Wildtrack

  And I screamed myself into blessed unconsciousness.

  When I woke up I could see a cream-coloured ceiling. There was no hairline crack, instead there were two brilliant fluorescent tubes which were switched on even though daylight seemed to be coming from a big window to my right. I could hear the pip of a cardiograph. To my left there was a chrome stand with a saline drip suspended from its hook. There was a tube in my left nostril that went thick and gagging down my windpipe. Two earnest faces were bent over the bed. One was framed in a nurse's white hat, the other belonged to a doctor who had a stethoscope at my chest.

  "Jesus," I said.

  "Don't talk." The doctor unhooked the stethoscope and began to feel my ribs.

  "Christ!" I suddenly felt the pain. Not the old pain, but a new one in my chest.

  "I said don't talk." The doctor had half-moon spectacles. "Can you move the fingers of your right hand?" I tried and must have succeeded for he nodded with satisfaction. "Now the left? That's good, that's good." His face did not reflect the optimism of his words. "If you speak," he warned, "do it very gently. Can you tell us your name?"

  "My name?" I was confused.

  "You were found without any identification. You're now in the South Devon General Hospital. Can you remember your name?"

  "Sandman," I said. "Nick Sandman."

  He showed no sign of recognizing the name. "That's good, Nick." He had been feeling my ribs as I spoke, but now he leaned forward to shine a light into my eyes. "Where do you live?"

  "Here," I said, knowing it was not a helpful answer, but suddenly the new pain was melding with the old, washing through me, making me arch my back, and I saw the doctor's hand dart to the hanging drip and I knew what would happen, but I did not want to sleep yet. I wanted to know how badly I was hurt, and so I tried to protest, but no words came. I saw the nurse frowning at me and I wanted to reassure her that I'd been through worse than this, much worse, but I could not speak for I was once again falling down the soft, dark and familiar tunnel of chemical sleep.

  Where I dreamed of Sycorax. At night, when the phosphorescence sparkles thick in the turned water of her wake, I like to peg her tiller and go forward. I go right forward, past the pulpit, until I'm standing on the bowsprit and holding on to the forestay. I turn there and stare back at her. That's what I dreamed I was doing, only in my dream I had two good legs. I dreamed I was standing on the bowsprit, as I had so often stood, and staring at the slim beauty of an empty hull driving through dark seas to leave an arrow's path of light beneath the stars.

  Thus should Sycorax sail for eternity; breaking the glittering seas and, driven by the endless winds of night, free.

  Sycorax had been built on my river as a rich man's toy, but built by men who only knew how to make a fisherman's workboat. She had the lines of a fishing smack, a Brixham mule, with a straight bow, a raked stern and a gaffed main. The design was old, and proven by generations of men who had worked the dangerous Western Approaches. She was an honest boat, sturdy and functional, but made pretty by her elegantly overhanging counter and by the workmanship of her fittings. Her first owner, uninterested in speed, had commissioned a safe cruising boat that would doggedly plunge through the worst of seas.

  Sycorax had known five good years until the Depression had struck. Her rich owner sold her, and, until 1932, she was resold every season by a succession of owners who must have found her either too slow or too expensive to maintain. So summer by summer Sycorax had faded. Her brightwork had become tarnished, her sails had blown out, and her paint had peeled. Yet the copper sheathing had kept her hull-planks as sound and dry as the day they were laid.

  By the mid-thirties she had become a working boat. Her cabin was stripped of luxuries and her coachroof ripped out to leave only a tiny cuddy aft of the mainmast. Her long raking stern was cut short and squared off, while her mizzen was thrown away, which must have made her an unbalanced brute at sea, but she took the mistreatment like the stubborn witch that she was. Her name was changed, which should have brought her bad luck, but as The Girl Pauline she did five safe seasons longlining and potting off the Devon headlands. The war ended that. She was abandoned; canted on her side in the sands of Dawlish Warren where the oxidised copper was ripped off her hull and the lead torn from her keel. Soldiers training for D-Day shot at her, her planks were sprung, and the rain seeped in to rot her oak frame.

  My father found her on the Warren in the sixties. He was making his money then, pots of bloody money, more money than he knew what to do with. His leaseback deals on London's property market had brought him a Rolls, two Jaguars, three Maseratis, and two Nicholson racing cruisers that were moored in the river beside our house. That was the Devon house where I'd been born. There was also a London house, a Berkshire house, and a flat by the harbour in San Tropez. For some reason my father fancied an antique yacht to add to his fleet. He loved flash things like fast cars and painted women and a son at Eton. My elder brother wore a fancy waistcoat at Eton, but, to my relief, the College wouldn't even look at me. I was too dumb, too slow, and had to be sent to a dullards' boarding school where I rotted happily in ignorance.

  I only cared about boats, and in that long summer holiday before I went to my dullards' school, I helped rebuild Sycorax in the yard where she'd been born. My father, like the first owner, ordered that no expense was to be spared. She was to be restored to her old and splendid beauty.

  Her hull was repaired with a loving and almost forgotten skill. I helped caulk the planks and became used to the ancient sea sound of mallet blows echoing from harbour walls. We tarred and papered her, then laid new copper so that she gleamed like a boat of gold. We lengthened the truncated stern to accommodate the new mizzen mast's twin backstays. Teak decks were joggled home, and a new cabin was made where all the brass fittings my father had collected could be lovingly installed.

  New masts were cut, carefully chosen from the north side of a spruce forest so that the trunk's heartwood would be central, and not drawn to one side by the sun on the southern forest flank. I helped the boatbuilders adze the spruce down, corner by corner, until two treetrunks had become smooth and shining masts. We soaked the new spars in linseed oil and paraffin, then put on coat after coat of varnish. I can still close my eyes and see that finished mainmast lying on its trestles; straight as a clothyard arrow and gleaming in the sunlight.

  Sails were made, sheets were rove, oil-lamps polished, and a dead boat came to life on the slips of a Devon yard. Her old name was deeply incised into her new transom, then painted with gold: Sycorax . A diesel engine was put in her aft belly, and the day came when she was lifted by slings into the mucky water of the yard's dock. She still had to be rigged, but I watched that hull float in the tide's wrack, and swore that so long as I lived she would be my boat.

  My father saw my devotion, and was amused by it. Once she was launched, though, he lost interest in Sycorax. She was as beautiful as he had imagined, but she was not the slow docile craft he had dreamed of. He wanted a boat for long sunsets with gin and melting girls, but Sycorax could be a hard-mouthed bitch when she set her mind to it. She was a stiff sailor in sea winds, and too long-keeled for easy river cruising. My father would have sold her, but he could never bear to part with pretty things, and Sycorax was dazzlingly pretty with her gleaming brass and shining varnish. He moored her below the house like a garden ornament. Once in a long while he would motor her upriver, but I was the only person who bothered to hoist her sails. Jimmy Nicholls and I would take her out to sea and set her bows to the vast waves that came in from the Atlantic. She could be stubborn, but Jimmy said she was as fine a seaboat as any that had sailed from Devon. "She only be stubborn when you wrestle her, boy," he would say to me in his deep Devon brogue. "Let her be and she'll look after you."

  Six years after Sycorax was relaunched I joined the Army. I had rarely seen my father so angry. "For Christ's bloody sake!" he had shouted. "The Army?" There was a pause, then a warily hopeful note. "The Guards?"

>   Not the Guards.

  "Why not the bloody Navy? You like sailing, don't you? It's about the only bloody thing you do like. That and skirt."

  "I don't like sailing in big ships."

  "You're throwing your bloody life away!"

  I might not have been bright, but my father thought I could hack a living at banking or broking, or one of the other pin-striped forms of thievery at which he and my elder brother so excelled.

  I joined the Army, but I would still go down to Devon and take the stiff cotton sails out of the boathouse loft so that Sycorax could go to sea. I married. Melissa and I would motor down to the Devon house for long weekends, but, as time passed, my father was rarely there to entertain us. Later I discovered why. He was borrowing money he could not repay on the strength of promises he could not keep. He was even ready to sell me both Sycorax and the wharf to raise some money. His battle became ever more desperate and flamboyant; and he lost it. He was sent down for seven years; a savage sentence, but the judge wanted to make it plain that just because a crime was committed in an office by a businessman it was no less a crime for that. But by then I was sailing to the South Atlantic and everything was changing.

  Except for Sycorax. Because she was now all that I had and all that I wanted.

  "You don't remember me, do you?" A tall, cadaverous man in a shabby grey suit appeared at my bedside. He was in his fifties and looked older. He had yellow teeth, bloodshot eyes, thin grey hair and a lugubrious face nicked with shaving cuts.

  "Of course I remember you," I said. "Detective Sergeant Harry Abbott. As toothsome as ever was."

  "Inspector Abbott now." He was pleased I'd remembered him. "How are you, Nick?"

  "I'm bloody well." I found it hard to speak clearly because the pain in my chest made breathing difficult. "I might go for a bike ride if the rain holds off."

  "It isn't raining," Abbott said gloomily. "It's actually quite springlike, for a change. Mind if I smoke?" He lit up anyway. Abbott used to play golf with my father who loved to be friendly with the local law. My father had encouraged their gossip and relied on their help when he drank and drove. He gave wonderful parties, my father. You could hear them a mile upriver, but there were never any complaints, not while the local police were so fond of him. "Seen Wednesday's papers?" Abbott asked me now.

  "No."

  He held a tabloid over the bed. 'Falklands VC Hero Assaulted at TV Tony's Hideaway,' it read. Front page. There was a photograph of me in uniform, a big picture of Anthony Bannister, and a photograph of the house. "Bloody hell," I said.

  "Mr Bannister was in London." Abbott folded the paper away. "So it wasn't him that beat the shit out of you."

  "It was a South African."

  "Figured it was." Abbott showed no surprise, nor much interest. He picked a grape from the bunch beside my bed and spat the pips on to the floor. "A big sod?"

  "Built like a barge."

  Abbott nodded. "Fanny Mulder. He's Mr Bannister's professional skipper." There was an infinite derision in the last two words.

  "Fanny?"

  "Francis, but always known as Fanny. He's pissed off, of course. Probably in France by now. Or Spain. Or gone back to the Fatherland. Whatever, he's waiting for things to quieten down before he comes back." Abbott stared at my face. "He certainly took care of you, didn't he?"

  "He nicked my wallet. And my bag. And everything off my boat."

  "He bloody tried to murder you, didn't he?" Abbott did not sound very concerned. "He dumped you on the foreshore and probably hoped the tide would wash you away. Some dentist found you. Mr Bannister says you broke into his boathouse?"

  "He had my bloody dinghy in there!" I protested too forcibly, and the pain in my chest whipped at me like the recoil of a frayed wire cable. I coughed foully. There were tears in my eyes.

  Abbott waited till I was silent. "Mr Bannister wants it all hushed up. He would, of course."

  "He would?"

  "Not good for the image, is it? He doesn't want the scum papers saying that a war hero was scuffed over by one of his pet gorillas. Image is very important to Mr Bannister. He's one of those blokes who straps himself into a fighting chair just to catch a bloody mackerel." Abbott laughed scornfully. "You know the kind, Nick, a bloody Londoner who comes down at weekends to show us dumb locals how it's all done."

  "Isn't he meant to be a brilliant sailor?" I asked.

  "His wife was. She insisted on buying the Devon house. She was here a lot, but then she was always bloody sailing." Abbott pulled open the drawer of the bedside cabinet and tapped a long drooping piece of ash into its emptiness. "I didn't like her so much. American." He added the last word as though it explained his distaste, then blew a plume of smoke towards my drip. "I miss your old man, Nick."

  "Not surprising, is it, when you consider how generously he gave to the police orphan and champagne fund?"

  Abbott sniffed disapproval. "Have you been to see your dad, Nick?"

  "I haven't had time," I said, then, to change the subject, "When did Bannister buy the house?"

  "Couple of years back. It took the courts that long to sort out your old man's mess."

  "Did Bannister take my boat out of the water?"

  "Lord knows." Abbott did not seem to care. "Could have been anyone. There was some mischief on the river this winter. Usual thing. Radios and depth-sounders nicked."

  "That was Mulder," I said. "There were crates of stuff in the boathouse. Including my gear."

  "Won't be there any longer, will it?" Abbott said carelessly. "He'll have shipped it all off to George Cullen. Remember George?"

  "Of course I remember George."

  "He's still as bent as a pig's tail. We reckon Mulder's been doing business with Georgie, but it's hard to prove."

  "I thought we taxpayers paid you to prove hard things."

  "Not my job, Nick, not my job." Abbott went to the window and frowned his disapproval at the cloudless sky. "I'm off crime now."

  "What are you? Traffic? Giving parking tickets to the grockles?" Grockles were tourists.

  Abbott ignored the gibe. "I'll tell CID about the stolen stuff, Nick, of course I will. But I doubt they'll do anything. I mean rich fellows whose shiny yachts get ripped off aren't exactly the highest priority on our list. Not while we've got orphans and widows being robbed. Orphans and widows tend not to have insurance, you see, unlike the floating rich."

  "My boat wasn't insured. My ex-wife didn't forward the renewal notice."

  "You are a bloody fool," Abbott said.

  "It was hard for Melissa to remember everything when she was having fun. Besides," I shrugged, "Jimmy Nicholls was supposed to be looking after Sycorax."

  "Jimmy's been in hospital since November," Abbott said, thus explaining why Sycorax had been abandoned. "Emphysema.

  He smokes too much." He looked down at his cigarette, shrugged, and stole another grape. "Seen your kids, have you?"

  "They visited me in the other hospital." I wondered why Abbott was so deliberately sheering away from more pressing matters. "Are you going to charge Mulder?" I demanded.

  "I doubt it, Nick, I doubt it. Wouldn't do much bloody good, would it?"

  "For Christ's sake! He stole all my stuff!"

  "Difficult to prove. You can prefer a charge of assault against him, if you like." Abbott did not sound enthusiastic.

  "Why don't you arrest him?"

  "You're the one who got clocked," Abbott pointed out reasonably, "not me."

  "Aren't you supposed to charge him?"

  "I told you. I'm not crime. I just volunteered to come and have a chat with you. For old times' sake."

  "Thank you, Harry," I said mockingly.

  "But if I was you, I wouldn't bother pressing charges," Abbott said airily. "Bannister looks after Fanny, he does. He'll hire him a top lawyer who'll muddy the waters, and you'll end up with the court's sympathy because of the medal, but they'll still pin a bloody great bill for costs on to you." He shook his head. "Not worth it, Nick.
Forget it."

  "I don't want to forget it. I've got to sue someone if I'm going to find the money to repair Sycorax."

  Abbott jerked his head towards the door. "There's a whole lot of bloody lowlife out there who'd gladly write you a cheque. The press, Nick. They've been trying to see you for days."

  "Keep them out, Harry, for Christ's sake. And I want to press charges against Mulder."

  Abbott sighed at my stubbornness. "If you insist, Nick. If you insist. I'll arrange for a bloody lawyer to come and see you." He went to the door, pausing there. "You know your old man was proud of you, Nick? Really proud." He waited, and when I made no response, he explained, "The VC."

  "The other two earned it," I said. "I just disobeyed orders."

  "It's still a Victoria Cross, Nick. It can change your life, earning a thing like that."

  "I don't want it to change my life. I just want to get it back."

  Abbott frowned. "Get what back?"

  "The medal, Harry. Bloody Mulder stole it with everything else. It was in my bag."

  Abbott flinched as if, at last, he recognized that I'd suffered a misfortune. "I am sorry, Nick."

  "Now do you see why I need to sue the bugger?"

  "If it's any consolation to you, he'll have the devil's own job to sell it. Any collector will know it's stolen, and I can't think Fanny knows the right fence. He usually only deals with George Cullen, and Georgie wouldn't touch your medal."

  "Put the word out, will you, Harry?"

  "I'll do that, Nick." Abbott nodded a farewell.

  The next day I swore out a complaint against Francis Mulder, accusing him of assault and theft. The lawyer was sympathetic, but pessimistic. Mulder, he said, had disappeared and was unlikely to return to England so long as the writ threatened. He thought my chances of recovering the medal were slight, and my chances of successfully recouping the costs of repairing Sycorax even slighter.

  "Suppose we sue Bannister for the boat damage?" I asked.

  "We'd need to prove that Mulder was acting on his behalf." The lawyer shook his head to show how little hope he placed on that idea.