Sea Lord

“I want everyone watching!” Harry said loudly. “They’ve got a lookout here, and I want him spotted!” He turned back to me, shrugged, and pushed the attache case towards me. “We might as well do it, Johnny.”

I pushed my pipe, my pouch of tobacco and some matches into the seat of my sawn-off jeans, then picked up the attache case of money. It was feather-light. “See you, Harry.”

“One minute!” Sir Leon frowned. “These people were particular that you carried nothing but the case. Leave your pipe here, my lord.”

I smiled very sweetly at him. “I might risk my life for your painting, Sir Leon, but I’m damned if I’ll do it without a smoke.”

He looked into my eyes, saw he would lose, so gave a cold nod of reluctant acceptance. Harry and his men wished me luck, then Charlie walked with me across the car park to the head of the pontoon. “Are you sure about this, Johnny?”

“Of course I’m not sure, Charlie, but what the hell else can I do?”

“Bugger off. Leave them. It’s only a rich man and his painting. It isn’t life or death!”

“But it is, Charlie. They tried to kill me and they damn nearly killed Jennifer. So it’s personal.”

“You’re a fool.” His solemnity surprised me, but then he shrugged away his unnatural gloom and forced a grin on to his broad face. “We could make a run with the money?”

“Why not?” I’d been waiting for him to make that suggestion. We both laughed, but there was suddenly nothing else to say, so I punched him on the shoulder. “Have a pint waiting for me, OK?”

“How about one of those French birds as well?” He slapped my bare arm in friendly farewell, then stepped back.

I knew he was watching me all the way down the pontoon, and I was touched by the worry I’d detected in him, but it was too late to turn back now. So I went on. Alone.

Part Five

I think I’d known from the very start that I wouldn’t follow Harry’s advice. Once I had committed myself I would not pull back at the end. I wanted to go through with it. Just like that day when I’d plunged into the heart of a gale-broken sea above the bar at Salcombe, I would risk death because, if I did not, I would prove myself a coward. I didn’t want to do this thing, but once committed, I would go as far as I could. And not just to prove that I was brave, but because of a girl who lay in foul pain on a hospital bed. I wanted to find the bastards who had done that to her, and I wanted them to regret what they had done.

An ignoble motive, I know. These days a man is supposed to be above such stupidity. Today we’re supposed to exemplify the virtues of sympathetic understanding. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the criminal because it’s clearly his education, or his broken home, or just society itself that has driven him to crime. In short we’re supposed to eat lettuce instead of raw meat, but I’m a throwback. I’m the twenty-eighth Earl of nothing very much, but there’s still enough pride left in the nothingness to want to see my enemies wishing they hadn’t been born, and enough pride to want to tell my woman that I’d revenged her, and enough pride to go to the bitter end of a nasty little game in which I was naked and my enemies held all the cards.

I felt truly naked as I walked barefoot down that pontoon. I knew I was being watched, not just by the police, but by one of Elizabeth’s people. That person could have been any one of the loungers on the big moored yachts, or any of the idling holiday-makers who leaned on the railings to stare down into the marina’s pool. Who were these people whom Elizabeth had found? I’d met two of them, Garrard and Peel, but who else?

Then I saw Marianne.

She was a filthy little boat; a home-made French job glued together out of marine ply then painted ox-blood red. You see hundreds of boats like her throughout Europe; I’d even seen a couple in the Pacific, sailed there by French youngsters who couldn’t afford anything sturdier. This boat was about eighteen feet long with a small cabin, a single mast, and an outboard motor mounted in a stern well. There was a compass mounted on her cabin roof, a grubby mainsail was roughly lashed to her boom, and a single jib was hanked to her forestay. I looked at her masthead and saw neither a radar reflector nor a VHF aerial, but, oddly, a Decca aerial was bolted just behind the outboard well. Except for the Decca, the villains had clearly found the cheapest boat they could.

I stepped down into her cockpit. She might have been a scabby little boat, hardly fit to cross a park pond, but she was still a yacht and it felt good to be afloat again. I tried the companionway and found it unlocked. The interior of the boat had been stripped bare; there were no bunks, no galley, not even a cockpit sole. The bilges were exposed and, I noted, dry. They had been swept bare and clean; evidence that whoever had provided this boat had been intent on leaving no traces.

Yet, strangely out of place in such a bare boat, some high-tech aids had been put aboard. A Decca set was screwed to the after bulkhead and, to power it, a twelve-volt car battery rested on the ribs beside the centreboard case. There was also a hand-held VHF radio, and the existence of that radio cheered me up for it seemed to be the first mistake my enemies had made. Doubtless they had provided the radio so they could communicate with me, but it also meant that I could talk to Harry.

I crouched inside the empty cabin and stowed the thin case of bearer bonds beside the battery, then lowered the centreboard. I noticed the Decca was already switched on, registering the latitude and longitude of St Peter Port. I left it on and picked up the radio. It was the size of a telephone handset with a short rubber-sheathed aerial and powered by internal batteries. I carried the radio up to the cockpit and ostentatiously waved it so Harry could see it. I turned it on, tuned it to Channel 16, and laid it on the back cockpit thwart.

I opened the petrol tank of the outboard and saw I had a full tank. It was only a three-and-a-half horsepower engine, so it wouldn’t drive me more than six knots, but I guessed it would run for a long time on a full tank. The engine started on the first pull of the rope. I left it in neutral while I went forward to cast off the bow line. Marianne had not been given any springs, nor any fenders, just two warps. I cast off aft. We drifted backwards till I put the engine into gear.

Marianne and I puttered out of the marina into the harbour. I followed the buoys round the outer perimeter, past the fuel stage, and out to the lighthouse which marks the harbour entrance. A fast patrol boat of the Navy’s Fisheries Protection Squadron was moored close to the harbour entrance. An officer stared down from the grey-painted bridge with more than usual interest as Marianne passed, and I wondered whether Harry had succeeded in co-opting the patrol boat. It had huge speed, a splendid radar and a wicked-looking gun. It would be nice to have such a vessel on my side, but its presence would clearly upset the careful ransom arrangements, so I didn’t expect to see it again.

I gave the officer a wave, then Marianne was out of the harbour and in the Little Russel. We had no choice of which way to turn. The tide goes through the Little Russel with the force of a steam train so Marianne and I would go north, for we didn’t have the power to fight our way southwards.

I turned north, slowed the engine, and went forward to hoist the jib. It was a rough piece of sailcloth, but I guessed it had some life left in it. I pulled up the main. Even Sunflower, after crossing the Pacific and rounding the Horn, had not had a sail so dirty, but this one drew well enough, so I went back aft and switched off the motor to save fuel. I tilted the motor up so the propeller wouldn’t drag, then sat at the tiller. The wind was a light southwesterly. It wouldn’t have moved Sunflower very far, but the small light Marianne seemed to like it. She didn’t sail badly. She chopped a bit, and she could fall off the wind very fast, but her helm eased when I trimmed her sails. I opened the cockpit lockers to find them empty. There was nothing on board except the Decca, its battery, me, a compass, a radio and four million pounds. And, I remembered, the two mooring warps. I used one to lash the tiller and coiled the other on the cockpit sole. My enemies had taken care to leave me without weapons, but I had the two ropes and perhaps they would be useful.

A small plane was flying above St Peter Port towards Herm. It banked halfway across the Little Russel and swooped down low. The sun flashed harsh off its windscreen, then the plane was past me and climbing away. It seemed I had friends. I glanced at the radio, half expecting Harry to make contact, but it was silent. A fishing boat thumped past me. There were at least a dozen yachts in sight, one of the big hydroplane ferries was coming up from the south and a small coaster was moored off St Sampson’s. The coaster had just fired her boilers and I saw how the smoke from her funnel drooped in a sagging plume to drift low above the water. I wondered who watched me. I wondered what they had in store for me.