understood. They huddled together in a defensive knot and threw strange glances at the policeman from London.
‘Right — then we’ll launch another boat.’
There was a shrugging and shaking of heads.
‘As a police officer I’m ordering you to give me assistance!’
‘What’s the use of that, when we couldn’t blessed-well catch him?’
It was Pike who volunteered the explanation:
‘He’s got a Perkins petrol engine aboard her. On a sea like this she’ll do eleven knots… there isn’t one of us others can make eight between us.’
‘You — Spanton! How much fuel did he have on board?’
‘Full tanks.’ The young mate didn’t bother to look round.
‘How far will that take him?’
‘To Holland if he wants to go there. But you don’t need to worry — he’ll never get to Holland.’
‘Let him go!’ snarled Hawks. ‘It’s his own affair, isn’t it? He knows his own business or nobody can’t tell him.’
‘The glass has dropped to nothing.’
‘He’s got eyes in his head! Let him go, I say — what’s the sense in bringing him back?’
A gust of hot air whirled suddenly over the beach: it tossed up scraps of litter and hissed spitefully through the marrams. It was followed by a moaning sound, hollow and frightening. The sun was now trapped in a net of the haze.
‘You hear that, Jimmy?’
Like blood was the sun. A pulsating ruddy eye, it seemed to boil behind the wrack. To the south the horizon was shuttered under mountains of solid darkness, their outriders advancing with malevolent rapidity. The noose of a hunter! On the glassy lake they were closing, on the clockwork toy that clattered naively over its surface.
‘It’s going to come on a-rummun.’
‘When you hear the Old Man groan…’
How had the air, from being torrid, grown cold so quickly — as though someone had opened the door of a gigantic refrigerator?
Dutt came plugging over the beach:
‘I’ve brought the car up the track, sir. Inspector Dyson’s gone to telephone to Air-Sea Rescue. He took one look down here, sir.’
‘Air-Sea Rescue!’
‘That’s right, sir. From Starmouth. He reckons that they might be able to get here.’
It was the barest of possibilities. The launch could be there in half-an-hour. From Starmouth, by sea, it wasn’t more than seven or eight miles. But then they had to get their hands on Esau — and then they had to get home again. And meanwhile, like the wrath of God…
Who could calculate the chances?
‘Is this something to do with us, sir?’
The reporters would liked to have known that, too. With their nostrils attuned for a killing, they were watching the event with a dour pertinacity.
‘For the moment, I want him back.’
Dutt accepted the hint without pressing his senior. The fishermen, who couldn’t have heard what was said, seemed to shrink a little closer in their obstinate huddle. A wind, now hot, now cold, was gusting wailfully up the beach: on the terrible pall to the south a net of lightning had started to flicker.
‘You won’t see no Air-Sea Rescue!’
They could hear the thunder in distant explosions. The sea had gone black only a few furlongs away, and in a moment the first raindrops were beating on their faces.
‘Look at it — ask yourself!’
Hawks was shaking in his glee.
‘There ain’t nothing going to fetch him — no, not nothing in this world. In a minute it’s going to blow like it never blew before!’
‘You shut your trap up, Bob!’
Young Spanton had turned on him in a fury.
‘Don’t you talk like that to me.’
‘Shut your trap, or I’ll knock you down!’
Hawks’s reply was lost in the uproar: the thunder was suddenly over their heads. A whirlwind of rain lashed down on the beach and immediately, it seemed, they were surrounded by darkness. There was a general rush for shelter, though everyone was drenched: it may have been the darkness that sent them all running. Their feet made leprous tracks in the newly-darkened sand, while above them the thunder was sundering the very air.
Somebody had the key to the net store and into this the fishermen tumbled. There was little room inside except what was taken up by gear. The door was slammed and secured with a cord: a hurricane lamp was found and lit. The rain, pelting down on the sheet-iron roof, made a continuous roar between detonations of thunder.
‘Damn my hat, but it’s a clinker!’
The wind shrieked over the little hut. From its corrugated eaves there were produced a variety of whistlings.
‘We won’t never beach her again.’
‘Nor he’ll never get to Holland!’
‘Watch your tackle there, old partners — there’s a Dutchman got amongst us.’
For they weren’t alone in their cluttered den — Gently had managed to squeeze in behind them. A bedraggled figure in his clinging shirt, he stood with his back to the clamouring door. The fishermen silenced themselves directly. Pike, reaching up, trimmed the flickering hurricane. Every second or so it was bleached out by lightning: there was a small, cracked window which faced the sea.
‘Robert Hawks! I want to talk to you.’
The lean fisherman glared at him without coming forward. Under the smoky, yellowish light of the hurricane his features looked sharper and unnaturally savage.
‘I haven’t got nothing to say.’
‘Oh yes, I think you have.’
‘You know better than me, then!’
‘It’s to do with Mrs Dawes.’
For an instant the thunder crashed, making any response impossible. Outside a can or something broke loose: it went banging and clattering away up the marrams.
‘Mrs Dawes — what’s that to do with me?’
Hawkes’s face had changed, it was sullen and wary. His mates’ eyes had faltered from Gently to him — Spanton, especially, was regarding him intently.
‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘I can tell you straight out! I don’t know nothing about Esau’s missus.’
‘Why did Esau kick her out?’
‘Just you swim out and ask him.’
‘I’m asking you, Hawks.’
‘And I say I don’t know!’
Another bout of thunder, lightning sizzling on its tail. The hut blazed and seemed to disintegrate in the white blinding charge. When the glow of the hurricane took over again it showed Hawks, struggling futilely, in Gently’s massive grip.
‘Once more — I’m asking you!’
‘Take your hands off me!’
‘Why did he kick her out?’
‘How should I know more than the rest!’
Gently struck him across the face. Nobody made an attempt to stop him. A silent, motionless court, they stood like figures in a Dutch interior — a Rembrandt that changed to El Greco when the lightning destroyed the
