Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

“We screwed ’em,” Terry agreed. Somehow the conversation had made us both morose. I watched the loom of the Start light, then took a bearing on the entrance to Salcombe Harbour. We were making good time. I wondered how much water was in her bilges.

There was bound to be some until the patched hull took up.

“Mind you,” Terry went on, “I don’t know what bloody good it did us. Life’s still a bloody bastard.”

“Is it, Terry?”

“Bloody women,” he said.

I wished I had not heard the note of sad hopelessness in his voice.

“As bad as that?” I asked.

“As bad as that, boss.” He huddled in the cockpit’s corner, sheltering from the wind. “You got out, didn’t you?”

“Melissa left me. I didn’t get out.”

“Would you have bugged out on your own?”

I shook my head. “Probably not. I sometimes think women are more ruthless than us.”

“I wish mine would be sodding ruthless. I wish she’d go back to her bloody mother. Then I could go back to barracks.” He tipped a beer bottle to his lips. “I’ve got some good mates in the barracks.”

“Is Sally still nagging you to get out of the Army?” He nodded. “Never bleeding stops. She says there’ll be jobs in the pits when the fucking strike’s over, but what jobs? All this bloody Government wants to do is gut the miners.”

“Would you want to work in the mines?”

“I’ve two uncles down the pits, so it’s family, like.” He paused.

“And it might take Sally off my back, and I suppose it would be a better life for the nippers, but I don’t know, boss. I like the Army, I do.” His voice tailed away and we sat in companionable misery; he thinking of his Sally, I of Angela. I’d lost her, of course, but I, unlike Terry, was free.

“If you ever want to escape,” I said to him, “there’s always a berth in Sycorax for you. We’re good together, you and I.” He toasted me with his beer bottle. “That’s true, boss.” We fell silent. The cliffs to the north were touched with moonlight and the water broke on them in wisps of shredding white. Everything had gone awry, but at least Sycorax was back where she belonged.

All I had to do now was to escape Bannister’s lawyers, finish the boat, then go to where the lawyers couldn’t follow; to sea.

George Cullen fidgeted with his pipe. He had reamed it, rammed it, now he tamped it with tobacco. “Times are hard, Nick.”

“I’m sure.”

“No one wants a proper boat any longer, do they? They just want plastic bowls with Jap engines.” He lit the pipe and puffed a smokescreen towards his peeling ceiling. “Fibreglass,” he said scathingly. “Where’s the bloody craftsmanship in fibreglass?”

“Tricky stuff to lay properly, George.”

“An epileptic bloody monkey could lay it properly. But not the bloody layabouts I get.” He stood and went to the dusty window of his office. It was raining again. The office was a mess. George’s big desk was heaped with old pieces of paper; some of them looked as if they were unpaid bills from at least twenty years before. The walls were thick with vast-breasted naked pin-ups who disconcertingly advertised valve springs, crankcases and gaskets. Among the display of lubricious and fading flesh were fly-spotted pictures of Cullen’s Fishing Boats; sturdy little dayboats for long-lining or trawling. It had been years since the yard last built one; back, indeed, in the time of George’s father. Now the yard survived on a dwindling supply of repair work and on making the despised fibreglass hulls for do-it-yourself enthusiasts who wanted to finish the boats for themselves.

It also survived on crime. George was a fence for every boatstripper between the Fal and the Exe. “Seen your old man?” he asked me.

“No.”

“I ran up there, when? Six months ago? Before Christmas, anyway.

Said he was missing you.”

“I was in hospital, George.”

“Course you were, Nick, course you were.” He began to fiddle with his pipe that had gone out. He was a vast-bellied man with a jowly red face, grey hair and small eyes. I’d never much liked him, but I understood George’s attraction for my father. There wasn’t a piece of knavery on the coast that George did not know about, and probably did not have a finger in, and he could spend hours regaling my father with the tales of rogues and fools that my father had so relished. From my earliest childhood I could remember George drinking our whisky and talking in his gravelly old voice. He’d seemed old then, but now I saw he was just in his seedy middle age. “Your old man’s dead proud of you, Nick, proud of you,” he said now. “The Vicky Cross, eh?”

“The other two earned it,” I said. “I was just lucky.”

“Rubbish, boy. They don’t give that gong away with the cornflakes, do they? So what do you need?”

“VHF, short-wave, chronometer, barometer, anchors, lights, batteries, sea loo, compass, bilge-pumps…”

“Spare me, for Christ’s sake.” He sat down again, flinching from some inboard pain. George was for ever at death’s threshold and for ever ingesting new kinds of patent medicines. He preferred whisky, though, and poured us each a glass now. It was only mid-day, but George had probably been on the sauce since seven o’clock.

It was no wonder, I thought, that Cullen’s Fishing Boats were no longer launched down his small slip.

Sycorax was tucked safe into a narrow dock beside George’s office.

He’d moored a wreck of a fishing craft outside to hide her. Terry Farebrother had been put on a train in nearby Plymouth. For the moment I’d found shelter. George’s price had been to hear the story, or as much as I cared to tell him. “Mulder,” he said now. “I know Fanny.”

“Like him, do you?”

“Fanny’s all right,” George said guardedly. “Brings me in a bit of business from time to time. You know how it is, Nick.”

“He nicks the business, George. He nicked a lot of bloody stuff off my boat. You’ve probably still got it, George.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” George said equably. “I’ll let you have a look later on, Nick, and if anything is yours I’ll let you have it at cost.”

“Thank you, George.”

“Fair’s fair, Nick,” he said as though he was doing me a great favour. “And you are Tommy Sandman’s boy. Anything for Tommy.

And for a hero, of course.” He knocked back the whisky and poured himself another. The glass was filthy, but so was the whisky that, despite its label, had never been anywhere near Scotland. “What sort of anchors do you want?”

“Two CQRs. One fisherman’s.”

He half closed his eyes. “We had a Dutchman run out of money here last year. Nice boat, too. You want his pair of 75-pound CQRs?”

“They’ll do. Have you got any chain?” I knew it was hopeless to ask a price, because I would not be given one until George had worked out to a penny just what I could afford. Then he’d add something. He would welcome me at the yard so long as I could show him a profit, and the day he thought he’d squeezed me dry he’d turf me out.

“Fathoms of chain, Nick. Half-inch do you?” There was a sudden commotion in the outer office where George’s secretary, a shapely girl whose typing speed was reputed to be one stroke a minute, spent her days polishing her fingernails and reading magazines of true romance. “You can’t go in there,” I heard Rita squeal. “Mr Cullen is in conference.”

“Mr Cullen can bloody well get out of conference, can’t he?” The opaque glass door banged open and Inspector Abbott came inside.

“Morning, George.” He ignored me. I was sitting in an ancient leather armchair with broken springs, and I stayed there.