Medusa

‘Drowned ‘isself,’ Carp answered. ‘Wot else? It’s easy enough to do at the Ferry with the shingle beach dropping almost sheer and a sluicing ebb tide that runs over five knots at springs. He was missing two days before anybody took Moira’s whimpers seriously. He’d done it before, gone off on ‘is own without her knowing where. Very unpredictable man. Once he slept out at Minsmere in the woods there two whole days. Bird-watching at the Reserve there is wot he said, but we all reck’ned it was because he’d ‘ad enough of it. They found ‘is body out by the Haven buoy … That’s right, the same buoy that young lieutenant was found clinging to. It was a yacht outward bound for Dutchland wot found ‘im. Helluva way to start a cruise, fishing a body out of the water that’s been dead — well, it must have been close on a week by then.’

A horn blared from the direction of the quay and I poked my head out of the saloon door, thinking perhaps Soo had come back for some reason. There was a car parked there, its headlights at high beam and directed straight at the Santa Maria. The wheelhouse light came on and a moment later the dinghy slid away from her side, the outboard sounding as harsh as a chainsaw in the stillness.

We watched from the doorway as the dinghy swung alongside the quay where the driver was waiting to receive the box or large carton that was handed up to him. The car drove off and the dinghy returned to the Santa Maria. The lights went out, everything still again, only the wind moaning in the trees and undergrowth of the protecting peninsula to the east of us.

‘Some more coffee?’ Luis had emerged and was holding the pot up in invitation. We had it with the rest of our Macallan at the chart table, checking the position at which we would finally turn on to our course for Malta. It was a straight run on a course of 155^° that passed some thirty miles south of Sardinia. ‘Six hundred miles,’ Carp said. ‘We should make it without motoring in a little over three days.’

‘If the wind holds,’ I said. ‘Which it seldom does.’

It took us only a few minutes to get ready for sea, then we hoisted the main, holding the cat head-to-wind and pulling the anchor warp in by hand until it was up and down. I didn’t start the engines, not even one of them, sailing the anchor out and hauling in on the main sheet until, with the wind abeam, we were headed to pass east of the island that lay across the inlet’s narrows like a cork in a bottle and separated Macaret harbour from the upper reaches of the inlet, which was Port d’Addaia. We passed within less than a cable’s length of the Santa Maria, slipping through the water quite silently, only a slight chuckle at the bows. Nobody stirred, no lights came on, and in a moment the bulk of the island hid her from view.

Carp and Luis hoisted the jib, and as we hardened in on the sheet, Thunderflash picked up her skirts and began to move. Off Macaret itself we began to feel the weight of the wind, the speed indicator moving towards seven knots. There was movement, too, as we got the wind coming in through the entrance. ‘Everything stowed?’ I asked Luis, and when he nodded I told him to go below and check again. ‘It will be rough when we come out of the lee of Illa Gran.’

Carp suddenly hailed me from for’ard. ‘There’s a boat coming in.’

‘Where?’

But he was already pointing, his arm indicating a position straight over the bows. By then the speed indicator was flickering on ten and a second later I saw it, a dark shape, with no lights. It was only the white of her bow wave that had enabled Carp to pick it out. ‘Bloody fool!’ he said as he landed on the teak grid beside my swivel chair.

‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘Coastal patrol?’

‘Don’t reck’n so. Bugger’s coming in without a single light showing. Could be Navy. An exercise. Otherwise …’

I was thinking of the Santa Maria, lying at the head of the inlet, and the car that had met Evans on the quay. I was certain it was Evans who had taken that box or case ashore. ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said. Already we could hear the thump of her diesel, and at that moment she was picked out for an instant by the headlights of a car on a bend ashore. There were barely a dozen metres between us as she went thundering past, and caught like that in the sweep of the car’s lights, the dark silhouette of three men showed in the wheelhouse. She was a motor yacht of the fifties vintage or even earlier. ‘Saving her batteries,’ Carp said. ‘Either that or she’s bringing in a nice little present for somebody on the quiet.’