“A Winkler?” I asked, wondering if the Winklers were a notorious family of criminals.
George poured himself more whisky. “A winkler,” he said with plump dignity, “is a rent-control operative.”
“Come again, George?”
He sighed. “Suppose you’ve got a property, Johnny, and there’s a sitting tenant in it, paying you a lousy rent, and the law won’t let you turf the useless bugger out. But you’re losing money on the property and you want to put another tenant inside who’ll pay you a proper rent. So what do you do? You can’t hire another bleeding lawyer, because you’ll get the same answer, so you hire yourself a winkler. Things begin to happen to your tenant. Nasty things. The water gets shut off, rats take up residence, and perhaps half the roof falls in. Their pussy cats get strangled and their car tyres get slashed. The tenant eventually gets fed up, moves out, and you pay the winkler for his services. He’s winkled them out, you see.” He added this last explanation helpfully.
“You know this fellow, Garrard?” I asked.
“Not personally” – George was being evasive now – “but I know he’s done some jobs for local businessmen. He comes from Bristol, I think. Ronny’s from London, but he’s not such a bad lot.”
“Ronny’s the bald one?”
George nodded. “Ronny Peel. He’d beat you into pulp if he was told to, but he’s not an animal, know what I mean? But that Garrard” – George shook his head worriedly – “I wouldn’t touch him, Johnny. He’s trouble.”
“I don’t want to touch him. I just don’t want him to know where I am.”
“I’ll keep quiet,” he promised, and I believed the promise because George’s criminality does not extend to violence; in fact he probably hates the sight of blood. Besides, George and I go back a long way. In the faraway past he’d given me a refuge from my family and, in his lackadaisical way, he had introduced me to boats. It was in this shabby yard that I’d learned to weld steel and work wood. It was here that I’d found my first proper job as a crew member on an oceangoing yacht. George had known me a long time, which by itself did not guarantee any favours, but I was also John Frederick Albert Rossendale, the twenty-eighth Earl of Stowey, and that helped. It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. So now, because of George’s aristocratic tastes, Sunflower and I were safe.
I had been wrong about needing George’s grid for a couple of days. More like a couple of weeks. Once I got Sunflower out of the water I saw just how sorry her hull was: the poor thing looked more like a floating compost heap than a yacht. It was no wonder she’d been so sluggish crossing the Atlantic. I should have anti-fouled her in America or the Caribbean, but I’d been reluctant to pay American prices for anti-fouling paint.
But, by waiting, I had forced myself to do more than just anti-foul Sunflower. In places the old paint had abraded right back to its epoxy pitch base. What I really needed to do was strip the whole hull back to bright steel, then start again. I should have craned her out of the water, screened her off, and done what Charlie would have called a proper job, except I had neither the time nor the money to be so thorough.
Instead I would have to do the best I could on George’s grid. A grid is simply a raised platform on which a boat can be stranded as the tide falls. At mean low tide, in George’s yard, Sunflower would be perched about eight feet above the water and, between tides, I would have around seven hours to work on her before the rising flood forced me to stop. I’d thus be needing a whole series of low tides. She was well berthed to the quay, but to stop her toppling sideways into George’s mucky dock I took a half-inch line from her upper spreaders and tied it to a ringbolt on the outside wall of his workshop. I knotted red rags round the rope and put a large sign by the ringbolt: ‘Leave this rope alone!’ I’d once watched a beautiful Danish ketch fall twelve feet off a grid in Brittany. It wasn’t pretty.
I fired up George’s ancient compressor, stripped myself to the waist, and hitched up his sand-blaster. Or rather sludge-blaster, for I couldn’t afford to buy the proper sand so had to make do with a miserable pile that mouldered damply behind the warehouse. The diesel fuel which fired the compressor also came from George’s stock, and was fouled. Even when I managed to make the compressor work, the damp sand clotted and jammed the hopper’s throat every few minutes, so progress, at best, was fitful. I used the enforced pauses to slap a rust-preventing resin on to the newly cleaned patches of Sunflower’s hull. Between later tides I would strip the resin, then slap on a holding primer, four coats of epoxy tar, one coat of anti-fouling primer and two coats of the anti-fouling. It would be mind-numbing work, but if I did it well enough then the hull would be protected from rust for the next ten years. When the rising tide forced me to abandon work on the hull I went inside the cabin where I was beginning to rebuild the damaged lockers. I made good progress, but still my grease tin of money was taking a beating.
I needed cash. That was ironic, considering Jennifer Pallavicini had been dangling twenty million pounds in front of me, while now my hopes of earning a few quid from George were clearly ill-founded for his yard was utterly bare of work. “Why do you keep it on?” I asked him.
“Gives me something to do, Johnny. Gets me away from the wife,” he chuckled. He was standing beside the compressor, watching me work. The hopper’s throat had just choked up and, before I dug the soggy sand free, I was wiping resin on to the bright steel of Sunflower’s hull. “And there’s the other side of it,” George went on.
“I hadn’t forgotten.” The other side of it was the stolen merchandise that went through his warehouse. George specialised in bent chandlery; forcibly retired Decca sets or radios.
“Mind you,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of selling out. The leisure market’s on the way up, and someone could make a nice little bundle by turning the yard into a yacht-servicing business.”
“Why not you, George?”
“I’m not a well man, Johnny.” I’d forgotten how George was always suffering from some new and undiagnosable ailment.
“So the yard’s for sale?”
He shrugged. “For the right price. It’s prime riverside property, after all.” He gestured about the yard as though he was selling a stretch of the St Tropez waterfront rather than a scabby junk heap mouldering around a smelly dock. “Are you interested, Johnny?”
“Me?” I laughed. “Just painting Sunflower will clean me out, not to mention rebuilding your equipment.” I scrambled up to the dock and tried to restart the compressor, but the water in George’s diesel fuel wouldn’t drive the engine. I swore, knowing I would have to siphon the fuel and clean the system. It was my own fault, of course, for using George’s yard. If I’d had the money I’d have paid to have Sunflower properly shot-blasted, but instead this old sand-blaster would have to suffice.
George watched me bleed the compressor’s fuel line. “Johnny,” he said after a bit.
“George?” I spat watery diesel into the dock.
“That painting…” He paused. He must have known that my trouble with Garrard had been caused by the Van Gogh, but this was the first time he had mentioned it. “Did they ever pin it on you?”
“If they had, George, do you think I’d be here? I’d be in the Scrubs, slopping out shit pails.”
He considered that answer and evidently found it convincing. “Of course,” he said, “now that your mother’s dead, I suppose the painting belongs to you?”