the aqualung bottles on the compressor to top up, and we left Dancer at the wharf while I went up to Ma Eddy’s and Angelo and Chubby took my drawing of the air bags across to his father’s workshop.
The bags were ready by four o’clock and I picked them up in the Ford and stowed them in the sail locker under the cockpit seats. Then I spent an hour stripping and reassembling the demand valves of the scubas and checking out all the other diving equipment.
At sundown I ran Dancer out to her moorings on my own, and was about to leave her and row ashore in the dinghy when I had a good thought. I went back into the cabin and knocked back the toggles on the engine-room hatch.
I took the FN carbine from its hiding-place, pumped a cartridge into the breech, set her for automatic fire and clicked on the safety catch before hanging her in the slings again.
Before it was dark, I took my old cast net and waded out across the lagoon towards the main red, I saw the swirl and run beneath the surface of the water which the setting sun had burnished to the colour of copper and. flame, and I sent the net spinning high with a swing of shoulders and arms. It ballooned like a parachute, and fell in a wide circle over the shoal of striped mullet. When I pulled the drag line and closed the net over them, there were five of the big silvery fish as long as my forearm kicking and thumping in the coarse wet folds.
I grilled two of them and ate them on the veranda of my shack. They tasted better than trout from a mountain stream, and afterwards I poured a second whisky and sat On into the dark.
usually this is the time of day when the island enfolds me in a great sense of peace and I seem to understand what the whole business of living is all about. However, that night was not like that. I was angry that these people had come out to the island and brought with them their special brand of poison to contaminate us. Five years ago I had run from that, believing I had found a place that was safe. Yet beneath the anger, when I was honest with myself, I recognized also an excitement, a pleasurable excitement That gut thing again, knowing that I was at risk once more. I was not sure yet what the stakes were, but I knew they were high and that I was sitting in the game with the big boys once again.
I was on the left-hand path again. The path I had chosen at seventeen, when I had deliberately decided against the university bursary which I had been awarded and instead I bunked from St. Stephen’s orphanage in north London and lied about my age to join a whaling factory ship bound for the Antarctic. Down there on the edge of the great ice I lost my last vestige of appetite for the academic life.
When the money I had made in the south ran out I enlisted in a special service battalion where I learned how violence and sudden death could be practised as an art. I practised that art in Malaya and Vietnam, then later in the Congo and Biafra - until suddenly one day in a remote jungle village while the thatched huts burned sending columns of tarry black smoke into an empty brazen sky and the flies came to the dead in humming blue clouds, I was sickened to the depths of my soul I wanted out.
In the South Atlantic I had come to love the sea, and now I wanted a place beside it, with a boat and peace in the long quiet evenings.
First I needed money to buy those things - a great deal of money - so much that the only way I could earn it was in the practice of my art.
One last time, I thought, and I planned it with utmost care. I needed an assistant and I chose a man I had known in the Congo.
Between us we lifted the complete collection of gold coins from the British Museum of Numismatology in Belgrave Square. Three thousand rare gold coins that fitted easily into a medium-sized briefcase, coins of the Roman Caesars and the Emperors of Byzantium, coins of the early states of America and of the English Kings florins and leopards of Edward III, nobles of the Henrys and angels of Edward IV, treble sovereigns and unites, crowns of the rose from the reign of Henry VIII and five-pound pieces of George ill and Victoria - three thousand coins, worth, even on a forced sale, not less than two million dollars.
Then I made my first mistake as a professional crimina I trusted another criminal. When I caught up with my assistant in an Arab hotel in Beirut I reasoned with him in fairly strong terms, and when finally I put the question to him of just what he had done with the briefcase of coins, he snatched a .38 Beretta from under his mattress. In the ensuing scuffle he had his neck broken. It had been a mistake. I didn’t mean to kill the man - but even more I didn’t mean him to kill me. I hung a DON’T DISTurb ” sign on his door and I caught the next plane out. ten days later the police found the briefcase with the coins in the left-luggage department at Paddington Station. it made the front page of all the national newspapers.
I tried again at an exhibition of cut diamonds in Amsterdam, but I had done faulty research on the electronic alarm system and I tripped a beam that I had overlooked.
The plain clothes security guards who had been hired by the organizers of the exhibition rushed headlong into the uniformed police coming in through the main entrance and a spectacular shoot-out ensued, while a completely unarmed Harry Fletcher slunk away into the night to the sound of loud cries and gunfire.
I Was halfway to Schiphol airport by the time a ceasefire was called between the opposing forces of the law - but not before a sergeant of the Dutch police received a critical chest wound. I sat anxiously chewing MY nails anddrinking inumarable beers in my room in the Holiday Inn near Zurich Airport, as I followed the gallant sergeant’s fight for life on the TV set. I would have hated like all hell to have another fatality on my conscience, and I made a solemn vow that if the policeman died I would forget for ever about my place in the sun.
However, the Dutch sergeant rallied strongly and I felt an immense proprietary pride in him when he was finally declared out of danger. And when he was promoted to assistant inspector and awarded a bonus of five thousand crowns I persuaded myself that I was his fairy godfather and that the man owed me eternal gratitude.
Still, I had been shaken by two failures and I took a job as an instructor at an Outward Bound School for six months while I considered my future. At the end of six months, I decided for one more try.
This time I laid the groundwork with meticulous care. I emigrated to South Africa, where I was able with my qualifications to obtain a post as an operator with the security firm responsible for bullion shipments from the South African Reserve Bank in Pretoria to overseas destinations. For a year I worked with the transportation of hundreds of millions of dollars” worth of gold bars, and I studied the system in every minute detail. The weak spot, when I found it, was at Rome - but again I needed help.
This time I went to the professionals, but I set my price at a level that made it easier for them to pay me out than put me down and I covered myself a hundred times against treachery.
It went as smoothly as I had planned it, and this time there were no victims. Nobody came out with a bullet or a cracked skull. We merely switched part of a cargo and substituted leaded cases. Then we moved two and a half tons of gold bars across the Swiss border in a furniture removals van.
In Basie, sitting in a banker’s private rooms furnished with priceless antiques, above the wide swift waters of the Rhine on which the stately white swans rode in majesty, they paid me out. Manny Resnick signed the transfer into my numbered account of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling and he laughed a fat hungry little laugh.
“You’ll be back, Harry - you’ve tasted blood now and you’ll be back. Have a nice holiday, then come to me again when you’ve thought up another deal like this one.”
He was wrong, I never went back. I rode up to Zdrich in a hire car and flew to Paris Orly. In the men’s room there, I shaved off the beard and picked up the briefcase from the pay locker that contained the passport in the name of Harold Delville Fletcher. Then I flew out Panam, for Sydney, Australia.
Wave Dancer cost me one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds sterling and I took her under a deck load of fuel drums across to St. Mary’s, two thousand miles, a voyage on which we learned to love each other.
On St. Mary’s I purchased twenty-five acres of peace, and built the shack with my own hands - four rooms, a thatched roof and a wide veranda, set amongst the Palms above the white beach. Except for the occasions when a night run had been forced upon me, I had walked the right-hand Path since then.
it was late when I had done my reminiscences and the tide was pushing high up the beach in the moonlight before I went into the shack, but then I slept like an innocent.
They were on time the following morning. Charly Materson ran a tight outfit. The taxi deposited them at the head of the Wharf while I had Dancer singled up at stern and stern and both engines burbling sweetly.
I watched them come, concentrating on the third member of the group. He was not what I had expected. He was tall and lean with a wide friendly face and dark soft hair. Unlike the others, his face and arms were darkly suntanned, and his teeth were large and very white. He wore denim shorts and a white sweatshirt and he had a
