Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

“Hell, Nick, I’d love to know who’s bugging Bannister, but it sure as hell isn’t me. Ssh!” She put a finger to my lips because Wildtrack II had swung round, accelerated, and now the searchlight slid towards us again. Mulder cut the throttles once more and I cautiously raised my head to see the big powerboat coming slowly down this western bank. I could sense Mulder’s confusion from the erratic movements of the light, but there was still a chance that he would find us.

Jill-Beth wriggled herself into a semblance of comfort. “How long will that bastard keep looking?”

“God knows.”

“I need to get back to Mystique . I left all my papers in the cabin.”

“We’ll just have to wait.” I paused. “Is that why you were with Mulder tonight? Hoping he’d say something incriminating?”

“Sort of.” She grinned at me. “You must have thought I was a real creep, but the chance to talk to him was just too good. But the bastard set me up. He knew just why I was here.”

“How did he know?”

“Beats me.” She raised her head to watch the light, then subsided again. “Why was that girl chewing you up?”

“Bannister wants me to be his navigator in the St Pierre. I’ve refused. She got upset.”

She stared at me in silence, perhaps puzzled that I should refuse such an offer. Then she shrugged. “I’m sorry to involve you, Nick.”

“Don’t be sorry. I wanted to be involved.”

Her big eyes reflected dark in the night. She said nothing, nor was there anything that I cared to say, so instead I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

She returned the kiss, then placed her head on my shoulder. We stayed still. I did not know just what tangle she was drawing me into, I only knew that I wanted to be a part of it. I sensed a tension flow out of her.

We talked then. Mulder searched for us, but we crouched in the dinghy and talked. She told me she came from Rhode Island, but now lived on Cape Cod. Her father was in the US Navy. I told her that my father was in jail, and that Bannister’s house had been my childhood home.

She told me Mystique was a cow to sail, but she had not wanted to bring her own boat over from Massachusetts because the crossing would have wasted valuable time. I asked her if hers was a big boat and she said yes, then wrinkled her nose prettily and told me she was kind of affluent. I told her I was kind of poor.

She said Sycorax was a great-looking boat. I agreed. I also decided that fate had been kind in sending this girl to my river. She was swift to laugh and quick to listen. We talked of sailing and she told me of a bad night when she’d been single-handed on the western side of Bermuda. I knew those reefs, and sympathised. She’d been a watch-captain on one of the boats caught in the ’79 Fastnet storm and I listened jealously to her descriptions.

We talked, almost oblivious of Mulder’s fumbling search, but then his light suddenly went out and the sound of his twin engines died away to leave an ominous silence. We both twisted to stare at the river, but nothing moved on the water except the dying disturbance of the powerboat’s wake.

“He’s given up,” Jill-Beth breathed.

“No,” I said.

“He’s gone!” she insisted.

“He wants us to think he’s gone.” I climbed over the dinghy’s thwart, wound the starting lanyard on to the Seagull, then yanked it. The motor belched into life and its distinctive sound echoed across the river. I let it run for five seconds, then cut the fuel just as the searchlight split the darkness in an attempt at ambush. Mulder had been hiding in the shadows, but his guess of where the outboard’s sound had come from was hopelessly wrong. I chuckled at having successfully tricked him.

Jill-Beth was less pleased. “He’s a stubborn bastard.”

“He’ll wait all night,” I said.

“Jesus! Shee-it!” She was suddenly vehement in her frustration.

“I need to get those damned papers! Hell!” She stared across the river to where Wildtrack II was searching the far bank. The searchlight flickered quick and futile across the empty leaves. “Suppose I swim back?” Jill-Beth asked suddenly.

“What if he finds you?” I asked in warning.

“I can’t just do nothing!”

In the end she helped me to hide the dinghy by filling it with stones and sinking it at the river’s edge. We concealed the Seagull under a pile of grass and leaves, then worked our way northwards.

It was too dangerous to stay close to the river while Mulder searched so we looped up to Ferry Lane through the hill pastures. I made Jill-Beth wear my brogues to save her bare feet from the nettles and thorns. It was an awkward journey through hedgerows and across rough fields, but I noticed how my leg did not buckle once and how the pain in my back seemed to relent in the face of our urgency.

The urgency was to rescue Jill-Beth’s papers which, she said, must not fall into Bannister’s hands. We planned to go as far as the ferry slip from which we would swim to Mystique . If Mulder had abandoned his search by then, and restored Wildtrack II to the boathouse, Jill-Beth would slip her moorings and sail out to sea. If there was still danger, then we would just remove the papers and swim ashore again.

But our planning was all in vain for, as we reached the shadows at the head of the ferry slip, we saw that Bannister had anticipated our fears. A dinghy was moored beside Mystique and two men, perhaps from Mulder’s crew, were searching her. Their torchlight flickered on the small boat’s deck. There was still a hint of orange smoke skeining the moorings, though the fires in the woodland had died to a dull glow.

Jill-Beth swore again.

“How important were the papers?” I asked.

“There’s nothing in them he doesn’t already know,” she said, “but they’ll tell him just how much I know. Shit!”

“Shall we call the police?” I asked. “I mean, they don’t have any right to search your boat.”

“Come on, Nick!” she chided me. “How long will it take for us to reach a phone? And how long before the goddamn police arrive?

Bannister will have his answers by then.” She stared at the flickering shapes on Mystique , then shrugged in resignation. “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, so there’s no point in trying.” She shivered, and I put an arm around her. She resisted for a second, then subsided against me. “Hell,” she said, “but you’re a very inconvenient man, Nick Sandman.”

“I thought I was rather convenient for you tonight.”

“I don’t mean that.” She went silent because Wildtrack II had appeared at Sansom’s Point. I thought Mulder was going to bring the big powerboat up to the moorings, but instead, in a swirl of moonlit foam, he accelerated in a semicircle to speed downriver again.

“What I meant,” Jill-Beth said softly, “is that it’s very inconvenient to get emotionally entangled during a case.”

“Are you emotionally entangled?”

She did not answer the question, and I did not press her. Instead we crouched together in the deep shadows at the slip’s head and stared at the bright lights on Bannister’s terrace from whence came the tumbling sounds of music and laughter. The night’s alarums were over for the party guests, but there was still a grim game of cat and mouse happening on the darkened river.

Jill-Beth could not escape to sea so long as Mulder blocked the river, and the South African had shown no signs of giving up the chase.

“I’m finished here,” Jill-Beth finally said. “I guess I screwed up, right?”

“I don’t see how you could have ever got your evidence,” I said in an attempt to make her feel better. “I mean, if Bannister did push his wife overboard, how could you ever prove it?”