by Peter Tonkin
At Robin’s order, the rear door was raised another foot. The foaming gush of water no longer touched its lower edge, simply flowing out of the SuperCat, seemingly as fast as it was flowing in through the damage at the front. So the vessel surged towards Full Ahead with the Runnel Stone Light rapidly falling behind her port beam and Penzance only twelve minutes distant, round the corner marked by Mousehole. But that was still hidden behind Boscawen Point.
‘Boscawen Point dead ahead,’ called Richard.
‘Full Ahead,’ called Robin. They both said the word ‘ahead’ at once.
Lionheart was skimming over the relatively quiet area at more than sixty miles an hour now. Her head was up; and if her petticoats were trailing, then that seemed to be no great problem. For the moment at least.
The quiet section of sea sat before them, pushed forward by the new storm-front at almost their own fierce speed. And it remained under their flying bows all the way to Boscawen Point.
Level with the Point but still some miles out, they edged gingerly on to a new heading almost due north. This leg was designed to bring them up past Mousehole so that they could swing into the broad bay which housed the safe havens of Penzance and Newlyn, both protected from the worst of the south-westerly weather by the cliffs of the headland above Mousehole.
The adjustment to speed and heading was slight, less than ten degrees to port, but to Robin’s super-sensitive hands it registered a problem. She didn’t even hear Richard sing out, ‘Mousehole dead ahead!’ She was completely absorbed in feeling how Lionheart was responding.
The SuperCat’s back end was heavy and even with the slight adjustment it nearly slewed out of control. They had certainly swung too far. Mousehole should be safely off the port quarter, like the Runnel Stone had been. It should not be dead ahead. More gingerly still, she eased over until everything settled back on Due North.
Richard’s pride and joy - still, more than twenty years after he bought it - was an E-Type Jaguar. It was massively overpowered, in Robin’s opinion, with a huge V12 engine. She had driven it once or twice, but never for pleasure. And never anywhere near its full potential. She thought rather queasily that this was like driving it at full speed with one of the rear tyres flat.
Just that little turn made the whole aft section of the Cat swing dangerously one way and then the other; and that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. When they got into the right position, five minutes north of Mousehole, they were going to have to swing 90 degrees to port. Nearly ten times further round than the turn that had nearly taken her out of control just now.
Her hands burned to ease back on the power but she simply didn’t dare. They couldn’t founder now. Not here. The coast was a grim buttress of cliffs, plunging to twenty or thirty metres below sea level. There was no safe haven - hardly even a landing spot this side of Mousehole - for anything as big and powerful as Lionheart. No matter what damage it did to the SuperCat she had to bring her round that tight turn north of Mousehole and into the protected shallows of the bay.
But then, as Lionheart settled on to her new course, she steadied and seemed content to plunge forward across the quartering sea. It would take them little more than five minutes at this speed to get to St Clement’s Isle, which guarded the harbour of Mousehole. Dare she change course again here, but this time through 45 degrees to take her north-west and again 45 degrees when the hull had steadied - to settle them safely on course towards Penzance.
At least, thought Richard grimly, feeling the hull’s gathering certainty after the dangerous little swing and unconsciously in tune with his wife’s darkest fears, the change of course north of Mousehole, dangerous though it might be, would bring them swiftly in behind the headland and out of these ruinous seas. The bay would shelve swiftly but the only big combers would be those that swung round in their wake. And with any luck Lionheart would almost surf home on them.
‘Coming past St Clement’s Isle and Mousehole,’ he sang out, only vaguely aware of how completely the swiftly passing moments were putting Robin on the horns of a dilemma. Should she risk two 45 degree turns - with the first still likely to sink them in the teeth of the storm if anything went wrong? Or should she wait for the wind shadow of the cliffs and try the full 90 degrees - hoping that if things went wrong then at least they might be able to swim across to Penzance as Richard had said.
Robin’s right hand tightened on the throttle levers. She came within a whisker of pulling them back but she forced herself to release them. She transferred her right fist to join her left, both of them trembling slightly, on the neat little steering wheel of the helm. She had been thinking of Richard’s E-type. This wheel was smaller than the Jaguar’s; almost unsettlingly so. She looked at the course monitor - what was left of the ancient compass binnacle which Paul, no doubt, had used on his square-rigger. She tensed herself to turn through 45 degrees.
‘Still water dead ahead,’ said Richard gently, as though this were their sitting room at home in Ashenden, and they were discussing the doings of the day. ‘If you let her run on for three or four more minutes you’ll be able to make the full turn there and then out of the storm. With only a three-minute run up into the bay.’ In some distant part of her mind she realized how effectively the measured calm of his tone was keeping the rising panic at bay within her.
Robin hesitated, calculating. He, and the thought he generated, was a distraction. There was no sense in which she deferred to him - nor that he expected her to. In command situations he discussed things, shared responsibility - team-built. She didn’t. She made up her mind and got on with it. But his apparently unthinking collegiality distracted her. And at sixty miles an hour - with a following storm pushing her ever faster down into a valley of relative calm - she didn’t have to be distracted long for the moment to have slipped past.
She looked up, frowning. She looked down. The calm closed around them in a twinkling. It all seemed to happen that quickly. The course monitor showed her that this was the optimum moment for a 90 degree turn into Penzance. And she acted. Still with the throttles at Full Ahead, she spun the wheel to port through 90 degrees.
The massive motors behind the skimming SuperCat reacted perfectly and she span through the degrees of the turn as she surged across the area of calm and into the throat of the bay. But beneath the engines, was three decks - and more - of cold green water, weighing 64 pounds per cubic foot. It weighed less than the 100 vehicles she was designed to carry, perhaps; but it was not secured. It had motion and momentum of its own. Crucially, unlike the cargo she was used to, this was not a part of the vessel. It was a free-moving, dangerously destructive entity. A loose cannon weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds.
And all of its destructive power was focused with almost fiendish ruthlessness upon the SuperCat’s weakest, least stable point. As Lionheart’s bow swung round through 90 degrees, so the unstable mass of water deep within her took motion and continued to spin her long after the motors had settled on to the new heading dictated by the helm. Had Lionheart actually been the E-Type, she would be skidding wildly out of control now. And Robin reacted accordingly. As soon as she felt the rear section swing away she turned on to a counter-course, steering into the skid. Her foot automatically stamped down for a brake - but there was none there. And then it released the pressure anyway, some long-forgotten driving lesson reminding her that it was bad to brake in a skid. The vessel’s square body angled, digging one hull deeper into the water. The spin intensified. Then began to ease. She glanced over at Tom but he was comatose. Somewhere along the way he had slipped into a shallow sleep.
And the SuperCat continued hurling forward at a steady sixty miles per hour. While Robin fought to keep control of her, she leaped across Mount’s Bay towards the enfolding arm of the land. Land, which protected them from the storm because it was high, rugged and solid. Land, which would destroy them if they hit it at this speed because it was high, rugged and solid. And, while the arm of the bay cut off the power of the st
orm, it also cut off an increasing number of alternatives as Lionheart surged across the bay still at full speed.
‘Penzance dead ahead,’ said Richard calmly.
With disorientating rapidity Robin’s view through the cracked and foam-washed windscreen went from open water to a wall of land. And the wall was coming towards them incredibly swiftly, seeming to widen out to port and starboard, cutting off all hope of manoeuvring. Now at last she was forced to cut the power. But the wildly swinging vessel continued to surf forward, with the out-wash of the storm-seas behind her. ‘Where are you planning to put her?’ asked Tom, conversationally, jerked awake, seemingly, by Robin’s simple tension.
‘Newlyn dead ahead,’ said Richard. And his hand closed for a moment on her shoulder. His touch steadied her and allowed him to repeat, gently, ‘Newlyn.’
Robin swung the wheel over again. ‘Where Richard said,’ she gasped in reply to Tom. Suddenly settled and full of confidence. ‘On the prom. Near as dammit. Or, more precisely, on the beach below it.’ She released the throttles in their Full Reverse position. Reached forward and pushed the button on the loud hailer. ‘Please fasten your seatbelts and prepare for collision,’ she said. She did not need to repeat herself. ‘Richard, Doc, the rest of you. If you can’t strap in, then get down on the deck with your backs against something solid.’
And her order came not a moment too soon. For the shoreline was pouncing towards them more rapidly than any movement she had ever seen afloat. The coastal slopes that reached up to Penzance and Newlyn seemed as threatening as any of the great waves they had encountered so far. For all they were bright with lights - even the occasional set of headlamps desperate enough to be out on a night like this. The brightly spangled darkness reared up the sky as though the end of Cornwall were taking flight, sweeping in low over her head.
But Robin was not looking up; she was looking down. Richard and she had enjoyed a blissful week down here early in their marriage and she remembered as well as he the long sandy beach that joined Newlyn to Penzance at the water’s edge. She remembered how it had been a part of the secret, almost coded language that they had shared before the twins arrived. Newlyn. Sea, sun, sand - and safety. And, because it was low tide now, the beach was long and flat. Because it was the middle of a stormy night the long, flat beach was deserted.
That was clearly the plan that Richard had shared with her - and that was as far as the conscious part of it ever got.
Lionheart’s still-low rear end touched bottom. Her high-riding bows slammed down into the surf. Three keels, water-jets, the lot, tore through the bottom of the sandy bay - until the sand and the friction started some tearing of their own. The simple power of her momentum drove her on and on, as though she were a crashing aeroplane and not a sinking ship. Up out of the surf she slammed, screaming and shaking as she began to tear to pieces. The great bow waves of water became slightly lesser bow waves of wet sand.
But even when she slid out of the water altogether, she still behaved like the yare lady she was, slipping over the beach as she had sliced through the waves, beginning to swing from side to side, but never enough to pitch or roll. Only friction could slow her now, and so it did as she broke through into a softer, dryer layer and settled. But beneath the softer layer there was a shelf of rock and this gripped her at last, ripping away the broken bottom of the SuperCat, and bringing her to a shuddering stand at last.
There was a moment of utter silence as the fact that they were safe and sound ashore sank in.
And then the cheering really began in earnest.
THE INQUIRY
Chapter 9: The Last Calm Day
It was the last summery day of that autumn, nearly six months after the loss of Goodman Richard, and there was nothing in the still, calm dawn to hint at the fury to come. Certainly, Richard had no intimation of looming disaster when he first awoke into it. He rolled out of bed a little before sunrise as he habitually did, smiled as Robin rolled automatically into the warm indentation left by his large frame and slept on oblivious. He silently shrugged on a dressing gown and padded out through the French window. If anything, at that moment, he was luxuriating in the freedom which came immediately after the teenage twins Mary and William went back to their boarding school, as they had done yesterday, Sunday, at the end of half term. The freedom, the space and the simple silence.
The master bedroom at Ashenden, like the big sitting room beneath it, opened on to marble flooring railed and colonnaded as though this were a wealthy residence in the Deep South of the United States rather than a traditional English one. The balconies looked over the blue- green slope of the achingly fragrant camomile lawn, over the formal and kitchen gardens - flower, vegetable and herb - and over the fence erected to contain the twins in childhood. Beyond the fence there was no more land. For the garden, like the house above it, stood teetering on the topmost cliff top on the southernmost reach of East Sussex’s white chalk coastline.
As he leaned thoughtfully on the railing, therefore, Richard was presented with a vista of calm sea and utter peacefulness. It seemed to stretch from the Dover Strait in the eastern distance, over the western part of the Channel itself, all the way down to the French coast - a smudge of French blue on the southern horizon today - and west to the Western Approaches. The Atlantic beyond lay, like Robin, still asleep beneath the softest blanket of departing darkness.
But there, away on Richard’s left the sun was just beginning to rise. Such was the situation of Richard and Robin’s beloved home that on certain mornings - like this one - when the position of the earth and the state of sky and sea were all just right, the sun came up out of the North Sea. Such mornings brought fleeting instants of green-gold glory to that dull grey sea. Just for a moment, as dawn swept over Antwerp, there was nothing but water on the curve of the earth between Richard’s dazzled eyes and the slowly rising sun. For a lingering instant as the great star came up from behind the curve of solid earth the whole eastern end of the Channel lit up. At its heart there was a jewel of burning emerald, framed with darkest sapphire. Then it was as though Richard could see the long beams of gold come pouncing over the surface of the world towards him, flooding everything that he could sense with light and warmth and the bustle of a new day.
The gulls high on the cliffs beneath his feet launched themselves into the air screaming their first feeding call. A tanker heaved out of the mist south-west of him, bustling in towards Europort, its night lights still burning. The 06.00 SuperCat scythed south towards Calais. A slower ferry steamed peacefully out of Dover. How old-fashioned the labouring vessel seemed to Richard, when put alongside the sleek SuperCat. Slow and bulky and well past its sell-by. As out of date as the Goodman Richard, which lay now in the chilly deeps beside Wolf Rock, as lost and drowned and dead as her Captain James Jones.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ whispered Robin, so close behind him that he jumped.
He turned to find her wrapped in the duvet, eyes sleepy and hair tousled, frowning slightly in the brightness and the hour. She was not a morning person.
‘I was looking at the six a.m. SuperCat and thinking about Lionheart,’ he answered, less than accurately. ‘We were lucky there was less damage than there seemed to be, both to the hull and the promenade - and that the insurers came round so quickly.’
‘Good publicity,’ she said. ‘All those grateful kids and heroic headlines. No wonder people are fighting to ride on the things - independently of the comfort, speed and convenience.’
‘Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said there’s no such thing as bad publicity?’ he joked.
‘Sounds more like Robert Maxwell. But I’m not sure he was right. Look at Goodman Richard. Captain and several senior officers presumed drowned. Hull declared a complete loss. Everyone from here to the Receiver of Wreck cutting up nasty. Poor old Charles Lee says they’ll have to wind up that charitable board that ran her. He may even have to cover some losses himself. Sell one of his ocean-going racers. Perhaps even pull out of next
year’s Fastnet Race.’
‘Really? I didn’t realize,’ said Richard, thinking for a wicked moment how good that would be for Doc and Katapult.
‘Oh Richard! You’re on the board of the charity yourself. It was his last letter to you that gave me the information. You must keep up with these things!’ Richard was a man of action, not of letters. He could be notoriously slapdash with his paperwork.
‘I’ve been busy,’ he declared, aggrieved.
‘Yes,’ she relented, snuggling up beside him. ‘So you have. And “busy” is putting it mildly. I don’t think anyone could have done as much as you have in the time. Leaving Goodman Richard aside, you’ve put everything back just the way it was - from Lionheart’s bows to Newlyn’s prom. Our stock is riding high again in every way.’
‘Always a good thing for a publicly quoted company,’ he rumbled in cheerful agreement.
There was a distant crunching of wheels on gravel, audible from the front of the house only because of the utter silence of the day.
‘Papers and post,’ said Richard, eager as always to get his hands on both. As he spoke, a motor revved and the wheels crunched over the gravel again, departing.
Richard was gone as soon as the sounds were, leaving Robin standing high and dry - and suddenly chilly. She lingered, frowning, some vague premonition darkening the dazzle of the day, some fey, fairy-given ability passed down from her Scottish Border grandmothers. She looked westwards, away over the Western Approaches. The blue of the Atlantic sky was marked with patterns of cloud; speckles and swirls of hazy whiteness - as though God had begun an Impressionist painting there.