by Peter Helton
Now that I was putting some distance between me and the opposition, I begrudged every occasion I had to slow down for moored boats and eventually also traffic and early-bird anglers. I particularly resented the anglers because they reminded me that I had let a big fish escape my net only to bring someone into greater danger than she was in already. I cruised, always as fast as I dared, past lush hills and still green woods. When I reached Pewsey and Pewsey Wharf, I slowed down to regulation speed to make sure that no one paid me enough attention to remember me later, should the Spiriters or Moonglowers ask about me. At Honeystreet, just after leaving my mooring, I had passed a turning point, which meant that my shadows could not be completely certain that I had not turned and run in the opposite direction. Perhaps if they did not catch up with me for a while, they might decide to look downstream for me.
Beyond the wharf I entered lush farmlands to either side, with Salisbury Plain stretching out to my right. On this reach of the canal I came upon a long, old-fashioned-looking barge with a wooden sign proclaiming it to be a ‘fuel boat’. Various hand-painted signs advertised diesel, butane gas, coal, logs, kindling and services such as ‘pump-out’ for your boat’s head. I had never heard of such a marvellous thing afloat and greeted it with delight. It was at that moment moored up behind a narrowboat customer. I tied up behind the fuel boat on the towpath side. I had no idea how much longer I would have to spend on my boat whichever way I travelled, and the evenings were getting cold now; mornings on the boat felt positively icy. With unseemly haste, I carried off a sack of coal and kindling and threw enough logs on the roof to last for a good while.
The woman who took my money had brawny arms, a deeply tanned summer skin and fingernails black-rimmed with coal dust. ‘Keep the change,’ I told her, eager to get going again.
‘My, my, you really are in a hurry to catch dreams,’ she said, folding the money into a pocket of her dungarees. ‘Slow down!’ she called after me. ‘Take it easy. And remember, it’s always quicker to walk!’ She laughed as I swung the last net of logs on to Dreamcatcher’s roof and quickly cast off. So much for not leaving an impression.
Being a novice and having only the vaguest idea what I would find around the next bend, the first lock came as a shock; I had sort of forgotten about this feature of boat travel, and by the looks of it we were going uphill again. There was now sporadic traffic on the water but it was late in the season; there were no more hire boats out here and for long stretches I met no one at all. This meant that I had to negotiate locks by myself and had no one to ask what might be around the corner. More locks was the short answer. This run of the canal was very rural, the harvested fields either side dotted with baled hay, though the railway line skirted it for several miles; the trains running past seemed to go with the speed of Japanese bullet trains compared with the progress I was making. It had been getting increasingly overcast; now the rain started – nothing spectacular, just fine, grey, constant and irritating rain, making everything cold, hard and slippery. (The reason you see only sunny pictures of canal holidays is not because people have sunny canal holidays but because they don’t want to get their cameras wet.) My progress was desperately slow and some of the lock paddles were so rusty and old that my muscles soon ached with the effort. I had just managed the tedious routine of closing the lock paddles again when behind me a train driver sounded his two-tone horn. I turned around. At a carriage window, two children waved vigorously. I raised my windlass and waved vigorously back until it slipped from my wet grasp, flew away from me in an ungainly arc, clattered against the gate and windmilled down into the dark waters of Lock 54 with a banal splash that did not do justice to the catastrophe it heralded.
Without the windlass to lift and lower the paddles, I would not be able to go through any more locks. I stood and stared down into the dark waters, with rain dripping down my nose, wondering what on earth I was going to do next. Not even the slightest inclination to dive into the lock stirred in me as I dripped and shivered in the sudden chill that blew at me from the north. What I needed, I decided, was an angler. Or else a windlass boat that sold the heavy metal cranks and other things that boaters might irretrievably lose by carelessly dropping them overboard. Did someone sell them? Or did they come with other amenities of the boat such as engines and propellers?
As you might expect, not a single boat was to be seen, and with my luck the next one along would be one or both of my devoted followers. I trotted back to Dreamcatcher, cast off and churned away as I pushed the throttle hard forward. Then I reversed hard and stopped again. The stern thingy greaser! I hadn’t done it since, well, the last time, and could not remember when that was. I lifted the hatch cover and dived down into the engine department. I gave the thing three turns just to be safe. When I emerged again, I found that in the two minutes this had taken Dreamcatcher had drifted and was now almost at right angles to the bank and in danger of grounding. Within the space of five minutes, it seemed, my complete amateur status had marvellously manifested itself. There was only one answer to this. Blind panic. I revved back and forth, poked the bank with the boathook, swore, revved some more and finally chugged away, damp, sweating, feeling stupid and full of foreboding.
As I chugged along, aware that the sight of the next lock would reveal to me the length of my new prison, I had no eyes for the beautiful Savernake countryside that was now being watered quite vigorously from above. I had stuffed a hat on my head but my hair was already so wet that it did little to alleviate my misery. Skippering a boat in autumn rain was worse than riding a motorbike, where at least you would be wearing the appropriate gear. I was ill-equipped for the wet and not a tumble dryer in sight. The blustery wind that had blown in these rain clouds to plague me also made steering a challenge. I soon learnt that a sixty-foot-long object floating slowly on water is easily blown off course if a decent blast of wind gives it a broadside. Unexpected relief, however, loomed ahead. What I first took to be a bridge turned out to be my first tunnel. It was long – over five hundred yards long – low, lined with brick and only wide enough for one boat. I could see the proverbial at the end of the tunnel but nothing inside. I turned on my headlight which was reassuringly bright in this Stygian interior, gave a couple of blasts on my horn to make sure no one entered on a collision course from the other end and took it very slowly. The diesel fumes swirled around me and the engine’s putter was amplified by the echoing vault. Every so often I checked behind, half expecting another headlight to appear, but the tunnel stayed empty. It was a relief to be out of the wind and rain. Even going at half speed, it only took a few minutes to make the journey from end to end, but when I cleared the tunnel, the weather had miraculously and dramatically changed again. The wind still blew but the rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up, allowing the sun through again. It may be an obvious thing to say, but a bit of sunshine can make a lot of difference to a wet man’s mood. And it got better.
In my life, luck and misfortune seem to strike a delicate balance and, as we know, sometimes one man’s ill luck is another’s gain. I chucked the hat down the stairs and let the wind blow-dry my hair. Just half a mile after emerging from the tunnel at the summit of the hill, I saw a single narrowboat ahead, moored on the towpath side to starboard. What was more, I could see a thin curl of smoke coming from the chimney which almost certainly meant someone was at home. I would ask for advice about getting a new windlass. As I approached, however, I recognized the boat, and when I got close enough I could read the name on the stern: it was Morning Mist, Vince’s old tub.
As I slowly glided up to the bank behind Morning Mist, I recalled the strange look Vince had given me at the Black Horse Inn the night before he took off without warning. I decided that our acquaintance was so brief that it really was none of my business, but he had been so helpful in the past that I was sure Vince would give me sound advice about my misfortune if I asked him. I quickly moored up and went to knock on his roof.
It took some time, but eventually
the door opened a crack and half of Vince’s face appeared in the gap. ‘Oh. You found me, then,’ he said flatly and with a marked absence of enthusiasm.
‘Hi, Vince, you all right? Good to see you again.’
‘Yeah, hi,’ he conceded, still giving me no more than half a face. He eyed me with a suspicious frown.
‘Erm, I had a bit of a mishap back there and I thought you could give me some advice …’
He frowned. ‘Mishap, eh?’ Vince’s better nature won over whatever made him wary of me; he made up his mind and squeezed sideways through the door. Behind him, the interior looked dim and the chicken coop smell followed him out on to the stern deck. ‘Like what?’
‘I managed to drop my windlass in the lock.’
Vince’s face softened into a smile. ‘You didn’t, did you?’ He scrutinized my face. ‘And that’s all you want from me?’
‘Not sure what you mean. I wanted to ask if you know how I can get my hands on another one, or how I can get it out of the damn lock.’
‘You haven’t been looking for me, then?’
‘No, just pure luck.’
‘But I heard you on the phone, at the Black Horse. You’re a detective and you mentioned an iguana?’
‘Yes, apart from being an impoverished painter, I also dabble as a private eye. I once managed to find an escaped iguana called Knut and for some reason it made the papers. The story has been following me around for years.’
‘And you’re not looking for an iguana now?’
‘Lor’, no, I’m looking for a girl called Verity.’ I began to get an inkling of the source of Vince’s chicken coop-flavoured anxiety. ‘So unless you have her hidden in your gas locker, you’re safe from me.’
Vince breathed an obvious sigh of relief. ‘Well, that’s all right, then. Good to see you again. I’ve been trying to recreate your spaghetti dish …’
‘Carbonara.’
‘Yeah, that one, but it turned out a total mess.’
‘I’ll write down the recipe for you.’
‘Great. Now let’s get your windlass back. You’re not the first to have dropped stuff overboard, and I go well prepared. Back in a tick.’ He disappeared into the bowels of his boat, still carefully closing the door behind him, but re-emerged only a couple of minutes later, carrying two large red-and-black horseshoe magnets fixed together with wire and fastened to one end of a green nylon line on a plastic reel. ‘Let’s go fishing.’
‘I don’t fancy walking, let’s take my tandem.’
‘Never ridden a tandem before.’
‘Really? Neither have I.’
It showed. We wobbled. Twice we barely avoided cycling into the drink, an experience I thought I had sufficiently explored not to need repeating. There was now occasional traffic on the water and the unusual sight of two middle-aged men wobbling along on a pink tandem made people give us friendly waves. I firmly resisted waving back at them. We took the tunnel at full speed with me ringing my bell all the way for the pleasing echo it got.
‘Do you remember where it went in?’ Vince asked. We were staring down into the murky depths of Lock 54. The mossy sides of it looked slimy and uninviting.
I pointed at where I thought it had gone under. ‘About there.’
Vince unwound the line a few feet, then swung the heavy magnets out, away from the side and let them plunge under water, allowing the reel to run in his hands until it stopped, then he laboriously wound it up again. At the end of the magnets hung an old tin. The soggy label was still legible. ‘Vegetarian Ravioli,’ said Vince with deep disappointment in his voice. The next cast lifted a mobile phone from the bottom, a Nokia C3. ‘This lock is full of crap, innit?’
Third time lucky. ‘Oops, this is heavy, I think we got it.’ He gently lifted my dripping hand crank from the lock.
‘Genius, Vince. I can’t tell you how stupid I felt chucking it in the lock. How can I repay you?’
‘That’s easy,’ said Vince.
Half an hour later I was ushered into the dim inner sanctum of Morning Mist. It was warm inside the boat, much warmer than outside. The smell was strong to someone unused to it but not completely unpleasant. Where in most liveaboard narrowboats you might have found a sofa, TV screen, bookshelves and so forth, here stood – on long, custom-made metal shelving – terrarium after terrarium full of exotic reptiles. Vince pointed out some of the specimens. ‘That’s Vinny the viper, and next door that’s Cammy’ – he tapped a fingernail on a chameleon’s glass prison – ‘that’s Lizzy the lizard, that’s Puff the adder …’ There were frogs and tortoises and some tiny turtles in an aquarium. Next came a large iguana.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I begged. ‘It’s Iggy, right?’
‘Close. It’s Pop.’
But the pièce de résistance came at the end. Near his fuel burner, which was chucking out tropical heat waves, was a giant terrarium, seven feet long and four feet deep. Inside was what had given Vince the jitters when he heard me mention Knut the iguana on the phone. ‘I thought you were some sort of reptile specialist,’ he said, ‘hunting down illegally owned animals.’
‘Well, that one is certainly illegal,’ I agreed.
‘I know. Meet Chomsky the crocodile.’
The croc in question was probably three feet long and looked as ill-tempered as crocs get when confined in a space smaller than, let’s say, Australia. ‘I got him when he was tiny, but he’s growing like mad and getting too big for his terrarium now. He’s also eating me out of house and home.’
‘You haven’t got a big brother called Hagrid by any chance?’
‘Ha, yeah, I know. And I know I have to give him up, but it’s not easy. I can’t just set him free in the countryside. And one or two others of my friends are illegal immigrants as well. I’m scared of what they’ll do to me if I own up to them.’
I looked down at Chomsky. ‘How big do they get?’
‘Regulation croc size. Big enough to eat a chap.’
‘Hello, Chomsky, I’m Chris and I taste terrible.’ I turned to Vince and gave him a look that was meant to be severe and sympathetic at the same time. ‘Call Bristol Zoo. Tell them about your predicament; tell them you have been a bit silly and are very, very sorry and that you need help and that you want the best for him and for anything else that should not be crewing this boat. With any luck, they’ll be more interested in caring for the animals than prosecuting you. Try it. Test the waters.’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded sadly at his crocodile. ‘You’re right. I’ll try it.’
‘How have you been feeding them, anyway? Do they eat cat food?’
‘No, and that’s my problem. I have two fridges going to keep their food in. That’s why everything I eat myself is out of tins or powdered – no space, see? But I’ve got total engine failure and can’t charge my batteries. I’m waiting for a mechanic but he won’t be here for another day or so. My solar panel has always been useless and my batteries are pretty much completely flat now.’
‘Bring them over, we’ll charge them on Dreamcatcher.’
‘Oh, mate, that’s a relief, I’m ever so grateful.’
Vince staggered back and forth with his batteries. I left him to it while I rummaged in the galley for a lunch idea. Vince had connected three of his batteries in place of mine and started Dreamcatcher’s engine to charge them, while three of mine were powering his floating zoo. I was quite resigned to this taking all day, so relieved was I to have my windlass back and not to be by myself if my shadows caught up with me. By the time Vince came down the stairs into the boat, I had decided to tell him the whole story. Perhaps when he got going again, he could keep an eye out for Verity and warn her that the canals were not as safe as she had thought. But when I looked up, Vince gave me the strangest look yet. He came and stood close to me and then gently laid a package on the worktop. I looked at him, slightly puzzled. ‘Look familiar?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Didn’t think you would have let me move the batteries if you knew it w
as there.’ The package consisted of a large resealable freezer bag which covered a brightly coloured child’s plastic pencil case. ‘Under your number three battery, someone cut a hole in the spar it’s standing on and put this inside. Have a butcher’s at it.’
‘It’s not bloody heroin, is it?’
Vince shook his head. Now he knew it wasn’t mine, he was enjoying himself. ‘Much prettier.’
I opened the bag and squeezed the pencil case. It was heavy and felt like a bag of screws. I unzipped it and looked inside. ‘Blimey! It’s Neil’s retirement plan.’ The case was half full of cut diamonds, all more or less the same size, like a bag of dried chickpeas. For the moment I was lost for words since too many thoughts crowded my mind. ‘Where did they come from?’ was an obvious one and also ‘Who do they belong to?’ but ‘Who is going to walk away with them?’ might become an interesting question.
‘You think that’s why the chap who owned this boat before died?’ asked Vince quietly.
‘He probably died in a fight in the lock. Perhaps he fell during the fight and knocked himself out and fell in. They wouldn’t have drowned him until they knew where the stash was, I don’t think.’
‘Maybe,’ said Vince, unconvinced. ‘Or they thought they would find it without his help. Either way, I don’t think they will let it go, do you?’
I didn’t. ‘I don’t know anything about diamonds, but Neil was going to move to Spain and presumably buy a house there with these. And live happily ever after.’
‘I wonder how he got hold of them. Do you think he stole them off the crooks?’
I zipped up the pencil case, put it back into the plastic freezer bag and carefully sealed it again. When I had filled the little sink with water, I dropped the bag in it. It floated.
‘Flotsam,’ I concluded. ‘It fell off a boat and he fished it out of the canal. And somehow the owners knew he had picked it up or saw him picking it up. And they’ve been looking for it ever since. Those guys who are following me?’
