The Walking Dead

He had been taken back, through the night, towards Barcelona, and in the dawn, with rain in the air, near to a station on the city's railway, he had suggested that the driver might wish to relieve his bladder after the long drive. Then he had come behind the man, taken his throat in his hands and strangled him. He had torched the car and left the body in undergrowth at the end of an uncleared track; the killing was to protect his identity. He had taken the train, with the day's early commuters, and after two changes had reached the airport, and forgotten the man who had driven him.

As he presented his ticket — best to travel in a tourist mass because with a group the scanning of passports at his destination would be slack — a ground hostess smiled at him, and he smiled back, but his eyes were on the bursting cleavage under her blouse.

She giggled and he laughed, as if he was going on holiday, took back his ticket, walked on and was buried in the flow of tourists.

* * *

He thought the package was drugs — heroin from Afghanistan or cocaine from Colombia — and Dennis Foulkes didn't give a damn. He was broke, and likely to be formally bankrupted. The cash stashed in a plastic bag in a galley cupboard would be enough to hold off the creditors, and protect his proudest possession.

She was the Joker of the Pack, and Dennis Foulkes loved her with passion. The money paid to him would hold off the inevitability of their parting. She was a motor-cruiser with two Volvo 480 h.p. engines that gave her a maximum speed, in good conditions, of thirty-three knots. She was a little over thirteen metres from bow to stern, with a beam of fractionally more than four metres. Inside those specifications were a cockpit, a saloon, a galley and dinette, three master staterooms — two of them en-suite — and crammed into every corner of her hull were the luxuries of wealth…He had had wealth. Money had dripped off him when he had run a prospering Rover car dealership, and he had not heard the warning sirens — eye off the ball — because he had just shelled out £265,000, paid without a loan, and he had taken the berth at the Kingswear marina on the south Devon coast, and had thought his business could run itself.

What a bloody fool. The car factory had collapsed in insolvency, what was in his showroom couldn't be given away, and he had not seen it coming. House gone — repossessed when the mortgage could not be met. Wife gone. All he had to remind him of what he had once been was the Joker of the Pack, which boasted the best electronic navigation systems, cocktail cabinets in solid wood, carpets and a bed in the biggest master stateroom that he could have shagged three little beauties in and not felt it a crowd. He did chartering. Any sod who'd pay could get a ride across the Channel, and he wasn't too proud to do day trips to Plymouth in the west or Lyme Regis to the east. He was for hire, and each pound or euro he was paid helped to keep his love under his feet. And if there were no punters, too early in the season, just a package wrapped in waterproof paper and bound with masking tape — stacked at the back of the galley cupboard — Dennis Foulkes wasn't losing sleep. The nightmare in his life was that his creditors at the bank or the mortgage company would hear of the Joker of the Pack, send in the bailiffs and flog her off dirt cheap to settle against the million, might be two, that he owed the bank and the building society — but a drip of cash showed willing and would keep them off his bloody back…Necessity, and love, dictated that he had made no judgements on the man who had sat with him in the café overlooking the harbour at Castro Urdiales.

The Joker of the Pack shuddered under him in the crested waves of a force six, might be seven, and he was far out in the Bay of Biscay and on course for a landfall sighting of the French coast at the Île d'Ouessant and then the run, God willing in calmer waters, across the Channel and into the Dart estuary.

He reflected, hanging on to the wheel as she bounced on the swell and water cascaded on to the bridge's windows, that the girl who had come tripping down the pier at Kingswear to arrange all this hadn't seemed the type tied into drugs importation. The guy had, cold sort of bastard for all his smiling, and he'd left a taste of fear behind him that was still in Dennis Foulkes's throat — but he'd thought her a nice girl. A pity about that awful bloody scar on her face.

* * *

He kept her shoulders and back always in view. Jamal was beside her, but it was the woman on whom he concentrated his attention.