“Shut up, Ronny.”
“But…”
“I said shut up!” Because I think I’d known ever since I’d keyed Mist-Spinner’s Decca. Only I didn’t believe it.
Dear God, I thought, but let me be wrong. I unhooked the microphone. I knew my enemies would be listening to Channel 37 and they would probably be monitoring Channel 16 as well, but unless they had two radios, each with a dual-watch capability, they could only monitor the two VHF channels. So I switched to 67, the coastguard’s working channel. I broke all the rules: I didn’t identify myself, I just broadcast a cryptic message to the whole English Channel. “This is a message for Inspector Abbott,” I said, “of the Devon and Cornwall Police. Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West. I say again. For Harry Abbott, Devon and Cornwall Police, Fifty Twelve Forty North, Zero Three Forty-six Sixty West.”
The coastguards were on to me like a ton of bricks. Who was transmitting? Why? Would I identify myself? I told them to get off the air and pass on the message and to do it fast. “But listen for further transmissions on this channel,” I added before switching the radio off.
The first light was gilding the wavetops. “Fancy another cup of tea, Ronny?”
“Not really, guv.” He didn’t want to go below with the corpse.
“I do.” I really wanted to be alone for a few minutes. “So get it.”
An hour later I saw the English coast. I switched off the Decca because I didn’t need it any longer. I hadn’t really needed it at all, not once I’d known the final rendezvous, because these were my home waters, and here, in the dawn, was my last waypoint.
We came home in a lovely sunrise. It was all so ordinary, all so very ordinary.
The waypoint was outside the harbour, but even a helmsman as inexperienced as Garrard would have been able to negotiate the entrance: just keep well to the left-hand side of the channel, steer due north, and don’t try it in southern gales.
There was a slight swell on the bar, then Mist-Spinner moved smoothly into the outer channel. We turned northeast and I let her idle through the moored yachts. It promised to be a warm day. Some yachts had already left the moorings while others were shaking out their sails. There had been a mist earlier, but it was gone, all but from the deepest creeks where the trees grew so close above the water. Gulls screamed and wheeled, while far to the north a helicopter chopped the air.
I had found some rusting binoculars in a cave-locker and I used them to search the anchorages. I knew what I was looking for, but somehow hoped not to see it.
Then I did. A man and a woman standing together on the flying bridge of a big motor cruiser. They were waving. Behind them, far off beyond the fields, I could see Charlie’s house. The kids would be going off to nursery school and Yvonne would be wondering where Charlie was.
The man and woman waved again. They looked so happy together, like lovers at dream’s fulfilment. Their boat gleamed white in the rising sun; the same sun that was reflecting off Mist-Spinner’s windscreen, so the couple could not see me behind the gold-glossed glass. They only saw their fortune coming, their damned great fortune, brought from the Channel Islands to Salcombe by the magic of a Decca set.
“That’s them,” Peel said helpfully, but I didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.
I waited till we were fifty yards from the waiting boat then turned on the VHF and unhooked the microphone. “Harry Abbott?”
He answered immediately. “Is that you, Johnny?”
“I’m off Frogmore Creek, Harry. My boat’s called Mist-Spinner, and the bastards you want are on a gin-palace called Barratry. Come and get them.”
I killed Mist-Spinner’s engine and I ran her gently down the side of my best friend’s boat. Charlie waited on Barratry’s afterdeck, boathook in hand. He hooked our pulpit rail. “Well done!” he called, “I told you it would be easy…” then his voice faded away as I stepped out from under the wheelhouse roof. I carried the shotgun and the attaché case.
“Hello, Charlie,” I said.
Elizabeth screamed. She was still on Barratry’s flying bridge. I looked up at her; then, with the shotgun in my right hand and the money in my left, I stepped over on to Barratry’s stern.
“Johnny!” Charlie was staring in shock, but still trying to smile as if this was a fortuitous meeting of friends.
“Shut up, Charlie,” I said; then, with a foul anger, “for Christ’s sake, shut up!” I looked up at Elizabeth. “Come down!” She climbed slowly down the chrome ladder. She was dressed in a silk bathrobe as though she had only just got up from the big bed in Barratry’s stateroom. I wondered how long they had been lovers. “You bastards,” I said.
Mist-Spinner and Peel drifted slowly away. Charlie and Elizabeth looked at the blood on my legs and at the gun in my hand and said nothing.
“Why?” I asked Charlie.
He didn’t answer, but I suddenly saw how it must seem to him to be the lover of Lordy’s daughter. That was the ultimate revenge, the sweetest revenge of alclass="underline" when the despised labourer’s son makes the Earl’s daughter moan in his bed.
“And it was you,” I said to Charlie, “who nicked the bloody picture.”
He hesitated, then smiled. “It was just a joke, Johnny.” He waited, but for what, I couldn’t tell. For me to smile? To laugh? “It was only a joke!” he protested. “I did it for you!”
“For me, Charlie?”
“I did it for you! I thought that if your mother sold the painting then you’d never go back to sea! You’d become like your father! You’d have hated that, Johnny, because you never belonged in the big house. You belonged at sea, Johnny, at sea!” He paused again, but I said nothing, and Charlie made an expansive gesture as if to suggest that, with a little humour and understanding, the whole mess could be resolved. “It was only a joke,” he said again, but weakly.
And I wasn’t laughing.
I looked at Elizabeth. It’s hard to see your own sister as beautiful, but she looked beautiful that morning; beautiful and hurt. I think she was ashamed, not about the painting, but because I had found her with Charlie. That was a game she had played in secret, and now I had discovered her. “You knew,” I accused her. “You knew I didn’t steal it! You must have known that as soon as Garrard found Charlie!”
She shrugged, as if to suggest that my innocence was irrelevant.
“So why didn’t you go to the police when Garrard found Charlie?” I asked her.
“Because the money would still have been yours when Mother died, and she didn’t want you to have it. She hated you! You destroyed our family, and I was going to save it!” Elizabeth spat the words at me, and I saw that she, like my mother, hated me, and I saw, too, how much Elizabeth must have enjoyed betraying my closest friendship. She would win it all and leave me nothing, not even a friend.
I looked back to Charlie. It seemed so obvious now, and it must have seemed obvious to Garrard who, seeking the painting and still believing in my guilt, had gone straight to my oldest friend. “Why didn’t you just ransom the painting?” I asked Charlie. “Was it really worth a death?”
“It wasn’t like that, Johnny!” Charlie spoke energetically. He was still hoping that charm and friendship could ease him off this hook. “No one was supposed to die!”
“Garrard died,” I said brutally. “I blew his head away. What’s left of him is in that boat.” I jerked my head towards the drifting Mist-Spinner, but I had been looking at Elizabeth as I spoke and I saw that her face had shown no reaction to my news. “Don’t you care?” I asked her. “You were bedding him, just as you’re bedding Charlie. Did you know that, Charlie, that she was screwing Garrard as well?”