‘Yes, I’ve thought of that.’ He nodded. ‘But there’s over two hundred men on this ship and most of them know you’re here.’ He got up, pacing back and forth behind me so nervously that I began to think it must be a more personal matter he wanted to discuss. He and Soo had probably been corresponding while he was in Malta, or before he had left Gibraltar. They might even have made up their minds already. But then he said, ‘How well do you know Pat?’
‘Evans?’ I swung round in my chair.
‘Yes.’ He had stopped pacing. ‘What do you know about him?’
‘Not very much.’ I paused. ‘No more really than Carp has told me.’
He leaned down, staring at me. ‘Tell me something.’ His dark eyes fixed themselves on my face. ‘The murder weapon – a rifle was it?’
‘An AK-47,’ I told him. ‘The sniper version with folding butt.’
‘So you’ve seen it?’
I didn’t say anything. It had been such an easy trap and I had fallen for it.
‘Where did you see it? Did that man Barriago give it to you?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Was Pat involved?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty certain he was and I was trying to tell you when you shut me up. I don’t know whether he acquired the weapon for Barriago, but he certainly disposed of it.’ He listened to me then as I told him what had happened, how I’d found the gun tucked away at the stern end of the starb’d engine compartment under the prop shaft, how I’d taken it up to the villa and concealed it under the floorboards in the kitchen.
‘And now they’ve found it.’
‘Apparently.’
Silence then and the sound of a door slamming, both of us thinking about that message from Menorca. Suddenly he laughed. ‘So you paid him back in his own coin, and now he’s fixed you again.’ His laughter was without mirth. ‘Par for the course,’ he muttered. ‘And now?’ He stared at me as though expecting an answer, then shrugged and sat down opposite me. ‘I gather that fellow Carpenter has told you about my being sent to live with Moira Evans at Felixstowe Ferry, and then Pat arriving?’ He nodded. ‘He would know, of course – all the gossip, all the things they said. Felixstowe Ferry! My God!’ He was smiling and shaking his head. ‘Lost my innocence there, found a no-good bastard of a half-brother – then, years later … But you know about that.’
‘The Haven buoy?’
He nodded. ‘That Haven buoy episode hangs round my neck like a millstone. It’s the cause …’ He put his head in his hands, rubbing the palms of them over his eyes. ‘He crucified me. He didn’t know it at the time. He thought he was saving my life, but he crucified me – and now the agony begins.’
‘What agony?’ I asked. His face had gone very pale, his eyes half-closed. ‘You all right?’ He looked as though he might pass out. His eyes flicked open then, his mind on something else. I asked him about his use of the word bastard. ‘Did you mean that literally? Is Evans your father’s illegitimate son?’
He didn’t answer for a moment, then suddenly he burst out laughing. ‘Is that what Carpenter told you, man? If so, he’s got it the wrong way round. Whatever else Pat is, he’s legitimate.’ And then, his mood changing again, he put his elbows on the table, his head thrust forward. ‘Look now, I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone else. In confidence, mind you. You’ll see why. You’ve heard part of it, so you may as well know it all. Especially as it’s my belief you’ve now got the boat they brought the stuff ashore in.’ He nodded towards the bottle. ‘Help yourself. This may take a little time.’ He leaned back, drawing on his cigarette. ‘The King’s Fleet mean anything to you?’
‘By the entrance to the Deben River, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘I heard you visited Woodbridge and Felixstowe Ferry a while back when you were searching for a boat. The Fleet was used by the Vikings, and the Romans before them. Now it’s cut off from the river by a high flood bank. But there’s still a few stretches of water left. When I was about fourteen and living for a time at the Ferry, Pat and I used to bird-watch there. It was a great place for nesting swans, some of the rarer water birds, too.’ And he added, ‘It was only later I discovered Pat’s real interest – he liked to smash the eggs with steel balls fired from a catapult, or try and put out a swan’s eye with it.’
‘Charming!’ I murmured, but he picked me up on that.
‘It wasn’t viciousness, you understand. It was a question of marksmanship. Later he acquired an airgun. It was the challenge, you understand. He didn’t think about the cruelty of it. He hasn’t that sort of imagination.’ He shook his head, staring vacantly at his empty glass, his mind back in the past. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t have any imagination at all. I’m not sure.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘You were going to tell me what happened there.’
‘Oh yes.’ He nodded. ‘Over four years ago now. I was on leave, the first since my wife and I split up. I thought it would be fun to go back to Suffolk, stay at the Ferry, particularly as it was November, a good time for bird-watching.’ He leaned back, his eyes half-closed again. ‘The second night I was there, after the evening meal, I took some chocolate biscuits and a Thermos of coffee and rum and walked along the Deben bank to the King’s Fleet. Half a mile or so in from the river there’s a series of little Broads-type lakes. The farmer had parked a trailer there part-loaded with bags of fertiliser. It made an ideal hide and I hadn’t been propped up there, my back against the bags, more than half an hour before I heard the beat of wings. They passed almost directly over my head, five dark shapes against the Milky Way, the beat fading, then strengthening again as the birds circled. Suddenly I had them in the glasses, coming in low, the wet glimmer of the Fleet shattered, a flurry of water as they breasted it, then only ripples and the five shapes gliding ghostly white. Five Brent, and if nothing else happened that night it would have been worth it just to see the way they touched down. It was magic.’
Recalling the pleasure of that night was, I think, a sort of displacement activity for him. It helped to relieve some of the tension, his eyes half-closed, his mind totally concentrated and the Welsh lilt in his voice suddenly quite pronounced, the words with a poetic touch: ‘… a slow, heavy beat, a single bird this time and quite invisible until the splash of its touchdown showed white on the black pewter surface of the Fleet. It was a swan, but it carried its neck stiff like a column, with none of the graceful curve of the ubiquitous mute. It looked like a Bewick, a juvenile, the feathers drab instead of white. And then I thought it might possibly be a whooper. It would be unusual, but by then it was past midnight and I felt anything could happen, having already had a very good night with the sighting of a goosander as well as three grebes among the coots.’
He was smiling to himself, reliving a night that was indelibly etched on his mind ‘I drank the last of my coffee and rum with the buildings of Felixstowe Ferry sharp-etched against the light of the rising moon, the dark line of the sea’s horizon just visible. When the moon finally rose above the sea the patches of water close by me were full of shadow shapes, coots bobbing their white-blazed heads, mallard and pochards motionless, the swans gliding slowly; no zephyr of a breeze, everything frozen still, a light winking far away in the approaches to Harwich. I remember I started thinking about another night, when I had come out to the Fleet with Pat and his father; then suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine.’
His eyes flicked open, dark pupils with the glazed look of jet. ‘It came from beyond the hill where an old farmhouse stood among some trees, a low hill that marked the limit of what had once been the great marsh that was part of the vanished port of Goseford. I waited for the sound of it to fade away towards Kirton village and the main Felixstowe-Ipswich road, but instead it gradually increased, no lights and a shadow moving on the road down from the farm.’
Through his glasses he had seen it was a van, the engine quieter as it coasted without lights down the slope to the Fleet. Duck shooters was his first though
t – poachers. There were two of them in the van and they had driven straight on, finally parking against the high grass bank that shut the Fleet off from its entrance into the Deben. ‘I didn’t worry about them after that, presuming they were fishermen. Now that the moon was clear of cloud I could see that what I had thought was a goosander, the pinkish breast showing pale and the down-turned bill just visible, was in fact a red-breasted merganser, a much more likely bird to see close by an East Coast estuary. I watched for another half-hour, and then a breeze sprang up, blowing in little gusts off the North Sea and bitterly cold. There was a dampness in the air, too, so that a rime of frost formed on my anorak. My fingers were numb by then and I got to my feet, climbing down off the trailer, and after picking up my knapsack with the Thermos flask in it, I headed down the track towards the Deben. Several times I stopped to watch the Fleet, my breath smoking and the birds mostly hidden now among the reeds, or still shadows fast asleep. It was just after one when I reached the grass-grown bank of the river.’ He paused. That was when I heard the sound of voices and the clink of metal on metal, the clatter of a halyard frapping.’
He was staring straight at me, his eyes blacker than ever in the glare of the wall light. ‘It was a little unnerving really. I was alone, you see, and yet I couldn’t help it. I had to know what it was all about. So I clambered up the bank, and as soon as my head cleared the top of it, I stopped.’ He paused again, and it was almost as though he did it for effect. Then he went on, his voice very quiet: ‘Tide was at the full, and it was a spring tide, the river and the inlet of the King’s Fleet almost brimming over with water, otherwise they would never have got it in there. I just stood there, gaping at the thing, it was such an incredible sight – a large catamaran, black-hulled, its single aluminium mast gleaming like silver in the moonlight. It was moored stem-on to the bank with an anchor out in the middle of the Fleet, and there were men passing cases up through a hatch in the starb’d hull to others on the bank.’
His hand was gripped on the edge of the table, the stub of his cigarette burning unheeded in the ashtray. ‘The quick furtiveness of their movements, their faces covered by stocking masks, gave a weirdness to the scene, the moon bright now and everything very clear and sharp in the frost. I snuggled down in the whitened grasses. Smugglers! I wasn’t sure, but clearly something was being run ashore at dead of night, and that meant contraband of some sort.’ His eyes flicked up at me. ‘What the hell do you do in a situation like that?’ And he went on, softly as though talking to himself. ‘I was alone, you see. I trained my glasses on them. There were three on deck, two ashore, and another passing the cases up. Six altogether, and one of them standing with his hand on his hip … I focused the glasses on the case being passed up over the stern, searched the growing pile on the bank. That’s when I began to be really scared.’
He was silent for a moment, staring into space. ‘It wasn’t drink, you see, nor drugs. It was arms! I wasn’t in any doubt. There were long cases that could only contain hand-held rocket-launchers, others that looked more like rifles, but it was the ammunition boxes – I’d seen too many of those not to recognise them instantly.’
He stopped then, stubbing out his cigarette, and in the silence I was conscious again of the ship’s sounds, and of the movement, too. ‘Maybe he caught the glint of my binocular lenses in the moonlight,’ he went on slowly. ‘Whatever it was, he was suddenly looking straight at me. Then he said something to the others and they froze, their stockinged faces all turned towards me.’ He shook his head. ‘It was unbelievable. The coincidence of it. The two of us …’ His voice faded into silence.
‘You mean it was Evans?’
‘Yes. Pat.’ He nodded. ‘And now – again. Out here. It’s as though some devilish fate …’ He left the sentence unfinished, and when I asked him what had happened, he shrugged. ‘What you’d expect, considering the cargo they were running. They had a man in the outfield, hidden in the tall grasses by the sluice. I ran straight into him. Big fellow. Rose up right in front of me and knocked me out, cold. Next thing I knew I was lying on the wooden grating of the catamaran’s steering platform with Pat bending over me.’ And after a moment he said, ‘Lucky for me. They’d have killed me if he hadn’t been there.’ He lit another cigarette, his eyes closed, his mind far away so that I had to get the rest of it out of him by question and answer.
When he had come round the catamaran was already under way. He could hear the winches clicking as the sails were hoisted and hardened in. Then the engines were cut and Evans whispered urgently to him to lie still. ‘I could hear voices on the deck for’ard, Irish voices, and Pat with his mouth right against my ear telling me he’d slip me into the water as close to Woodbridge Haven buoy as possible. He told me they’d tied up to it on the way in, waiting for the tide to make over the bar. The warp hadn’t been double-ended, so instead of slipping it, they had cut it.’
He stopped there, apparently lost in the memory of that night and what had happened after they’d crossed the bar.
‘And that was the rope you used to lash yourself to the buoy,’ I prompted.
He nodded slowly. ‘He had me flung overboard up-tide of the buoy so that I pretty well drifted down on to it. They were Irish on board, not East Coasters, and they didn’t understand. They wanted me dead, but not with a bullet in my guts. Found drowned –’ He smiled wryly. ‘Nobody can ever be accused of murder if you’re picked up out of the sea with your lungs full of water.’
‘But why did he do it?’ I asked. The blood relationship was all very well, but the man was running arms to the IRA in England…
‘There was a condition, of course.’ I hardly heard the words, they were spoken so softly.
‘But you couldn’t possibly keep quiet about it,’ I said. Anyway, he hadn’t attempted to conceal the fact that he had seen them landing arms at the King’s Fleet. ‘Or was it just his identity you promised not to reveal?’
He nodded, ‘I swore I’d never tell anyone I’d recognised him. I wouldn’t have done, anyway,’ he murmured. ‘He knew that. But he made me swear it all the same.’
‘Then why have you told me?’ I asked him.
He got up suddenly and began pacing back and forth again, his shoulders hunched, the new cigarette burning unheeded in his hand. When I repeated the question, he said, ‘I’m not sure really.’ He stopped just behind my chair. ‘To show you the sort of man Pat is. That’s one reason. A warning. And at the same time …’ He went over to his desk and sat down, pulling the message slip out of his pocket and going through it again. ‘God in heaven!’ he murmured. ‘Why doesn’t he get the hell out? Now, while nobody knows he’s involved.’
And then he turned to me. ‘He’s not all bad, you see. And to end up in prison. A life sentence. He’s not the sort of man who could bear imprisonment. Freedom is everything to him. That’s why he deserted from the Navy, why he couldn’t stand any ordinary sort of job. It’s against his nature, you understand.’ He was pleading with me, trying to persuade me to keep quiet about where I had found that Russian gun. I remembered Soo’s words then, wondering what exactly the relationship had been between this man, who was now the Captain of a Royal Navy frigate, and his half-brother, who was a gun-runner, what they had felt for each other when they were both youngsters at Ganges and Pat Evans had got him down from the top of that mast.
He looked up at me suddenly. ‘How old’s that catamaran you sailed to Malta?’
‘It was built six years ago,’ I said.
He nodded perfunctorily as though it was what he had expected. ‘The hulls are painted white now, but underneath – any sign of black paint?’
‘You’d have to ask Carp,’ I told him. But neither of us were in any doubt it was the same boat.
He didn’t say anything after that, sitting hunched at the desk the way he had been when I had come down from the bridge to have a drink with him, his mind closed to everything else but the signals lying there under his hands.
The loudspeake
r burst into life, a muffled announcement about the deadline for posting letters home. He listened to it briefly, then returned to the papers.
‘About tomorrow?’ I reminded him.
He looked up, frowning. ‘I’ll think about it. Meanwhile, if. you’ve finished your drink …’ He returned to the papers, his withdrawn manner making it clear the period of intimacy was over. ‘See you in the morning.’ But then, as I was going out, he stopped me. ‘Ever done any board-sailing?’ And when I told him I had run sailboard courses when I first came to Menorca, he nodded. ‘That might help.’ And he added, ‘I’ll think about it. Let you know in the morning.’
I went up to the bridge then, standing inconspicuously by the radar, watching the knife-like bows rise and fall beyond the twin barrels of the 4.5-inch guns, the white glimmer of the bow wave either side, my body adapting to the pitch and roll as we drove north-westwards through breaking seas. The wind had backed into the north and was blowing about force five. Standing in the dark like that, conscious of the engines vibrating under my feet, the sound of them overlaid by the noise of the sea, and the watch on duty still like shadows all about me, there was an extraordinary sense of isolation, of time standing still. I was thinking of Thunderflash and the voyage to Malta, all the other occasions when I had been alone at the helm, just the sea and my thoughts for company. But now it was different. Now I had the feeling I had reached some sort of watershed.
Tomorrow! And my life slipping through my mind. Nothing achieved, never anything solid, all I had built in Menorca breaking in my hands, Soo, the business, everything, and now that bloody catamaran … ‘Care for some coffee, sir? Or there’s kai if you prefer it.’ One of the leading seamen was standing at my elbow with a tin tray full of mugs. I chose the chocolate and took it over to the chart table, where the Navigating Officer was now checking our position against the plot. ‘Do you know where we’ll be anchoring?’ I asked him as he completed the log entry.
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