Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

The wind was shifting about skittishly from moment to moment but blowing mostly from the west: which meant that the powerboats on their mainly westerly course would be headed directly into it.

All of which meterological observation the Saint summed up to himself in this way: navigation straight forward, thanks to the visibility, but in every other way a rough, tough race.

He girded up his figurative loins to meet this prognostication by consuming a leisurely and substantial hotel breakfast. As he munched his way imperturbably through grapefruit, wheat-flakes, a buttered Finnan haddock that overhung the plate, and a mountain of toast, washed down with a pint or so of coffee, he looked forward to the exertion to come.

The diet wasn’t the recipe for obesity that it might have been. He expected to burn it all up very quickly in the race. He expected to use a lot of energy in the eight or ten hours it might take him to win it. He knew that besides the drain of continued concentration on achieving every bit of non-suicidal speed the conditions might allow, there would be the constant exertion of riding the boat’s bucking motion so as to stay approximately upright and functional for all the time. He knew that he and his partner would need to draw liberally on their fitness, and he fully expected to see some of the competition drop out sooner or later for want to that same fitness.

He had dressed for the race simply and practically in tough canvas trousers and oiled-wool sweater. As he strolled out of the hotel entrance, he met a shorter strong-looking man who was similarly clad but with the addition of a dark wollen beret on his close-cropped head.

“OK, Vic?” The Saint grinned, clapped his navigator on the shoulder, and fell into step beside him.

“Positively rarin’ to go, Soimon.”

An answering grin split Vic’s broad canny face, which had the high colour of a man who had spent most of his life in the open air, summer and winter.

“Tin’t ’alf gointa be rough roide, though,” he added with a glance at the sky.

“Looks like it,” the Saint agreed. “But there’s one consolation in that. If it’s uncomfortable for us, think how uncomfortable it’s going to be for at least one member of the Tatenor team. And if that slows ’em down a fraction, I don’t suppose you and I’ll be the first to complain.”

“Reck’n not,” Vic agreed, with a broad cheerful wink and a single oblique sweep of the head that was an expressive gesture halfway between an affirmative nod and a negative shake. “But ut’s a fast boat they’ve got there, arl roight... a moighty fast boat.”

He paused as they turned to walk the last hundred yards along the harbour wall past most of the opposition to the Privateer’s mooring. “Reck’n we can beat ’em though,” he added thoughtfully.

“I reckon we can,” said the Saint.

Vic Cullen was a boatbuilder from Bursledon, across the Solent. After thirty years’ working with boats, on and off the water, there wasn’t much anybody could teach him on the subject. He had built the Privateer virtually single-handed to a design he and Simon had worked out together. His only help with the work had come from the Saint himself in the odd intervals of his exigent adventures elsewhere.

The teams of scrutineers were busy with their final inspections, and the salt breeze carried a low babble of voices from the waiting competitors, punctuated intermittently by the raucously variegated notes of motors starting up. Beneath that man-made and evanescent hubbub was something powerful and eternal — the rhythmical slap and swell of the sea. Even here against the harbour wall its motion was noticeably stronger than it had been in the last few days, and as Simon and Vic neared the short jetty where the Privateer was moored they could see her scarlet hull bobbing up and down impatiently, and hear the stretched creaking of wet rope as she tugged at her moorings.

“Strainin’ at the leash, look,” Vic said with pride; and the Saint nodded and smiled, sharing that same pride.

“Scrutineers should be with us in a few minutes,” he said. “She’ll just have to contain herself till they’ve done.”

This was her first race; and it was for racing above all that this trim compact boat had been built. She was every inch a beauty; but it was the beauty of a spare and functional design. Every line of that sleek hull, from the futuristically cutaway stern to the streamlined cockpit canopy and steeply raked bow, had been calculated for speed. She was a thoroughbred racing machine, a slim-line twenty-two-foot lightweight with a modest five litres of engine and with the irreducible minimum of fittings and frivolities allowable within the race rules, which in those days were not over-elaborate.

Those days were, roughly speaking, the beginning of the modern revivalist era of powerboating competition, before the introduction of more rigid systems of boat classification and qualification. Less than midway through the twentieth century, the sport had been enthusiastically rediscovered after a lengthy neglect, and its free-for-all freshness attracted a colourfully wide range of hopefuls.

The Cowes-to-Penzance race that year was a typical result; but the record books will be found to be mysteriously obscure on the subject if not altogether blank. The fact is, nevertheless, that there were thirty-six entrants in all: thirty-six assorted boats receiving the scrutineer’s final check on that windy August morning.

The degree of assortedness was astonishing. Simon Templar had cast an incredulous eye over many of them, and had decided that the owners’ choice of names for their boats offered a rough and ready indication of their chances.

Those blazoned with the most intimidating appellations — Thundershark, Tornado, Hell for Leather and the like — mostly turned out to be the tiny, infinitely hopeful outboarders. At the other extreme were the half dozen big thirty-five- and forty-footers representing the brute force approach: plenty of bulk and up to a thousand horses of petrol or diesel power to blast it across the waves. For some reason, maybe connected with having a faulty sense of humour, the proud owners of these jumbo-size entries tended to have given them coy names like Buckaboo, entered by Sammy Topwith of motor racing fame, Big Bouncie, a fancied US contender, and Skimmie, the great hope of the Aussies.

Somewhere in among this litter of the inept and the overpowered was the gold of real racing, boats built for the job and handled by men who knew what it took and had what it took. The names in this group had a romantic flavour that suggested their clean graceful lines: Dolphin II, Red Marlin, Silver Lady, the crack Italian boat Bellissima — and Simon Templar’s Privateer.

Moored near the Privateer was Charles Tatenor’s massive yellow boat, the Candecour. With her overall length of thirty-eight feet and her six-hundred horsepower twin Rolls-Royce diesel engines she fell decidedly into the brute-force category, although the name was an exception to the general trend, and had no obvious derivation that the Saint could see. She was a conversion rather than a purpose-built job, but in this case the work had been carefully and professionally done even though most of the luxury fittings had been preserved. Tatenor had even added to the ostentation, by having the external trim finished off with a series of intricately carved mahogany panels and an ornate figurehead in the shape of an eagle; all of which gave the Candecour an outward air of rococo excess that belied its brisk performance on the water.

Tatenor himself was standing a few yards away on the quayside with Fournier. Each of the two men was wearing a one-piece waterproof suit and carrying a bright orange crash helmet.