by Alan Hunter
‘I’ve brought the car up the track, sir. Inspector Dyson’s gone to telephone to Air-Sea Rescue. He took one look down here, sir.’
‘Air-Sea Rescue!’
‘That’s right, sir. From Starmouth. He reckons that they might be able to get here.’
It was the barest of possibilities. The launch could be there in half-an-hour. From Starmouth, by sea, it wasn’t more than seven or eight miles. But then they had to get their hands on Esau – and then they had to get home again. And meanwhile, like the wrath of God …
Who could calculate the chances?
‘Is this something to do with us, sir?’
The reporters would liked to have known that, too. With their nostrils attuned for a killing, they were watching the event with a dour pertinacity.
‘For the moment, I want him back.’
Dutt accepted the hint without pressing his senior. The fishermen, who couldn’t have heard what was said, seemed to shrink a little closer in their obstinate huddle. A wind, now hot, now cold, was gusting wailfully up the beach: on the terrible pall to the south a net of lightning had started to flicker.
‘You won’t see no Air-Sea Rescue!’
They could hear the thunder in distant explosions. The sea had gone black only a few furlongs away, and in a moment the first raindrops were beating on their faces.
‘Look at it – ask yourself!’
Hawks was shaking in his glee.
‘There ain’t nothing going to fetch him – no, not nothing in this world. In a minute it’s going to blow like it never blew before!’
‘You shut your trap up, Bob!’
Young Spanton had turned on him in a fury.
‘Don’t you talk like that to me.’
‘Shut your trap, or I’ll knock you down!’
Hawks’s reply was lost in the uproar: the thunder was suddenly over their heads. A whirlwind of rain lashed down on the beach and immediately, it seemed, they were surrounded by darkness. There was a general rush for shelter, though everyone was drenched: it may have been the darkness that sent them all running. Their feet made leprous tracks in the newly-darkened sand, while above them the thunder was sundering the very air.
Somebody had the key to the net store and into this the fishermen tumbled. There was little room inside except what was taken up by gear. The door was slammed and secured with a cord: a hurricane lamp was found and lit. The rain, pelting down on the sheet-iron roof, made a continuous roar between detonations of thunder.
‘Damn my hat, but it’s a clinker!’
The wind shrieked over the little hut. From its corrugated eaves there were produced a variety of whistlings.
‘We won’t never beach her again.’
‘Nor he’ll never get to Holland!’
‘Watch your tackle there, old partners – there’s a Dutchman got amongst us.’
For they weren’t alone in their cluttered den – Gently had managed to squeeze in behind them. A bedraggled figure in his clinging shirt, he stood with his back to the clamouring door. The fishermen silenced themselves directly. Pike, reaching up, trimmed the flickering hurricane. Every second or so it was bleached out by lightning: there was a small, cracked window which faced the sea.
‘Robert Hawks! I want to talk to you.’
The lean fisherman glared at him without coming forward. Under the smoky, yellowish light of the hurricane his features looked sharper and unnaturally savage.
‘I haven’t got nothing to say.’
‘Oh yes, I think you have.’
‘You know better than me, then!’
‘It’s to do with Mrs Dawes.’
For an instant the thunder crashed, making any response impossible. Outside a can or something broke loose: it went banging and clattering away up the marrams.
‘Mrs Dawes – what’s that to do with me?’
Hawkes’s face had changed, it was sullen and wary. His mates’ eyes had faltered from Gently to him – Spanton, especially, was regarding him intently.
‘That’s what I want to know.’
‘I can tell you straight out! I don’t know nothing about Esau’s missus.’
‘Why did Esau kick her out?’
‘Just you swim out and ask him.’
‘I’m asking you, Hawks.’
‘And I say I don’t know!’
Another bout of thunder, lightning sizzling on its tail. The hut blazed and seemed to disintegrate in the white blinding charge. When the glow of the hurricane took over again it showed Hawks, struggling futilely, in Gently’s massive grip.
‘Once more – I’m asking you!’
‘Take your hands off me!’
‘Why did he kick her out?’
‘How should I know more than the rest!’
Gently struck him across the face. Nobody made an attempt to stop him. A silent, motionless court, they stood like figures in a Dutch interior – a Rembrandt that changed to El Greco when the lightning destroyed the lamp.
‘I’ll report you –!’
‘Answer the question!’
‘I tell you straight—’
Gently hit him again. The twisted lips spat blood and showed the teeth in a vicious snarl.
‘Some night, when you’re not expecting it!’
He aimed a wicked kick at the groin. Gently shortened his grip on the canvas slop and shook the fisherman as though shaking a rat.
‘Answer me!’
‘How should – don’t hit me!’
His teeth were rattling in his head.
‘Everyone can tell you – it was to do with other men!’
‘Which other men?’
‘How should I – don’t hit me any more!’
‘Why did she come back?’
‘She didn’t!’
He attempted another kick.
For a moment Gently seemed to be crushing him under the weight of gigantic shoulders. Hawks, driven down on his knees, had his face turned full to the lamp: his eyes were cursing Gently, cursing from the depths of a fathomless hell.
Large eyes … dark eyes … eyes crazy with passion!
They were the eyes of Mixer’s photograph: they were the eyes of Rachel Campion.
With a motion that echoed Esau’s Gently hurled the fellow from him. He fell in a tumbled heap at the feet of his silent comrades.
‘And to think you helped him launch …’
Spanton kicked some loose sand at his face.
The little hut was savaged with lightning: when they could see again, Gently was gone.
He was halted outside the hut by a spectacle of unimaginable grandeur. Leaning against the howling wind, he stared seaward in awed unbelief.
The storm had by this time overrun the entire sky, sealing every horizon with its driving black squadrons. The sea had begun to make and there were breakers pounding the beach. The darkness was so complete that it might as well have been midnight. Excepting at one spot – and that was the phenomenon which astounded him! At about a mile out to sea there was an area of angelic light. Above it the clouds had hollowed into an enormous, twisting cauldron, down which, in slanted lines, the sun was pouring its silver fire.
And there was something in that area! – he sheltered his eyes from the sheeting rain. A fleck, no larger than a tiny white bird, showed where the Keep Going was still plugging along. Into the storm centre Esau had put her. He was riding the calm at the heart of the hurricane. The storm, which confounded the hearts of men, was friend and brethren to the white-bearded Sea-King.
Gently hurried down the gap to join the rain-battered Wolseley. Dyson, wearing a borrowed oily, had just arrived from the village.
‘No luck with Air-Sea Rescue – Dawes has had it, I’m afraid.’
‘Where’s the nearest lifeboat station?’
‘Castra, but if you’re thinking …’
And then, as Gently let in the clutch:
‘Where does Dawes come into this business, anyway?’
The nearest phone box was the
one by the Beach Stores. It was cascading water, both inside and out. The instrument, at first, sounded dead as a door knocker; then it burst into life with a fizzing of interference.
‘Castra Lifeboat Shed.’
He was put through immediately. At the other end it was the cox’n who came on the line.
‘Put out in this lot! Do you know what you’re asking me?’
‘Just listen a moment until I give you the details.’
He explained the circumstances briefly, the cox’n answering him in grunts. At the end he was hung up with curt instructions to wait. Rain was coursing down the panel at the back of the box and from the roof, which appeared to be cracked, a trickle descended on his shoulders.
‘Right you are, now I’ve had a look. I reckon it may be going to clear. If you think your man can hang on for, say, another hour or more …’
‘I shall have to come along with you.’
‘You! Are you used to these capers?’
‘I might be able to persuade him … anyway, it’s a chance I shall have to take.’
It didn’t look any clearer as they hissed along the Starmouth Road. Gently was having to use his lights and to hold the car against the buffeting wind. Twice the lightning blazed from the road, apparently right beneath their wheels: he had to brake to a crawl each time until his eyes became readjusted.
‘Did Dawes ever marry, by any chance?’
Now Dyson was probing away at the problem. Dutt they had left at Hiverton with a pair of glasses, borrowed from Neal. He was to watch from the coastguard lookout, to which a telephone was still connected. If he observed any change of course he was to pass it on to Castra.
‘He’d’ve been much younger, wouldn’t he?’
‘Where exactly do we turn?’
‘Beyond the church. I was only thinking …’
But he could get nothing out of Gently.
The lifeboat shed was a tall timber structure, its pent roof jutting out firmly above the beach. A shallow ramp led to the lower level, and from the bottom of this blocks were already in position. Gently jammed the car on to a patch of marrams. Nobody appeared to notice their arrival. The sea, breaking heavily on the beach below them, had a tremendous look to the eye of a landsman.
‘Come in here a moment, will you?’
They followed a hand that beckoned to them. Inside, under brilliant lights, the big lifeboat towered on its slip. A small tractor with tracks chuffed fussily in a corner and the crew stood by in yellow oilies and gumboots.
‘Here … in here.’
The cox’n led Gently into the office. He was an elderly man with a shrewd, weathered face. He pointed to a chart which lay spread out beneath an anglepoise: for a moment it looked strange and unintelligible to Gently.
‘Confound the blessed thunder! Do you see where we are? There’s Hiverton, see, and there’s the Ness above it. I’d like you to estimate his speed if you can … if you’re right about his course, he’s making good east by north …’
He consulted a table, his lips working noiselessly, then he drew two lines with a parallel rule.
‘North-east a quarter north made good should fetch him … he couldn’t make more than seven, and we’ve the wind aft of the beam.’
Gently was hustled into oilies, gumboots and a life jacket. The cox’n poured him a tot of brandy and clinked glasses with ceremony. Dyson stood mournfully by, his opinion in his face. There were limits, it seemed to say, to the proper duties of C.I.D. men.
At the last moment he came forward.
‘Under the circumstances, don’t you think?’
Gently shrugged and scribbled some notes on the back of a borrowed message form.
‘For the background to it get hold of Pagram at the Yard. The rest you can piece together … Simmonds, of course, you needn’t detain.’
The launch, when it came, was improbably casual – in point of fact, the sea had not yet risen very high. They were nudged through the breakers with no untoward incident, the clutch was knocked in, and they were surging on their way.
‘Go below if you want to.’
The cox’n nodded towards the doorway. Through a couple of fixed ports one could see the lighted cabin.
‘If you don’t mind I’d sooner …’
‘Just suit yourself, of course. But if you want to be sick, anchor your toes under this rail.’
They were striking the seas at an angle and the boat soon took on a roll. Every so often one hammered her and flushed the cockpit with uncomfortable gallons. The shore disappeared as if by magic. One saw it only in the blazes of lightning. For all practical purposes their world was a few acres, capped in by murk and pummelled by the screaming rain squalls.
‘Further out they’ll come bigger.’
The cox’n seemed to relish the prospect. His eyes rarely strayed from the illuminated compass card. The wheel kicked visibly in his tanned, hairy hands, but each time it was met with a sort of mechanical reflexion.
‘And if you want to be sick …’
Why did he have to harp on that? Gently hunched himself uneasily against the white-painted coaming. In the usual way he was quite a good sailor, in his youth he had done the trip to Stockholm in a cargo boat.
Some distance out they changed course, which brought the seas almost astern of them. The lifeboat now had a pitching motion which was very far from happy. Twice she was pooped by curling rollers, rather heavily the second time. Gently, caught on the hop, was partially choked by the torrent of salt water.
‘You can always go below.’
But he clung to his post in the cockpit. His experience of past trips had taught him that this was the safest way. The pity of it was that he’d had no food – it always helped, a well-filled stomach. At lunch he’d had nothing but salad, followed by a sickly tasting trifle.
He tried to concentrate on the boat and its thrashing, ponderous motion: but then, almost at the same time, he knew that he would have to be sick. His stomach and bowels were staging a sudden rebellion, they were snapping away his efforts at conscious control.
‘Toes under the rail!’
The rest was unrelieved misery. Before long he had ceased caring about the storm or anything else. After retching he succumbed and tumbled down into the cabin, and there, on a heaving bunk, had wanted nothing but to die.
Later on, it seemed to him that he had been below for hours. He could remember every minute of that pitching inferno. Two of the crew were actually playing cards – they used the engine-casing for a table: a third, cigarette in mouth, was holding down the pile of discards.
‘Twist!’
‘I’ll go a bundle.’
He never found out what it was they were playing. Their absorption in the game lent a crazy touch to the scene. At the end of every hand a copper or two was passed between them. He could have sworn it went on for a week, although his watch said forty minutes.
‘Try to drink some of this, old partner.’
They had slopped him out some coffee. A thermos-flask, as big as a barrel, was being tilted over the cup.
‘We all get a touch of it, now and then.’
How could the fellow lie to him like that? Gently knew that they’d never been seasick: they were a different style in humanity.
Then finally, to end the nightmare, had loomed a dripping figure from the cockpit:
‘We’ve sighted a vessel ahead, sir … cox’n would like to have you on deck.’
Really, he couldn’t have cared less, but he dragged himself up the steps again. Fortunately the tumult he stumbled into had the effect of clearing his brain. It was a good deal lighter, now, and one could see for considerable distances. Behind them, which was southerly, there was a horizon of watery yellow.
‘That’ll be her, I reckon.’
The cox’n pointed briefly over the fairing. At first Gently could make out nothing except the rolling bulks of waves. Then, as they lifted, he glimpsed it, only a few hundred yards away: it was sliding down a greyback, its v
arnished counter pointed towards them.
‘We’ll be up with him very shortly.’
Gently caught a quizzical side glance.
‘I know all about old Esau … what do you think you’re going to do?’
There wasn’t any answer to that one. Gently crouched miserably under the bulkhead. He felt abjectly at the mercy of these men of the sea. In his pursuit of the Sea-King he had been lured out of his element, and now, as he closed with him, he was being made to feel the folly of it.
‘We can beat him for speed in a seaway like this, but there’ll be no going aboard him, if that’s the idea.’
‘Will I be able to speak to him?’
‘You can use the loud hailer.’
‘In this … could she last?’
‘He’s rode out the worst of it.’
They bullocked closer and closer, rolled on waves like small mountains. Ahead of them the Keep Going switchbacked easily over the crests. Esau still stood to his helm, his feet planted a little apart; he swayed to the boat’s motion as a circus rider to his horse.
For the cox’n the seas held a clinical interest:
‘Up here, we don’t often get them this size.’
One of the crew drew attention to the Keep Going’s buoyancy:
‘He must have a power pump – there’s everything on that boat!’
At last they had closed to within fifty or sixty yards of him: they were near enough to read the gilded lettering on the name board. The cox’n nudged Gently and motioned towards the loud hailer.
‘You can call him up now, but we shall have to keep a distance.’
Gently unclipped the instrument, which resembled a clumsy megaphone. Never before had he felt so strongly the futility of what he was going to do. Sick, and feeling weak as a child, he balanced the hailer on the fairing. His knees were cockling under him each time they smacked into a trough.
‘Ahoy there, Keep Going!’
The wailing voice was not his own: a mournful sea thing, it went protesting through the chaos.
‘Esau … ahoy! Can you hear me … Esau!’
Only a few hours before he’d been making the same appeal to Simmonds.
‘Esau … listen!’
But why should he bother to listen? What was this mewling landsman’s voice to the storm-riding Sea-King?
