began swimming again, watching Mandrake’s lights dwindle and lose themselves against the spangled backdrop of the shore.
I had left my wristwatch in the forecastle so I did not know how long it was before I lost all sense of feeling in my arms and legs. I tried to keep swimming but I was not sure if my limbs were responding.
I began to feel a wonderful floating sense of release. The lights of the land faded out, and I seemed -to be wrapped in warmth and soft white clouds. I thought that if this was dying it wasn’t as bad as its propaganda, and I giggled, lying sodden and helpless in the lifejacket.
I wondered with interest why my vision had gone, it wasn’t the way I had heard it told. Then suddenly I realized that the sea fog had come down in the dawn, and it was this that had blinded me. However, the morning light was growing in strength, I could see clearly twenty feet into the eddying fog banks.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep; my last thought was that this was probably my last thought. It made me giggle again as darkness swept over me.
Voices woke me, voices very clear and close in the fog, the rich and lovely Welsh accents roused me. I tried to shout, and with a sense of great achievement it came out like the squawk of a gull.
Out of the fog loomed the dark ungainly shape of an ancient lobster boat. It was on the drift, setting pots, and two men hung over the side, intent on their labours.
I squawked again and one of the men looked up. I had an impression of pale blue eyes in a weathered and heavily lined ruddy face, cloth cap and an-old briar pipe gripped in broken yellow teeth.
“Good morning,” I croaked.
“Jesus!“said the lobster man around the stern of his pipe.
I sat in the tiny wheelhouse wrapped in a filthy old blanket, and drank steaming unsweetened tea from a chipped enamel mug - shivering so violently that the mug leaped and twitched in my cupped hands.
My whole body was a lovely shade of blue, and returning circulation was excruciating agony in my joints. My two rescuers were taciturn men, with a marvellous sense of other people’s privacy, probably bred into them by a long line of buccaneers and smugglers.
By the time they had set their pots and cleared for the homeward run it was after noon and I had thawed out. My clothes had dried over the stove in the miniature galley and I had a belly full of brown bread and smoked mackerel sandwiches.
We went into Port Talbot, and when I tried to pay them with my rumpled fivers for their help, the older of the two lobster men turned a blue and frosty eye upon me.
“Any time I win a man back from the sea, I’m paid in full, mister.
Keep your money.”
The journey back to London was a nightmare of country buses and night trains. When I stumbled out of Paddington Station at ten o’clock the next morning I understood why a pair of bobbies paused in their majestic pacing to study my face. I must have looked like an escaped convict.
The cabby ran a world-weary eye over my two days” growth of dark stiff beard, the swollen lip and the bruised eye. “Did her husband come home early, mate?” he asked, and I groaned weakly. , Sherry North opened the door to her uncle’s apartment and stared at me with huge startled blue eyes.
“Oh my God, Harry! What on earth happened to you? You look terrible.” “Thanks,” I said. “That really cheers me up.”
She caught my arm and drew me into the apartment. “I’ve been going out of my mind. Two days. I’ve even called the police, the hospitals - everywhere I could think of.”
The uncle was hovering in the background and his presence set my nerves on edge. I refused the offer of a bath and clean clothes - and instead I took Sherry back with me to the Windsor Arms.
I left the door to the bathroom open while I shaved and bathed so that we could talk, and although she kept out of direct line of sight while I was in the tub, I thought it was developing a useful sense of intimacy between us.
I told her in detail of my abduction by Manny Resnick’s trained gorillas, and of my escape - making no attempt to play down my own heroic role - and she listened in a silence that I could only believe was fascinated admiration.
I emerged from the bath with a towel wound round my waist and sat on the bed to finish the tale while Sherry doctored my cuts and abrasions.
“You’ll have to go. to the police now, Harry,” she said at last.
“They tried to murder you.”
“Sherry, my darling girl, please don’t keep talking about the police. You make me nervous.”
“But, Harry-“
“Forget about the police, and order some food for us. I haven’t eaten since I can remember.”
The hotel kitchen sent up a fine grilling of bacon and tomatoes, fried eggs, toast and tea. While I ate, I tried to relate the recent rapid turn of events to our previous knowledge, and alter our plans to fit in.
“By the way, you were on the list of expendables. They didn’t intend merely holding a barbecue with your fingers. Manny Resnick was convinced that his boys had killed you-2 and a queasy expression passed over her lovely face.
“They were apparently getting rid of anyone who knew anything at all about the Dawn Light.”
I took another mouthful of egg and bacon and chewed in silence.
“At least we have a timetable now. Manny’s charter which is incidentally called Mandrake - looks very fast and powerful, but it’s still going to take him three or four weeks to get out to the islands. It gives us time.”
She poured tea for me, milk last the way I like it. “Thanks, Sherry, you are an angel of mercy.” She stuck out her tongue at me, and I went on. “Whatever it is we are looking for, it just has to be something extraordinary. That motor yacht Manny has hired himself looks like the Royal Yacht. He must be laying out close to a hundred thousand pounds on this little lark. God, I wish we knew what those five cases contain. I tried to sound Manny out - but he laughed at me. Told me I knew or I wouldn’t be taking so much trouble.
“Oh, Harry.” Sherry’s face lit up. “You’ve given us the bad news - now stand by for the good.”
“I could stand a little.”
“You know Jimmy’s note on the letter - B. Mus?” I nodded.
“Bachelor of Music?”
“No, idiot - British Museum.”
“I’m afraid you just lost me.”
“I was discussing it with Uncle Dan. He recognized it immediately. It’s reference to a work in the library of the British Museum. He holds a reader’s card. He’s researching a book, and works there often.”
“Could we get in there?”
“We’ll give it a college try.”
I waited almost two hours beneath the vast golden and blue dome of the Reading Room at the British Museum, and the craving for a cheroot was like a vice around my chest.
I did not know what to expect - I had simply filled in the withdrawals form with Jimmy North’s reference number - so when at last the attendant laid a thick volume before me, I seized it eagerly.
It was a Secker and Warburg edition, first published in 1963. The author was a Doctor P.A. Ready and the title was printed in gold on the spine: LEGENDARY AND LOST TREASURES OF THE WORLD.
I lingered over the closed book, teasing myself a little, and I wondered what chain of coincidence and luck had allowed Jimmy North to follow this paperchase of ancient clues. Had he read this book first in his burning obsession with wrecks and sea treasure and had he then stumbled on the batch of old letters? I would never know.
There were forty-nine chapters, each listing a separate item. I read carefully down the list.
There were Aztec treasures of gold, the plate and bullion of Panama, buccaneer hoards, a lost goldmine in the Rockies of North America, a valley of diamonds in South Africa, treasure ships of the Armada, the Lutim bullion ship from which the famous Lutim Bell at Lloyd’s had been recovered, Alexandra the Great’s chariot of gold, more treasure ships - both ancient and modern - from the Second World War to the sack of Troy, treasures of Mussolini, Prester John, Darius, Roman generals, privateers and pirates of Barbary and Coromandel. It was a vast profusion of fact and fancy, history and conjecture. The treasures of lost cities and forgotten civilizations, from Atlantis to the fabulous golden city of the Kalahari Desert - there was so much of it, and I did not know where to look.
