Dolly and the Singing Bird (22 page)

She was very frightened, her hands almost boneless with cold; and as she spoke to me, her nervous attention was distracted again and again by the heavy steering, and the pull of the waves. The wind was backing a bit and still strengthening: ahead the tide and the wind and the swirling quarrel of currents would chop the waves for us round the long, black spit of Sleat, with its lighthouse winking, steady and white at the end.

Beyond, faintly, other lights glimmered and blanked as the intervening waves jumped; and sometimes, mothlike, grey in the night, a seabird passed silently, close. Beside us, the foam minced back from our flanks, rosy-gold in the light from the portholes, and Victoria said, “He’s below. I’m not to go down. What is it?
What’s happened
? He isn’t well, you know: that’s why he’s got this boat. Why did you make me come back on board?
I can’t hold this damned thing
!”

But she
was
holding it, although she was crying, and I knew that if I bullied her, she would go on holding it as long as she lived. I said, “If you sheet her in hard and then bring her up to the wind, what will happen?”

“She’ll rattle herself to bits. In time,” said Victoria, chattering.

“But she’ll stop sailing?”

“She’ll do that: yes.”

“Right. Victoria, I’m going below. Keep her steady. It isn’t easy, I know, but I don’t want to be thrown off balance if I can help it. Then when I yell, bring her round.”

“What are you going to do?” Her eyes in her dim face were staring at me with a kind of horrified fascination.

“Look out!” I waited while she swung
Seawolf
’s bows round, and the water we had taken over the nose came streaming down and into the scuppers. The self-draining cockpit was having a hell of a time. I said, “I’m going to lock Ogden into the fo’c’sle, that’s all. Then all we have to do is wait until
Dolly
and
Binkie
come up. Simple.”

Simple. Ogden was now in the fo’c’sle, doing God knew what, but believing that he and Victoria, stuck at the tiller, were the only two on board the boat. I had locked the fo’c’sle hatch from the top. All I had to do, in order to make Ogden a prisoner, was to open the cockpit door, step quietly down through the saloon and the galley, and turn the key in the door to the fo’c’sle… Except that I wanted something else too. The recording tape.

The door down from the cockpit creaked badly— all the doors on Ogden’s boat did. I might have worried, as I opened it gently now and closed it as gently behind me, so that the light from within should not distract Victoria… I might have worried if I had not once already heard the noise in the fo’c’sle, where the wind reverberated and buzzed like hornets, rising a half-tone and then another, dying to nothing before starting all over again. Ogden would not hear me coming.

I picked my way softly through the litter on the saloon deck, where the fallen book had been reinforced by a newspaper, a scatter of cushions and a torch, its bulb broken. Just ahead of me was the vital door, the key left logically and confidently on the outside.

I had only to turn it to be safe. Except that, Kenneth—Kenneth, are you all right?—except that I meant to find that spool of tape and destroy it because of what it might say. Because it might reveal how Kenneth’s top secret leaked, in the first place, from that locked lab. in Nevada. For there were only two keys. Mine was one—and although Michael Twiss might have used it, Johnson said Twiss didn’t poach the device. Johnson was convinced, and for my money, knowing Michael, that was quite true. So whom did that leave?

Now, Ogden had to be dealt with. It did no good to hang about waiting. I put my hand on the tarnished brass knob of the fo’c’sle, turned it slowly, and flung it wide open. The man sitting at the transmitter inside jumped up turning, the gun bright in his hand. Then I fired.

I fired—and he fell. But I saw long before he dropped at my feet that it wasn’t Cecil Ogden at all. It was Kenneth Holmes I had shot.

Electrified, I forgot my own prearranged signal. I cried out, and Victoria, obeying instructions, brought the yacht head up to wind.

The effect in sound is roughly as if a teashop had been picked up quickly and dropped again. Physically, it means a violent shifting of gravity for every object animate and inanimate within reach. The deck jerked from my feet. Shelves, bunk-edge, door-handles attacked my sides like pitchforks; cupboard doors clapped and thudded, grazing my head. And as I smashed like an escaped roller skate into one corner, Ogden, who had been pinned in that corner by Kenneth holding Ogden’s own gun —Ogden now kicked the gun from my grasp, sending me sprawling, pocketed it and got up, his own automatic safely back in his hand, pointing straight at my heart.

He was grinning. “Well done, sweetheart. Tosca could hardly do better. But I don’t trust you, all the same. Now, stay just where you are while I investigate…” But I was already looking at Kenneth.

He wasn’t moving. What a fool I was! What a bungling idiot! Of course, Kenneth came up the companionway while I was below and Ogden busy with the anchor and the jib. Where could he have hidden? Then I had it. Of course.
Seawolf
’s own wooden pram, lying lashed upside down by the skylight would cover a single man easily. And then later, when Ogden was busy below, Kenneth would merely unlock the fo’c’sle hatch from above and drop down on his head.

“He’ll do,” said Ogden now, rising, and I saw that he had Kenneth’s hands and feet lashed tightly together. I could only see the side of his face and a lot of blood just below. For a moment I remembered Hennessy’s ear, and had to bury an impulse towards insane laughter. Kenneth was alive, and not in danger: I accepted Ogden’s word for that. But if ever I needed to live on my wits, it was then. For they were all I had to live on, I and my voice at that moment: my common sense and my will to succeed.

Then Ogden said in his colourless, sulky voice, “Then Victoria’s got the other gun out there, has she? We’ll have to get this damned boat turned round and running, won’t we, sweetheart? Never do for our friend Johnson to catch us. The trouble is,” and the straggling eyebrows rose, and the fleshy lips parted in a grimace above the long, knobbly chin: “The trouble is, we’ll need to go about soon, and I’m a trifle short-handed. In fact, I could do with a little help. I pay well, you know. Generously, in fact. Would you give me a little help, Madame Rossi,” said Ogden, while below me, damn, damn, Kenneth stirred and opened his eyes—“Would you give me a little help to sail where I want to go, if in return I promise you
this
?”

It was Johnson’s small spool of rust-coloured tape. I looked at it in his dirty big palm, while Kenneth, pale-faced, shouldered himself up to a sitting position, and said, “No. She won’t.”

We stared at each other, Kenneth and I. At length I said, “Do you know what is on that tape?” And Kenneth replied instantly, with violence. “I don’t know. I don’t care. But neither you nor I is going to do hand’s turn to sail this damned boat”

“He’ll throw it into the sea.”

“Let him.”

“But it exonerates you. It’s bound to show that Ogden and not you got the bomb on to
Lysander
.”

“There’s enough evidence here and with what Johnson’s dug up to show that already. You can’t suppose either he’ll stand up to questioning. Valentina”—the blood was filling in with glistening purple all the stitches of his navy blue jersey—“if you help him now, I’ll never forgive you.”

“Then we’ll have to use other persuasions, won’t we?” And slowly, the little black mouth of the automatic shifted to cover Kenneth as he half-sat at our feet. “Go and tell Victoria to fling her gun overboard where I can see it, and bring the boat round back on course. Or lover-boy gets a shot in the heart.”

Kenneth couldn’t blame me now. I didn’t look at his upturned, agonised face, but ran through, leaving the fo’c’sle and saloon doors wide ajar, as Ogden had ordered, and did as he asked. But when Victoria had thrown her gun in the sea, and she and I had tried in vain to bring
Seawolf
round on her helm; and when Ogden, abandoning Kenneth, had come blundering through from below, shouting orders, and had wrenched the helm from us—by the time all that had happened, we were no longer sailing
Seawolf
for Cecil Ogden under duress. We were sailing her under a thick sky, in spewing, ravenous seas whose spindrift filled the night with grey mist, and a wind blowing westerly in what was now a full gale. We were sailing, unpractised fools that we were, for our lives.

On
Dolly
, they would have noticed that the barometer had dropped to 29.5 and was still falling, while the wind had veered from south-east to south-west.
Dolly
would have three or four reefs already in her mainsail, and canvas covering her skylights and hatches. The storm jib would be out of the sail locker, the lifeline shackled ready to the jackstay, the pumps checked, and everything loose below made secure.

But we were on
Seawolf
, where everything was old and borrowed and held together with string. Ogden’s face as he felt the weight of the helm betrayed an alarm he had not shown before Johnson or any of us up to now. His other hand, which had been holding the mainsheet, altered its grip and instead pulled the sail again taut, while the boat, jumping crazily, veered back again, and up into the wind. Barely clearing our heads as we crouched, lurching, in the cockpit, the great wooden boom jumped and rattled, the mainsail kicked, the jib and staysail snapped, distressed, in front of the mast. Ogden shoved the helm into my hand and, shouting at Victoria, climbed on to the razor-edge deck.

They had two things to do: to take down the staysail, which would reduce the canvas in front of the mast; and lower the mainsail and put a reefed storm trysail in its place. From the light striking out of the saloon, I could see the whites of Victoria’s eyeballs as she turned to follow Ogden out of the cockpit. Up to now, her code had driven her to obey his every command, but this clapper-bell of shuddering timber, with the spray falling like gravel into the cockpit and the wind screaming through the high rigging, was frightening her out of her wits. Her face white, her hair in soaking rat-tails about her, Victoria carried out her primary orders and adjusted the set of the jib.

But there was no question of handing the staysail, for with a series of cracking explosions the elderly stuff of the staysail had blown itself apart into ribbons, and like some jeering mace of buffoonery, fluttered its ghostly bunting at the bows. I saw her look up, as the staysail tore, and I saw her knuckles whiten where they gripped the brass storm rail at her side. Then the competent Victoria was sick.

There was through the extraordinary confusion of noise, a shattering crash as
Seawolf
tipped sharply from one side to the other and the ill-stowed contents of the crockery shelves hurled themselves in the air. I could see Ogden, braced against the mast, with the mainsail halyard in his grasp, shouting at Victoria, who was hanging on without looking at him, clearly incapable of anything but continuing to be sick. I thought, briefly, of Kenneth, bound hand and foot, crashing helplessly to and fro in the fo’c’sle, and of Johnson’s tape, thrust into Ogden’s pocket. While we were hove-to like this, the motion would be at its worst. On the other hand, we had stopped actually sailing, and the distance between
Seawolf
and
Dolly
and the Buchanans in
Binkie
behind her must be lessening every moment. Except that once his spread of main canvas was reduced, Ogden would almost certainly set
Seawolf
sailing again. And whether he did or not, it was rapidly becoming a question whether, sailing or rescued, we could hold together long enough to survive.

Then I realised Ogden was calling me. The next moment, he came crashing down beside me in the cockpit, improvised a hasty lashing to steady the tiller, and seizing me by the arm, pulled me up on deck in the roaring, rain-spattered darkness. The deck nudged, slid and contracted under my feet: the mainsail canvas shuddered and leaned on me, reducing my standing space to a sliver. And beyond that sliver, the sea revealed itself darkly in tall escalators and rockets of foam and on the slate and indigo horizon as a running tumble of changing black peaks. There was no sign, between range and range of these liquid mountains, of the lights of either
Binkie
or
Dolly
. There was only the dim yellow glow from the skylight under my feet, showing Ogden’s long, unshaven face, half intent, half nervously distraught, as he wrestled to lower the wet, wrangling canvas, and the bent shoulders of Victoria, clinging retching and choking to the faltering deck. Half my mind was occupied with compelling, immediate dangers; with controlling the great, shiny boom as the fabric towering high above all our heads lowered into a ruckle of wet leaden folds; with gripping these during the pause of Ogden’s brief indecision; and then the dizzy, nailbreaking horror of balancing oneself against sea, squalls and the juddering boom, while with Ogden I moved from end to end of the mainsail, knotting the reef-points and thus binding and shortening the canvas. Half my mind was on this. The other half told me that no one sailing a yacht in the Inner Hebrides this night would find it a matter of either blame or surprise if Cecil Ogden and his reel of standard play tape were both lost overboard.

Perhaps, as we faced one another over the boom, he read something of this in my face. In any event, his thick lips formed a sudden contortion, and as his fingers ceaselessly worked, he observed, “That’s right. Be a good girl. After all, Ogden’s the only one of us who knows how to sail.
And
he keeps his word. You help me get to the mainland, Tina my sweetheart, and what’s in my pocket is yours.” Then the reefing was done, and the peak and throat halyards set up; and with the sails set and the tiller unlashed and in Ogden’s big, dirty hand,
Seawolf
paid off and, lying flat on her port rail, headed into the storm.

After a single slithering crash, indicating that everything below decks had shifted in turn to the lee side,
Seawolf
settled down to a kind of bucketing rhythm on her new tack and Victoria, her face greenish-white behind the strands of her hair, stopped being sick and lay limp in the cold, swilling cockpit, her head on her arms. I took a step down towards the saloon.