Before I could begin to puzzle this out, I heard a movement above me — no more than a faint whistling like something passing through the air at speed. I turned my head just in time to see the end of the windlass flash across my sight.
A split second later, a stunning blow landed on my skull and I fell backwards onto the floor of the cabin, unconscious.
As I came round, my first feeling was an excruciating agony at the back of my skull, which seemed to spread tendrils of pain through my head and neck, and numb my shoulders and arms. Then came the nausea, and I had to swallow painfully as I fought to keep the contents of my stomach down.
I was lying face down on the floor, and the planks were cold against my cheek. The smell in my nostrils should have been of wood, but it wasn’t. The reek of diesel was almost overpowering. But there was something else too that I thought I ought to be able to identify. Though my ears were ringing, there was also a noise somewhere that my brain couldn’t put a name to.
I don’t know how long I lay there waiting for the pain to subside. But my senses seemed to come alive before my brain did. The smells and sounds suddenly registered and became recognisable. Frightened, I moved my head too suddenly, and the pain erupted again. But now I was reacting automatically, driven by the adrenaline that was surging through my body and the unreasoning fear that gripped my limbs.
Fire. The acrid smell filling the cabin was smoke, and beyond it was the crackling of flames. Behind me, the boat was burning. I turned my head as I lifted it from the floor and saw fire leaping and sparking over a pile of paper and rags in the corner near the hatches. The flames were just beginning to creep up the steps, where a trickle of diesel was about to gain the impetus to run downwards to meet it. Without my torch, the blazing objects were all I could see in the smoke-filled darkness.
Somehow I was on my feet. My head was spinning, but I knew I had to get out, and fast. Instinctively, I headed away from the fire, through the door of the cabin, back towards the galley. No sooner had I got the door shut behind me, than I heard the diesel fuel ignite and felt the boat rock as an explosion filled the cabin. Heat seared the door, and the wood twisted and blackened.
I kept going, past the bedroom, cannoning off the doors and bulkheads, and found myself in the saloon. I knew that just in front of here were the gas bottles, and it wasn’t the place to be in a fire. When the flames and heat reached this far, Kestrel would be blown to bits, even if the fuel tank didn’t go up first.
At the fore-end was a small door out onto the bow. It was padlocked on the outside, but the only other way out was through one of the tiny windows. I threw myself desperately against the door, feeling the frame give slightly under the impact. I tried again and again. The wood began to splinter. I could hear the boat burning fiercely behind me, and I glanced back to see flames licking under the saloon door.
With one final, desperate lunge, I crashed through the hatch and stumbled helplessly out onto the bow. With a roar, the fuel tank exploded, and fire leaped out to scorch my back. I threw myself forward into the darkness and plunged instantly into freezing water. The shock drove the breath from my lungs, but I managed to keep my head for a minute or two as I pumped my legs and thrashed my arms to put as much distance between myself and the blazing boat as I could.
Finally, I was forced to come up for air. The night was lit up like daylight by the flames roaring towards the sky. I could see the stern cabin had been blown away completely, and the missing roof exposed a glowing inferno.
I splashed about until I was on the far side of the canal and within reach of the pilings on the bank. My wet clothes were weighing me down, and I was conscious of the bulk of the package slipping down inside my coat. With one hand, I reached in and pulled out the sodden envelope and tossed it onto the bankside.
Even then, I found that I lacked the strength to pull myself up. All I could do was cling to the pilings and watch Kestrel burn.
39
Detective Sergeant Graham and I were both wrapped up in coats and scarves as we stood on the towpath next day and watched scenes of crime officers in paper suits go over the blackened wreck of the boat. Our breath steamed the frosty air as I waited for Graham to speak. But for a while he seemed content to let me stew. His expression was more worried than ever, and his face was pale with cold under his stubble.
‘Did nobody see anything?’ I asked at last.
He gave me an impatient glower. ‘The couple who pulled you out of the water saw nobody. And the lady in the next house over there only remembers you, Mr Buckley. The same neighbour who told us you’d visited Ash Lodge previously.’
‘Mrs Wentworth.’
‘That’s the lady’s name.’
‘Yes, you know perfectly well I visited Ash Lodge. I didn’t deny it. I came to see Samuel Longden, but he wasn’t here.’
‘Remind me, was that before or after the time you were supposed to meet him in Lichfield market square?’
‘Before, obviously. Afterwards—’
‘Afterwards, he was dead. Of course. You seem to have had bad luck trying to meet up together. But looking for him on his boat nearly three weeks after his death seems a bit desperate, sir.’
I gritted my teeth to prevent myself from getting angry at the insinuations. I wasn’t in the best of moods. As far as I was concerned, I’d been brained with a windlass and then almost burned to death before nearly drowning in the canal. Was it too much to expect a bit of sympathy?
It was the owners of Rose Marie, moored further along the bank, who’d come to my rescue with a life belt and a boat hook. Having dragged me to the towpath side and onto solid ground, they’d tried to persuade me to go to hospital for treatment. But apart from a few minor burns and scratches, the worst injury was the gash in my scalp where the windlass had hit me, and the raging headache it had left me with.
In another few minutes, I might have yielded to common sense and gone for a check-up. But the policeman who’d turned up with the fire brigade had been interested only in getting my name and address and my garbled version of events. He’d questioned me suspiciously as I sat and shivered in front of the stove on Rose Marie, wrapped in a blanket.
In the end, the policeman’s attitude had made me feel so angry that I could think of nothing else except sneaking off to collect the package which I’d dropped in the long grass on the far bank, and which I desperately hoped might contain something that would give me a clue why all this was happening. Only when I’d done that, I thought, would I feel able to get off home to a couple of paracetamols and a warm bed.
But it had been hours before I was able to get away. I’d been forced to stay and watch while the firemen performed the futile and ironic task of pouring water into a boat, a paramedic patched up my wounds, and my new boater friends had hunted round to find me some dry clothes. Even after the firefighters and the police had left, I’d waited in my car until I was sure that the Rose Marie people were settled down for the night. Then I’d walked along the towpath to the nearest footbridge, a quarter of a mile along the canal, before I could work my way along the edge of the fields and locate my package — a soaking mess in the grass.
By then, I’d been nearly blind with weariness and pain. I’d driven back to Lichfield in a stupor, like someone drugged. A few hours later, I’d woken up lying on my bed in my clothes, soaked in sweat and stiff with bruising, whimpering with terror — only to be called back to the scene and forced to explain myself all over again to DS Graham on a freezing canal bank.