“When are you returning to London?” I asked. My mobile phone started to ring before Fiona could reply. The call was brief and to the point. The female voice at the other end purred and stated that Mr Flackyard was holding a Champagne reception and auction in aid of local charities at his home this evening and, that he would be delighted if Miss Price and I could attend, formal black tie, starting around 8.00 p.m. After accepting the invitation on behalf of us both, I hung up.
“Tonight,” Fiona said. “I’ll be driving up tonight, back to the rat race and a normal routine again I suppose, they’ll almost certainly take me off the case now.”
“Well, that last call was interesting. Flackyard is hosting a Champagne charity function this evening and has requested our company. So how about a few more days by the seaside — unless you have to rush off, that is?”
“Well let me see, I do have an appointment at 9.00am sharp tomorrow, with a really boring desk job. So what do you think?”
“You’d better phone your boss and tell him that there have been some interesting new developments with the situation down here and that your presence is still required. Don’t say anything more than that, except that a full progress report will be with Ferran & Cardini by this evening. Here, use my phone, it’s secure.”
Fiona used my mobile phone to call her boss in London.
“Oh, by the way, you’d better unpack your diving gear again, we’ll be going for a little swim later,” I said as I left the boathouse.
As I stepped outside, the wind and rain gave no sign of relenting. Going straight up to my room I spent the next hour at my laptop, putting together a progress report on the developments relating to Robert Flackyard. I added that Fiona had come clean, telling me that we’d been working for the same side all the time! After emailing LJ, I saved the report to disk and erased it from the hard drive. This done I phoned Sam ‘the car wash’. He answered after two or three rings with a cheerful hello, surprised that I was calling him. Where was he? At Robert Flackyard’s home cleaning all of his flash cars? His boss had called him and said that he had been personally asked for, that there was going to be a glitzy party and charity auction there tonight and one of Mr Flackyard’s Aston Martins would be sold off to the highest bidder. So he was to stay there all day and polish every one of them.
“OK, now listen very carefully, I want you to make a note of everyone coming and going, get their registration numbers if possible. If Caplin in particular turns up or anyone else arrives throughout the day, immediately text me their name on this number. If Flackyard leaves also let me know, and remember to write down times.”
My thoughts were racing as I finished talking. What a stroke of luck that our young observer should be in exactly the right place at the right time. Or was it?
Mrs Rumple was no where to be found. A note on the kitchen notice board read, gone into town — back by 6.30pm. The time was now 2.30pm, leaving just four hours to relocate the fifty deadly opium packages.
Chapter 16
Take the English Channel on a cold and miserable day and keep a brisk wind striking across it from the Northeast. Put a luxury cruiser somewhere between the heaving waves with the swell on its starboard quarter, and into it put two crew standing clad in wetsuits when there should have been at least four.
The swell was enough to tip us down in the valleys between the waves at an alarming angle. To the Southwest I watched the coastline come into view from each wave crest. A surreal scene with clouds as black as coal, low and menacing. Brilliant shafts of sunlight, highlighting across sea and land like static and streaks of phosphorescence. These weren’t ideal conditions to dive in, but at least the weather was, for our sake, keeping the sunshine sailors at home and only a handful of hardened thrill seekers out in these conditions.
I was already feeling the constriction of the tight fitting wetsuit and began to wonder whether it had been such a good idea to put it on back in the boathouse, especially as we wouldn’t be diving for another half an hour? Fiona carried out the last minute checks on all of the dive equipment, and weighted down each one of the five bags containing the opium packages with lead we had found tucked in a corner of the garage. When absolutely satisfied that each one was secure, a nylon rope was used to tie them all together in a continuous chain.
Our heading was to a point about one mile out from Old Harry rocks to the wreck of a WWII German submarine, sunk during the last war. An ocean-going U-boat as I remembered was a very large piece of machinery, over six hundred tons and two hundred feet in length. Making it the ideal hiding place for the five sacks that we had to conceal, each containing ten of the small waxy bales of raw opium.
The story of the U-boat was often enthusiastically told by some of the older locals, who could recall the event. It went something along the lines of that the submarine had surfaced at night to off load a crack unit of SS commandos, a British destroyer was lying in wait and had sunk her. She went down in forty meters of water with all hands lost. Afterwards the Ministry of Defence had the bodies removed and buried in unmarked graves, in village churchyards around the Dorset countryside. The whole affair was then covered up so as not to fuel speculation about a possible German invasion. Their official notice stated that the destroyer was simply firing her guns after a routine re-fit.
I pushed a button and the anchor chain slid out from its housing and into the foaming water below. At one hundred and five feet it stopped. I left the engines ticking over to hold us in position and went down to the dive platform, where Fiona was waiting.
The howl of the wind and driving rain was deafening after the relative calm of the bridge, and even the steady drone of the large diesel engines was lost.
With each wave the boat lurched up into the air, but we somehow managed to put on our oxygen tanks, fins and masks without being swept over board.
I lowered the sacks into the water one at a time while Fiona took care of the high-powered underwater lanterns that we would need inside the U-boat.
I tapped her on the shoulder and shouted, “We have thirty minutes maximum down there. Follow me and stay close.”
With that we clambered down the dive ladder on the port side, instead of going off the stern, so as to stay away from the propellers. I snapped the mouthpiece between my teeth and pulled the mask into place. The coldness of the water bit to the bone as I lowered myself in.
I jack-knifed through the opaque water. Beneath the heaving surface the sea was green and without dimension. A white explosion of microscopic bubbles raced to my feet as I swam down towards the great hulk of the submarine. Fiona swam close to my side, the powerful lamps already having to light our way as we went deeper. All was calm and soft. The water, no longer green but purple, was motionless as we swam down. To my right, Fiona was cleaving a phosphorescent wake, and as she descended I watched her turn a graceful somersault and touch her feet on the bottom with scarcely a movement of silt. My own clumsy effort at this ended with dirty clouds of silt and weed rising around my fins.
I let the sacks drop to the sea floor; Fiona handed me one of the lanterns, and as my eyes became adjusted to the purple darkness one vast portion of the seabed grew darker than the rest. The huge potbelly of the sunken submarine loomed over us. I clipped the lamp onto my tank harness and retrieved the end of the rope that coupled the sacks together. I then gave Fiona a hook-like motion with my free hand and climbed an invisible ladder on to the foredeck. We swam past the smooth convex swell of the main tanks.