In Camera

by Gerald Hammond

  Sheila had been riding along on the crest of her relief after her ordeal. But now that she could see again the prospect of a future she also felt the need to know what it might hold. ‘Who and what are you, Ian Fellowes?’ she asked. ‘I know your name, but where do you come from? And what’s going on?’

  Ian put the boat about and steadied her on a new course. ‘Have patience a little longer,’ he said. ‘I know that it must be driving you up the wall not to know what’s happening and why, but could you hold her steady for a few minutes? Keep the breeze where it is. If the sail starts to flap, pull the stick towards you. I’ll see if this old tub boasts a compass and a decent foresail. We could use some more speed. He’s locked his cabin doors but the forehatch is loose.’

  ‘We seem to be getting along all right,’ Sheila said doubtfully. The idea of speeding through the milky vapour was nightmarish.

  ‘We need enough way to get out of the channel in a hurry if a ship comes groping along by radar and echo-sounder. Or to take evasive action if your friends come close.’

  ‘What about the motor?’

  He glanced at the rusty outboard and curled his lip. ‘Just for the moment, I’d rather hear than be heard.’

  Chapter Three

  Sheila found herself alone and in control of a boat under sail. At first, she expected her least mistake to cause capsize or worse. They were sailing towards a wall of impenetrable fog in which all sorts of unimaginable dangers might lurk. But the wall of fog always receded, remaining a constant fifty yards or so ahead of the bow, taking with it whatever obstacles it might be hiding. Suddenly, the boat was friendly and responsive.

  What seemed to be an enormous sail ran up the forestay. Ian padded back and sheeted it in. The boat took on a new angle of heel and picked up more speed. To Sheila, they seemed to be churning along, almost flying. She let worry slip away and concentrated on following instructions. Despite fear and discomfort, she was beginning to enjoy herself. Within a single day, a drab and monotonous life had been transformed. Her art had taken a leap forward. She had been rescued from dire peril by a heroic male figure. And now she was being introduced to a unique new sensation, control of a boat under sail. New horizons, she was sure, were opening beyond her restricted vision. She would almost have welcomed another adventure, provided that it was not too dangerous.

  Ian Fellowes was looking around, trying to pierce the white vapour.

  ‘Where are we?’ Sheila asked.

  ‘If we see a buoy soon, I’ll tell you. If not, we’re lost.’ At that moment a conical buoy came out of the mist, seeming to slide across their bows. ‘This is where we are,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’

  It was not much of an answer, but she awarded it a subdued giggle. There were other things on her mind. ‘I’m cold,’ she said.

  ‘You must be. Come to think of it, so am I. Keep steering for a little longer.’

  He looked at his watch again and vanished down the forehatch and she heard him rummaging around in the cramped space below. When he came up again he had shed his jacket and possibly his other wet clothes and had dragged on a set of paint-stained overalls. He used a small wooden box to weigh down a folded chart and beside it he dropped an untidy bundle of clothes and a coil of cord with tags and tassels.

  She handed back the helm almost with reluctance. The bundle of clothes comprised a pair of jeans, a thick and oily sweater, socks, a blanket and a suit of oilskins.

  ‘He’s a big lad, whoever he is,’ Ian said. ‘But at least they’re dry clothes and something to keep the breeze out. Go below, if you can manage while folded double. Or you can change under the blanket. I won’t look.’

  ‘I’m not much of a peep-show anyway,’ she said humbly. She tried to run her fingers through her hair. ‘Do we have any fresh water? I’d like to wash the salt—’

  ‘Hush a minute!’ They both listened. But there was no sound except for the sluice of their progress and the occasional mew of a gull. ‘I’m beginning to imagine things,’ he said.

  He faced forward, steering his course by the wind, while she squeezed herself into the aft corner of the cockpit, jammed between the tiller and the coaming and, half-seated, struggled out of her sodden dress. It felt daring to undress with a man only inches away. She had dropped her wet dress on the cockpit sole when the sound which had alerted him came again. A motorboat engine could be heard, steady on the port bow but growing louder.

  Holding the mainsheet blocks to prevent a rattle, Ian put the boat about. It was impossible to keep his back to Sheila and if it had been possible it would have been irrelevant. Sheila’s first reaction was chagrin, that he should glimpse her in her sensible underwear. Why was she always doomed to be unglamorous? She could have been wearing something feminine in clinging silk. Even to be nude would have been less of a humiliation. Then, as danger dawned on her, she thought that she would drown herself rather than be delivered again into the hands of that inhuman duo. Hastily, she dragged on the jeans and sweater.

  They ghosted back across the channel. The sound of the motorboat crossed their stern. Ian went about again. The sound pottered across their bow and down the other side. Twice, the engine noise stopped and her terror rose again, clamping her jaw and stealing the strength of her limbs. She could imagine men, evil men with weapons, listening for her heartbeat. Ian held the boat steady, the sails neither slatting nor fully filled. The noise of the engine began again. It faded away upstream.

  Ian Fellowes let out his breath. ‘Much virtue in silent travel,’ he said. If her vision had been sharper, she might have seen that his hand was shaking.

  ‘Perhaps it was somebody who could have helped us.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘They were making a searching pattern. And they stopped their engine to listen.’

  ‘They could have been looking for a stolen boat. This boat.’

  ‘If the mist’s still holding, back there, the owner won’t know it’s missing yet. Unless the wrong people have told him.’ He shrugged. ‘But that’s just my guess. Next time around, do you want to make the decision?’

  Sheila opened her mouth to deny any such wish, but she had lost his attention. A faint shape hardened in the mist. It became another buoy.

  ‘Lady Shoal.’ He adjusted the course slightly. ‘There’s a short cut through Abertay Sands but I wouldn’t try it in this mist. Anyway, I think we’ve already gone past it.’ He had taken a grid compass from the wooden box and fitted it to a bracket at the front of the cockpit. He began a series of computations involving his watch, the compass and the chart.

  ‘Are you still busy?’ Sheila asked a few minutes later. ‘Or is this an okay time to talk?’

  Ian looked up from the chart. ‘Provided the next two buoys show up where they should, I think the immediate panic’s over. Go ahead.’

  They stole a moment to glance at each other, awareness becoming observation. She was not the old prune he had thought her at first. He saw a thin woman, although at some time he had noticed that she was far from flat-chested. Even with her hair tangled and plastered to her skull, she was not without a sort of anxious charm, her femininity enhanced by dependence. She had left the fullness of youth behind, but that loss was offset for the moment by the childish effect of the too-large clothes with the turned-back sleeves and legs. She could have been a teenager who had dressed in Daddy’s clothes for an impromptu cabaret. His best guess was that she was around thirty.

  Sheila, for her part, noticed that her rescuer was not, as she had thought, eight feet tall; nor was he handsome. He was slightly over average height and no more than passable even by Sheila’s undemanding standards. But her eye, biased by thankfulness, chose to ignore a small pimple beside his nose, the stubble on his cheeks and that his sandy hair, as it dried, was sticking up in tufts. Instead, she took note of the firm jaw, the kindly smile and the occasional twinkle in the nervous blue eyes.

  ‘What did you do to that woman?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing that I’m proud of,�
� he said. ‘It seemed to be an occasion for forgetting that I was brought up to be gentle with ladies.’

  ‘You needn’t be ashamed. Nothing would have been too bad for her. She was talking about drowning me in a bucket, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. You saved my life,’ she said, ‘and I’m grateful. But don’t you think I should know why I was in danger, and why I’m being carried out to sea by a man I never met before? I can’t believe that you’re telling yourself, “Once aboard the lugger”.’

  He laughed for the first time, a deep chuckle which somehow pleased her. ‘This isn’t a lugger, it’s a sloop,’ he said. ‘And, believe me, you’re only a small corner of a larger and rather nasty picture.’ He broke off. The beat of heavy engines sounded from ahead. He put the helm up and eased the sheets to nurse the boat across the wind.

  ‘If it’s a ship they could help us,’ she said.

  ‘They could run us down. A wooden boat with a wooden mast hardly shows up on radar at all, especially if the radar’s still adjusted to avoid wave-clutter.’ He listened. The steady pulse was definitely drawing astern. Soon a grey outline loomed through the mist and vanished again. He brought the boat back on course. ‘Cargo of timber. He’ll be going in to Tayport.’ He looked at his watch again. Sheila wondered how sailors had ever managed to travel the seas before watches were invented. ‘He’ll have to lie off until the tide makes again,’ Ian said. ‘I’m just as happy not to be aboard. I suspect that we’ve made the Tay too hot for ourselves . . . Hey, I think we’re coming out of it!’

  At first, she thought that he was referring to the river. Her unfocused vision could hardly perceive that their horizon was moving outward, from fifty to a hundred and then two hundred yards. Then, it seemed instantaneously, the sun was through and the sea danced and sparkled to the east. Astern, all view up-river was still shut off. The sea-breeze which had shifted the fog also pressed the sails and the boat chortled along with renewed zest.

  Ian pointed to a slender pencil which stood up on the port bow. ‘The whistle buoy,’ he said triumphantly, as if this should have told Sheila all that she needed to know. ‘Hold her steady for a minute.’

  He vanished again through the forehatch, leaving Sheila to wonder whether he might not be giving himself time to concoct a story. She narrowed her eyes, trying to keep the buoy in focus. Once she lost sight of it and had to search desperately until she discovered that it seemed to have moved round to the side. She brought the boat back on course.

  A minute or two later, the main hatch slid back and the low doors between the cabin and the cockpit were pushed open. ‘Soup coming up,’ Ian said. ‘While the kettle boiled, I thought I’d unscrew the lock. There’s some fresh water and a towel of sorts, if you want to rinse your hair.’

  It seemed to Sheila that, of the three things she wanted most in the world, to wash the salt out of her hair took pride of place, before even soup or answers to her questions. She hung head-first over the cockpit coaming while he poured water through her hair from a plastic carrier. She dried it with a grubby towel and, while the sun and the breeze finished the drying, teased at it with a comb from the cabin between sips of what was surely the finest soup in the world.

  They had passed the whistle buoy, which had produced no more than a feeble yip while they were within earshot. Ian set a new course on the grid compass and eased the sheets. The boat’s dance changed from a quickstep to a very slow foxtrot.

  ‘You’re some sort of policeman, aren’t you?’ Sheila said.

  ‘Good guess.’

  ‘MI Five? Or Six?’

  He chuckled again. ‘Nothing so romantic. Just a humble detective sergeant from an outpost of Lothian and Borders.’

  Sheila looked at him doubtfully. ‘That doesn’t sound much like what you’ve been doing today,’ she said. ‘Does a detective sergeant from around Edinburgh usually get into fights near Dundee? Or are you off duty?’

  ‘It hasn’t been as typical a day as I’d have liked it to be,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll try to explain. I’m based in the Borders under a Superintendent in Edinburgh. We had a tip-off that somebody in Dundee was into something that he shouldn’t. My chief mistrusted the source and told me to take no action. But the Chief Superintendent of the local division took a different view. He fiddled my absence and told me to go and take an unofficial look.’

  ‘That still doesn’t sound like the police at all,’ Sheila said. ‘I think you’re a private eye.’

  ‘I’m a detective sergeant,’ he said patiently. ‘Try to think of me that way.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘But you’re asking me to take your word for an awful lot. How do I know that you’re a goody and not a rival baddy?’

  The choice of words made him smile. He left her in charge of the helm again and went below to fetch his identification card.

  She screwed up her eyes and satisfied herself that the photograph corresponded with his features. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’re a detective sergeant.’ Or else, she thought, his cover had been well prepared. She watched a lot of television in her lonely studio flat. ‘Do you know who those people were?’

  ‘Yes, I know who they were. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they don’t know who you are?’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘They must do. I left my bag back at the caravan.’ She stopped short. ‘What happened to my drawing?’ Her eyes filled with tears. The idea of losing the evidence of her burgeoning talent was more awful than the threat to her life.

  ‘It’s safe,’ Ian said quickly. ‘No need to turn on the waterworks. I picked it up and it was in my pocket. I’ve spread it out to dry, below. It’s not exactly pristine.’

  ‘Thank heavens, whatever state it’s in! If I’ve got the original, I can always repeat it.’ She was suddenly anxious to get back to real life and work. ‘Does it really matter if they know who we are? Surely we’ve only got to get ashore and contact the police. We could turn back—’

  ‘Back I am not turning,’ he said. He gripped the tiller as if afraid that she would wrest control from him. ‘I will turn coat, turtle or blue in the face, but not back. That’s about the only irreversible decision I’ve taken so far.’ He studied her, weighing her up. She touched her drying hair, thinking that she must look like a golliwog. When he sighed, she was sure of it. ‘I’d made up my mind not to tell you anything,’ he said at last. ‘I thought that you might be safer in ignorance. But if it’ll convince you that we’re in danger . . . let me see if I can get this across to you. Cast your mind back to the caravan.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Sheila said with a small shiver.

  ‘Hang onto that emotion for a minute. It may help you. This thing is big and, as you said, those folk are evil. You saw and recorded two people meeting who should not have met.’

  At first avoiding names or other clues to the identity of the participants, he told her the story which had come from Robert Hall and the reasons for believing that a weapon of assassination had been commissioned. ‘I recognised the woman,’ he went on. ‘She’s bad news. The other man was probably the client. He must have approached her as go-between to get him the weapon, and you saw it being delivered.

  ‘They decided to kill you, but you got away. Our survival may be disastrous for them. And they can call on all the resources of money and men that they need. In the woman’s case, she can whistle up the sort of hard men who would kill either or both of us for a tenth of the price which she’s probably put on our heads by now. Am I frightening you?’

  ‘You are, rather.’

  ‘Good. That’s what I’m trying to do.’

  ‘But who are these people?’ she persisted. ‘It makes it worse, not having an identity to put to them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The bogey-man isn’t so frightening when you know that he’s only a burglar.’

  Ian glanced up at the set of the sails. There was some sense in what she said. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘you know so much already that I don’t t
hink knowing a little more would increase the danger. Her name is Braddle. Dora Braddle. And she’s a very tough cookie. I’m inclined to put a lot of distance between her and ourselves. That’s why we’re heading south. If we go north there are very few harbours, lots of cliffs and an easily watched coast. I think we’ve more chance of landing unseen in the Forth.’

  ‘Go on about Dora Braddle,’ Sheila said. The woman had for her some of the awful fascination of a snake or a hairy spider.

  Ian looked around the horizon while he tried to recollect the details, told to him by an unusually garrulous inspector whom Ian had been assisting on a case in which the remote hand of Dora Braddle was suspected.

  ‘Dora started life in accountancy,’ he said. ‘She moved to a stockbroker’s office. She had one eye for finance and another for a fiddle, and at that time she wasn’t as adept at covering her tracks as she became later. So she got the heave. Then she took up with Danny Bruce.’

  ‘I’ve heard that name,’ Sheila said, pleased to be back among names which were not totally alien. ‘It was in the papers. Didn’t he go to prison?’

  ‘He did. He was a fence in a very big way of business, in Glasgow, and a very careful man. When he slipped at last and went inside, Dora got together with Danny’s daughter Mary, who’s a real chip off the old block, and they cooked up a new version of an old racket.

  ‘Danny left his daughter in charge of his legitimate businesses, a string of antique and junk shops. The two ladies seem to have rebuilt the illegal side as a new-style operation, a combination of fencing and money laundering.’

  ‘Money what?’ Sheila wanted to grope for a non-existent pencil and to draw a cartoon of the fat woman, washing bank notes in a wooden wash-tub and hanging them on a fence to dry. Her mind was sometimes subject to fits of levity, which she was quite unable to control.