Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

I wanted to trap him. He was thieving from my boat, and I wanted to make him regret it. I knew I would have to be cunning, for he was surely alert to the possibility of the owner returning. So I kept rowing away from Sunflower , though now, because I was past her, I was able to watch her constantly. The man did not reappear in the companionway, so he must have felt safe.

I went a good two hundred yards past Sunflower ’s mooring, then turned south amongst a gaggle of moored Salcombe yawls. I rowed until Sunflower ’s bows were pointing directly towards me, then I let the ebbing tide carry me down towards her. I steered with a single oar over the dinghy’s transom. I noticed there was no tender tied to Sunflower , which was odd, but, when I was just twenty yards away, I forgot the oddity because I heard voices. There were evidently two intruders aboard, a man and a woman. The woman’s voice, sharp and penetrating, seemed to make a protest, but the man’s voice overrode her.

I put out a hand and caught the rail of Sunflower ’s pulpit. The tide was trying to take the dinghy down Sunflower ’s starboard flank to where I would have been visible through the cabin ports, but I held the dinghy back, took a breath, then slowly hauled myself over the bows. The big hull rocked gently under my weight, but not enough to warn the intruders of my presence. I’d kept the inflatable’s painter in my left hand and I quickly hitched it to the pulpit rail. The inflatable would bump softly against the steel hull, and I prayed the tiny thumping would not alert them. The man was speaking again, low and urgently, but I could not hear his exact words.

I crouched over the forehatch. I guessed that the man and woman would be in the main cabin. I could just see the twisted remains where they had forced the hasp of the main companionway. I briefly thought of making my entrance there, but my footsteps could have alerted them as I negotiated the cabin roof and I wanted to surprise them. I took the bunch of keys from my pocket and, taking exquisite care not to make them jangle, found the small key for the forehatch padlock. The dinghy, driven by the wind, thumped softly and persistently against the hull. Rain slicked Sunflower ’s teak-planked deck.

The key went unwillingly into the lock, resisted, then turned. I eased the padlock out of the steel hasp, laid it with the keys on the deck, then took hold of both latches.

Then a bellowing roar made me twist round. I should have realised that the man and woman must have used another boat to reach Sunflower , which boat, to prevent suspicion, had left them aboard before going a safe distance away. Their accomplice on board that other boat had belatedly seen me, and now he was accelerating towards the rescue of his companions. The rescuer was a huge man, built like a prizefighter, who conned his small boat with a noticeable clumsiness. That boat was a small aluminium dory, flat bottomed and driven by a big outboard which was flinging water white to either side. The noise must have alerted the intruders, for the man’s head reappeared in the companionway. I saw sleek black hair lying close to a narrow skull, then the man turned and stared in astonishment at me.

I had snatched a boathook from its rack on the cabin roof. I kept two boathooks there. One was for hooking boats or moorings, but the other, the one I seized, had a more specialised purpose. I had sharpened its spike to sail-needle sharpness, then ground a blade edge down the outer curve of the hook. That done I had hollowed out the head of the shaft and weighted the weapon with lead. In effect I had made myself a miniature boarding pike that had proved its worth more than once. Any yacht in far waters is fair game for a thief, and a lone sailor had better take precautions or else he or she will end up as crabmeat. Now, in Salcombe’s supposedly peaceful harbour, I swung the weighted blade, blunt side forward, at the black-haired man. He turned away from the blow, which nevertheless caught him on the back of his neck. It half felled him, or else he was already falling, for he disappeared down the companionway.

I was shouting, part in rage that the intruders had dared to break into Sunflower , and in part to scare the man. I scrambled over the liferaft and coachroof, then jumped down into the cockpit where I turned and held the boathook like a poised harpoon. The dory was slewing round, spraying water in a great curved sheet. The big man at its controls shouted incoherently at his companions on Sunflower . I could see the woman’s legs in my cabin. She was sitting on the starboard bunk, but I could not see her male companion. “Stay there, you bastards!” I shouted. I planned to trap my intruders inside Sunflower , cow them into docility, then use the VHF to call the police. The man in the dory was having trouble controlling his boat, which was a blessing because I didn’t fancy fighting a man of his height and weight.

I was about to go down into the cabin when the unlocked forehatch swung open and the black-haired man pulled himself lithely up on to the foredeck. He was thin. He had a suntanned countryman’s face and was wearing a check shirt beneath a waxed cotton coat. He had a yellow waistcoat, brogues, and cavalry twill trousers. He was dressed for the racecourse rather than the water. The dory thumped alongside, ringing like a cracked bell on Sunflower ’s steel hull. “Come on!” the helmsman shouted at his companion, “jump!”

I ran forward. The thin black-haired man did not jump into the dory, but turned to face me instead. He brushed at his tweed jacket, and somehow the commonplace gesture slowed my attack. Then he looked up at me. He had very confident eyes. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his late thirties, with a sardonic, knowing look about his narrow features. It was a face which suggested a long acquaintanceship with human fallibilities, but it was also a face with an intrinsic air of command. “There’s really no need to get excited,” he said to me in a very condescending voice.

“What the hell are you doing on my boat?” I still advanced on him, but slowly now and with the boathook held out like a pike.

“I want to talk to you, of course.” He had a very crisp voice; an unashamedly upper-class voice honed by public school and effortless confidence. “Shall we go below?”

“Only after you’ve paid for the damage you’ve done.”

He smiled wearily. “We’re going to be tedious, are we? And for God’s sake stop pointing that hook at me.”

The dory’s helmsman, a much coarser creature than the thin man, still held on to Sunflower ’s guardrails. He was bald, big, and was staring with concern at the threatening boathook, but the other had already dismissed the weapon’s menace. He reached out with his right hand to fend off the hook. I resisted his gesture and, in sudden anger, he gripped the boathook’s head to wrest it out of my hand.

He was surprisingly strong for such a thin man, but, a second after he had seized the hook, and while he was still pulling, his brain registered a stinging pain where he had expected none. I added to the pain by twisting the haft. Blood was spilling out of his hand now, dripping on to Sunflower ’s deck. I saw the sudden agony on his face. He snatched his right hand away, dripping blood, then groped his left hand beneath his jacket to find a slim, long-bladed knife that had been sheathed at his belt. His larger companion was evidently uncertain whether to come to the thin man’s aid or keep the dory alongside, so did nothing. I lunged, skewering the boathook’s sharpened point into the thin man’s upper arm. He swore, tried to fend the hook away with his knife, but I had swung it away and now hefted it hard back.