Sea Lord

“So the time has come for you to pay for your sin. We must all do it, some of us sooner rather than later. Bring his lordship, Peel.”

Peel lifted me as if I’d been a child. I was trying to free one hand to stab my fingers at his eyes, but he sensed what I was doing and just gripped my canvas-wrapped body in a crushing bear hug. He carried me across the yard, then lowered me on to the quay’s parapet where he knelt beside me to stop any attempt I might make to free myself of the sodden and clinging material.

“The object of the exercise,” Garrard announced confidently, “is to make it appear as though you drowned in your sleep.” He swung himself down to Sunflower’s deck and, a moment later, reappeared with my sleeping bag which he brought back up to the quayside. “It has frequently occurred to me, my lord, that the well-educated should take to violent crime more often. Has it ever occurred to you that the success of the police is almost always due to the low average intelligence of the criminal? I intend your death to be entirely above suspicion, which is why I, and not Peel, am in charge of this operation. Is that not right, Peel?”

“Yes, Mr Garrard.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said. The fear was making me sob. I hadn’t been over- fearful of the fight, I could even contemplate being hurt, but now I knew I was going to die and there was an implacability in these two men which told me there would be no escape. I was frightened. I was more frightened than I have ever been. “For Christ’s sake…” I began.

“Shut the fuck up,” Garrard said, and for the first time there was a real savagery in his voice. Till now he had been amusing himself by playing with me, but now the real evening’s business must begin. “Hold him tight, Peel.”

Peel dutifully kept the canvas gripped tight. I lurched suddenly, attempting to break free, but it was hopeless. I tried again, twisting and thrusting and straining, but the huge man held me down with a dismissive ease. He had doubtless taken on far bigger men than I in the wrestling ring.

I was going to die, but first I must watch Sunflower’s downfall. Garrard was carefully untying the knot which held her hard against the quay. There was to be no clean slash of the rope this time, for doubtless a cut rope would invite suspicion. Instead it would look as though the rope had undone itself, Sunflower had toppled, and I had been trapped in her canted and flooded hull.

“For God’s sake, Garrard!” I shouted. “I don’t know what the hell this is about!”

Garrard ignored me, but his bigger companion seemed genuinely concerned at my distress. “Calm down” – Peel patted my shoulder – “all this hollering won’t help.” He sounded like a kindly parent soothing a nervous child at a dentist’s.

“For Christ’s sake!” The fear was like bile in my throat. I was staring down death’s gullet and I was helpless. I was crying, and I was ashamed of crying, and I was trying vainly to twist my way out of the swathing canvas.

“Calm down,” Peel said again. “It won’t last long. Do you want me to ask Mr Garrard for a ciggy?”

Garrard had freed the rope and now walked with it up one side of the dock, out towards the river, so that when he pulled he would be dragging Sunflower away from the dock’s end wall. “No!” I shouted.

“It’s all right.” Peel seemed very worried for me. “Are you sure you don’t want a ciggy?”

“No!”

The cry was despairing.

Sunflower was moving.

It took all the strength in Garrard’s wiry body. At first he could not move the big boat, but then he began to pull rhythmically and, inch by inch, the hull responded. I heard the fenders shifting against the dock’s wall. I was trying to protest. I was half blinded by tears of rage, but I could still see the mast-tip moving against the night’s clouds.

“No!” I wailed the protest.

The mast-tip moved a full foot, returned, then moved again, and this time it did not oscillate back. Sunflower was teetering on the knife edge of her long keel. Garrard grunted, strained, and I saw the mast move away from me.

“No!” But this time the cry was a sob. I twisted to the dock edge so I could watch my boat fall.

Sunflower fell. The springs momentarily checked her fall, but the weight of her steel hull was too great and I heard the cleats rip clean out of her deck. She gathered speed. Garrard switched on his torch.

Sunflower’s chines crashed on to the edge of the grid. The whole boat bounced and shook. I saw the splash of water as her mast slashed down into the dock, then heard the grinding and splintering as the falling hull drove the tall mast down into the dock’s bottom. Her keel was still lodged on the grid. For a second I thought the whole hull would turn over, but then the keel scraped free of the timbers and the steel hull crashed down into the shallow water. A small tidal wave creamed white to rock the moored fishing boats. The wave crashed against the dock’s sides, then flowed back. I half expected the liferaft canister to explode its pneumatic contents, but the canister stayed shut as the water in the dock splashed, gurgled and subsided.

“Most successful,” Garrard said happily as he shone his torch into the dock.

Sunflower lay on her port side, half sunk in the black disturbed water. Her mast was torn off in a tangle of shrouds and halliards. From this angle the hull looked relatively unscathed, but I knew that her portside guardrails would certainly have sheared, and that her scuttles were probably broken. As the tide rose she would fill, then be sunk.

“What we do now” – Garrard had walked back to where Peel guarded me – “is to drown you, my lord.”

“Do I put him in the sleeping bag first?” Peel asked.

“He will be easier to manage when he is dead. Just like all the others. So take him down there, Peel, and give him a very good baptism. Total immersion, I think.” Garrard mockingly touched his forelock to me. “Goodnight, my lord.”

“For God’s sake!” I had no fight left in me, nothing now but an abject, bowel-loosening terror. I really was going to die in this miserable dock, and I didn’t even know why. “For God’s sake! I haven’t done anything!”

“You inherited, my lord, that is what you did wrong.” Garrard laughed. He was pleased with himself, and well he might be. The stratagem he had devised for my death was nothing short of brilliant. I could not guess what means of my murder he had planned, but once he had discovered the condition of my boat he had improvised this apparent accident. In the morning, when Rita or George found Sunflower, it would be assumed that I had drowned in the night because I had not tethered my boat properly.

And I still did not know why my death was sought, except that it must be connected with the Van Gogh. “Who sent you?” I pleaded.

But Garrard was finished with me. He pushed back his cuff to look at his watch. “Let’s get on with it, Peel!”

Peel hesitated. Not out of any sudden pity for me, but because he was trying to work out how best to carry my wrapped body down the sheer dock wall to the water.

“Tie him up!” Garrard sounded exasperated. “For God’s sake, Peel, use what few bloody brains you’ve got!”

“But I haven’t got any rope.”

“God spare me from employing cretins.” Garrard strode away to find a length of rope.

“Who sent you?” I asked Peel.

“You know we can’t tell you that. Are you sure you don’t want a ciggy?”

“Who?” I pleaded.

“Jesus Christ!”

This was not the answer to my question, but rather a symptom of fear. Peel, who had been pinioning me, abruptly straightened up. “Mr Garrard! The police!” He hardly needed to shout the warning, for headlights were suddenly brilliant in the yard, throwing a bright light on to Garrard who was trying to shield his eyes. A car’s engine roared loudly. Peel, when he drove the van back to the yard, must have left the gate open, for I’d heard nothing.

A single car accelerated into the yard. Garrard fled into the alley behind the warehouse. I was shouting. The driver of the car must have locked his handbrake for the back wheels skidded around to slash the headlights past