Ten minutes later, with the wind rising and the shelter of the estuary losing its power, the Morning Glory had pulled well away from the lifeboat. Neither Powerscourt nor the Inspector could see any trace of the Bar. But Robbie assured them that they were past it now. Dimly ahead, he could see the bulk of Bolt Head which marked one side of the end of the long estuary and the beginning of the English Channel. Now then, he said to himself, which way is the Morning Glory going to turn? As the cloud lifted again they could see her, two sails aloft, heading straight ahead.
‘She ain’t out of the estuary yet, not proper,’ said Robbie Barton. ‘She’s got to pass Prawle Point on the other side before she’s really out in the open sea.’
The stereotype for a head porter would be a tall figure, well over six feet in height, solidly built, possibly wearing a top hat, dispensing taxis and greetings by the front door of one of London’s great hotels like the recently opened Ritz halfway along Piccadilly. Timothy Mills, head porter of the Marine Hotel, Salcombe, was just over five feet six inches tall and as thin as a whippet. He looked defiant when Johnny Fitzgerald showed him the slip of paper from Estuary House.
‘This is your handwriting, I believe,’ said Johnny.
‘It is. I’m sorry if I’ve done the wrong thing. My wife’s been ill, so very ill, you see, and I needed the money for the doctor’s bills. You’re not going to arrest me, are you? I couldn’t bear to leave Bertha on her own.’
‘I’m not going to arrest you, Mr Mills. I’m sorry to hear about your wife. The best thing would be if you could tell us everything you did for the Estuary House people and everything you know about where they’ve gone.’
‘Well now, my main job,’ said Mills, ‘was to tell them when anybody was making inquiries about them, and sending notes to Nat Gibson about that boat over the way. Oh, I nearly forgot.’ Mills, having cheered up a little on hearing he was not to be arrested, looked really anxious all of a sudden. ‘I had to go into Plymouth for them shortly after they arrived.’
‘And what did you have to do in Plymouth, Mr Mills?’
‘I didn’t quite know what to make of it, actually. I had to buy a uniform for the young man.’
‘What sort of uniform?’
There was a pause and then the words were pulled out like a bad tooth. ‘A policeman’s uniform.’
‘God in heaven,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald. ‘What on earth did they want with a policeman’s uniform?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Mills, ‘there’s only the old one gone off on the boat. The young one’s still here, or if he’s not, maybe he’s going round pretending to be a police officer.’
‘Thank you very much,’ said Johnny and shot off to the telegraph room to consult with Sergeant Vaughan.
Sharp Tor, Starehole Bay, Shag Rock, Pig’s Nose, Ham Stone, Gammon Head, Mew Stone, Robbie Barton called out the names of the landmarks along the coast as they passed. There was no sign of the William and Emma changing over to sail yet. The coxswain told his passengers that they probably made better speed with the oars. The wind was rising now, changing direction, blowing hard towards the shore. The moon came out and stayed out for a couple of minutes. Powerscourt saw that the contest was deeply unfair. The odds were stacked in favour of Morning Glory, even with the wind against her. She was built for speed and for grace. The William and Emma was built to be solid, to keep afloat however bad the storms, to reach the wrecks off the Devon shore and bring the passengers and the seamen home to safety. It was a dray horse against an Olympic sprinter.
‘She’s not turning to the left or the right, Inspector, my lord. No late supper in Plymouth or Dartmouth by the look of it.’
‘My God,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’ve been a fool! Why didn’t I think of it earlier. Of course she’s going straight out to sea. Once she’s three miles from the coast she’s outside British territorial waters altogether, and outside British jurisdiction. Inspector Timpson here couldn’t arrest them even if we could catch them.’
‘Well,’ said Robbie, ‘she’s not three miles out yet. She’s got some way to go. But we’d better start praying for a miracle if we’re ever to catch up with her.’
It took Sergeant Vaughan less than half an hour to find William James Strauss, disguised as a police constable, making his way very slowly along the road from Salcombe to Kingsbridge where the railway connected you to a wider world. Lady Lucy took the young man into the Imperial Suite away from the police uniforms. Johnny Fitzgerald had been reunited with his bottle of Chateau Lafite.
‘You must be William James Strauss,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘And the older gentleman is a Mr Allen, a Wilfred Allen, is that right?’
‘People call me Jimmy,’ said the young man, speaking with a strong South African accent, ‘and the older man, as you put it, is Wilfred Allen.’
‘And there was a third person, I think, was there not? Elias Harper, if my memory serves me. What became of him?’
The young man turned pale. ‘Do I have to answer that?’
‘You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to,’ Lady Lucy replied. ‘I’m not a policeman, as you can see. Not tall enough for a start.’
Jimmy Strauss managed a ghost of a smile. ‘Can I tell you what happened? What’s been going on, I mean. I feel it’s all bottled up inside me.’
‘Of course,’ said Lady Lucy.
The flares lit up the night sky as if some celestial switch had been turned on. Half a mile away from the lifeboat, directly across the path of the Morning Glory, lay the nine thousand tons of HMS Sprightly, one of His Majesty’s destroyers based in Plymouth. There was a roar of gunfire and Powerscourt could see the splashes a couple of hundred yards to the left of the yacht.
‘Morning Glory!’ said a voice trained to rule the waves. ‘His Majesty’s Ship Sprightly, at your service. You are to turn round and return to Salcombe at once.’
The voice from the yacht did not have the same carrying power but the crew of the William and Emma heard the words territorial waters and three miles out mentioned at least once.
‘Did you bring a measuring tape with you, Morning Glory? Don’t talk to us about territorial waters,’ the voice replied. ‘Round here territorial waters are what the Royal Navy says they are. I repeat, turn around and return to Salcombe.’
This time the key word in the reply seemed to be international law.
‘Round here, I repeat, international laws are the same as territorial waters, Morning Glory. They are what the Royal Navy says they are. Turn around, I say.’
There was another complaint from the Morning Glory. There was a brief silence from HMS Sprightly. Then there was another roar of gunfire, the shells dropping this time fifty yards on either side of the yacht. Powerscourt thought the spray must have reached the boat.
‘Turn around, Morning Glory. If you want to see another morning, start turning about right now. Next time I’ll sink you. My boys need some shooting practice.’
Another burst of flares lit up the scene. There was another bellow from HMS Sprightly.
‘Salcombe Lifeboat William and Emma! Stay where you are! Our coxswain wants a word!’
The Morning Glory was turning round. And at the stern a man was climbing down the steps into the little rowing boat being towed behind her. Nat Gibson, it seemed, had had enough. The little boat set off towards the William and Emma. Wilfred Allen, the man come from Johannesburg to Devon, was on his own now.
‘It all started with that battle long ago,’ said Jimmy Strauss, ‘when the three of them left him for dead. A local woman found Mr Allen several days after and nursed him back to health. It took a long time. She thought her gods must have saved him from death. By the time he was well, and his eye had healed out, the other three had all gone back to England.’
‘Why did he stay in South Africa? Why didn’t he come back?’
‘His parents were dead. He told me he wanted a new start. And of course he became very rich through the gold and diamonds. He became one of the biggest trade
rs in the world.’
‘Did he indeed. But why did he wait thirty years before taking his revenge?’ asked Lady Lucy.
‘I think it had to do with his wife. She was ill for years and years with one of those wasting diseases that doesn’t actually kill you, but just leaves you weaker and weaker all the time. He would never have left her, Mr Allen. She only died last year. Three days after the funeral he saw Sir Rufus walking down the street in Johannesburg. He told me, Mr Allen, that he didn’t know he had that much rage in him. Everything about the battle, the promises beforehand that they would all look after each other, it all came back and flooded him like a tidal wave. That’s when he decided to come back and give the three of them their just deserts.’
Lady Lucy thought she would take a chance. She had no evidence at all for what she was about to say but she thought it might be the truth, or close to the truth.
‘But he didn’t actually kill any of them himself, Mr Allen, I mean. The other man did that, didn’t he? Mr Elias Harper, the man who travelled here in second class.’
‘How did you know that? Harper did the dirty work all right. Mr Allen was tucked up in Estuary House all the time.’
‘And where is Mr Harper now?’ Lady Lucy suddenly remembered the drowned man, the corpse that nobody claimed, the body never reported missing. ‘He went for a sail, didn’t he, Jimmy?’
Jimmy nodded.
‘And he didn’t come back?’
Jimmy shook his head.
Another voice boomed out across the English Channel from HMS Sprightly, that of Captain Fruity Worthington himself this time.
‘Francis?’
‘Fruity?’
‘How are you, my friend. Lady Lucy well I trust?’
‘Very well indeed, thank you, Fruity. Thank you so much for coming along. You’ve saved our bacon.’
‘Don’t mention it. Pity we couldn’t sink her, mind you. We’re going to hang around until Morning Glory’s tucked up inside that harbour. No point in taking any chances, what?’
‘Thank you again, Fruity. We must return to the harbour to talk to the fellow when he’s back in Salcombe.’
Morning Glory was just about to go past the William and Emma. The vessels were less than thirty yards apart. Allen was holding some long thin object in his left hand. Nat Gibson, the hired skipper, had come aboard the lifeboat, saying he didn’t mind sailing yachts for people who might not be one hundred per cent reliable, but he was damned if he was going to be shot at by his own side.
‘Morning Glory!’ shouted Powerscourt as the yacht slipped past. There was a volley of oaths in reply.
‘Damn you, Powerscourt! Damn you to hell!’ Allen yelled with hatred in his voice. ‘If you’re trying to ruin me, two can play at that game!’
Powerscourt could just see Allen raise the long thin object to his shoulder and start firing a heavy rifle. It was difficult shooting in the swell but Allen was lucky. One shot hit the man sitting next to Powerscourt in the shoulder and the blood spurted out on to Powerscourt’s jacket. Another one seemed to have hit the lifeboat below the waterline as seawater was now pouring into the bottom of the boat. Soon it was over their boots and rising fast. Powerscourt left the sailors to deal with the leak. A very tall man appeared and rigged up a temporary bandage on the wounded shoulder. Powerscourt and Inspector Timpson dragged their pistols out of their pockets and began raking the Morning Glory with gunfire. There was a scream to tell them that one of their bullets must have struck home. But the yacht was still under control, turning away from the William and Emma and heading for the Prawle Point side of the estuary. When the Morning Glory was out of range, Powerscourt realized that the damage to the lifeboat was far greater than he had thought.
The boat was sluggish. His knees were nearly submerged. Only four men were left at the oars. Two others were trying out various different shapes of cork plug to fill the hole where the bullet must have passed through. The rest of them were bailing desperately as fast as their arms would go. Powerscourt was told by the man next to him that the bullet had landed on the overlap between two planks and thus forced a larger hole than it would have done if it had struck in the middle of the board. Powerscourt and the Inspector pulled their shoes off and began to bail. The level still seemed to be rising.
‘Should we row, or bail, Coxswain?’ Powerscourt shouted.
‘Row!’ came the reply, as Barton manoeuvred another piece of wood, fished out of a vast locker at the stern, bent into a slight curve to fit over the plug where the bullet had passed through, on to the damaged section of the boat. Nat Gibson had taken the tiller as Powerscourt and the Inspector took their places side by side on the oars. Gibson seemed to be steering, not towards Salcombe, but towards the nearest point of land.
The William and Emma was making virtually no headway. Only the wind, strengthening again and blowing towards the shore, moved them along very slowly. Powerscourt wondered if for him, too, this was going to be his last case. He would die, not at the Reichenbach Falls, but here, drowned in the English Channel a couple of miles from the shore. He tried to calculate the distance to dry land and thought it might just as well be the Atlantic Ocean, he could never swim that far. He pulled at his oar, trying to capture the rhythm of the other oarsmen. He wondered about Lucy, hearing of her husband’s death in a strange hotel on the coast of Devon, her children far away.
Inspector Miles Devereux leant back in his chair in the telegraph room at the Marine Hotel. ‘Some people in South Africa are working late on our behalf.’ He showed Sergeant Vaughan the cables piling up in front of him. ‘Johannesburg reports that he was one of the richest men in South Africa. They know from the tickets that he left the country in the middle of December bound for Southampton. They’ve even got on to his yacht club in Durban, for heaven’s sake. He was a keen yachtsman, our friend Allen. He moored a whole series of boats there, all with the same name, Cyclops, after the blinded giant in the Odyssey. The latest was Cyclops Four.’
‘Have they said anything about how he lost his eye at all, sir?’ Sergeant Vaughan asked.
‘They haven’t said a word about that, Sergeant. Maybe they don’t know.’
‘I was wondering, sir, about the men on duty at the entrances to the town. Should we stand them down?’
Inspector Devereux paused for a moment. ‘I think not,’ he said finally. ‘Think about it. We’re engaged on a triple murder inquiry here. We’ve got an awful lot of guesses but very few facts so far. Keep them there for the time being.’
Sergeant Vaughan cycled off into the night to tell his men to remain at their posts until further notice.
After ten minutes’ rowing, Powerscourt felt his palms and his shoulders beginning to ache.
‘How much further to go?’ he asked the back in front of him.
‘It’s not the distance that’s the problem, my lord. It’s this bloody leak. It’s getting worse, not better. It must be about two miles or so from here to the coast.’
‘That’s about half the length of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race,’ his neighbour on the oars chimed in. ‘They do that in about twenty or twenty-five minutes.’
‘But their boats aren’t full of bloody water, are they? They’re not actually sinking, like we are.’
‘One of them did sink,’ chipped in Nat Gibson from the tiller. ‘Cambridge sank in eighteen fifty-nine, I think it was. Bloody boat was too light, she shipped water from the start, went down just after Barnes Bridge.’
The water inside the William and Emma was a third of the way up the sides now. Inspector Timpson, a God-fearing member of Trinity Church in Kingsbridge, was saying his prayers very softly. He’d done the Lord’s Prayer twice and was halfway through the Creed. Powerscourt thought he would be eligible with these memories for a place at the Jesus Hospital where the ability to recite those prayers was one of the few requirements needed for entry. A short man with a slight limp came to take Nat Gibson’s place at the tiller. Gibson went for a conference with the men inspectin
g the pieces of wood by the leak.
‘We can’t risk it,’ said Coxswain Barton at last. ‘I would like to nail one of these pieces of wood into the area around the leak. But putting in the nails might split the side right open. We’d be full of water and sinking inside a minute. We’re going to have to wrap the plug in oilskin and try to hold it in place by other means. And we’re going to have a major attempt at getting this water out of the boat or we’ve had it.’
One man sat with his back to the rowers’ bench and pressed with his feet against a piece of wood placed over the hole.
‘Hang on in there, Jimmy,’ said Robbie Barton, ‘you could be there some time. We’ve got to bail as we’ve never bailed before.’
More containers were handed out. Only two men were left at the oars to give the boat some leeway. All the rest were pressed into service. Barton began shouting at them as if they were galley slaves of old.
‘One, two three, bail! One, two three, bail!’
Bend down, fill up, throw. Bend down, fill up, throw, bend down, fill up, throw, Powerscourt said to himself. It didn’t seem to be making much difference.
‘One, two, three, bail! One, two three, bail!’
Johnny Fitzgerald had gone back to Estuary House on his own. He made his way to the top floor and peered out into the night through the telescope on the top floor. He could see a few lights at East Portlemouth on the far side of the harbour and some more in the centre of town. But out to sea he could see nothing at all. None of the birds he loved so much were to be seen or heard, only the whisper of the sea. He thought of his friend out there in the English Channel. He remembered some of the adventures they had shared together. Rather like Lady Lucy, Johnny didn’t think his friend was really safe on his own during these investigations. He needed someone at his side, somebody to look after him.
Death at the Jesus Hospital Page 34
