Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

Somehow I was on my feet. My head was spinning, but I knew I had to get out, and fast. Instinctively, I headed away from the fire, through the door of the cabin, back towards the galley. No sooner had I got the door shut behind me, than I heard the diesel fuel ignite and felt the boat rock as an explosion filled the cabin. Heat seared the door, and the wood twisted and blackened.

I kept going, past the bedroom, cannoning off the doors and bulkheads, and found myself in the saloon. I knew that just in front of here were the gas bottles, and it wasn’t the place to be in a fire. When the flames and heat reached this far, Kestrel would be blown to bits, even if the fuel tank didn’t go up first.

At the fore-end was a small door out onto the bow. It was padlocked on the outside, but the only other way out was through one of the tiny windows. I threw myself desperately against the door, feeling the frame give slightly under the impact. I tried again and again. The wood began to splinter. I could hear the boat burning fiercely behind me, and I glanced back to see flames licking under the saloon door.

With one final, desperate lunge, I crashed through the hatch and stumbled helplessly out onto the bow. With a roar, the fuel tank exploded, and fire leaped out to scorch my back. I threw myself forward into the darkness and plunged instantly into freezing water. The shock drove the breath from my lungs, but I managed to keep my head for a minute or two as I pumped my legs and thrashed my arms to put as much distance between myself and the blazing boat as I could.

Finally, I was forced to come up for air. The night was lit up like daylight by the flames roaring towards the sky. I could see the stern cabin had been blown away completely, and the missing roof exposed a glowing inferno.

I splashed about until I was on the far side of the canal and within reach of the pilings on the bank. My wet clothes were weighing me down, and I was conscious of the bulk of the package slipping down inside my coat. With one hand, I reached in and pulled out the sodden envelope and tossed it onto the bankside.

Even then, I found that I lacked the strength to pull myself up. All I could do was cling to the pilings and watch Kestrel burn.

Detective Sergeant Graham and I were both wrapped up in coats and scarves as we stood on the towpath next day and watched scenes of crime officers in paper suits go over the blackened wreck of the boat. Our breath steamed the frosty air as I waited for Graham to speak. But for a while he seemed content to let me stew. His expression was more worried than ever, and his face was pale with cold under his stubble.

‘Did nobody see anything?’ I asked at last.

He gave me an impatient glower. ‘The couple who pulled you out of the water saw nobody. And the lady in the next house over there only remembers you, Mr Buckley. The same neighbour who told us you’d visited Ash Lodge previously.’

‘Mrs Wentworth.’

‘That’s the lady’s name.’

‘Yes, you know perfectly well I visited Ash Lodge. I didn’t deny it. I came to see Samuel Longden, but he wasn’t here.’

‘Remind me, was that before or after the time you were supposed to meet him in Lichfield market square?’

‘Before, obviously. Afterwards—’

‘Afterwards, he was dead. Of course. You seem to have had bad luck trying to meet up together. But looking for him on his boat nearly three weeks after his death seems a bit desperate, sir.’

I gritted my teeth to prevent myself from getting angry at the insinuations. I wasn’t in the best of moods. As far as I was concerned, I’d been brained with a windlass and then almost burned to death before nearly drowning in the canal. Was it too much to expect a bit of sympathy?

It was the owners of Rose Marie , moored further along the bank, who’d come to my rescue with a life belt and a boat hook. Having dragged me to the towpath side and onto solid ground, they’d tried to persuade me to go to hospital for treatment. But apart from a few minor burns and scratches, the worst injury was the gash in my scalp where the windlass had hit me, and the raging headache it had left me with.

In another few minutes, I might have yielded to common sense and gone for a check-up. But the policeman who’d turned up with the fire brigade had been interested only in getting my name and address and my garbled version of events. He’d questioned me suspiciously as I sat and shivered in front of the stove on Rose Marie , wrapped in a blanket.

In the end, the policeman’s attitude had made me feel so angry that I could think of nothing else except sneaking off to collect the package which I’d dropped in the long grass on the far bank, and which I desperately hoped might contain something that would give me a clue why all this was happening. Only when I’d done that, I thought, would I feel able to get off home to a couple of paracetamols and a warm bed.

But it had been hours before I was able to get away. I’d been forced to stay and watch while the firemen performed the futile and ironic task of pouring water into a boat, a paramedic patched up my wounds, and my new boater friends had hunted round to find me some dry clothes. Even after the firefighters and the police had left, I’d waited in my car until I was sure that the Rose Marie people were settled down for the night. Then I’d walked along the towpath to the nearest footbridge, a quarter of a mile along the canal, before I could work my way along the edge of the fields and locate my package — a soaking mess in the grass.

By then, I’d been nearly blind with weariness and pain. I’d driven back to Lichfield in a stupor, like someone drugged. A few hours later, I’d woken up lying on my bed in my clothes, soaked in sweat and stiff with bruising, whimpering with terror — only to be called back to the scene and forced to explain myself all over again to DS Graham on a freezing canal bank.

‘If you’ve talked to Mrs Wentworth, she’ll have told you that the reason I came out here last night was because she rang me,’ I said.

‘Yes, she did,’ admitted Graham.

‘And she rang me because she couldn’t get any satisfactory response from the police.’

‘I’ve checked with the control room. She did make two calls, but the information she gave was very vague. A patrol came by during the evening, but everything seemed to be quiet.’ He shrugged. ‘We get a lot of calls like that. Especially from householders in this sort of area. Strange noises at night, you know. Very common.’

‘So she rang me instead, and I came. But there seems to have been someone else here too. Doesn’t there, sergeant?’

‘If your version of events is correct, Mr Buckley.’

I knew I was fighting a losing battle. Everything that happened seemed to conspire to convince the police that I was a one-man crime wave. For the moment, Graham would have to be allowed to believe that I’d set fire to Kestrel myself. I had no evidence to prove otherwise. Moreover, I hadn’t even got a theory about why any of it had happened.

But I knew that I had an accurate memory of the smell of diesel, as well as the subtle movement of the boat like someone stepping on and off the stern. Had the fire been meant for me personally? If so, why? Had this unidentified person realised I’d find something on board Kestrel ? But who had known I’d be there at the boat? And who’d known that Godfrey Wheeldon had given me the keys? There was no one person that fitted the bill for both questions, which made the whole thing impossible.

‘And you say you got the keys to the boat from a gentleman in Cheshire?’ said DS Graham with a disbelieving rise in his voice.