Sea Lord

“Do it!”

He did it. Once I’d heard Garrard’s corpse thump down into the cuddy, I gave Peel a bucket and mop. “Now clean off the blood.”

He started work. I pulled the case of bearer bonds on to the chart table and left it there. The engine ran happily. I was making ten knots, a good enough speed.

The fog cleared when we were north of the Casquets. I turned off all the wheelhouse lights so I could see better. We were about to cross the traffic separation zones where the big tankers thumped oblivious in and out of the Atlantic. Mist-Spinner left a clean clear wake on the dark swell. Peel, his job done, crouched at the far side of the wheelhouse and stared in awe at the giant ships.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Peel.”

“Your first name, you idiot.”

“Ronny.”

I rewarded him with a smile. “Got any cigarettes, Ronny?”

“Don’t smoke, guv.”

“Garrard did, didn’t he?”

“He did, yes.”

“Any in his pockets, do you think?”

He stared in horror at me. “You want me to…” Then he realised that was precisely what I wanted him to do, so he opened the cuddy door, took a breath, and climbed down. I could hear his noises of disgust, but after a few minutes he reappeared with a half-empty packet and a lighter.

“Thank you, Ronny.”

He was pathetically grateful for a kind word. I lit a cigarette and dragged the smoke into my lungs.

“Am I in trouble?” Peel asked after a while.

“A lot.” I throttled back to let a bulk carrier slide a half-mile ahead of me. The beam from the Channel Light Vessel was reflected from the long waves to starboard.

“I only did what Mr Garrard told me to do,” Peel pleaded.

“And what else did Mr Garrard tell you, Ronny? Did he tell you about my sister?”

He nodded. “She was going to get the painting when you was dead, see? And then she was going to sell it, and she was going to give Mr Garrard his share of the money. Because he bought it, you see.”

“I don’t see, no.”

“Right back at the beginning. When he met your sister at the races. She asked him to help her find it, and she gave him money for the expenses, like, and he did find it, and he bought a third share off the bloke, because the bloke was short of readies and couldn’t find a proper buyer. It’s too hot, you see. Mr Garrard said you couldn’t sell really famous paintings, only the rubbish.”

I was staring ahead at the empty sea. Peel was worried by my silence, but for a long time I just steered the compass course and ignored him.

“A third share?” I asked him at last.

“That’s right. One for Mr Garrard, one for your sister, though of course she didn’t have to pay anything ’cos she was going to sell it, like, and the other third –”

“Shut up, Ronny.”

“But…”

“I said shut up!” Because I think I’d known ever since I’d keyed Mist-Spinner’s Decca. Only I didn’t believe it.

Dear God, I thought, but let me be wrong. I unhooked the microphone. I knew my enemies would be listening to Channel 37 and they would probably be monitoring Channel 16 as well, but unless they had two radios, each with a dual-watch capability, they could only monitor the two VHF channels. So I switched to 67, the coastguard’s working channel. I broke all the rules: I didn’t identify myself, I just broadcast a cryptic message to the whole English Channel. “This is a message for Inspector Abbott,” I said, “of the Devon and Cornwall Police. Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West. I say again. For Harry Abbott, Devon and Cornwall Police, Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West.”

The coastguards were on to me like a ton of bricks. Who was transmitting? Why? Would I identify myself? I told them to get off the air and pass on the message and to do it fast. “But listen for further transmissions on this channel,” I added before switching the radio off.

The first light was gilding the wavetops. “Fancy another cup of tea, Ronny?”

“Not really, guv.” He didn’t want to go below with the corpse.

“I do.” I really wanted to be alone for a few minutes. “So get it.”

An hour later I saw the English coast. I switched off the Decca because I didn’t need it any longer. I hadn’t really needed it at all, not once I’d known the final rendezvous, because these were my home waters, and here, in the dawn, was my last waypoint.

We came home in a lovely sunrise. It was all so ordinary, all so very ordinary.

The waypoint was outside the harbour, but even a helmsman as inexperienced as Garrard would have been able to negotiate the entrance: just keep well to the left-hand side of the channel, steer due north, and don’t try it in southern gales.

There was a slight swell on the bar, then Mist-Spinner moved smoothly into the outer channel. We turned northeast and I let her idle through the moored yachts. It promised to be a warm day. Some yachts had already left the moorings while others were shaking out their sails. There had been a mist earlier, but it was gone, all but from the deepest creeks where the trees grew so close above the water. Gulls screamed and wheeled, while far to the north a helicopter chopped the air.

I had found some rusting binoculars in a cave-locker and I used them to search the anchorages. I knew what I was looking for, but somehow hoped not to see it.

Then I did. A man and a woman standing together on the flying bridge of a big motor cruiser. They were waving. Behind them, far off beyond the fields, I could see Charlie’s house. The kids would be going off to nursery school and Yvonne would be wondering where Charlie was.

The man and woman waved again. They looked so happy together, like lovers at dream’s fulfilment. Their boat gleamed white in the rising sun; the same sun that was reflecting off Mist-Spinner’s windscreen, so the couple could not see me behind the gold-glossed glass. They only saw their fortune coming, their damned great fortune, brought from the Channel Islands to Salcombe by the magic of a Decca set.

“That’s them,” Peel said helpfully, but I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.

I waited till we were fifty yards from the waiting boat then turned on the VHF and unhooked the microphone. “Harry Abbott?”

He answered immediately. “Is that you, Johnny?”

“I’m off Frogmore Creek, Harry. My boat’s called Mist-Spinner, and the bastards you want are on a gin-palace called Barratry. Come and get them.”

I killed Mist-Spinner’s engine and I ran her gently down the side of my best friend’s boat. Charlie waited on Barratry’s afterdeck, boathook in hand. He hooked our pulpit rail. “Well done!” he called, “I told you it would be easy…” then his voice faded away as I stepped out from under the wheelhouse roof. I carried the shotgun and the attache case.

“Hello, Charlie,” I said.

Elizabeth screamed. She was still on Barratry’s flying bridge. I looked up at her; then, with the shotgun in my right hand and the money in my left, I stepped over on to Barratry’s stern.

“Johnny!” Charlie was staring in shock, but still trying to smile as if this was a fortuitous meeting of friends.

“Shut up, Charlie,” I said; then, with a foul anger, “for Christ’s sake, shut up!” I looked up at Elizabeth. “Come down!” She climbed slowly down the chrome ladder. She was dressed in a silk bathrobe as though she had only just got up from the big bed in Barratry’s stateroom. I wondered how long they had been lovers. “You bastards,” I said.