Samantha stopped him sharply, and there was a ripple of laughter, a
relaxation of tension and a casual round of greetings.
Hi, Nick, I'm Sally-Anne. A pretty girl with china-blue eyes behind
wire-framed spectacles put a heavy tumbler of wine into his hand.
We are short of glasses, guess you and Sam will have to share She slid
up along the bench and gave them a few inches of space and Samantha
perched in Nicholas lap. The wine was a rough fighting red, and it
galloped, booted and spurred across his palate but Samantha sipped her
share with the same relish as if it had been a S 3 ChAteau Lafitte, and
she nuzzled Nicholas ear and whispered: Tom is prof of the Biology
Department, he's a honey.
After you - he's my most favourite man in the world. A woman came
through from the galley, carrying a huge platter piled high with bright
pink shrimps and a bowl of molten butter. There was a roar of applause
for her as she placed the dishes in the centre of the table, and they
fell upon the food with unashamed gusto, The woman was tall with dark
hair in braids and a strong capable face, lean and supple in tight
breeches, but she was older than the other women and she paused beside
Tom Parker and draped one arm across his shoulders in a comfortable
gesture of long-established affection.
That's Antoinette, his wife. The woman heard her name and smiled across
at them, and with dark gentle eyes she studied Nicholas and then nodded
and made the continental O of thumb and forefinger at Samantha, before
slipping back into the galley.
The food did not inhibit the talk, the lively contentious flow of
discussion that swung swiftly from banter to deadly back again, bright
trained informed minds seriousness and clicking and cannoning off each
other with the crispness of ivory billiard balls, while at the same time
buttery fingers ripped the whiskered heads off the shrimps, delving for
the crescent of sweet white flesh, then leaving greasy fingerprints on
the wine tumblers.
As each of them spoke, Samantha whispered their names and credentials.
Hank Petersen, he's doing a PhD on the blue-fill tuna - spawning and a
trace of its migratory routes.
He's the one running the tagging tomorrow.
That's Michelle Rand, she's on loan from UCLA, and she's porpoises and
whales. Then suddenly they were all discussing indignantly a rogue
tanker captain who the week before had scrubbed his tanks n the middle
of the Florida straits and left a thirty-mile slick down the Gulf
Stream, He had done it under cover of night, and changed course as soon
as he was into the Atlantic proper.
We finger-printed him, Tom Parker like an angry bear, we had him made,
dead in the cross hairs. Nick knew he was talking of the
finger-printing of oil residues, the breakdown of samples of the slick
under gas spectroscopy which could match them exactly to the samples
taken by the Coast Guard from the offender's tanks. The identification
was good enough to bear up in an international court of law. But the
trick is getting the son-of-a-bitch into court. Tom Parker went on. 'He
was fifty miles outside our territorial waters by the time the Coast
