Peter James - A Twist of the Knife

She tapped the numbers in expectantly. But all she got was an angry buzz and the display shook.

Sod it! Why the hell hadn’t he used that one? Just to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake she entered it again. And got the same response.

She stared at the phone, thinking. She knew there were settings on some phones that only permitted you a limited number of tries at a pass code before locking you out. How many did this allow?

What the hell might he have used? On such an important phone, it must be a sequence of numbers that he would remember easily. What about his date of birth?

She entered 1948, and instantly got the same angry buzz and short, sharp shake of the display.

‘Stupid bastard!’ she said, out aloud this time. What else? She tried the numbers backwards. Same result. She tried her own date of birth backwards. Same result again. Then she shouted at the phone. ‘Come on, you are my sodding lifeline! Give me your bloody code!’

It required four numbers. How many sodding combinations of four numbers could there be? She started trying, at random, different sequences. His birth date, day and month: 1607. Day and year: 1648. Then her own. Then 0000. Each time she got the same response.

‘Please!’ she said. ‘Oh God, please let me in.’

She took the phone up on deck and saw, to her alarm, that they had veered way off course whilst she had been below. She brought the boat back round onto the correct heading, but the wind had dropped so much that she was barely making any progress at all. She needed to get some sail up, or else start the engine and motor, but she was worried about the amount of fuel they were carrying. She had always left that to Tony, but remembered that he had always been careful not to run the engine for longer than necessary. He always told her that they needed to conserve their fuel for charging up the boat’s batteries and for entering and leaving ports. Juliet 3 was a sailing yacht, not a power boat. They did not have long-range fuel tanks. How far would their fuel take her, she wondered?

The mainsail was useless, way beyond repair, one large strip of it listlessly flapping around Tony’s body, like a shroud, before slipping away and fluttering around. She would have to sail under the jib, because when she did reach Columbo harbour at Sri Lanka, she would sure as hell need to motor in — she didn’t have the skills to go in under sail.

She freed the jib sheet from the cleat, then pulled hard to unfurl it. After a few minutes of exertion, the massive sail was fully extended and filled with the wind that was coming from the stern. She could feel the boat accelerating forwards, and watched the needle on the dial steadily climb from one knot to three. The mainsail, now a huge, tattered rag, flapped uselessly.

Three knots, she thought. How long would it take to get to their destination, sailing with only the jib, making seventy-two nautical miles a day? Somewhere between two to three weeks. She stared, warily, up at her husband’s motionless body. Then, in a sudden fit of anger, she shouted up at him, ‘You want medical help, Tony? Give me your sodding phone code!’

Then she wept again. She had not prayed for years, not since she was a child. But suddenly, she found herself pressing her hands against her face and praying.

‘Oh God, please help us. Please help us.’

As if in answer, she suddenly heard a horrible, ugly cry above her. ‘ Aaarrrggghh! Aaarrrrggghh!’ She looked up and saw a gull-like bird with a sinister hooded face, as if it was wearing a mask. Spooking her, it circled the boat several times, unfazed by the sail that continued to wrap around Tony’s body then flap away, free, again. After a few minutes, slowly, unhurriedly, it soared away.

Did the bird mean she was closer to land than she realized, she wondered?

She watched it warily, until it became a tiny speck, remembering, suddenly, the albatross in the ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. Was it bad luck to see a gull, too? There was a country superstition in England that it was bad luck to see just one magpie, you needed to see another quickly. Did the same apply to gulls?

Shakily, she went below again to try the satnav and radio once more, but the satellite navigation screen was just a mass of squiggly lines and the radio continued to produce nothing but a buzz of static. She gave up on them and instead tried to study the chart, to see how far they were from the nearest port. But for several minutes, sitting at the chart table, all she could do was cry, her grief pouring out. She felt so alone, so scared and almost as if nothing mattered any more. She had lost the man she loved. Lost their life. The easiest thing would be to climb back up the steps, go to the rear of the cockpit, haul herself over the stern rail and let go.

But then she thought about her children and her grandchildren, and dabbed her eyes, blotted up the tears that had fallen onto the chart and did her best to pull herself together. It was having no one to talk to — no one at all — that was the worst thing at this moment. No one to share her grief or fear with. And the prospect of two weeks like this. Two weeks of sailing, with Tony stuck up there by the spreaders, in the full glare of the sun when it came out. There had to be a way to get him down.

Had to. Please God.

She studied the chart carefully and took measurements. Indonesia was definitely a lot closer than Sri Lanka. Five or six days’ sailing instead of about fourteen. But she wasn’t confident enough about her navigation skills to risk changing course. She could have programmed the satnav if that had been working, but although Tony had taught her how to plot a course, calculating currents and, where relevant, tides, she didn’t trust herself enough to do it alone. And for a start, she didn’t even know her exact position.

If the sky had been clear, with the sun or stars out, she might have been able to figure out her exact position from the sextant. But there was only thick, unbroken cloud. Tony had drawn, in pencil, a circle around their last position, which he had plotted yesterday evening. There was no land showing, although she knew that if she just steered a course east she would be almost bound to reach somewhere on the Indonesian coast — the country virtually formed a barrier in that direction.

But that would be taking her off the planned course, and she could not be sure of landfall remotely near anywhere that had an airport. At least if she kept going towards Sri Lanka she would be heading closer to home. And when she reached there she could find an undertaker and fly home with her husband.

Although, she suddenly remembered in her misery, Tony had always told her that he wanted to be buried at sea, and she had promised him that if he pre-deceased her, she would arrange that. How ironic, she thought now, that he had died at sea, doing what he loved, and she wasn’t able to get him down and do at least that.

Perhaps, if the authorities permitted it in Sri Lanka, she could arrange it there?

Maybe, she wondered, they were closer to land than she thought. How far could gulls fly from land? Thousands of miles? Perhaps. Some birds flew great distances when they migrated, didn’t they? Where had that one, with its sinister hooded face, come from?

She went back up on deck, swung the wheel to bring them back on course, then looked at the broken self-steering mechanism, wondering if there was any way she could fix it. But she could see that a whole central cog had ripped away. Nothing short of welding was going to fix it.

She resigned herself to having to man the helm for as long as she could, and sleeping for as little as possible.

The sun was high in the sky now and, despite the light breeze, it was sweltering on deck. She tried to look up, but the sight of the lifeless body of the man she had loved so much swinging around in the bosun’s chair, and the creepy sail that kept furling around him like a shroud, was too much for her to bear. Instead she stared, steely-eyed, ahead, her gaze fixed on the far horizon beyond the prow of the vessel.