Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

“When are you going?”

He paused again. “I’m not allowed to say, Nick.”

“Jesus wept. OK. Just give her my message, Matthew.”

“I’ll try, Nick.”

“And tell her something else.”

I didn’t need to tell him what else; he understood. “I’ll tell her, Nick.” He sounded sorry for me.

I rattled the phone rest, then tried to phone Micky Harding, but he was not at the paper and there was no answer at his home. I put the phone down. Rita unlocked the petty cash box and put my IOU

inside. George charged me fifty pence a call and fifty pence a minute thereafter. Rita scaled the charges down for me, but I still owed the old crook over ten pounds. “He wants you to go out tonight, Nick,” she said.

“Out?”

“His usual bloke’s got a broken arm. George wants you to take the 52-footer. He says you’re to fill her up with diesel. He’ll go with you.”

So that night I joined the distinguished roster of Devon smugglers. I helmed the 52-footer twenty miles offshore where we met a French trawler. The Frenchman swung three crates across to our boat. They contained radios stolen from harbours and marinas up and down the Brittany coast. George paid them off with a wad of cash, accepted a glass of brandy, and added a bottle of his lousy Scotch to the payment. Then I took him home again. There were no waterguards to disturb us as we chugged into the Hamoaze in a perfect dawn. George puffed his pipe in the cabin. “Got a very sweet little MF set there, Nick. You could do with an MF, couldn’t you?”

“I’ll take a VHF as my fee for tonight.”

He sucked air between his teeth. “You haven’t paid your berthage fees, Nick.”

“You call that bloody rubbish dump of a dock a berth?” He chuckled, but before he drove home he dropped a battered VHF set on to a sailbag in Sycorax ’s cockpit. I spent the next Sunday fitting it and, to my astonishment, it worked.

I spent the Sunday after that salvaging a galley stove from a wrecked Westerly that George had bought for scrap. I manhandled the stove across the deserted yard. I’d already rigged the gaff as a derrick and only had to attach the whip to the stove, but as I reached the quay above the boat I saw I had company. Inspector Harry Abbott was sitting in Sycorax ’s cockpit. He was wearing his check golfer’s trousers, had a bottle of beer and a packet of sandwiches in his lap, and my Colt .45 in his right hand.

“Afternoon, Nick.” He aimed the Colt at my head and, before I could move, pulled the trigger.

It was unloaded. He chuckled. “Naughty, Nick, very! You know what the penalty is for possession of an unlicensed firearm?”

“A golfing weekend with you, Harry?”

He tutted. “Ungrateful, aren’t you, Nick? I save your mangy hide and all you do is insult me. What’s George bringing in these days?”

“Nothing much. A few radios, mostly French.” I tied the whip into place and climbed down to the deck. By using the peak halliard I had a perfectly good crane that swung the stove dangerously close to Abbott’s head. He deigned to steer it down to the cockpit floor.

“I thought you’d like to know,” he said, “that there is no longer a warrant out for your arrest.”

“I didn’t know there ever was one.”

“A hue and cry, Nick, that’s what there was. We searched for you high and low! Do you know what you have cost Her Majesty’s Government in police overtime?”

“Is that what you’re on now, Harry? Overtime?” I saw it was my beer he was drinking. He courteously offered me a bottle, which I took, then I sat opposite him. “Cheers, Harry.”

“Cheers, Nick.” He drained the bottle and opened another. “The funny boys are in on this one, Nick.”

“Funny boys?”

“Very funny boys. They’re not kind and gentle like me, Nick.

They’re full of self-importance and they talk impressively about the safety of the realm. They have nevertheless decided that your life should be spared.”

“Why?”

“How would I know?” He lit a cigarette and flipped the dead match over the side to float among the other garbage in George’s dock. “But there is a condition, Nick.”

I put my legs up on the opposite thwart. I was wearing old shorts and the scars at the backs of my thighs looked pink and horrid. Abbott glanced at them and grimaced. “Phosphorus?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were shot?”

“Bullet hit a phosphorus grenade hanging on my belt. The phosphorus caught fire, and the bullet split in two. One lump went down the right thigh, and the bigger lump up my spine.”

“Nasty.” He said it with genuine sympathy.

“I’ve had better days than that,” I agreed.

“It’s because of that, you see, that they trust you. Wounded war hero and all that, Nick. I mean, it’s unthinkable that one of Her Majesty’s VCs would be carrying an illegal shooter or helping Georgie Cullen bring in dicky radios from the French coast, isn’t it?”

“Quite unthinkable,” I agreed.

“So you’re going to piss off, Nick. You’re going to sail this heap of garbage round the world and you are not going to try and stop Mr Bannister sailing on the St Pierre.”

I finished the beer and opened another. The day was blisteringly hot. “Is that the condition, Harry? That I bugger off and leave Bannister alone?”

“Took a lot of my time to fix it.” He spoke warningly. “If the Chief Clown had his way, Nick, you’d be roasting in prison now. And not in some nice open prison like your dad, but a real Victorian horror story.”

“Thanks, Harry.”

Inspector Abbott had surrendered to the day’s heat far enough to discard his blazer, but no more. He wiped his face with a rag. “Mr Bannister lodged a complaint about you. He says you dismasted his boat, cut its warps, and all in practice for the day when you were going to sink it at sea. Do you know he’s even got a tape-recording?”

“That tape’s a—”

“I know, Nick!” Abbott held up a weary hand. “We’ve spoken to Mr Harding, haven’t we? And Mr Harding has seen the error of his wicked ways. He hasn’t got any proof now, so there can’t be a scandalous little story which will upset our American cousins. We don’t want to upset them, because they’ve got all the money these days. We are a client state, Nick.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t suppose you do, Nick. Who was the little bloke with you on the night you put nasty holes in nice Mr Bannister’s speedboat?”

“I can’t remember, Harry.”

“Make sure he forgets, too. Sleeping dogs should be left slumber-ing, Nick, and you were in danger of waking them up.” I offered him another beer. He took it. “Mind you,” Abbott went on, “Mr Bannister had a mind to aggravate things. He was unleash-ing the lawyers on you, but we pointed out that if they found you, and if he pressed charges, then we’d naturally insist that he and his Boer would have to stay in England and give evidence.”

“Which he didn’t want to do…” I was beginning to understand some things now “…because it might jeopardize his timing for the St Pierre?”

“Exactly.”

I tipped my head back and rested it on Sycorax ’s guardrails. I wondered if I was understanding too much. “You want Bannister to die, don’t you?”

Harry tutted. “You mustn’t talk about death, Nick.”

“You want to keep Kassouli’s jobs?”

“I imagine the Chief Clown wants to, yes.”

My head was still tipped back. “Are you a funny boy, Harry?”

“I’m just the dogsbody, Nick.”

I brought my head forward. This policeman liked to play the genial fool, but his eyes were very shrewd.

“So Yassir Kassouli gets what he wants?” I said.