“Not according to her will. She left it to my sister.” I said it to discourage George’s speculation, though I suspected that Jennifer Pallavicini was right and that the painting, if it could ever be recovered, was probably mine. Twenty million pounds, and all mine, except, of course, that if the painting ever did reappear there would be a salivating horde of lawyers and taxmen scrabbling to get their slices of the money. But even those rapacious bastards would find it hard to destroy all of twenty million.
“It must be worth a penny or two.” George must have been guessing my thoughts.
“Several million pennies, George.”
“How much?”
I straightened up from the engine. “Sir Leon Buzzacott offered twenty million quid the other day, which means it’s probably worth a bit more.”
George puffed at his pipe. He clearly wasn’t certain whether to believe me. In his line of business a good night’s work yielded a few thousand, not millions. “I don’t like paintings,” he said eventually. “I used to deal in a few. Rubbish, most of them. Seascapes, that sort of thing, but it was never worth the bother.” He shrugged, evidently regretting some past escapade. “Those two fellows,” George went on, “do you think they’re after the painting?”
“Of course they’re after the painting. So is Sir Leon Buzzacott. So is my twin sister. Half the damn world wants the thing, but all I want is some clean diesel fuel. Have you got any?”
He shook his head, dismissing the problem of the contaminated fuel. “So you could be a millionaire, Johnny?”
“I told you. It belongs to my sister. Now bugger off, George, I’m trying to work.”
He buggered off and I worked on the compressor till five o’clock when I climbed to Rita’s office where a cup of tea waited for me. I telephoned Charlie’s house, but he still hadn’t returned from Hertfordshire. “Is there a number in Hertfordshire?” I asked Yvonne. She said there was, but that Charlie was never there. She said he telephoned her when he needed to, but she gave me the number anyway. She sounded desperately tired. I asked her to tell Charlie that I was now at George Cullen’s boatyard. She promised she would, but she didn’t sound very friendly as she made the promise.
I tried the Hertfordshire number. It was the site office of a construction company and a gruff man said he hadn’t seen Charlie Barratt for two days. I put the phone down. “What the hell’s Charlie doing in Hertfordshire?” I asked Rita, more in frustration than in any hope of fetching an answer.
She blew on her newly-painted fingernails. “He’s a big man now, Charlie is. He’s ever so rich.”
“And I’m the Pope.” I knew Charlie had done well since he’d settled back home, but Rita’s awed tones seemed to be over-egging the pudding.
“He is,” she insisted. “Plant hire. You name it and Charlie’s got it. Artics, tippers, cranes, earth-movers, bulldozers.” Rita shrugged. “He’s got ever such a nice boat, too.”
“A yacht?”
She shook her head. “A big cabin cruiser. It’s got one of those thingummyjigs on the front.”
I tried to guess what a thingummyjig was. “A radar aerial?”
“A hot tub,” she remembered. “It’s ever so smart. He brought it down here last year.”
Charlie clearly had done well. When I’d left England he had been the owner-operator of an ancient Commer lorry; yet now, if Rita hadn’t confused him with anyone else, his business had flourished. I was pleased for, if any man deserved success, it was Charlie. He had always been a hard worker, and had a slew of practical skills to work with. When we had been boys, he and I had worked together in George Cullen’s yard and even at fourteen Charlie had shown the practical skills of an adult. His schoolteachers, naturally, had written him off as a dumb peasant, but Charlie had always been too smart to let any teacher meddle with his ambitions.
I finished my tea, went back downstairs, and stripped down the compressor’s fuel system. By nightfall I had it working, ready for the morning. It was what Charlie would have called a proper job and, to celebrate it, I poured a glass of George’s ghastly whisky, made myself a mushy stew, then slept.
I woke at one o’clock.
At first I thought it was the ebbing tide dropping Sunflower’s keel on to the grid that had woken me; then, in the tiny light leaking through the companionway, I saw the time and realised it was only twenty-three minutes away from low tide which meant that Sunflower must have been stranded on the grid for at least four hours. I listened for whatever had woken me. I could only hear the halliards slapping the mast, the wind sighing at the spreaders, and the slop of river water in George’s dock. Everything seemed normal, but nevertheless something had disturbed me. In a night watch, in the middle of an ocean, the slightest change of Sunflower’s sound or motion would bring me to wakefulness, and something, even in the safe haven of George’s dock, had just triggered that alarm system. I reached out for the light switch, then froze.
The gate to George’s yard squealed. I realised that it had been that same creak of unoiled hinges that had woken me. It was a sound that always made me alert, even in daytime. I wanted to be left alone in George’s yard, and whenever I heard the squeal of the hinges I would warily make sure that the visitor was not some unwelcome person from my past. Now, in the depths of the night, I had been woken by the warning sound. I left the cabin unlit, rolled out of the bunk, and pulled on a pair of jeans.
I had been sleeping with the companionway open, so I made no noise as I slipped up to the cockpit. By standing on a thwart I could just see over the sill of the quayside.
A dark-painted van, with no lights, was being driven slowly into George’s yard. I did not move. It was possible, even likely, that these were some of George’s friends who had permission to use his warehouse. The van was probably loaded with stolen goods. The only reason I was suspicious was that George had not given me any warning. Usually, when some mayhem was imminent, he would tell me not to worry if I heard something go bump in the night.
The van braked to a halt. Its motor was cut.
I slid my special boathook out of its brackets.
The van’s front doors opened quietly. Two men climbed out. George always left a light burning outside his office door and, in its glow, I could see that one of the men was burly and bald, the other thin, commanding, and black-haired. It was Garrard and Peel, who now stood beside the van staring to where Sunflower’s masts reared above the grid. And how the hell, I wondered, had they found me? It had to be George. Doubtless he had done a favour to someone by betraying my whereabouts, and I promised myself that I’d kick his fat hide to kingdom come when I had the chance. I supposed it was my own fault for telling George that the painting was worth at least twenty million quid. George’s cupidity must have overwhelmed his love of a lord.
The two men would have seen me if I’d tried to climb up over the quay. I did not want them to see me. They thought I was fast asleep, and I wanted them to continue in that blissful ignorance. I glanced towards Sunflower’s dark cabin, wondering whether I had time to fetch my rigging knife, but knew I dared not waste a second.
For to hesitate would be to trap myself. The two men were already walking softly towards Sunflower as I slid over her stern and lowered myself to the grid. The water was black beneath me. I could hear the men’s footsteps as I lowered myself again, this time into the black, filthy, and freezing water. I shivered, then pushed away from the grid’s piles towards one of the decrepit fishing boats at the end of the small dock. The weighted boathook tried to drag me down, but I did not have far to go, and the impetus of my push carried me to the dock’s side wall where a rusty ring gave me a handhold. I pushed on again, this time hiding in the impenetrable shadow between the fishing boat and the wall.