Firefly Gadroon (12 page)

Now it was dusk all along the estuary. I’d zoom aground if I wasn’t careful. Lights were showing, greens, reds and yellows. What the hell did they all mean? Red for going forwards, something like that. I flicked switches experimentally. No light, nothing except the engine beating comfortably under my feet. Well, what the hell. I moved the steering-wheel and fiddled with the controls. It seemed simple enough. A throttle but no brakes. How do you stop a boat? Still, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I got her front end pointed seawards and took her forwards motion off gradually so she gradually drifted backwards towards the dune.

Looking over my shoulder I spotted Germoline, now braying anxiously trying to encourage the motionless Drummer to get them to safety. I shouted I was coming but stopped that when Germoline took a few eager paces towards me. If she wandered off or panicked now it was hopeless. Handling the boat was difficult. The best way I found after several false goes was to keep the engine slow ahead and put the wheel over inch by inch so the square end moved closer to the dune. I lodged aground with a horrible grinding noise and fell over. I had the wit to shove
the gear into neutral as soon as I got vertical again. No good drifting with the propellers broken into smithereens.

‘Okay, Germoline,’ I said, shivering with cold yet delighted at one success. Now I only had to work out how you get a donkey to climb aboard a boat from a sand dune. And the dune was now low down. The donkey cart was wheel deep and Germoline was stamping in alarm as the waves climbed her legs. Drummer was still dry.

The trouble is, everything on a boat takes time. I clambered to the front with the anchor and slung it over, then rushed about searching. No planks or boardwalks. Nothing for it. I found this harpoon thing under the side of the cockpit and used it to stove in the cabin door. As long as it was insured. More vandalism, and two planks from the bunks. I slung the rear anchor over the side, hurling it as far as my knackered condition allowed. It was the best I could do.

I flopped the planks between the gunwale and the dune’s top. It would be a steep climb, and my improvised bridge wobbled like hell. Germoline would just have to be a good balancer.

Drummer was easier than I expected though I had to drag him all the way. Then there was nowhere to lay him down except the cabin floor, so I dragged him in there with Germoline braying and screaming like a demented thing. I scrabbled back to her, just undid the straps under her belly and left the bloody cart there. By then the sea was over the wheels and the cart was tilting with every wave. The samphire was floating off, and most of my clothes were gone. I got my jacket which had lodged on a dune tuft.

Getting Germoline on the boat was a real shambles. Twice the planks tipped us off. I only got her to trust me by lugging Drummer up and showing her he was already aboard. Then she streaked up the planks on her own and
stood, drenched and shivering, half in and half out of the cockpit and coughing like an old sweat.

Drummer seemed to be breathing but I couldn’t be sure. The cabin interior was dark. Dusk had practically fallen. I found a length of rope and tied Germoline up to the struts of the cockpit. The trouble was I kept retching, probably reaction from fright, practically getting myself drowned and having to exert my atheromatous frame in an unwonted manner. And I’d swallowed half the bloody North Sea.

I covered Drummer with one of the blankets just as he was because I was scared of trying to straighten him, and bundled a pillow under his head. Then I ripped a hole in another blanket and stuck my head through like a poncho. That left a sheet for Germoline. She didn’t like it very much but I wasn’t having any backchat from a temperamental donkey at this bloody stage and bullied her into being draped with it. Then I cast off, if that’s the phrase, moving us cautiously into the main estuary with the throttle a bit forwards. I still couldn’t find any light switches. Maybe I’d stoved them in.

The boat must have moved about half a mile when Joe’s tower started flashing us. He drove me out of my mind, beaming a light right into my eyes so I could hardly see where I was going. ‘You’re too sodding late, you useless berk!’ I bawled at the light. I cut the throttle so there was hardly any movement, which was just as well because Joe’s barmy light made me run into a sandbank. Putting the engine into neutral – I couldn’t get reverse – and trusting to the sea’s velocity rocked us off and we recovered the mid-channel after some time. At least there was a red and a green light up ahead and the yacht club bar’s glowing windows. Everywhere else was in gloom now except for the lone red lights topping the old gun platforms miles out to sea.

I made the middle of the staithe by a miracle of brilliant navigation, though to be honest the tide was slower there and only one channel heads that way. The reflections from Joe’s daft searchlight even helped me a bit. If I knew how to semaphore I would have signalled what I thought of him, stupid sod.

I don’t know how long it took us to get anywhere near the stone wharf but it put years on me. Rocking boats moored in the main reach kept looming out of the darkness and they all seemed to be pointed angrily at us, but by now I didn’t care if I sank a few here and there. I was past worrying about details. If the flaming owners couldn’t be bothered to get up off their fat arses when I’m shouting that Mayday thing and floundering stark bollock naked in the briny they didn’t deserve to own bloody boats in the first place. It was the yacht club lights that saved me from driving straight at the stone wharf. When I saw them nearly in line I put the engine into neutral, left the cockpit controls and dashed forwards to chuck the anchor over. Then I did the same at the back end and cut the engine. As I did my elbow caught on a protruding button. A klaxon horn blared for an instant from the front of the cockpit. Now I find it, I thought bitterly. No lights, but a horn at last. Enough to wake the dead, or so I told myself then. I leaned my head wearily on the control panel.

‘Help’s coming,’ I said to Drummer. ‘We made it. Hold on, Germoline.’

I reached for the button and kept my hand there for what seemed hours. The horn blared and blared and blared.

They got a quack whose surgery stood across from the staithe proper. I can still see Drummer’s body on the yacht club’s new carpet. In the dreadful glare of the strip lights you could see what the bastards had done to him. He was in an appalling mess. His face was practically unrecognizable. His arms were deformed, bent the way no arms were ever meant to. Blood caked his nostrils and his stubbly chin. He must have tried to fend the blows off. It was too painful even to think about, the old bloke vainly attempting to evade the maniacal battering on the dunes . . . Somebody gave me a brandy which I fetched up, then some gin thinned out with minty stuff which I kept down.

I’ve never had much time for club people, especially golfers and these yohoho boat characters. You can never tell what they’re saying, for a start. They have private languages. But this crowd was really kind. They’d come out at a rush to our boat and ferried us off, calling their nautical terms in the night with gusto. They carried Drummer on a makeshift stretcher and cleared their posh bar for him, ignoring the muddy filth which trailed from Drummer and me. I asked somebody to please look after Germoline and was told she was safe ashore – the first time I’ve been called ‘Old Sport’ and not got mad.

The doctor gave Drummer a good cautious examination in total silence while the amateur sailors sipped rums and glanced ominously at each other. I wouldn’t go and lie down. I’d never seen so many polo neck sweaters in my life. Everybody was very friendly in an awkward embarrassed way. One or two patted my shoulder in sympathy before the doctor rose, folded her tube thing and told us Drummer was dead. ‘I’m sorry,’ was how she put it. In better times I’d have chatted her up because she was a cracker, especially for a quack, but now all I could think of was Maslow’s maddening voice. Joe was seeing to the boat I’d nicked.

They lent me some clobber, trousers, socks, oddly a pair of running shoes and the inevitable woolly sweater. I even got a crested yachting cap. People said things but I could manage nothing back. I think I got out a few words about sandbanks.

An hour or so afterwards they took me to Joe’s house. His wife Alice was still up and his two lads, Alan back from Wainwright’s and Eddie from the oyster beds, the three of them pale and quiet. I couldn’t eat the hot soupy stuff Alice gave me and just went to lie on the couch in their living room.

All night long I lay there listening to the sound of the sea. It seemed the shortest night on record, though I was sure I never slept.

Joe never rested that night. He worked like a dog, and looked worse than me at breakfast. He and two helpers had gone around all the households on the wharves knocking folk up and asking what they had seen that evening. The local school teacher hit on the bright idea of taking small portable cassette tape-recorders along. They gave the completed tapes to the bobby about six, but people had seen nothing significant, or so they said. Everybody was eager
to please. Nothing like Drummer’s death had ever happened before in Barncaster Staithe, and Drummer was a favourite among the colourful characters living locally.

I was summoned to Dr Meakin’s surgery after breakfast to make a formal indentification of Drummer. I felt stupid because there wasn’t anybody for miles around who could mistake Drummer. Anyhow I stood there, muttered my piece, and signed the policeman’s paper. Doc Meakin said how sorry she was and thanks for having tried to save him anyway. Drummer was cleaned and brushed down. He lay on a roller stretcher covered with a sheet. A few of the yachtsmen were there signing statements.

The police car brought Inspector Maslow after we’d finished the formalities. By then Drummer had been something over twelve hours dead. In Maslow came, bossy and thick. I watched him arrive with complete detachment, almost as if he were a celluloid image straight off a screen. He had a quick chat with the Staithe policeman, then asked us to clear off, all except one. Guess who. Dr Meakin went with the others after glancing at me. She was worried. I wasn’t, not any more.

Maslow crooked a finger at me, chancing his luck. ‘A word with you, Lovejoy.’ We stood like two bookends in the surgery with Drummer lying to one side. ‘Lovejoy,’ said the berk. ‘What do you know about all this?’

‘Only what I told you.’ My voice was somebody else’s. ‘Before it happened, you will recall.’

‘Never mind that,’ he snapped, puffing up. ‘The implications are you know plenty. Are you concealing evidence?’

‘No,’ I said. I was mild as a duck pond. ‘But you did.’ My head felt hot and light.

‘Me?
’

‘Yes. I notified you of a crime in good time to prevent it. And you suppressed my notification.’

He decided on attack. His sort honestly get to me worse even than traffic wardens. ‘You stole an ocean-going motorized luxury launch, Lovejoy.’

That shut me up. Well, I had. Then this big familiar-looking bloke cut in. He’d thoughtfully dallied in the hallway while the rest shuffled outside to stand around the garden lighting pipes. I recognized him as the Yank I’d saved from buying that crummy forgery of Nelson’s letter at the auction. It seemed aeons ago. He looked all nautical, which was why I’d not recognized him earlier.

‘Excuse me, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Not steal exactly. It’s my boat. Name of Naismith.’

‘And you gave him permission, sir?’ I could see Maslow was going to be stubborn.

The bloke hesitated. ‘Not exactly. But I would have, if I’d been here.’

We all thought hard. There was some New World logic in there somewhere. To me it seemed preferable to that relentless Old World stuff you can never argue with.

‘Thanks, mate,’ I told him.

‘You’re welcome.’ He ducked out again. A big bloke, he kept having to mind the low oaken beams. I noticed he again idled in the hallway, gazing absently at a seascape hanging by the stairs. Don’t say I’ve an ally at last, I hoped in disbelief. Unless he turned out to be yet another friend of Maud’s. They’d been near each other at that same auction . . . Maslow was apoplectic but trying to stay calm.

‘All right, Lovejoy,’ he said at last. ‘You can go. But watch it, that’s all. I’ll want you down at the station later—’

‘Maslow,’ I said, grinning like I’d never done before. ‘Piss off.’ There was only one witness, though I like now to think Drummer was watching too.

Maslow rounded on me, finger raised in warning. We were as pale as each other. ‘Look here, Lovejoy—’

I hit him then, sweet as a nut. He folded with a whoosh and crumpled to the floor. Lovely. I decided to save some of Maslow’s punishment for later. The big Yank hadn’t even turned round, though he must have heard.

‘So long, Drummer,’ I said to the sheet. ‘I’ll do you the gadroon. You see.’

Maslow, trying to stand, crumpled in agony again and fell between me and the door. I kneed him ever so gently on his back, still folded and grasping his belly. ‘Out of the way, Maslow. There’s justice to be done.’ The law has no sense of what’s right.

I passed the big bloke in the hall. He was still frowning at the seascape.

‘Be careful, Mr Naismith,’ I said. ‘That’s a reproduction.’

‘Is that right!’ he said affably to the seascape. ‘Well, thanks.’

I went out by the back door to avoid Doc Meakin and the others. There was a feeling I’d see more of the big Yank called Naismith.

Before I left the staithe I went over to Joe’s house at the end of the staithe. I asked Joe if I could look at the sea reach between the promontory and the big sandbar where I’d found Drummer and Germoline.

‘Can we look from your coastguard place?’

‘If you like.’ He tried grinning and failed. ‘It’s only the same sea, Lovejoy.’

Joe’s lad Alan ran ahead of us and started explaining about his dad’s telescope and instruments. The lookout space was recessed back from a balcony, with walls covered by charts of isobars and whatnot.

‘Don’t fool me, Joe,’ I said, trying my best. ‘You never get the weather right.’