Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Ronny’s the bald one?”

  George nodded. “Ronny Peel. He’d beat you into pulp if he was told to, but he’s not an animal, know what I mean? But that Garrard” – George shook his head worriedly – “I wouldn’t touch him, Johnny. He’s trouble.”

  “I don’t want to touch him. I just don’t want him to know where I am.”

  “I’ll keep quiet,” he promised, and I believed the promise because George’s criminality does not extend to violence; in fact he probably hates the sight of blood. Besides, George and I go back a long way. In the faraway past he’d given me a refuge from my family and, in his lackadaisical way, he had introduced me to boats. It was in this shabby yard that I’d learned to weld steel and work wood. It was here that I’d found my first proper job as a crew member on an oceangoing yacht. George had known me a long time, which by itself did not guarantee any favours, but I was also John Frederick Albert Rossendale, the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, and that helped. It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. So now, because of George’s aristocratic tastes, Sunflower and I were safe.

  I had been wrong about needing George’s grid for a couple of days. More like a couple of weeks. Once I got Sunflower out of the water I saw just how sorry her hull was: the poor thing looked more like a floating compost heap than a yacht. It was no wonder she’d been so sluggish crossing the Atlantic. I should have anti-fouled her in America or the Caribbean, but I’d been reluctant to pay American prices for anti-fouling paint.

  But, by waiting, I had forced myself to do more than just anti-foul Sunflower. In places the old paint had abraded right back to its epoxy pitch base. What I really needed to do was strip the whole hull back to bright steel, then start again. I should have craned her out of the water, screened her off, and done what Charlie would have called a proper job, except I had neither the time nor the money to be so thorough.

  Instead I would have to do the best I could on George’s grid. A grid is simply a raised platform on which a boat can be stranded as the tide falls. At mean low tide, in George’s yard, Sunflower would be perched about eight feet above the water and, between tides, I would have around seven hours to work on her before the rising flood forced me to stop. I’d thus be needing a whole series of low tides. She was well berthed to the quay, but to stop her toppling sideways into George’s mucky dock I took a half-inch line from her upper spreaders and tied it to a ringbolt on the outside wall of his workshop. I knotted red rags round the rope and put a large sign by the ringbolt: ‘Leave this rope alone!’ I’d once watched a beautiful Danish ketch fall twelve feet off a grid in Brittany. It wasn’t pretty.

  I fired up George’s ancient compressor, stripped myself to the waist, and hitched up his sand-blaster. Or rather sludge-blaster, for I couldn’t afford to buy the proper sand so had to make do with a miserable pile that mouldered damply behind the warehouse. The diesel fuel which fired the compressor also came from George’s stock, and was fouled. Even when I managed to make the compressor work, the damp sand clotted and jammed the hopper’s throat every few minutes, so progress, at best, was fitful. I used the enforced pauses to slap a rust-preventing resin on to the newly cleaned patches of Sunflower’s hull. Between later tides I would strip the resin, then slap on a holding primer, four coats of epoxy tar, one coat of anti-fouling primer and two coats of the anti-fouling. It would be mind-numbing work, but if I did it well enough then the hull would be protected from rust for the next ten years. When the rising tide forced me to abandon work on the hull I went inside the cabin where I was beginning to rebuild the damaged lockers. I made good progress, but still my grease tin of money was taking a beating.

  I needed cash. That was ironic, considering Jennifer Pallavicini had been dangling twenty million pounds in front of me, while now my hopes of earning a few quid from George were clearly ill-founded for his yard was utterly bare of work. “Why do you keep it on?” I asked him.

  “Gives me something to do, Johnny. Gets me away from the wife,” he chuckled. He was standing beside the compressor, watching me work. The hopper’s throat had just choked up and, before I dug the soggy sand free, I was wiping resin on to the bright steel of Sunflower’s hull. “And there’s the other side of it,” George went on.

  “I hadn’t forgotten.” The other side of it was the stolen merchandise that went through his warehouse. George specialised in bent chandlery; forcibly retired Decca sets or radios.

  “Mind you,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of selling out. The leisure market’s on the way up, and someone could make a nice little bundle by turning the yard into a yacht-servicing business.”

  “Why not you, George?”

  “I’m not a well man, Johnny.” I’d forgotten how George was always suffering from some new and undiagnosable ailment.

  “So the yard’s for sale?”

  He shrugged. “For the right price. It’s prime riverside property, after all.” He gestured about the yard as though he was selling a stretch of the St Tropez waterfront rather than a scabby junk heap mouldering around a smelly dock. “Are you interested, Johnny?”

  “Me?” I laughed. “Just painting Sunflower will clean me out, not to mention rebuilding your equipment.” I scrambled up to the dock and tried to restart the compressor, but the water in George’s diesel fuel wouldn’t drive the engine. I swore, knowing I would have to siphon the fuel and clean the system. It was my own fault, of course, for using George’s yard. If I’d had the money I’d have paid to have Sunflower properly shot-blasted, but instead this old sand-blaster would have to suffice.

  George watched me bleed the compressor’s fuel line. “Johnny,” he said after a bit.

  “George?” I spat watery diesel into the dock.

  “That painting…” He paused. He must have known that my trouble with Garrard had been caused by the Van Gogh, but this was the first time he had mentioned it. “Did they ever pin it on you?”

  “If they had, George, do you think I’d be here? I’d be in the Scrubs, slopping out shit pails.”

  He considered that answer and evidently found it convincing. “Of course,” he said, “now that your mother’s dead, I suppose the painting belongs to you?”

  “Not according to her will. She left it to my sister.” I said it to discourage George’s speculation, though I suspected that Jennifer Pallavicini was right and that the painting, if it could ever be recovered, was probably mine. Twenty million pounds, and all mine, except, of course, that if the painting ever did reappear there would be a salivating horde of lawyers and taxmen scrabbling to get their slices of the money. But even those rapacious bastards would find it hard to destroy all of twenty million.

  “It must be worth a penny or two.” George must have been guessing my thoughts.

  “Several million pennies, George.”

  “How much?”

  I straightened up from the engine. “Sir Leon Buzzacott offered twenty million quid the other day, which means it’s probably worth a bit more.”

  George puffed at his pipe. He clearly wasn’t certain whether to believe me. In his line of business a good night’s work yielded a few thousand, not millions. “I don’t like paintings,” he said eventually. “I used to deal in a few. Rubbish, most of them. Seascapes, that sort of thing, but it was never worth the bother.” He shrugged, evidently regretting some past escapade. “Those two fellows,” George went on, “do you think they’re after the painting?”

  “Of course they’re after the painting. So is Sir Leon Buzzacott. So is my twin sister. Half the damn world wants the thing, but all I want is some clean diesel fuel. Have you got any?”

  He shook his head, dismissing the problem of the contaminated fuel. “So you could be a millionaire, Johnny?”

  “I told you. It belongs to my sister. Now bugger off, George, I’m trying to work.”

  He buggered off and I worked on the compressor till five o’clock when I climbed to Rita’s office where a cup of tea waited for me. I telephoned Charlie’s house, but he still
hadn’t returned from Hertfordshire. “Is there a number in Hertfordshire?” I asked Yvonne. She said there was, but that Charlie was never there. She said he telephoned her when he needed to, but she gave me the number anyway. She sounded desperately tired. I asked her to tell Charlie that I was now at George Cullen’s boatyard. She promised she would, but she didn’t sound very friendly as she made the promise.

  I tried the Hertfordshire number. It was the site office of a construction company and a gruff man said he hadn’t seen Charlie Barratt for two days. I put the phone down. “What the hell’s Charlie doing in Hertfordshire?” I asked Rita, more in frustration than in any hope of fetching an answer.

  She blew on her newly-painted fingernails. “He’s a big man now, Charlie is. He’s ever so rich.”

  “And I’m the Pope.” I knew Charlie had done well since he’d settled back home, but Rita’s awed tones seemed to be over-egging the pudding.

  “He is,” she insisted. “Plant hire. You name it and Charlie’s got it. Artics, tippers, cranes, earth-movers, bulldozers.” Rita shrugged. “He’s got ever such a nice boat, too.”

  “A yacht?”

  She shook her head. “A big cabin cruiser. It’s got one of those thingummyjigs on the front.”

  I tried to guess what a thingummyjig was. “A radar aerial?”

  “A hot tub,” she remembered. “It’s ever so smart. He brought it down here last year.”

  Charlie clearly had done well. When I’d left England he had been the owner-operator of an ancient Commer lorry; yet now, if Rita hadn’t confused him with anyone else, his business had flourished. I was pleased for, if any man deserved success, it was Charlie. He had always been a hard worker, and had a slew of practical skills to work with. When we had been boys, he and I had worked together in George Cullen’s yard and even at fourteen Charlie had shown the practical skills of an adult. His schoolteachers, naturally, had written him off as a dumb peasant, but Charlie had always been too smart to let any teacher meddle with his ambitions.

  I finished my tea, went back downstairs, and stripped down the compressor’s fuel system. By nightfall I had it working, ready for the morning. It was what Charlie would have called a proper job and, to celebrate it, I poured a glass of George’s ghastly whisky, made myself a mushy stew, then slept.

  I woke at one o’clock.

  At first I thought it was the ebbing tide dropping Sunflower’s keel on to the grid that had woken me; then, in the tiny light leaking through the companionway, I saw the time and realised it was only twenty-three minutes away from low tide which meant that Sunflower must have been stranded on the grid for at least four hours. I listened for whatever had woken me. I could only hear the halliards slapping the mast, the wind sighing at the spreaders, and the slop of river water in George’s dock. Everything seemed normal, but nevertheless something had disturbed me. In a night watch, in the middle of an ocean, the slightest change of Sunflower’s sound or motion would bring me to wakefulness, and something, even in the safe haven of George’s dock, had just triggered that alarm system. I reached out for the light switch, then froze.

  The gate to George’s yard squealed. I realised that it had been that same creak of unoiled hinges that had woken me. It was a sound that always made me alert, even in daytime. I wanted to be left alone in George’s yard, and whenever I heard the squeal of the hinges I would warily make sure that the visitor was not some unwelcome person from my past. Now, in the depths of the night, I had been woken by the warning sound. I left the cabin unlit, rolled out of the bunk, and pulled on a pair of jeans.

  I had been sleeping with the companionway open, so I made no noise as I slipped up to the cockpit. By standing on a thwart I could just see over the sill of the quayside.

  A dark-painted van, with no lights, was being driven slowly into George’s yard. I did not move. It was possible, even likely, that these were some of George’s friends who had permission to use his warehouse. The van was probably loaded with stolen goods. The only reason I was suspicious was that George had not given me any warning. Usually, when some mayhem was imminent, he would tell me not to worry if I heard something go bump in the night.

  The van braked to a halt. Its motor was cut.

  I slid my special boathook out of its brackets.

  The van’s front doors opened quietly. Two men climbed out. George always left a light burning outside his office door and, in its glow, I could see that one of the men was burly and bald, the other thin, commanding, and black-haired. It was Garrard and Peel, who now stood beside the van staring to where Sunflower’s masts reared above the grid. And how the hell, I wondered, had they found me? It had to be George. Doubtless he had done a favour to someone by betraying my whereabouts, and I promised myself that I’d kick his fat hide to kingdom come when I had the chance. I supposed it was my own fault for telling George that the painting was worth at least twenty million quid. George’s cupidity must have overwhelmed his love of a lord.

  The two men would have seen me if I’d tried to climb up over the quay. I did not want them to see me. They thought I was fast asleep, and I wanted them to continue in that blissful ignorance. I glanced towards Sunflower’s dark cabin, wondering whether I had time to fetch my rigging knife, but knew I dared not waste a second.

  For to hesitate would be to trap myself. The two men were already walking softly towards Sunflower as I slid over her stern and lowered myself to the grid. The water was black beneath me. I could hear the men’s footsteps as I lowered myself again, this time into the black, filthy, and freezing water. I shivered, then pushed away from the grid’s piles towards one of the decrepit fishing boats at the end of the small dock. The weighted boathook tried to drag me down, but I did not have far to go, and the impetus of my push carried me to the dock’s side wall where a rusty ring gave me a handhold. I pushed on again, this time hiding in the impenetrable shadow between the fishing boat and the wall.

  A torch beam slashed down into the dock, flicked across the water, then settled on Sunflower. The beam was dazzling for a few seconds, then was switched off. I was struggling forward, ducking under the thick tyres which George used as fenders. I needed to round the dock’s corner to the river wall where an iron ladder climbed to the quayside.

  I heard one of the men drop down on to Sunflower’s deck. The torch was switched on again. They had abandoned stealth by now, but their bird was flown, planning his own ambush. I was hurrying for I did not want to give the two men time to search Sunflower, and thus undo all my repair work. I cleared the fishing boat, hauled myself forward on its bow mooring rope and turned the corner into the tug of the tide’s current. For a second I feared I would be swept downstream by this last feeble ebb, but I lunged the boathook forward and managed to snag one of the ladder’s rungs. The hook made a dull clunking noise, but the two men were making enough noise of their own, and did not hear me. They were talking. The noise I feared was the splintering sound as they began to search Sunflower’s half-repaired cabin, but so far they only talked.

  I climbed the ladder’s rusted rungs. The torch beam slashed over my head like the loom of a lighthouse. I froze.

  “The bastard’s gone.” That was Garrard’s distinctive voice. I heard him grunt as he hauled himself back to the quay’s top. “Try the office.”

  I heard the office door rattle, but it was locked and the big bald man made no attempt to force it. The torch beam began circling the yard again. I climbed to the top of the ladder, waited till the light was probing the rubbish tip behind the warehouse, then rolled into the shadow of one of the many junk piles which littered George’s yard.

  I would have preferred it if the two men had been on board Sunflower, for then, given the advantage of the quayside, I would have been above them. I’d contemplated trapping them there and, using the boathook as a weapon, forcing some answers from them. Instead both men were roaming the yard. I thought that if I stayed motionless they might abandon the search and leave me in peace. It wasn’t that I was sca
red of a fight, but there’s no point in fighting superior odds unless it’s really necessary, and so I stayed still.

  Garrard stayed by Sunflower and told Peel where to search. The bald man thus clambered futilely about George’s yard while Garrard idled on the quay above my boat. And while he idled he discovered the rope that I’d tied from the upper spreaders to the ringbolt.

  Garrard had a smaller torch and, in its light, he examined the bow and stern ropes and the spring lines, then flashed the beam up to trace the rope that was taut at the spreaders. He walked to the workshop wall and tugged on the rope and he saw how the added tension dragged the mast towards him. He tested the rope again, and I knew what was passing through his evil mind. Without that tether, Sunflower’s balance would be very precarious. She was resting on her long, deep keel and, though she weighed a good few tons, it would not take much effort to unbalance her. It was just about low tide and, with one good push, she would fall like a truck into the shallow waters eight feet below her. Her mast would break and God knew what other damage would be done.

  Garrard plucked down my notice which warned no one to touch the rope and tore it into two. I tensed, ready to charge at him, but instead of drawing his knife and slashing the rope he lit a cigarette and leaned against the workshop wall. It seemed he had no intention of destroying Sunflower, just as, strangely, he showed no sign of wanting to search her. It appeared the two men had only one interest this night: finding me.

  “Bugger’s gone.” Peel trudged disconsolately into view.

  They spoke softly for a minute or two, too softly for me to hear anything they said. Both their torches raked once more round the yard, the beams scything over my head, but for some reason neither man searched the low heap öf metal behind which I was hidden. They did shine their torches down into the moored boats, but it was clear they had given up any hope of finding me.