Sea Lord

something with an old friend, won’t you?”

He produced a bottle of Scotch which had a label I’d never seen before and hope never to see again. In Mozambique, which is a destination I would not recommend to passing yachtsmen, I had drunk from a bottle which purported to be Scotch. It was called ‘Sbell’, and bore a very poor copy of a Bells label. Sbell whisky was a drink for a desperate man, though it made an excellent all-purpose solvent. George’s Scotch was of the same order. I took a sip, then grimaced. “Where on earth did you get this muck, George?”

“It was a business gift, Johnny. From an associate.”

“Bloody hell.” I drank it anyway, then held out my glass for more.

George refilled my glass. He’s an affable crook. He looks as bent as any front-bench politician, what with his beer belly, jowly face, and small suspicious eyes, but he has a great taste for gossip and a healthy fear of the prison yard. He had inherited this Hamoaze boatyard from his father, but the yard didn’t do real business any more. George’s income came from fencing items thieved from boats. The police must have known about him, so the only explanation for his continued liberty must have been that he was grassing on someone. I’d known George for twenty-one years. I used to spend my holidays working in the yard. Back then there had still been a semblance of industry at Cullen’s Boats, but that pretence seemed to have been long dropped.

He waddled to the window and stared down at Sunflower. “Been far in her, Johnny?”

“Round the world, George.”

“Have you now?” He gazed at her as he stuffed his pipe with tobacco. “I’ve always fancied sailing round the world. Never had the chance, of course. Too busy.”

George couldn’t make it past Plymouth Breakwater in a gin palace, let alone sail round the world, but I smiled politely. He shrugged, then hospitably offered me his tobacco pouch. “Just visiting, are you, Johnny?”

I shook my head. “I want your grid for a couple of days, and what’s left of your workshop.”

“Of course, Johnny, of course. I’ll have to check that no one’s booked in, of course, but…”

“Shut up, George. Of course no one’s booked in. And don’t worry, I’ll earn my keep.”

“Ah.” George frowned. I suppose he had been expecting me to offer him cash, while now I was suggesting that he paid me for odd jobs, but his cupidity was beaten by his snobbishness. A lord was a lord, even if he was penniless. George lit his pipe, then went back to his littered desk. “We’ll work something out, Johnny.”

“And I want something else, George.”

He heard the wariness in my voice and matched it with his own. “Something else?”

“I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

George might be a sluggish old toad, but he has a nose for mischief. He slumped down in his padded chair. “The police again, Johnny?”

“Not the police. A couple of bastards think I’ve got something. They came looking for it yesterday, and they might come looking again. So I don’t want them to know where I am.”

“Anyone I know?”

I described the two men as I filled my pipe with George’s black shag. I couldn’t give much of a description of the big balding man who had helmed the dory, but I offered an excellent description of the thin man who had such a crisp public school accent.

“Garrard,” George interrupted me when I mentioned the thin man’s voice.

“Garrard?”

“Trevor Garrard. Used to be in the army. A right posh villain, he is. Was he carrying a knife?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Garrard, then. You don’t have to worry about his mate, he’s just a thick lump of muscle, nothing more, but you should watch Garrard. He’s nasty.” I was not in the least surprised that George knew the two men because there was very little villainy in the Southwest that George did not know about. “Garrard was cashiered out the army,” George went on, “then he got snared by the Fraud Squad, so now he’s a winkler. He did a bit of bookie’s business at one time, but I don’t suppose he dares show his face on a racecourse these days. He was too violent, you see, and the coppers got a line on him, so nowadays he’s mostly a winkler.”

“A Winkler?” I asked, wondering if the Winklers were a notorious family of criminals.

George poured himself more whisky. “A winkler,” he said with plump dignity, “is a rent-control operative.”

“Come again, George?”

He sighed. “Suppose you’ve got a property, Johnny, and there’s a sitting tenant in it, paying you a lousy rent, and the law won’t let you turf the useless bugger out. But you’re losing money on the property and you want to put another tenant inside who’ll pay you a proper rent. So what do you do? You can’t hire another bleeding lawyer, because you’ll get the same answer, so you hire yourself a winkler. Things begin to happen to your tenant. Nasty things. The water gets shut off, rats take up residence, and perhaps half the roof falls in. Their pussy cats get strangled and their car tyres get slashed. The tenant eventually gets fed up, moves out, and you pay the winkler for his services. He’s winkled them out, you see.” He added this last explanation helpfully.

“You know this fellow, Garrard?” I asked.

“Not personally” – George was being evasive now – “but I know he’s done some jobs for local businessmen. He comes from Bristol, I think. Ronny’s from London, but he’s not such a bad lot.”

“Ronny’s the bald one?”

George nodded. “Ronny Peel. He’d beat you into pulp if he was told to, but he’s not an animal, know what I mean? But that Garrard” – George shook his head worriedly – “I wouldn’t touch him, Johnny. He’s trouble.”

“I don’t want to touch him. I just don’t want him to know where I am.”

“I’ll keep quiet,” he promised, and I believed the promise because George’s criminality does not extend to violence; in fact he probably hates the sight of blood. Besides, George and I go back a long way. In the faraway past he’d given me a refuge from my family and, in his lackadaisical way, he had introduced me to boats. It was in this shabby yard that I’d learned to weld steel and work wood. It was here that I’d found my first proper job as a crew member on an oceangoing yacht. George had known me a long time, which by itself did not guarantee any favours, but I was also John Frederick Albert Rossendale, the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, and that helped. It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. So now, because of George’s aristocratic tastes, Sunflower and I were safe.

I had been wrong about needing George’s grid for a couple of days. More like a couple of weeks. Once I got Sunflower out of the water I saw just how sorry her hull was: the poor thing looked more like a floating compost heap than a yacht. It was no wonder she’d been so sluggish crossing the Atlantic. I should have anti-fouled her in America or the Caribbean, but I’d been reluctant to pay American prices for anti-fouling paint.

But, by waiting, I had forced myself to do more than just anti-foul Sunflower. In places the old paint had abraded right back to its epoxy pitch base. What I really needed to do was strip the whole hull back to bright steel, then start again. I should have craned her out of the water, screened her off, and done what Charlie would have called a proper job, except I had neither the time nor the money to be so thorough.

Instead I would have to do the best I could on George’s grid. A grid is simply a raised platform on which a boat can be stranded as the tide falls. At mean low tide, in George’s yard, Sunflower would be perched about eight feet above the water and, between tides, I would have around seven hours to work on her before the rising flood forced me to stop. I’d thus be needing a whole series of low tides. She was well berthed to the quay, but to stop her toppling sideways into George’s mucky dock I took a half-inch line from her upper spreaders and tied it to a ringbolt on the outside wall of his workshop. I knotted red rags round the rope and put a large sign by the ringbolt: ‘Leave this rope alone!’ I’d once watched a beautiful Danish ketch fall twelve feet off a grid in Brittany. It wasn’t pretty.

I fired up George’s ancient compressor, stripped myself to the waist, and hitched up his sand-blaster. Or rather sludge-blaster, for I couldn’t afford to buy the proper sand so had to make do with a miserable pile that mouldered damply behind the warehouse. The diesel fuel which fired the compressor also came from George’s stock, and was fouled. Even when I managed to make the compressor work, the damp sand clotted and jammed the hopper’s throat every few minutes, so progress, at best, was fitful. I used the enforced pauses to slap a rust- preventing resin on to the newly cleaned patches of Sunflower’s hull. Between later tides I would strip the resin, then slap on a holding primer, four coats of epoxy tar, one coat of anti-fouling primer and