The Fish Kisser

by James Hawkins

  “That’s alright, Officer,” replied Motsom, turning around, breathing easier, managing an imitation smile.

  “If we could just check the rest of the vessel now, Sir?”

  He dropped the smile and choked, “Of course …” then froze. Ideas rocketed around his brain, but none made sense. Shoot them—and what about the rest of the sailors—they were bound to be armed; take them hostage—but the old trawler could never outrun the patrol boat, and the tiny cabin was already overflowing with LeClarc; pray—it had never worked before. Ten seconds of tense anticipation followed—ten seconds of heart stopping anxiety, as Motsom stood absolutely motionless, a glazed stare in his eyes.

  “Just the fish hold, Sir,” the officer continued, as if there had been no hiatus. “Perhaps you’d escort us.”

  Motsom took another breath and three minutes later, the empty hold checked, they were apparently satisfied as they thanked Motsom and apologized again for any inconvenience.

  “No trouble, Officer,” replied Motsom as he escorted them on deck and watched as they leaped back to their own ship. Remaining on deck, shivering slightly in the cool breeze, he waited as the other vessel crept stealthily ahead, then lifted its bow and roared off into the night. Motsom’s lungs deflated with a huge sigh of relief, then he stepped back into the wheelhouse and nearly fainted. The smashed compass binnacle was staring him straight in the face. He had forgotten all about it.

  “They must have seen it,” he was explaining to McCrae and Boyd two minutes later in the wheelhouse. The skipper had been bundled below and trussed alongside his deck hand and, without a hand at the helm, the little trawler was wallowing in the lazy swell. “They couldn’t have missed it,” Motsom continued. “One of them was leaning right against it.”

  “So why didn’t they say nothing?” asked Boyd.

  “’Cos they knew something was up,” replied Motsom his patience wearing thin. “That kid must have sent out a message before you got to him this morning,” he added, giving McCrae a killing stare.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” McCrae shot back angrily. “I stopped him as soon as you told me.”

  “’Course it was your bloody fault, you’re always ballzing things up.”

  “Oh yeah. Well who lost the f’kin Fish Kisser in the first place. If you hadn’t…”

  “Stop bloody arguing,” interjected Boyd. “We’ve got to do something.” He paused for thought then his face brightened, “Why don’t we just do what you told them; fish for awhile and hope they didn’t notice the compass. In any case they might think it was an accident.”

  “As well as the radio!” exclaimed Motsom.

  “You never know,” continued Boyd, “Anyway as soon as they are out of the way, we make a dash for the coast, grab a car, and get the fat freak to Istanbul.”

  It sounded simple and, as McCrae asked rhetorically, “You gotta better idea?”

  “O.K.,” said Motsom, his features softening slightly. “That sounds reasonable. I always fancied a spot of fishing.”

  “We might even catch something to eat,” said McCrae. “I could kill a kipper, I’m starving.”

  Two hours later, they were still there, steaming slowly back and forth as the net dragged the seabed. Normality had apparently returned. The skipper was in his in wheelhouse, his smouldering pipe clogging the atmosphere. The young deck hand was on the aft deck controlling the winch that held the steel hawsers which snaked down into the water and dragged the trawl. But nothing else was normal. Below in the tiny cabin, LeClarc still slept fitfully. His exhausted body refused to let him wake, but his cold wet clothing irritated his skin, making him twitch and turn. McCrae and Boyd both shivered on deck, carefully watching the deckhand, while Motsom stared at the radar screen. “Mac,” he shouted to McCrae, “come here.”

  “What Billy?” he answered, entering the wheelhouse.

  “They’re still there,” he said, his finger glued to a bright spot on the screen. “Every time we turn, they turn. The bastards are onto us. This ain’t going to work.”

  “We’re going to run out of fuel soon,” mused the skipper, stoking the flames.

  Motsom glanced at his watch in the light of the radar screen, then shot the skipper a look. “You said that eight hours ago,” he muttered, then turned to McCrae. “Find the fuel tank and see if you can work out how much we’ve got left.”

  Ten minutes later McCrae was back. “We’ve got tons of fuel. The auld bugger was lying. The tank’s still half full.”

  “Right. Get the net up,” instructed Motsom. “Let’s try something different.”

  McCrae gave him a curious look, “What?”

  Motsom swept his finger across the radar screen to a busy area ten miles further east. “Look,” he said, as if he’d worked it out for himself. “These are ships at anchor. If we get in amongst them they might lose us, or end up following something else. We can get out the other side. Here,” he continued, pointing to the far side of the mooring ground. “Then we’ll only have a few miles to go to the coast.”

  “What are we goin’ to do with this?” McCrae asked, his eyes roaming around the wheelhouse.

  “There’s plenty of fuel,” replied Motsom with a twisted smile.

  McCrae’s eyes lit up as he breathed, “It’d make a great bomb.”

  “Shhh!” hushed Motsom, pointing to the skipper.

  McCrae’s shrug inferred, “So what?” as he asked quietly, “And the fatso—what are we going to do with him?”

  Motsom clasped his hands together, then exploded them apart as he discharged a mouthful of air with a “Poof!” “We’ll have to let him go,” he said as if he were discussing the lay-off of a faithful servant. “Poor Trudy.”

  “Who the hell is Trudy?”

  “His bird I guess,” replied Motsom, chuckling. “He was rambling about her—reckons she’s lost her door key. Big deal.”

  Trudy’s door key, the one to her mother’s apartment, was not lost. It was with the pathetic bundle the nurse had tried to give to Lisa McKenzie shortly after her arrival at Watford hospital.

  “Perhaps you’d like these,” the nurse had said, offering her Trudy’s purse and smashed watch. Lisa erupted in a burst of grief at the sight of the familiar items and couldn’t bring herself to take them. To do so would have meant acknowledging the finality of the situation: especially the wrecked remains of the watch, a poignant reminder of her sixteen- year- old daughter whose time on earth had all but ended when the hands stopped.

  “I’ll take them,” said Peter McKenzie.

  “It’s her things the ambulance men brought in with her,” the nurse explained. “Her clothes were a bit messy,” she continued euphemistically, “and the police took them. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s alright,” he mumbled.” Anything the nurse said would have been alright, all they cared about was Trudy, their little girl.

  “Trudy is in very poor condition,” the skinny young doctor had said as they surveyed the comatose figure at the centre of a spider’s web of wires and tubes. “Physically she’s not too bad, mainly cuts and bruises, they’ll heal quite quickly.” His voice became graver, “The problem lies with her mind—clinically speaking she was dead when the police found her.”

  “Dead,” echoed Lisa, her eyes fixed on the monitor, gaily “beeping” in time to Trudy’s heart, oblivious to the pain.

  “Yes. Didn’t the police tell you what happened?”

  “Not really,” replied Peter. “Although we understand she was in someone’s cellar.”

  “Not exactly,” replied the doctor, unhygienically picking and poking his nose while recounting how she had been found by the electrician called to trace the mysterious use of electricity, and the locksmith who had prised open the door at the bottom of the pit.

  “The first policeman,” he referred to his notes, “Detective Jackson, started mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage immediately, but the problem is that her brain had been starved of oxygen for a long tim
e.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Peter.

  “It means we won’t know for a little while what is going to happen …”

  “She will live—won’t she?” Lisa’s frantic voice cut in.

  The doctor allowed the silence to grow for a few seconds, letting the couple draw their own conclusions from his sad eyes. “It is too early to say,” he eventually conceded, but his expression clearly said, “Don’t bank on it.”

  “Was she …” Lisa’s voice trailed away, then she tried again, “Did he …”

  The doctor helped her out. “There was no sexual activity in the last day or so, but before that …” he stopped and shrugged, letting Lisa’s imagination loose.

  “I just hope they find the bastard,” she spat, with as much spite as she could muster.

  “They,” whoever “they” were, had not found LeClarc, although there was now no question “they” were trying hard and had a fairly good idea where he was. For more than three hours the trawler had been weaving in and out of moored ships, making erratic turns, speeding up, slowing down, and taking every conceivable evasive action. But, like a sleek shark patiently circling its prey, every time they emerged from behind a massive moored oil tanker or a giant freighter, the tenacious hunter would always be waiting. Almost invisible in the pale moonlight, just a blip on the radar screen, no matter how they twisted and turned, it was always there, stealing through the dark, stealthily sneaking up on them, then veering off to keep station a mile or so away. The predators had become the prey; the piranhas the prawns.

  For the first couple of hours Motsom had been convinced the captain of the other vessel had some kind of sixth sense—a shark’s sense—enabling him always to be in the right place at the right time. Slowly, reality dawned—there was more than one shark. There were in fact three.

  How did they know? Motsom wondered, as he stood next to the skipper, ordering this way or that. What had given the game away? Then he shot the skipper a suspicious look and stretched above his head for the logbooks. Seconds later, without a word, Motsom smashed a fist into the old man’s face and sent him sprawling across the floor into the chart table.

  “Mac,” bawled Motsom.

  He came running.

  “Look,” He held up one of the books. The missing corner of a blank page told the tale.

  “He must’ve slipped a message to one of those scum,” he said. “That’s why they kept quiet about the compass. He’d warned them.”

  “What shall I do with him?”

  “Take him below and get Sprat. We’re going to have to make plans.”

  Motsom jabbed at the dots on the screen a few minutes later, a definite note of concern in his voice. “I think it’s this one and these two,” he said.

  “We could just give ourselves up,” offered Boyd, but the chill of Motsom’s glare had him backtracking immediately. “Just kidding.”

  “Why don’t we bomb it and get away in the lifeboat?” suggested McCrae, anxious to exercise his peculiar skills.

  “How far do you think we’ll get? The life-boat’s a bloody rowing boat,” shot back Motsom. “Plus, they probably know who we are—me anyway.”

  Billy Motsom was correct. The crews of the three patrol boats, two Dutch and one English, were well aware of their identities. Their location and activities had been monitored all day, ever since the skippers’ failure to respond to the radio that morning and the brief mayday message from the deck hand. The discovery of the stolen Saab, in which they had jumped the canal bridge, added to the weight of evidence when it was found abandoned, not a mile from the home of the trawler.

  The fishery officers, two British detectives in borrowed uniforms, had reported directly back to Superintendent Edwards aboard one of the Dutch vessels with the scrap of paper the old trawler skipper had pressed into his hand.

  “3 Gunmen. 3 Hostages. Help,” was all it said, nothing else was necessary.

  “Look,” cried McCrae with alarm, “They’re getting closer.”

  The circling sharks were closing in. The three bright dots were definitely nearer the centre of the screen—and they were the bullseye. Dawn was only an hour or so away, the hunters had been stalking all night and were moving in for the kill.

  “A dawn raid,” Motsom mused, knowing the longstanding police practice of catching their quarry half-asleep, and leaped into action. “Mac. Start a fire,” he shouted. “Sprat, launch that bloody rowing boat. We’ll take a chance. With any luck they’ll be so busy trying to put out the flames we can get away.”

  McCrae was halfway out the door when Sprat Boyd stopped him with a word. “Wait!”

  Boyd hadn’t moved from the radar screen, and he didn’t look up for fear of catching a disapproving stare from Motsom. “I’ve got a better idea,” he said. The others drifted back as he continued talking, sensing their faces over his shoulder. “These big ships,” he pointed to the anchored vessels, “they’ve all got bloody great long ladders down to the water. I’ve seen them. Why don’t we drive by one real close and jump. Leave this tub going flat out so they’ll chase it for bloody miles ’til the fuel runs out.”

  “Or hits something and smashes to pieces,” added McCrae, warming to the idea.

  “And just how do we get ashore?” bitched Motsom.

  Boyd had an answer. “We swim to the ship and pinch a proper speedboat. They must have them.”

  Motsom wasn’t sure. “I can’t swim very well…” he admitted, then pride got the better of him. “O.K. we’ll give it a try, I don’t fancy rowing all bloody day.”

  Five minutes later the trawler disappeared off the patrol vessels’ radar screens as its tiny blip blended with the large blob of a slab-sided freighter. But the ’patter’ of its engine still reverberated across the water, sending out a homing signal to the watchmen on the decks of the patrol boats. Then the little boat slipped behind the monster and the “patter” deepened to a dull echo. Thirty seconds later it turned into a deep-throated roar as Boyd slammed the throttles wide open, leaped out of the wheelhouse and dived over the side into the inky water. The trawler picked itself up and, freed of its malignant cargo, danced across the waves, its powerful engines designed to drag tons of fish from the sea-bed, now light-heartedly making a dash for the open sea.

  The sharks were quick to respond as the trawler bounded from behind the freighter, attacking it with a salvo of searchlights and the blare of a loudspeaker. “Heave to. Heave to or we’ll shoot.” But the driverless vessel turned a deaf ear, raced drunkenly toward another moored ship, then veered easterly—Holland and home.

  chapter fifteen

  “Why can you never find a policeman when you want one?” D.I. Bliss muttered angrily, as he drove the stolen black Mercedes through central Turkey.

  “It’s the same in Holland,” said Yolanda, through a yawn, catching him by surprise as she woke.

  “No wonder people steal things,” he grumbled, shuffling through the car owner’s cassette collection, seeking something soothing—Brahms or a Bach adagio perhaps. “We’ve been driving for hours and haven’t been stopped.”

  “Nearly three hours,” she noted, glancing at her watch. Then she stretched extravagantly and ended by combing the fingers of her left hand through his hair.

  “I haven’t even seen a police car,” he continued despondently, a soft warm feeling running through him as her fingers played with the hairs on the back of his neck; he slipped a likely looking tape into the player.

  “I don’t know if we’d be able to get them to believe us anyway,” she added, then clamped her hands over her ears at the raucous blare of a Turkish version of “Jailhouse Rock.”

  The road, which earlier had been as peaceful as could be expected anywhere on a early Saturday morning, was now buzzing with carloads of families, busloads of tourists, and truck-loads of everything imaginable, and unimaginable. A ribbon of humanity, and all their worldly possessions, streaming across the Steppes of Anatolia, according to the map they had bought at
a gas station, several hours, and a few hundred miles, earlier.

  She yawned again as the parched mountainscape slid by, as it had for hour upon hour. The grandly named Steppes of Anatolia, turned out to be nothing more than a barren rocky desert. Occasionally, they would pass a green tree, cannily growing spindly and sickly in the hope of avoiding the woodchopper’s axe or a voracious goat. Some even more enterprising trees lodged themselves precariously into fissures up on the side of escarpments but, otherwise, the scorched landscape appeared almost devoid of life. “I think the Valley of Death is somewhere around here,” muttered Bliss, his geography slightly askew as he scoured the dusty landscape, disappointed at the absence of Cossacks and a regiment of plumed Hussars. “Nothing but bloody goats,” he moaned, with a venom speaking of previous injurious experience. It’s a bit like life, he thought, bored by the never-ending undulating landscape, though the odd rocky outcrop and a small craggy mountain added occasional interest. A few romantic precipices and a failed marriage went through his mind, then he caught himself: his marriage hadn’t failed—failure suggested catastrophic collapse—his union with Sarah had gradually dissolved until it became two tenants with shared facilities and memories, and a grown up daughter, who, like her mother, had flown the coop. “I should call Samantha; she might be worried,” he told himself, remembering that he’d half promised to meet her for Sunday brunch. Then he had an unsettling thought. “Yolanda?” he said nervously.

  “Ah, ah,” she hummed sleepily.

  “You remember what we did in the airplane yesterday?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, her eyes closing, the start of a dreamy smile sprouting around her mouth, and she left her lips parted a fraction, in preparation for a wider smile, which she knew, was coming. He blushed and stuttered, “We didn’t, um, we didn’t, um, take any precautions.”

  The smile bloomed. “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful.” Then the blossom faded. “What do you want? Boy or girl?” Without giving him an opportunity to speak, she prattled on. “I would prefer a boy myself, we could call him Peter or Caas … although I’ve often thought Dave was a nice name.” Her resolve started to crack, seeing the mounting look of concern on his face. “We could have a girl next …” was all she managed before the smile burst back into bloom and turned to laughter. “Don’t worry Dave, I take a pill.”