Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Yes." I said it abruptly, not wanting to betray the dismay I felt. I looked into the big upstream pool where another handful of boats was moored, but Sycorax was not there. I looked downstream towards the bend which hid the village, but no boats were moored in the reach. She was gone.

  I turned round. The middle-aged man had gone back to loading his inflatable dinghy with supplies. "Were you moored out through the winter?" I asked.

  "'Fraid so." He said it sheepishly, as though I was accusing him of maltreating his boat.

  "You don't know what's happened to Sycorax, do you?"

  "Sycorax?" He straightened up, puzzled, then clicked his fingers as he remembered the name. "Tommy Sandman's old boat?"

  "Yes." It was hardly the moment to say that my father had long ago sold me the yacht.

  "Sad," he said. "Shame, really. She's up there." He pointed across the river; I turned, and at last saw her.

  She had not disappeared, but rather had been dragged on her flank up the wooded hill to the south of the boathouse. I could just see her stern in the undergrowth. A deep-keeled hull like Sycorax 's should be propped on a cradle or held by sheerlegs if she's out of the water, but whoever had beached my boat had simply hauled her like dead meat and abandoned her in the undergrowth.

  "A bloody shame," the man said ruefully. "She was a pretty thing."

  "Can you take me across?" I asked.

  He hesitated. "Isn't it private?"

  "Not the woods, I think." I was sure, but I did not want to betray my connections with this stretch of river. I wanted to be anonymous. I wanted no one to share my feelings this day, because, even if the dream was broken, it was still my private dream.

  The man did not want to help, but the freemasonry of the river would not let him turn me down. He watched my awkward manoeuvres that were necessary because I could not simply step down into the dinghy, but instead had to sit on the stones at the slip's edge and transfer myself as though I was going from bed to wheelchair.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "Car accident. Front tyre blew out."

  "Bad luck." He handed down the bags of paint and brushes, then climbed in himself and pulled the outboard into noisy life. He told me he was a dentist with a practice in Devizes. His wife hated the sea. He pointed out his boat, a Westerly Fulmar, and said he thought he was getting too old for it, which probably meant his wife's nagging was wearing him down. In a season or two, he said, he would put his Westerly on the market and spend the rest of his life regretting it.

  "Don't do it," I said.

  "She wants to see Disneyworld."

  We fell into companionable gloom. I looked up at Sycorax. The gold lettering on her transom caught a shaft of sunlight and winked at me. "Who beached her?" I asked.

  "Lord knows. It isn't the sort of thing Bannister would do."

  "Bannister?" I asked.

  "Tony Bannister." He saw with some astonishment that I did not immediately place the name. "Tony Bannister? The Tony Bannister? He owns the property now. He keeps his boat down in the town marina."

  It was my turn to be astonished. Anthony Bannister was a television presenter who had become the darling of the British public, though his fame had spread far beyond the glow of the idiot box. His face appeared on magazine covers and his endorsement was sought for products as diverse as cars and suntan lotions. He was also a yachtsman, one of the gilded amateurs whose big boats grace the world's most expensive regattas. But Bannister, I recalled, had also known the sea's horror; his wife had died the previous year in an accident at sea while Bannister had been on course to win the St Pierre trophy. The tragedy had prompted nationwide sympathy, for Bannister was a true celebrity. So much of a celebrity, indeed, that I felt oddly complimented that he now lived in my father's old house.

  "Perhaps it's an unlucky house, eh?" The dentist stared up at the expanse of windows.

  "Because of his wife, you mean?"

  "Tommy Sandman lived there, too."

  "I remember." I kept my voice neutral.

  The dentist chuckled. "I wonder how he likes his new home?"

  The chuckle held a distinct British pleasure at a rich man's downfall. My father, who had once been so brilliantly successful, was now in jail. "I imagine he'll survive," I said drily.

  "More than his poor bloody son. Crippled for life, I hear."

  I kept silent, pretending an interest in the ugly houseboat moored at my wharf. She had once been a working boat, perhaps a trawler, but her upperworks had been sliced off and a hut built there instead. There was no other word for it: a hut that was as ugly as a container on a barge. The hut had a sloping roof covered with tarpaper. A stainless steel chimney protruded amidships. At the stern there was a railing which enclosed an afterdeck on which two deckchairs drooped. Washing was pegged to the railings. "Who lives in that?" I asked the question with some distaste.

  "Bannister's racing crew. Bloody apes, they are."

  The presence of the houseboat on my wharf suggested that it had been Bannister himself who had removed Sycorax, but I did not want that to be true. Anthony Bannister's public image was that of a strong and considerate man; the kind of person any of us might turn to for advice or help, and I was reluctant to abandon that imaginary friend. Besides, he was a yachtsman who had lost his wife, which made me feel sympathetic towards him. Someone else, I was sure, must have moved Sycorax.

  We were in line with the cut now and I could see a second Bannister craft in the boathouse: this boat was a low, crouching, twin-engined speedboat with a polished hull and a flashy radar arch. I could see her name, Wildtrack II, and I remembered that Bannister's yacht which had so nearly won the St Pierre had been called Wildtrack. There was a sign hanging in the roof arch above the powerboat: "Private. Keep Out".

  "Are you sure we should be here?" The dentist throttled back, worried by other strident signs which had been posted along the river's bank: "Private", "No Mooring", "Private". The lettering was bright red on white; glaring prohibitions that jarred the landscape and seemed inappropriate from such a well-loved man as Bannister.

  "The broker said it was OK." I jerked my head towards Sycorax. "He said anyone could view her."

  "You're buying her?"

  "I was thinking of it," I answered guardedly.

  The explanation seemed to satisfy the dentist that I was not a burglar, and my accent was presumably reassuring, but he still looked dubious. "She'll take a bit of work."

  "I need the therapy." I was staring at Sycorax, seeing how she had been dragged a full twenty feet above the high-water mark. There were stones in that slope which would have gouged and torn at her planking as she was scraped uphill. Her stern was towards me and her keel was pointing down the hill. I could see that her propellor had gone, and it seemed obvious that she'd been dragged into the trees and left to die. "Why didn't they just let her rot on the water?" I said angrily.

  "Harbour Authority wouldn't allow that, would they?" The dentist span the dinghy expertly and let its stern nudge against the end of the wharf where a flight of stone steps climbed towards the woods. He held the dinghy fast as I clambered awkwardly ashore. "Wave if you want a lift back," he said.

  I was forced to sit on the steps while the pain receded from my back. I watched the dentist take his dinghy to the upstream moorings. When his motor cut there were only the gentle noises of the river, but I was in no mood to enjoy the peace. My back hurt, my boat was wrecked, and I wondered why Jimmy Nicholls had allowed Sycorax to be moved. God damn it, that was why I had paid Jimmy a fee. The money had not been much, but to earn it Jimmy had merely to keep an eye on Sycorax . Instead, I'd returned to find her high and dry.

  The climb was hard. The first few feet were the most difficult, for there were no trees to hold on to and the ground had been scraped smooth by Sycorax's passage. I had to stop after a few feet and, bent double, catch the breath in my lungs. There were low branches and undergrowth that gave handholds for the last few feet, but by the time I reached Sycora
x the pain was like white-hot steel burrowing into my spine. I held on to her rudder, closed my eyes, and forced myself to believe that the pain was bearable. It must have been all of two minutes before I could straighten up and examine my boat.

  She lay on her side, dappled with the wintry sun. At least a third of the copper sheathing had been torn away. Floating ice had gouged, but not opened, her planking. The keel had been jemmied open and the lead ballast stolen. Both her masts and her bowsprit were gone. The masts had not been unstepped, but sawn off flush with the deck. The teak grating in the cockpit, the washboards, and both hatch covers were missing. The compasses had disappeared.

  The brass scuttles had been ripped out. The fairleads and blocks were gone. Anything of value had been taken. The coachroof must have snagged on a tree-stump halfway up the slope for it had been laid open as if by a tin-opener. I leaned on the broken roof and peered into the cabin.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. At first all I could see was the black gleam of still water lying deep in her canted hull, then I saw what I expected: nothing. The radios were gone, the stoves had been stolen and all the lamps were missing. The main cabin's panelling had been stripped. A mattress lay in the rain water. There would be rot in the boat by now. Seawater pickles wood, but fresh water destroys it. The engine, revealed because the cabin steps had been tossed aside, was a mass of rust.

  I was feeling oddly calm. At least Sycorax was here. She had not disappeared, not sunk, and she could be rebuilt, and all it would take would be my time and the money of the bastard who had done this to her. The damage was heart-rending, but, rather than anger, I felt guilt. When I had been eight years old my dog, a fox terrier, had been hit by a milk lorry. I had found the bitch dying in the grass beside the lane. She'd wagged her tail to see me and I'd wept beside her and felt guilty that all her innocent trust in me had been betrayed. I felt that way now. I felt that I had let Sycorax down. At sea she looked after me, but back in the place where men lived I was her protector, and I heard myself talking to her just as I used to talk to her when we were at sea. I patted her ripped coachroof and said everything would be all right. It was just her turn to be mended, that was all.

  I stumbled back down the hill. I planned to cross the river, then walk to the pub and give Jimmy Nicholls a few hard moments. Why the devil hadn't he done something? The freehold of the wharf was mine and there was no law on God's earth by which anyone could take it. The wharf had been built two hundred years before when lime was exported from the river, but now the sixty feet of old stone wall were mine. Even the Harbour Authority had no rights over the wharf, which I'd bought from my father because it would provide a haven for Sycorax and a place I could call home. It was my address, God damn it, my only address: the Lime Wharf, Tidesham, South Devon, and now Anthony Bannister had his ugly houseboat moored to it. I still found it hard to believe that a man as celebrated as Bannister had stolen the wharf by moving Sycorax , but someone had stranded my boat and I swore I would find them and sue them forevery penny my broken ship needed.

  I stepped over one of the springs which held the houseboat safe against my wharf. I was going to hail the dentist for a lift across the river, but glanced first into the boathouse.

  And saw my dinghy there. She lay snugly moored against Wildtrack II's starboard quarter. My ownership was proclaimed in flaking paint on her transom: 'Tender to Sycorax'. She was a clinker-built wooden dinghy, my dinghy, and she was tied alongside Bannister's flash speedboat.

  I think perhaps it was the ugliness of that speedboat which convinced me of Bannister's guilt. Anyone who owned a boat so flash and sharp could not be as considerate as his decent image suggested. To me, suddenly, he became just another rich bastard who thought his money gave him privileges beyond the law.

  So sod the bastard. He'd wrecked my boat, stolen my wharf, but I was damned if he would steal my dinghy. I decided I would take the tender back into my ownership, then row myself on the ebb tide to the village pub. "Hello!" I shouted aloud. No one answered. I thumped on the side of the houseboat, but no one was on board.

  The boathouse could either be entered by water or by a single door which led from the garden. I had to use the garden door which was padlocked. I paused for a moment, balancing the legalities in my mind, but decided against the possibility that Bannister had rescued the dinghy and was keeping it against my return. The presence of his filthy houseboat on my wharf suggested otherwise, and so I decided to break in.

  My back ripped with pain as I lifted a heavy stone and hammered at the brass lock. The sound of my attack echoed dully from the manicured grass slope beneath my father's old house. It took six sharp blows before the hasp came away from the wood and the door splintered open.

  I stepped inside to find Wildtrack II rocking gently to the falling tide. She had a green tarpaulin cover which stretched from her forward windscreens back to the massive twin engines on her stern. Her bows, sharp as a jet fighter's nosecone, were slicked with chrome. She was a monster, spawned by greed on vulgarity, and my father would have loved every inch of her.

  I walked round the boathouse's internal dock. My cotton sails, still in their bags, were heaped against one wall next to my fisherman's anchor. The name Sycorax was stencilled on the canvas sailbags. I stooped, hissing with the pain, and felt the treacherous dampness in the bags. God damn Bannister, I thought. God damn his greed.

  I found two oars and tossed them into my dinghy, then climbed gingerly over Wildtrack II's stainless steel guardrail. She shivered as I stepped on her deck. I saw that the two springs which held my dinghy close to the speedboat's flank were cleated somewhere beneath the tarpaulin, so I began by unlacing the stiff material and peeling it away from the windscreens. Once the cover was folded back, I stepped down on to the helmsman's black leather chair.

  And found my brass scuttles.

  And my radios. The VHF and the short-wave were both there, and both with their aerial and power connections snipped short.

  The radios were among heaps of similar items that were piled in two tea-chests which had been hidden beneath the tarpaulin. Most of the items had come from other yachts. There were echo-sounders, electronic logs, VHF sets, compasses, and even Lewmar winches that must have been unbolted from the decks of moored boats. There's little profit in stealing boats in England, not when the registration is so good, but there has always been a profit in plundering them of valuables. I stared down into the chests, guessing that the value of their contents must be three or four thousand pounds at black-market prices. Why in God's name would a man as rich as Bannister meddle with bent chandlery?

  "Don't move."

  The voice came from the door which I'd broken open.

  I turned.

  "I said don't move, bastard!" The man shouted it, just as we used to shout when we went rifle-butt first into a backstreet house in Northern Ireland. The first command always made the people inside jump in alarm and we would then scream the second order to freeze them tight.

  I froze tight.

  The man was silhouetted in the doorway. The sun was bright on the pale lawn behind him while the boathouse was in deep shadow, so I couldn't see his face; only that he was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with muscle-humped shoulders and a cropped skull. It certainly wasn't Bannister who faced me. The man carried a double-barrelled shotgun that was pointed at my chest.

  "What do you think you're doing?" He had a harsh and grating voice which clipped his words very short. The accent was born of that bastard offspring of the Dutch language, Afrikaans.

  "I'm taking my property," I said.

  "Breaking and entering," the South African said. "You're a fucking thief, man. Come here." He jerked the gun to reinforce his command.

  "Why don't you piss off?" I shouldn't have been belligerent, not in my weakened state, but I was feeling mad as hell because of what had happened to Sycorax. I stooped to my tender's bowspring and jerked it off the stainless-steel cleat.

  Wildtrack
II rocked violently as the man jumped on to her bows. The movement made me stagger, and I had to clutch the radar arch for support just as he reached over the windscreen with his left hand. I caught his hand with my own, instinctively trying to unbalance him by hauling him towards me.

  I'd forgotten how little strength there was in my legs. I pulled him so far, then my right knee gave way and I staggered back into the tea-chests. The South African laughed and I saw the gun, brass-butt towards me, coming forward.

  I was off balance, I could not parry, and the butt thumped like a piledriver into my ribs. I jabbed fingers at his eyes, but my coordination was lost. The gun came again, throwing me back, then he contemptuously reached for my jacket to haul me out of the speedboat's cockpit.

  I heard myself scream as he scraped my spine over the windscreen's top edge. I hit at him, and he must have found that amusing for he gave an oddly feminine, high-pitched chuckle before he threw me like offal on to the dock. I sprawled on my own sailbags which were not soft enough to prevent the pain forking down my legs like blazing phosphorus. The gun slammed down again into my ribs.

  He stood over me and, confident that I had been battered into submission, discarded the gun. "Get up," he said curtly.

  "Listen, you bastard..." I tried to push myself upright, but the pain in my spine struck like a bullet and I gasped and fell again. I had been going to insist, not necessarily politely, that the South African help me remove my property from the boathouse, but the pain was gagging me.

  He must have been worried by my twitching and gasping body. "Get up!" he paused. "You're faking it, fairy." There was worry in his voice. "You're not hurt, man. I hardly touched you." He was trying to convince himself.

  He must have leaned down to me, because I remember his hands under my shoulders, and I remember him yanking me upright. He let go of me and I tried to put my weight on to my right leg, but it buckled like jelly. I fell again, and this time my wounded back must have speared down on to the upturned fluke of the fisherman's anchor.