Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“Right!” Harry was trying to regain the initiative. “Marianne ! There must be a record of her. I want her photographed, and I want the registers searched. Who owns her? Who sold her? Where’s she normally berthed? Talk to the Frogs, the name sounds French. Go on! Move!”

“I’m coming with you,” Charlie said to me.

“No!” Sir Leon snapped.

Charlie leaned on the table so that his big shaggy head was very close to Sir Leon’s face. “He’s my friend, and if he’s going to risk his life, I’m going with him.”

Sir Leon was quite unmoved by Charlie’s physical proximity. “We are going to follow the instructions very precisely. I assume” – he turned to one of the Guernsey policemen – “that this boat can be followed with an aircraft?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Then be so good as to arrange it, but tell your people not to make the coverage obvious.” He looked down at the notes he had made. “Are there any naval forces on the island?”

One of the local policemen thought that a fisheries protection vessel was in the outer harbour. Sir Leon looked up at Harry. “I imagine a telephone call to London will secure their co-operation, but tell them they’re to stay out of sight of the yacht. They will have to follow directions from the covering aircraft.”

Harry pushed buttons on his mobile phone, while Sir Leon glanced down at his notebook. Sir Leon had taken over. He was showing an impressive, natural authority, but expressing it so calmly that he radiated an air of confidence. He ticked two items off his list of notes, then offered me a cold look. “I trust, my lord, that these precautions will convince you that I am not attempting your murder?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but just glanced at his notes again. “I imagine their insistence on your wearing nothing but shorts is to make certain that you carry no weapons on board.”

“Or a radio,” I said.

“I hadn’t thought of that.” He sounded surprised that I might have had a notion denied to him, and even made a small note to that effect. “Quite. Well, my lord, are you willing to follow these instructions?”

I supposed I was. I certainly hadn’t come this far to back down. The only immediate difficulty I could see was that we had four million pounds in funny money but not a single pair of shorts between us. “Give us your knife, Charlie.”

He gave me his pen-knife and I slashed at the legs of my jeans. Once the denim was cut, they tore easily. I ripped the legs off, stepped out of them, then pulled off my shirt and deck shoes. I saw Sir Leon look at the fresh scars on my legs and give a small grimace of distaste.

“I’m coming with you,” Charlie said stubbornly.

He couldn’t win that argument. Both Sir Leon and Harry Abbott were against it. If we broke the rules, both men insisted, then all might be lost, so our best hope was to follow the instructions exactly. “But remember” – Harry was trying to demonstrate his own authority in the face of Sir Leon’s formidable competition – “I’ll pull you out if it looks dangerous, Johnny.”

“I’m going to be OK, Harry.” I sounded a great deal more confident than I felt. All around me men were talking urgently into police radios, but I was the one who had to walk almost naked down the pontoon, which, I was sure, would lead me to two killers.

“I want everyone watching!” Harry said loudly. “They’ve got a lookout here, and I want him spotted!” He turned back to me, shrugged, and pushed the attaché case towards me. “We might as well do it, Johnny.”

I pushed my pipe, my pouch of tobacco and some matches into the seat of my sawn-off jeans, then picked up the attaché case of money. It was feather-light. “See you, Harry.”

“One minute!” Sir Leon frowned. “These people were particular that you carried nothing but the case. Leave your pipe here, my lord.”

I smiled very sweetly at him. “I might risk my life for your painting, Sir Leon, but I’m damned if I’ll do it without a smoke.”

He looked into my eyes, saw he would lose, so gave a cold nod of reluctant acceptance. Harry and his men wished me luck, then Charlie walked with me across the car park to the head of the pontoon. “Are you sure about this, Johnny?”

“Of course I’m not sure, Charlie, but what the hell else can I do?”

“Bugger off. Leave them. It’s only a rich man and his painting. It isn’t life or death!”

“But it is, Charlie. They tried to kill me and they damn nearly killed Jennifer. So it’s personal.”

“You’re a fool.” His solemnity surprised me, but then he shrugged away his unnatural gloom and forced a grin on to his broad face. “We could make a run with the money?”

“Why not?” I’d been waiting for him to make that suggestion. We both laughed, but there was suddenly nothing else to say, so I punched him on the shoulder. “Have a pint waiting for me, OK?”

“How about one of those French birds as well?” He slapped my bare arm in friendly farewell, then stepped back.

I knew he was watching me all the way down the pontoon, and I was touched by the worry I’d detected in him, but it was too late to turn back now. So I went on. Alone.

Part Five

I think I’d known from the very start that I wouldn’t follow Harry’s advice. Once I had committed myself I would not pull back at the end. I wanted to go through with it. Just like that day when I’d plunged into the heart of a gale-broken sea above the bar at Salcombe, I would risk death because, if I did not, I would prove myself a coward. I didn’t want to do this thing, but once committed, I would go as far as I could. And not just to prove that I was brave, but because of a girl who lay in foul pain on a hospital bed. I wanted to find the bastards who had done that to her, and I wanted them to regret what they had done.

An ignoble motive, I know. These days a man is supposed to be above such stupidity. Today we’re supposed to exemplify the virtues of sympathetic understanding. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the criminal because it’s clearly his education, or his broken home, or just society itself that has driven him to crime. In short we’re supposed to eat lettuce instead of raw meat, but I’m a throwback. I’m the twenty-eighth Earl of nothing very much, but there’s still enough pride left in the nothingness to want to see my enemies wishing they hadn’t been born, and enough pride to want to tell my woman that I’d revenged her, and enough pride to go to the bitter end of a nasty little game in which I was naked and my enemies held all the cards.

I felt truly naked as I walked barefoot down that pontoon. I knew I was being watched, not just by the police, but by one of Elizabeth’s people. That person could have been any one of the loungers on the big moored yachts, or any of the idling holiday-makers who leaned on the railings to stare down into the marina’s pool. Who were these people whom Elizabeth had found? I’d met two of them, Garrard and Peel, but who else?

Then I saw Marianne .

She was a filthy little boat; a home-made French job glued together out of marine ply then painted ox-blood red. You see hundreds of boats like her throughout Europe; I’d even seen a couple in the Pacific, sailed there by French youngsters who couldn’t afford anything sturdier. This boat was about eighteen feet long with a small cabin, a single mast, and an outboard motor mounted in a stern well. There was a compass mounted on her cabin roof, a grubby mainsail was roughly lashed to her boom, and a single jib was hanked to her forestay. I looked at her masthead and saw neither a radar reflector nor a VHF aerial, but, oddly, a Decca aerial was bolted just behind the outboard well. Except for the Decca, the villains had clearly found the cheapest boat they could.