The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

We drove down to the police station then to see if there was any news of Patch. But all the sergeant at the desk could tell us was that he had been seen in a number of pubs in the dock area and had spent part of the night at an all-night cafe out on the Ports mouth road. He had got a lift about four in the morning in a truck headed back towards Southampton. They were now trying to trace the truck driver.

We hung around for a little, but there was no further news. ‘And it’s my opinion,’ the sergeant added darkly, ‘that there won’t be any — ‘cept for the finding of the body as you might say. The people at the cafe described him as desperate — looked like death, the report says.’

Hal drove me to the railway station then, and when he had gone I bought an evening paper. Without thinking I found myself looking at the forecast. Winds moderate, northwesterly. As I stood waiting for my train I was thinking of Higgins and the Dellimare Company and the fact that the Minkies were only a day’s sail from Lulworth.

PART THREE

THE MINKIES

‘Sea Witch! Ahoy! Ahoy, Sea Witch!’

Gulls wheeled, screaming, and my voice came back to me, a lonely shout in the drizzling rain. The yacht lay motionless in the crater of the cove, the reflection of her black topsides shattered every now and then as cat’s-paws of wind riffled the mirror-surface of the water. The waves of a swell broke in the entrance and, all round, the hills loomed ghostly and grey in the mist, all colour lost, their grass slopes dropping to the dirty white of the chalk cliffs. There wasn’t a soul about.

‘Ahoy! Sea Witch!’ A figure moved on the deck, a splash of yellow oilskins; the clatter of oars and then the dinghy was coming to meet me. It grounded with a crunch on the wet shingle and I climbed in and Mike rowed me out. I was relieved to find that I didn’t have to tell him about the Enquiry; he had followed it all in the newspapers. But once we were on board with the dinghy made fast and my gear stowed, he began to ask questions — what had happened to Patch, why hadn’t he turned up at the Court this morning? ‘You know they’ve issued a warrant for his arrest?’

‘A warrant? How do you know?’ I asked. I don’t know why, but it shocked me. It seemed so pointless.

‘It was on the six o’clock news.’

‘Did it say what the charge was?’

‘No. But they’ve got police checks on all the roads leading out of Southampton and they’re keeping watch on the ports.’

We discussed it during the meal. There were only the two of us. Ian had gone home to visit his people. Mike was to phone him as soon as we were ready to start operations again, but he hadn’t done so yet because the latest forecast was wind moderate northwesterly, backing westerly later and becoming fresh, with the outlook unsettled. The thing that puzzled Mike most about the whole business was why Patch hadn’t told the Court about Dellimare’s offer. Not having been present at the Enquiry, but only reading the reports, it was natural, I suppose, that he should still retain a vivid impression of Patch’s visit, and over coffee he suddenly reminded me of the package I had been given at Paimpol. ‘I suppose it couldn’t contain some vital piece of evidence?’ he said.

Until that moment I had forgotten all about it. ‘If it had,’ I said, ‘he would have asked me to produce it.’

‘Have you still got it?’

I nodded and got up and went into the after cabin. It was still there in my brief-case and I took it through into the saloon. Mike had cleared a space on the table and I reached for a knife and cut the string, feeling as I had done during the war on the occasions when I had had to deal with the effects of some poor devil who’d been killed.

‘Looks like a book of some sort,’ Mike said. ‘It couldn’t be the log, could it?’

‘No,’ I answered. ‘The log was in Court.’

Inside the brown paper wrapping was an envelope. The name /. C. B. Dellimare was typed on it and below, in blue pencil, was scrawled the one word Collect. The envelope had been ripped open, the tear crossing the stamped impress of a City bank. I had a vague hope then that perhaps Mike was right — that it was some sort of an account book belonging to Dellimare or the Company, something that would reveal a financial motive. And then I slid the contents on to the table and stared incredulously.

Lying amongst the supper things was a thick wad of five pound notes.

Mike was gazing at the pile, open-mouthed with astonishment. He’d never seen so much cash in his life; neither of us had. I split it between us. ‘Count it!’ I said.

For several seconds there wasn’t a sound in the saloon except the crackle of those Bank of England notes. And when we had totalled it all up, it came to exactly Ł5,000, and Mike looked up at me. ‘No wonder he didn’t want to bring it out through the Customs himself,’ he said. And then, after a pause, he added, ‘Do you think he accepted Dellimare’s offer after all?’