Deep Waters

by Martin Edwards

  Nobody laughed. Albert stared at the bailiff, saying nothing. He let the poor joke fall, flatten, fail, and by its very failure recoil upon its originator. Then, at last, he said smugly, ‘You didn’t ought to make threats like that, boy. You’m a public servant. ’Tis up to you to keep a civil tongue in your head, now.’

  There was a pause, loaded with hatred. Whiteway drained the half-pint of rough cider called ‘scrumpy’ that was all his parsimony would permit him to drink, and rose to his feet, a long-faced, stooping, miserable man.

  ‘You’re a poaching, sneering, smuggling good-for-nothing, Pascoe,’ he said thickly. ‘One day it’ll be my turn to laugh, and I don’t mind how soon it comes, so I’m warning you!’

  The door slammed shut behind him. Albert stared at it sorrowfully. Always the same trouble; the man’d never stay to have his leg pulled proper.

  ‘Arrh!’ he said, ‘the—!’ and the word he used was libellous. He tilted his ketchup bottle, wiped his lips on the back of his hand and glanced round the bar. ‘Who’s for a game of darts?’

  At ten o’clock, time was called. The strangers had gone long ago. Only the regulars remained. They drained their glasses slowly, taking their time because beer tasted all the better after hours. Eventually they drifted towards the door.

  Somebody said, ‘Going upalong, Albert?’

  Albert stood in the open door. The night was clear and soft and the stars were out. He was not drunk—half the contents of the ketchup bottle remained, scrupulously saved for another occasion—but he was warm with drink. He shook his head.

  ‘Not yet awhile, Charlie,’ he said. ‘I got to fetch something from the boat. G’night, all.’

  She was called the Alice, and she lay at her winter moorings half a mile up-river from Pendennick. She was the pride of Albert’s life, a twenty-three-foot fishing-boat converted to a day cruiser with a small, stuffy cabin forward, a glassed-in shelter for the steersman, and a well aft from which the seats were removable when the space was needed for fishing. She had an old-fashioned main engine and a smaller, more modern wing engine. With both going the Alice could plough herself through the water at eight knots, but at that speed she was inclined to be smelly and she shook and chattered like a cement-mixer.

  The tide was falling. Albert left the road and trudged across shingle to sit on a rock at the water’s edge. He had lied when he said he needed to fetch something from the boat; in fact he had just wanted to look at her, to plan the things he would do to her when the time for refitting came, and to dream about Easter. At Easter the tourists started coming, which, for Albert, meant money in the pocket and, better still, liberation from the detestable necessity of working as a docker.

  His pipe had gone out. Dreamily, Albert reached in his pocket for matches. Then, without warning, a voice in the darkness behind him said, ‘Don’t move, please.’

  Albert did move. He jumped uncontrollably.

  A man appeared at his side. Albert looked up, his eyes wide with astonishment. It was one of the strangers who had been in The Lugger. The stranger had a pistol in his right hand.

  Slowly, Albert put his unlit pipe in his mouth.

  ‘Is that your boat?’ the stranger asked. ‘If so, my friend and I would like to hire her.’

  ‘I’ll not talk to ’ee till that pistol’s put away,’ Albert said grimly.

  ‘Yes, you will.’ The stranger’s voice, in which there was a trace of foreign intonation, was harsh and cold. ‘Be sensible. We can take the boat if we want to. We’re giving you the chance to make a little money, my friend, and to keep your boat into the bargain. Is she seaworthy?’

  ‘She be,’ Albert said, with sullen pride in his voice.

  ‘Would she take us to France?’

  The pipe came out of Albert’s mouth. ‘To France! You’m reckoning to go to France—now, in my Alice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arrh! talk sense, mister.’

  ‘Will she get us there?’

  Albert shrugged. He looked lovingly at the Alice, and pride stirred his tongue again. ‘She would,’ he said, ‘but she aren’t going to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, for one thing, ’tis agin the law.’

  The man beside him smiled with one side of his mouth. ‘We were in the inn tonight,’ he said. ‘From what we heard it did not seem that you were a man to take the law too seriously.’

  Albert said nothing.

  ‘If you’ll take us to France we’ll give you fifty pounds,’ the stranger continued. ‘If not, I shall have to shoot you before we leave because we cannot afford to let you raise the alarm.’

  There was a long silence. Albert looked at the Alice and at the pistol in the man’s hand. He scratched his nose with the stem of his pipe. An inward voice was telling him that this cool-tongued, white-faced stranger did not make empty threats. He would shoot, if necessary. And then Alice and the kids would be alone and he, Albert Pascoe, would be floating, face downwards, in cold, green water with the salmon flashing by on their way to spawn.

  Sweat stood on his forehead. He made a sudden, violent gesture with his hand. ‘You’m barmy! France! in the middle of the night with no charts!’ He pointed his pipe at the Alice. ‘She’m a day cruiser, mister. She don’t belong to do this kind of thing.’ A new thought struck him and he added flatly, ‘Anyway, there’s no more than a gallon of petrol in her tanks, so that’s that.’

  The stranger said quietly, ‘We have petrol—fifty gallons in cans in the back of the car. The need for it had occurred to us.’

  The silence returned. Albert shifted on his rock, restless, glancing at the pistol—and at the Alice, as if she might be able to tell him what he should do.

  The stranger said impatiently, ‘Well?’

  Albert shrugged. ‘Seems I shall have to take ’ee, mister,’ he said sullenly. ‘But ’tis agin the law and good sense, and you’ll maybe not see tomorrow if the weather blows up.’

  The stranger smiled. ‘We shall be happy to take the risk,’ he said. ‘Now give my companion some help with the petrol.’

  Fifteen minutes later the Alice had full tanks and a reserve of six four-gallon jerry-cans aboard.

  While Albert made preparations to start the cold engines, the stranger with the gun stood over him. The other man drove the car away and came back on foot.

  Albert said, ‘She’m ready to go now if you’m still set on it.’

  ‘We are,’ the stranger said. ‘Do you know the French coast?’

  ‘I been there.’

  ‘Do you know of a place where you could put us ashore secretly?’

  ‘I reckon I might find a place on the Brittany coast,’ Albert said unwillingly. ‘’Tis a risky business, though.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘’Bout fifteen hours, if the weather holds.’

  There was a silence. Then the man with the gun snarled, ‘Fifteen hours! You’re lying! It should not take so long as that.’

  Albert looked at him. ‘I’m not lying,’ he said quietly. ‘If you reckon you’m able to get her there quickerer, you’m welcome to try.’

  The back of the stranger’s hand came slashing out of the darkness. It caught Albert on the cheek, knocking his head back and making his ears ring painfully. He made a noise in his throat and moved forwards, his hands reaching out. The black eye of the pistol stared at him. He dropped his hands.

  ‘That was for insolence and to show you that we can be harsh if necessary,’ the stranger said. ‘Now let us go, and if I think you are trying any tricks I shall shoot you. Understand?’

  Albert said nothing. He stooped to swing the handle of the main engine. It fired. He set the throttle and turned to the wheel. The second stranger cast off.

  As the Alice pulled away from her mooring and turned down the estuary towards the sea, Albert was staring fixedly
into the darkness ahead, the set of his lips making his moustache jut angrily forwards.

  Two men saw the Alice creep out of Fowey harbour. One was the coastguard on duty on the hill above the harbour mouth, who noted down that she had left but took no other action. The second was Herbert Whiteway. Having a one-track mind, Whiteway instantly jumped to the conclusion that Albert was out after salmon.

  With excitement gleaming in his pale eyes the water-bailiff wrapped himself in many coats, got out his dinghy, and rowed quietly across the estuary to take up a position of concealment under the lee of the jetties opposite Pendennick. There he stayed, nursing the conviction that Albert was merely waiting for the tide to be right before he started netting.

  In the early hours of the morning the south-westerly wind which prevails in Cornish waters sprang up and quickly freshened until it was blowing half a gale. When Herbert Whiteway got home he was a sadder and wetter, if not wiser, man.

  However, at breakfast time there was something to cheer him up. He opened his morning paper to see headlines blacker than usual across the front page—CABINET MINISTER’S SUICIDE. BLACKMAIL SUSPECTED. And beneath the headlines two photographs, under which the text read:

  THE TWO MEN ABOVE ARE WANTED FOR QUESTIONING AND MAY BE CARRYING VITAL STATE SECRETS. THEY WERE PREVENTED FROM LEAVING THE COUNTRY AT SOUTHAMPTON YESTERDAY, BUT BROKE CUSTODY, AND ESCAPED IN A STOLEN CAR.

  A few minutes later, in the Fowey police-station, Whiteway leaned eagerly over the counter. ‘Them two men,’ he panted. ‘I seen them in The Lugger last night.’

  The policeman behind the counter was infuriatingly calm. He nodded.

  ‘Yes, mate. So did the landlord. You’m a bit late.’

  Whiteway scowled. ‘Albert Pascoe took the Alice out last night,’ he said with angry malice. ‘She’s not back yet. I reckon he took them two fellows with him.’

  At half past two in the afternoon Albert cut the Alice’s wing engine and throttled down the main. It was blowing hard. The sky was leaden with racing cloud through which there were no gaps for the sun to shine.

  A hundred yards away, waves with wind-broken crests crashed into foam against black needles of rock with cliffs behind them. But between the rocks there was a channel and beyond the channel fairly calm water and a cove with a gently sloping beach.

  Albert went to the cabin door. ‘We’m there,’ he said. ‘If you’m willing to risk it, I’ll try to put you ashore.’

  The two strangers were half sitting, half lying in a huddle of sick agony amid the litter of the cabin. The leader, the one with the pistol, looked up, swallowed bile frantically and lurched to his feet. When he was outside, Albert pointed. The stranger stared at the tumult of the waves and shut his eyes. ‘France?’ he whispered.

  ‘That’s right,’ Albert said.

  ‘Can you get the boat in… in there?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  The stranger nodded, gripping the side of the wheelhouse so hard that his knuckles were as white as chalk. Albert swung the Alice’s bows towards the little beach. White water broke over her. She staggered and yawed and swooped like a storm-tossed seagull, but she missed the rocks. Gently, gently, Albert nosed her into the beach. The strangers were ready.

  Albert put his hand out. ‘Fifty pound,’ he said.

  A sodden envelope came out of a coat-pocket and was pressed into his hand. In their waterlogged city clothes the two men clambered over the bows and lurched up the beach.

  Albert shouted, ‘Gimme a shove off!’ but they ignored him. He spat. Then smiled a grimly happy smile. At least he was shut of them. That was good.

  The Alice’s engines throbbed. Water boiled at her stern. Albert hopped over the side, heaved, hopped back in again, soaked to the skin. The Alice slid slowly backwards, her keel grating on the sand. Helm hard over. She came round. A tooth of rock reached out for her but she seemed somehow to dodge. She was in open water.

  Albert rubbed the salt out of his eyes. He spared a glance over his shoulder and saw the two strangers searching for a way up the cliffs. He grinned again.

  Then he opened the envelope he had been given. It was full of wet newspaper.

  The police found the strangers’ car hidden among bushes close to the place where the Alice had been moored. That was at nine o’clock in the morning. By ten o’clock messages had gone to London, and from London to Paris and Paris to Brittany. Watchers on the bleak Brittany coastline saw nothing of the Alice, nor of the wanted men.

  The R.A.F. were asked to fly sorties in an attempt to locate the boat. They did, but the weather defeated them and they saw nothing.

  Alice Pascoe spent the day in the coastguard’s hut above Fowey harbour, having left her children in the care of a neighbour.

  By half past six in the evening Albert was very tired. He had tied a loop of cord round his wrist and fastened the other end to one of the spokes of the Alice’s wheel, so that the tugging of the wheel would awaken him if he chanced to sleep.

  The wind had lessened. The waves no longer showed white caps. The Alice rode the swell with a neat, swooping motion that would have unravelled the stomach of a landsman but which Albert found soothing. In spite of his tiredness he was glad—glad to be going home, glad to be alive, even glad, in a way that he did not fully understand, that the strangers had robbed him of his promised fifty pounds.

  He up-ended his ketchup bottle for the last time at six-thirty-five, stared regretfully at its utter emptiness and pitched it over the side.

  Dusk was coming down as he sighted the landmark of the Gribbin, a peak of black and yellow cliff two or three miles west of Fowey. He left the wheel for a moment then, and went to stoop in the cabin entrance in order to light his pipe. It was when he straightened, puffing hard, that he saw the first porpoises.

  Three of their black backs wheeled a few yards away, the triangular dorsal fins cutting up, over, and down again into the water in a movement of slow poetry.

  And ahead of the gliding porpoises a great salmon leaped. More porpoises wheeled. Another salmon broke the surface; then a third and a fourth—and the fourth was so close to the Alice that it almost jumped inboard.

  Like a man in a dream, Albert flipped the throttles down and went to the cabin. After rummaging for a few seconds, he found the thing he was looking for, a rusty old gaff on the end of a six-foot pole. He went to the side of the boat and leaned over, staring fixedly down into the water. Porpoises and salmon showed nearby but he did not raise his head.

  Then there came a gleam of silver and a splash right under the lee of the almost stationary boat. Albert struck, his hands as skilled with the gaff as the hands of a pianist on the keyboard. He felt the gaff bite, and he gave a great heave, staggering backwards into the well of the boat.

  He stared down with happy incredulity at the full-grown, twenty-pound cock salmon that he had snatched from the beaks of the porpoises.

  Then alarm struck at him. Herbert Whiteway. Fifty pound or three months. He glanced about him. The sea was deserted. Arrh, who could have seen?

  On his knees he touched the salmon. ‘You’m a beauty, my dear. You’m a real beauty!’

  They were waiting for him at the Town Quay—Alice, Herbert Whiteway, ten reporters, most of the inhabitants of Fowey, four dogs, and an Inspector of Police. Albert brought the Alice in smartly, hugging the splendid guilty knowledge of the salmon to himself. He cut the engines, flicked a rope’s end round a bollard and made her fast. He stumped soggily up the steps and kissed Alice. Cameras clicked.

  ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to come with me, Mr Pascoe.’

  Albert looked up into the face of the Police Inspector. He nodded. ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  In the police car the Inspector said, ‘You took two men in your boat last night…’

  ‘I had to,’ Albert said gruffly. ‘They forced me with a pistol, like.
’

  ‘Did you land them?’ The policeman’s voice was urgent.

  ‘Arrh.’

  ‘Do you know exactly where?’

  ‘Surely,’ Albert said. ‘I put they ashore in a cove, not far from St Levan.’

  The Inspector peered down at a map on his knees, his forefinger following a coastline. Albert watched him. He coughed ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You got the wrong chart, sir. St Levan, I said. ’Tis not far from Land’s End.’

  The Police Inspector’s head came up and the map of Brittany slid off his lap on to the floor of the car. His eyes were wide with astonishment. ‘In Cornwall!’

  Albert grinned. ‘’Twas when I last saw it,’ he said, then added, ‘I reckoned they two had no business to be asking to go to France in the middle of the night. I reckoned they was bad ones, so I went out to sea for an hour or two and then, when the weather worsened, I come round in a big circle.

  ‘There was no sun to say I was changing course, and anyway they was proper seasick by then. Didn’t ask no questions. I told they it was France and they went ashore. Glad to be on dry land, I reckon.’

  He chuckled. ‘If you’m after those two, sir, they’ll be there still unless they swum for it. To my knowledge there’s no way up the cliffs from that cove at all.’

  As an honoured guest, Albert was driven back to the Town Quay after his visit to the police-station. With the Inspector’s friendly hand on his shoulder he walked proudly through the still-waiting crowd.

  But when he caught sight of Herbert Whiteway, he stopped in his tracks. The water-bailiff was standing in the Alice, his face gleeful with triumph and malice. Albert’s salmon lay on a piece of sacking at his feet.

  Albert swallowed. Dismay hit him, self-disgust, anger, and a sense of bitter unfairness. Alice was there, her face glum with disaster. He looked at her for a moment and then lowered his eyes.

  Before he could say anything, the Police Inspector’s surprisingly soft voice sounded, ‘Something wrong, Mr Whiteway?’