lamp.
‘I’ll report you — !’
‘Answer the question!’
‘I tell you straight-’
Gently hit him again. The twisted lips spat blood and showed the teeth in a vicious snarl.
‘Some night, when you’re not expecting it!’
He aimed a wicked kick at the groin. Gently shortened his grip on the canvas slop and shook the fisherman as though shaking a rat.
‘Answer me!’
‘How should — don’t hit me!’
His teeth were rattling in his head.
‘Everyone can tell you — it was to do with other men!’
‘Which other men?’
‘How should I — don’t hit me any more!’
‘Why did she come back?’
‘She didn’t!’
He attempted another kick.
For a moment Gently seemed to be crushing him under the weight of gigantic shoulders. Hawks, driven down on his knees, had his face turned full to the lamp: his eyes were cursing Gently, cursing from the depths of a fathomless hell.
Large eyes… dark eyes… eyes crazy with passion!
They were the eyes of Mixer’s photograph: they were the eyes of Rachel Campion.
With a motion that echoed Esau’s Gently hurled the fellow from him. He fell in a tumbled heap at the feet of his silent comrades.
‘And to think you helped him launch…’
Spanton kicked some loose sand at his face.
The little hut was savaged with lightning: when they could see again, Gently was gone.
He was halted outside the hut by a spectacle of unimaginable grandeur. Leaning against the howling wind, he stared seaward in awed unbelief.
The storm had by this time overrun the entire sky, sealing every horizon with its driving black squadrons. The sea had begun to make and there were breakers pounding the beach. The darkness was so complete that it might as well have been midnight. Excepting at one spot — and that was the phenomenon which astounded him! At about a mile out to sea there was an area of angelic light. Above it the clouds had hollowed into an enormous, twisting cauldron, down which, in slanted lines, the sun was pouring its silver fire.
And there was something in that area! — he sheltered his eyes from the sheeting rain. A fleck, no larger than a tiny white bird, showed where the Keep Going was still plugging along. Into the storm centre Esau had put her. He was riding the calm at the heart of the hurricane. The storm, which confounded the hearts of men, was friend and brethren to the white-bearded Sea-King.
Gently hurried down the gap to join the rain-battered Wolseley. Dyson, wearing a borrowed oily, had just arrived from the village.
‘No luck with Air-Sea Rescue — Dawes has had it, I’m afraid.’
‘Where’s the nearest lifeboat station?’
‘Castra, but if you’re thinking…’
And then, as Gently let in the clutch:
‘Where does Dawes come into this business, anyway?’
The nearest phone box was the one by the Beach Stores. It was cascading water, both inside and out. The instrument, at first, sounded dead as a door knocker; then it burst into life with a fizzing of interference.
‘Castra Lifeboat Shed.’
He was put through immediately. At the other end it was the cox’n who came on the line.
‘Put out in this lot! Do you know what you’re asking me?’
‘Just listen a moment until I give you the details.’
He explained the circumstances briefly, the cox’n answering him in grunts. At the end he was hung up with curt instructions to wait. Rain was coursing down the panel at the back of the box and from the roof, which appeared to be cracked, a trickle descended on his shoulders.
‘Right you are, now I’ve had a look. I reckon it may be going to clear. If you think your man can hang on for, say, another hour or more…’
‘I shall have to come along with you.’
‘You! Are you used to these capers?’
‘I might be able to persuade him… anyway, it’s a chance I shall have to take.’
It didn’t look any clearer as they hissed along the Starmouth Road. Gently was having to use his lights and to hold the car against the buffeting wind. Twice the lightning blazed from the road, apparently right beneath their wheels: he had to brake to a crawl each time until his eyes became readjusted.
‘Did Dawes ever marry, by any chance?’
Now Dyson was probing away at the problem. Dutt they had left at Hiverton with a pair of glasses, borrowed from Neal. He was to watch from the coastguard lookout, to which a telephone was still connected. If he observed any change of course he was to pass it on to Castra.
‘He’d’ve been much younger, wouldn’t he?’
‘Where exactly do we turn?’
‘Beyond the church. I was only thinking…’
But he could get nothing out of Gently.
The lifeboat shed was a tall timber structure, its pent roof jutting out firmly above the beach. A shallow ramp led to the lower level, and from the bottom of this blocks were already in position. Gently jammed the car on to a patch of marrams. Nobody appeared to notice their arrival. The sea, breaking heavily on the beach below them, had a tremendous look to the eye of a landsman.
‘Come in here a moment, will you?’
They followed a hand that beckoned to them. Inside, under brilliant lights, the big lifeboat towered on its slip. A small tractor with tracks chuffed fussily in a corner and the crew stood by in yellow oilies and gumboots.
‘Here… in here.’
The cox’n led Gently into the office. He was an elderly man with a shrewd, weathered face. He pointed to a chart which lay spread out beneath an anglepoise: for a moment it looked strange and unintelligible to Gently.
‘Confound the blessed thunder! Do you see where we are? There’s Hiverton, see, and there’s the Ness above it. I’d like you to estimate his speed if you can… if you’re right about his course, he’s making good east by north…’
He consulted a table, his lips working noiselessly, then he drew two lines with a parallel rule.
‘North-east a quarter north made good should fetch him… he couldn’t make more than seven, and we’ve the wind aft of the beam.’
Gently was hustled into oilies, gumboots and a life jacket. The cox’n poured him a tot of brandy and clinked glasses with ceremony. Dyson stood mournfully by, his opinion in his face. There were limits, it seemed to say, to the proper duties of C.I.D. men.
At the last moment he came forward.
‘Under the circumstances, don’t you think?’
Gently shrugged and scribbled some notes on the back of a borrowed message form.
‘For the background to it get hold of Pagram at the Yard. The rest you can piece together… Simmonds, of course, you needn’t detain.’
The launch, when it came, was improbably casual — in point of fact, the sea had not yet risen very high. They were nudged through the breakers with no untoward incident, the clutch was knocked in, and they were surging on their way.
‘Go below if you want to.’
