“Yes, I am.” Since my brother died I’ve been the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, but I prefer the anonymity of plain John Rossendale because a title isn’t any damn use at sea. “But I don’t use the title,” I explained to her, “so just call me John, OK?” I rummaged through the mess on the cabin sole and found a bottle of antiseptic and a half-clean towel which I held out to her. “Why don’t you go forward and clean yourself up? I’ll make some tea.” She went on staring at me. “Go on,” I encouraged her.
She took the bottle and towel, but still did not move, so I climbed up the companionway steps into the cockpit as though I was making sure that the two men had gone. Nothing stirred in the harbour except the rain slithering across the grey water. Smoke rose from chimneys in the town. I heard the girl moving in the cabin below, then the click as she locked herself into the forecabin. I took my binoculars from their clip in the cockpit cave-locker and stared towards the town, but I could see no sign of the small aluminium dory. My intruder had disappeared.
I went below again and swore under my breath. The thin man had turned Sunflower inside out. He had forced locked doors open, then spilt the locker contents on to the sole. He’d torn up the sole and rummaged through the bilges. He’d broken the VHF. The radio’s case looked as if it had been prised apart with a jemmy. I switched the set on, but nothing happened. The damage to the boat was not immense, but the cost of making the repairs would be painful. I cursed the bastard again; then, because I could not contemplate starting to clean up, I went topsides once more, turned on the gas at the aft locker, then went below and lit the gas hob. The small galley was about the only place on the boat which had escaped the thin man’s attention, presumably because I had disturbed him before he could start its destruction. The chart table had been wrenched off its piano hinge and all my precious, rare charts were torn and crumpled. The sextant was safe, which was a blessing. It didn’t seem as if anything had been stolen, but I could not be certain till I had searched the boat properly.
I made a strong pot of tea, mixed some powdered milk, and jammed up a leaf of the cabin table. I packed a pipe, lit it, then waited.
It was ten minutes before the girl came nervously out of the forecabin. She was wearing one of my Aran sweaters, which suited her. She had short black hair, dark eyes, and honey-brown skin. She had also, so far as I could tell, recovered her composure, though there was still a wariness in her expression.
“Tea,” I greeted her. “The milk’s reconstituted. Sugar?”
“No sugar.” She picked her way across the wreckage of the cabin and nervously sat opposite me. “No milk either, please.”
“Rum instead of milk?”
She shook her head, then brushed her fingers through her hair. I saw that she was pretty. Even with a cut face, frightened eyes, and a mucky damp sweater she was pretty.
“Did that bastard take the forecabin apart?” I asked.
“Not as badly as this cabin.” She shuddered suddenly. “I was waiting for you in the cockpit when they arrived. There were two of them, but only one came aboard. I thought he was a friend of yours.” She shivered again and momentarily closed her eyes. “Thank you for frightening him away.”
“My pleasure.” I put a mug of tea in front of her. “Sorry there’s no lemon. Does the pipe smoke bother you?”
“No.” She cradled the tin mug in both hands, found it too hot, and quickly put it down. She glanced around the ransacked cabin, and grimaced. In the cold damp air Sunflower’s accommodation seemed dispiriting and drab. The girl took a deep breath, then looked across the table at me. “I’m Jennifer Pallavicini.”
I did not respond. I had been half expecting her to tell me more about the thin man, but instead she had offered me the formal introduction, so I just smiled an acknowledgement.
“Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?” There was a trace of indignation in her voice.
“Should it?”
“We’ve been writing to you for three years!”
I shrugged to show that none of her letters had reached me, then sipped my tea which I’d generously laced with rum. The heat of the liquid scalded the tender patch where the tooth had been drawn, and I winced. “Your letters are probably mouldering in General Deliveries all over the world. I’m sorry.”
“We wrote care of your mother.”
I half smiled. “I wasn’t the favourite child. She never even sent me a birthday card, let alone other people’s letters.”
“So then we heard you’d come home for your mother’s funeral,” she continued, “and because you never replied to our letters, I was sent down to find you.”
To her it all made sense; to me, none. My mother had never forwarded a letter to me, I had never heard of Jennifer Pallavicini, and I wondered how she had discovered that Sunflower was moored in Salcombe. I had also noted that she had been sent to find me, implying that she was merely a messenger. “Who sent you?” I asked.
She gave me an almost hostile look. It was clear that Miss Jennifer Pallavicini was recovering very swiftly from her encounter with the thin man. This was a tough girl, I suspected, and that realisation made me look more closely at her. There was a lot of character in my visitor’s face; a face blended of intelligence, beauty and determination. A formidable girl, I thought, and not one to take lightly. “So?” I prompted her.
“I work for Sir Leon Buzzacott.”
“Ah,” I said neutrally, though in truth her answer made complete sense. Buzzacott was the rich man who had almost bought Stowey’s Van Gogh, then been denied it. He had never hidden his bitter disappointment. Buzzacott, one of the City’s most glittering financiers, had established his own art collection, the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, at his country house. He believed that too many of Britain’s art treasures were crossing the Atlantic or going to the Japanese, and he had sworn to stop the haemorrhaging flow of paint. The Van Gogh had been his proudest acquisition, filling a great gap in his collection, and it evidently still rankled that the painting did not hang on his museum’s wall.
“What exactly do you do for Sir Leon?” I asked.
“I’m the curator of nineteenth-century Europe.” It seemed either a large task or an excessive boast; anyway, it made me smile, which annoyed her. “Damn you,” she said.
“Damn me?” I was taken aback by the sudden hostility. I’d saved her from a worse beating, lent her clothes, made her tea, and now she was treating me like a piece of scum.
She closed her eyes in exasperation. “Sir Leon has never relinquished his hopes of acquiring the painting. Naturally a new price will have to be negotiated, but Sir Leon will match any offer you may receive. Indeed, my lord…”
“John,” I interrupted her.
“Indeed, Mr Rossendale,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Sir Leon will accept any reasonable valuation which, in present market terms, must make the painting worth at least twenty million pounds.”
It’s easy to pretend not to care about money, to say that a blue-water sailor only needs enough cash to keep the rust out of the hull and to patch up the sails and to buy a few bottles of hooch and tins of stew. That derision of money is the chorus of the sea-gypsies; how we’ve escaped the vulgar greed of the world, how we even feel sorry for the pin-striped business executives rushing towards their bypass surgery because of the stress of making money, and we’re so proud that we’ve escaped the love of the filthy stuff, and we profess not to care about it and even to despise it, but then along comes a dark-haired girl who casually says her employer is willing to lay out twenty of the big ones, and so I gaped at her and wondered if she was mad, or if I was going deaf. “Twenty?” I asked weakly.