The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

‘Why fantastic? They must know I’m on board. And you wouldn’t have sailed if you hadn’t believed my story. Imagine what they face if the truth conies out.’

Mike turned to me. ‘Do you believe this, John?’ His face was very pale. He sounded bewildered.

‘I think we’d better try and shake them off,’ I said. Patch had his own reasons for driving us on. But I knew I didn’t want that boat to catch up with us in the dark.

‘But good God! This is the English Channel. They can’t do anything to us here.’ He stared at Patch and myself, waiting for us to answer him. ‘Well, what the hell can they do?’ And then he looked out at the blackness that surrounded us, realising gradually that it made no difference that we were in the Channel. There were just the three of us alone in a black waste of tumbled water that spilled to white on the crests, and without another word he got the log line out of the locker and went aft to stream it astern.

‘We go on then,’ Patch said. The sudden relief from tension made his voice sound tired. It reminded me that he had had no sleep the night before and no food, that for days he’d been under a great strain.

Mike came back into the cockpit. ‘I think we’re holding them now,’ he said. I glanced back at Griselda.

Her navigation lights were masked every now and then by the marching wave-tops. ‘When the tide turns,’ I said, ‘we’ll beat up to windward and see if that will shake them off.’ I got up stiffly from behind the wheel. ‘Will you take the first watch, Mike?’ It would have to be two hours on and four off, with one man alone at the wheel and the other two on call. We were desperately short-handed for a hard sail like this. I gave him the wheel and went through into the charthouse to enter up the log.

Patch followed me in. ‘Have you thought about who will be on board that motor boat?’ he asked me. I shook my head, wondering what was coming, and he added, ‘It won’t be Gundersen, you know.’

‘Who will it be then?’

‘Higgins.’

‘What’s it matter which of them it is?’ I asked. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘Just this,’ he said earnestly. ‘Gundersen is a man who would only take calculated risks. But if Higgins is in control of that boat…’ He stared at me, watching to see whether I had understood his point.

‘You mean he’s desperate?’

‘Yes.’ Patch looked at me for a moment. ‘There’s no need to tell young Duncan. If Higgins doesn’t stop us before we get to that salvage tug, he’s done for. When he’s arrested, the others will panic. Burrows, for one, will turn Queen’s evidence. You understand?’ He turned away then. ‘I’ll go and get some food inside me.’ But in the doorway he hesitated. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to land you in a thing like this.’

I finished entering up the log and turned in, fully clothed, on the charthouse bunk. But I didn’t sleep much. The movement was uncomfortable, and every time I looked out through the open doorway I could see Griselda’s lights bobbing in the darkness astern of us, and then I would listen to the sound of the wind in the rigging, alert for the slightest indication that it was slackening. Twice Mike had to call me out to help him winch in the sheets, and at two o’clock I took over the helm.

The tide had turned and the seas were steep and breaking. We altered course to southwest, sheeting in the sails till they were almost flat as we came on to the wind. It was cold then with the wind on our faces and the spray slatting against our oilskins as Sea Witch beat to windward, bucking the seas and busting the wave-tops open, water cascading from her bows.

Behind us, Griselda’s navigation lights followed our change of course and the white of her masthead light danced crazily in the night as she wallowed and pitched and rolled in our wake. But a power boat doesn’t fit herself to the pattern of the water the way a boat under sail does and gradually the red and green lights dipped more frequently below the level of the waves, until at last all we could see was her steaming light dancing like a will-o’-the-wisp on the wave-tops.

Mike’s voice reached out to me through the noise of wind and sea: ‘We’ve got them now.’ He was excited. ‘If we go about…’ The rest of it was lost to me, whipped away by the wind, drowned in the crash of a wave bursting against the bows. But I knew what was in his mind. If we went on to the other tack, sailing northwest, instead of southwest, there was a good chance that they wouldn’t notice our change of course, even though the night had become brilliant with stars. And once clear of them we could turn downwind, get to the east of them and make for the Alderney Race.