Salvage for the Saint (4 page)

“I reckon we can,” said the Saint.

Vic Cullen was a boatbuilder from Bursledon, across the Solent. After thirty years’ working with boats, on and off the water, there wasn’t much anybody could teach him on the subject. He had built the Privateer virtually single-handed to a design he and Simon had worked out together. His only help with the work had come from the Saint himself in the odd intervals of his exigent adventures elsewhere.

The teams of scrutineers were busy with their final inspections, and the salt breeze carried a low babble of voices from the waiting competitors, punctuated intermittently by the raucously variegated notes of motors starting up. Beneath that man-made and evanescent hubbub was something powerful and eternal—the rhythmical slap and swell of the sea. Even here against the harbour wall its motion was noticeably stronger than it had been in the last few days, and as Simon and Vic neared the short jetty where the Privateer was moored they could see her scarlet hull bobbing up and down impatiently, and hear the stretched creaking of wet rope as she tugged at her moorings.

“Strainin’ at the leash, look,” Vic said with pride; and the Saint nodded and smiled, sharing that same pride.

“Scrutineers should be with us in a few minutes,” he said. “She’ll just have to contain herself till they’ve done.”

This was her first race; and it was for racing above all that this trim compact boat had been built. She was every inch a beauty; but it was the beauty of a spare and functional design. Every line of that sleek hull, from the futuristically cutaway stern to the streamlined cockpit canopy and steeply raked bow, had been calculated for speed. She was a thoroughbred racing machine, a slim-line twenty-two-foot lightweight with a modest five litres of engine and with the irreducible minimum of fittings and frivolities allowable within the race rules, which in those days were not over-elaborate.

Those days were, roughly speaking, the beginning of the modern revivalist era of powerboating competition, before the introduction of more rigid systems of boat classi-fication and qualification. Less than midway through the twentieth century, the sport had been enthusiastically rediscovered after a lengthy neglect, and its free-for-all freshness attracted a colourfully wide range of hopefuls.

The Cowes-to-Penzance race that year was a typical result; but the record books will be found to be mysteriously obscure on the subject if not altogether blank. The fact is, nevertheless, that there were thirty-six entrants in all: thirty-six assorted boats receiving the scrutineer’s final check on that windy August morning.

The degree of assortedness was astonishing. Simon Templar had cast an incredulous eye over many of them, and had decided that the owners’ choice of names for their boats offered a rough and ready indication of their chances.

Those blazoned with the most intimidating appellations—Thundershark, Tornado, Hell for Leather and the like—mostly turned out to be the tiny, infinitely hopeful outboarders. At the other extreme were the half dozen big thirty-five- and forty-footers representing the brute force approach: plenty of bulk and up to a thousand horses of petrol or diesel power to blast it across the waves. For some reason, maybe connected with having a faulty sense of humour, the proud owners of these jumbo-size entries tended to have given them coy names like Buckaboo, entered by Sammy Topwith of motor racing fame, Big Bouncie, a fancied US contender, and Skimmie, the great hope of the Aussies.

Somewhere in among this litter of the inept and the overpowered was the gold of real racing, boats built for the job and handled by men who knew what it took and had what it took. The names in this group had a romantic flavour that suggested their clean graceful lines: Dolphin II, Red Marlin, Silver Lady, the crack Italian boat Bellis-sima—and Simon Templar’s Privateer.

Moored near the Privateer was Charles Tatenor’s massive yellow boat, the Can-decour. With her overall length of thirty-eight feet and her six-hundred horsepower twin Rolls-Royce diesel engines she fell decidedly into the brute-force category, although the name was an exception to the general trend, and had no obvious derivation that the Saint could see. She was a conversion rather than a purpose-built job, but in this case the work had been carefully and professionally done even though most of the luxury fittings had been preserved. Tatenor had even added to the ostentation, by having the external trim finished off with a series of intricately carved mahogany panels and an ornate figurehead in the shape of an eagle; all of which gave the Candecour an outward air of rococo excess that belied its brisk performance on the water.

Tatenor himself was standing a few yards away on the quayside with Fournier. Each of the two men was wearing a one-piece waterproof suit and carrying a bright orange crash helmet.

Though Simon had exchanged the odd word with Tatenor within the ambit of this and previous races, he preferred to dislike him cordially at a distance. But Tatenor caught his eye now, and flicked a depreciatory finger at the Privateer’s scarlet hull.

“I do hope she holds up for you,” he called across.

“You’ll be able to follow her progress for yourself, and without turning your head,” replied the Saint with even politeness.

Tatenor laughed hollowly, exposing teeth of perfect porcelain translucence whose shade matched the white of his hair and contrasted with the deep tan of his handsome weather-beaten features.

“I suggest you might care to check the boiler in that thing before we start,” he brayed, flicking another dismissive finger in the Privateer’s direction and chuckling at his own remark.

“And you,” retorted the Saint good-humouredly, “had better lash down the Chippendale and be prepared to jettison a couple of footmen when the going gets tough.”

“Boiler!” Vic exploded softly to Simon as Tatenor turned away with a frozen smile on his large brown face. “We’ll show you somethin’, Mister lah-de-dah Tatenor!”

Simon felt vaguely uncomfortable himself with Tatenor’s speech, for some reason he couldn’t quite pin down. It was a discomfort that was something more than simple dislike of the parodied form of English articulation inflicted on the rest of us by certain representatives of the old-guard sporting gent brigade, of which Tatenor seemed to be almost a founder officer. It was decidedly something more than that; it was the kind of discomfort, the kind of nebulous puzzlement, which the Saint had felt before in all manner of circumstances when something was micrometrically off-key and his senses were busy delivering messages to his understanding which that partly instinct-driven system refused to accept as making a wholly convincing picture. When Simon Templar felt this way he could be sure there was something behind it which with luck and persistence he would presently ferret out from his subconscious. But that would happen in its own time, and for the moment he had the race to think about and no intention of actively worrying away at a nagging disquiet about Charles Tatenor’s speech.

But then something reached his ears which was all the more thought-provoking for being so wholly unexpected.

He heard Charles Tatenor speaking to Fournier in perfect French.

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Even though the two had turned away before Tatenor spoke, the Saint’s acute hearing picked up the sentence clearly. He heard Tatenor translate, for Fournier’s benefit, the last flippant remark of his own about the Chippendale and the footmen.

Whether Fournier grasped the satirical point at once is doubtful—judging from the corrugations of puzzlement that appeared on his unprepossessing brow—but incidental. The noteworthy thing to Simon Templar, himself an exceptional linguist and fluent French speaker, was Tatenor’s perfect assurance in the language. His apparently effortless impromptu translation would have been hard to better, but so would his pronunciation, accent, and—the most difficult—intonation. To the Saint’s ear, which was assuredly no mean ear at all as ears for that sort of thing went, Tatenor’s French was as indistinguishable from the French of an educated Frenchman as his English was from the English of an educated Briton.

And that reflection provoked a line of thought to which the Saint was to come back again and again, during the race and after.

During and after. Especially after. Because the race ended, for Simon Templar, in an unexpected way, and for Charles Tatenor more surprisingly still …

It began, however, in the way that was usual for the times: with a rolling start. Powerboats are only semi-controllable at sub-planing speeds when a big group of them are frothing along in a turmoil of contending washes, and to let them spin and jockey for the best positions as at the start of a race for yachts would be asking for trouble. Discipline was therefore imposed on the scene in the form of a start boat with the function of pacing the competitors up to the line for a rolling start, so that they would all cross the line more or less together and at the same speed.

The Saint manoeuvred the Privateer into her drawn lane position towards the outside of the muster area, about a mile and a quarter behind the line, with the start boat on the extreme outside, farthest from the Cowes shore and the assembled thousands who had gathered to watch what little of the race a landbound spectator could hope to see. Four minutes before the off, with a final blip of motors, the start boat set off for the line, rapidly reaching the planned speed of just over fifteen knots. As a concession to traditionalists a starting-gun was fired from the start boat just as she crossed the line; but few of the competitors could have heard it above the noise of their engines. The trick was to keep fractionally astern of the start boat—any boat crossing the line ahead of it would be disqualified.

Simon Templar kept fractionally astern of it.

He heard the gun, faintly, as they crossed the line, and then he eased the throttle open to about two-thirds maximum to get the boat up on the plane, as the jargon has it. After a minute or so he opened the throttle a little wider to raise the speed experimentally as far as he dared in that decidedly assertive sea.

The Saint looked around, through the heavy spray the Privateer was throwing up.

He was lying second. Two or three boat lengths ahead, away on their port, was the Italian entry Bellissima. It seemed to be leaping from one wave crest to the next, its propellers sometimes rising right up out of the sea. Each time it took off, the ocean seemed to fall away vertiginously beneath it—and every time it landed it hit the water with a tremendous smack and was momentarily all but obscured from sight by the rising spume. And the Saint and Vic were only too well aware that exactly the same thing was happening to the Privateer, and that to an observer outside the boat the repeated impacts probably seemed equally likely to smash it to smithereens at any moment.

The equations of propulsion and drag in a high-speed motor boat are finely balanced; every day presents its own parameters of wave rhythm and current and wind resistance. The first rule of thumb you learnt was that the less the boat was in actual contact with the water the faster it would go. But all propulsion had to be achieved through the water: airscrews or rockets would disqualify the craft as a boat. So you were dependent on your propellers and it was important that they stayed under the water as much as possible to keep the propulsion going continuously. Too little up on the plane and you followed a switchback course over the peaks and down into the troughs of the waves, with a heavy drag of water resistance on the hull. Too much up on the plane to minimise that drag, and you risked losing more than you gained as your screws clawed frequently at empty air.

And that, to the Saint’s eyes, was what was happening now to the Italian boat. While it had pulled ahead of him in the first minutes, probably by getting more rapidly and less cautiously up to its optimum speed for the conditions, it had now overshot the mark and he was very slowly gaining on it. But his judgment told him that if anything the Privateer herself was maybe erring fractionally in the same direction, and now he slackened off the throttle an almost imperceptible notch.

Vic nodded approval and agreement, then touched the Saint’s arm and pointed astern, to their nearer port. Perhaps half a dozen lengths behind was the Candecour; and it was plain to them both that the big boat was gaining on them.

Simon sighed.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to let him past.”

He knew there was no help for it. A couple of minutes after they had inched past the Bellissima, they were in turn overtaken by the Candecour, some fifty yards on their port. The yellow-helmeted figure at the wheel, which must have been Tatenor, raised an arm as they went inexorably and infuriat-ingly by. He waved, though without any shadow of the gaiety that might have been conveyed by an orthodox reciprocation of the upraised hand. Tatenor’s wave was a single one-shot extension of the arm from an upright to a forward position. It was almost a salute, but with an element of gloating finality in it which seemed in some way chilling.

“Snotty bastard!” Vic snorted with feeling.

But Vic knew, with the same seamanlike feel for the interaction of boat and waves and weather as Simon Templar’s own, that there was nothing to be done. They were skimming over the water as fast as the Privateer could skim in those conditions, in that direction, on that day; and it so happened that the Candecour was travelling faster. In fact, though they hated to admit it, Tatenor’s boat was optimising that difficult equation better—for the moment—than their own.

For the moment … Those, the Saint told himself with set determination, were the operative words. For the moment, the Candecour’s great weight and bulk might suit the conditions, but much as it depressed him to see that yellow stern drawing steadily away in front, the race was a long way from won yet. For the moment, they still had the north coast of the island off their port side. But soon they would clear its western extremity, marked by the Needles, a familiar landmark of jagged rocks that stuck out of the sea like the angular protuberances of some giant sea monster’s submerged body. Beyond this point the boats would encounter a completely different series of currents. Wave amplitude would probably change too, and they would be battling into a still stronger headwind than they already faced. And then … there was more than a chance that the Privateer would come into her own.