Sea Lord

Mist-Spinner and Peel drifted slowly away. Charlie and Elizabeth looked at the blood on my legs and at the gun in my hand and said nothing.

“Why?” I asked Charlie.

He didn’t answer, but I suddenly saw how it must seem to him to be the lover of Lordy’s daughter. That was the ultimate revenge, the sweetest revenge of all: when the despised labourer’s son makes the Earl’s daughter moan in his bed.

“And it was you,” I said to Charlie, “who nicked the bloody picture.”

He hesitated, then smiled. “It was just a joke, Johnny.” He waited, but for what, I couldn’t tell. For me to smile? To laugh? “It was only a joke!” he protested. “I did it for you!”

“For me, Charlie?”

“I did it for you! I thought that if your mother sold the painting then you’d never go back to sea! You’d become like your father! You’d have hated that, Johnny, because you never belonged in the big house. You belonged at sea, Johnny, at sea!” He paused again, but I said nothing, and Charlie made an expansive gesture as if to suggest that, with a little humour and understanding, the whole mess could be resolved. “It was only a joke,” he said again, but weakly.

And I wasn’t laughing.

I looked at Elizabeth. It’s hard to see your own sister as beautiful, but she looked beautiful that morning; beautiful and hurt. I think she was ashamed, not about the painting, but because I had found her with Charlie. That was a game she had played in secret, and now I had discovered her. “You knew,” I accused her. “You knew I didn’t steal it! You must have known that as soon as Garrard found Charlie!”

She shrugged, as if to suggest that my innocence was irrelevant.

“So why didn’t you go to the police when Garrard found Charlie?” I asked her.

“Because the money would still have been yours when Mother died, and she didn’t want you to have it. She hated you! You destroyed our family, and I was going to save it!” Elizabeth spat the words at me, and I saw that she, like my mother, hated me, and I saw, too, how much Elizabeth must have enjoyed betraying my closest friendship. She would win it all and leave me nothing, not even a friend.

I looked back to Charlie. It seemed so obvious now, and it must have seemed obvious to Garrard who, seeking the painting and still believing in my guilt, had gone straight to my oldest friend. “Why didn’t you just ransom the painting?” I asked Charlie. “Was it really worth a death?”

“It wasn’t like that, Johnny!” Charlie spoke energetically. He was still hoping that charm and friendship could ease him off this hook. “No one was supposed to die!”

“Garrard died,” I said brutally. “I blew his head away. What’s left of him is in that boat.” I jerked my head towards the drifting Mist-Spinner, but I had been looking at Elizabeth as I spoke and I saw that her face had shown no reaction to my news. “Don’t you care?” I asked her. “You were bedding him, just as you’re bedding Charlie. Did you know that, Charlie, that she was screwing Garrard as well?”

He didn’t reply, but all the charm and energy went from his face as if he’d been struck. He hadn’t known and he was hurt. He thought he had been using Elizabeth, and now, at last, he sensed that she had been using him.

Elizabeth’s face still did not show any emotion. My God, I thought, but how she had used her men. She’d used Garrard to kill, and Charlie to set up the clever rendezvous with the Decca sets. And Charlie, clever Charlie, had coolly gone to Guernsey and sent me off to my death, then spun me through the electronic maze before flying home for this rendezvous. Clever Charlie. I raised the muzzles of the gun.

Charlie shook his head desperately. “I tried to warn you, Johnny! How many times did I warn you? How many times did I tell you to bugger off!” Charlie saw no softening in my face. “For God’s sake, I even tried to stop you yesterday! I didn’t want you to die! That was her and Garrard! I just wanted to scare you back to sea, out of the way! Good God, Johnny, I even repaired your boat! I only wanted the ransom, it was Garrard who said we should kill you to get the price as well! It was all Garrard’s idea, not mine!”

It was a version of the truth, spoken passionately to carry conviction, and perhaps, at the beginning, he alone of the three had not wanted my death. And I thought how scared Elizabeth and Garrard must have been when I returned, when they found Jennifer on Sunflower, and how they must have believed that Charlie was betraying them, and how Charlie must have argued for my life, agreeing only that I should be scared away from England. And perhaps, I thought, he had only wanted the ransom, reckoning that I would share my good fortune with him if the painting was recovered and I sold it. But then I had given the painting away, and Charlie’s friendship for me had been corroded by the acid of lust and greed, and so he had gone aboard Sunflower and filled her bilges with gas. I looked into his eyes, trying to understand. “Tell me about the gas, Charlie.”

He found nothing to say. What was there to say? That he regretted it? I was sure he did, but he regretted the loss of all the money more. I looked past Charlie, far beyond Barratry’s bows, and saw two launches heading towards us. I looked back to my best friend, still trying to understand how he could try to kill me one day and smother me with his generosity the next. I’d slept in his house, but of course I had been safe there for he would never have wanted my death to seem like murder, but rather to have looked like an accident. That way he would have been safe. “My God, Charlie,” I said sadly, “but you are a bastard.” I remembered Jennifer and aimed the barrels at his eyes.

But I couldn’t kill him. He’d saved my life once, singing his way through a ship-killing storm in the Tasman Sea. I stared at him over the gun’s crude sights. “So where’s the painting, Charlie?”

He didn’t answer till I twitched the gun, then he shrugged. “In the cellar, Johnny. Wrapped up and safe.”

“And it’s mine!” Elizabeth almost screamed at me. “Mother left it to me! It’s mine!”

“Damn you,” I said, “damn you both.” Then the first launch bumped alongside, and big efficient men climbed aboard Barratry. I dropped gun and money on the deck, then turned away to face the rising sun.

Friendship. Was anything worth the betrayal of friendship? Except lovers take precedence over friendship, and Charlie had found his Lady and he would kill his friend to make her rich, and himself rich with her. I closed my eyes. Not because I was staring at the sun, but because I had come home, and was crying.

Epilogue

Lazy water lapped at Sunflower’s hull. The sun was brilliant, remorseless, high, but the white awning which was stretched from Sunflower’s mizzen to her mainmast sheltered me. The ketch was properly called Sunflower II, but I’d left off the Roman numerals when I’d painted her name on the stern. I had wanted to call the boat Jennifer, but Jennifer Pallavicini wouldn’t let me. She had dictated a letter from her hospital in Switzerland saying she didn’t want the boat named after her. I hadn’t understood her reasoning, but she had been adamant, and so I had called the boat Sunflower II instead. The new Sunflower was a good yacht; steel-hulled, eight feet longer than the original Sunflower and with two gas alarms in her bilges.

She had been launched five months ago, and now she was berthed in the Leeward Islands. It was midday, hot as hell, but I was shadowed by the awning and had a cold beer I’d taken from the galley fridge. I’d never had a fridge on a boat before, but nor had I ever been given a millionaire’s cheque book to build a boat before. And, given that cheque book, I’d made a good sea boat. She’d rolled incessantly on the long crossing from Madeira to the West Indies, but every boat rolls in the trade route. She’d proved fast, despite her long keel and heavy hull. None of her gear had gone disastrously wrong; nothing but the usual small crop of problems: a chafing halliard, a lifting sail seam, a leaking deck fitting; nothing I couldn’t mend with my own two hands, and nothing that would stop this long lovely boat from going around the world. She was, in truth, a proper job. The odious Ulf would probably find something wrong with her, but the odious Ulf wasn’t here.

There was just me, Sunflower II and, at the landward end of the rickety wharf that jutted out into this impossibly blue water, a girl.

I’d watched the girl step down from the island bus. Once the bus had growled away she had looked towards Sunflower, but then hesitated. She had been carrying four string shopping bags and perhaps they had been too heavy for her, because she had left two of the bags under a palm tree, adjusted the