In Camera

by Gerald Hammond

  The room had been furnished for a professional man who liked to work in comfort and from home. There was a sumptuous swivel chair at a large and highly polished mahogany desk. Several leather-covered easy-chairs were centred around the Adam fireplace. The carpet was deep and the paintings on the panelled walls were original, chosen as much for capital appreciation as for beauty. Papers were usually confined to the matching bookcases or banished to the starker room next door which had once been reserved for the use of a visiting secretary.

  At the desk, which was set at a bay window and in clearer weather commanded a view over the yacht club to Tayport, one telephone was in use and a light on the other indicated that the extension in the adjoining room was also being used.

  In front of the unlit fire, the thickset American stood as if to heat his behind with the residual warmth of flames long dead. His hands, deep in his pockets, were gently massaging away the pain. Dora Braddle, slumped like a sack of suet in one of the deep armchairs, glared at the ceiling.

  Charles Hanratty, the owner of the house, was seated at the large corner-table usually reserved for the study of his collection of oriental erotica. The table was now spread with charts and littered with instruments. He was a tall, silver-haired man blessed with aloof poise. His manner towards the others was superior, even patronising. That he was vain was evident from his manicured fingernails, the careful removal of hair from his ears and nostrils and an opulent dapperness in his clothes.

  ‘So much for the Fife coast,’ Hanratty said. He adjusted a pair of heavily framed spectacles on his Roman nose. ‘Now we should look further afield.’

  ‘How far could they go?’ Dora asked.

  ‘It’s been four hours now. Given a decent breeze they could be past Arbroath going north, or entering the Forth if they went south. Further, if they risked the Cut. They could make Aberdeen in twelve hours or get down as far as the Tyne in about eighteen.’

  ‘But there isn’t any breeze,’ Dora Braddle pointed out.

  ‘There isn’t any breeze here,’ said Hanratty. ‘But here is where they are not. The forecast mentioned a shallow depression to the south. That could give them a nice little onshore breeze which hasn’t got here yet. And Lonely Lady sails well on a reach. I’ve raced against her.’

  ‘Never mind the crap,’ Dora said. ‘Just tell us where to put men.’

  The man at the phone finished his call. Hanratty looked at him and glanced at Dora. She nodded. ‘Directory Enquiries, Foxy,’ Hanratty said. ‘You want the Forth Ports Authority. They can give us the numbers for Granton, Leith, North Berwick and Dunbar. And while you’ve got Enquiries, get the numbers for the marinas at the Queensferries.’

  ‘I’ve got contacts at North Berwick,’ Dora said.

  ‘Get Mike to phone them on the other line. We want Aberlady and Tyninghame Bays covered and a watch kept from the road out to St Abb’s Head.’

  ‘I’ll fix it,’ Dora said. ‘Anywhere else?’

  ‘Does your man in Pittenweem still have a lobster boat available for . . . special tasks?’

  Dora twitched in her chair. Hanratty was not supposed to know that her agent was available, for a fee, to convey unwanted objects or inconvenient memories into deep water and there to lose them for ever. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Send him out to May Island. The shore station has a radio-phone but they wouldn’t pass private messages for us over the air to the lighthousekeepers. On the other hand, the lighthouse staff might be persuaded to radio a message to the police in an emergency. Tell your man to wait in the anchorage at West Tarbert. They’d be mad to use Kirkhaven with the wind in the east.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it from the other room,’ Dora said. She pushed herself to her feet, exchanging eye-signals with the American.

  Hanratty failed to notice the small exchange. ‘Now for the north,’ he said. ‘That skipper may have mistaken some other boat for Lonely Lady. We’d better cover the coast as far as Peterhead.’ He lost himself in his charts.

  The American muttered something about the bathroom. Dora beckoned through the open door. Foxy, at the telephone, looked up but she shook her head at him. The American walked casually out and pulled the door to. Dora led him along the corridor until they were well out of earshot.

  ‘If those two don’t fall into our hands soon,’ she said, ‘we’ve got problems.’

  He nodded sombrely. ‘There’ll be a chain reaction. But the problem’s all yours. I got what I came for and I can go back into the shadows. It was mostly to save your ass that I grabbed the woman in the first place. The only reason I’ve stuck around as long as I have is that I want to see that bugger put down, the one who smacked me in the passionfruits.’

  ‘If you hadn’t grabbed her,’ Dora said bitterly, ‘we wouldn’t be in this fix. She’d never have known what she’d got. And I wouldn’t have been stamped on.’ She rubbed her round stomach reflectively.

  ‘In the end, the shit always floats to the surface. When there’s been a big hit, they dig and dig until they’ve got the lot. If it isn’t the cops it’s the writers trying to prove a theory.’

  ‘Is your target that big? No, don’t tell me,’ she added quickly.

  ‘I wasn’t going to.’

  ‘If we go,’ Dora said, ‘I leave first.’

  ‘Of course,’ the American said. Behind his smile, his mind was ticking over smoothly. If Dora was so anxious to make off with the money he had just paid her, it must mean that she expected Mary Bruce to freeze Dora’s share of their joint capital as soon as it was known that the latter had drawn unwelcome attention to their activities. Sharks, he knew, would turn and rend a wounded companion, but sharks were as innocent lambs compared to those ladies. ‘If you do a bunk, I suppose Mary Bruce carries the can?’

  ‘With luck.’ Dora shrugged. ‘It’s a tough old world,’ she said.

  ‘Her dad won’t be pleased.’

  ‘Her dad won’t be around for another year and then he’d have to find me.’

  ‘What about . . .?’ The American pointed towards the closed door.

  Dora drew her finger across her throat. Her smile redeemed her sharp features. For a moment she was almost beautiful.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ the man said.

  *

  May Island stands in the mouth of the Firth of Forth, five miles from either shore. Afternoon wore on towards evening as they held course towards the island. They ate tinned steak and drank milkless tea. Sheila would have sold her soul for one dry cigarette. To distract herself from what she knew to be an unworthy craving, she offered only token resistance when Ian invited her to talk about herself.

  Being pitchforked from a humdrum existence into adventure had left Sheila without any sense of reality. She might have been fumbling for recollection of some previous incarnation. And yet it all came across. Ian could picture it clearly. The childhood in Forfar, doting on a father who left control and discipline to her mother. The shock of her father’s death. Inevitable friction with her mother, by now too domineering to relent. Secretarial college and a dull but independent job. The engagement which failed because of the need to support and nurse an ailing mother. Hostility suppressed, replaced by guilt.

  Then, dreaded yet welcome, freedom and a small legacy, sufficient to buy a studio flat and to aim herself at her real ambition. She talked about the routine at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, and Ian could sense more than she told him. Her face and her tone said more than her words. Freedom had arrived too late. She was enthralled by her work but disappointed that her classmates, finding her older than themselves and mistaking her shyness for reserve, had gently but firmly excluded her from their corporate liveliness. She would have liked her studio to be a salon but it was becoming a prison. She knew that they were calling her ‘Chill’ Blayne behind her back, but she withheld that detail from him.

  She came back to the present when the wind backed and Lonely Lady began to roll.

  They could have had it rough off Fife Ness, wh
ere the tide makes its turn over a shelving bottom, but rather than risk being seen from the shore Ian had set a course which took them past well out to sea. The breeze returned to the east, bringing only a long swell to which Lonely Lady lifted gracefully.

  The mist was still there, usually little more than a haze but thickening in random patches as the day cooled. Once it blew clear so that the coast of Fife showed up and Sheila could feel hostile eyes on her, but Ian calmed her fears, explaining how inconspicuous was a small boat with tan sails at such a distance. The breeze fell light and the mist closed in again. They began to hear the lowing of the two foghorns on May Island.

  Ian gave Sheila the helm. He set a new course on the compass and freed the sails for what was now nearer to a run than a reach. He got to his feet – stiffly, after sitting for so long – and stood on the side-deck, one arm around a shroud, feeding the coils of the hand-line from hand to hand. The mist was thicker around the island.

  ‘I’ll be watching for rocks and feeling for the bottom at seven fathoms,’ he said. ‘When I make anxious noises, act quickly. Push the tiller the way I point. Never mind what the sails do, I’ll sort them out later; just let’s not sail onto the rocks.’ He gripped the line above a tag of red bunting, swung the lead and let the line shoot ahead. As it came vertical, he felt for the bottom. ‘Nothing yet,’ he said. He paused in the act of coiling the wet line. ‘I wonder why they set up their meet at Broughty Ferry, of all places.’

  Sheila brooded anxiously over the grid compass, reminding herself again that the card moved in the same direction as the tiller and not the other way as she would have expected. ‘It had to be somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘But why there? If he’s American and she’s Glasgow.’

  ‘The gun was made in Dundee.’

  ‘So meet in Dundee or somewhere further south and west, not Broughty. It would be against her instincts to travel in the opposite direction from home, when what she was carrying could land her in the deepest trouble of her life.’ He finished coiling the line and cast it again. The nearer foghorn boomed, eerily, slightly muted as if land were beginning to obtrude between it and them.

  ‘If it means anything,’ Sheila said, ‘I’d seen Dora Braddle once before. I saw her earlier in the day from the bus. She was going into one of those big houses across the main road from the yacht club.’

  Ian was coiling the line again. It dribbled cold water onto his bare feet and he moaned softly. ‘That could explain it,’ he said. ‘If the money was lying in the hands of a minder, a third party . . .’

  ‘Yes, but listen,’ Sheila said. ‘The reason I noticed her at all was that I knew the house. A girl in my year used to live there. She dropped out to get married. Joan Hanratty. I was at the wedding.’

  Ian waited while his line sank. He felt for the bottom and found it. At the same moment, rocks showed out of the mist. Sheila squeaked and put the helm over. Ian dropped into the cockpit and took it from her, steering with his knee while he tried to recover the hand-line and adjust the sheets. ‘Hanratty?’ he said. ‘Hanratty? What does her father do?’

  ‘I think he was something to do with the law, but he seems to be retired now. I met him at her wedding. I didn’t like him much. He seemed to be too proud of his possessions. People who take too much pride in owning things never seem to have anything in themselves to be proud of. And he was vain about his youthfulness,’ she added. ‘You know the type. A solarium for a tan and his hearing-aid hidden in his spectacle frames.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Ian put the helm further over and sheered away from the island. The sails slatted. He sheeted in and they were away on a reach to the south again. The rocks faded into the mist and the foghorns called plaintively after them. ‘There was a solicitor named Hanratty. He got struck off last year. I always read up these cases, partly out of professional interest and partly in a spirit of “There but for the grace of God go the rest of them”. No other profession finds dishonesty so easy, or so tempting. He’d been up to several fiddles, mostly in connection with wills and conveyances – which makes him sound like perfect legal help for Dora. Listen, tell me, before we even think about going near land again, did he sail?’

  Sheila thought back. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I remember Joan saying something about money being tight and her father having to give up his boat.’

  ‘Thank God for talkative friends!’ Ian said grimly. ‘If they’ve got a sailor on the team, he won’t forget May Island. We’ll go on south. They’ve got to let up somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe they let up at the Tay.’

  ‘Maybe. But suddenly I’ve taken a scunner to May Island. And to Dunbar. What kind of boat did he have? Dinghy? Day-sailor? Gin-palace? Ocean-racer?’

  ‘I know that they could sleep on board,’ Sheila said helplessly. ‘I never knew her all that well and she only spoke about it the once. She mentioned Elie and Aberdour.’

  ‘That does it!’ said Ian. ‘We go round the corner and continue south. I don’t fancy St Abb’s or Eyemouth, they’re too small and too close; and I wouldn’t fancy Burnmouth in an onshore wind and in the dark even if nobody were after us. I think we’ll try Berwick-on-Tweed. Two large towns facing each other, a wide harbour-mouth and a choice of docks. I think we’ll take a look at the Tweed in the early morning.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Well, I’m pooped.’ Ian yawned vastly at the thought. ‘I don’t think I slept for more than an hour last night, in an armchair in the van. You take over while I have a doze. This course should clear St Abb’s Head. You’ll see the light flashing every ten seconds away to starboard – that side,’ he explained carefully. ‘Anything else, bang on the deck and scream bloody murder. Wear my watch. Wake me at three if I’m still sleeping or earlier if you feel yourself beginning to doze off. Got it?’

  ‘I think so,’ Sheila said.

  ‘You can see a lighthouse flashing, even without your glasses?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ she said.

  *

  At first, Charles Hanratty had found the planning of the hunt intellectually stimulating. His enjoyment of a contest of the mind had been his pleasure in legal practice and the motivation which had tempted him away from its strict precepts. And it was a boost to his ego to know that a group of such strong personalities depended on him for his expertise.

  But, when the evening sun began to glow flatly through the clearing mist, the atmosphere in the room had changed from expectation to despondency and his mood had changed with it. He resented the imperious despatch of his wife to stay with their married daughter and the commandeering of his house and services; and he was uncomfortably aware that he had already lost his licence to practise as a solicitor and was in great danger of losing also his less legal but equally profitable connections. Worst of all, he now knew too much.

  He had decided some hours earlier that his salvation lay in a successful outcome to the chase. He might not like his horse but he must ride it to win. For the moment. If it fell or came second, then he would know that it was possible to outrun Dora’s long arm. His instinct told him it was being nosed out.

  Dora finished her call and hung up the phone. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘They could have gone to the moon.’

  The American stirred in one of the armchairs. ‘If your man Grotty says that nobody’s been near your place,’ he said, ‘then as of half an hour ago our two young friends haven’t made contact with the police.’

  ‘Unless there’s been a trap set,’ Dora said. ‘I can’t get an answer on Mary’s line. I don’t like it a bit. Could those two be holed up somewhere?’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Hanratty said. ‘There are drilling rigs laid up near the coast and small bays and anchorages which would be safe in this weather. If that’s what they’ve done, it becomes a waiting game. My bet is that they’ve pushed on south. Do you have any hard men in Northumberland?’

  ‘Tweedmouth’s c
overed,’ Dora said.

  ‘I’m thinking of Holy Island. Do you have anyone in Newcastle or Blyth?’

  ‘That’s off my patch,’ Dora said. ‘Grotty knows a man in Seahouses, but we’ve already sent him out with his boat. I could get somebody down from Glasgow before that yacht could get there.’

  Hanratty glanced from his watch to the tide tables. ‘Tell him to get his skates on or he’ll not get over the causeway at low tide.’

  ‘I’ll phone from next door and keep this line free for incoming calls,’ Dora said. She looked at Hanratty with cold eyes. ‘I don’t like what you said about a waiting game. We can’t afford it. If those two sailed to an oil rig, would the staff radio the police?’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ the American said.

  Dora had not taken her eyes off Hanratty. ‘Or they could speak to some other yacht. While we wait, the law could be preparing to pounce. We need those two sods and we need them soon. That’s your job.’

  ‘And I’m doing all that’s humanly possible,’ Hanratty said. ‘I can’t make things move any faster just to get you off my back. If I could, believe me, I would.’

  Dora barely caught the American’s eye as she left the room but he joined her as she finished her Glasgow call. Her handbag, of alligator skin to match her shoes, was open on the desk.

  ‘I don’t go for this,’ he said. ‘Every minute that goes by stretches the mesh of the net wider.’

  ‘And involves more men at a hundred a day each,’ Dora said grimly. ‘Plus the bounty, if one of them hits the bull’s-eye. Christ! I might save more than I lost by skipping out right away. I think . . . yes, I think we’ve got to distance ourselves from this little operation. We’ll let it run on but I’ll monitor it from a distance. Grotty can start tidying up. He’ll know soon enough if those two have made it to the authorities, and if that happens he cleans out my bank account and waits for me in London.’

  ‘You’d trust a man called Grotty?’ the American asked incredulously.

  Dora smiled bleakly. ‘I’ve got enough on Grotty to send him away for a thousand years after remission. Of course I trust him. I wouldn’t send him out to rob a piggy bank, he’s not the active type. But as a background man, he’s good.’