Bannister believed me? God damn it, but he was a fool! And Angela! The look she had given me before she stalked from the room had been one of pure reproach. More than that, a look of derisive hatred because she believed I had betrayed both her and Bannister.

I slipped on the grass, thought for a second that my damned leg was about to fold up on me, but it had only been a damp patch of lawn that had made me lurch. The sudden movement wrenched pain in my back, but the leg was still strong. I looked to see if anyone was following us, but Terry had plainly terrified them. Terry himself, high on the adrenalin of a successful fight, chuckled. “Orders, boss?”

“We get the fuck out of here. On Sycorax. You do the springs, then cast off the bow warp. Leave the stern till last.” Terry had sailed with me before and knew what he was doing.

But did Sycorax know? She had been out of commission for over six months, she was untested, and I had to take her to sea in a fretting wind against a flood tide. I dragged the mainsail cover back, lifted the boom, and fumbled with the topping lift. I saw Angela appear on the balcony of Bannister’s bedroom. She was staring down at me.

“Micky Harding!” I shouted at her. “Phone Inspector Abbott!” She turned away. “Springs and warp off!” Terry shouted at me.

“Standing by!”

The tide was swinging Sycorax’s bows off the wall. She was moving in the water at last.

“Let’s go!” The stern warp splashed off the wharf and Sycorax was unleashed. “Peak halliard, Terry!”

I did not trust the engine to start quickly, if at all. We were drifting on the tide and I needed a sail to give me some power. “Haul her up!”

I heard the rattle of the halliard and the flap of the big sail. It rose stiffly, stretching to the night wind, and there was a sudden creak as the starboard shrouds took the mast’s weight and I felt a sudden surge of joy. It was not how I had imagined it, not in the least how I had dreamed of it, but Sycorax and I were going to sea.

“Did you kill that big guy?” I asked Terry.

“Christ, no!” He was scornful. “Just brought some tears to his fucking eyes. Have you got a light down here?”

“Only an oil-lamp.”

He swore again. He had taken the companionway off to reveal the engine and was now trying to swing it into life. “Why can’t you get a decent fucking motor?”

“Can’t afford it.” I pegged the tiller. “Throw up the yellow sail bag, Terry.”

He struck a match, found the sail bag, and heaved it into the cockpit. I struggled forward with the heavy load. I hanked on the jib’s head, ran its tack along the bowsprit with the traveller, then hoisted away. I tied the sheets on to the sail and threw them back towards the cockpit. I heard Terry swear at the motor again and I told him to abandon it and hoist the mizzen. I could see figures standing on Bannister’s terrace. Would the police be waiting at the river’s mouth? I dragged the staysail from its bag and fumbled with its shackle. Terry had to unpeg the tiller and adjust our course as I pulled the sail up. My back was hurting.

I rove the foresails’ sheets through their fairleads, hauled the port sheets tight, and took over the tiller. We had no running lights, no compass, nothing but the boat, the sails and a pig of an engine that wouldn’t start. Terry had gone below again, had lit the chart table’s oil-lamp, and now swung the engine’s handle. Nothing.

The wind was made tricky by the western hills. At moments it seemed to die completely, then it would back suddenly to gust in a wet squall. Sycorax was in confusion. She had not been ready for sea, but to sea she was going. I heard the blessed sound of water running by her hull. We were clearing Sansom’s Point which at last hid the lights of Bannister’s house from us.

“Topsail, Terry. Remember how to do it?”

“Yes, boss.”

We now had jib, staysail, main, top and mizzen, and Sycorax was leaning to the wind, hissing the water, taking us fast down the river’s buoyed channel. Fast, though, was a relative term. We were moving through the water, but the tide was moving against us. Our motion felt fast enough, but from the bank we would be creeping at less than walking pace. I was also uncomfortably aware that Wildtrack II’s sharp bows might appear at any moment.

Terry, the topsail hoisted, came back to the cockpit. “What happened, boss?”

“Two rich men are having a row. Both tried to involve me. Bannister thought I’d joined the other side. Now he wants Sycorax.” Terry took that lot on board, then squatted below the coaming to light a cigarette. “I thought Bannister was a decent bloke. He seems nice on the telly. Sally always watches his programme.”

“He’s a bloody wally,” I said savagely, “and he wants to take Sycorax.”

“Sod him, then.” Terry complacently accepted my judgement.

“Exactly.” But I was thinking of that look of mingled remorse and hatred which Angela had shot at me. She thought I was the enemy, that I had betrayed her. God damn it, I thought, but my emotions had become inextricably tangled with her. “Bloody women,” I said.

“Bloody engine.” Terry had gone back to the struggle, swung the handle again, and by some miracle the old engine banged into protesting life. “Give it some throttle, boss!” I gave it some throttle, it threatened to die, then the cylinders settled into a proper, comforting rhythm and I slammed it into gear and Sycorax thrust forward against the tide.

“Where are we going?” Terry asked.

“I don’t have a clue.” I’d been trying to answer that myself. I needed to hide Sycorax from Bannister’s bailiffs. The only refuge I could think of was George Cullen’s boatyard on the Hamoaze. “Plymouth,” I suggested. “When do you have to be in barracks?”

“Fourteen hundred. Tomorrow.”

“It’ll be tight. You want me to drop you off at the town quay?” He glanced behind. “Will those buggers chase you?”

“They might.”

“I’ll stay.”

They followed us. The first I saw of our pursuers was a gleam of reflected lamplight from Wildtrack II’s polished bows. We were already abaft the town quay and the powerboat was a mile behind.

It could close the gap in seconds if it wanted, but clearly Bannister, or whoever was at Wildtrack II’s helm, did not want to make an interception in full view of the quay. The powerboat hung back.

Our engine began to run rough. The diesel fuel was old, and I suspected there was water mixed in it. I hated bloody engines. There had been many times when I had been tempted to haul the damn thing out and sink it, but Terry coaxed it and we limped on. Someone shouted at us from the quay that we had no lights.

The headlands that marked the river mouth closed on us. I could feel the wind’s uncertainty as it was confused by the masses of land.

Rain was slapping on the sails. There was white water at the bar and it would be a rough passage. The engine was missing a beat now, thumping horribly in its bearings. “Kill it!” I shouted. I didn’t want the shaft to shake the gland loose and let in sea water.

The engine died just as the bows juddered to the first sea. Sycorax was free at last, running to the ocean she was made for. Her sails were full and behind her the water whitened and spread. She took the steep, breaking seas like a thoroughbred and I whooped for the joy of the moment.

Terry grinned. “Happy, boss?”

“I should have done this bloody weeks ago!”

“And what about those bastards?” Terry nodded towards the river mouth where Wildtrack II had appeared.

“Screw them.” I gave him the tiller and set about trimming the sails. The topsail yard and jackyard were loose, the topping lift needed slackening and the foresail halliards tightening. We were heading westward, along the coast, and we were hard on the wind.

We went perilously close to the Calfstone Shoal from which a breaking wave shredded foam across our bows. The rain was slackening, and there were gaps in the southern cloud that were edged by silver moonlight. Sycorax was slicing the wind and cutting into a head sea. The waves were big enough to dip her bows low and I saw the jib’s foot come up dripping with water and there had been a time when I thought I’d never live to see that sight again. I was happy.

Except Wildtrack II still threatened us. “Bastards are closing!” Terry shouted.

I’d deliberately put Sycorax head to wind, and close to the Calfstone, in the hope that Wildtrack II, emerging at speed from the river mouth, might run aground on the shoal. It was a slender hope, and one that failed. I twisted in the cockpit to watch the slinking powerboat. I did not think they were likely to ram us. Most likely Wildtrack II had been sent to follow Sycorax and to betray our final position so the bailiffs could find us. Bannister, I thought, would be remorseless in his revenge on me, just as Kassouli was remorseless in his revenge on Bannister.

The night was not my helper. The sky was clearing. Soon we would be thrashing west under moonlight and would be in full sight of Wildtrack II without a hope of losing the powerboat. I needed time to think. I also needed to be comfortable. I was wet through and shivering. Terry was in the same discomfort and I told him to go below and find some warm clothes.

“Some proper bloody food would help, boss.” I fell off the wind slightly to put the floodtide on the starboard bow. I saw how gracefully the rebuilt Sycorax took the seas. It was a promise of what she would do with the bigger seas that waited in the years ahead. I trimmed her, belayed the sheets and pegged the tiller. She could sail herself now until we had cleared the transit of Start Point and could turn due west again. It would be a long hard thrash until the current ebbed, but we had all night.

I fetched my monocular and trained it on Wildtrack II. It was hard to hold her in sight, and harder still to see who was on board. I could see three men. No Angela. I thought I saw a man with a bandaged face, who had to be Mulder. “Could that fellow you clobbered be walking by now?” I asked Terry.

“Bloody hell, yes.” Terry tossed me up a sweater and oilskin jacket. “I only tapped the fucker.”

I wondered if Mulder had brought his shotgun, but surely they would not plan murder? Then the thought occurred that if Kassouli was right, these men had already committed one murder at sea. I stared at the powerboat. It was taking the seas badly, rearing its slick hull high on the wavecrests, then slamming down in discomfort.

Would they try and end the discomfort by sinking Sycorax? I couldn’t lose the thought of the shotgun. “Terry?”

“Boss?”

“If you feel under the engine you’ll find a wooden box screwed to a frame on the starboard side. There’s a package in it. Can you get it?”

He lifted off the companion steps and I heard him grunt as he groped in the bilge’s darkness. “Jesus,” he said as he felt the shape of the package. “Is that the bloody Colt I kept for you?”

“I don’t want to use it, not unless I have to.”

“No, boss.” He sounded disappointed.

“But unwrap it. Then get some sleep.”

Wildtrack II was still holding her distance. There were two fishing boats in sight, and I wondered if their presence was inhibiting Mulder. The beam of the Start Point light slid across the sky. I was sailing south now, aiming to go outside the tidal race at the Point.

Wildtrack II was shadowing us. The powerboat was showing a white light at the top of its radar arch, another at its stern, and the proper red and green sidelights. My pursuers were letting me know where they were, and letting me know that I could not escape them.

They kept abreast of us for the three hours it took to claw past Start Point. There was a deeper swell offshore, and Sycorax seemed to revel in the longer, higher seas. She felt hard and good, well rigged and confident. But in the morning, I thought, just as soon as I put into shelter, Bannister’s lawyers would descend on her with a writ. I had no idea how such a process was initiated, or how it was fought; only that I would be damned if Bannister took my boat from me. I had a talent, I reflected bitterly, for the making of wealthy enemies. First Kassouli, now Bannister. And all I had tried to be was truthful.

Terry slept for an hour, then came blinking up into the moonlight.

“Still there?” he asked of Wildtrack II.

“Still there.” We were on a port tack now and the powerboat was further out to sea. She was probably using her radar to follow us, but Sycorax made a small target, I had no reflector hoisted, and there were fishing boats about to give confusing echoes, and so Wildtrack II was staying well within easy visual range. A container ship, brilliant with deck lights, steamed eastwards beyond her. I was certain now that Bannister only wanted to discover my destination, but I was determined to lose him. “I think,” I said slowly, “that it’s time to scare the fuckers off. I’m going to tack.” Terry handled the foresails’ sheets. Sycorax, never graceful in a tight turn, lurched round and settled on to the starboard tack. I let her off the wind, slackening the mainsheet into a broad reach so that we were running directly at our pursuers. “He’s going to try and avoid us, Terry, but he won’t really know what we’re doing. So be ready for some smart manoeuvres. And get the gun. You’ll need a couple of extra mags.”

He gave me a surprised glance, but said nothing. He fetched the Colt, came back to the cockpit, and worked a round into the breech.

“What we’re going to do,” I said, “is scare the bugger witless.

You’re not going for the crew, but for the boat. Aim for the waterline or the engines. If you think there’s the least danger of hitting any of the crew, don’t fire. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.” The “sir” was unconscious. He put the safety on, then thrust the pistol into a pocket of his oilskin jacket.

I used the monocular again, training it forward, and this time I clearly saw both Bannister and Mulder standing in the powerboat’s cockpit. They were staring at Sycorax, doubtless wondering just what we intended, then they must have decided that we meant no good, for I saw Bannister bend down to the throttles and the boat dipped its stern as she accelerated away.

“Tacking!” I shouted. We tacked. Terry sheeted the headsails across, we tightened up, and were clawing almost head into the wind. The breeze seemed stronger, slicing over the coachroof and bringing a sting of spray from the bows. “Watch the bugger for me, Terry!”

“He’s having a think, boss.”

Wildtrack II, having gone ahead of us, had now slowed again.

I felt the tremble of water under Sycorax’s hull. We pitched once and the bows slammed down with a thump which banged back through the boat’s skeleton. The waves were building. The wind was noisy in the rigging and was slatting the leading edges of the sails. I was pointing her up as much as I could, still aiming her bowsprit like a spear at Wildtrack II’s flank. “Where is he?”

“He’s putting his foot down.”

The powerboat, still puzzled by our behaviour, had accelerated again. She was going inshore of us now, perhaps planning to circle around to take position on our stern. I matched her move, spilling wind so that we were running north before the wind and banging into the cross seas. She was a hundred yards away, running across our bows, and I could see three faces staring from the cockpit.

“Turning to port,” I warned Terry. “Get ready to fire!” He brought out the gun and cradled it in two big and capable hands.

I turned back into the wind and hardened the sails. Now it looked as if we’d stopped playing games and resumed our westward progress. As I’d guessed and hoped, Wildtrack II also slowed. Her bows began to turn towards us. She was circling to follow us and, at its closest, her turn would bring her to within thirty paces. Long range for a Colt, but I wasn’t after pinpoint accuracy.

I watched the powerboat. I was falling off the wind a touch, slowing and widening our own turn to close the range. Wildtrack II was also slowing. The sea was bucking Sycorax, thumping her hull and shaking her sails. “You’re going to have ten seconds!” I shouted at Terry. “For Christ’s sake don’t hit anyone, but go for his hull! Aim as far for’rard as possible and as close to the waterline as you can.”

“Got it, boss.” He grinned, and I heard the snick of the safety going off, then the slam of the gun being cocked. He crouched on the starboard cockpit thwart, steadied by the coaming and the cabin bulkhead. The movement of our boat, and the heaving of the target, would make accuracy almost impossible and I prayed that Terry would not hit any of the three men. I almost told him to hold his fire, but then, when we were just thirty yards from the Wildtrack II, a wave heaved her up and I saw an expanse of her anti-fouling revealed in the moonlight. “Fire!”

Terry held the gun two-handed, braced himself, and opened fire at the speedboat’s belly.

The noise was just like a sail flogging in a gale. The old sailors used to say the wind was blowing great guns when their canvas banged aloft and made a noise like cannons, and now the Colt filled the sea with the same murderous sound. The muzzle flash leaped two feet clear of the boat and I saw a streak of foam reflect red, then I looked at the powerboat and I saw the three faces disappear beneath the coaming. There was no way of knowing where Terry’s bullets went, but water suddenly churned white at Wildtrack II’s stern and she shot away from us.

“Hold your fire! We’re tacking!”

Terry changed magazines. I pulled the tiller gently towards me, wrenched in the mainsheet, and waited till Sycorax’s head was round before releasing the headsail sheets. The effort tore at my back, and I wondered if I ever could sail this heavy boat alone.

We were running now, stern to wind. Wildtrack II, like a startled deer, was circling at full speed. Her bows thumped the waves as she spewed a high wake sixty yards long. Once I saw her leap clear off a wavecrest before slamming down into a trough. Then she headed straight towards us and I suspected Mulder must have his gun and that he planned to have his revenge on Sycorax. “Get ready!” The powerboat accelerated. I guessed they planned to swamp us with their wash as well as loose a broadside at our sails. They would have to be dissuaded, and I decided against waiting to make our own broadside shot at them. “Into the bows, Terry. Fire!” The powerboat’s bows were high and its anti-fouled belly, pale against the night, reared vulnerably above the water. Terry stood, legs spread, and fired. He emptied a magazine at the approaching boat and I swore I saw a scrap of darkness appear in the hull where a heavy bullet ripped the fibreglass ragged.

Terry changed magazines. Wildtrack II was slowing, her bows dropping. Terry braced himself again, fired again and this time the powerboat’s windscreen shattered in the night. The glass shards were snatched away like spindrift, and I saw the three heads twist away in panic. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” I was scared witless that the final shot might have hit one of the three men.

The powerboat veered off. I stared intently and thought I saw three figures still moving in the cockpit. That was a relief for me, but not for them, for they were in trouble. The powerboat would be taking water, needing to be pumped, and now their only safety lay in reaching harbour as soon as possible. They were forced to forget us, and Terry jeered as they fled. I sat down. “Make the gun safe, Terry.”

“Already done it, boss.”

We tacked again, sheeted home, and clawed into the south-west wind. The tide had long turned and the surging channel current was at last coming to our aid. I thanked Terry for his help.

“That’s what the working class are for, boss. To get you useless rich sods out of deep shit.”

“What the working class could usefully do now,” I said, “is get some bloody beer.”

I pegged the tiller. There was nothing to do now until we turned for Plymouth breakwater. We were a darkened ship sailing a black ocean. The wind was brisk, still chilled by the evening’s rain. There was something mesmerizing about Sycorax’s motion; her plunging bow and rocking buoyancy.

Terry asked me about the filming and I told him how the television people kept asking me about the night I’d won the medal, and how I hadn’t really told them anything at all. “I can’t remember very much,” I confessed.

“You were a bloody wally, boss,” Terry said amicably.

“I remember going left round those rocks. The bastards were about ten yards behind, weren’t they?”

“Ten! Bloody fifty.”

“Truly?”

“I could hear you shouting,” he said. “You were like a calf in the slaughterhouse. God knows how those buggers missed you at first.

The Major had come up to tell us to keep our heads down and he was shouting at you to come back.”

“I didn’t hear him.”

“He gave up in the end. He reckoned you were a dead ’un. He said it was your own bloody fault ’cos you’d taken us to the wrong place anyway. We should have been a bloody half-mile away, and instead you was doing a Lone Ranger on their headquarters company.” He chuckled. “Then when you switched out their lights the Major told us to get the hell up after you.”

“It worked,” I said bleakly.

“We screwed ’em,” Terry agreed. Somehow the conversation had made us both morose. I watched the loom of the Start light, then took a bearing on the entrance to Salcombe Harbour. We were making good time. I wondered how much water was in her bilges.

There was bound to be some until the patched hull took up.

“Mind you,” Terry went on, “I don’t know what bloody good it did us. Life’s still a bloody bastard.”

“Is it, Terry?”

“Bloody women,” he said.

I wished I had not heard the note of sad hopelessness in his voice.

“As bad as that?” I asked.

“As bad as that, boss.” He huddled in the cockpit’s corner, sheltering from the wind. “You got out, didn’t you?”

“Melissa left me. I didn’t get out.”

“Would you have bugged out on your own?”

I shook my head. “Probably not. I sometimes think women are more ruthless than us.”

“I wish mine would be sodding ruthless. I wish she’d go back to her bloody mother. Then I could go back to barracks.” He tipped a beer bottle to his lips. “I’ve got some good mates in the barracks.”

“Is Sally still nagging you to get out of the Army?” He nodded. “Never bleeding stops. She says there’ll be jobs in the pits when the fucking strike’s over, but what jobs? All this bloody Government wants to do is gut the miners.”

“Would you want to work in the mines?”

“I’ve two uncles down the pits, so it’s family, like.” He paused.

“And it might take Sally off my back, and I suppose it would be a better life for the nippers, but I don’t know, boss. I like the Army, I do.” His voice tailed away and we sat in companionable misery; he thinking of his Sally, I of Angela. I’d lost her, of course, but I, unlike Terry, was free.

“If you ever want to escape,” I said to him, “there’s always a berth in Sycorax for you. We’re good together, you and I.” He toasted me with his beer bottle. “That’s true, boss.” We fell silent. The cliffs to the north were touched with moonlight and the water broke on them in wisps of shredding white. Everything had gone awry, but at least Sycorax was back where she belonged.

All I had to do now was to escape Bannister’s lawyers, finish the boat, then go to where the lawyers couldn’t follow; to sea.

George Cullen fidgeted with his pipe. He had reamed it, rammed it, now he tamped it with tobacco. “Times are hard, Nick.”

“I’m sure.”

“No one wants a proper boat any longer, do they? They just want plastic bowls with Jap engines.” He lit the pipe and puffed a smokescreen towards his peeling ceiling. “Fibreglass,” he said scathingly. “Where’s the bloody craftsmanship in fibreglass?”

“Tricky stuff to lay properly, George.”

“An epileptic bloody monkey could lay it properly. But not the bloody layabouts I get.” He stood and went to the dusty window of his office. It was raining again. The office was a mess. George’s big desk was heaped with old pieces of paper; some of them looked as if they were unpaid bills from at least twenty years before. The walls were thick with vast-breasted naked pin-ups who disconcertingly advertised valve springs, crankcases and gaskets. Among the display of lubricious and fading flesh were fly-spotted pictures of Cullen’s Fishing Boats; sturdy little dayboats for long-lining or trawling. It had been years since the yard last built one; back, indeed, in the time of George’s father. Now the yard survived on a dwindling supply of repair work and on making the despised fibreglass hulls for do-it-yourself enthusiasts who wanted to finish the boats for themselves.

It also survived on crime. George was a fence for every boatstripper between the Fal and the Exe. “Seen your old man?” he asked me.

“No.”

“I ran up there, when? Six months ago? Before Christmas, anyway.

Said he was missing you.”

“I was in hospital, George.”

“Course you were, Nick, course you were.” He began to fiddle with his pipe that had gone out. He was a vast-bellied man with a jowly red face, grey hair and small eyes. I’d never much liked him, but I understood George’s attraction for my father. There wasn’t a piece of knavery on the coast that George did not know about, and probably did not have a finger in, and he could spend hours regaling my father with the tales of rogues and fools that my father had so relished. From my earliest childhood I could remember George drinking our whisky and talking in his gravelly old voice. He’d seemed old then, but now I saw he was just in his seedy middle age. “Your old man’s dead proud of you, Nick, proud of you,” he said now. “The Vicky Cross, eh?”

“The other two earned it,” I said. “I was just lucky.”

“Rubbish, boy. They don’t give that gong away with the cornflakes, do they? So what do you need?”

“VHF, short-wave, chronometer, barometer, anchors, lights, batteries, sea loo, compass, bilge-pumps…”

“Spare me, for Christ’s sake.” He sat down again, flinching from some inboard pain. George was for ever at death’s threshold and for ever ingesting new kinds of patent medicines. He preferred whisky, though, and poured us each a glass now. It was only mid-day, but George had probably been on the sauce since seven o’clock.

It was no wonder, I thought, that Cullen’s Fishing Boats were no longer launched down his small slip.

Sycorax was tucked safe into a narrow dock beside George’s office.

He’d moored a wreck of a fishing craft outside to hide her. Terry Farebrother had been put on a train in nearby Plymouth. For the moment I’d found shelter. George’s price had been to hear the story, or as much as I cared to tell him. “Mulder,” he said now. “I know Fanny.”

“Like him, do you?”

“Fanny’s all right,” George said guardedly. “Brings me in a bit of business from time to time. You know how it is, Nick.”

“He nicks the business, George. He nicked a lot of bloody stuff off my boat. You’ve probably still got it, George.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” George said equably. “I’ll let you have a look later on, Nick, and if anything is yours I’ll let you have it at cost.”

“Thank you, George.”

“Fair’s fair, Nick,” he said as though he was doing me a great favour. “And you are Tommy Sandman’s boy. Anything for Tommy.

And for a hero, of course.” He knocked back the whisky and poured himself another. The glass was filthy, but so was the whisky that, despite its label, had never been anywhere near Scotland. “What sort of anchors do you want?”

“Two CQRs. One fisherman’s.”

He half closed his eyes. “We had a Dutchman run out of money here last year. Nice boat, too. You want his pair of 75-pound CQRs?”

“They’ll do. Have you got any chain?” I knew it was hopeless to ask a price, because I would not be given one until George had worked out to a penny just what I could afford. Then he’d add something. He would welcome me at the yard so long as I could show him a profit, and the day he thought he’d squeezed me dry he’d turf me out.

“Fathoms of chain, Nick. Half-inch do you?” There was a sudden commotion in the outer office where George’s secretary, a shapely girl whose typing speed was reputed to be one stroke a minute, spent her days polishing her fingernails and reading magazines of true romance. “You can’t go in there,” I heard Rita squeal. “Mr Cullen is in conference.”

“Mr Cullen can bloody well get out of conference, can’t he?” The opaque glass door banged open and Inspector Abbott came inside.

“Morning, George.” He ignored me. I was sitting in an ancient leather armchair with broken springs, and I stayed there.

“Morning, Harry.” George automatically reached for another filthy glass into which he splashed some of his rotgut whisky.

“How’s things?”

“Things are bloody. Very bloody.” Abbott still ignored me. “Would you have seen young Nick Sandman anywhere, George?” George flickered a glance towards me, then realized that Abbott must be playing some sort of game. “Haven’t set eyes on him since he went to the Falklands, Harry.”

Abbott took the whisky and tasted it gingerly. He shuddered, but drank more. “If you see him, George, knock his bloody head off.” Again George glanced my way, then jerked his gaze back to Abbott. “Of course I will, Harry, of course.”

“And once you’ve clobbered him, George, tell him from me to keep his bloody head down. He is not to show his ugly face in the street, in a pub, anywhere. He is to stay very still and very quiet and hope the world passes him by while his Uncle Harry sorts out the bloody mess he has made.” Some of this was vehemently spat in my direction, but was mostly directed at George. I said nothing, nor did I move.

“I’ll tell him, Harry,” George said hastily.

“You can also tell him, if you should see him, that if he’s got a shooter on his boat, he is to lose it before I search his boat with a bloody metal detector.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

“And if I don’t find it with a detector, then I’ll tear the heap of junk apart plank by bloody plank. Tell him that, George.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

Abbott finished the whisky and helped himself to some more.

“You can also tell Master Sandman that it isn’t the Boer War I’m worried about, but the War of 1812.”

George had never heard of it. “1812, Harry?”

“Between us and America, George.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

Abbott walked to the window from where he stared down through the filth and rain at Sycorax. “I’ll tell the powers-that-be that after an exhaustive search of this den of thieves there was no sign of Master Sandman, nor of his horrible boat.”

“Right, Harry.” The relief in George’s voice that there was to be no trouble was palpable.

Abbott, who had still not looked directly at me, whirled on George and thrust a finger towards him. “And if you do see him, George, hang on to him. I don’t want him running ape all over the bloody South-West.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

“And tell him that I’ll let him know when he can leave.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

“And tell him he’s bloody lucky that no one got killed. One of his bloody bullets went within three inches of Mr Bannister’s pretty head. Mr Bannister is not pleased.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

“They always were rotten shots in that regiment,” Abbott said happily. “Unlike the Rifles of which I was a member. You don’t need to tell him that bit, George.”

“Right, Harry.”

“And tell him his newspaper friend is out of danger, but will have a very nasty bloody headache for a while.”

“I’ll tell him, Harry.”

Abbott sniffed the empty glass of whisky. “How much did you pay for this Scotch, George?”

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

“You were fucking robbed. I’m off. Have a nice day.” He left. George closed his eyes and blew out a long breath. “Did you hear all that, Nick?”

“I’m not deaf, Harry.”

“So I don’t need to tell you?”

“No, George.”

“Bloody hell.” He leaned back in his chair and his small, shrewd eyes appraised me. “A shooter, eh? How much do you want for it, Nick?”

“What shooter, George?”

“I can get you a tasty little profit on a shooter, Nick. Automatic, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, George.” He looked disappointed. “I always thought you were straight, Nick.”

So did I.

A hot spell hit Britain. The Azores high had shifted north and gave us long, warm days. It was not the weather for an attempt on the St Pierre. In the yachting magazines there were stories about boats waiting in Cherbourg for the bad weather that would promise a fast run at the race, but Wildtrack was not among them. Rita brought me the magazines and a selection of the daily papers. There had been reports of a shooting incident off the Devon coast, a report that received neither confirmation nor amplification and so the story faded away. Bannister’s name was not mentioned, nor was mine. The Daily Telegraph said that a man was being sought in connection with the shooting, but though the police knew his identity he was not being named. The police did not believe the man posed any danger to the general public. England was being hammered at cricket. Unemployment was rising. The City pages reported that Kassouli UK’s half-yearly report showed record profits, despite which, about a week after I’d reached George’s yard, there was a story that Yassir Kassouli was planning to pull all his operations out of Britain. I smelt Micky Harding behind the tale, but after a day or two Kassouli issued a strong denial and the story, like the tale of gunfire off the Devon coast, faded to nothing.

I worked for George Cullen. I mended engines, scarfed in gunwales, repaired gelcoats, and sanded decks. I was paid in beer, sandwiches, and credit. The credit bought three Plastimo compasses.

I mounted one over the chart table, one on the for’ard cockpit bulkhead, and one just aft of the mizzen’s step. I bought the two big anchors off George and stowed them on board. I nagged George to find me a good chronometer and barometer. And every day I tried to phone Angela.

I did not leave messages on the answering machine in Bannister’s house, for I did not want him to suspect that I had reason to trust Angela. I left messages on her home answering machine, and I left messages at the office. The messages told her to phone me at Cullen’s yard. Rita, whose skirts became shorter as the weather became hotter, listened sympathetically to my insistent message-leaving. She thought it was like something out of her magazines of romance.

The messages achieved nothing. Angela was never at her flat, and she never returned the calls. I tried the television company and had myself put through to Matthew Cooper.

“Jesus, Nick! You’ve caused some trouble.”

“I’ve done nothing!”

“Just aborted one good film.” He sounded aggrieved.

“Wasn’t my fault, Matthew. How’s Angela?”

He paused. “She’s not exactly top of the pops here.”

“I can imagine.”

“She keeps saying that the film is salvageable. But Bannister won’t have anything to do with you. He’s issued a possession order for Sycorax.”

“Fuck him,” I said. Rita, pretending not to listen as she buffed her fingernails, giggled. “Will you give Angela a message for me?” I asked.

“She’s stopped working, Nick. She’s with Bannister all the time now.”

“For Christ’s sake, Matthew! Use your imagination! Aren’t good directors supposed to be bursting with imagination? Write her a letter on your headed notepaper. She won’t ignore that.”

“OK.” He sounded reluctant.

“Tell her to find a guy called Micky Harding. He’s probably out of hospital by now.” I gave him Micky’s home and work numbers.

“She’s to tell Micky that he can trust her. She can prove it by calling him Mouse and by saying she knows that Terry was with me on the night. He’ll understand that.”

Matthew wrote it all down.

“And tell her,” I said, “that Bannister’s not to try the St Pierre.”

“You’re joking,” Matthew said. “We’re being sent to film him turning the corner at Newfoundland!”

“When are you going?”

He paused again. “I’m not allowed to say, Nick.”

“Jesus wept. OK. Just give her my message, Matthew.”

“I’ll try, Nick.”

“And tell her something else.”

I didn’t need to tell him what else; he understood. “I’ll tell her, Nick.” He sounded sorry for me.

I rattled the phone rest, then tried to phone Micky Harding, but he was not at the paper and there was no answer at his home. I put the phone down. Rita unlocked the petty cash box and put my IOU

inside. George charged me fifty pence a call and fifty pence a minute thereafter. Rita scaled the charges down for me, but I still owed the old crook over ten pounds. “He wants you to go out tonight, Nick,” she said.

“Out?”

“His usual bloke’s got a broken arm. George wants you to take the 52-footer. He says you’re to fill her up with diesel. He’ll go with you.”

So that night I joined the distinguished roster of Devon smugglers. I helmed the 52-footer twenty miles offshore where we met a French trawler. The Frenchman swung three crates across to our boat. They contained radios stolen from harbours and marinas up and down the Brittany coast. George paid them off with a wad of cash, accepted a glass of brandy, and added a bottle of his lousy Scotch to the payment. Then I took him home again. There were no waterguards to disturb us as we chugged into the Hamoaze in a perfect dawn. George puffed his pipe in the cabin. “Got a very sweet little MF set there, Nick. You could do with an MF, couldn’t you?”

“I’ll take a VHF as my fee for tonight.”

He sucked air between his teeth. “You haven’t paid your berthage fees, Nick.”

“You call that bloody rubbish dump of a dock a berth?” He chuckled, but before he drove home he dropped a battered VHF set on to a sailbag in Sycorax’s cockpit. I spent the next Sunday fitting it and, to my astonishment, it worked.

I spent the Sunday after that salvaging a galley stove from a wrecked Westerly that George had bought for scrap. I manhandled the stove across the deserted yard. I’d already rigged the gaff as a derrick and only had to attach the whip to the stove, but as I reached the quay above the boat I saw I had company. Inspector Harry Abbott was sitting in Sycorax’s cockpit. He was wearing his check golfer’s trousers, had a bottle of beer and a packet of sandwiches in his lap, and my Colt .45 in his right hand.

“Afternoon, Nick.” He aimed the Colt at my head and, before I could move, pulled the trigger.

It was unloaded. He chuckled. “Naughty, Nick, very! You know what the penalty is for possession of an unlicensed firearm?”

“A golfing weekend with you, Harry?”

He tutted. “Ungrateful, aren’t you, Nick? I save your mangy hide and all you do is insult me. What’s George bringing in these days?”

“Nothing much. A few radios, mostly French.” I tied the whip into place and climbed down to the deck. By using the peak halliard I had a perfectly good crane that swung the stove dangerously close to Abbott’s head. He deigned to steer it down to the cockpit floor.

“I thought you’d like to know,” he said, “that there is no longer a warrant out for your arrest.”

“I didn’t know there ever was one.”

“A hue and cry, Nick, that’s what there was. We searched for you high and low! Do you know what you have cost Her Majesty’s Government in police overtime?”

“Is that what you’re on now, Harry? Overtime?” I saw it was my beer he was drinking. He courteously offered me a bottle, which I took, then I sat opposite him. “Cheers, Harry.”

“Cheers, Nick.” He drained the bottle and opened another. “The funny boys are in on this one, Nick.”

“Funny boys?”

“Very funny boys. They’re not kind and gentle like me, Nick.

They’re full of self-importance and they talk impressively about the safety of the realm. They have nevertheless decided that your life should be spared.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?” He lit a cigarette and flipped the dead match over the side to float among the other garbage in George’s dock. “But there is a condition, Nick.”

I put my legs up on the opposite thwart. I was wearing old shorts and the scars at the backs of my thighs looked pink and horrid. Abbott glanced at them and grimaced. “Phosphorus?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were shot?”

“Bullet hit a phosphorus grenade hanging on my belt. The phosphorus caught fire, and the bullet split in two. One lump went down the right thigh, and the bigger lump up my spine.”

“Nasty.” He said it with genuine sympathy.

“I’ve had better days than that,” I agreed.

“It’s because of that, you see, that they trust you. Wounded war hero and all that, Nick. I mean, it’s unthinkable that one of Her Majesty’s VCs would be carrying an illegal shooter or helping Georgie Cullen bring in dicky radios from the French coast, isn’t it?”

“Quite unthinkable,” I agreed.

“So you’re going to piss off, Nick. You’re going to sail this heap of garbage round the world and you are not going to try and stop Mr Bannister sailing on the St Pierre.”

I finished the beer and opened another. The day was blisteringly hot. “Is that the condition, Harry? That I bugger off and leave Bannister alone?”

“Took a lot of my time to fix it.” He spoke warningly. “If the Chief Clown had his way, Nick, you’d be roasting in prison now. And not in some nice open prison like your dad, but a real Victorian horror story.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

Inspector Abbott had surrendered to the day’s heat far enough to discard his blazer, but no more. He wiped his face with a rag. “Mr Bannister lodged a complaint about you. He says you dismasted his boat, cut its warps, and all in practice for the day when you were going to sink it at sea. Do you know he’s even got a tape-recording?”

“That tape’s a—”

“I know, Nick!” Abbott held up a weary hand. “We’ve spoken to Mr Harding, haven’t we? And Mr Harding has seen the error of his wicked ways. He hasn’t got any proof now, so there can’t be a scandalous little story which will upset our American cousins. We don’t want to upset them, because they’ve got all the money these days. We are a client state, Nick.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t suppose you do, Nick. Who was the little bloke with you on the night you put nasty holes in nice Mr Bannister’s speedboat?”

“I can’t remember, Harry.”

“Make sure he forgets, too. Sleeping dogs should be left slumber-ing, Nick, and you were in danger of waking them up.” I offered him another beer. He took it. “Mind you,” Abbott went on, “Mr Bannister had a mind to aggravate things. He was unleash-ing the lawyers on you, but we pointed out that if they found you, and if he pressed charges, then we’d naturally insist that he and his Boer would have to stay in England and give evidence.”

“Which he didn’t want to do…” I was beginning to understand some things now “…because it might jeopardize his timing for the St Pierre?”

“Exactly.”

I tipped my head back and rested it on Sycorax’s guardrails. I wondered if I was understanding too much. “You want Bannister to die, don’t you?”

Harry tutted. “You mustn’t talk about death, Nick.”

“You want to keep Kassouli’s jobs?”

“I imagine the Chief Clown wants to, yes.”

My head was still tipped back. “Are you a funny boy, Harry?”

“I’m just the dogsbody, Nick.”

I brought my head forward. This policeman liked to play the genial fool, but his eyes were very shrewd.

“So Yassir Kassouli gets what he wants?” I said.

“The rich usually do, Nick.” He paused. “And between you and me, and no one else, Mr Kassouli wanted you arrested. He wanted the bloody book thrown at you. But we’ve persuaded him that we can look after our own. That’s what I’m doing now, Nick. Looking after you.”

“This comes from the bloody Government, doesn’t it?” He heard my anger. “Now, Nick!”

“Jesus wept!” I drank some beer. “Suppose Bannister’s innocent?” Abbott shook his head. “Why confuse the issue?” He laughed at me. “Bloody hell, Nick, since when were you the white knight?” I said nothing, and he sighed. “You’re a bloody fool, Nick. Why did you go to the press?”

“I wanted out.”

“You should have talked to me.” Abbott looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then shook his head sadly. “Nick, it comes from the top, and you’re powerless to do anything. So forget it.” I made a non-committal noise.

Abbott drank beer. “I saw your dad last week.”

“How was he?”

“He misses you. When are you going to see him?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“I think you should, Nick. In fact I think I’ll make that another condition of not arresting you.”

“I thought you said there was no warrant for me any more?” Abbott hefted the gun. “Three years?”

“How did you find it?”

He smiled. “Did George tell you I threatened to use a metal detector?”

I smiled back, remembering the charade. “Yes.”

“Which meant that you’d hide the gun near a piece of metal, so as to confuse your Uncle Harry. So I just had a look at your engine, and hey presto.”

“It’s a souvenir, Harry.”

He looked at the barrel. “Ejercito Argentina. Didn’t do the silly buggers a lot of good, did it? So, are you going to try and warn Mr Bannister?” I hesitated. Abbott shook his head at my foolishness.

“It won’t do you any good, Nick. Do you think he’ll listen to you?”

“No.”

“So I’ll take it you won’t try, which answer will please the Chief Clown. Are you going to stay away from Bannister’s house, his television studio, his mistress’s house, and everybody else’s bloody house?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to see your father?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll take that as yes.” He fished in his jacket pocket and brought out two Monte Cristo cigars in their tin cases. “Give him these from me, Nick.”

“I will.”

“And, having seen him, are you then going to bugger off in this floating junkyard?”

“Yes.”

“Welcome back to the human race, Nick Sandman.” He dangled the gun by its trigger guard. “I assume this is an arcane piece of yacht safety equipment?”

I smiled. “Yes, Harry, it is.”

“Then bleeding well hide it where a middle-aged copper doesn’t trip over it.” He tossed it into my lap. “How much did George offer you for it?”

“He didn’t name a price.”

Abbott laughed, then stood and stretched his long arms. “That’s it then, job done. I did try to warn you in the spring.”

“What was the job, Harry?”

He ignored that question. “I’ve brought you some sandwiches and I’ll leave you the newspapers. They’re full of lies, but you might enjoy the comic strips.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

He climbed to the quayside. “You’re an awkward bugger, Nick, and you’re probably a lazy sod who should get a proper job, but I don’t dislike you. And I do like your old man. Tell him I sent my regards.”

“I will.”

“Bon voyage, Nick.”

I fitted the stove after Harry had gone. I gimballed it, connected it up to a gas cylinder, then celebrated the achievement by making myself a cup of tea. The dock stank in the heat. I sat on Sycorax’s stern, drank the tea, and read the papers.

In Northern Ireland a man’s kneecaps had been shot away. Iraq and Iran were slagging each other in the desert. The Russians were slagging the peasants in Afghanistan. The miners were slagging everyone. A disease called Aids was threatening to achieve what a millennia of Puritans had failed to do. Unemployment was still rising. England was still being hammered at cricket. Angela’s photograph stared at me from an outside page devoted to gossip.

I stared back at the photograph. For a second I didn’t believe it was Angela, but it was. Bannister sat beside her in the picture. There was a story alongside the photograph. ‘Almost a year since the tragic death of his first wife, the American heiress Nadeznha Kassouli, Mr Tony Bannister, 46, has announced his engagement to Miss Angela Westmacott. Miss Westmacott, who has never been married before, is a producer on Mr Bannister’s programme.’ There was more. The wedding would take place very soon, most likely in Paris, and certainly before Bannister set off on his St Pierre attempt. The bride was giving up her job in television, but would probably work for Bannister’s production company which made rock videos and advertisements.

She looked so very beautiful in the photograph. She sat on a sofa in Bannister’s Richmond house. In the foreground was a brand new glass-topped table which must have replaced the one I’d broken.

Bannister sat beside her with a smile like the cat that had got the cream. Angela’s long slim legs were crossed. She wore a hesitant smile that I’d come to know so well, though her eyes were cool. She was in a light dress that hinted at her body’s supple elegance. Her right hand rested lightly on Bannister’s shoulder, while her left, hanging over the sofa’s arm, bore a big shining diamond. She looked like a thoroughbred; leggy and beautiful, a girl fit for a handsome celebrity. A girl it was ludicrous for a broken sailor in a broken boat in a stinking dock to want. But the photograph told me that I did still want her, and I suddenly felt forlorn and bereft and miserable.

God damn her, but she had surrendered to safety, and I was alone.

The county’s police force were playing the inmates of the open prison. The police had been bowled out for 134, while the prisoners’ team had so far scored 42 for the loss of just one wicket. I was in the Midlands and my father, because I had at last come to visit, seemed to be in a private heaven. I’d seen his garden, the workshop where he made ship models, his room, and now he walked round the cricket field with me. It was like a boarding school, only the pupils were middle-aged men rather than boys. It was quite unlike my idea of a prison, but only the trusted felons were sent there; those who were not violent and who would not try to escape. The warders called my father ‘Mr Sandman’, and he had clearly charmed them all. He asked after their wives, sympathized over their children’s exam results, and promised them herbs from his garden. “They’re good fellows,” he said happily.

He looked so damned well. He’d lost weight, which suited his six-foot four-inch frame. His black hair was touched with grey at his temples, he was suntanned, and he was fit. “The gardening helps, of course. I play a bit of tennis, quite a lot of badminton. I swim a fair bit, but they keep the pool damned chilly. I get a bit of the other, too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Father. You’re in prison.”

“An open prison, my dear Nick. I do recommend one if you’re ever in need of a rest. Admittedly the admission procedure is tiresome, but after that it’s a very decent life. We do work on the local farms, you see, and the girls know where to find us. They’re mostly professionals, of course, but a chap has to stay in practice. Are you in practice?”

“Not really.”

He laughed. “I thought you were looking decidedly doggish.

Won’t Melissa lay it out for you?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“My exes always did,” he said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. “Just because a woman can’t bear to live with a fellow doesn’t mean she won’t bed him. Did you find another?”

“For a time.”

“Lost her, eh? Not to worry, Nick. There are, thank God, so many women in this world. God was very good to us in that regard. Oh, well done!” This was for a fine late cut that left a policeman running vainly towards the boundary. “The batsman”—my father pointed with his cigar—“is doing three years for computer fraud. Not very clever to be caught, was it?”

“Wasn’t clever of you,” I said.

“Bloody stupid of me.” He smiled at me. He was delighted I had come and had not once mentioned all the unanswered letters. I felt awkward, ashamed, and inadequate. He had always made me feel that way, though never intentionally. “My trouble,” he said, “is that I think too big.”

“True.”

He laughed. He’d been arrested for fraud and God alone knows what else. He had been running an insurance company and there had been no money to pay the claims, and over half the policies—which he had been selling off to other companies as a bookmaker lays off his bets—turned out to be false. “Another year,” he said wistfully, “and I’d have been solvent. Had a very tasty scheme going in Switzerland with Iranian money. In fact, Nick, if you fancy a trip to Berne…”

“No, Father.”

“Of course, Nick. Money never was your thing, was it?” He sounded contrite. We paused in our stroll and I was proudly introduced to a warder and his family. My father made a great point of mentioning the VC. The warder’s family seemed really grateful that my father had taken notice of them, just as if he was from the local gentry and they his tenants. They said how pleased they were to have met me.

“Decent people,” my father said as we strolled on. We found two deckchairs in the shade of a fine oak tree and we sat. “So what have you been doing, Nick?”

“Recovering, mainly.” I told him about Sycorax.

He thought it was a wonderful jest that I’d found a refuge with George Cullen, and I had to give a detailed description of our night trip to rendezvous with the French trawler. “I thought the old rogue would have died years ago. Drinks like a bloody judge! He’s making you pay for all this gear?”

“Through the nose.”

“Nick, Nick!” I had disappointed my father who had the haggling skills of the bazaar. He frowned in thought. “Ask him about Montagu Dawson.”

“The artist?” I was puzzled, but that was nothing new when I was with my father. I did remember, though, how he used to have two classic Dawsons hanging in his London offices; both paintings showed tall ships driving through foam-flecked seas.

“George sold a few Dawsons,” my father said. “They were as bent as a snake’s wedding tackle, of course, but George used to find American yachtsmen in the Barbican pubs, and he’d spin this yarn about Dawson having been a friend of the family.” My father chuckled. “The paintings were done by a fellow at Okehampton.

He’s the same chap who painted that Matisse your mother’s so very fond of. Talented fellow, but a piss-artist, I fear. Anyway, point of it all, one of George’s bent Dawsons ended up in the wrong hands, the police were tumbled out of bed, and officially the case has never been closed. It isn’t a major threat to George, of course, but he won’t like to be reminded of it, and he certainly wouldn’t like it if you suggested you might drop a line to Scotland Yard. Do they still have a fine-art squad? I don’t know, but George has certainly got a couple of those fake Dawsons still hanging in his home. Have you ever been to his house?”

“No.”

My father shuddered. “Ghastly place. Plastic furniture and music-box cocktail cabinets. The old bastard’s as rich as Croesus, but he’s got the taste of a camel. Oh, good shot!” The ball flicked across the grass straight towards our chairs. I fielded it with my foot, then flinched as I bent to pick the ball up. I threw it to the nearest fielder and my father watched me sadly. “Is it bad, Nick?”

“It’s all right. I can sail a boat.”

“Round the world?” he asked dubiously.

“Round the world,” I said stubbornly.

He was quiet for a moment or two. His cigar smoke drifted up into the oak leaves. He’d been pleased with Harry Abbott’s gift, and I wished I had brought him something. He looked very relaxed and confident despite the blue prison clothes. He gave me one of his shrewd, amused glances. “Harry Abbott came to see me a week or so back. He gave me some news of you.” I was watching the cricket and said nothing.

“Been in the wars again, have you, Nick?”

“Harry should keep his mouth shut.”

“You know Kassouli was setting you up, don’t you?” For a second I didn’t react, then I turned to look into his eyes.

“What the hell do you know about it, Dad?”

He sighed. “Nick! Do me a small favour. I might not be able to sail a small boat through a hurricane, but I do know what makes the wicked world go round. I did some business with Kassouli once.

He’s a tough bugger. Still got the stink of the souk about him, despite his Boston wife and Savile Row suitings.”

“Setting me up?”

He drew on his cigar. “Tell me about it, Nick.”

“I thought you knew the answers already.” I was defensive.

“Just tell me, Nick.” He spoke gently. “Please.” So I told him. I hadn’t planned to tell him about Angela, but I did in the end, because I wanted to tell somebody. I missed her horribly.

I kept telling myself that she was not for me, that she was too urban-ized and ambitious, too elegant and difficult, but I could not persuade myself that I would be better off without her. I missed her, and so I found myself telling my father about the visits to London, the nights in her small bedroom, the weekend in Norfolk, and then the recent news of her engagement and forthcoming wedding. The date had been announced in the papers. Angela would marry Bannister in the English Church in Paris after the coming weekend.

I told my father more. I told him about Mulder and Jill-Beth and Bannister and Kassouli. He listened in silence. He finished the cigar, threw it away, and its stub smoked in the grass like a newly fallen fragment of shrapnel. He rubbed his face. “This Kirov girl. You say she phoned you at Angela’s flat?”

“Yes.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She wanted to reach me, of course.”

He shook his head. “Ostensibly she wanted you to be Kassouli’s man in Tony Bannister’s crew, yes? The whole essence of that, Nick, is that Bannister wouldn’t know that you were Kassouli’s man. So why risk alerting him by leaving a message on his girlfriend’s answering machine? There’s only one answer to that, Nick. They wanted Bannister to know you were dodgy. They gave you a high profile, didn’t they? She makes sure you rescued her from Mulder, she flies you to the States, and she smudges a damn great fingerprint on Angela’s answering machine. Why?”

A ribald cheer went up as one of the prison batsmen was run out.

The prison needed fifty-three runs to win and still had eight wickets left. “And someone sent Mulder a picture of me, too.” I spoke slowly.

It was like a moment after an awful storm when the clouds rend, sunlight touches an angry but settling sea, and the storm damage at last becomes visible. Seeing the sense of my father’s words, I felt foolish. “It was a photograph taken at Kassouli’s Cape Cod house.

He didn’t say who the sender was.”

My father gave me a pitying look. “It was the Kirov girl. Or Kassouli. They wanted Bannister to know you were tied up with them.

And who do you think told this Mulder fellow where to find you and Jill-Beth Kirov on Dartmoor?”

“She did?” I said it hesitantly, not wanting to believe it.

“Of course! They want Bannister to feel safe. They want Bannister to believe that he’s found the fly in his ointment: you. So they set you up to be the threat. You just happened to be convenient, Nick, so they pointed a damned great finger at you. They did some clumsy sabotage, but only when the boat was where you could get at it. And all the time the real man was lying very low.”

“Mulder.” It was obvious.

“Bingo. How did Bannister meet Mulder?”

“His wife found him.”

“Who took the tape-recording?”

“Mulder.”

“That was just a happy accident, of course,” my father said. “He probably had a camera with him, and planned to take a snap of you and the Kirov girl together, instead of which he lumbers on your mate with his tape-recorder. So who, my dear Nick, do you think Mulder works for?”

“Kassouli.” I sat there, feeling very foolish. “And Mulder beat me up because he had to prove his loyalty to Bannister?”

“I would imagine so, wouldn’t you?”

“But the rumour says Mulder helped with the murder!”

“Who’s spreading the rumours?” my father asked patiently.

“Kassouli?”

“And who has convinced Kassouli that his daughter was murdered?” my father asked, then answered it himself. “Mulder.

And why? Because a rich man’s gratitude can be very bankable.

Mind you, I’d have smelt a rat the moment Kassouli offered four hundred thousand! The going rate for a killing can’t be much over twenty grand, but people like you always think that a big sum only increases the seriousness of something.”

“But Jill-Beth brought it with her!” I protested. “I saw it. A hundred thousand dollars.”

“Which Mulder would have taken from you as proof that you were betraying Bannister.” My father spoke gently. “Why do you think he followed you in the boat that night? He probably thought you had the hundred grand in Sycorax. My dear Nick, they were stitching you up. Kassouli probably hoped you might help him by being a back-up to Mulder, which is why he laid it all out for you in America, but once he saw you were going to be boring and honourable he danced you like a puppet to distract Bannister.” He saw my face. “Don’t blame yourself, Nick. Kassouli’s played for higher stakes than this and against some of the slimiest creatures that cap-italism ever spawned. You musn’t feel bad at being beaten by one of the best.”

But I did feel bad. I’d never been clever, not as my father and brother and sister were clever. When we’d been growing up they had always competed to win the word games, while I would sit silent and lost. I lack subtlety. Only a bloody fool would have charged straight up that damned hill when there was another company working their hard way round the flank. Still, I’d saved that company from some casualties. “Damn it,” I said now. My father did not reply, and I tried one last and despairing protest. “But Kassouli doesn’t even know if his daughter was murdered!”

“Perhaps he does. Perhaps Mulder has the proof. Perhaps Mulder has been blackmailing Bannister and taking money off Kassouli.

Whatever”—my father shrugged—“Yassir Kassouli will get his perfect revenge. You can kiss Bannister goodbye.”

“At sea,” I said bitterly.

“Far from any jurisdiction,” my father agreed. “There’ll be no messy body, no police dogs, no forensic scientists, no murder weapon, no witnesses who aren’t Kassouli’s men, nothing.”

“But I’ll know about it,” I said stubbornly.

“And who would believe you? And if you made a fuss, Nick, just how long do you think Yassir Kassouli would tolerate you?” He touched my arm. “No, Nick. It’s over now as far as you’re concerned.”

I stared at the cricket, but saw nothing. So the night that Jill-Beth had screamed, and I had thought Mulder was raping her, had all been a part of the careful construction to trap me? And I, believing myself to be full of honour, had fallen for it. I swore softly. I knew my father was right. He’d always been so good at explaining things.

The truth had been there for me to see, but I’d been blind to it. Now, according to the yachting magazines, Fanny Mulder was to be the navigator on Bannister’s boat. Bannister himself would skipper Wildtrack, but Mulder would be the boat’s tactician and navigator.

From Kassouli’s point of view it was perfect, just as it was always meant to be; perfect.

“What time’s your bus?” my father asked.

“Five.”

We strolled slowly round the boundary together. “The world’s a tough place,” my father said softly. “It isn’t moved by honesty and justice and love, Nick. That’s just the pabulum that the rulers feed the people to keep them quiet. The world is run by very ruthless men who know that the cake is very small and the number of hungry mouths is growing all the time. If you want to stop the revolution then you have to feed those mouths, and you do it by being very tough with the cake. Kassouli means jobs and investment.”

“And Bannister?”

“He married the wrong woman, and he carelessly lost her. At the very least he’ll be sacrificed for carelessness. You think that’s unfair?”

“Of course it is.”

“Good old Nick.” He rested a hand on my shoulder for an instant.

“Seen your brother or sister lately?”

“No.”

He smiled. “I can’t blame you. They’re not very nice, are they? I made life too easy for them.”

“You made life too easy for me as well.”

“But you’re different, Nick. You believed all that claptrap they fed you in the Sea Scouts, didn’t you? You still do, probably.” He said it affectionately. “So what, my favourite son, will you do about Angela?”

“There’s nothing to do. They get married on Monday.”

“There’s everything to do!” my father said energetically. “I’d start by buying every orchid in Paris and drenching them with the most expensive perfume, then laying them at her feet. Like all beautiful women, Nick, she is there for the taking, so take her.”

“I’ve got Sycorax. I’m sailing south.” He shrugged. “Will Angela sail on the St Pierre?” I shook my head. “She gets seasick.”

“If I were you, then, I’d wait till she’s a rich widow, which can’t take very long, then marry her.” He was being quite serious.

I laughed. That was vintage Tommy Sandman.

“Why ever not?” he asked, offended.

“I’m sailing south,” I said stubbornly. “I want to get to New Zealand.”

“What about Piers and Amanda?”

We stopped at the prison entrance. There were no guards, not even a locked gate, but only a long drive that stretched between pea fields. “I’ll fly back and see them,” I said.

“That takes money, Nick.”

I held up my hands that were calloused again from the weeks of good work. “I can earn a living.”

“I’ve got some cash. The buggers didn’t get it all.”

“I never thought they did.”

“If you’re ever in trouble, Nick…”

“No.” I said it too hastily. “If I’ve learned one thing these last months, it’s to pay my own way in life.”

“That’s a mistake.” He smiled. “With full remission, Nick, I’ll be out in a year. You’ll let me know where you are?”

“Of course.”

“Perhaps I’ll come and see you. We can sail warm seas together?”

“I’d like that.” I could see the bus coming up the long drive. Dust plumed from its wheels on to the pea plants. I fished in my pocket and brought out the flat box. “I thought you might like to keep this for me,” I said awkwardly. I told myself that the gesture was spontaneous, but I knew it wasn’t because I’d taken the trouble to bring the box with me. I might not have brought my father cigars or wine, but I had fetched him the one thing I knew would give him the most pleasure.

He opened it and I saw the tears come to his eyes. He was holding my medal. He smoothed the claret ribbon on his palm. “Are you sure?”

“I’ll probably lose it.” I tried to avert any expressions of emotion.

“Things get lost on small boats.”

“They do, yes.”

“Look after it for me, will you?” I asked, trying to make it a casual request.

“I will.” He turned it over and saw my name engraved in the dull bronze. “I’ll have it put in the governor’s safe.”

“The bronze is supposed to come from Russian cannons we cap-tured at Sevastopol,” I said.

“I think I read that somewhere.” He blinked the tears away and put the medal into his pocket. The bus turned in the wide circle in front of the gate, then stopped in a shuddering haze of diesel fumes.

“I’ll see you, Dad,” I said.

“Sure, Nick.”

There was a hesitation, then we embraced. It felt awkward and lumpy. I walked to the bus, paid my fare, and sat at the back. My father stood beneath the window. A few more returning visitors climbed in, then the door hissed shut and the bus lurched forward. My father walked alongside for a few paces.

“Nick!” I could just hear him over the engine’s noise. “Nick! Paris!

Orchids! Scent! Seduction! Who dares wins!” The bus pulled away. He waved. The gears clashed as we accelerated, and then I lost him in the cloud of dust.

Duty was done.

I insisted on two bilge pumps, both manual. One was worked from the cockpit, the other from inside the cabin. George grumbled, but provided them. “Tommy shouldn’t have told you about the Dawsons,” he said.

I wondered why such a small crime worried him, but later realized it was because the London police were still searching for the forger.

George would not have cared about the local force, for he had his understanding with them, but he was leery of London.

There was a letter from London waiting for me on Rita’s desk. I eagerly tore it open, half expecting it to be from Angela, but of course she was in Paris. The letter was from Micky Harding. He was recovering. He apologized for messing up. He was sorry that the story had died. There was no evidence to support it, and such a story couldn’t run without proof. He’d floated the Kassouli withdrawal rumour to a city editor of another paper, but I’d probably seen how that story had rolled over and died. If I was ever in London, he said, I should call on him. I owed him a pint or two.

On Tuesday The Times had a photograph of Bannister’s Paris wedding. The bride wore oyster-coloured silk and had flowers in her hair. Her Baptist minister father had pronounced a blessing over the happy couple. Angela was smiling. I cut the photograph out, kept it for an hour, then screwed it up and tossed it into the dock.

I spent the next few days finishing Sycorax. I installed extra water tanks, two bunk mattresses and electric cabin lights. I also had oil-lamps, which I preferred using, just as I had oil navigation lights as well as electric ones. George found me a short-wave radio which I installed on the shelves above the starboard bunk. I screwed a barometer to the bulkhead over the chart table and bought a second-hand clockwork chronometer that went alongside it. I began stowing spare gear and equipment in the lockers, and took pride in buying a brand new Red Ensign that would fray on my jackstaff in faraway oceans. I found an old solid-fuel stove to heat the cabin. There had been a time when every cruising yacht carried such a stove, and Sycorax had always been so equipped, and I took a peculiar delight in installing the cast-iron monster. I caulked and capped the chimney in seething rain. The hot weather had gone. Cyclones were bringing squalls and cold air that made the channel choppy and promised a tumultuous wind in the far north Atlantic.

The first hopefuls set off from Cherbourg to take advantage of the Atlantic gales. An Italian crew went first and made an astonishing time to the Grand Banks, but their boat was rolled over somewhere east of Cape Race and lost its mast. Two French boats followed. I read that Bannister was honeymooning in Cherbourg while he waited for even stronger winds.

It was the wrong weather for compass-swinging, which demanded smooth water so that the delicate measurements were not joggled, but I took advantage of one sullen, drizzly day to sail between carefully plotted buoys and landmarks in Plymouth Sound. I had roughly compensated the compasses with tiny magnets that corrected the attraction of the metal in the engine and stove, but I still needed to know what other errors the needles contained, so I sailed Sycorax north and south, east and west, and courses in between, noting the compass variations on each heading. Some were big enough to demand more fiddly work with the tiny magnetic shims, which then meant that every course had to be sailed again, but I finished the job by sundown and pinned a clingfilm-wrapped correction card over my navigation table. That night I took my dirty washing to a launderette and reflected that, with a little luck, my next wash would be on shipboard where I’d use a garbage bag filled with two quarts of water and washing powder. It works as well as any electric machine.

I went to London the next day and took the children to Holland Park where we played hide and seek among the wet bushes.

Afterwards I insisted on seeing Melissa. “They’re going to kill Bannister,” I told her.

“I’m sure that’s not true, Nick.”

“He won’t listen to me,” I said.

“It’s hardly surprising, is it? I gather you declared war on him!

Are you sure you’re recovered from the Falklands? One keeps reading these tedious stories about Vietnam veterans who seem to be perfectly normal until they open fire in a crowded supermarket.

I do hope you won’t go berserk in the frozen-food section, Nick. It would be jolly hard for Mands and Pip to have a mass-murderer for a father.”

“Wouldn’t it,” I agreed. “But would you phone Bannister? He’ll listen to you. Tell him he mustn’t trust Mulder. Just convince him of that. I’ve written to him, but…” I shrugged. I’d broken my promise to Abbott by writing to Bannister. I’d written to his Richmond house, the television studios, and to the offices of his production company. I’d written because there was no proof that he was guilty of the crime for which, I was certain, he was about to be punished. Doubtless my letters had been categorized with all the other nutcase letters that a man like Bannister attracted.

Melissa ran a finger round the rim of her wine glass. “Tony won’t listen to me now, Nick. He’s married that ghastly television creature.

She’s certainly done well for herself, hasn’t she? And I’m quite sure Tony’s in that post-marital bliss thing. You know, when you swear you’ll never be unfaithful?” She laughed.

“I’m serious, Melissa.”

“I’m sure you are, Nicholas, but if you think I’m going to make a fool of myself by telling Tony to give up his little boat race, you’re wrong. Anyway, he wouldn’t believe me! Fanny Mulder may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s completely loyal to Tony.” I’d told Melissa everything, including my new certainty that Mulder was Kassouli’s man and would navigate Wildtrack to a death.

“Phone him!” I said.

“Don’t be nasty, Nick.”

“For God’s sake, Melissa!” I closed my eyes for a second. “I’m not mad, Melissa, I’m not shell-shocked and I’m not having bad dreams.

I don’t even like Bannister. Would you believe it, my love, if I was to tell you that it could suit me hideously well if he were to die? But I just cannot stomach the thought of murder! Especially when it’s in my power to prevent it.” I shook my head. “I’m not being noble, I’m not being honourable, I just want to be able to sleep at nights.”

“I do hate it when you get into a Galahad mood. I remember how it used to make me miserable when we were married.”

“So phone him,” I urged her. “You can find out which hotel he’s in, can’t you?”

She lit a cigarette. “His secretary might tell me,” she allowed cautiously.

“Then phone him and say that you think it’s all nonsense. Blame me, if you like. Say I’m mad. But say you promised to pass on the message. The message is that Mulder is Kassouli’s man and always has been.”

“I won’t speak to that little television upstart.”

“You want Bannister to die?”

She looked me up and down, noting my dirty trousers and creased shirt. “You’re being very dramatic, Nick.”

“I know. But please, my love, please?”

She havered, but plumped for safety. “I’m not going to make a fool of myself…”

“You want me to tell the Hon-John about you and Bannister?”

“Nick!”

“I’ll do it!”

She considered me for a few seconds. “If you withdraw that very ungentlemanly threat,” she said acidly, “then I will consider telephoning Tony for you. I won’t promise it.” She frowned. “On the other hand, it would be decent to congratulate him on his wedding, would it not? Even if it was to that vulgar little gold-digger.” I knew I would get no more from her. “I withdraw the threat,” I said, “and I apologize for making it.”

“Thank you, Nick. And I will promise to consider talking to Tony.” She looked pleased with her tactical victory. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I’ve got a job,” I said, “working in the boat trade.” I had no intention of telling Melissa that I was leaving England. If I had, then her lawyers would have been round my stern like sharks smelling blood.

I fabricated my casual work for George Cullen into a fantasy of yacht-broking, which mildly pleased her.

“So you’re not sailing into the sunset?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m physically up to it, you see.”

“Quite right. So have you got a proper address now?” I invented an address in Plymouth, which satisfied her. By the time she discovered there was no such place as 17b Institute Road, I would be long gone. I reckoned I would be ready in three or four days, after which I would slip my warps and head out past Drake Island, past the Breakwater, and thus into the Western Approaches.

I would pass Ushant on the French coast, then go to the great emptiness.

I made Melissa promise once more that she would try to phone Bannister, or at least think about it, then I took the bus back to Plymouth. Buses were cheaper than trains, and I had no Angela now to tempt me into high-speed but expensive travel. Another bus took me to George’s boatyard.

George, his workers gone for the weekend, was peering down at Sycorax. I saw he’d moored the fishing-boat outside Sycorax again.

“You’re not going this weekend, are you?” he asked me.

“Monday or Tuesday.”

“I’ll be glad to have the dock back,” he said as though there were yachts lining up in the Hamoaze for his skilled attentions. “So you’ve got everything you need, Nick?”

“I still need fenders, a Dan buoy, jackstays, a rigid tender”—my old dinghy was still at Bannister’s house, and somehow I did not think I would see her again—“fuel filters, radar-reflector, sail needles, courtesy flags, a couple of spare impellers, medicines…”

“All right!” He checked the flow. “I’m going home. Look after the yard.”

It began to rain. I went into Sycorax’s cabin and made myself a cup of tea. I screwed a framed photograph of Piers and Amanda over the navigation table and tried not to think of how many months it would be before I saw them again. Instead I wondered whether Melissa would telephone Bannister, and decided she probably wouldn’t.

Yet I had done all I could to preserve his life, save going to France and confronting him. Yet confrontation would do no good, for Bannister undoubtedly would not believe me. He doubtless would not believe Melissa either, but I had tried. Kassouli would win.

I told myself I had behaved decently in trying to save Bannister.

Melissa had asked me why, and I’d given her the answers of truth and justice which she believed, for she knew how important those things were to me, yet the real truth was both simpler and far less noble. The real truth was that I cared very little whether Bannister lived or died, or whether he deserved punishment for his wife’s death; the truth, however ignoble it might be, was that I had struggled to warn Bannister because that was my only way of staying in touch with Angela.

I had done it all for Angela. Each attempt to reach Bannister was a way of reminding Angela that I lived and loved. Each high-minded attempt to save his life was a pathetic protestation of my love. That was why I had tried so hard. It was unsubtle and demeaning, but also irresistible, for Angela had lodged in my desire, and life without her seemed flat.

I needed to go to sea. I needed winds and waves to blow that flatness clean away. I sipped my tea and jotted down what few items of equipment I still needed. I started a list of perishable supplies; the very last things I’d buy before I turned Sycorax towards the earth’s end.

Through the rain outside, coming from George’s locked offices above me, I heard a phone start ringing. I could not concentrate on the list of supplies, so instead I teased my anticipation by unfolding my chart of the Azores. The season would be ending by the time I reached Horta, which was good because berthing fees would be low.

I could resupply with fresh food and renew friendships in the Café Sport. I smiled in anticipation, then noticed that the phone in the offices still rang. And rang. And rang.

I banged my right knee as I scrambled up the side of the wharf. The curved coping stones were wet, throwing me back down the wall, but I seized one of Sycorax’s warps and scraped my way over the top. My knee was numb and my back laced with pain as I limped across the yard. The rain had begun to fall harder so that it bounced in a fine spray from the cobbles.

The phone, dulled by the window and the rain, still rang.

I slipped in a puddle. I had the keys to the yard’s outer gate in my pocket, but George never trusted me with the office keys in case I made phone calls that he could not monitor. I pulled at the door, but he’d remembered to lock it. I swore. The phone still rang.

I told myself it was probably only a customer asking about one of George’s endlessly delayed jobs, but it was a bloody stubborn customer who’d phone at this time of the evening. I found an abandoned stanchion and swung it to shatter the door’s pebbled glass. I reached through for the latch. The phone sounded louder now that I was inside the building.

I limped upstairs, thanking providence that there was no burglar alarm. I knew the phone would stop before I reached it. I smashed the glass in the door of Rita’s office, then tripped on the frayed carpet as I lunged across the room. I stumbled and, as I fell headlong, my right hand grabbed the telephone’s old-fashioned braided lead and the ancient Bakelite instrument slid off the desk to shatter its case on the floor. I fumbled for the fallen handset and prayed I had not cut off the connection. “Hello!”

There was silence. Except for the airy and echoing hiss that told me the line was not dead. I straightened the broken phone on the carpet and twisted myself round so that my back was against Rita’s desk. “Hello?”

“Nick?” The voice was very small and unnaturally timid.

“Oh, God.” I felt tears in my eyes. Then, stupidly, I really was crying with the relief of it. “Angela?”

“Nick.”

“I’m crying,” I said.

“So am I,” she said, “for Tony.”

I closed my eyes. “Where are you?” I asked.

“Cherbourg. Melissa telephoned.”

I said a small prayer of thanks for Melissa’s caring and compas-sionate soul. “I told her to.”

“I know. I don’t know what to do, Nick.”

“Stop Tony sailing.”

“He’s already gone. They caught the afternoon’s tide.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Melissa called just afterwards and then I spoke to that journalist you told me to find and he said you’d been telling the truth. I should have believed you before, Nick, but…”

“It doesn’t matter.” I stared up at a calendar that Rita had hung on the wall. The calendar, which showed three kittens nestling in a pink blanket, was an incongruous advert for a firm that supplied VHF sets. “You must radio him,” I said. “Get a taxi to the Chantereyne Marina. Go to the office there—”

“I’ve tried him on the radio telephone already. It wasn’t any good.

He says I’m being hysterical. He says it’s newly-wed nerves. He says you’re just trying to stop him winning the St Pierre because you work for Kassouli.”

I scrambled to my feet to see if there was a clock on Rita’s desk.

There wasn’t. “What time is it now?”

“Nearly seven o’clock.” I subtracted one hour to get British Summer Time. “Nick?” Angela asked.

“I’m still here.”

“Can you stop him, Nick?”

“Jesus.” I thought for a few seconds. The answer had to be no, but I didn’t want to be so bleak. “What time did he leave?”

“He crossed the start line at twenty past three exactly.”

“Local time?” I asked. She confirmed that and I told her to wait.

I went into George’s office and ripped pin-ups off his wall to reveal an ancient and faded chart of the Channel. I dragged open his desk drawer and, among the pipe reamers, corkscrews and patent medicines found an old pair of dividers. This year’s tide table was in the other drawer. High Water at Dover had been ten minutes after mid-day, British Summer Time, which meant Bannister was sensibly using the fastest tidal current to launch his run.

I went to the window. The wind was southerly, gusting hard enough to slap the rain against the dirty panes. I picked up the phone on George’s desk. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Wait.” I walked the rusty dividers across George’s wretched chart. I knew that Wildtrack would be going like a bat out of hell to clear the Lizard before she swung up towards the Mizen on Ireland’s south-west coast. After that she would go north-west, hunting for the backwash of the depression-born gales that arced their way eastwards across the North Atlantic, but the only place I could stop her was in my own back alley: the Channel. I added a divider’s pace for the fair current and reckoned that, by three in the morning, and assuming Wildtrack had taken a slightly northerly course to clear the traffic-separation zone, Bannister would be in an area about twenty nautical miles south-south-west of Bolt Head. I drew a circle on the chart to limit the search area.

It’s easy to posit such a search on a chart, but out in the Channel, amidst a squally darkness, it would be like trying to find a dying firefly in the Milky Way. I shortened the dividers to compensate for Sycorax’s pedestrian pace, then pricked them north from my circle to Plymouth. Eight hours of windward discomfort.

“I might intercept him if I leave now,” I said dubiously.

“Please, Nick?” There was a pleading eagerness in her voice. “Will you stop him?”

The difficulty was not stopping Wildtrack. “Listen, Angela, I can’t even promise to find him.”

“But you’ll try? Please?” The last word was said with all her old seething passion.

“I’ll try. I promise.” I thus volunteered for the madness. “What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded helpless and frightened.

“Listen,” I said. “Fly to Exeter. Hire a private plane if you have to. Meet me at Bannister’s house tomorrow. I’ll be there about mid-day.”

“Why?”

Because I want to see you, I thought, but did not say it. Because I’m about to flog myself ragged in a bloody night for your rotten husband, and the least you can do is meet me afterwards and say thank you, but I didn’t say that either. “Just be there, Angela. Please?” She paused, and I thought she was going to refuse. “I’ll try,” she said guardedly.

“I’ll try too.” I put the phone down. The wind rattled George’s window panes and blew damp litter in tumbling disarray across his yard. It was a south wind, and still rising, which meant that tonight’s sail would be a windward slog to nowhere. The chances of finding Bannister were negligible, but that was no excuse to break the promise I’d just made to Angela. I closed the broken doors behind me, ducked my head to the wind, and limped to Sycorax.

I moved George’s half-wrecked fishing-boat, primed my wretched engine, and hurt my back turning the flywheel. I needed a self-starter.

I needed self-steering. I needed my head examining. I supposed that this was the manner in which knight errants had arranged their own disappointments; one bleat from the maiden and the fools galloped off into dragon land. The motor caught eventually and I let it get used to the idea of working while I dragged the foresails through the forehatch and hanked them on their halliards. I felt a moment’s jealousy of the slick sailors who had roller-reefing and self-tailing winches, then forgot the self-pity as I took Sycorax stern first into the river where the waves scudded busily before the cold wind. I hammered the gear lever into forward and Sycorax bluffed her bows against wind and water.

I prayed that the engine would keep running. We were pushing past drab quays where even the gulls, perched to face the southerly wind, looked miserable. Once out of the river I hoisted all the sails, but left the engine running so I would not have to tack my way past the breakwater. The sky on this English summer’s evening was a low, grey and wintry murk through which two Wessex helicopters thumped towards a frigate moored in the sound. A landing craft, black and khaki, thumped evilly towards Mount Edgcumbe, and the brutal, squat lines of the ugly craft brought back memories of the time when I had two good legs and the belief that I was both invincible and immortal. A sudden percussive bang from the Wembury gunnery range brought the memories into sickeningly sharp focus, but then I forgot the past as my engine gave an ominous bang of its own. It stopped dead, but it had taken me safely to the searoom at the breakwater’s western edge.

The open sea was raggedly high. Sycorax jarred at the first wave beyond the breakwater, then she seemed to realize what was expected of her and she tucked her head round and heeled to the wind that was flicking the tops off the waves into tails of white spume. I was sorting out the tangle of sheets in the cockpit. I was soaked through. Once clear of the Draystone I’d go below and find rough-weather clothes, but for now I knew I must stay with the tiller. A big Moody ran past me and the skipper waved and shouted something that got lost in the wind. He was probably calling that I had a nice boat. He was right, I did.

But that was small consolation tonight. I hunched low in the cockpit and knew that I was only making this gesture to impress Angela. I was meddling in her life because it gave me a chance to be close to her, but there had been no sign on the telephone that she reciprocated that wish. She had sounded desperate for her husband, while I had wanted her to be desperate for me. Such is pride.

I turned on to the starboard tack and hauled the sheets tight. I might have done this mainly for Angela, but there was a small part of me that was offended by what had happened. I’d been warned off by people who did not give a toss for the justice of their cause.

No one knew how Nadeznha Bannister had died, but that ignorance had not prevented them planning a callous revenge. So tonight, despite the warnings, I would sail out of bloody-mindedness. I remembered another night when I’d been told, ordered, not to do something. There’d been a sniper, I remembered, and two bunkers with bloody great .50 machine-guns.

The sniper was the real bastard, because he’d had a brand new American nightsight and had already hit a half-dozen of our men.

The boss had radioed that we were to bug off out of there, but to do that would have been to jeopardize…I jerked back to the present as Sycorax crashed her bows into a steeper wave and the spray rattled harsh along her decks. I shivered, pegged the tiller, and went below for sweater, boots and oilies.

As it fell dark I saw the vaporous loom of the Eddystone’s light sweeping its double flash through the pelting rain. Sycorax was holding her course beautifully as she pounded through a broken sea; she might not have slick self-tailing winches and roller-reefing, but her long deep keel made her a better sea boat than any of the modern plastic-fantastics that roamed the pleasure coasts of the world. I switched on my electric navigation lights and hoped the battery was properly charged. The engine smelt weird, so I just put the cover back on and hoped benign neglect would cure whatever had gone wrong. I tapped the barometer and found the glass was rising. I called the coastguard on the VHF and asked for a forecast.

Strong winds tonight, but falling off towards dawn, then another depression following quickly.

I went topsides briefly and checked that no merchant ship was about to turn me into matchwood. None was, so I went below again and emptied two tins of baked beans into a saucepan. It was all the food I had, and tasted good. I filled a Thermos with tea and carried it to the cockpit. Now it was simply a question of letting the wet hours pass. The rain slackened as the full darkness came, and I wondered if the wind was already falling off. The sea was softer now, though the swell which slid under Sycorax’s counter was long and high. The waves had gone from silver-grey to grey to dark. Soon they would be jet black, but perhaps streaked with phosphorescence.

Clouds drowned the moonlight.

Sycorax sailed herself. Her tiller was pegged and her sheets cleated tight. Sometimes, as the swell dropped her hard into a trough, the mainsail would shiver, but she picked herself up and drove on. I still had no radar-reflector and hoped that the big ships which were bashing down from Amsterdam and Hamburg and Felixstowe were keeping a proper watch. I could see the bright confusion of their lights all about me.

Midnight passed and the wind dropped and veered. I let out the sheets and felt Sycorax’s speed increase as she found herself on her favourite point of sail: a broad reach. I’d seen few other yachts, but just before one o’clock, and when I should still have been well north of Wildtrack’s course, I saw the lights of a vessel under sail. She was travelling west and, to intercept her, I unpegged the tiller and hardened Sycorax into the wind again. The big swell sometimes dropped the other yacht out of my sight, all but for her masthead’s tri-coloured light which would flicker over the shredding wavetops.

I tried to judge her size, but could not. I took bearings on her which told me she was sailing fast.

I opened the locker where my flares were stored. Bannister would not stop if I radioed him on the VHF, and if I tried to sail across his bow I invited a collision that, though it would stop him, could also sink Sycorax. Instead I planned to cross his stern and loose red emergency flares into the sky, because even a racing boat would have to stop and help a boat in distress. That was the law. Mulder and Bannister might curse, but they would have to gybe on to the new course and come to my rescue. Once they had come alongside I would play what cards I had. They were not many, but they included a Colt .45 which I had fetched up from its hiding place. I knew that if I fired the rocket flares I would cause chaos in the Channel. There would be lifeboats, radios and other ships all contributing to a rescue that wasn’t needed, but I had promised Angela to stop her husband, and if that promise turned a busy sealane into chaos, then chaos it would be.

I saw I was heading the approaching yacht. He was on the port tack, I on a starboard, so it was his job to stay clear of me. He’d seen my lights, for he steered a point southerly to give me room. I hardened again, and he thought I had not seen him and shone a bright torch beam up on to his mainsail to make a splash of white light in the darkness. At the same time another of his crew called me on Channel 16; the VHF emergency channel. “Sailing boat approaching large yacht, do you read me, over.”

It was not Mulder’s voice, nor Bannister’s. I thought I detected a French accent in the crackling speaker. I was close enough to see the sail number in the torchlight and, because it was not Wildtrack, I fell off the wind to go astern of him. The torch was switched off. A voice shouted a protest that was made indistinct by the spray and wind.

The yacht’s stern light showed me the name Mariette on the white raked transom. The port of registry was Étaples. I waved as I passed, then the wind tore us apart as I headed south again.

By three o’clock I knew I must be well inside the rough circle I’d sketched on George’s chart. The night was black as pitch and the wind was still dropping. I turned westwards, heading against Wildtrack’s course. I searched for an hour. I saw two more French-men, a Dutchman, but no Wildtrack. A bulk-carrier crashed past and Sycorax’s sails slatted as we were tossed on the great wake. Apart from the big ship the sea was empty. I had failed.

I turned north. There was already a lightening to the east as the false wolf-light of dawn edged the clouds. I was bone tired, cold, and hungry. I had failed, but I had always known how narrow was my chance of success. From Sycorax’s cockpit I could never see more than two miles and Wildtrack could have run past me at any time in the darkness. In truth I doubted whether I had ever sailed far enough south. Bannister was gone to the Lizard and death.

It began to rain again as I ran for home. The rain beaded the shrouds and dripped from the lacing on the boom. I made some more tea and found a wrinkled apple in the galley. I cut out the rotten bit and ate the rest.

Dawn showed the sea heaving in a greasy, slow swell. Patches of fog drifted above a sludge-like sea. If the fog lifted, it rained. The wind was west now, but negligible and sullen. The rudder, with no speed to give it bite, banged in its pintles. Another depression was meant to be racing towards the Channel, and Wildtrack would be praying for its arrival if she was to make a fast outwards run.

I was just praying to get home. Sailing isn’t always fun in the sun.

It isn’t always happy friends on sparkling decks in a perfect force four on a glinting ocean. It can be misery incarnate. It can be rain and fog and cold and hunger. It can be a sulky sea and a listless sky.

It can be failure, and then the only consolation is to remember that we volunteered for the misery.

So, in misery, I crawled north. I spent a quarter-hour working out the tidal currents to help my course, then tried to coax the engine into life. It was on strike, and the wind seemed to be in sympathy with its grudge. I stripped the fuel system, tried again, and still it wouldn’t start, so, instead, I tidied up the cabin and washed the decks. I told myself time and time again that I would not be disappointed if Angela had not returned to Devon. I told myself that the two of us had no future. I told myself over and over that I really did not care whether she was waiting for me at Bannister’s house or not.

At mid-morning, reluctant at first, a wind scoured the sea and creaked the port shrouds. I dropped the mop and seized the tiller.

I listened to the growing sound of water running past the hull and felt my excitement increase because Angela might be waiting for me. I did care. I cared desperately.

It was mid-day before I passed the Calfstone Shoal. The bell-buoy clanged at me. The wind was fitful now, but strong enough to carry me up the river and round the point.

Where, on the terrace above the river, and in front of an empty house, Angela was waiting.

She had been crying. She was in jeans and sweater, her hair bound in a single plait that hung to her narrow waist. “It’s a hell of a way to start a marriage.”

Or to end one, I thought, but did not say as much.

She was distraught, but I was too cold and famished to be a gentle listener. I made myself eggs, bacon, coffee and toast that I ate at the kitchen table. Angela sat opposite me and I noticed the thick gold wedding ring on her finger beside her diamond. She shook her head despairingly. “I tried to talk to him…”

“…but he wouldn’t listen.” I finished the sentence for her.

“He thinks you put me up to it. He thinks you want him to fail.” She stood and paced the floor. She was restless and confused, and I did not blame her. She only had my word, and that of Micky Harding, that her new husband was sailing to his death.

For a time she tried to convince herself that it was untrue. I let her talk while I ate. She talked of Bannister’s belief that he could take the coveted St Pierre, and of his happiness because she had walked up an aisle with him. She spoke of the programmes Bannister would make in the new season; she spoke of the future they had discussed and, because that future was threatened, it only seemed the brighter and more blessed to her now. “Tell me it isn’t true.” She spoke of Kassouli’s threat.

“As far as I know,” I said carefully, “it is true.” She shook in sudden anger. “How dare they say he murdered Nadeznha?”

“Perhaps because they believe he did?”

“He didn’t! He didn’t!”

“You know that?” I poured myself more coffee.

“For Christ’s sake!” She was still angry. “Do you think I’d have married him if he’d killed her?”

“Why did you marry him?”

She lit a cigarette. She had been chain-smoking ever since I’d come back. “Because I love him,” she said defiantly.

“Good.” I hid my disappointment.

“And because,” she said, “we can make a decent life for each other. I give him the security he wants, and he gives me the security I want.”

“Good,” I said again.

“And,” she said even more defiantly, “because I couldn’t marry you.”

I smiled. “I’m not a very good prospect.”

She drew on her cigarette. “You’ve caught the sun.” It sounded like an accusation.

“I’ve been working. Real work. Sawing and planing and getting paid for it. I didn’t get much money, but I’ve finished the boat. All but for a radar-reflector. And some fenders. And one or two other things.”

“Have you found a girl?”

The question surprised me, for it implied a jealousy that I had not expected. “No. I kept seeing your picture in the papers and I’d cut it out, keep it for ten minutes, then throw it away. I got drunk once or twice.”

She smiled, the first smile she’d given me. “I watched you in the film rushes. I used to go to the cutting rooms and run loops of your ugly face.” She shrugged. “You screwed up my lovely film, Nick Sandman.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.” She shrugged. “I’ve given up the business, though, haven’t I? That was one of the promises I made to Tony. No more telly.” She looked at her watch. “Where will he be by now?

Off southern Ireland?”

“Yes.”

She had begun to cry very softly. “He can’t give up, can he? He’s got cameras watching him, so he has to be a big, brave boy. Men are so bloody stupid.” She blew her nose. “Including you, Nick Sandman. What are you going to do now?”

I shrugged. “I’m going to provision Sycorax. I shall go to town, visit the bank, and spend a fortune on supplies. After that, on tomorrow’s tide, I shall sail away. I’ll make a landfall at Ushant, then head for the Azores.”

She frowned. “Just like that?”

“You think I should lay on brass bands and cheerleaders?” She gave me a flicker of a smile. “I’d want seasick pills.”

“Goldfish get seasick.”

She laughed. “They don’t!”

“No, it’s true. If you take them to sea as pets, they get seasick.” I poured the last of the coffee. “I wouldn’t mind a cat.”

“Truly?” She sounded surprised.

“I’ve always liked cats,” I said. “You’re a bit cat-like.” She stared down at the table. I’d thought our last few moments had been too relaxed and, sure enough, her mind was still with Wildtrack. “I’ve thought of phoning the coastguard. But it won’t do any good.”

“No. They’d just laugh at you.”

“I’ve tried the radio-telephone again, but he just gets angry.

He thinks I’m trying to stop his moment of glory. And the last two times I tried, it was Fanny who answered.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. We’d been through this already, and there was nothing I could do. “Pray that he lives,” I said.

She stared bleakly at me. “Perhaps I should go to Canada?” I smiled. “What can you do there?”

“I can try and stop him. I could go with the film crew.”

“What will you do?” I asked. “Ram him? And how do you know the film crew will even find him? I know they’ll be in radio touch, but have you ever seen the fog in those waters? Or perhaps Wildtrack will make her turn at night. What will you do then? Crash the camera helicopter on the foredeck next day? Or do you think you can persuade him to give up there when you couldn’t do it here?” I suddenly realized that my pessimism was doing her no good. “I’m sorry.

Maybe you should try. Anything’s better than doing nothing.” She sighed. “Tony may not even reach the turning point. God knows.”

“He’ll reach St Pierre,” I said.

“He will?” She was puzzled by my certainty.

I stared in silence at her, thinking of something Kassouli had said to me. Jill-Beth had not been specific when I tape-recorded her words, but Kassouli, I now remembered, had wanted me to steer a certain course on the return leg. “Jesus wept,” I said softly, “I’ve been so bloody stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re going to take him to the exact place where Nadeznha died! Don’t you see? On the outward leg he’ll have to go much too far north, but coming back he can run the great circle with the gales!

That’s why they’ll let him turn, because the perfect revenge has to be at the same damn place!”

“What place?” Her voice was urgent.

I couldn’t remember. The only places I’d seen the coordinates were on the frame of Nadeznha Bannister’s portrait in Wildtrack’s after cabin and on the papers that Kassouli had shown me. “Forty something north,” I said helplessly, then shrugged to show that my memory had failed me. Then I remembered the inquest transcript.

Angela ran from the kitchen, and I followed her. She went to Bannister’s study where she pulled open drawers to spill old television scripts, letters and diaries across the carpet. She found the transcript at the back of a filing cabinet. She turned the pages quickly, then seemed to freeze when she came to the evidence she wanted.

“Forty-nine, eighteen north,” she read aloud, “and forty-one, thirty-six west.” She turned to me. “Where is that?” I used an atlas to show her. I took one of Bannister’s pencils and I showed her how, on the mercator projection, Wildtrack would have to sail an arching parabola westwards, then a shallower curve back home. I put a cross on the point where Nadeznha Bannister had died. Angela used a ruler to work out the distances. I watched her thin fingers and I knew, in the room’s silence, what would come next.

“Nick…”

I had gone to the window. “It’s about three thousand nautical miles for Wildtrack,” I said. That was the distance from Cherbourg to the turning point at St Pierre, then back to the pencil cross.

“And from here. By the fastest route?” I could hear hope in her voice.

“Seventeen hundred?” It was probably fractionally less, but there was no such thing as a ‘fastest route’; not against headwinds and the North Atlantic current. “Say two thousand land miles.”

“How long would it take…?” She did not finish the sentence, but she really did not need to. She wanted to ask me how long it would take Sycorax to reach that cross on the map.

I could see the trees on the far bank heaving in the rising wind. It was odd weather; a quick succession of winds and calm, but tonight would see another stiff blow. “Sixteen days,” I guessed.

“Nick?” Her voice was tentative, even frightened, but she was pleading with me. She wanted me to go into the North Atlantic to save her husband.

“It would be faster,” I said brutally, “if I had someone to crew for me.”

She shook her head, but so abstractedly that I thought she had not heard properly. “But could you…?” she started, then seemed to think of something that drained the hope out of her face. “It’s your leg, isn’t it? You’re frightened that it will collapse.”

“It hasn’t happened for weeks,” I said truthfully, “and even if it had, it wouldn’t stop me.”

“So…” She could not bring herself to ask the favour directly.

“Yes,” I said. Wildtrack had a day’s start, but Wildtrack had much further to go. Yes, I could reach the killing place, and yes, I would try.

I’ve never victualled a boat so quickly, nor so well. Angela used her car and credit card to go to the town, while I raided Bannister’s larder and boathouse.

“I can’t let him die!” she said to me as she pushed a wheelbarrow of food down to the wharf. She said it as if to justify the insanity of what I did.

I didn’t care to discuss the motives; it was enough that I’d agreed to go for her. “What’s in the barrow?”

“Coffee, dried milk, eggs. Tins of everything.”

“The eggs need to be dipped in boiling water for five seconds. It preserves them.”

She took the eggs back to the house while I stored the tins in freezer bags to keep the bilge water from rusting the metal and ob-literating the labels. I stored packet soup, fresh bread, fruit, veget-ables, biscuits, baked beans, more baked beans, Irish whiskey, still more whiskey, margarine, tinned fruitcake, salt, sugar, tinned ham, and corned beef. I’d finished my rough list of perishable stores and hoped I’d forgotten nothing essential. Teabags, washing powder, compass alcohol, rice, oatmeal, disinfectant, multivitamins, cooking oil, lamp oil, soap. I wasn’t victualling only for a North Atlantic run, but thinking of what would follow. My own suspicion, my own certainty, was that I would never find Wildtrack. I went on a quixotic search because I did not know how to say no to a blonde, but once I had failed I would turn Sycorax’s bows southwards, and so I provisioned for a long dog-leg voyage that would take me from England to the Canadian coast, then southwards to where the palms and slash pines grew. Fruit juice, nuts, stock cubes, more whiskey, spare light bulbs, lamp wicks, loo paper, washing-up liquid that could also serve as salt-water shampoo.

The wind was still rising, and the glass dropping. By nightfall there would be a half gale blowing. Bannister had what he wanted, a fast start, and I would share it.

Angela brought the parboiled eggs and I gave her more errands.

“I want some coal or coke. Firelighters. I want sweaters, socks, warm weather gear. I want the best bloody oilskins in the house. I need a sextant, charts, the best sleeping bag you’ve got. I want an RDF and a self-steering vane.”

“Whatever you want, Nick. Just look for it.” I ransacked the house for things I might need. I borrowed a set of Bannister’s spare oilskins that were so much better than mine. I borrowed a sextant so I would have a spare. I found charts of the North Atlantic and the Canadian coast. I stole the battery from the Peugeot to supplement the two already on board Sycorax. From a drawer in Bannister’s study I took a fancy hand-held radio-direction finder and a pack of spare batteries, then scooped an armful of pa-perbacks from his shelves. More whiskey. I took the fenders off Wildtrack II. I crammed provisions into Sycorax’s every locker. Angela helped, piling stores higgledy-piggledy on the cabin sole. Half the time I didn’t know what she was stowing below, but I could sort out the whole mess on the voyage. I used the boathouse hose to top up with water, then craned three extra cans of diesel fuel on to the foredeck. I lashed the big cans down, though I doubted if the bloody engine would ever run long enough to need them. There was some broken self-steering gear in the boathouse and I put it all aboard. It could be mended and rigged at sea.

I still needed medical stores. Angela drove her Porsche into town and came back with bandages, butterfly clips, plasters, hypodermics and painkillers. I’d told her to go to the doctor and get a prescription for painkillers, local anaesthetics, tranquillizers, antibiotics and Benzedrine. I scribbled a note to the doctor explaining my need and Angela brought everything back. More whiskey. Potatoes, flour, crispbread, Newcastle Brown Ale, chocolate bars, razor-blades, bacon, fishing-lines, antiseptic cream, sunglasses.

By six o’clock it was almost done. The wind was blowing hard now, coming from the south-west. If the weather pattern held then I’d have a stiff beat out of the river and a wet blow down to the Lizard, and a rough sea to the Mizen Head, but after that, off the shelf waters, I’d be reaching fast into the high latitudes. From there I’d drop down to the rendezvous.

My tender was still in the boathouse. As Angela took the last two boxes down to the cabin I hoisted the dinghy on to Sycorax’s coachroof where I lashed it upside down. The dinghy was my only liferaft; there were not even lifejackets aboard. As I tied the last lashing to the starboard handrail it began to rain and suddenly there was no more to be done except to say goodbye.

I kissed Angela. We stood in the rain beside the river and I kissed her once more. I held her tight because a part of me did not want to leave. “I can’t promise anything,” I said.

“I know.”

“You just have to wait now,” I said.

“Yes.” She was embarrassed that I was doing this for her, but it was the last desperate throw, and I could not deny it to her. I’d planned to sail away whatever happened, and all I did now was make a northerly detour to where the seas would be cold, grey and bleak.

“Time to go.” I wanted to stay with her, but the falling tide beckoned. There were no bands or cheerleaders, just an overloaded boat on a river pecked by rain and squirled by wind. “I’ll write,” I said. “Some day.”

“Please do.” She spoke stiffly.

“I love you,” I said.

“Don’t say it, Nick.”

It was a miserable parting; a miserable departure. The engine wouldn’t start, but the jib tugged Sycorax’s bow away from the wharf.

Angela let go my springs and warps as I hoisted the mainsail and mizzen. Water swirled between the hull and the bank as I coiled the ropes.

“There’s a present for you in the cabin!” Angela shouted. Sycorax was moving fast now, snatched by the ebb and the river’s turbid current. Angela thought I had not heard her, so cupped her hands and shouted again, “In the cabin, Nick! A present!” I waved to show that I’d heard, but I couldn’t go below to find the gift until I had Sycorax settled into the main channel. Once there I pegged the tiller, went down the companionway, and found the last two boxes that Angela had loaded. One was filled with catfood, the other contained a small black female kitten that, as soon as I opened the box lid, greeted me with needle-sharp claws.

I went topsides. I looked back, but the rain had already driven Angela away from the wharf. The kitten, astonished by its new home, glared at me from the cabin steps. “I’ll call you Angel,” I said.

Angel hissed at me. The hair on her back bristled. I hoped she was a sea cat. I hoped she’d bring me luck.

I passed the pub and wondered when I would see it again.

Someone, recognizing the boat, waved from the window, and I waved back. I knew that in far-off seas I would remember that bar as a place of idle talk and lustrous beer, but then I had to tack in the village’s narrow reach and the manoeuvre took my mind off the anticipated nostalgia. I saw faces watching me from the holiday-makers’ cars which were parked on the riverside. The tourists saw a business-like boat loaded for a voyage. There was nothing glossy about Sycorax now; she was lashed tight in the evening’s rain and her beauty was that of a functional craft ready for the ocean. The kitten scrambled up to the cockpit and bared its tiny teeth at me. I scratched her under the chin, then watched as she leaped up to the coachroof where she began to sharpen her claws on the dinghy’s lashings. “Angel,” I tried out the name. “Angel.” I hadn’t filled in my Form C1328, Part One, to inform Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise that I was travelling abroad. Bugger Form C1328.

I didn’t have Sycorax’s registration papers, the lack of which would mean bureaucratic aggravation in foreign ports. Then bugger the bureaucrats, too; the world had too many such dull killjoys and Sycorax would sail despite them.

Ahead of me now were the town quays, then the river’s entrance where the half-gale was smashing waves white across the bar. The clouds were bringing an early dusk beneath which the homely lights gleamed soft from windows in the town. The blue-neon cross on the gable of the Baptist church flickered like lightning and I said a prayer for my small ship that was going down to the big seas. Rain slashed down at us, and the kitten protested to me from inside the cabin’s hatch.

Car lights flashed from the stone jetty by the town boatyard. As Sycorax drew closer I saw the blue Porsche parked there and knew that Angela had come to see us off. She ran down to the fuel pontoon and waved both arms at me. I waved back and I wondered why the farewell was suddenly so enthusiastic when, a half-hour before, it had been so cool. “I like the cat!” I shouted as loud as I could.

“Nick! Nick!” Then I saw she was beckoning. I pushed the tiller over, sheeted in on the new tack, and let the boat glide up towards the pontoon. Two big motor cruisers were moored there and I watched as Angela climbed over the poop of the larger boat. She stood outboard of its guardrails, holding on to a stanchion. She carried a bag.

I put Sycorax’s head to the wind and let the tide carry me alongside the cruiser. Angela threw the bag on to the foredeck, waited a second, then caught my hand and jumped into the cockpit.

I pushed the tiller to starboard and sheeted the jib across to turn our bows. I saw that Angela had left her car door open and its lights still burning.

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

“Of course I’m not sure, but…” She sounded oddly angry with me.

“But what?”

Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “It’s your leg. You’re going to kill yourself out there, Nick.”

“I’ll be fine, I promise.”

“And you said it would be quicker with two people on board.”

“That’s true.” I let the sails flap. “But not if one of them is seasick.” I wanted her to come more than I could possibly say, yet I was using arguments to make her stay behind.

She bent back her left ear to show me an adhesive patch. “The chemist says they’re infallible.” She must have bought the patch when she had gone to fetch my pills and potions, which meant she must have been debating this action for hours.

“It’s going to be rough out there,” I warned her. I was letting Sycorax drift on the current in case Angela wanted me to take her back to the pontoon.

“If you give me a choice now,” she said, “I might not stay.” I did not give her the choice. Instead I gave her the tiller and hauled in the sheets. “Hold this course. See the white pole on the headland? Aim for it.”

I fetched her bag from the foredeck and hoisted the staysail. I was so happy I could have walked on water.

Then Sycorax’s bows hit the waves at the river’s bar, the first cold spray shot back like shrapnel, and the three of us were going to sea.

PART FOUR

Part Four

Angela was seasick.

For hour after miserable hour, day after night, night after day, she lay shivering and helpless. I tried to make her spend time in the cockpit where the fresh air might have helped, but she shrank away from me. She stayed in the cabin’s lee bunk, wrapped in blankets, and retching into a zinc bucket.

The kitten was fine.

The kitten seemed to think a world permanently tipped away from the wind and battered by a half-gale was a perfect place. It slept in Angela’s lap, giving Angela the one small pleasure she could appreciate, while in the daylight it roamed the boat, performing daredevil acrobatics which made me think it was bound to be washed overboard, yet the little beast had an instinct for avoiding the rush of sea. Once I saw her leap up to the mainsail’s tack. She clung to the cotton, legs splayed, as a sea thundered over the coachroof to shatter on the tethered dinghy. The kitten seemed to like the mainsail after that and would sometimes scamper up the sail as I bellowed hopelessly that she’d tear the cotton with her claws. She’d get stuck up by the gaff jaws, looking like a small black spider on a vast chalk wall, but somehow she always found her way down. Her other favourite place was the chart table and every time I opened a chart she would leap on to it and curl up by the dividers. Then she’d purr, defying me to throw her off. I navigated from cat hair to cat hair.

There was little else to steer Sycorax by. The sky stayed clouded, the nights dark, and, once we had left the Irish lights behind, we were blind. I could not make Bannister’s fancy radio-direction finder work; all that happened when I pressed its trigger was that a small red light would glow, then nothing. Finally, in a fit of tired temper, I hurled the damn thing into the sea with a curse on all modern gadgets. I told myself, as I had told myself a million times before, that the Mayflower had reached America without a silicon chip, so I could too.

So, like the Mayflower, we thrashed north-west under a press of sails. Angela had the lee bunk, the bunk tipped away from the wind, which meant she could not fall out, so I used the weather bunk and snatched hours of sleep curled against the canvas straps that held me in place. I made Thermos flasks of soup that Angela pushed irritably away. I had never been seasick, but I knew well enough what it was like. For the first day she feared she was dying, and thereafter she feared she was not. So much for the chemist’s adhesive patch.

Sycorax thrived. She seemed to be telling me that she had endured enough nonsense in the last months, and this was what she was born to do, and she did it well. There were the usual crop of small problems in the first days. The jib clew began to tear and I temporarily replaced it with the storm jib and spent an evening sewing the stiff cotton tight again. The caulking round my chimney lifted, which was my own fault, and I spent a wet two hours tamping it back. The short-wave radio gave up its ghost after just two days and no amount of coaxing, banging or cursing would bring it back to life. The lack of the radio was more serious than the loss of the radio-direction finder, for without the short wave I could not check the accuracy of my key-wound chronometer. We were sailing by God, by guess, and by the Traverse Tables until the sky cleared and I could take a sight in the hope that the chronometer was keeping good time. There was a deal of water in the bilges whenever I pumped her, but I’d expected that. The caulked seams would tighten soon enough.

My greatest problem was my own tiredness. Angela could not help, so I was having to sail both day and night. I still had not rigged the broken self-steering gear which was stowed under the tender, but Sycorax had always sailed well enough with shortened sail and a pegged tiller while I slept. Such a procedure presupposed a constant wind direction, and entailed frequent wakings to check the compass headings. The worst moment came eight nights after we’d put to sea when a cleat horn snapped clean off and I woke to the hammering panic of the staysail flapping. The boat was rolling like a drunk on the swells as I struggled on to deck.

Rain was seething in the darkness as I turned Sycorax into the wind, backed the jib, and sheeted the main across. Then, with my lifeline locked on, I went forward to find the lost sheet. It took me ten minutes to bring it back to the cockpit, belay it over the jib cleat, and settle the boat back on her compass heading. My nightlights flickered on the shrouds while, beyond them, ghostly and fretting, the crests were shattering white as they rolled towards us. I pumped the bilges, then, in my rain-soaked oilies, climbed back over the washboards. Angela woke and groaned. “What happened?”

“Cleat broke, nothing to worry about.”

“Why don’t you have proper winches like Tony?” I thought the question showed a return of interest; perhaps even the first symptom of resurrection. “Because they’re flashy nasty modern things that would look wrong on Sycorax, and because they cost over a hundred pounds apiece.” I felt my back aching as I tugged off the stiff, wet oilskins. “Do you want something to eat?”

“God, no.” She groaned again as the boat slammed into a wave.

“Where are we?”

“West of Ireland, east of Canada.”

“Are we sinking?”

“Not yet. But the wind’s piped up a bit.”

I woke an hour later to feel the boat pitching and corkscrewing. I oilied up, then went topsides again to find the weather was brewing trouble. I took down the main and hoisted my loose-footed storm trysail instead. I dropped the jib and reefed the mizzen. The boat was still unbalanced, trying to broach into the hissing seas, so I took down the trysail and re-rigged it as a mizzen staysail. That stiffened Sycorax nicely, and she needed stiffening for the sea was heaving like a landscape gone mad. We were far north now, so the night was light and short and I could see that the wind and heavy rain were creaming the wavetops smooth and covering the valleys with a fine sheet of white foam. Sycorax buried her bowsprit twice, staggered up, and the water came streaming back towards the cockpit to mix with the pelting rain. I had neither dodgers nor sprayhood, though the lashed tender offered some small forward protection from the sea. I pumped the bilges every few minutes.

For the rest of that night, all the next day, and into the following night, that wind and sea pounded and shivered us. I slept for an hour in the morning, woke to the madness, pumped for a half-hour, and slept again. I took Benzedrine. By the midnight of the gale’s second night the wind was slackening and the sea’s insistent blows were lessening, so I pegged the tiller, left the sails short, and crawled into my bunk. Angela was weeping in despair, but I had no energy to soothe her. I only wanted oblivion in sleep.

I slept five hours, mostly in half-wake dreaming, then crawled from the damp bunk to find the gale had passed. I forced myself out of the sleeping bag, pulled on a soaking sweater, and went topsides to see a long, long swell fretted with small and angry waves that were the remnants of the wind’s passage. I took down the mizzen staysail, unlashed the boom and gaff, hoisted the main and jib, then unreefed the mizzen. I pumped the bilge till my back could take no more pain. I was hurting in every bone and muscle. This was called sailing, but the wind had dropped to force four and there were rents in the dawn clouds that promised sunshine. The sea glinted silver in the west and I leaned on the coachroof, too tired to move, and thanked Sycorax for all she had done. I patted her coachroof and spoke my thanks out loud.

The cat, hearing my voice, protested that she had not been fed for hours. I slid back the hatch and climbed down into the soaked cabin.

The cat rubbed itself against my legs. I no longer called her Angel, for every time I did Angela answered. I opened a tin of cat food and was so hungry I was tempted to wolf it down myself. Instead I cleaned up the cabin sole, including the spilt contents of the zinc bucket, and tried to persuade myself that this was indeed the life that I had dreamed of in those long hospital nights.

An hour later a Russian Aurora Class missile-cruiser cleared the northern horizon. She was escorted by two destroyers that sniffed suspiciously towards Sycorax. I dutifully lowered and raised my Red Ensign. That courtesy over, and duly answered by the dipping of a destroyer’s hammer and sickle, I switched on the VHF. “Yacht Sycorax to Russian naval vessel. Do you read me, over?”

“Good morning, little one. Over.” The operator must have been expecting my call for he answered instantly. He sounded horribly cheerful, as though he had a bellyful of coffee and fried egg, or whatever else constituted a hearty Russian breakfast.

“Can you give me a position and time check?” We stayed on the emergency channel which was hardly likely to disturb anyone this far out to sea. “Over.”