Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  "I hope it stays very happy," I said, thus becoming a blackmailer, and at the same time curious to hear what would be churned up from Melissa's remarkable memory.

  "It's only a story." Melissa opened an onyx box, took out a cigarette and waited for me to hasten forward with a lighter.

  I did not move so Melissa lit her own cigarette. "I mean, there are bound to be stories, Nick. There always are. About glamorous men like Tony." She paused to blow out a stream of smoke. Her overmantel was thick with embossed invitation cards. There was one, I saw, from my old mess. Good old loyalty. "You mustn't repeat this, Nick," she said dutifully.

  "Of course not."

  "It's all to do with Nadeznha, his late lamented. Awful name, isn't it? Sounds like one of those Russian ballet dancers who defect to the West as soon as they discover pantyhose and underarm deodorants. Anyway, you know she died last year?"

  "I know."

  "People were full of sympathy for Tony, of course, but there is just the teensiest whim of suspicion that he might have wanted her out of the way." Melissa watched me very carefully. "It's the perfect murder, isn't it? I mean, who's to know?"

  "Overboard," I said.

  "Exactly. One splash and you don't even have to buy a coffin, do you? Perhaps that's why I never went sailing with you?" She smiled to show she had not meant it. "Anyway, Nadeznha died at night and there was only one other person on deck."

  "The Boer?"

  "Score a bull's eye."

  "But why would Bannister want her dead?"

  Melissa rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "Because she was going to walk out on him, of course! That's what everyone thinks, anyway. And she'd have skinned him. Think of the alimony!" Melissa's voice took on an unaccustomed enthusiasm. "And I'm sure Tony's not exactly playing the taxman with a straight bat. He's got endless offshore companies and shady little bank accounts. Nadeznha would have revealed all, wouldn't she?"

  "He must have good lawyers," I said. "And divorce must be as common as tealeaves among TV people."

  "As common as cocaine, anyway," Melissa corrected me. "But Nadeznha would have had much better lawyers. She was frightfully wealthy. And anyway, Tony's pride couldn't have endured losing a catch like Nadeznha."

  "Was she a catch?"

  "Only Kassouli's daughter." Melissa's tone showed how disgusted she was by my ignorance. "Oh, come on, Nick! Even you must have heard of Yassir Kassouli!"

  I'd heard of him, of course. It was a name mentioned in the same breath as Getty, or Rockefeller, or Croesus. Yassir Kassouli owned ships, oil companies, finance houses and manufacturing industries around the globe. He had been born in the Levant, but had married an American wife and become an American citizen. He was rumoured to be richer than God.

  "His money," Melissa said, "will go to his son, but Nadeznha can't have died poor, can she? She was the genuine American Princess."

  "She was certainly pretty." I thought of the photographs in Bannister's Devon house.

  "If you like bouncing tanned flesh and Girl Guide eyes, yes." Melissa shuddered. "Mind you, there was something quite eerie about all that mixed blood. She married Tony on the rebound, of course, and Kassouli never really approved. She was slumming in his eyes. And Yassir Kassouli has never forgiven Tony for her death. I mean, at worst it was murder, and at best carelessness. And you can imagine how sinister someone like Kassouli can be if he decides he doesn't like you. He's hardly likely to send you a solicitor's letter; much more likely to slip a cobra into your bed." She laughed.

  "Do you think Bannister murdered Nadeznha?" I asked.

  "I never said any such thing!"

  "You think the Boer pushed her overboard?" I pressed her.

  Melissa adopted a look of hurt innocence. "I am merely telling you the faintest, most malicious, trace of gossip, and I will utterly deny ever mentioning Tony's name to you." She tapped ash into a crystal bowl. "But the answer to your question, Nick, as to who might have threatened Tony, is Yassir Kassouli. The current whisper is that Yassir's sworn that Tony's not going to win the St Pierre."

  "Which is why Bannister keeps that Boer brute around?"

  "You're very slow, Nick, but you do eventually grasp the point. Exactly." Melissa stubbed out her cigarette to show that the subject was closed. "So what are you going to do now, Nick?"

  "I'll see the kids in two weeks."

  "I don't mean that, Nick. I mean with what passes for the rest of your life?"

  "Ah! I'm going to repair Sycorax, then sail her to New Zealand. I'll fly back to see the kids when I can."

  "You think money grows on trees?"

  "My affair."

  She picked up the emery board again. "Get a job, Nick. I mean, it's frightfully brave of you to think you can sail round the world, but you really can't. Hon-John will help you. He has oodles of friends who'd be jolly pleased to hire a VC. You can buy a grown-up suit and call yourself a public-relations man."

  "I'm going to sail round the world."

  She shrugged. "I shall need security from you, Nick. I mean, you can't just abandon your children in destitution while you gallivant in the South Seas, can you?"

  "Why ever not?"

  "I shall have to tell my lawyers that you're planning to run away, Nick. I hate to do it, you know that, but I really don't have any choice. None."

  I smiled. "Dear Melissa. Money, money money."

  "Who'll look after the children if I don't?"

  "Their nanny?" I kissed her upturned cheeck. "I'll see you in two weeks?"

  "Goodbye, Nicholas. The maid will see you out." She pulled the bellrope.

  I left Melissa empty-handed, but in truth I had not expected to get any of Bannister's rent money.

  But nor had I expected to hear the sibilant whisper of a rumoured crime. Was that what Inspector Abbott had meant when he spoke of using the long spoon? I limped through the drifts of fallen blossom and remembered Nadeznha Bannister's face from her photographs; she had been so pretty and happy, and now she lay thousands of feet deep with her body rotted by gas and drifting in the sluggish darkness.

  And there was a whisper, nothing more than a catspaw of wind rippling a perfect ocean calm, that she had been murdered.

  And Bannister was clearly protecting the Boer.

  And, I told myself, it was none of my damned business. None.

  It was none of my business, but I couldn't shake it out of my head.

  When I got back to Devon I searched amongst the yachting magazines in Bannister's study for an account of the accident that had killed Nadeznha. I found something even better; in a brown folder on his desk there was a transcript of the inquest into Nadeznha's death.

  It told a simple story. Wildtrack had been on the return leg of the St Pierre, some five hundred miles off the Canadian coast, and sailing hard in a night watch. The seas were heavy, and the following wind was force six to seven, but gusting to eight. At two in the morning Nadeznha Bannister had been the watch captain. The only other person on deck was Fanny Mulder, described in the inquest papers as the boat's navigator. That seemed odd. I'd been told Fanny was the professional skipper, and anyway, why would a navigator be standing a night watch as crew?

  Mulder's evidence stated that the wind had risen after midnight, but that Nadeznha Bannister had decided against reducing sail. In the old days a yacht always shortened sail to ride out gales, but in today's races they went hell for leather to win. The boat, Mulder testified, had been going fast. At about two in the morning Nadeznha noticed that the boom was riding high and she had asked Fanny to go forward and check that the kicking strap hadn't loosened. He went forward. He wore a safety harness. He testified that Nadeznha, who was at the wheel in the aft cockpit, was similarly harnessed. He remembered, as he went through the centre cockpit, thinking that the seas were becoming higher and more dangerous. He found the kicking strap's anchor had snapped. Just as he was re-rigging the strap to a D-ring at the mainmast's base, Wildtrack was pooped. A great sea, larger than any other in that dark nig
ht, broke on to the yacht's stern. She shuddered, half-swamped, and Fanny told how he had been thrust forward by the rush of the cold water. His harness held, but by the time he had recovered himself, and by the time that Wildtrack had juddered free of the heavy seas, he found that Nadeznha was gone. The yacht's jackstaff, danbuoys, guardrails and lifebelts had been swept from the stern by the violence of the breaking wave.

  Bannister, who was named as skipper of Wildtrack, was the first man on deck. The rest of the crew quickly followed. They dropped sail, started the engine and used white flares to search the sea. At daybreak they were still searching, though by then there could have been no hope, for Nadeznha Bannister had not been wearing a lifejacket, trusting instead to her safety harness. An American search plane had scoured the area at dawn, but by mid-day any hopes of a miracle had long been abandoned. Nadeznha Bannister's body had never been found.

  The coroner remarked that Wildtrack had not shortened sail, and he criticized the attitude of yachtsmen who believed that risks should be taken for the ephemeral rewards of victory. That was the only criticism. He noted that the decision not to shorten sail had been taken by the deceased, whose skill at sailing and whose bravery at sea were not in question. It was a tragic accident, and the sympathy of the court was extended to Mr Anthony Bannister and to Nadeznha's father, Mr Yassir Kassouli, who had flown from America to attend the inquest.

  The verdict was accidental death, and the matter was closed.

  "Force six or seven?" Jimmy Nicholls said. "I wouldn't shorten sail either."

  "You think it was an accident?" I asked.

  "I weren't there, boy. Nor were you. But it just shows you, don't it? Always unlucky if you take a maid to sea. Maids should stay ashore, they should."

  It was Tuesday. My lawyer had advised me that, if I wanted Sycorax restored, I should make the film, and so Jimmy was taking me to the marina in his thirty-foot fishing boat. It was a warm day, very warm, but Jimmy was dressed in his usual woollen vest, flannel shirt, serge waistcoat and shapeless tweed jacket that hung over thick tar-stained trousers which were tucked into fleece-lined sea-boots. Ne'er cast a clout till May be out, they say in England, but Jimmy did not intend discarding any clothing until he was stripped for his coffin.

  He had almost found the coffin this last winter. "Buggers put me in hospital, Nick." He had told me this twenty times already, but Jimmy never liked to let a point drop until he was convinced it had been well understood. "T'weren't my fault, nor was it. Bloody social workers! Told me I were living in a slum, they did. Told me it were the Government's doing. I told' em it were my home." He coughed vilely and spat towards the houseboat that was still moored on my wharf. Mulder was supposed to live in the ugly floating hut, but I had not seen the South African since my visit to Bannister's house in Richmond.

  "You should give up smoking, Jimmy," I said.

  "Buggers would like that, wouldn't they? There was a time when an Englishman were free, Nick, but we ain't free now. They'll be stopping our ale next. They'll have us all on milk and lettuce next, like the Chinese." The Chinese diet was one of the many matters on which Jimmy was seriously misinformed. The one subject of which he was a complete master was seamanship.

  He was seventy-three now. In his twenties he had sailed in a J-class racing yacht; one of the twenty hired hands who lived in the scuttleless fo'c'sle of a rich man's racer with a single bucket for all their waste. Jimmy's job had been mastheadman, spending his days a hundred feet high on the crosstrees to ensure that the big sails did not tangle with the standing rigging. He had been paid three pounds and five shillings a week, with two shillings added for food and an extra pound forevery race won. During the war he'd served in destroyers and been torpedoed twice. In 1947 he had become a deckhand on a small coaster that shuttled china clay and fertilizers about the Channel. Later he'd worked in trawlers, while now, notionally retired, he owned this clinker-built boat that hunted bass, crab and lobsters off the jagged headlands. Jimmy was a Devon seaman, tough as the granite cliffs that tried to suck his boat into their grinding undertow. I suspected that when his time came Jimmy would arrange his own death in those dark waters rather than surrender to the hospital's oxygen tent.

  Now, as we chugged downstream, I again probed Jimmy's opinions of Nadeznha Bannister's death. "I don't reckon she'd have taken a risk," Jimmy said. "She could sail a boat right enough, I'll say that for the maid."

  That was like Socrates admitting that someone was a reasonably clear thinker. "Right enough to fall overboard?" I asked.

  "Ah!" It was half cough and half spit. "You're all the same, you youngsters. You think you know what you're doing out there! I've seen men who knew the sea like a hound knows its master, and they still went oversides. There isn't a law, Nick, not about the water. How long you been sailing, now?"

  "Since I was twelve."

  "How long's that?"

  I had to think. "Twenty-two years."

  Jimmy nodded happily. "And in another twenty-two, boy, you just might have learned a thing or two."

  I kept trawling for gossip. "Did you ever hear anything about Mrs Bannister?"

  He shook his head. "Not that would surprise you, no."

  "I heard she might have been having an affair."

  "T'weren't with me!" He roared with laughter, and the laugh turned into a hacking cough.

  I waited for the coughing to finish. "I've heard rumours, Jimmy, that it wasn't an accident."

  "Rumours." He spat over the side. "There are always rumours. They say she was pushed, don't they? I heard that. And they say as how it wasn't that Mulder fellow on deck with her, but Mr Bannister."

  "That's new to me."

  "Just pub talk, Nick, just pub talk. The maid be dead, and nothing'll bring her back to harbour now."

  I tried another tack. "Why does Bannister keep Mulder with him?"

  "Buggered if I know. He don't talk to me, Mr Bannister don't. I ain't high and mighty enough. But I don't like that other bloke. Keeps bad company, he do. Drinks with Georgie Cullen. Remember George?"

  "Of course I remember George."

  Jimmy lit one of his stubby pipes. We were turning into the wide sea-reach that was edged by the town and he stared across the river to where two Dutch pair trawlers were being scraped and painted by the old battleship buoys. The Dutch government subsidized their fishermen who could therefore afford a new trawler every other year. Their rejects were sold to us. Just short of the trawlers a motor-cruiser was trying to pick up a mooring buoy. The skipper was bellowing at his crew, a woman, who reached vainly with a boathook, but the skipper had misjudged the tide which made the woman's task hopeless. "You useless bloody cow!" the man shouted.

  Jimmy chuckled. "Most of 'em couldn't float an eggbox round a bloody bathtub. Call themselves sailors! It would be easier to train a bloody chimp."

  A French aluminium-hulled boat was motoring in from the sea. I recognized the same yacht that had been moored in the pool beneath Bannister's house the previous week. The same black-haired girl was at the tiller and I nodded towards her. "She's a good sailor."

  "Boat comes from Cherbourg. Called Mystique." There was very little Jimmy did not know about the river. Tourists, seeing his filthy clothes and smelling his ancient pipe, might avoid him, but his old rheumy eyes saw everything and he picked up news in the river's small pubs with the merciless efficiency of a monofilament net. "The maid ain't a Froggy, though," he added.

  "She isn't?"

  "American. Her father were here in the War, see. She be seeing his old haunts." The Americans who had landed in Normandy had trained on the Devon beaches. "And she be writing a book, she do say."

  "A book?" I tried to hide my interest in the girl.

  Jimmy cackled. "Reckoned you'd be hungry when you came out."

  "Thanks, Jimmy."

  "She say she be writing a pilot book. I thought there were plenty enough pilot books for the channel, but she do say there ain't one for Americans. 'Spose that means we'll be swamp
ed by Yankee boats next." He span his wheel to turn his boat towards the entrance of the town boatyard. It no longer made boats, but instead was a marina for the wealthy who wanted protected berthing for their yachts. I could see Wildtrack waiting for me at one of the floating pontoons. She was long, very sleek, with a wide blue flash decorating her gleaming white hull.

  "Have you heard anything about someone wanting to stop Bannister from winning the St Pierre?" I asked Jimmy.

  "The Froggies, of course. They'd do anything to keep him from winning it, wouldn't they?" Jimmy had a true Devon man's distrust of the French. He admired them as seamen, probably preferred them to any other nation, but was dubiously aware that they were not English.

  Jimmy brought the heavy fishing boat alongside the pontoon with a delicacy that was as astonishing as it was unthinking. He looked over at Wildtrack and grimaced at the small crowd that waited for me. Mulder was in Wildtrack 's cockpit. Matthew Cooper was on the pontoon with his film crew, and Anthony Bannister waited to one side with Angela beside him. Angela was wearing shorts and Jimmy growled in appreciation of her long legs. "That be nice, Nick."

  "She'd bite your head off as soon as look at you."

  "I like a maid with a bit of spirit in her." He held out a hand to check me as I went to step on to the pontoon. "You never did have any sense, Nick Sandman, so you listen to me. You takes their damned money and you mends your boat. You let them make their daft film, and then you go off to sea. You hear me? And you don't mess about with the dead, boy. It won't get you nowhere."

  "I hear you, Jimmy."

  "But you never were one to listen, were you? Go on with you, boy. I'll see you in the pub tonight." He glanced at the waiting film crew. "Do you have to wear lipstick, Nick?"

  "Piss off, Jimmy."

  He laughed, and I went to make a film.

  I can't say that we went to sea as a happy ship. Mulder did not speak to me, his crew were surly, while Matthew and his camera team stayed out of everybody's way. Angela retired to the after cockpit.