Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

But, by waiting, I had forced myself to do more than just anti-foul Sunflower . In places the old paint had abraded right back to its epoxy pitch base. What I really needed to do was strip the whole hull back to bright steel, then start again. I should have craned her out of the water, screened her off, and done what Charlie would have called a proper job, except I had neither the time nor the money to be so thorough.

Instead I would have to do the best I could on George’s grid. A grid is simply a raised platform on which a boat can be stranded as the tide falls. At mean low tide, in George’s yard, Sunflower would be perched about eight feet above the water and, between tides, I would have around seven hours to work on her before the rising flood forced me to stop. I’d thus be needing a whole series of low tides. She was well berthed to the quay, but to stop her toppling sideways into George’s mucky dock I took a half-inch line from her upper spreaders and tied it to a ringbolt on the outside wall of his workshop. I knotted red rags round the rope and put a large sign by the ringbolt: ‘Leave this rope alone!’ I’d once watched a beautiful Danish ketch fall twelve feet off a grid in Brittany. It wasn’t pretty.

I fired up George’s ancient compressor, stripped myself to the waist, and hitched up his sand-blaster. Or rather sludge-blaster, for I couldn’t afford to buy the proper sand so had to make do with a miserable pile that mouldered damply behind the warehouse. The diesel fuel which fired the compressor also came from George’s stock, and was fouled. Even when I managed to make the compressor work, the damp sand clotted and jammed the hopper’s throat every few minutes, so progress, at best, was fitful. I used the enforced pauses to slap a rust-preventing resin on to the newly cleaned patches of Sunflower ’s hull. Between later tides I would strip the resin, then slap on a holding primer, four coats of epoxy tar, one coat of anti-fouling primer and two coats of the anti-fouling. It would be mind-numbing work, but if I did it well enough then the hull would be protected from rust for the next ten years. When the rising tide forced me to abandon work on the hull I went inside the cabin where I was beginning to rebuild the damaged lockers. I made good progress, but still my grease tin of money was taking a beating.

I needed cash. That was ironic, considering Jennifer Pallavicini had been dangling twenty million pounds in front of me, while now my hopes of earning a few quid from George were clearly ill-founded for his yard was utterly bare of work. “Why do you keep it on?” I asked him.

“Gives me something to do, Johnny. Gets me away from the wife,” he chuckled. He was standing beside the compressor, watching me work. The hopper’s throat had just choked up and, before I dug the soggy sand free, I was wiping resin on to the bright steel of Sunflower ’s hull. “And there’s the other side of it,” George went on.

“I hadn’t forgotten.” The other side of it was the stolen merchandise that went through his warehouse. George specialised in bent chandlery; forcibly retired Decca sets or radios.

“Mind you,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of selling out. The leisure market’s on the way up, and someone could make a nice little bundle by turning the yard into a yacht-servicing business.”

“Why not you, George?”

“I’m not a well man, Johnny.” I’d forgotten how George was always suffering from some new and undiagnosable ailment.

“So the yard’s for sale?”

He shrugged. “For the right price. It’s prime riverside property, after all.” He gestured about the yard as though he was selling a stretch of the St Tropez waterfront rather than a scabby junk heap mouldering around a smelly dock. “Are you interested, Johnny?”

“Me?” I laughed. “Just painting Sunflower will clean me out, not to mention rebuilding your equipment.” I scrambled up to the dock and tried to restart the compressor, but the water in George’s diesel fuel wouldn’t drive the engine. I swore, knowing I would have to siphon the fuel and clean the system. It was my own fault, of course, for using George’s yard. If I’d had the money I’d have paid to have Sunflower properly shot-blasted, but instead this old sand-blaster would have to suffice.

George watched me bleed the compressor’s fuel line. “Johnny,” he said after a bit.

“George?” I spat watery diesel into the dock.

“That painting…” He paused. He must have known that my trouble with Garrard had been caused by the Van Gogh, but this was the first time he had mentioned it. “Did they ever pin it on you?”

“If they had, George, do you think I’d be here? I’d be in the Scrubs, slopping out shit pails.”

He considered that answer and evidently found it convincing. “Of course,” he said, “now that your mother’s dead, I suppose the painting belongs to you?”

“Not according to her will. She left it to my sister.” I said it to discourage George’s speculation, though I suspected that Jennifer Pallavicini was right and that the painting, if it could ever be recovered, was probably mine. Twenty million pounds, and all mine, except, of course, that if the painting ever did reappear there would be a salivating horde of lawyers and taxmen scrabbling to get their slices of the money. But even those rapacious bastards would find it hard to destroy all of twenty million.

“It must be worth a penny or two.” George must have been guessing my thoughts.

“Several million pennies, George.”

“How much?”

I straightened up from the engine. “Sir Leon Buzzacott offered twenty million quid the other day, which means it’s probably worth a bit more.”

George puffed at his pipe. He clearly wasn’t certain whether to believe me. In his line of business a good night’s work yielded a few thousand, not millions. “I don’t like paintings,” he said eventually. “I used to deal in a few. Rubbish, most of them. Seascapes, that sort of thing, but it was never worth the bother.” He shrugged, evidently regretting some past escapade. “Those two fellows,” George went on, “do you think they’re after the painting?”

“Of course they’re after the painting. So is Sir Leon Buzzacott. So is my twin sister. Half the damn world wants the thing, but all I want is some clean diesel fuel. Have you got any?”

He shook his head, dismissing the problem of the contaminated fuel. “So you could be a millionaire, Johnny?”

“I told you. It belongs to my sister. Now bugger off, George, I’m trying to work.”

He buggered off and I worked on the compressor till five o’clock when I climbed to Rita’s office where a cup of tea waited for me. I telephoned Charlie’s house, but he still hadn’t returned from Hertfordshire. “Is there a number in Hertfordshire?” I asked Yvonne. She said there was, but that Charlie was never there. She said he telephoned her when he needed to, but she gave me the number anyway. She sounded desperately tired. I asked her to tell Charlie that I was now at George Cullen’s boatyard. She promised she would, but she didn’t sound very friendly as she made the promise.

I tried the Hertfordshire number. It was the site office of a construction company and a gruff man said he hadn’t seen Charlie Barratt for two days. I put the phone down. “What the hell’s Charlie doing in Hertfordshire?” I asked Rita, more in frustration than in any hope of fetching an answer.

She blew on her newly-painted fingernails. “He’s a big man now, Charlie is. He’s ever so rich.”

“And I’m the Pope.” I knew Charlie had done well since he’d settled back home, but Rita’s awed tones seemed to be over-egging the pudding.