Medusa

by Hammond Innes

  It was almost dark by the time I left the hospital and cut down the little hairpinned gut that led to the waterfront. I could see the catamaran before I had even parked the car, a broad cabin top spanning the whole width of the twin hulls, her single mast standing very tall and overtopping the dock sheds. She was moored outside of a big yawl, and when I asked permission to cross over to the catamaran, an American in a blue jersey, half-glasses perched on his nose, poked his head out of the doghouse. ‘Sure. But there’s nobody on board. They’re over at the cafe-bar across the road.’

  I asked him where he was from and he said, ‘Newport, Rhode Island, via Gibraltar and Ibiza.’

  I swung my leg over his guardrails, crossed the foredeck to stand by the shrouds looking down on the long, slim line of the two hulls, their bows poking out from the broad foredeck platform, a safety net slung between them.

  ‘Good trip,’ he went on. ‘We made it across the ditch in just over sixteen days, almost all of it under sail.’

  A woman’s head appeared in the hatch, grey-haired like the man. ‘That cat belong to you?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish it did.’ I jumped on to the cabin top, moving aft across the top of it to drop down into the cockpit. There was a swivel chair for the helmsman immediately aft of the wheel and a console full of dials – engine revs, speed through the water, true and apparent wind speeds, just about everything anybody could want, and though the door was locked, I could see through the glass panel that the whole arrangement was repeated in the saloon, which was broad and spacious, running across the ship with a semi-circular settle, a big folding table and steps leading down into the hulls on each side. Compared with the old Santa Maria the accommodation was so grand it was more like a house, and around the chart table, on the starb’d side, there was everything a navigator could wish for, radar, sat-nav and Decca, ship-to-shore radio telephone …

  ‘Quite a machine, eh?’ the American said.

  I nodded, laughing ruefully. To own this sort of a vessel I’d have to sell both our villas. They were in our joint names, and even if Soo agreed and we succeeded in selling them on the present market, it would probably not be enough. The ship needed painting, of course, and the scrape along the outer curve of the port hull was deeper than I had thought. It looked as though some frames might be broken. But otherwise she seemed in remarkably good shape. There was even a big semi-inflatable moored alongside with wheel steering, spray screen and remote controls to the outboard engine.

  I hauled myself back on to the American’s deck. ‘You came through Gib, you say. Did you see a Royal Navy frigate in the harbour there?’

  ‘Not that I recall. It’s a big place, all those high stone quays, and anyway we were round in the marina.’ And he added, ‘We saw some US Navy ships though. They were powering through the Straits as we came in from Cape St Vincent. Destroyers by the look of them. More watchdogs for the Sixth Fleet’s carriers, I guess.’

  I was back on the dock then, wondering why anyone should want an old fishing boat like the Santa Maria in place of that cat. I could see her name now. It was on the flat, sloping stern of each hull – Thunderflash. If I owned a machine like that … I turned back to the American. ‘What made you think I was the owner?’

  He smiled and gave a quick shrug. ‘Something in the way you were moving about her. Thought maybe it was a delivery job.’ There had been four of them on board, he told me, when they came in that morning. One he took to be the skipper, two were obviously crew, and there had also been a short, dark man dressed in a suit who looked and behaved like a passenger. They had had to clear immigration, as well as health and customs, so he presumed the boat had come from France or Italy, which could of course mean Corsica or Sardinia. The passenger had gone ashore immediately afterwards, the skipper about an hour later, while the others just sat around drinking wine and listening to the radio. The skipper had returned about half an hour before I had arrived with a man who was obviously Flórez and the four of them had then gone across to Anton’s for a drink.

  The café-bar was almost opposite the Estacián Maritima, just back of the Customs House. Above it loomed the older part of Mahon, clouds scudding over a moon-dark sky. As always at this time of night, the bar was dark and very crowded. They were at a table at the far end, heads close together, coffee cups and glasses at their elbows, a bottle in the centre. They were talking in English and as I approached I heard one of them say, ‘Fifteen minutes, and that’s not driving fast.’

  Flórez saw me then, and as he switched on a smile and got to his feet, the man sitting with his back to me raised his hand as though for silence. ‘You want a drink with your coffee, Mr Steele?’ Flórez called the order to the barman and pulled up a chair. ‘Later we go over to the ship.’ He didn’t introduce me to any of the others, merely saying I was the man he had been talking about.

  There was a short, awkward silence after I had sat down. I was between Flórez and the man I took to be the skipper. He wore an old reefer and his neck stuck out of the collar of it like a column running straight up into the long, narrow head. His face, what little I could see of it in that light, was weathered to a dark brown, a strong, flamboyantly handsome face with a powerful jaw line and a nose that hung straight and sharp over a narrow, tight-lipped mouth. It was an almost Gallic face, the eyes very bright, the brilliance of the whites under the thick head of black hair giving them a wide-eyed look that was almost a stare. A little black moustache, turned down over the corners of the mouth, seemed to split his features in two, dividing the jaw and the mouth from the sharp, pointed nose and staring eyes. If it hadn’t been for the moustache, I think I might have recognised him at once.

  ‘That fishing boat of yours …’ he said. ‘Señor Flórez took me to see it this morning. Just what I and my two friends here are looking for.’ His two friends, seated across the table from me, nodded. One of them was small and sharp-featured, the other much larger, a big barrel of a chest, broad shoulders, his crumpled features reminding me of a boxer from Dublin I had picked up one time in Gib and delivered to Tangier. ‘We got to earn a living.’ He smiled an engaging, friendly smile. ‘Nice place, Mahon. Fishing good, too.’ There was a softness in his voice, the accent faintly Irish.

  ‘What he means is we’re just about broke,’ the man beside me went on. ‘We need a fishing boat and somewhere ashore where we can live and store our gear. You happen to have what we want. I saw that villa you’re building this afternoon. I also had a look at Port d’Addaia. If we had the villa we’d keep the boat there. Nice and handy. Well sheltered, too.’ He wasn’t looking at me now, his eyes on his coffee as though talking to himself and his hands flat on the table. They were big, fine-boned, very capable-looking hands. ‘Now tell me something about this fishing boat of yours – speed, range, charts on board, sails, etc. I’ve read the details, of course, and one of your men showed me over her, but I’d like to hear about her from you, okay?’

  My coffee came as I began to run through the inventory and the performance, and all the time I was thinking of that catamaran and trying to build up the value of the Santa Maria, knowing that the exchange was heavily weighted in my favour. To build a cat like that at the present time – good God, it would cost a fortune.

  A glass had come with my coffee. He reached for the bottle and filled it for me. ‘Salud!’ We drank, raising our glasses as though the deal were already completed.

  ‘I saw you come in this morning,’ I said. ‘Where were you from?’

  He stared at me, and there was something about the eyes … but then he had turned away. ‘Fishing,’ he said. ‘We’d been fishing.’

  ‘You had a passenger on board, so I naturally thought …’

  ‘I tell you, we’d been fishing.’ He looked at me again, his eyes coldly hostile. ‘There was a friend of mine with us. We enjoy fishing. All of us.’ He stared at me hard for a moment. ‘Don’t we?’ he said to the other two, and they nodded. ‘Okay.’ He knocked back the rest of his drink and got almost
violently to his feet. ‘If you’re interested in the deal, then we’ll go over to Thunderflash and you can poke around down below. But –’ and he leaned suddenly over me, prodding my chest with a hard index finger, ‘don’t go asking stupid questions, see. One of the reasons we’re all here is because Flórez said you were discreet – when it was to your advantage. Right?’

  I didn’t say anything. Looking up at him and seeing those eyes staring down at me, I suddenly realised who he was. This was the man Gareth Lloyd Jones had been looking for. Evans. Patrick Evans. Slowly I got to my feet, the others too, and we all went out and across the road to the dock. The American was below as we clambered across his boat and dropped on to the deck of the catamaran. Evans unlocked the door, ushering me below in a way that left me in no doubt that he was the owner, and the moment I stepped down into that great saloon, with its breadth and comfort and the fabulous view for’ard, I was hooked. I had never been in this type of craft before. Even at the Boat Show in London, the last time I had been there, I hadn’t seen anything like this, so immaculately designed, so perfectly suited to cruising in the Mediterranean.

  He showed me round himself, double beds in each of the hulls with washbasin, loo and shower for’ard, hanging lockers aft and two single berths, the steps down from the saloon built over the port and starb’d engines, and all the time my mind racing, thinking what I could do with it, a different charter clientele entirely – San Tropez, Monte Carlo, Capri, the Aegean. We went back to the saloon and he produced a bottle of whisky. ‘Well?’ He was smiling. He knew from my comments, from the look on my face, that he’d be able to get what he wanted. And I? – with luck I would get what I wanted, what I’d always wanted – oh my God yes. We drank, smiling at each other, and then I nearly ruined it. ‘I don’t think I got your name.’

  ‘Lloyd,’ he said.

  Not Evans or Jones, but the first part of Gareth’s surname – Lloyd. ‘Do you know a man named Gareth Lloyd Jones?’ His eyes snapped wide, suddenly wary, his face gone hard again and quite expressionless. ‘He was here on leave,’ I said, floundering slightly as I explained. ‘He was looking for somebody – somebody rather like you. And I thought I saw you – in Es Grau, a bar there, three, four months ago. Were you here then?’

  He glanced at Flórez, half rising to his feet, those powerful hands of his clenched so tight the knuckles showed white. But then he smiled at me and sat down again, forcing himself to relax. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s when I decided on Menorca. I was looking for somewhere to settle, you see.’ He picked up his whisky, swallowed some of it, staring at me all the time, hostility gradually giving way to curiosity. ‘How well do you know Gareth?’ he asked me. And when I explained how we had met, he leaned back against the cushions of the settle. ‘He’s still here, is he?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He left yesterday.’

  ‘How long was he here?’

  ‘About five days, I think.’

  ‘Did you see much of him?’

  I shook my head. ‘We had lunch together at Fornells, that’s about all, and that same evening he came to the Red Cross barbecue with us. I think my wife saw more of him than I did.’

  He sat there for a moment, quite still and apparently lost in thought, his eyes fixed on a shelf full of bottles at the end of the bar. ‘That night,’ he said slowly. ‘He was with you, wasn’t he? Flórez says there was some trouble. You flushed a couple of squatters out of a cave and they pinched his car. Right?’

  I nodded, wondering at his interest.

  ‘Did you see them? Would you be able to recognise them?’ And he added quickly, ‘I’m sorry about your wife. I believe she was hurt.’

  ‘No, we didn’t see them,’ I said. And I told him briefly what had happened. But he didn’t seem interested in the details, only in the fact that Gareth Lloyd Jones had been there. ‘You say he was looking for me?’ he interrupted. ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He said you were at school together, that you saved his life.’ And because I wanted to get back to the business in hand and clarify the ownership details, I said, ‘He also told me your name was Evans.’

  I saw him hesitate. But it was only momentary. ‘Lloyd Evans. It’s a double name, see, like Gareth’s.’ And he added, ‘Said we were at school together, did he?’ He was smiling now, seemingly at ease again. ‘HMS Ganges. That’s what he was referring to.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Yes, I suppose you could call it a school. It was a training establishment for naval ratings. It had a flagpole. Still there, I believe – a bloody great pole about a mile high, and some stupid sod of a PO makes him go up to the top almost his first day. A punishment, he called it, but it was straight bloody sadism. Christ! the poor little bastard had only just arrived, raw as a cucumber and scared out of his wits. I had to go up and talk him down. Practically carried him.’

  He nodded his head, still smiling to himself. ‘Got plenty of spunk, I’ll say that for him. He was a town boy, East End of London, mother owned a greengrocer’s, something like that. Don’t reck’n he’d ever been up a mast before in his life. I remember watching, a squad of ten nozzers we were, and that bastard of a PO orders him over the futtock shrouds, wot we called the Devil’s Elbow. It was all of a hundred feet up. Somehow he made it, and up the rope ladder. After that it was bare pole and he’d been told to touch the button at the top.’ He looked at me quickly. ‘Difficult for you to imagine what it’s like. Most people never seen a mast that high except in the distance on one of the Tall Ships.’

  I nodded, the picture of it clear in my mind. ‘I’ve seen that mast,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me about the height of it.’

  ‘Seen it?’ He looked surprised, and when I explained, he nodded. ‘I heard it was turned into a sports centre. Best thing for it with all those messes and officers’ quarters with polished wooden decks. And the ranges, of course. So you’re into competition shooting, are you?’ He was looking at me hard as though that somehow made a difference. ‘Bisley?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Until a few years back.’

  He nodded. ‘I know somebody who practises at Shotley on the old ranges we used as kids. That’s how I know about the commercial range facilities.’

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked him, but he was already back to the story of Gareth Lloyd Jones climbing that mast. ‘Poor little bugger, he got himself to the top of the ladder and it was at that point he made the mistake of looking down. I know what it feels like, looking down from that height, because I was the cadet chosen to stand point, right on top of that fucking button. There’s a lightning conductor there and that’s all you’ve got to hang on to, standing to attention with the others manning the yard and some bloody admiral inspecting the school.’ He leaned back, his eyes half-closed, and still that smile. ‘Hadn’t thought about it till now, but yes, I suppose he’d feel I’d saved his life.’

  The way he had told it, such relish in the recollection, and now going on to explain how he had got Gareth down, talking to him all the time. ‘You get pretty close to a boy when you’ve been through an experience like that together. It wasn’t easy for either of us.’ There was a flamboyance about the man. It was as though he had an urgent need for self-dramatisation. I think this is often the case with men who are preternaturally handsome, perhaps because their looks make things appear so easy at first, and then suddenly they begin to realise looks are not enough. ‘Still in the Navy, is he?’ And when I told him Lloyd Jones had just been promoted and had left Menorca to take command of a frigate waiting for him in Gibraltar, he nodded. ‘Of course. He was cut out for it, real Navy material. But Lieutenant Commander, and a frigate of his own …’ He swirled the whisky round in his glass. ‘You sure he didn’t say anything about why he was looking for me?’ He raised his eyes, staring at me.

  ‘I don’t think I asked him,’ I said. ‘I presumed, when he said you were at school together, that you were close friends, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. We’re certainly close.’ And he smiled
as though at some private joke. He smiled a lot during that meeting on Thunderflash, but the smile never reached his eyes, and his face wasn’t a smiling face. When he smiled it was a conscious stretching of the mouth that revealed teeth so white and even they might have been false. And it wasn’t only his face that was hard. His body was hard, too. Even then I was conscious that he was a very fit, very tough man.

  ‘You saved his life twice,’ I said. But he wasn’t to be drawn on that, his mind already back to the subject of the Santa Maria and the villa up on Punta Codolar. He wanted to start fishing right away. And he added with a thin, rather wry smile, ‘Silly, isn’t it? Here I am with this boat that’s worth a small fortune, and I’m short of money and nowhere to live.’ He wanted to make the exchange right away. ‘Tomorrow. I’d like us to be free to shift our gear on to the fishing boat tomorrow. You’re not using her for anything. I’ve looked her over and she’s ready to go. So’s Thunderflash. A quick clean round the ship after we’ve gone and you could have a charter party on board by the weekend. What do you say?’

  What I said, of course, was that I’d have to talk it over with Soo and she wouldn’t be out of hospital until next morning. ‘Exchanging boats is one thing,’ I told him. ‘But that villa was my wife’s idea. I don’t know whether she’ll agree.’ For a moment I toyed with the thought that I might force through an exchange on a boat-for-boat basis, perhaps with a small cash addition, but he wasn’t that much of a fool.

  In the end he agreed to leave it over until I had had a chance to talk to Soo. ‘Ring Señor Flórez here. He’ll know where to find me. But I want that fishing boat by Saturday at the latest, tanked up with fuel and ready to go. That gives you two days, okay?’ He got to his feet then, and when I asked him whether he needed anybody local to show him the best fishing grounds, he looked at me sharply and said, ‘Don’t bother. I know where I’m going.’