Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

He had almost found the coffin this last winter. “Buggers put me in hospital, Nick.” He had told me this twenty times already, but Jimmy never liked to let a point drop until he was convinced it had been well understood. “T’weren’t my fault, nor was it. Bloody social workers! Told me I were living in a slum, they did. Told me it were the Government’s doing. I told’ em it were my home.” He coughed vilely and spat towards the houseboat that was still moored on my wharf. Mulder was supposed to live in the ugly floating hut, but I had not seen the South African since my visit to Bannister’s house in Richmond.

“You should give up smoking, Jimmy,” I said.

“Buggers would like that, wouldn’t they? There was a time when an Englishman were free, Nick, but we ain’t free now. They’ll be stopping our ale next. They’ll have us all on milk and lettuce next, like the Chinese.” The Chinese diet was one of the many matters on which Jimmy was seriously misinformed. The one subject of which he was a complete master was seamanship.

He was seventy-three now. In his twenties he had sailed in a J-class racing yacht; one of the twenty hired hands who lived in the scuttleless fo’c’sle of a rich man’s racer with a single bucket for all their waste. Jimmy’s job had been mastheadman, spending his days a hundred feet high on the crosstrees to ensure that the big sails did not tangle with the standing rigging. He had been paid three pounds and five shillings a week, with two shillings added for food and an extra pound for every race won. During the war he’d served in destroyers and been torpedoed twice. In 1947 he had become a deckhand on a small coaster that shuttled china clay and fertilizers about the Channel. Later he’d worked in trawlers, while now, no-tionally retired, he owned this clinker-built boat that hunted bass, crab and lobsters off the jagged headlands. Jimmy was a Devon seaman, tough as the granite cliffs that tried to suck his boat into their grinding undertow. I suspected that when his time came Jimmy would arrange his own death in those dark waters rather than surrender to the hospital’s oxygen tent.

Now, as we chugged downstream, I again probed Jimmy’s opin-ions of Nadeznha Bannister’s death. “I don’t reckon she’d have taken a risk,” Jimmy said. “She could sail a boat right enough, I’ll say that for the maid.”

That was like Socrates admitting that someone was a reasonably clear thinker. “Right enough to fall overboard?” I asked.

“Ah!” It was half cough and half spit. “You’re all the same, you youngsters. You think you know what you’re doing out there! I’ve seen men who knew the sea like a hound knows its master, and they still went oversides. There isn’t a law, Nick, not about the water.

How long you been sailing, now?”

“Since I was twelve.”

“How long’s that?”

I had to think. “Twenty-two years.”

Jimmy nodded happily. “And in another twenty-two, boy, you just might have learned a thing or two.”

I kept trawling for gossip. “Did you ever hear anything about Mrs Bannister?”

He shook his head. “Not that would surprise you, no.”

“I heard she might have been having an affair.”

“T’weren’t with me!” He roared with laughter, and the laugh turned into a hacking cough.

I waited for the coughing to finish. “I’ve heard rumours, Jimmy, that it wasn’t an accident.”

“Rumours.” He spat over the side. “There are always rumours.

They say she was pushed, don’t they? I heard that. And they say as how it wasn’t that Mulder fellow on deck with her, but Mr Bannister.”

“That’s new to me.”

“Just pub talk, Nick, just pub talk. The maid be dead, and nothing’ll bring her back to harbour now.”

I tried another tack. “Why does Bannister keep Mulder with him?”

“Buggered if I know. He don’t talk to me, Mr Bannister don’t. I ain’t high and mighty enough. But I don’t like that other bloke. Keeps bad company, he do. Drinks with Georgie Cullen. Remember George?”

“Of course I remember George.”

Jimmy lit one of his stubby pipes. We were turning into the wide sea-reach that was edged by the town and he stared across the river to where two Dutch pair trawlers were being scraped and painted by the old battleship buoys. The Dutch government subsidized their fishermen who could therefore afford a new trawler every other year. Their rejects were sold to us. Just short of the trawlers a motor-cruiser was trying to pick up a mooring buoy.

The skipper was bellowing at his crew, a woman, who reached vainly with a boathook, but the skipper had misjudged the tide which made the woman’s task hopeless. “You useless bloody cow!” the man shouted.

Jimmy chuckled. “Most of ’em couldn’t float an eggbox round a bloody bathtub. Call themselves sailors! It would be easier to train a bloody chimp.”

A French aluminium-hulled boat was motoring in from the sea.

I recognized the same yacht that had been moored in the pool beneath Bannister’s house the previous week. The same black-haired girl was at the tiller and I nodded towards her. “She’s a good sailor.”

“Boat comes from Cherbourg. Called Mystique .” There was very little Jimmy did not know about the river. Tourists, seeing his filthy clothes and smelling his ancient pipe, might avoid him, but his old rheumy eyes saw everything and he picked up news in the river’s small pubs with the merciless efficiency of a monofilament net. “The maid ain’t a Froggy, though,” he added.

“She isn’t?”

“American. Her father were here in the War, see. She be seeing his old haunts.” The Americans who had landed in Normandy had trained on the Devon beaches. “And she be writing a book, she do say.”

“A book?” I tried to hide my interest in the girl.

Jimmy cackled. “Reckoned you’d be hungry when you came out.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

“She say she be writing a pilot book. I thought there were plenty enough pilot books for the channel, but she do say there ain’t one for Americans. ’Spose that means we’ll be swamped by Yankee boats next.” He span his wheel to turn his boat towards the entrance of the town boatyard. It no longer made boats, but instead was a marina for the wealthy who wanted protected berthing for their yachts. I could see Wildtrack waiting for me at one of the floating pontoons. She was long, very sleek, with a wide blue flash decorating her gleaming white hull.

“Have you heard anything about someone wanting to stop Bannister from winning the St Pierre?” I asked Jimmy.

“The Froggies, of course. They’d do anything to keep him from winning it, wouldn’t they?” Jimmy had a true Devon man’s distrust of the French. He admired them as seamen, probably preferred them to any other nation, but was dubiously aware that they were not English.

Jimmy brought the heavy fishing boat alongside the pontoon with a delicacy that was as astonishing as it was unthinking. He looked over at Wildtrack and grimaced at the small crowd that waited for me. Mulder was in Wildtrack ’s cockpit. Matthew Cooper was on the pontoon with his film crew, and Anthony Bannister waited to one side with Angela beside him. Angela was wearing shorts and Jimmy growled in appreciation of her long legs. “That be nice, Nick.”

“She’d bite your head off as soon as look at you.”

“I like a maid with a bit of spirit in her.” He held out a hand to check me as I went to step on to the pontoon. “You never did have any sense, Nick Sandman, so you listen to me. You takes their damned money and you mends your boat. You let them make their daft film, and then you go off to sea. You hear me? And you don’t mess about with the dead, boy. It won’t get you nowhere.”