Sea Lord

  “Fetch the van,” Garrard said.

  Peel started the van and switched on its headlights. In the strong light I could see Garrard was dressed in his horsy cavalry twill, waistcoat and tweed jacket. I could also see that his right hand was bandaged from the savaging I’d given it with the boathook. He looked like the kind of man I used to know well: loud-voiced and confident, always to be found at a racecourse where he’d have known the stable lad of an unfancied horse in the third race which was worth a bob or two on the nose. Such men had knowing eyes and bitter resentments. They could be good companions for an afternoon, but not for longer.

  Peel put the van into gear. The bandage on Garrard’s right hand was not inconveniencing him for, almost casually, he drew his knife and reached up to Sunflower’s tethering rope. The knife must have been razor sharp, for it sliced through the half-inch rope without any apparent effort.

  I tensed again in sudden flaring panic.

  I could see, in the van’s headlights, that Sunflower had not moved. I had her leaning towards the dock, which offered a margin of safety, but my heart was flogging like a wet sail in a headwind all the same. Garrard watched her, half expecting to see the yacht crash down into the Stygian blackness beneath, but she stayed upright. He crushed his cigarette under his right shoe, opened the passenger door, and the van drove away.

  I waited. The van disappeared behind the workshop. I heard the yard gates open, the van growl through, then the gates crash shut. I listened as the van drove up the street, paused at the main road junction, then accelerated away.

  Silence.

  The wind was lifting the cut rope into the night, but Sunflower, good Sunflower, was stable and solid.

  I stood up slowly. I was freezing cold. I was wearing nothing but one pair of sodden jeans and my muscles were stiff as boards. I took the wet jeans off, walked to the quayside, and tossed them down into Sunflower’s cockpit. This was no time to be worrying about being naked, my priority was to retrieve that flying rope and rerig it, and that, I knew, would take some careful work.

  The rope was cut, so I needed some more to make its length good. George had some old rope lying in the yard, but I did not trust it. Instead, and taking exquisite care not to upset Sunflower’s precarious balance, I lowered myself into her cockpit. I stayed on the dockside gunwales, adding my weight to her stability. In a cave-locker in the cockpit I had some spare warps. I found one and tossed it up to the quay, then, still staying hard by the dock wall, I groped with the boathook for the rope’s bitter end.

  The wind was carrying the cut rope away from me, out over the dark waters of the dock. I reached for the errant line with the boathook’s full length, but the weighted head made the implement much too unwieldy for such a delicate job. I slotted the heavy boathook back into place and pulled out the other one. That did the job quickly, snagging the wind-whipped rope-end that I drew towards me. I held on to it as I climbed back to the quayside.

  It took five minutes to disentangle the rope from where it had blown itself about the shrouds. The wind dried me as I worked, but I was still bitterly cold.

  I tied the cut rope to my spare warp with a sheet bend, then made a lorryman’s hitch in the warp. I threaded the loose end through the ringbolt, back through the hitch’s loop, then hauled it tight. I felt Sunflower’s mast come towards me as the rope took her weight. I made two turns and hitches to make the whole thing fast, then let out my breath. Sunflower was secure again.

  “Clever boy,” said Trevor Garrard.

  I turned.

  He was no more than five paces from me. He held the knife loosely in his bandaged right hand, but it wasn’t the long blade which disturbed me, rather his face, which was lit by the bulb outside George’s office. He was utterly confident. Whatever happened now, and it was bound to be violent, this man had no fear.

  “But you’re not so clever as you think,” he went on in a mocking tone, “because it was really rather obvious that you’d make your boat safe as soon as we’d gone, so all I had to do was stay in the yard.” He smiled in tribute of his own cleverness, then gave me a small mocking bow. “Good evening, my lord.”

  I said nothing. Being naked made me feel horribly vulnerable. I had no weapon, and this man’s calm assurance was very frightening. He might smile at me, but his eyes were feral, suggesting a man who knew neither pity nor remorse. A bitter man, fallen from grace and resentful. I backed away from him, but there was nowhere to flee to, except the river, and Garrard had carefully placed himself between me and that refuge.

  I backed round the workshop corner in time to hear the main gate creak open again.

  “That’s Peel coming back,” Garrard said. “You haven’t met Peel properly, have you? I’ll introduce you in a moment.”

  My right foot jarred against a loose metal stanchion. I stooped quickly and picked it up. It was a two-foot length of rusting angle-iron sharpened to a crude point. The weapon gave me some confidence, but it did not seem to worry Garrard. “Peel!” he shouted.

  “I’m here, Mr Garrard.”

  “Find a tarpaulin, Peel.” Garrard gave his orders as though he was still in the army. He looked back to me. “Peel is not the brightest luminary to emerge from the state-school system, but he has the gross virtue of huge bodily strength. He used to be a professional wrestler. If you attack me with that crude piece of iron, my lord, I shall be forced to hurt you rather nastily.”

  “I don’t have the painting,” I said in a futile hope that the denial would give him pause.

  “Of course you don’t. My task is simply to make certain that you don’t get it back.”

  He was so foully sure of himself, and he was confusing me. Why was he so confident that I didn’t have the painting? He had surely suspected me when he had searched Sunflower, but tonight he had not even bothered to go into her cabin. I was trying to snatch answers from a fog, and the fog was shot through with rank fear. “Do you have the painting?” I asked him.

  He laughed, but said nothing.

  “Do you know who’s got it?” I tried. I did not expect an answer now; I was merely trying to keep him talking while I looked for an opportunity to attack him. I was holding the angle-iron low, like a knife. I guessed I could get in one nasty blow before Garrard could use his blade. I was apprehensive, but it wasn’t my first fight, and I knew these next few moments had to be carefully planned, then efficiently executed. It’s like sailing in filthy weather; the better prepared you are, the more likely your survival is. I was outnumbered, and plainly Garrard was chillingly confident of his skills, but I still had an excellent chance. I only needed to reach the river and, because I was naked and they were fully dressed, I knew neither man could outswim me. In the meantime I must behave as they expected me to behave: timidly. “Do you know who’s got the painting?” I asked again.

  “Let us say, my lord, that I know you don’t have it.”

  “Then why the hell did you search my boat?” I almost charged him then, but I saw a wariness in his eye that kept me still.

  “I searched your boat,” he said, “to see if I could discover any correspondence. But clearly, if you are planning to retrieve the painting, you’ve made the arrangements by phone.”

  “You’re crazy! I haven’t made any arrangements!”

  “But you’re negotiating with Buzzacott. We have to stop that, my lord.”

  “Got it!” Peel had found the filthy sheet of old canvas which had half protected George’s pile of sand. He dragged it into the yard, then grinned when he saw I was bare-arsed naked. I had turned to face him, but kept glancing back to make sure Garrard did not move. He didn’t.

  “His lordship appears to be shivering with the cold,” Garrard called to his partner, “so wrap him up. But don’t mark him!”

  Peel advanced on me. He had spread the canvas out like a matador’s cloak. I was frightened, so much so that I could feel the goose-bumps on my naked flesh and I could hear the blood thumping at my ear-drums, but I was still confident that
I might yet outwit these two and reach the river. I feared for what might happen to Sunflower, but at least I would escape a filleting. Then the import of what Garrard had just said dawned on me. He didn’t want me marked. Which surely meant he wouldn’t use the knife?

  “Easy now, guv.” Peel had a raw east London voice. He had lumbered to within a few paces of me and now spread the canvas wide to engulf me.

  I turned and charged at Garrard. I shouted as I charged. The knife in his bandaged right hand was a sliver of mirror-bright light. I planned to shoulder-charge him and to drive the angle-iron like a rusting stake into his belly. He seemed frozen by astonishment at my sudden attack, and I felt the brief fierce joy of imminent victory. I drew the stake back for the single crippling blow, then struck.

  And he moved. One second he was a sitting duck, and the next he had leaped aside like a hare. He merely put out a foot.

  I tripped on his foot and sprawled on to the yard’s cobbles. The angle-iron clattered away.

  It had all been so shamefully easy for Garrard, who now stood over me with his knife. “Does your lordship wish to offer us any further amusement?”

  I struck up at him with my fist, but Garrard avoided the blow easily. He reached down with his left hand, I flailed at it, but he simply jabbed his fingers at my neck and a sudden, searing pain paralysed me. I gasped for breath, couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, and had to lie there, wide-eyed, as Peel swathed me in the canvas. He wrapped the clammy material round me with movements that were almost tender. “There,” he said soothingly, “that didn’t hurt, did it?”

  Anger and fear and pain flared in me. I was angry at being so easily humiliated, and suddenly terrified because I was now at their mercy. The pain receded, and I found I could move again, but the canvas restricted me as tightly as a strait-jacket. “I promised not to mark you, my lord, but I said nothing about not hurting you.” The sardonic Garrard stood above me. “So kindly co-operate with us.”

  I stared up at him, resenting and hating him, but utterly helpless. I’d been taught a lesson: that Garrard was an expert in violence and pain. The army had trained him to it, but had been unable to discipline him, so now he was a dangerous animal, loose and vicious. He sheathed his knife. “I always believe some explanation is a courtesy, so I will merely say, my lord, that your sin consisted in inheriting the painting.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Truth and desperation gave my words vehemence, but they left Garrard quite unmoved.

  “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 w
alked 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.