Sea Lord

nimble about a boat, and his desperate slash at my right thigh missed.

I was defeated and fleeing. I wanted to reach the foredeck from where I would dive overboard and swim after the drifting Marianne which I’d last seen off Mist-Spinner’s bows. I was too cold and weak to defeat Garrard, but I could leave him here, stranded and helpless, while I sailed away to fetch reinforcements. It wasn’t brave, but it was sensible.

Garrard clambered desperately after me. I limped forward. The searchlight was still switched on, aimed blindly forward to where the waves shattered about Les Trois Grunes. Marianne was thirty yards off the port bow and rolling violently in the shoal water. It would be a tough swim, perhaps a killing swim, but better to die in the sea’s cold cleanness than from Garrard’s knife. I took a breath, then, in the fogged beam of the searchlight, I saw the second shotgun. It was Peel’s shotgun; the weapon he must have discarded on the foredeck when he had first boarded Marianne. The gun now lay in Mist- Spinner’s bow scuppers, trapped there by the pulpit bars.

I threw myself at the weapon. A lurch of the sea made me trip on the forehatch rim; I fell, but the boat’s motion slid me on my blood-slicked belly to where the gun waited. A steel cleat ripped at my thigh. Garrard saw the weapon and jumped desperately from the small platform beside the wheelhouse. His knife was raised. Mist-Spinner corkscrewed in a sudden upsurge of the sea, then thumped down into a trough. My cold hands could not grip the weapon and, when the boat lurched to starboard, I almost let the gun fall into the water. I half slid off the deck after it, only saving myself by grabbing the pulpit rail with my left hand. White water seethed and broke under me. Garrard shouted as the deck heaved back up and I imagined his voice was shouting in triumph and I almost screamed because my imagination felt his blade’s deep slash. The gun was precarious in my nerveless right hand. The knife still didn’t strike. The shout had been Garrard’s protest as a roll of the deck jarred him back against the wheelhouse.

I twisted on to my back. Life was counted in fractions of seconds now. If Garrard could reach me, then I would be dead, but if the boat’s violence in the shoals made him clumsy and gave me time, then I would live. I turned to face him and could see nothing except the blinding white brilliance of the searchlight beam. I was still half overboard, clinging to the pulpit with my left hand. I tried to sit up, but an upward surge of the bows drove me down. I could not see Garrard. I was blinded by light, paralysed by weakness, and terrified. Mist- Spinner hammered off the wave crest and a spout of breaking water exploded up beside me.

I was tempted to let myself fall and to strike out for the drifting Marianne. I did not even know if this gun was loaded, let alone cocked, but then a slice of silver light dazzled from the great white blinding flood of the searchlight. It was the knife blade, raised to strike, and beside it was a ghost of a face, mouth open, teeth showing, shouting, then the light was blotted out by Garrard’s body as he hurled himself towards me.

My thumb groped for the gun’s hammers. No time. I was screaming defiance and fear. I barely had time to pull the triggers. My right hand was round the narrow part of the stock, the gun’s butt was against my ribs, and the barrels were pointing somewhere at the shadow above me.

I pulled both triggers. I was still screaming, now in anticipation of the knife’s strike.

The gun had been cocked. The butt drove into my ribs like a kicking horse. Noise filled the chaotic air.

Garrard’s head simply disappeared. Blood fountained in a halo about the searchlight beam. I watched, appalled, the first strong colour of this black night. His knife clattered down to the deck and lodged against my right ankle while his body twitched back as if plucked by strings. It slammed against the sloping wheelhouse windows, then slid down on to the foredeck.

I closed my eyes. I was still half overboard. My ribs hurt. I was cold and shaking. I pulled with my left hand and, slowly, very slowly, I inched myself aboard. White water broke at Mist-Spinner’s stem and drenched the foredeck and, when I opened my eyes, I saw Garrard’s diluted blood flooding the shallow scuppers. I rolled on to my side, safe now inside the pulpit rails and slowly, very slowly, knelt upright. I still clutched the gun.

Garrard’s expensive tweed jacket was soaked in blood. The cloth of the jacket had snagged on a cleat and the motion of the boat was twitching him from side to side in a sick parody of life, but he was dead. I’d blown away his knowing, confident face. All that was left of his head was a butcher’s mess of blood, brains and bone.

I just stared at him as if I expected the headless corpse somehow to stand and come back to the attack. I was shaking. I’d never killed a man before. I’d promised Jennifer to kill this one, but making the promise was one thing, fulfilling it was quite another. Blood gurgled in the scuppers and drained overboard.

“Help!” Peel shouted from the stern.

Very slowly, very stiffly, I picked myself up. I felt weak and sick and cold. Mist- Spinner heaved and fell. I took a huge breath, realised I wasn’t going to vomit, so picked a careful path through the offal on the deck. I edged past the wheelhouse to see Peel clinging to the stern. He’d used the lifebelt’s rope to reach the transom but he was too cold to pull himself aboard. I swivelled the searchlight to dazzle him.

His eyes became huge as I walked down the aft deck. I put the double barrels close to his left eye. “What was the signal you were supposed to send when you’d got the money?”

“Don’t shoot! For Christ’s sake, don’t shoot!” His teeth were chattering.

“What was the signal you were supposed to send when you’d got the money?” My voice was toneless. There had to be such a signal, I knew.

“Fingers,” he said.

I stared at him. Such a banal word. “Fingers?” I said incredulously.

“Honest! Don’t shoot, please!”

“And where were you taking the money?”

“I don’t know.”

I jerked the barrels to cut one of his eyebrows. “Where, Peel, where?”

“It’s on the little box. I can’t work it. I don’t know, mate.” He was sobbing with terror and cold now. “I don’t know. Mr Garrard worked the box, not me.”

The Decca, of course. I pulled the gun’s triggers, and the hammers fell on to the dead chambers. “Get in the boat if you can,” I said, “and if you can’t, drown.”

The boat slammed down into white water. So far as I could remember the rocks at Les Trois Grunes only dried out at the lowest tides, yet that was small consolation. A dip in the long swell could easily drop us on to one of the rock pinnacles and rip the bottom out of Mist-Spinner, so my first task was to clear Mist-Spinner away from the hazard, and only then look for the clever mind that had spun me through this electronic maze. The night wasn’t over yet, and maybe the killing wasn’t done, but at least I had evened the game.

If Garrard had known boats, he would still have been alive and I would have been dead, for Mist-Spinner had a prop plate. Most working boats have such a plate, put there against the eventuality of drifting across their towed lines. Because no fisherman wants to go overboard to clear a fouled prop, just aft of the stern-box they put a bolted plate which, lifted, gives access to the propeller.

I found some tools in the wheelhouse. It needed all my strength on the big wrench to shift the bolts. One of the old rusted bolts sheared, but the others came free and I swung the plate aside to reveal the small black well of cold water. I could have fetched Garrard’s knife from the foredeck, but I didn’t fancy the sight of his corpse, so instead I rummaged through the wheelhouse cave-lockers and found an old gutting knife. I reached down into the cold water and cut the rope free from the propeller blades. It took less than five minutes.

Peel whimpered at the stern, alternately calling for help and cursing. Once or twice he tried to climb aboard, but the cold had sapped his huge strength. I ignored him as I bolted the prop plate home and laid the deck planks back into place. Then I picked up Garrard’s discarded shotgun and tossed it overboard.

“Help. Please!” Peel whimpered.

I unshackled the pulley from the lifting derrick. “Hold on to that,” I told him.

He grasped the pulley’s hook with his right hand. I took the tackle’s strain, inching him up the transom. Mist-Spinner was thumping and lurching in the broken water. I couldn’t see any of the hidden rocks, but I knew where they were because their presence was betrayed by a swirling turmoil of water not far from the port bow. The water seemed to be sucked down towards the rock pinnacles, then to shatter upwards in a white misting spray. “Come on, you bastard!” I shouted at Peel, urging him to use some of his great strength to