Bernard Cornwell - Thrillers 01 Read online

  “That’s new to me.”

  “Just pub talk, Nick, just pub talk. The maid be dead, and nothing’ll bring her back to harbour now.”

  I tried another tack. “Why does Bannister keep Mulder with him?”

  “Buggered if I know. He don’t talk to me, Mr Bannister don’t. I ain’t high and mighty enough. But I don’t like that other bloke. Keeps bad company, he do. Drinks with Georgie Cullen. Remember George?”

  “Of course I remember George.”

  Jimmy lit one of his stubby pipes. We were turning into the wide sea-reach that was edged by the town and he stared across the river to where two Dutch pair trawlers were being scraped

  and painted by the old battleship buoys. The Dutch government subsidized their fishermen who could therefore afford a new trawler every other year. Their rejects were sold to us. Just short of the trawlers a motor-cruiser was trying to pick up a mooring buoy. The skipper was bellowing at his crew, a woman, who reached vainly with a boathook, but the skipper had misjudged the tide which made the woman’s task hopeless. “You useless bloody cow!” the man shouted.

  Jimmy chuckled. “Most of ’em couldn’t float an eggbox round a bloody bathtub. Call themselves sailors! It would be easier to train a bloody chimp.”

  A French aluminium-hulled boat was motoring in from the sea. I recognized the same yacht that had been moored in the pool beneath Bannister’s house the previous week. The same black-haired girl was at the tiller and I nodded towards her. “She’s a good sailor.”

  “Boat comes from Cherbourg. Called Mystique.” There was very little Jimmy did not know about the river. Tourists, seeing his filthy clothes and smelling his ancient pipe, might avoid him, but his old rheumy eyes saw everything and he picked up news in the river’s small pubs with the merciless efficiency of a monofilament net. “The maid ain’t a Froggy, though,” he added.

  “She isn’t?”

  “American. Her father were here in the War, see. She be seeing his old haunts.” The Americans who had landed in Normandy had trained on the Devon beaches. “And she be writing a book, she do say.”

  “A book?” I tried to hide my interest in the girl.

  Jimmy cackled. “Reckoned you’d be hungry when you came out.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy.”

  “She say she be writing a pilot book. I thought there were plenty enough pilot books for the channel, but she do say there ain’t one for Americans. ’Spose that means we’ll be swamped by Yankee boats next.” He span his wheel to turn his boat towards the entrance of the town boatyard. It no longer made boats, but instead was a marina for the wealthy who wanted protected berthing for their yachts. I could see Wildtrack waiting for me

  at one of the floating pontoons. She was long, very sleek, with a wide blue flash decorating her gleaming white hull.

  “Have you heard anything about someone wanting to stop Bannister from winning the St Pierre?” I asked Jimmy.

  “The Froggies, of course. They’d do anything to keep him from winning it, wouldn’t they?” Jimmy had a true Devon man’s distrust of the French. He admired them as seamen, probably preferred them to any other nation, but was dubiously aware that they were not English.

  Jimmy brought the heavy fishing boat alongside the pontoon with a delicacy that was as astonishing as it was unthinking. He looked over at Wildtrack and grimaced at the small crowd that waited for me. Mulder was in Wildtrack’s cockpit. Matthew Cooper was on the pontoon with his film crew, and Anthony Bannister waited to one side with Angela beside him. Angela was wearing shorts and Jimmy growled in appreciation of her long legs. “That be nice, Nick.”

  “She’d bite your head off as soon as look at you.”

  “I like a maid with a bit of spirit in her.” He held out a hand to check me as I went to step on to the pontoon. “You never did have any sense, Nick Sandman, so you listen to me. You takes their damned money and you mends your boat. You let them make their daft film, and then you go off to sea. You hear me? And you don’t mess about with the dead, boy. It won’t get you nowhere.”

  “I hear you, Jimmy.”

  “But you never were one to listen, were you? Go on with you, boy. I’ll see you in the pub tonight.” He glanced at the waiting film crew. “Do you have to wear lipstick, Nick?”

  “Piss off, Jimmy.”

  He laughed, and I went to make a film.

  I can’t say that we went to sea as a happy ship. Mulder did not speak to me, his crew were surly, while Matthew and his camera team stayed out of everybody’s way. Angela retired to the after cockpit.

  Tony Bannister grasped the nettle, though. “I’m glad you’ve come, Nick.”

  “Somewhat under protest,” I said stiffly.

  “I’m sure.” We were motoring across the bar, between the rocky headlands where the breakers smashed white. To starboard I could see the waves breaking on the Calfstone Shoal. “I think,” Bannister said awkwardly, “that we’d better let bygones be bygones. We behaved badly, but I would have told you about Fanny, and you would have got your medal back.”

  “I just don’t like dishonesty.”

  “I think you’ve made that very plain. Let’s just agree that we’ll try harder?”

  For the sake of peace, and because we seemed stuck with each other’s company, I agreed.

  We had bucked our way across the bar and Mulder now ordered the sails hoisted. He killed the engine, folded the propellor blades, and instantly Wildtrack became a creature in her element. She was no longer defying the sea with her diesel fuel and churning blades, now she was caught in the balance of wind and water. The sails were vast and white, swooping her gracefully southwards into the face of a brisk south-westerly wind.

  Bannister and I sat in the central cockpit. Mulder must have known I was watching him and he must have guessed how I wanted to despise his seamanship.

  But he was good.

  I wanted him to be a butcher of a helmsman. I wanted him to be as crude as his physical appearance suggested. But instead he displayed a confident and rare skill. I’d expected him to be that most hateful of creatures, the loud and strident skipper, but his orders were given without fuss. His crew of seven men, identically dressed in blue and white kit, were drilled to a quiet efficiency, but the star of the boat was Fanny Mulder. He had an instinctive, almost gentle, touch and I knew, right from the beginning, that he was a natural. He was good.

  And I was suddenly, unexpectedly happy. Not because I’d made a precarious peace with Bannister, but because I was at sea. I was watching my dark Devon coast slip away. Already the small beaches were indistinct, hidden by the heave of grey

  waves. I could look back into the river’s mouth and I saw what I had forgotten; how the inland hills were so green and soft, while the sea-facing slopes were so wind battered and dark that it almost seemed as if the river was a wound cut into a crust of matter to reveal the softer flesh within.

  I looked seaward. A Westerly was beating under full sail towards Dartmouth. A grey misshapen mass on the horizon betrayed a fleet auxiliary heading for Plymouth. A lobsterman coming from Start Point thudded past us in a stained boat heaped with pots and buoys and I thought I detected a derisive expression on the skipper’s face as he glanced at Bannister’s fancy boat. I would not have chosen a boat like Wildtrack to take me back to the ocean, but suddenly that did not matter. I was back where the hospital had said I would never be, and I could smell the sea and I could feel its lash in the spray and I could have cried for happiness when I saw the first fulmar come arrowing down to flick its careless flight along a wave’s shifting face.

  “You look happy.” Bannister had taken the wheel from Mulder.

  “It’s good to be back.” There was an awkward moment when neither of us had anything to say. Mulder had disappeared, sent down to the main cabin while Bannister conned the boat. I suspected, and later confirmed by observation, that Mulder was not to be included in the film. The audience would have to understand that it was the beloved Tony Bannister who was rescuing me. He looked impressive as he stood at the big wheel. His legs were braced, his face tanned, and his hair wind-stirred. On film he would look marvellous, like a Viking in a designer floatcoat.

  “What do you think of the boat?” he asked me.

  “Impressive.” The truth was that I preferred my yachts to be old-fashioned. I’d never cared overmuch for speed, but Wildtrack cared so much that her digital log was accurate to one hundredth of a knot.

  Yet, in her way, I suppose Wildtrack was an impressive boat. She was certainly expensive. The main cockpit was in the boat’s centre, but there was a rear cockpit, aft of the owner’s cabin,

  which would serve as a sundeck when the boat was in warmer seas. She was a boat built for the world’s rich, complete with digital logs offering a ludicrous accuracy and motor-driven winches and weather faxes and satellite receivers and running hot water and air-conditioning and ice-making machinery and power-steering. The old seamen who had sailed from Devon, Raleigh and Drake, Howe and Nelson, would have understood Sycorax immediately, but they would have been flummoxed by the silicon-chip efficiency of this sleek creature.

  They would have been flummoxed, too, by the extraordinary equipment which the film crew had deployed on the coachroof. Bannister saw my nervousness and tried to reassure me. “The idea is to film a background interview today. How you learned to sail, where, who taught you, why. We’ll chop it all to ribbons, of course, and cut it in with some old home movies of you as a kid. Does that sound good to you?”

  “It sounds bloody foul.”

  “Let’s give it a whirl when we’re ready.”

  The cameraman was filming general views of the boat, but was inexorably working his way aft to where Bannister and I waited in the central cockpit. I noticed how Bann
ister fidgeted with the boat. He constantly checked the wind-direction indicator on the dashboard, then twitched the helm to keep the small liquid-crystal boat-shape constant on the tactical screen. Mulder had not needed the electronic aids to sail Wildtrack at her highest speed, but Mulder was a natural helmsman and Bannister was not. He suddenly seemed uncomfortably aware of my gaze. “Would you like to take her, Nick?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’re steering 195,” Bannister said as he stepped aside.

  “195.” I glanced down at the compass. So long as the wind did not change, and this wind seemed set for eternity, I only had to keep one finger on the big stainless-steel and power-assisted wheel to compensate for Wildtrack’s touch of weatherhelm. The sea was not big enough to jolt the big yacht off her course. A few waves shuddered the hull, but I noted with relief how my balance seemed unaffected by them. I sensed a gust, luffed into it for speed, and then paid off with the extra half knot staying

  on the fancy speedometer. I did it without thinking and knew in that moment that nothing had changed.

  It isn’t hard to sail a boat. The hard bit is the sea’s moods and the wind’s fretting. The hard bit is surviving shoals and squalls and tidal rips. The hard bit is navigating in a filthy night, or reefing down in a shrieking storm when your body is already so wet and cold and tired that all you want to do is die. But putting a boat into a wind’s grip and holding her there is as easy as falling off a cliff. Anyone can do it.

  However, sailing a boat well takes practice that turns into instinct. I had found, at that moment when I added the small pulse of speed to the long hull, that the instincts had not been abraded by the years of hospitals and pain. Nothing had changed, and I was back where I wanted to be.

  The cameraman had appeared close in front of me. The clapper-board snapped, and I gritted my teeth and tried to forget the lens’s intrusive presence.

  “Tell me when you first sailed, Nick?” Bannister asked.

  “Long time ago.” I was watching the wind-kicked spray shredding from the rocks off Start Point. We were overtaking a big Moody that was idling along while its crew lunched in the cockpit. They waved.

  “Tell me how you started?” Bannister insisted. The sound-recordist crouched at my feet and thrust a long grey phallus of a microphone up towards my face.

  Bannister had to coax me, but suddenly I found it easy to talk. I spoke of Jimmy teaching me in a dipping-lug dinghy, and I talked of stealing my father’s boats to explore the Channel coast, and I described a bad night, much later on, when Sycorax had clawed me off the Roches Douvres, and I still swear that it was Sycorax who saved my life in that carnage of rock and rain. I should never have been under the lash of that northerly gale, but I’d promised to pick up a fellow lieutenant in St Malo and somehow Sycorax had kept the promise for me. I must have talked enthusiastically, for Bannister seemed pleased with what he heard.

  “When you were wounded,” he asked, “did you ever think you’d be back in a boat?”

  “I thought of nothing else.”

  “But at the very first, in battle, didn’t you give up hope?”

  “I wasn’t too aware of anything at that moment.” Now that he was talking about the Falklands I heard my answers becoming sullen and short.

  “What actually happened,” he asked, “when you were wounded?”

  “I got shot.”

  He smiled as though to put me at my ease. “What actually happened, Nick, when you won the VC?”

  “Do you want to cross the Skerries?” I nodded ahead to where the shallow bank off Start Point was making the tide turbulent.

  “The VC, Nick?” he prompted me.

  “You want to go inshore of the Skerries?” I asked. “We’ll get the help of the tidal current there.”

  Bannister, realizing that he was not going to draw me on the medal, smiled. “How does it feel,” he asked instead, “to be in a boat again?”

  I hesitated, searching for the right words. I wanted to say I’d let him know just as soon as I was in a proper boat, and not in some hyper-electronic Tupperware speed-machine, but that was unfair to the pleasure I was having, and the thought of that pleasure made me smile.

  “Cut!” Matthew Cooper called to his cameraman.

  “I didn’t answer!” I protested.

  “The smile said everything, Nick.” Cooper looked back towards Angela in the aft cockpit and I saw him nod. The performing dog, it seemed, had done well.

  Bannister, off camera now, crouched to light a cigarette with a gold-plated storm lighter. “You’re going to have to answer those unwelcome questions, Nick.”

  “I am?” I let Wildtrack’s bows fall off the wind to take us east of the broken water.

  “You can’t be coy about the medal, you know. The reason we’re making the film is because you’re a hero.”

  “I thought we were making it because it was your thug who damaged my boat?”

  He smiled. “Touché. But you will have to tell us. Not today, maybe, but one day.”

  I shrugged. It seemed that this day’s filming was over because the camera crew began to pack up their equipment as Mulder took the wheel from me. To escape from the South African’s sullen company I explored Wildtrack. I’d been worried before I came aboard that my injuries might have made my balance treacherous, but I found no difficulty in keeping my footing as I went to the foredeck. There was pain in my back, though I fancied that the regular morning swimming in Bannister’s pool had done wonders to strengthen the muscles and dull the discomfort. I was more worried about my right leg which still shook uncontrollably and threatened to spill me like a drunk. That weakness was at its worst when I was tired, which was hardly an encouragement for single-handed sailing across the world, but at least my mobility on Wildtrack’s deck gave me optimism. I used the handrails and shrouds for support, but I would have done that even if I had never been wounded.

  I dropped down a hatch and saw how the forepeak had been stripped empty to make the bows light. The main cabin showed the same dedication for speed. I’d expected a lavish comfort pit, but luxury had been sacrificed for lightness. What money had been spent had gone on navigational equipment; there was Loran, Decca, Satnav, even an Omega to trap very low frequency radio waves transmitted around the globe. The only thing I could not see was a sextant.

  The rear cabin, approached through a narrow tunnel that ran abaft the centre cockpit, was more lavishly furnished and it was clear that these were Bannister’s quarters. There was an air-conditioner, a heater, even a television and a VCR built into the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk.

  Above the double bunk, framed and screwed to the bulkhead, was a photograph of Nadeznha. There was a line of print on the photograph’s vignette and I knelt on the bunk to read it: ‘Nadeznha Bannister, 1956–1983, 49° 18’ N, 41° 36’ W’.

  I stared into the dead girl’s dark eyes that were now so familiar to me from all the other pictures I’d seen. She had been no attenuated blonde like Melissa or Angela, but a robust girl

  with dark skin and strong bones. It seemed a terrible waste that her bones were in the ocean’s deep darkness.

  The cabin’s rear hatch slid forward and Bannister swung himself down. He seemed surprised to find me in his quarters, but made no protest. He nodded towards the photograph. “My wife.”

  “She was very beautiful,” I said.

  He pulled open the sliding door to the head and took something from a locker there. I saw it was a phial of seasickness capsules. He turned and stared at the photograph. “Greek, Arab, French, Persian and American blood. A wonderful mix. Mind you, it also gave her a fearful temper.” He somehow made the temper sound like one of his wife’s more endearing characteristics. “She could be very determined,” he went on, “especially about sailing. She was so damned sure she could win the St Pierre, which is why she was pushing the boat so hard.”

  “Is that what killed her?” I asked brutally.

  “We don’t know, not really.” He offered a theatrical pause as though speaking of his wife’s death was painful. “It was a dirty night,” he said at last, “a following sea, and Wildtrack was pooped. That’s usually caused because you’re travelling too fast, isn’t it? And I think Nadeznha must have unclipped her safety harness for a few seconds.”