Stormchild Read online

  “It might be possible,” I said, though my tone implied there could be vast difficulties in such a delivery for, eager as I was to sell Stormchild, I was not at all certain that her proper fate was to become a flashy toy to impress Miller’s friends and clients. Stormchild was a very serious boat, and I loved boats enough not to want this beautifully built craft to degenerate in the hands of a careless owner. “If it’s a warm-weather vacation boat that you want,” I said as tactfully as I could, “then perhaps you ought to think about a fiberglass hull? They need much less maintenance and they offer better insulation.”

  “There are plenty of people willing to do maintenance work in the Med,” the lawyer said unpleasantly, “and we can always bung some air conditioners into her.”

  My flash of temper had clearly not discouraged the little runt, so I tried warning him that cooling a boat the size of Stormchild would be an expensive business.

  “Let me worry about expense,” Miller said, then bared his teeth in a grimace that I could, if I chose, translate as a smile. “In my line of work, Blackburn, I occasionally need to impress a client, and you don’t do that by being cheap.”

  “Surely the best way to impress clients is to keep them out of jail?” I suggested.

  He gave a scornful bark of laughter. “Good God, man, I’m not a criminal lawyer! Christ, no! I negotiate property deals between the City and Japan. It’s quite specialized work, actually.” He insinuated, correctly, that I would not understand the specialization. “But the Japanese are pathetically impressed by big white boats”—he glanced at his shivering girlfriend—”and by the girls that go with them.”

  Mandy giggled while I, suppressing an urge to wring Miller’s neck, took him below decks to show off the impressive array of instruments that were mounted above Stormchild’s navigation table. Miller dismissed my description of the SatNav, Decca, radar, and weatherfax, saying that his marine surveyor would attend to such details. Miller himself was more interested in the boat’s comforts which, though somewhat lacking in gloss, nevertheless met his grudging approval. He especially liked the aft master cabin where, warmed by one of my big industrial heaters, Mandy had stretched her lithe length across the double berth’s king-size mattress. “Hello, sailor,” she greeted Miller.

  “Oh, jolly good.” Miller was clearly anticipating the effect that Mandy’s lissome beauty would have on his Japanese clients. “Will you take a hundred and ten?” he suddenly demanded of me.

  He had obviously smelled that Stormchild was a bargain, and I felt a terrible sadness for I knew that, once the boat had been used as the sweetener on a few deals, and once Miller had made his fortune from those deals, she would be left to rot in some stagnant backwater. “Why don’t you take a good look at the other cabins,” I said with as much patience as I could muster, “then we can negotiate a price in my office. Would you like some coffee waiting for you?”

  “Decaffeinated,” he ordered imperiously, “with skim milk and an artificial sweetener.”

  I planned to give him powdered caffeine laced with condensed milk and white sugar. “The coffee will be waiting in the office,” I promised, then left them to it.

  Billy, who had just finished rigging the repaired four-and-a-half-ton yawl, ambushed me halfway across the yard. His chivalrous concern, like that of every other red-blooded male in the yard, was for the lubricious and goose-pimpled Mandy. “Bloody hell, boss, what does she see in the little fucker?”

  “She sees his wallet, Billy.”

  “Did you see the fucker’s oilskin coat?” Billy asked indignantly.

  “It can get very rough on the boating pond in Hyde Park,” I said reprovingly, then I turned away because a car had just driven past the big sign that read “Absolutely No Unauthorized Vehicles Beyond This Notice,” and I was readying myself to shout at the driver, when I realized that the car was my brother’s antique Riley.

  “They’re not racing today, are they?” Billy asked, and my own first thought was that David must have come to the yard to launch his 505 racing dinghy. My reverend elder brother was a lethal competitor and, like others who were addicted to the frail, wet discomfort of fragile racing boats, he pretended to despise the sybaritic conveniences of long-distance sailors like myself. “You mean you have a lavatory on that barge?” he would boom at some hapless victim. “You pee in windless comfort, do you? Next you will inform me that you have a cooking stove on board. You do! Then why not just stay in some luxury hotel, dear boy?”

  “You’re not taking your eggshell out in this wind, are you?” I greeted David as he opened the Riley’s door, then I saw he could not possibly be thinking of taking out the 505, for he was wearing his dog collar and cassock, and even David’s mild eccentricities did not extend to sailing in full clerical rig. Instead he was dressed ready for the afternoon’s Easter weddings, and I supposed he had come to inveigle me into buying him a pub lunch before he performed his splicing duties. Then the passenger door of the Riley opened and another man climbed out.

  It is at that point, just as Brian Callendar climbs out of David’s car, that my memory of that Easter weekend becomes like some dark and sinister film that is played over and over in my head. It is a film that I constantly want to change, as if by rewriting its action or dialogue I can miraculously change the film’s ending.

  Brian Callendar comes toward me. He is an acquaintance rather than a friend, and he is also a detective sergeant in the County Police Force, and there is something about his face, and about David’s face behind him, which suggests that the two men have not come to the boatyard for pleasure. The Riley’s engine is still running and its front doors have been left open. I remember how the wind was whirling wood-shavings out of the carpenter’s shop and across the sloping cobbles of the boatyard’s ramp. “Tim?” Callendar said in a very forced voice. I am still smiling, but there is something about the policeman’s voice which tells me that I won’t be smiling again for a very long time. “Tim?” Callendar says again.

  And I want the film to stop. I so badly want the film to stop.

  But it won’t.

  David took my elbow and walked me down to the pontoon where he stood beside me as Callendar told me that a yacht had exploded in mid-channel. Some wreckage had been found, and amongst that wreckage was a yellow horseshoe life buoy with the name Slip-Slider painted in black letters.

  I stared at the policeman. “No,” I said. I was incapable of saying anything else. “No.”

  “A Dutch cargo ship saw it happen, Mr. Blackburn.” Callendar, as befitted a bringer of bad news, had slipped into a stilted formality. “They say it was a bad explosion.”

  “No.” The word was more than a denial, it was a protest. David’s hand was still on my elbow. Church bells were clamorous in the town, foretelling the afternoon’s weddings.

  Callendar paused to light a cigarette. “There are no survivors, Mr. Blackburn,” he said at last, “at least none they could find. The Dutch boat has been looking, and the navy sent a helicopter, but all they’re finding is wreckage, and not much of that either.”

  “No.” I was staring blindly at the river.

  “Who was on board, Mr. Blackburn?”

  I turned to look into the policeman’s eyes, but I could not speak.

  “Was it Joanna?” David sounded uncomfortable, as he always did when raw emotions extruded above the calm surface of life, but he also sounded heartbroken, for he knew exactly who would have been sailing Slip-Slider. The question still had to be asked. “Was Joanna aboard?”

  I nodded. There was a thickening in my throat. I wanted to turn and walk away as though I could deny this conversation. I looked back to Callendar to see if he was joking. I even half smiled, hoping that the policeman would smile back and it would all turn out to be a bad joke.

  “Was anyone else aboard, Mr. Blackburn?” Callendar asked me instead.

  I shook my head. “Just Joanna.” I was shaking. Nothing was real. The world had slipped its gears. In a second David would
laugh and slap my back and everything would be normal again. Except David did no such thing, but just looked stricken and unhappy and embarrassed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. I had given up smoking fifteen years before, but I took the cigarette from Callendar’s fingers and dragged on it. I supposed that either the navy or the Dutch boat had called the Coastguard with Slip-Slider’s name, and the Coastguard would have looked in their card-index and discovered that I was Slip-Slider’s owner. Then they would have called the police, and Callendar, being on friendly terms with me, would have volunteered for this horrid duty, but he had first recruited David to help him. “Oh, Jesus,” I said again, then threw the foul-tasting cigarette into the river. “When?” I asked. “When did it happen?” Not that it mattered, but all I had left now were questions which would try to turn tragedy into sense.

  “Just after nine o’clock this morning,” Callender said.

  But nothing made sense, Nothing. Except the slow realization that my Joanna was dead, and I began to cry.

  The film goes scratchy then; scratchy and fragmented. I didn’t want to watch the film, yet night after night it would show itself to me until I was crying again, or drunk, or usually both.

  I remember telling the London lawyer and his girl to fuck off. I remember David pouring brandy into me, then taking me to his home where his wife, Betty, began to cry. David had to leave and marry three couples, so Betty and I sat in the cheerless comfort of their childless home while the church bells rang a message of joy into the wind-scoured air. The first reporters sniffed the stench of carrion and phoned the rectory in an effort to discover my whereabouts. Betty denied my presence, but when David came back from his weddings a group of pressmen waylaid him at the rectory gate. He told them to go to hell.

  I felt I was already in that fiery pit. David, more comfortable with actions than emotions, tried to find a mechanical reason for Joanna’s death. He wondered if there had been a leak of cooking gas on Slip-Slider, but I shook my head. “We had a gas alarm installed. Joanna insisted on it.”

  “Alarms don’t always work,” David said, as though that would comfort me.

  “Does it matter?” I asked. I only wanted to cry. First my son had been killed, then Nicole had disappeared, and now, Joanna. I could not believe she was dead. Somehow, hopelessly, I thought Joanna might still be alive. For the next few days I fiercely tried to imagine that she had been blown clear of the exploding boat and was still swimming in the channel. I knew it was a stupidly impossible scenario, but I convinced myself she would somehow be safe. Even when they found Joanna’s remains I tried to convince myself that it was not her.

  It was, of course, and when the pathologists were done with what remained of my wife, the undertakers put the scraps in a bag, then into a coffin, and afterward they made up the coffin’s weight with sand before David buried her in the cemetery high on the hill where she and I had used to sit and watch the channel. Joanna was buried in the same grave as our son, Dickie, who had also died in an explosion just as a year was blossoming into new life.

  A navy boat scooped up what remained of Slip-Slider, and the wreckage was brought ashore and examined by forensic scientists, who confirmed what the pathologists had already deduced from their examination of Joanna’s remains. My wife had been killed by a bomb.

  I remember gaping at Sergeant Brian Callendar when he told me that news, and I again tried to deny the undeniable. “No, no.”

  “I’m sorry, Tim. It’s true.”

  There was not much physical wreckage for the forensic scientists to analyze; just the life buoy, some shredded cushions from the cockpit, a plastic bucket, the man-overboard buoy, the radar reflector, the dinghy, one oar, the shaft of a boathook, and the wooden jackstaff to which the red ensign, scarred by the bomb blast, was still attached. It was in the shaft of the jackstaff that the scientists discovered a tiny cogwheel which they later identified as coming from a very common brand of alarm clock, and I was able to confirm that to the best of my knowledge there had been no such clock on board Slip-Slider, which meant the cheap alarm must have been used to trigger the bomb’s detonator.

  The police laboratories, despite the paucity of Slip-Slider’s remains, were nevertheless able to deduce what kind of explosive had been used, and how it had been detonated. By analyzing where each scrap of wreckage had been stored on board, the forensic men could even tell that the bomb had been planted low down on the port side of the engine block. The blast of the bomb would have driven a gaping hole in Slip-Slider’s bilges through which the cold sea must have recoiled in a torrent, but the blast had also erupted razor shards of shattered fiberglass upward and outward to throw whatever and whoever was in the cockpit into the sea. In the same blinding instant the explosion must have filled Slip-Slider’s cabins with an intolerable pressure that had blown the decks clean off the hull. The boat would have sunk in seconds, and Joanna, Brian Callendar assured me, would have known nothing.

  Callendar had come to the house where he had made me a cup of tea before giving me all the grim details of the forensic findings. “It means they’ll bring in the hard men from Scotland Yard”—he paused—”and it means you’re going to be run ragged by the press.”

  The reporters were already besieging me. I protected myself as best I could by taking the phone off the hook and barricading myself in the house where I lived off whiskey, despair, and the sandwiches David brought me. The journalists shouted their questions whenever they saw a shadow at the windows, but I ignored them. I had no answers anyway.

  The journalists, just like the police, wanted to know who had planted the bomb. For a time the police suspected me, but when the hard men from London searched the boatyard and the house they found nothing incriminating, and nothing to suggest our marriage had not been happy. The police grilled me about my army experiences, but that was of no help to them either, for my time in the army had been spent almost entirely in David’s company playing bone-crunching rugby or going on uselessly strenuous expeditions that had not the slightest military value. David and I had kayaked through the Northwest Passage, dogsledded across Greenland, and climbed allegedly unconquered peaks in the Andes, and all courtesy of the British taxpayer, whose only reward had been press photographs of grinning maniacs with frost-encrusted beards. What I had never done in the army was learn to use explosives.

  Nor did I have any motive for destroying Slip-Slider. Yet there were other men who might have had a motive to plant a bomb on board the boat; the same men who had constructed the bomb that had killed my son. “But that bomb,” Inspector Fletcher said, “was your common or garden Provisional IRA Mark One Milk Churn, remotely detonated by radio and stuffed full of Czechoslovak Semtex. Remind me where it happened?”

  “Freeduff.” The name still sounded so stupid to me. Freeduff, County Armagh, was the inconspicuous farmlet where Lieutenant Richard Blackburn, commanding his very first patrol, had been blown into gobbets of scorched flesh and shattered bones.

  “Freeduff,” Fletcher said in the voice of a man recalling old pleasures, “between Crossmaglen and Cullyhanna. Am I right?”

  I gave him a long, meditative look. Inspector Godfrey Fletcher was the hardest of the hard men who had been assigned to investigate Joanna’s murder, and he was evidently no ordinary policeman, but an official thug who moved in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism and political nastiness. He had the narrow face of a predator and eyes that were not nearly so friendly as his manner. The old adage advises that you set a thief to catch a thief, and on that basis Fletcher was probably a man well suited to catching murderous bastards. He was also a man who had clearly enjoyed his time in Northern Ireland. “What were you,” I asked him after a while, “SAS?”

  He pretended not to have heard me, lighting a cigarette instead. “But the bomb that killed your wife was not a Mark One Provo Milk Churn, was it?” His gun-fighter eyes stared at me through the cigarette smoke. “And the Provos never claimed responsibility for your wife’s death, did they?” It
was two weeks after Joanna’s funeral and Fletcher had come to the house to tell me, very grudgingly, that he no longer suspected me of my wife’s murder. But nor, it now seemed, did he think that the Provisional IRA was responsible.

  It had been the press who, in the absence of any other culprits, began the speculation that the Provisional IRA had planted the bomb that destroyed Slip-Slider. It was not such a fanciful notion as it might have seemed, for Joanna and I had often loaned the Contessa 32 to British Army crews, who wanted some race experience; Slip-Slider had won her class in the last Fastnet Race with a crew of Green Jackets aboard, and some newspapers surmised that the IRA had assumed an army crew would be sailing the Contessa that Easter weekend.

  “But this wasn’t your average IRA bomb,” Fletcher went on. “The Provos are too sophisticated to use mechanical clocks. They like to use silicon-chip timers out of microwaves or VCRs. Using a tick-tock these days is like planting a blackball with a smoking fuse; it’s messy and crude.”

  “Maybe it was a splinter group of the IRA?” I was repeating the press speculation, but without any conviction.

  “Then why didn’t they claim responsibility? What’s the point of slaughtering an innocent woman for the cause of a New Ireland unless you tell the world of your achievement? Because if you don’t boast about your murders then the Libyans won’t know where to send their money and you’ve merely wasted a bang, and these days the IRA want bigger bucks for their bangs.” Fletcher was standing at the open kitchen door, staring down the long valley toward the restless channel. Joanna had bought the house for that gentle long view toward the sea. Fletcher blew smoke toward the orchard. “No, Mr. Blackburn”—he did not turn round as he spoke—”I don’t reckon your wife died for a New Ireland. Your son did, but his death was an explicable act of political terrorism; your wife’s death was made to look like an IRA follow-up, but it wasn’t. The IRA don’t use toytown bombs anymore. So who does? Who are your enemies, Mr. Blackburn?” He turned from the door and stared into my eyes.