Stormchild (2 page)

I nodded. “The bugger’ll never know it was hit.”

She opened the bedroom window and sniffed the wind. “It’s going to be a fast crossing,” she said happily. Joanna had grown up in Guernsey where she had learned to sail as naturally as other children learned to ride a bicycle. She relished strong winds and hard seas and, anticipating that this day would bring her a fast wet channel crossing, all spray and dash and thumping seas, she was eager to get under way.

I cooked Joanna’s breakfast, then drove her down to the river. She was dressed in oilies, while her red-gold hair, beaded by a light shower, sprang in a stiff undisciplined mop from the edges of her yellow woolen watch hat. She suddenly looked so young that, for an instant, her eager face cruelly reminded me of our daughter, Nicole.

“You look miserable,” Joanna, catching sight of my expression, called from the cockpit.

I knew better than to mention Nicole, so invented another reason for my apparent misery. “I just wish I was coming with you.”

“I wish you were, too,” she said in her no-nonsense voice, which acknowledged we could do nothing to change the day’s fate, “but you can’t. So be nice to the London lawyer instead.”

“Of course I’ll be nice to him,” I said irritably.

“Why ‘of course’? You usually growl at customers you don’t like, and I’ve yet to meet a lawyer you don’t treat like something you scrape off a shoe.” Joanna laughed, then blew me a kiss. “Perhaps I should stay and make the sale?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll be good to the bastard,” I promised her, then I released
Slip-Slider’s
bowline and shoved her off the pontoon. “Give me a call when you arrive!”

“I will! And go to David’s sermon! And eat properly! Lots of salad and vegetables!” Joanna had released the stern line and put the engine in gear. “Love you!”

“Love you,” I called back, and I was struck again by Joanna’s sudden resemblance to our daughter, then, after a last blown kiss, she turned to look down river to where the channel waves crashed white on the estuary’s bar. I watched her hoist the sails before a gray squall of sudden hard rain hid
Slip-Slider
and made me run for the shelter of my car. I drove to a lorry driver’s cafe on the bypass where they made a proper breakfast of blood pudding, eggs, fried bread, bacon, sausage, kidneys, mushrooms, and tomatoes, all mopped up with bread and butter and washed down with tea strong enough to strip paint.

By the time I opened the yard for business the rain had eased and a watery sun was glossing the river where, one by one, the boats hoisted their sails and slapped out toward the boisterous sea. I stripped the tarpaulins from
Stormchild’s
decks and jealously thought how Joanna would be sailing
Slip-Slider
sharp into the wind, slicing the gray seas white, while I swept
Stormchild’s
topsides clean, then put two industrial heaters into her cabins to take the winter’s lingering chill out of her hull.

The London lawyer turned up an hour late for his appointment. He was a young man, no more than thirty, yet he had clearly done well for himself for he arrived in a big BMW and, before climbing out, he ostentatiously used the car phone so that we peasants would realize he possessed such a thing. But we were more inclined to notice the girl who accompanied him, for she was a tall, willowy model type who unfolded endless legs from the car. The lawyer finished his telephone call, then climbed out to greet me. He was wearing a designer oilskin jacket with a zip-in float liner and a built-in safety harness. “Tim Blackburn?” He held out his hand.

“I’m Blackburn,” I confirmed.

“I’m John Miller. This is Mandy.”

Mandy gave me a limp hand to shake. “You’re quite famous, aren’t you?” She greeted me.

“Am I?”

“Daddy says you are. He says you won lots of races. Is that right?”

“A long time ago,” I said dismissively. I had been one of the last Englishmen to win the single-handed Atlantic race before the French speed-sleds made the contest a Gallic preserve, then, for a brief period, I had held the record for sailing nonstop and single-handed round the world. Those accomplishments hardly accorded me rock-star status, but among sailors my name still rang a faint bell.

“Daddy says it was impressive, anyway,” the girl said with airy politeness, then gazed up at the deep-keeled
Stormchild
which was cradled by massive metal jack-stands. “Golly, isn’t it huge!”

“You must stop saying that to me,” the lawyer, who was no more than five foot two inches tall, guffawed at his own wit, then sternly told me he had expected to find the boat in the water with her mast stepped and sails bent on.

“Hardly at this time of year”—I was remembering Joanna’s instruction to be nice to this little man, and thus kept my voice very patient and calm—”the season’s scarcely begun and no one puts a boat in the water until they need to. Besides,” I went on blithely, “I thought you’d appreciate seeing the state of her hull.”

“There is that, of course,” he said grudgingly, though I doubted he would have noticed if the hull had been a rat-infested maze of rust holes. John Miller clearly did not know boats, and that ignorance made him palpably impatient as I ran down the list of
Stormchild’s
virtues. Those virtues were many; the yacht had been custom built for an experienced and demanding owner who had wanted a boat sturdy enough for the worst seas, yet comfortable enough to live aboard for months at a time. The result was a massive, heavy boat, as safe as any cruising yacht in the world, with a powerful brute of a turbocharged diesel deep in her belly. But
Stormchild
was also a pretty boat, with fine lines, a graceful rig, and decks and coach roofs handsomely planked in the finest teak.

“Which is why,” I told the lawyer a little too brusquely, “I’d be grateful if you took off your street shoes before climbing aboard.”

Miller scowled at my request, but nevertheless slipped off his expensive brogues. Mandy, who had begun to shiver in the unseasonably cold wind, discarded her stiletto heels before tiptoeing up the wooden boarding stairs and stepping down into
Stormchild’s
cockpit. “She’s ever so pretty,” Mandy said gallantly. The lawyer ignored her. He was peering at the cockpit instrument display and pretending that he understood what he was seeing.

“You’ll take a hundred thousand?” he challenged me suddenly.

“Don’t be so bloody silly,” I snapped back. My anger was piqued by the knowledge that
Stormchild
was horribly underpriced even at a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and I felt another twinge of regret that Joanna and I were not ready to buy her.

Miller had bridled at my flash of temper, but controlled his own, perhaps because I was at least fourteen inches taller than him, or perhaps because my fading fame carried with it a reputation for having a difficult temperament. One tabloid newspaper had called me the “Solo Seadog Who Bites,” which was unfair, for I simply had the prickly facade that often conceals a chronic shyness, to which I added an honest man’s natural dislike of all lawyers, frauds, pimps, politicians, and bureaucrats, and this lawyer, despite his pristine foul-weather gear, was plainly a prick of the first order. “We were thinking of keeping her in the Med”—Miller tapped the compass as though it was a barometer—”I suppose you can deliver her?”

“It might be possible,” I said, though my tone implied there could be vast difficulties in such a delivery for, eager as I was to sell
Stormchild,
I was not at all certain that her proper fate was to become a flashy toy to impress Miller’s friends and clients.
Stormchild
was a very serious boat, and I loved boats enough not to want this beautifully built craft to degenerate in the hands of a careless owner. “If it’s a warm-weather vacation boat that you want,” I said as tactfully as I could, “then perhaps you ought to think about a fiberglass hull? They need much less maintenance and they offer better insulation.”

“There are plenty of people willing to do maintenance work in the Med,” the lawyer said unpleasantly, “and we can always bung some air conditioners into her.”

My flash of temper had clearly not discouraged the little runt, so I tried warning him that cooling a boat the size of
Stormchild
would be an expensive business.

“Let me worry about expense,” Miller said, then bared his teeth in a grimace that I could, if I chose, translate as a smile. “In my line of work, Blackburn, I occasionally need to impress a client, and you don’t do that by being cheap.”

“Surely the best way to impress clients is to keep them out of jail?” I suggested.

He gave a scornful bark of laughter. “Good God, man, I’m not a criminal lawyer! Christ, no! I negotiate property deals between the City and Japan. It’s quite specialized work, actually.” He insinuated, correctly, that I would not understand the specialization. “But the Japanese are pathetically impressed by big white boats”—he glanced at his shivering girlfriend—”and by the girls that go with them.”

Mandy giggled while I, suppressing an urge to wring Miller’s neck, took him below decks to show off the impressive array of instruments that were mounted above
Stormchild’s
navigation table. Miller dismissed my description of the SatNav, Decca, radar, and weatherfax, saying that his marine surveyor would attend to such details. Miller himself was more interested in the boat’s comforts which, though somewhat lacking in gloss, nevertheless met his grudging approval. He especially liked the aft master cabin where, warmed by one of my big industrial heaters, Mandy had stretched her lithe length across the double berth’s king-size mattress. “Hello, sailor,” she greeted Miller.

“Oh, jolly good.” Miller was clearly anticipating the effect that Mandy’s lissome beauty would have on his Japanese clients. “Will you take a hundred and ten?” he suddenly demanded of me.

He had obviously smelled that
Stormchild
was a bargain, and I felt a terrible sadness for I knew that, once the boat had been used as the sweetener on a few deals, and once Miller had made his fortune from those deals, she would be left to rot in some stagnant backwater. “Why don’t you take a good look at the other cabins,” I said with as much patience as I could muster, “then we can negotiate a price in my office. Would you like some coffee waiting for you?”

“Decaffeinated,” he ordered imperiously, “with skim milk and an artificial sweetener.”

I planned to give him powdered caffeine laced with condensed milk and white sugar. “The coffee will be waiting in the office,” I promised, then left them to it.

Billy, who had just finished rigging the repaired four-and-a-half-ton yawl, ambushed me halfway across the yard. His chivalrous concern, like that of every other red-blooded male in the yard, was for the lubricious and goose-pimpled Mandy. “Bloody hell, boss, what does she see in the little fucker?”

“She sees his wallet, Billy.”

“Did you see the fucker’s oilskin coat?” Billy asked indignantly.

“It can get very rough on the boating pond in Hyde Park,” I said reprovingly, then I turned away because a car had just driven past the big sign that read “Absolutely No Unauthorized Vehicles Beyond This Notice,” and I was readying myself to shout at the driver, when I realized that the car was my brother’s antique Riley.

“They’re not racing today, are they?” Billy asked, and my own first thought was that David must have come to the yard to launch his 505 racing dinghy. My reverend elder brother was a lethal competitor and, like others who were addicted to the frail, wet discomfort of fragile racing boats, he pretended to despise the sybaritic conveniences of long-distance sailors like myself. “You mean you have a lavatory on that barge?” he would boom at some hapless victim. “You pee in windless comfort, do you? Next you will inform me that you have a cooking stove on board. You do! Then why not just stay in some luxury hotel, dear boy?”

“You’re not taking your eggshell out in this wind, are you?” I greeted David as he opened the Riley’s door, then I saw he could not possibly be thinking of taking out the 505, for he was wearing his dog collar and cassock, and even David’s mild eccentricities did not extend to sailing in full clerical rig. Instead he was dressed ready for the afternoon’s Easter weddings, and I supposed he had come to inveigle me into buying him a pub lunch before he performed his splicing duties. Then the passenger door of the Riley opened and another man climbed out.

It is at that point, just as Brian Callendar climbs out of David’s car, that my memory of that Easter weekend becomes like some dark and sinister film that is played over and over in my head. It is a film that I constantly want to change, as if by rewriting its action or dialogue I can miraculously change the film’s ending.

Brian Callendar comes toward me. He is an acquaintance rather than a friend, and he is also a detective sergeant in the County Police Force, and there is something about his face, and about David’s face behind him, which suggests that the two men have not come to the boatyard for pleasure. The Riley’s engine is still running and its front doors have been left open. I remember how the wind was whirling wood-shavings out of the carpenter’s shop and across the sloping cobbles of the boatyard’s ramp. “Tim?” Callendar said in a very forced voice. I am still smiling, but there is something about the policeman’s voice which tells me that I won’t be smiling again for a very long time. “Tim?” Callendar says again.

And I want the film to stop. I so badly want the film to stop.

But it won’t.

David took my elbow and walked me down to the pontoon where he stood beside me as Callendar told me that a yacht had exploded in mid-channel. Some wreckage had been found, and amongst that wreckage was a yellow horseshoe life buoy with the name
Slip-Slider
painted in black letters.

I stared at the policeman. “No,” I said. I was incapable of saying anything else. “No.”

“A Dutch cargo ship saw it happen, Mr. Blackburn.” Callendar, as befitted a bringer of bad news, had slipped into a stilted formality. “They say it was a bad explosion.”