A Ravelled Flag (Strong Winds Trilogy)

by Julia Jones

  “I believe he’ll say don’t rock the boat,” she answered as if she’d read his mind. “Do nothing until Lottie Livesey has been salvaged.” She was already busy with Strong Winds’ mizzen halliards. “He’s a cautious man. Run that foresail up while you’re thinking. It was your life on the line back there as well as mine. We needn’t carry too much sail. Enough to take us into deeper water for a watch or two. Clear our heads and flush the bilges.”

  “What sticks in my gullet like a fisherman’s barb,” she said, when they were a couple of hours out of Harwich, north-east of the Gunfleet Sand, “Is passing one bent farthing of the sprogs’ legacy to that shoal of blood-sucking parasites. Don’t look so startled, Sinbad, I know that you’ve been nodding. I’ve pumped the bilges through for a good fifteen minutes without breaking the rhythm of your snores. The cabin’s fresher now. Help me bring her round and pass me my wet-weather gear then you can go and get your head down properly.”

  “Oh, er ... yeah. I do like it, though. I really do. Out here in the dark. Getting away from the land – trying to work out the different lights, then looking up at the sails against the stars.”

  “I know you do. You’re a lad after my own heart – more than I had ever hoped. But there’s no shame in letting yourself sleep when there’s someone else to take her turn. It’ll be tomorrow soon enough and we’ll all have some explaining to do. Then you’ll be back to school and first mate Anna will be coding up a message in that folder. To think of Theodora’s money being used to pay-off tiger-sharks! She was a good woman you know – if inclined to be romantic. I didn’t see so much of her but she and Eirene were close. And Cal ... adored her.”

  He had thought the sky was beginning to lighten as they gybed Strong Winds back towards the coast. Then the stars disappeared behind low cloud and another steady drenching rain made him glad to settle for his bunk.

  He had that dream again. The one about the outcasts on the lonely shore. He thought he knew where it had come from now but it was odd how the faces of the castaways kept changing: sometimes they were children from Great Aunt Ellen’s generation, either Anna’s relations or characters from the pages of a story. Other times they were Skye’s lost parents or even the Chinese cleaner and that dog that Xanthe had called Ben Gunn.

  He slept deeply and felt thick-headed when he finally woke and found Strong Winds scudding up the Orwell in the wet, grey morning.

  “Going to collect your mother from the vicarage.”

  “But ... we’ve been banned from Pin Mill Hard.”

  “There’s more to Pin Mill than the Hard. Mrs Everson has a mooring we can use. Off the far end of the beach. An erstwhile haunt of yours, I’m told. And I believe you know various alternative paths through the woods.”

  “Who?”

  “Her daughter. Big woman. Rowed me out to the junk last night and bought Vexilla back.”

  So that’s why there’d still been two dinghies in the creek.

  “After which I think a couple of days shore leave might be in order. I may need to shop around for anchors. I imagine there’ll be plenty of choice in Ipswich.”

  Adults could be quite shockingly untruthful. Gold Dragon had no intention of buying pricey new anchors from the various chandlers and boatyards she visited in Ipswich. She was putting herself about, demonstrating to anyone who might be interested that she neither was dead nor had been scared off.

  She did buy one venerable specimen, virtually given away with forty metres of rusty chain, from a houseboat dweller in the New Cut, but as soon as they returned to Gallister Creek, on the day before the beginning of term, he discovered that she’d noted exactly the co-ordinates of their former anchorage. He and Skye were put to work, rowing Vexilla up and down, while Great Aunt Ellen trailed a grappling iron to snag on her sabotaged gear. Then she was back on board Strong Winds using her powerful winch to haul up both the anchors and re-lay them as before.

  Her time in Ipswich was also time spent on reconnaissance. Semi-derelict docks, warehouses with buddleia sprouting from condemned asbestos roofs, corroding storage containers, abandoned boats – she was there, hooking around.

  “Pirates,” she explained, “operate on the edge of other people’s territorial waters. They need a no-man’s land where they can retreat. Somewhere that regular law-abiding citizens aren’t too keen to visit. It doesn’t have to be as scruffy as this, of course.”

  “You would know about operating on the edge?” he was bold enough to ask her. “Retreating into no-man’s lands?”

  “I might,” she replied.

  Then, on the first day of Donny’s new school term, she left Skye contentedly on board Strong Winds, working on some private project, and took herself to Lowestoft by train.

  Anna returned the music folder to its space in the DT cupboard. Her un-appealing new tunes were coded to reassure her mother that all the children were well. They also concealed the address of a diocesan shelter in an area of town where women stood on street corners late at night and where men drove slowly, close to the edges of the pavements.

  The folder lay on the shelf. Agonising days dragged past.

  What if Pura-Lilly had lost the Gallister High cleaning contract? Donny hung about the DT department long after the school day ended, looking out for anyone in overalls with that drooping flesh-pink logo. He didn’t recognise anyone. He hoped for the Chinese cleaner: he’d almost have been glad to glimpse the Tiger.

  Anna grew anorexic with worry.

  Gold Dragon claimed that Vexilla needed checking for some sort of disease that only attacked glass-fibre boats. She chose a calm late-January Saturday to persuade Donny, Anna and Maggi to deliver her to the far end of the New Cut, cover her with a bird- stained tarpaulin and sail all the way back to the Stour in Lively Lady. It took them ages, though it was a nice enough day and seemed completely unnecessary. They checked the building site containers while they were in the area. There was no-one living there.

  It was almost February half-term before the space in the cupboard emptied.

  The music folder was back within twenty-four hours. Lottie’s love and happiness spilled into lines of manuscript that Anna longed to sing, though all that they actually said was that her mother’s work-group had been away at a meat-packing factory and she would visit the all-night shelter as soon as she was able.

  Rev. Wendy had already begun volunteering there. She came home before breakfast every morning looking shocked.

  As soon as Lottie’s message had been de-coded Edward arrived at the vicarage carrying two black briefcases. Anna was in the hall, observing Hawkins’s flight patterns. She was certain that she heard the lawyer tell Gerald that he’d brought ten thousand each and come prepared to take his turn. Then Wendy chivvied both men into her study and shut the door with a slam.

  Great Aunt Ellen had decided not to tell anyone how much she hated the idea of paying Theodora’s money to the tiger-sharks. She was still trying to keep out of it: still trying not to use the knowledge that she’d learned in the Islands.

  “Feed them and they grow fatter. Their stomachs distend, they grow greedier. Life becomes harsher for all the other minnows in the pond.”

  It was Lottie who wouldn’t do it. She didn’t use the same words but she told Wendy in the Shelter – and then Anna, via the folder – that every time one of the workers gave in to the pressure to earn money in ways that were wrong, the lives of all the others became harder.

  “Not Mum’s principles again,” wailed Anna.

  Gold Dragon gave in. “Ai Qin Pai has already offered help. Hoi Fung, the chef at the Floating Lotus, will leave her employment angrily and move to work in Ipswich. There is a takeaway with a bad reputation down an alley not far from the river. If we can put your mother in his way he will buy her from whoever owns her debt.”

  “That’s ... appalling,” breathed Xanthe. It was half-term, it was raining and she sh
ould have been revising. Instead all of the Allies were sitting in Strong Winds’ cabin, plotting.

  “Your Trustees will give him the money to do this.” Gold Dragon took no notice of anyone except Anna. “When he has your mother, Hoi Fung will renege on the deal. He will say that the goods are not as promised. Your mother will run. He will put himself in great danger and you will not see your money again. It will not be paid to the tiger-sharks, it will be taken back to the Floating Lotus to help others who are trying to break free.”

  “That’s ... awesome.”

  An evening in early March

  Anna, wearing white lacy tights, an off-the-shoulder t-shirt and a skirt that Maggi had decided was too short when she was ten, stood in the harsh light of the Oriental Xpress Pizza and Kebab fastFood Café and giggled. Inspector Flint was there – just as she’d expected. And he’d made one of his wonderfully witty jokes. She’d known Flint would turn up once she started posting lonely heart messages on the Eager To Meet You 18+ website. But this time the minnow was hooking the shark.

  Gerald, who was in the café with her, was sticking close as a traumatised limpet. They’d dressed him in hipster jeans, a leather jacket and a t-shirt with studs that spelled Old Devil and she’d spent hours trying to coach him in his new role as a sleazebag. But he couldn’t get it. He’d never believed that the policeman would be there.

  She could see him trying to smirk knowingly – struggling to look as if he too was out for a good time. It wasn’t working. She had to keep Flint’s attention focused on her and trust that his own stupid arrogance would stop him catching on. She tittered again and wriggled a little closer.

  “Extraordinary what items people think suitable for the church bazaar,” Rev. Wendy had commented as she had sorted through the bin-bags to select her husband’s camouflage for this unlikely encounter. Her own rescue plan had very definitely not included any of the children. There had been harsh words when Great Aunt Ellen had explained why she thought it necessary to use Anna to make sure her mother would co-operate in her own rescue.

  “Of course no-one will ask Lottie Livesey whether she approves the sale of her debt. Hoi Fung will offer a good price and he will say that he is expecting some agreeable company now that he has moved to this new town. They will laugh at him but they will laugh behind their hands – until they are sure they have his cash. These are dangerous people. We cannot take the risk that Anna’s mother will refuse to be there when she is expected.”

  “If this is a matter of conscience she may feel she has no choice.”

  “If her finer feelings prevent her arriving at the handover the best that will happen is that Theodora’s money will pass to the tiger-sharks ...”

  “And the worst?”

  “Is that a good man will lose more than his remaining leg. The Oriental Xpress has an evil reputation.”

  “Yet you propose to send a child there! A child In Care!”

  Gerald cleared his throat nervously and pushed both hands into his cardigan pocket, possibly to stop them shaking.

  “You know dear, I could ... accompany Anna.”

  If Rev. Wendy hadn’t already spent several weeks volunteering at the all-night Shelter she would have sent him back to his kitchen at once. As it was she went completely quiet and sort of gazed at him.

  “You would do that? Risk your good name ... to keep her safe? Because people will think the worst, you know. And, for that night, you would have to allow them to think it ...”

  “But you and I would know the truth, dear.”

  It was really sweet, Anna told the Allies later, the way they looked at each other then. Wendy seemed to think that her husband was some sort of knight in shining armour and Gold Dragon had no more trouble persuading her to go along with the plan.

  “All we need is for Anna’s mother to believe that her daughter is in danger. No more than that. Then we’ll be sure that she won’t fail us at the handover.”

  “No-one wanted to spell out exactly what danger they had in mind for me,” Anna commented. “So I asked them whether it would be worse than Death by Pink McFlurry? But they didn’t get it. They still can’t believe that Flint is ... what he is.”

  “But surely if he sees Gerald there,” Maggi had objected, “he’ll know there’s something wrong.”

  “Okay, so it’s a risk. But I reckon he’ll just assume that Gerald’s as bad as he is – and he’ll just note it down in for next time he needs to put the squeezers on. Flint doesn’t exactly have a high opinion of anyone except himself. He won’t spot decency.”

  “So why do you think your mum’ll come?”

  “Partly because it’s such a bad place. Also Gold Dragon says there’s a local catch-phrase that would totally upset Mum if she heard it used about me – so she was going to make quite sure that it got around.”

  “She didn’t tell you what the catch-phrase was, I suppose?” “Course not. Even Gold Dragon’s protective, you know.”

  There were only a half dozen tables in the Oriental Xpress. A group of tired-looking men from boats in the New Cut were eating hungrily at one: a couple of young girls in heavy make-up were lingering over cokes at another. Most of its customers stood outside, even on winter nights, eating out of polystyrene cartons – or took their food away. Most of the litter around the area could be traced back to the café.

  The Chinese chef in the stained white overalls peeled wafer-thin slices from the rotating kebab spit and shook the grease from another batch of chips. He looked sullen. A group of well-hards slouched in, ordered chips with xtra-hot curry sauce, then slouched out into the dark again, clutching their cans of Vommitt.

  It was a cold night, overcast and threatening yet more rain. Rev. Wendy was parked a little way down the street, fingers hovering nervously over the ignition of her Skoda. Donny was waiting in Vexilla; Gold Dragon was keeping out of sight in the Buccaneers’ Arms, a nearby pub.

  “Safe house,” she’d told him. “Best in the area. If I’d had longer I could have managed the entire run without you. As it is you’re standing by to stand by and I sincerely hope you won’t be needed. If Hoi Fung gets away as planned I’ll be only too glad to stand you down.”

  They hadn’t told Rev. Wendy that Donny was involved and she hadn’t asked. Skye and Maggi were at the vicarage. Xanthe had a coursework deadline.

  A small man in a business suit walked into the café. He didn’t look at Flint: he didn’t speak to the chef. The boat-dwellers took no notice of him: the two young girls moved closer together, hunching their bare skinny shoulders and looking sideways from under their mascara. One of them lit a cigarette, which they shared, inexpertly.

  The Tiger sat down at a table in the corner, placed a brief case in front of him and opened it. It was empty.

  He looked at the big, scarred, one-legged chef.

  The chef looked back, still sullen. He pointed at the door. Shrugged. Sliced another fold of meat.

  Anna got an astonishing fit of giggles. She perched herself on Flint’s table top, not noticing, apparently, that this brought her skirt almost to her hip bones. Gerald harrumphed. Then he forgot his role completely and told her to sit down properly or he’d have to take her home.

  “For heaven’s sake!” she snapped at him. “Why don’t you go talk to the other girls. I want the Inthpector to buy me one of his Xtra large ith-cweams.”

  She tried a melting smile and Flint leered as if she were a dish of sizzling scampi with a rosy tartare relish.

  The Tiger crooked his finger at the chef. Hoi Fung looked the other way.

  The Tiger crashed his rigid hand hard onto a wooden chair, which collapsed. Still Hoi Fung took no notice.

  Gerald snapped back at Anna. Shocked, she got off the table and hitched down her skirt, glaring at him.

  That was when her mother walked in.

  With Toxic close behind her.

&nbs
p; They’d given Lottie the outline of the plan via the music folder but when she looked at Anna she didn’t look like someone who was acting.

  “Get out of here, wash that stuff off your face, go home and change your clothes. At once!” she said. “And I’ve no idea what you think you’re doing,” she said to Gerald, who looked as guilty as if all of this hadn’t been a set-up. “You’d better leave as well. Before someone reports you. For being criminally irresponsible and disgusting. No-one’s going to make my daughter into a cage-bird.”

  Hoi Fung started shouting then. Shouting at the Tiger in Cantonese. Pointing at Lottie and waving his arms. He pulled a bulging folder from beside the fryer and shoved it inside his overalls. Grabbed a kitchen knife.

  The Tiger was coming at him. Leaping onto the high counter.

  Hoi Fung was immediately in front of the kitchen exit. Why didn’t he run?

  Flint snatched out his radio and pressed a red button. “Calling all units! Calling all units!”

  Now the well-hards were blocking the doorway behind Toxic. She had her BlackBerry out, of course and was selecting photo-angles: the psychopathic foreign chef, the under-dressed teenager and her alleged ‘carer’, the noble policeman at the Heart of his Community.

  “Come on, Mum,” said Anna. “Come on, Gerald. We’ve got to leave. He won’t run until he knows we’re safe.”

  The boat-people stood up then and headed for the door. They were older men, recruited by Polly Lee from the miscellany of vessels moored along the New Cut. With Hoi Fung’s food inside them they looked burly and purposeful. There would be pints waiting for them at the Buccaneers’ Arms.

  “Come on,” said Anna again. “It’s our walking bus.”

  She pushed her mother and Gerald into the midst of the group. The men bunched together, flexed their shoulders and marched towards the well-hards who fell back, looking suddenly young.

  Lottie had been dressed up in a short skirt and high heels – probably to impress the possible buyer of her debt. She broke ranks as they pushed past Toxic, whipped one of her stilettos off and smashed its heel down on the BlackBerry. Then she twisted round and sent the same shoe hissing across the room to hit the Tiger sharp in the back of his head.