Wildtrack Read online

  "Head down!" I called out. Jill-Beth ducked and the dinghy scraped under branches. I killed the engine as the dinghy's bows jarred on some obstruction. The searchlight whipped past us as the powerboat slewed round into the main channel. She must have been doing thirty knots now and her engines could have woken the dead in village graveyards a mile away. I scrambled past Jill-Beth and tied the dinghy's painter to a low bough. "Give me your wet trousers," I said.

  She frowned with puzzlement, but obeyed. I hung the white trousers over the dinghy's side, looping one leg over the gunwale and hanging the other straight down into the water. "Breaking our shape," I explained. "He's looking for a wooden dinghy, not a brown and white pattern." The drooping tree branches would help confuse our shape, but I knew Mulder's searchlight was powerful enough to probe through the leaves and I hoped the white cloth would disguise us.

  "He's stopping." Jill-Beth was down in the dinghy's bilge and her voice was scarce above a whisper.

  The powerboat was slowing and I heard its engines fade to a mutter as its bow dropped and its shining aerofoil hull settled into the current. Mulder had accelerated to where he thought we might be; now he would search. "Head down!" I crouched with Jill-Beth in the boat's bottom.

  The light skidded past us, paused, came back, then went on again. I breathed a sigh of relief. Wildtrack II was burbling along the river now, searching. Mulder had missed us on his first pass. But he would be back.

  Jill-Beth tweaked the trousers I'd hung over the gunwale. "A soldier's trick?"

  "Is it?" I said.

  "Because you weren't injured in a car crash, were you?"

  "You shouldn't listen to gossip at parties."

  "Gossip?" She laughed softly, and her face was so close to mine that I could feel her breath on my cheek. "You're Captain Nicholas Thomas Sandman, VC. Your last annual report before the Falklands was kind of non-committal. Captain Sandman's a fine officer, it said, and did well in Northern Ireland, but seems frustrated by the more commonplace duties of soldiering. In brief, he's not very ambitious. He spends too much time on his boat. The men liked you, but that wasn't sufficient reason for the regiment to recommend you for staff college. They really wanted you to leave the regiment to make room for some younger gung-ho type, right? You lacked the motivation to excel, they said, then someone gave you a real live enemy and you proved them all wrong."

  I said nothing for a moment. The water gurgled past our fragile hull. I had pulled away from Jill-Beth, the better to see her face in the shadows. "Who are you?"

  "Jill-Beth Kirov, like the ballet." She grinned, and her teeth showed very white against her dark skin. I raised my head high enough to see Wildtrack II searching the far bank and I made out Mulder's distinctive silhouette against the glare caused by his searchlight on the thick leaves.

  "Who are you?" I asked again.

  "I work for a guy called Yassir Kassouli. Heard of him?"

  "Bannister's father-in-law."

  "Ex-father-in-law," she corrected me, then stiffened suddenly as the searchlight whipped round and seemed to shine straight at the two of us. I saw the willow leaves above our heads turn a mixture of bright silver-green and jet black as the light slashed into the branches. "Jesus!" Jill-Beth hissed.

  "It's all right." I put an arm over her shoulder to keep her head low. The light swept on, probing another shadow, but I kept my arm where it was. She did not move.

  "What do you do for Kassouli?" I whispered the question almost as if I feared Mulder might hear us over the growl of his idling engines.

  "Investigator."

  "A private detective?" I asked in some astonishment. I thought private detectives only existed on television, but how else could she have discovered the details of my confidential army file?

  "Insurance investigator," she corrected me. "I work for the marine division of an insurance company that's a subsidiary of Kassouli Enterprises."

  "What do you investigate?"

  "Hell," she shrugged, "whatever? I mean, if some guy says a million bucks' worth of custom-built motor yacht just turned itself into a submarine off the Florida Keys, and now he wants us to fork out for a new one, we kind of become curious, right?"

  I tried to imagine her dealing with crooks, and couldn't. "You don't look like an investigator."

  "You expect the Pink Panther? Shit, Nick, of course I don't look like a cop! Hell, if they see some chick in a bikini they don't start reaching for their lawyer, do they? They offer me a drink, then they tell me all the things they wouldn't tell some guy with a tape-recorder." She peered upriver, but Mulder was now far off the scent.

  "And just what are you investigating here?" I asked.

  "Nadeznha Bannister's life was insured with her father's company for a million bucks. Guess who the beneficiary is?"

  "Anthony Bannister?"

  "You got it in one, soldier." She grinned. "But if Nadeznha was murdered, then we don't have to pay."

  There was something chilling about the calm and amused confidence with which she had spoken of murder; so chilling that I took my arm from her shoulder. "Was she murdered?"

  "That's what I'm trying to prove." She spoke grimly, intimating that she was not having any great success.

  "What else are you doing?" I asked.

  She must have heard the suspicion in my voice, for her reply was very guarded. "Nothing else."

  "Dismasting Wildtrack?" I guessed. "Cutting its warps?"

  "Jesus." She sounded disgusted with me. "You think I'm into that kind of stupidity? Just what kind of a jerk do you think I am?"

  Then if not her, who? Yet I believed her strenuous denial, because I wanted this girl to be straight and true. "I'm sorry I suggested it," I said.

  "Hell, Nick, I'd love to know who's bugging Bannister, but it sure as hell isn't me. Ssh!" She put a finger to my lips because Wildtrack II had swung round, accelerated, and now the searchlight slid towards us again. Mulder cut the throttles once more and I cautiously raised my head to see the big powerboat coming slowly down this western bank. I could sense Mulder's confusion from the erratic movements of the light, but there was still a chance that he would find us.

  Jill-Beth wriggled herself into a semblance of comfort. "How long will that bastard keep looking?"

  "God knows."

  "I need to get back to Mystique. I left all my papers in the cabin."

  "We'll just have to wait." I paused. "Is that why you were with Mulder tonight? Hoping he'd say something incriminating?"

  "Sort of." She grinned at me. "You must have thought I was a real creep, but the chance to talk to him was just too good. But the bastard set me up. He knew just why I was here."

  "How did he know?"

  "Beats me." She raised her head to watch the light, then subsided again. "Why was that girl chewing you up?"

  "Bannister wants me to be his navigator in the St Pierre. I've refused. She got upset."

  She stared at me in silence, perhaps puzzled that I should refuse such an offer. Then she shrugged. "I'm sorry to involve you, Nick."

  "Don't be sorry. I wanted to be involved."

  Her big eyes reflected dark in the night. She said nothing, nor was there anything that I cared to say, so instead I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth.

  She returned the kiss, then placed her head on my shoulder. We stayed still. I did not know just what tangle she was drawing me into, I only knew that I wanted to be a part of it. I sensed a tension flow out of her.

  We talked then. Mulder searched for us, but we crouched in the dinghy and talked. She told me she came from Rhode Island, but now lived on Cape Cod. Her father was in the US Navy. I told her that my father was in jail, and that Bannister's house had been my childhood home.

  She told me Mystique was a cow to sail, but she had not wanted to bring her own boat over from Massachusetts because the crossing would have wasted valuable time. I asked her if hers was a big boat and she said yes, then wrinkled her nose prettily and told me she was kind of affluent
. I told her I was kind of poor.

  She said Sycorax was a great-looking boat. I agreed. I also decided that fate had been kind in sending this girl to my river. She was swift to laugh and quick to listen. We talked of sailing and she told me of a bad night when she'd been single-handed on the western side of Bermuda. I knew those reefs, and sympathised. She'd been a watch-captain on one of the boats caught in the '79 Fastnet storm and I listened jealously to her descriptions.

  We talked, almost oblivious of Mulder's fumbling search, but then his light suddenly went out and the sound of his twin engines died away to leave an ominous silence. We both twisted to stare at the river, but nothing moved on the water except the dying disturbance of the powerboat's wake.

  "He's given up," Jill-Beth breathed.

  "No," I said.

  "He's gone!" she insisted.

  "He wants us to think he's gone." I climbed over the dinghy's thwart, wound the starting lanyard on to the Seagull, then yanked it. The motor belched into life and its distinctive sound echoed across the river. I let it run for five seconds, then cut the fuel just as the searchlight split the darkness in an attempt at ambush. Mulder had been hiding in the shadows, but his guess of where the outboard's sound had come from was hopelessly wrong. I chuckled at having successfully tricked him.

  Jill-Beth was less pleased. "He's a stubborn bastard."

  "He'll wait all night," I said.

  "Jesus! Shee-it!" She was suddenly vehement in her frustration. "I need to get those damned papers! Hell!" She stared across the river to where Wildtrack II was searching the far bank. The searchlight flickered quick and futile across the empty leaves. "Suppose I swim back?" Jill-Beth asked suddenly.

  "What if he finds you?" I asked in warning.

  "I can't just do nothing!"

  In the end she helped me to hide the dinghy by filling it with stones and sinking it at the river's edge. We concealed the Seagull under a pile of grass and leaves, then worked our way northwards. It was too dangerous to stay close to the river while Mulder searched so we looped up to Ferry Lane through the hill pastures. I made Jill-Beth wear my brogues to save her bare feet from the nettles and thorns. It was an awkward journey through hedgerows and across rough fields, but I noticed how my leg did not buckle once and how the pain in my back seemed to relent in the face of our urgency.

  The urgency was to rescue Jill-Beth's papers which, she said, must not fall into Bannister's hands. We planned to go as far as the ferry slip from which we would swim to Mystique. If Mulder had abandoned his search by then, and restored Wildtrack II to the boathouse, Jill-Beth would slip her moorings and sail out to sea. If there was still danger, then we would just remove the papers and swim ashore again.

  But our planning was all in vain for, as we reached the shadows at the head of the ferry slip, we saw that Bannister had anticipated our fears. A dinghy was moored beside Mystique and two men, perhaps from Mulder's crew, were searching her. Their torchlight flickered on the small boat's deck. There was still a hint of orange smoke skeining the moorings, though the fires in the woodland had died to a dull glow.

  Jill-Beth swore again.

  "How important were the papers?" I asked.

  "There's nothing in them he doesn't already know," she said, "but they'll tell him just how much I know. Shit!"

  "Shall we call the police?" I asked. "I mean, they don't have any right to search your boat."

  "Come on, Nick!" she chided me. "How long will it take for us to reach a phone? And how long before the goddamn police arrive? Bannister will have his answers by then." She stared at the flickering shapes on Mystique, then shrugged in resignation. "You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so there's no point in trying."

  She shivered, and I put an arm around her. She resisted for a second, then subsided against me. "Hell," she said, "but you're a very inconvenient man, Nick Sandman."

  "I thought I was rather convenient for you tonight."

  "I don't mean that." She went silent because Wildtrack II had appeared at Sansom's Point. I thought Mulder was going to bring the big powerboat up to the moorings, but instead, in a swirl of moonlit foam, he accelerated in a semicircle to speed downriver again.

  "What I meant," Jill-Beth said softly, "is that it's very inconvenient to get emotionally entangled during a case."

  "Are you emotionally entangled?"

  She did not answer the question, and I did not press her. Instead we crouched together in the deep shadows at the slip's head and stared at the bright lights on Bannister's terrace from whence came the tumbling sounds of music and laughter. The night's alarums were over for the party guests, but there was still a grim game of cat and mouse happening on the darkened river. Jill-Beth could not escape to sea so long as Mulder blocked the river, and the South African had shown no signs of giving up the chase.

  "I'm finished here," Jill-Beth finally said. "I guess I screwed up, right?"

  "I don't see how you could have ever got your evidence," I said in an attempt to make her feel better. "I mean, if Bannister did push his wife overboard, how could you ever prove it?"

  "That's my job," she said bitterly, then pulled herself gently away from my embrace. "But what's important now is to get you safely back. I can't show my face here again, but you're still kosher. Tell them that, as far as you know, you just rescued me from that Goddamned rapist, OK? We haven't talked about Kassouli, and you think I'm just a girl writing a pilot book."

  "It doesn't matter about me," I said, "except that I don't want to leave you."

  She smiled at my protestation, then kissed me. "If you disappear now, Nick, Bannister will think you've been working with me. How long do you think your boat will be safe then? Jesus! You saw how ready that South African is to pull a trigger! He'll stop at nothing, Nick."

  The thought of Sycorax at risk made me silent.

  "Stay here," Jill-Beth urged me, "and I'll get in touch with you. I'll leave a message with Jimmy Nicholls and it'll be real soon, Nick."

  "I want it to be soon."

  "Real soon." She said the words softly, in promise, and I felt a shiver of excitement. Jill-Beth gently pulled away and stood up. "Can I keep the shoes for tonight?"

  "Where are you going?"

  "I've got to reach a telephone. I'll call one of Kassouli's British executives and tell him to send a car for me. I need to go to London, I guess, in case Kassouli wants me to fly home." She shrugged. "He's not real keen on people who screw up."

  "You did your best," I said loyally.

  "Yassir Kassouli's not interested in my best, only success."

  I shivered. The parting was awkward, and made more so by the unasked questions and unsaid words. I smiled. "Don't leave England without meeting me."

  "I've got to return your shoes, right?" She laughed, then tied the laces as tightly as she could. "Take care, Nick."

  "You take care, too."

  She impulsively leaned towards me and kissed me warmly. "Thank you foreverything." She said it softly, then pulled away from me and bundled up the wet clothes she'd fetched from the dinghy.

  "What about Mystique?" I asked.

  "The charterers will fetch her back. I'll call them from London." We kissed again, then she started uphill. I watched her shadow moving in the lane and listened to the scuff of the heavy shoes.

  The sounds faded and I was alone. The men who'd searched Mystique rowed towards the far bank. Mulder was still downriver and I felt suddenly forlorn. I tried to conjure back the sensations of Jill-Beth's skin and voice. Till that moment I had not thought of myself as lonely, but suddenly it seemed to me that the American girl would fit so easily into Sycorax's life.

  I sat for a long time, thinking. I should have been thinking about murder and proof and justice, but I had been entranced by a girl's smile and a girl's voice and by my own hunger. The music sounded across the water. I consoled myself that Jill-Beth had promised to call me soon, and somehow that promise seemed to imply a whole new hope for a whole new life.
r />   I waited a good hour, but Mulder was as stubborn as I feared and did not return. In the end I stripped naked, bundled my clothes at the small of my back, and went quickly down the ferry slip and into the river. I breaststroked through the quicksilver shimmer of moonlight to my wharf where I pulled myself over Sycorax's counter. I dried off, went below, and tried to imagine the finished cabin as a home for two people. Then, dreaming the dreams of love's foolish hopes, I locked the washboards and hatch, then waited for dawn.

  No one stirred in the dawn. The litter of the night's party was strewn down the garden where a vague and sifting mist curled from the river. Wildtrack II was back in its dock. I'd heard the powerboat come in during the night and I had waited with a hammer in case Mulder should try to enter Sycorax's cabin, but he had ignored me. I'd slept then.

  Now, waking early, I took one of Bannister's inflatables and went downstream to where I'd left my dinghy. I emptied it of water, then dragged tender and outboard over the mud and towed them home. If Mulder saw me from Wildtrack , he did nothing.

  I washed my hands in the river, took some money from its hiding place in Sycorax's bilge, then walked up to the house. Some of the guests slept in the big lounge, others must have been upstairs, but no one was stirring yet. I made myself coffee in Bannister's kitchen, then took the keys to one of his spare cars. There was a Land-Rover that Bannister kept deliberately unwashed so that tourists would think he had a working farm, and a Peugeot. I took the Peugeot for my long overdue errand.

  I hadn't driven in over two years, and at first my right leg was awkward on the pedals. I missed the brake once and almost rammed the heavy car into a ditch, but somehow I found the hang of it. I drove north and east for three hours, arriving at the housing estate at breakfast time. Concrete roads curved between dull brick houses. I parked in a bus-stop and waited for an hour, not wanting to wake the household.

  Sally Farebrother was still in her brushed nylon dressing-gown when she opened the door to me. She had a small child clutching at her right leg and a baby in her arms. She looked surprised rather than pleased to see me; indeed, she must have wondered if I was in trouble, for I looked like a derelict in my filthy jersey, torn jeans, and old sea-boots. Sally did not look much better herself; she had become a drab and shapeless girl burdened with small children and large resentments. Her dyed hair was lumpy with plastic rollers and her face was pasty. "Captain?"