gang?master. We know there’s no love lost with Lufkin. We think he’s honest. Let’s see if he’s got a tale to tell.’
Valentine turned the key, thinking that if Shaw wanted a chauffeur he should bloody well hire one.
Sly’s houseboat was moored behind Boal Quay. There was an abandoned creek, an old bend in the river by? passed by the main channel which spewed into the estuary. A crescent of houseboats stood moored to a raised jetty. Each had a small hut on dry land, a gangway across the mud, access to a power point and a standpipe. It was home to a menagerie of misfits, some of the boats fashioned into fantastic shapes: one, the superstructure an old single?decker bus laid on a steel hull, another incorporating a Reliant Robin. In between the New Age fantasies there were boats from a more stately era — an old Cambridge college boat, with a veranda like a Victorian railway?station platform; an old steam tug off the set of
The heavy scent of rotting wood and putrid mud was cloying. Sly’s home was a wooden barnacle on a steel hull, portholes lit, a washing line on the forward deck hung with a single pair of overalls. Moored alongside was a metal?hulled inshore fishing boat with an open deck, a mast bristling with sonar, GPS, radomes, a fish?finder aerial and floodlights. Shaw recognized it as the one they’d seen anchored off Styleman’s Middle on the morning they’d found James Baker?Sibley’s body.
They were only halfway across the gangplank when Sly appeared. A deck light flooded them in white, catching falling snowflakes. Shaw was struck again by Sly’s size — the barrel?chest, the ham fists. On board his floating home he’d lost the awkwardness that had been apparent out on Styleman’s Middle. He raised a hand to his side, without looking, and clicked the light off at a switch, then ran the hand down to find a latch so that he could swing the double doors into the cabin wide open. He pulled a blue seaman’s cap off his cannonball head.
Inside they could see the winter?red glow of a potbellied stove.
‘She’s new,’ said Shaw, ducking inside, wrapping himself in the sudden woody heat. ‘The fishing boat alongside.’
‘Refurb,’ said Sly, shutting the doors. ‘I’ve done a lot of the work. The engine’s giving me gyp. Which isn’t funny, ’cos it’s my livelihood now.’
Shaw let him tell them what he wanted to tell them.
Sly took a handful of wooden staves from a basket by the door and fed them into the pot?bellied stove.
The room was simple, furnished with just a few chairs and a single oval table in scratched mahogany. A bookcase filled the prow end. The portholes were brass, a skylight above was crated with snow. As Sly tried to find glasses Shaw looked at some of the framed prints: a map of the Falkland Islands, a picture of a tanker in the Suez Canal, one of Sly — a young man of twenty perhaps — arms round two other sailors outside a bar somewhere hot, in shorts, tattoos on their arms. He was the biggest of the three; the torso muscled like meat, the neck as wide as the thighs.
And an old leather football in a glass case, a hand?painted legend in white: ‘RFA Winners: 1971/2’.
Sly gave them glasses with a shot of vodka in each. ‘We heard you had a fight with Lufkin last Christmas. What was that about?’ asked Shaw.
‘Drink,’ said Sly, tipping back the glass. ‘Too much of it. He’s only little, it goes to his head.’ Shaw guessed Sly was a man who’d relied all his life on his power to physically intimidate. Now, with the advance of age, he’d been unable to adapt. He moved with a slightly arthritic limp.
‘We’ve been asking around, Mr Sly,’ said Shaw, studying a chart laid on the table — the Wash sands out to the navigation light on Roaring Middle. ‘And there seems to
Sly ran the back of his hand across his lips. ‘Maybe.’ They heard a burst of sparks fizzing out in the darkness and through the porthole saw flames lick up from a fire. Out on the mud there was an island of grass and a bonfire burnt; in the shadows men moved.
‘That’s the social club,’ explained Sly.
Valentine hadn’t taken his eyes off Sly. ‘And Lufkin’s got the boss on his side right? That’s Colin Narr?’
‘And Colin Narr’s been there for years,’ said Shaw. ‘So how come your face doesn’t fit now all of a sudden?’
Sly shrugged. ‘Too old to cut it. It’s a young man’s game.’
Shaw’s temper had run its course. When he spoke, his voice had an edge like a rusty saw. ‘Mr Sly, I’ve just left Mr Fibich — you know Bedrich?’
Sly didn’t move a muscle, his glass cradled in his hand.
‘We went to pull him in at the hostel down in the North End. He decided he didn’t want to come, so he stabbed a police officer, then dragged a meat knife across his wrists. He’s dead. Someone will have to tell his wife, his kids. It’ll be someone like me. We wanted to talk to him about the man you found out on Styleman’s Middle. A man by the name of James Baker?Sibley.’
They heard wood crackling out in the dark, a surge of intoxicated laughter.
‘And we want to ask you the same questions,’ finished Shaw, setting the drink on a ledge below a porthole.
‘Mr Sly, you seem to be labouring under a misconception,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s immaterial to me on whose watch these crimes took place. You were out there. You’re out there every day. You’re in charge. I want some answers. Did you have anything to do with Mr Baker?Sibley’s death?’
Sly took a decision, tipping what was left of the alcohol down his throat. ‘No. I liked James, we’d known each other for many years. He was my boss.’
‘In what sense?’ asked Shaw, the edge still in his voice.
‘In the sense that he owned Shark Tooth.’
‘What?’ said Valentine, flicking his notebook open and closed in irritation.
‘Why doesn’t everyone know that?’ asked Shaw. ‘Silent partner,’ said Sly. ‘That’s the way he wanted it. Same as his dad. I did the job for him too before he died. The money’s offshore. Commander Baker?Sibley set it up in the nineties. I was in the Falklands with him. Narr ran the business — but I reported over his head, straight to the family.’
Valentine sniffed. ‘What about the other shareholders?’
‘They’re in for the local knowledge, expertise, influence. They hold the licences. But James bankrolled it. I was his eyes and ears. And I didn’t like what I saw, and I didn’t like what I heard.’
‘Right. You knew — of course you knew. That Lufkin and Narr were smuggling, maybe dumping the toxic
‘Sure. He had interests all over — Greece, south of France, Hungary… the last thing he wanted was the police crawling over some two?bit scam. So yeah — he wanted it stopped. But in life there’s what you want, and there’s what you get.’
‘Why didn’t he just chuck Narr out — Lufkin too?’
‘Like I say — Narr’s important, he knows the business, the licences are in his name. Chuck him out, you ain’t got a business.’
‘So why didn’t you tell us it was James’s body when you found it on Styleman’s Middle?’
‘I saw a lot of dead men in the Falklands,’ said Sly. ‘They all look the same. Like meat.’ He bowed his head, knowing that wasn’t good enough. ‘I needed time to think. Time to work it out.’
‘And you worked it out. Then you did nothing.’
‘That’s your job. I’m out of it.’
‘We need some help,’ said Shaw. ‘I don’t think Colin Narr was on the yacht when James died. But I think he sent Lufkin out there. I need to make that link.’
‘I don’t want to be part of this,’ said Sly. ‘Can you promise me that?’
‘I can promise you only one thing, Mr Sly. That if you don’t tell us what you know I’ll make sure you’re charged with perverting the course of justice. This investigation was severely hampered by our failure to ID the body on Styleman’s Middle. That’s down to you.’
Sly slugged the vodka back and refilled his glass. ‘Take the ferry across at West Lynn. Take it tonight. Half? way across there’s a small trawler in mid?stream, the
