Rum Affair (28 page)

Symphonetta’s
boat was faster than ours. As we stared at the remote, rocking discs of
Seawolf’s
portholes, we could see Ogden for a moment, dark against her green topsides as he climbed up the companionway, and a shape which must be Victoria, roused by the noise of the speedboat. Then he was on board, and
Symphonetta’s
launch had been cast off to drift, and after standing for a moment, no doubt in startled enquiry, Victoria slipped forward to get up the anchor while Ogden disappeared below.

Soon, the engine would start, and Ogden would help Victoria get the anchor aboard, and then running back to the cockpit, would put the engine in gear and away. I wondered what story he had told to Victoria. And I thought, we can’t catch them now. Then the stutter of a starting motor, stammering again and again, came faintly over the beat of our outboard and I remembered, with a cold excitement and nausea combined, that Lenny had been on board
Seawolf
that night, ostensibly to look at the battery. Whatever you thought of Johnson and his friends, they were efficient. Of course
Seawolf
’s
engine wouldn’t work.

Kenneth had realised it, too. He said: “They’ll have to raise sail. That means he’ll have to get rid of us first. Can you manage this outboard?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Good. Look, we’ll have to divide forces. I’m going to steer over to Hennessy’s speedboat and get myself aboard. Then while I have his attention, I want you to get on his blind side and somehow get on board
Seawolf.
Once she sees what’s happening, Victoria will help you. He may realise what we’re doing, but he’s only one man. He can’t be in two places at once.”

There were many things one could say: sensible things. He can’t get far, under sail. Why not wait for the others? There was still
Binkie’s
boat, there on the pier, and along the shore now, a twinkling of torches, jerking and streaming. The Buchanans, Hennessy, Johnson and Rupert were all coming. Then I looked at Kenneth’s face, and I thought of the tape and all that it might contain; and I said only: “Be careful. He’ll have a gun now.”

Then we had reached the rocking black shape of
Symphonetta’s
smart speedboat: there was a lurch, and I was alone, the helm in my hand. On
Seawolf,
something light flapped near her bows – Victoria had untied the jib and was trying to raise it while Ogden cranked up the anchor.

But he had left it too late. As
Symphonetta’
s
speedboat, hissing, curved and made straight for his gangway, I saw Ogden drop what he was doing and run back along deck. As he passed the skylight something silver glinted in his hand, and I drew a long, shallow breath. Then I put the helm down and made for
Seawolf
’s
opposite side. A moment later, and I was tied up to her rail.

It was as I was standing there seesawing in the dinghy, staring upwards, that someone let off a revolver on the other side of the boat. I counted three shots. Then Victoria screamed.

I had drawn breath to call her when I heard running feet, and she came. “Tina?” Either she had seen me sail round, or Kenneth had managed to tell her. Silhouetted against the dim glow from the hatches her face was staring and white, half-hidden by her rough flying hair. Poor Victoria, who thought she could treat men as ponies. She saw me and said: “Cecil’s gone crazy, I think. They were fighting . . . Dr Holmes had an oar . . . Cecil’s flung him back in the water and taken the companionway up . . .”

“Victoria. Listen. Get the companionway, if you can without Ogden noticing. And bring it here.”

She stared at me, hardly listening. “He’s got a gun! He’s shooting! Tina, we have to get help.”

“Victoria!
Get the companionway.”

She obeyed orders. That is why she does so well, on a boat. In two quiet steps she had it lifted over the coachhouse roof, and let down beside me. A moment later, I was on deck beside her. “Now listen. Is Kenneth hurt?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He dived, and Cecil went on shooting into the water. Then Cecil left it and jumped into the cockpit. I think he’s trying to find out what’s wrong with the engine . . . Listen!” She looked distraught. “He’s calling. He’ll want help with the anchor. Tina, let’s get back in the boat.”

“No . . . Wait! Go forward and do what he wants,” I said quickly. “He won’t harm you. He can’t, he needs you to help him sail. The engine won’t start: Lenny fixed it – never mind why. It’s a long story. The others will come and help soon – look, there’s
Binkie
’
s boat putting off from the jetty now. We only need to delay him a little, and try not to let him see the companionway is down on this side. If Kenneth’s all right, he’ll swim round to it, and then we’re three against one. But if he sees you trying to leave he’ll shoot, Victoria. Pretend to help. That’s safest and best.”

She said: “All right,” although she was shaking. “But you—”

“Never mind me. You go and get the anchor in and the jib up, and take your time about it.” And as she ran forward, in answer to another command in Ogden’s sharp voice, I slid into the cockpit, and found my way down a small flight of steps to the wide four-berth saloon down below. Here the motion was violent – the anchor must be tripping and the jib either down still, or up and not yet trimmed. A book Victoria had been reading slid backwards and forwards on the floor, and unwashed tea things rattled in the steel sink. She had been feeling very low, Victoria, it was clear. At the far end of the fo’c’sle, a door opened and shut slackly with every roll. Running below for his revolver, Ogden had left the fo’c’sle unlocked. In a moment, I was inside.

At first, I despaired. It was a mess of patched clothing and old tumbled blankets mixed up with capstan handles and tarred twine and cakes of marine glue and old boathook heads, all tipped out on the floor when the starboard bunk had pulled away from its fixing. Then I saw that it was made to pull out, and that the old lining boards which formed the curving walls of the fo’c’sle were also partly dismantled, showing behind a gleam of something neat in plastic, with cables and dials. I pulled aside the rest of the lining then, but there was no sign of the tape. Instead, I found Ogden’s two other guns. I pocketed them while on the deck above me there was a confused trampling of feet, the sound of Ogden’s voice, giving orders, and thinly, Victoria’s breathless replies.

I realised that the running rattle of the anchor chain through the hawsehole had stopped, and what I was hearing now was the creak of blocks and the clink and shuffle as the mainsail leapfrogged up. As
Seawolf
caught the wind I saw, across the dark fo’c’sle where I stood and beyond the galley and the lit oasis of the deserted saloon, a stir as Ogden entered the cockpit to take his place at the helm. I saw his arm reach behind him and sheet in the mainsail. Then the deck below me threw me off balance, and suddenly I was on my side in a tangle of bedding, the two revolvers digging hard in my flesh.

We were sailing. Victoria and I were alone on
Seawolf
with this mad and desperate man.

There was a hatch above me, locked on the inside. I glanced just once through the fo’c’sle door, to see his bulk, tethered now to the tiller. I wondered if he had seen
Dolly’s
empty dinghy, which I cast off as I scrambled aboard, and if he was wondering where I had got to. Kenneth, he must suppose, was swimming somewhere out there, or wounded, or drowned. It was possible. But with luck, he might reach one of the boats safely, and the Buchanan’s launch, now heading for
Dolly,
would find him and take him on board.

I hoped so, for Kenneth was not really a practical person. And to get what you want in this life, you cannot always play a clean game. I closed the door and began, gently, to unlock the hatch. I had a job to do. And on the whole, I should be better off doing it on my own.

It was dark on deck, and slippery, and very wet. At first I lay full length quite still where I was, between the brass handrail which ran along the side of the coachhouse roof and the ridge of the gunwale. It was not a very happy position. I was against the lee rail of a hard sailing ship, and if I released my grip of this icy brass rail, I should be hard put to it not to slip sideways between those wide man ropes and thence into the sea. As it was, the sea was coming to me. Ogden was aiming for speed, not finesse, and there was a good-going wind blowing up from the south-east. Every now and then, she put her head down and dug into a good one, and then a cold body of water streamed down my left side. A little earlier I had zipped up my hood and my pockets, and I was grateful: there was no famous hair blowing to obscure my sight or give me away. I wondered fleetingly what the management of the Colón, where I ought to be performing, would say if they were watching me now. Lying there, I breathed deeply and easily. Even against the blustering pressure of wind, my chest muscles were supple and strong. I could have lifted up my voice then and quelled the sea and the wind: I could have sung Brünnhilde and Isolde. I could deal with Ogden. I knew it.

First, where was Victoria? The sails were set and drawing, their sheets roughly belayed, with no sign of a change of course to come. There had been little effort at tidying: the rope ends, uncoiled, were slithering tangled together and an empty paint tin, left on deck with its brush in calmer, sunnier days, was rolling clanking between anchor and hatch. Victoria’s work was done there: Ogden would have called her back to the cockpit.

And then I thought, he would need her, of course, at the tiller. He had work to do, hadn’t he, below? He had the fo’c’sle door to secure and the mess inside to clear up. Most urgent of all, he must have messages to send. Tape or no tape, Ogden wouldn’t stay to be caught now. He’d make for the mainland, at Mallaig, Morar or Arisaig, and a fast car to a small airfield. Or perhaps in some bay a foreign crab boat was waiting, innocently riding out the bad weather, and ready to take Ogden on board while a blindfolded Victoria, perhaps, was ferried conveniently ashore.

That was the help he would ask for and what he would have been told to expect. I wondered, myself, if they would trouble with him. Those who arrange boats and planes and fast cars have to take considerable risks, and Johnson’s alarm call would be all over the country by now. Ogden’s employers, with an amused and irritated smile, like the members of the Royal Highland Cruising Club, might well have written off Cecil Ogden for good . . . Unless Gold-tooth would help him, as he had done at Staffa. I wondered very much if Gold-tooth were still at the other end of a radio telegraph on Duke Buzzy’s yacht. And I tried not to wonder whether or not Ogden knew that his ally Gold-tooth had been given diamonds by me to defect. I lifted my head, and slowly moved back along the narrow, wet strip of deck.

It
was
Victoria at the helm. Abaft her head, appearing and disappearing in the dark tumble of waves a long way behind us, were the riding lights of at least two other yachts, one sailing up to the wind, and one paid off and well reefed away from it. The red port light to the south of us looked like
Dolly’s;
the green starboard light was undoubtedly Bob Buchanan’s. I wondered briefly where Hennessy was, and if
Symphonetta
still swayed by herself dark and asleep on the loch. I was surprised that Johnson had taken time even to ferry the Buchanans to
Binkie,
when every moment took Ogden further away. I was surprised also that either yacht was troubling with sail, until I raised my head further to look in the cockpit, and felt the force of the wind. Nothing could have driven them faster than that, or kept them as steady.

Victoria was in the cockpit, alone, and the door leading down to the saloon had been firmly shut. I slid down beside her, unzipped a pocket, and handed her one of Ogden’s two guns.

She was very frightened, her hands almost boneless with cold; and as she spoke to me, her nervous attention was distracted again and again by the heavy steering, and the pull of the waves. The wind was backing a bit and still strengthening: ahead the tide and the wind and the swirling quarrel of currents would chop the waves for us round the long, black spit of Sleat, with its lighthouse winking, steady and white at the end.

Beyond, faintly, other lights glimmered and blanked as the intervening waves jumped; and sometimes, moth-like, grey in the night, a seabird passed silently, close. Beside us, the foam minced back from our flanks, rosy-gold in the light from the portholes, and Victoria said: “He’s below. I’m not to go down. What is it?
What’s happened?
He isn’t well, you know: that’s why he’s got this boat. Why did you make me come back on board?
I can’t hold this damned thing!”

But she
was
holding it, although she was crying, and I knew that if I bullied her, she would go on holding it as long as she lived. I said: “If you sheet her in hard and then bring her up to the wind, what will happen?”

“She’ll rattle herself to bits. In time,” said Victoria, chattering.

“But she’ll stop sailing?”

“She’ll do that: yes.”

“Right. Victoria, I’m going below. Keep her steady. It isn’t easy, I know, but I don’t want to be thrown off balance if I can help it. Then when I yell, bring her round.”

“What are you going to do?” Her eyes in her dim face were staring at me with a kind of horrified fascination.

“Look out!” I waited while she swung
Seawolf
’s bows round, and the water we had taken over the nose came streaming down and into the scuppers. The self-draining cockpit was having a hell of a time. I said: “I’m going to lock Ogden into the fo’c’sle, that’s all. Then all we have to do is wait until
Dolly
and
Binkie
come up. Simple.”

Simple. Ogden was now in the fo’c’sle, doing God knew what, but believing that he and Victoria, stuck at the tiller, were the only two on board the boat. I had locked the fo’c’sle hatch from the top. All I had to do, in order to make Ogden a prisoner, was to open the cockpit door, step quietly down through the saloon and the galley, and turn the key in the door to the fo’c’sle . . . Except that I wanted something else too. The recording tape.