Hammond Innes - High Stand

We talked it over for a while, Miriam building castles, mentally leaping ahead to a full-blown mine, and myself doing the best I could to keep her feet somewhere near the ground. It was all good fun, dreaming dreams and both of us involved. Finally she paid the bill — she insisted absolutely and I let her, because it was her evening, the start of an attempt to build a future for herself from the wretchedness of what had happened. Then we went out into the shadowy world of Coal Harbour quay, the night very still with low cloud so that the water and the old boathouses were lit by the reflected glow of the city’s lights.

We reached the uneven, pot-holed surface of the private roadway leading westward to the hotel, walking arm-in-arm, not talking now — just content to let the stillness and the magic of the night work on us, conscious of our closeness and the hours ahead. We were approaching the entrance to the marina and stopped for a moment to watch one of those fast big game fishing boats gliding in towards the pontoon. ‘That’s what I’d like,’ Miriam said. ‘A boat like that, so I could explore — ‘ She walked on.

We were just passing the approach to one of the parking bays when a car’s engine started. The lights flicked on at high beam, our shadows leaping across the roadway. Startled, our eyes were blinded. Then the engine revved and in the instant that the car began moving down on us with a squeal of tyres, something triggered inside me, an instinct of preservation. I flung Miriam forward — The marina. Run!

Thank God she didn’t hesitate. We made it as the car hurtled past us, scraping the wall and screeching to a halt. The sound of doors and voices calling in the darkness. But by then we were down the ramp and onto the floating pontoon. There was a crack like a backfire and something smacked into the water beside us. Feet sounded on the ramp, the pontoon swaying. I took the second bay, a pontoon full of parked boats, hoping to God I had picked the right one, the boats all dark, not a soul about.

And then I saw it — the high, white bow of that fishing cruiser gliding in towards the end of the pontoon. ‘Jump or swim,’ I gasped. ‘We’ve got to make that boat.’ I gave one quick glance over my shoulder. ‘Can you make it?’

‘Yes.’ She was close behind me and even then I noticed her breasts, the way she moved. And then we were almost at the end of the pontoon and I was calling to the skipper high on the open bridge: ‘Mayday! Mayday!’ I yelled. ‘Need your help. Muggers.’

He reacted quite instinctively, closing the gap to the pontoon-end just as I reached it. I jumped, landing on my feet and staggering against the wheelhouse. Miriam landed beside me. ‘Full ahead — please,’ I called up to the man above me. ‘They’re armed.’

He must have seen them running towards him along the pontoon, for he didn’t hesitate, slamming his cruiser into gear, and as the screws bit, he increased the revs, lifting the bows half out of the water and swinging the boat away in a boiling arc towards the pale line of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club boat sheds.

He was the owner, an American by the sound of it. ‘You want the police?’ he asked as we joined him on the open bridge. ‘I got R/T down below.’

‘Did you see their faces clearly?’ I asked. ‘Could you identify them?’

But of course he had been too occupied getting his boat away. ‘If you hadn’t called Mayday…’ He shrugged, cutting down on the revs and settling back in his swivel chair, idling across the harbour as I said who we were and told him something of what I thought it was all about. ‘So you can’t identify them? You’re a lawyer and you don’t see what the police can do about it?’ He sat there for a moment, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, gazing out at the dark outline of the Coal Harbour buildings. A car was disappearing up towards Georgia Street, otherwise there was no sign of movement. ‘I’m from California,’ he said, ‘and down there we get to hear a lot about what drugs do to people, the way kids act — anything to get the next fix; and of course the millions to be made by the men running the racket. You want my advice?’ He turned his head sharply, leaning forward and staring at us through his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘You get the hell out, back to England, and fast. That’s my advice. And if they need you back over here to give evidence, you make damn sure you’re under police protection every second you’re here. You, too, lady. Okay?’ He stood up, increasing the revs again and heading in for the lit bulk of the hotel.

He put us ashore by backing up to the bows of one of the charter cruisers. ‘Just remember what I said,’ he called down to us. ‘I’ve been in politics as well as business and I know what these boys can do, the sort of hoodlums their money buys them. It may seem all right in England, but over here …’ He laughed, raising his hand in a casual salute, screws frothing as he eased away. ‘And look after the little lady, eh?’ The American voice came faintly back to us across the water. We went up to my room and I did my best, lying there, naked between the sheets, the lights fading, the water blackening, a world of beauty nodding off to sleep. And in the dawn, in the first greying of the light, the hills upside down in the flat mirror of Burrard Inlet and the ashtray beside our bed full of stubbed-out butts, in that dawn reality stood like a silent ghost staring in at the big windows — a golden future for us both, and all I could think of was those bloody hunters waiting up in the Yukon, the two of us lying in each other’s arms and the shadow of the drug ring hanging over us …