Mason started to run up the beach, his feet slipping on the smooth stones.
“I’m going to look for a phone box,” he called back to Tony, over his shoulder.
*
The storm built up, relentlessly climbing the Beaufort Scale. The wind had risen to forty-five knots, and fifty-foot waves smashed into the side of HMS Taunton Castle, three miles off the shore.
Both the Captain and the First Officer were on the bridge when a message came through from the Watch that he had spotted navigation lights on the starboard bow, and that whatever the vessel was, it was moving bloody fast.
The First Officer looked out of the window and established visual contact himself.
The lights were like fireflies, bobbing up and down in the darkness. There were no mast lights, so it must be a fairly small craft.
He could clearly see the white stern light and the red port-side light – but where the hell was the green starboard light?
Perhaps the boat was sailing parallel to them – but in the opposite direction.
But that couldn’t be it – because it was getting nearer all the time.
“The bloody boat’s on its side, sir,” he said to the Captain. “It’s being carried by the current and it’s heading straight for us!”
As the Captain ordered evasive action, the First Officer watched the lights getting closer and closer, until he could see the dim shape of the boat between them.
The bump against the side of the ship could have been just another wave – but it wasn’t. It was the impact of a twenty-seven-foot Vancouver cruiser battering against a thick metal hull.
It wasn’t a fair contest at all. The HMS Taunton Castle was unmarked by the encounter. The Seaspray – on the other hand – virtually disintegrated.
*
Linda finished her cigarette, and threw it down on to the shingle.
“Well, I’m off,” she said to Tony. “Do you want a lift?”
“Off? You’re leaving?”
“Yes, I’m leaving. There’s not much point in hanging around, is there? If Nigel’s not dead already, he’s as good as. So do you want that lift or not?”
“No,” Tony said. “No, I don’t. I’d rather crawl back on my hands and knees – over broken glass – than take a lift from you.”
Both the words and the tone stung her.
“Please your-bloody-self, then,” she said.
It was the second time she had sworn in as many minutes, and that really was very unladylike, she thought – but honestly, she had been provoked.
The wet seemed to have seeped right through to her bones, and it was a relief to reach the rented car. When she switched on the heater, it blew out only cold air at her, but it would soon warm up as she drove along. She put the vehicle into first gear and pulled off.
The country lane twisted and turned, and even though she was an excellent driver, the going was slow. The wipers clicked back and forth monotonously, clearing the windscreen of rain.
She flicked on the radio.
“Hello, all you night owls out there,” the DJ said with red-eyed cheerfulness. “You’re listening to the Golden Oldie show. The year is 1970, the year Edward Heath – remember him? – became Prime Minister, and this is Freda Payne with ‘Band of Gold’.”
The heater had warmed up her feet, and she was beginning to feel a little better, but it would be nice to get home and have a long hot bath. She hit the main road to London and increased her speed.
She listened to the singer lament that all she had left of her marriage was her wedding ring.
“Well, I’ve done better than that,” she thought cheerfully.
There was the flat for a start. And Nigel’s life insurance – maybe they’d pay more because he died in an accident.
The road was clear and she pressed her foot down to the floor. She was making good time now.
“1979. Woody Allen makes Manhattan, and Gloria Gaynor is number one in the charts, telling us that she doesn’t need a man to survive.”
And neither do I, Linda thought.
She had lost Tony, but he had never been anything but the icing on the cake. There would be no more gangsters for her. The next man would be rich, and old – and very easy to please.
She took the bend slightly wide, but it would still have been fine if she hadn’t hit the patch of loose chippings. The tires shrieked, and she went into a skid. She braked violently, took her foot off the pedal immediately, and pulled hard on the wheel, setting the car back on a true course.
It was only then that she saw the lorry.
It was a little further up the road, its back lights flashing continuously. There was no time to stop. As the wheels of Linda’s car crunched over the red warning triangle, she wrenched at the steering with all her might.
She almost made it. Only the back bumper touched the lorry, and it was no more than a glancing blow. But at that speed, it was enough. The car shot across the road, spinning out of control – right in front of the juggernaut approaching from the other direction.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Tread carefully,” the coastguard said, as he led Mason down the stone steps to the beach. “It’ll be slippery after all that rain.”
Mason looked up at the sky. Apart from a few cotton-wool clouds which were drifting towards the early morning sun, it was completely clear. It was hard to believe that, only a few hours earlier, nature could have been so savage and unrelenting.
“Of course, we don’t know for sure that it was your friend’s cruiser which was involved in the collision,” the coastguard said, “although, I have to admit, we’ve had no reports of any other boats being out at sea last night.”
He was a decent bloke, Mason thought, and he was trying to be as tactful as possible in a difficult situation.
They reached the beach.
“If there is any wreckage,” the coastguard said, “it should have been washed up somewhere along this stretch.”
The storm had spewed all kinds of objects on to the beach – oil drums, soggy and virtually unrecognizable cigarette packets, plastic bottles. The coastguard bent down, and picked something up.
He held out the object for Mason’s inspection. It was a splintered piece of wood, perhaps two feet long by five or six inches broad, but unlike most of the surrounding driftwood, it was smooth and highly lacquered.
“It’s from a boat, all right,” the coastguard continued. “Of course, we don’t know it came from the Seaspray. Could have been in the sea a while. Although,” he continued, examining the edge, “I have to say that this splintering looks fairly recent.”
It was the Seaspray all right. Mason knew it was.
Nigel had been out in a storm on a boat too big to be handled by one man. If there’d been a second tender, he might have had a chance. Jack Sodbury and the other lads had made it – Tony had picked them up a few miles down the coast. But there hadn’t been a another tender, and besides, by the time Linda received his second panicked message, it was already too late – the weather had turned so foul that even a lifeboat crew would have hesitated before putting to sea.
They walked further along the beach. They found no more of the Seaspray, but lying next to an old tire, the coastguard discovered a wad of mushy brown paper, tied up with an elastic band.
“That’s money,” he said. “Ten pound notes.” He picked up the soggy bundle. “There must be several hundred quid here. Do you think it belonged to your friend?”
“Yes,” Mason said.
“Bloody hell! It was a lot to be carrying around, wasn’t it?”
It was only a tiny portion of the whole, Mason thought. But that, and a few other bundles which would be picked up by lucky beachcombers, was all that was left. The rest, the reward for his planning – the compensation for all the strain he had been through – was at the bottom of the sea, with poor bloody Nigel.
“Did he always have this much on him?” the coastguard asked.
“Oh, yes,” Mason replied. “He lik
ed to be prepared for emergencies.”
*
The hall was completely bare; the table, the mirror, the carpets – everything – had gone. There was nothing left in the living room either, except for one trunk on which Elsie was sitting. Well, at least she’d had the guts to wait and tell him to his face, Mason thought.
“So you’re leaving me,” he said.
“That’s right,” Elsie agreed. “You can’t really blame me, can you? You’d have done the same if you’d had the chance.”
“That’s true,’ he admitted.
“It was on the radio that the boat Nigel Monk had chartered had been lost at sea,” Elsie said. “I take it that was where you had the money stashed from the Madeira job.” She laughed at his startled expression. “Did you really think you could hide it from me forever?”
He shook his head. No, not really. He had always accepted – somewhere deep down inside himself – that Elsie would get the better of him in the end.
“How long have you known about it?” he asked.
“Since well before Christmas.”
So the whole thing had been a charade. Seeing him off at Euston Station, cooking his Christmas dinner and leaving it on the table – it had all been part of a game in which Elsie proved, for one last time, that she would always be one step ahead of him.
“Where’s the furniture?” he asked. “Gone to auction?”
Elsie nodded. “I’ve sold the lease on the flat, too. And the Alfa. The safe-deposit box is still there, but it’s empty. In other words, my darling husband, I’ve taken the lot.”
“You can’t leave me with nothing,” he said.
“Oh, but I can, Frank. And I will. If I’m going to put a few thousand miles between me and my nice Catholic Daddy, I’ll need all the cash I can lay my hands on.”
“If the Madeira job had come off, I wouldn’t have left you destitute,” Mason said. “I was going to send you half my share.”
Elsie laughed again.
“I believe you, Frank. You always were a mug. But I want it all … and you’re going to let me take it.”
“No!”
“Yes.” Elsie reached into her handbag, pulled out a brown envelope and handed it to him. “Have a look at those,” she said.
Mason opened the envelope and took out a number of glossy black and white photographs. They were taken at night – the only illumination provided by a streetlight – but they were clear enough.
They all focused on a door that Mason recognized as the entrance to the bed-sit in Matlock Road. In each photograph, there was a different person standing there – Mason himself, Linda, Tony, Portuguese Pedro, Harry Snell, Jack Sodbury, Arnie the Actor, the rest of the gang.
“All Toad Gower needs to pin this job on you is something to tie you in with everybody else,” Elsie said. “These pictures would just about do it, don’t you think? You’d end up serving a long stretch, and you couldn’t stand that, could you, Frank? And you couldn’t even ask for it to be taken into consideration that you’d returned the money,” she chuckled, “because it’s all stored in Davy Jones’ Locker.”
Mason wasn’t laughing. He was thinking back to a visit he’d made months earlier, to a dingy flat where the only things of any value were laid out on the coffee table – cameras!
“Nigel,” he said
“Nigel,” Elsie agreed. “He seems to have been better at taking pictures than he was at sailing boats. I caught him hiding in a car, watching one of your meetings. I scared him shitless. He’d been taking photographs for weeks. For insurance, I should think – or maybe he was going to try his arm at a spot of blackmail. I didn’t ask, I just offered him a deal.”
“A deal?”
“If he handed the photographs over to me, I wouldn’t tell you that he’d taken them. I can’t say he was very gracious about it, but he agreed anyway. You can keep those as a souvenir, Frank. I’ve got lots of other copies.”
Mason sighed. “You win, Elsie,” he said.
His wife smiled triumphantly back at him. “Course I bloody do,” she crowed.
EPILOGUE
August 1987
The couple walking along the Grand Union Canal that pleasant summer afternoon got more than a passing glance from several people. It was not the fact that he was much older than her which drew their attention. Nor was it because he looked so big and powerful and she, despite her obvious pregnancy, so fragile and innocent. What really made them special was that they were so totally absorbed in one another that they hardly seemed aware of the fact that there was a world beyond their two selves.
“Are you sure this walk isn’t too much for you?” Frank asked, a concerned edge to his voice.
Susan laughed. “Back home in Lancashire, women used to work in the mills almost up to the moment they gave birth.”
“They used to go down coal mines as well,” Frank said, “but you and our baby are going to have a better life than that.”
They reached Little Venice.
“Let’s go for a drink,” he suggested, pointing across at the tables outside a riverside pub.
“Can we afford it?” Susan asked.
Frank jiggled the coins in his pocket.
“Oh, easily,” he said nonchalantly, then added more realistically, “Well, just about.”
They sat under an umbrella, sipping their drinks and watching the swans.
“Don’t worry your head about money,” Frank said. “By the time the baby’s born, we’ll be rolling in it.”
“Really?” Susan said sceptically.
“Well, if not exactly rolling in it, at least comfortable enough,” Frank amended. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. “What do you think of that?”
Susan ran her finger over the embossed letters, and read the words aloud.
The Mason Security Company, plc.
Frank Mason – Managing Director.
Frank looked slightly embarrassed.
“You've got to be a bit flash when you’re in business,” he said, almost apologetically.
“How are Jack Sodbury and the rest of them settling into the job?” Susan asked.
“They’re taking to it like ducks to water,” Frank told her. “After all, it only means standing on the other side of the counter for a change, doesn’t it?”
Susan narrowed her eyes, as if she were trying to read his mind.
“I still haven’t worked out whether you started the firm for yourself – or for them.” she said.
“I suppose it was a bit of both,” Frank replied. “I felt I had to do something for them, after the Madeira job fell through.” He coughed, awkwardly. “And speaking of the lads, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve asked Tony to meet us here.”
“So you didn’t just come on a whim. It was all planned!” Susan said accusingly.
“That’s right,” he confessed.
“But why, Frank?”
He shrugged.
“You can’t go through life bearing grudges. Tony had his chance to double-cross me, and he didn’t take it. It’s time to forgive him. And I’d like you to forgive him, as well.”
Susan shook her head in mock despair.
“Are you ever going to stop trying to make things right for everybody else, Frank?”
“Probably not.”
Tony appeared on the tow path, stood there for a second, and then made his way hesitantly towards their table.
“How are you, Susan?” he asked. “It’s got to be said, you’re looking great. Pregnancy suits you both.”
Susan smiled up at him. She felt none of the hostility she’d expected to feel – only a vague surprise that this man had ever had any hold over her.
“Sit down, Tony, you’re making the place look untidy just standing there,” she said. She turned to Mason. “Order some more drinks, love.”
Frank signalled the waiter. “A pint of bitter, an orange juice and …”
“I’ll have an orange juice, too,” Tony said. He saw Susa
n raise a quizzical eyebrow. “I’ve stopped drinking since the last time I saw you.”
“That’s a change.”
“I’m trying to change in a lot of ways.”
There was an embarrassed silence for a few seconds, then Frank reaching into his back pocket and pulled out a picture postcard.
“This arrived yesterday,” he told Tony. “It’s from Elsie.”
Tony glanced at the picture.
“Bloody hell!” he said. “She’s in Madeira!”
Mason grinned. “She just couldn’t resist rubbing my nose in it, could she?”
“She was taking a bit of a risk by letting you know where she was living, wasn’t she? What if you decided to tell her dad?”
“Elsie likes taking risks,” Mason said. “Besides, she knows me well enough to be pretty sure that I’d never do that. But there’s one thing she didn’t tell me, because, though she’d really have loved to twist the knife in the wound even further, even she recognized that it was probably a step too far.”
“You’ve lost me,’ Tony admitted.
“She told me where she was living, but she didn’t dare tell me who she was living with.”
“How do you know she’s living with someone?” Tony asked.
Susan smiled. “We don’t know,” she said, “but Frank has a theory.”
“It’s more than a theory,” Mason said stoutly. “Let’s just look at the facts.” He began to count them off on the fingers of his right hand. “One: Elsie, by her own admission, knew all about the Madeira job weeks before we pulled it. It was her ideal opportunity to get rid me. All she had to do was have a word with her loving dad, and I’d have been wearing a concrete overcoat at the bottom of some river. But she kept quiet about it because she’d already thought of something even smarter she could do with the information. Two: After getting halfway across the Atlantic without any trouble, the Seaspray sinks in the English Channel, just a few hundred yards from land.”
“There was a storm,” Tony pointed out.
“Of course there was a storm,” Mason agreed. “And Nigel knew there was going to be one. In fact, he was waiting for a storm, and he wouldn’t have put out to sea if there hadn’t been one?”
The Madeiran Double Cross Page 22
