In Camera

by Gerald Hammond

  Keith wanted to protest, not because her reasoning was unsound but because his only concept of hell took the form of an endless flight in a small helicopter. But before he could find any fresh arguments, they heard Paul Cardinal calling from the study. They went through together.

  ‘I got one,’ Paul said. (Molly tried to catch Keith’s eye but he refused to make eye contact.) ‘An old friend in the oil industry can help out. When and where shall I tell him to come?’

  Keith looked at the study clock. Daylight would be fading before they could hope to get to Holy Island and back. He had no intention of blundering around in the dark in the hands of a pilot of unknown capability, ‘First light,’ he said. ‘Tell him two miles north of Newton Lauder. There’s a flat field near here, between the main and the local roads. We’ll spread a white sheet.’

  Paul relayed the instructions.

  Deborah had come downstairs again. ‘I’ve washed,’ she said defiantly, ‘but I couldn’t lie down. I want to go with the helicopter.’

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ Keith said. He swallowed. ‘I’m going with Paul and there won’t be a spare seat.’

  ‘You’re going? But what about—?’

  ‘What about nothing,’ Keith said. If he was not firm, he was going to chicken out. ‘I’m going and that’s that. If you want something useful to keep you occupied while we’re away, go and see Charlie and find out if that Bible’s still in existence.’

  ‘Charlie?’ Paul said. ‘Who’s Charlie?’

  ‘He’s the Earl of Jedburgh. An old beau of Deborah’s. His family name was Ilwand, which is another archaic spelling of Elliot. His seat is at Aikhowe.’

  Keith escaped upstairs and burrowed into a cupboard in the gunroom. There was a Browning automatic in there somewhere, still in its original wrapping.

  Paul regarded Deborah with increased respect. ‘So you could’ve been a . . . a . . .’

  ‘Countess,’ Deborah said. ‘Yes, I could. But I think I’d rather be a detective’s wife.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re taking on,’ Paul said.

  Chapter Six

  Lonely Lady, moored to the disused lifeboat slipway at Holy Island, nodded gently while they bickered over their next move. Ian’s head moved restlessly, watching for the appearance of an enemy above the skyline of the Heugh, the escarpment which screens the natural harbour. For the moment, they could have been alone in the world.

  Now that she had reached shore unscathed, Sheila was scenting the delights of hot baths, fresh food and a stable floor under her feet and she was reluctant to face the sea again. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘now that you’ve phoned your chief and put my sketch in the post, the danger’s over. Isn’t it? We’ve done what they were trying to stop us doing, if they ever did do more than chase us along the beach.’

  Ian took her points one at a time. ‘Not my chief,’ he said. ‘I have two of them. The one I’m doing this for would think twice and then call on the coastguard – and if Dora has friends in that quarter we could literally be sunk. I phoned somebody I can trust. As to danger being over, maybe and maybe not. We know what we’ve done, but if there’s anybody after us they may not wait to find out before doing whatever they’ve been told to do. And your sketch would mean very little in evidence if you weren’t there to speak to it.’

  ‘But there wasn’t anybody here,’ Sheila said, not for the first time.

  ‘There could be, five minutes after the causeway uncovers. There would be, if I were in Dora’s shoes. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we were never in any danger. But in view of the disaster for Dora if our evidence comes out, I’m not prepared to take chances on it. Now that we have food and water and clothes and fuel for the outboard—’

  ‘Clothes of a sort. Your . . . your friend is going to the police, isn’t he?’

  ‘Of course. But he’ll speak to the right person at the right time. I’m glad now that we didn’t send any message by another boat – we could have raised a storm.

  ‘I’ve got my instructions. He’s going to smooth things over with the owner of Lonely Lady. I’m to get the hell out of harm’s way until he can send a helicopter to pick me up. That could take time, if the choppers are all busy. After that, if you come along for another ride, we can tuck you away somewhere safe while the whole complex mess unravels.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be safe if I phoned for a car to take me away?’ Sheila asked wistfully. ‘I couldn’t pay for it,’ she added.

  Ian was tired of doing her thinking for her while he was anxiously trying to think for himself. ‘Don’t worry about the cost of a car,’ he said. ‘Have it on me, if you’ve made up your mind. Personally, I wouldn’t take the risk, but you’re a big girl. If that’s what you want to do, go ahead.’ He began to take the tiers off the mainsail. ‘I’m sailing, before somebody can come over the causeway with a rifle. He may be watching the mainland end now, nursing a gun, or he may not. I can’t tell you for sure,’ he added more gently, ‘and I can’t make up your mind for you. But I’m leaving now.’

  Sheila looked up at the Heugh. At that distance and without her glasses it was little more than a smudge. That decided her. If danger threatened, it would be all the more terrifying, coming unseen out of a blur. She found that she would rather face the sea again with a sharp-eyed protector than the dangers of the land alone. ‘I’m coming,’ she said.

  They motored out of the large, natural harbour through the narrowing channel, past the small castle on its conical hill, keeping the beacons lined up astern. The outgoing tide swept them along.

  From his position on the mainland, Jimmy Jay only saw the tip of the masthead, but he ground his teeth at the sight. Of all the yachts on the coast, Sod’s Law dictated that this would be the one. Too late now to redeem himself with Dora. He decided to crawl into a hole and not to come out until the shit had stopped flying, if ever.

  Two hours of motor-sailing in light airs brought Lonely Lady to the Fame Islands. Ian fetched out a long warp and a CQR anchor and they brought up in the Kettle, an anchorage sheltered by the low humps of Knox Reef, West Wideopen and Fame Island itself. Ian pointed out the escape route to the south offered by Wideopen Gut.

  Sheila, still hankering for the comforts of land, was in a peevish mood. ‘I think,’ she said primly, ‘that that’s the most disgusting place-name I ever heard.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Ian said. ‘But it’s very suitable.’ As their ordeal neared an end and tiredness took over from tension, he began to feel lightheaded. ‘If anyone comes at us from seaward, I’ll be through there like a dose of salts.’

  Sheila gasped, giggled and then threw back her head. They laughed together. Seals, looking like earless Labradors, came to the surface to see what the noise was about.

  They luxuriated in a leisurely meal of the best that Holy Island had been able to offer, eaten from cracked plates with plastic cutlery that seemed to have originated with some airline. Then each took a turn on watch while the other struggled in the cramped space below to wash and change into the jeans and T-shirts which had been all that the local shop could find in their respective sizes. It would have been easier on deck but, although their privacy seemed complete, they could have been in the binoculars of lighthousemen or birdwatchers. Messages might now be flying to Dora, but Ian thought not and he was becoming too tired to care.

  After a night and more than a day of constant and sometimes frantic activity, there was a sudden peace. Their world was a huge globe of still water and still, clear air. They sat in the cockpit, dozing or chatting desultorily. Sheila had acquired a writing-pad to replace her sketching block. When she had finished as detailed a portrait of the American as her memory, assisted by Ian’s, could manage, she began to fill the pad with sketches of Bamburgh Castle, romantically dominating the skyline from two miles off, and then of the seals which came round the boat in friendly quest for fish offal. She found that a seal’s face lent itself to a wide variety of expressions.

  ‘So when do we expect this
helicopter?’ she asked suddenly.

  Ian Fellowes jerked out of a half-sleep. ‘They don’t wait around like taxis,’ he said. ‘At least, I don’t think they do.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Sheila looked up from a vigorous sketch of her companion. She had drawn him twice as a seal but was now portraying him as himself. If he had seen it, which he never did, he might have been surprised to see who he could appear in the eyes of a lady of romantic temperament. Without distorting the truth by more than a hair’s breadth, Sheila had straightened his nose and added to the firmness of his jaw. She had also given to his brow a serene nobility which was usually lacking. She had drawn a head that would have looked well above armour and a white horse but it was still recognisably Ian Fellowes. ‘A ride in a helicopter will be another new experience,’ she said. ‘Is it coming here?’

  ‘This is a bird sanctuary. If we landed a chopper here we’d have every wildlifer in the country up in arms. I said to overfly us and then to pick us up from the beach below Bamburgh Castle.’

  ‘We can’t just abandon somebody’s boat.’

  ‘He’ll have her collected, probably by somebody from Seahouses—’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From North Sunderland. Over there,’ he said, pointing lazily. ‘They call it Seahouses. Or the pilot may bring a man with him. She’ll be returned to the owner with apologies and enough of a cheque to poultice any wounded feelings. I’m more concerned about just who’ll pay the bill at the end of the day.’

  Time wore on without any sign of the promised helicopter. Mist crept low over the water, drawing unreality over the scene. The sun dipped for the short midsummer night. Neither of them cared to doss down in the squalid conditions below. Instead, they brought up the bunk cushions and the only two blankets and huddled down on the cockpit sole, sheltering from a night which had become suddenly colder. A heavy slop came rolling in from the north-east, product of a depression over the distant fjords, and Lonely Lady turned broadside to it and tried to roll her mast out.

  With no distraction for their minds, their bodies were vulnerable. Soon, Sheila threw off the blanket and hung miserably over the side. Ian got up and used the heavy water carrier as a weight, sending it up the mast on the main halliard so that the boat’s period of roll would no longer synchronise with the seaway. The rolling reduced, but too late. In his turn, Ian knelt and surrendered.

  When the worst of the miseries were past, they huddled down again in their nest, shivering and clinging together for warmth and comfort. The mood of mutual dependence, at a time when every circumstance was unfamiliar, bore them along. Small liberties led to greater and, when these were accepted and returned, they found themselves, without conscious intent, joined in the ultimate embrace.

  Fear and nausea were forgotten. Sheila was due, or long overdue, for some bodily loving. Her one previous affair, entered into out of a sense of duty to her chosen lifestyle, had been brief, physically painful and totally unsatisfying. Ian’s lingering inhibitions and the discomfort of the cockpit sole combined to postpone his achievement of release. It was a revelation to Sheila that a man – even one who, she still half believed, was a member of a profession noted for its talent in such matters – could restrain himself for so long for her greater pleasure. She came at last to an orgasm which she could only describe to herself as mind-blowing. Later, she tried to paint it, but doing it, in her own opinion, far less than justice. The painting, mostly depicting coloured bubbles, resembled an explosion in a factory making washing-up liquid.

  They fell asleep at last, heedless of any possible dangers, and woke to a bright dawn and the clatter of the helicopter passing high overhead on course for Bamburgh Castle. The noise put thousands of seabirds into the air and guano pattered around them like rain.

  They adjusted their clothing without looking at each other, and made sail.

  *

  Harry Skoll was ostensibly an inshore fisherman working out of North Sunderland, but the largest part of his living came from the theft of expensive gear off the yachts at Blyth and around the Tyne. This he passed to Mary Bruce, for disposal through contacts on the Clyde, receiving in return payments impenetrably disguised as racing wind-falls or the proceeds from the sale of shellfish.

  He believed, quite wrongly, that the ladies had always treated him fairly. So when he recognised Foxy’s voice on the phone, he was willing to branch out. For a hundred a day per person, he would keep a watch out for Lonely Lady; and, if he should make contact with her, he would destroy boat and crew, for an agreed fee plus legal expenses if required. He would, he said, take three men and work a shift system.

  He waited for dark in order to obscure the identifying numbers on his lobster boat, and went out in her alone. An extra three hundred pounds per day was hardly to be passed up, and Harry Skoll’s experience of yachtsmen did not suggest that they would be formidable opponents. When Lonely Lady at last poked her bow out from behind Farne Island, he had been at the helm for more than twenty-four hours and he was close to exhaustion. In such ways can incompetence and greed undermine the most thorough planning.

  An hour earlier, the lights of a yacht approaching from the direction of the Tweed had boosted him into wakefulness with a surge of adrenalin. The newcomer had turned out to be a white ketch, twice the size of his quarry. This alarm past, he had sunk back into torpor and, although the appearance of Lonely Lady’s sails, ghosting slowly in the light breeze, coincided with the Farne Islands’ end of his patrol, he nearly ignored her and was in the act of turning away before his sluggish mind took note of the evidence of his eyes. He swung onto a converging course and fumbled in the case of bottles at his feet. He had decided that petrol bombs, on the lines of Molotov cocktails, offered the best and most suitable weaponry, and the cheapest.

  Sergeant Fellowes had been on the go for longer than had Harry Skoll and although he had had some sleep he had also had Sheila Blayne. He was swimming through a sludge of exhaustion to which he was giving way as he neared his journey’s end. He hardly noticed the other boat until, with nightmare shock, he realised that she was coming down purposefully on his port quarter. He reached behind him to start the outboard motor and, as the little engine spluttered into life and kicked Lonely Lady forward, he gybed. Lonely Lady spun on her heel.

  When Skoll looked up, ready to throw, he found his quarry away on his beam. He put his helm over and swung in again, closer this time. His first petrol bomb went through the gap between main- and foresail, trailing a whisper of flame, as Ian gybed again. The lobster boat passed Lonely Lady’s stern and Skoll had time to throw a second bottle which left an arc of burning petrol on the mainsail before narrowly missing the deck and plopping into the sea. Sheila, who had been rapidly learning the way of boats, eased the foresail sheets and they bustled away towards the shore again.

  Sheila had had more sleep than Ian and, being less concerned about such matters as wind changes and dragging anchors, had slept more deeply. Her experiences of the night had also induced in her a state of relaxation. As a result, while Ian responded mechanically to the need for evasive action, Sheila, whose usual reaction would have been to wring her hands and whimper, was both alert and calm enough to think constructively about deterrence and retaliation. She pulled the two-gallon can, still half full of petrol, from under the cockpit seat and loosened the cap.

  Harry Skoll came in again, on the lee side this time to prevent another gybe. Ian saw him approaching but his mind refused to come up with any more answers. He looked back and, unaccountably, yawned.

  That yawn was Harry Skoll’s undoing. His first assault on an unsuspecting quarry might have succeeded. But in the letdown after the earlier alarm his body, like Ian’s, was out of adrenalin. Tiredness was resuming control. In the face of Ian’s cavernous yawn, his own face convulsed in sympathy. His jaw clicked, his ears popped and, more crucially, his watering eyes clamped shut. His response was so total that his aim faltered. The throw would have passed harmlessly above the cockpit an
d below the boom except that Ian, opening his eyes to the near passage of a missile, instinctively put up a hand and caught it, stared for a moment in horror at the inverted bottle and threw it back again. With the strength of desperation, Sheila followed up with the petrol can.

  The two boats were close and parallel and even the wildest throw could hardly have missed by more than a few inches. Harry Skoll, caught between the after-effects of his yawn and the need to duck beneath a bottle which nearly split his head open, failed at first to take in the significance of the can which had landed at his feet, spraying a gout of petrol over his surroundings and himself, and was now gurgling into the bilges. He was on the point of striking his lighter to ignite the rope fuse in another missile when he realised that he was now steering a potential fireball. He got rid of the nearly empty can over the side and circled away. He was furious, outraged. This was dastardly, dangerous, outwith the rules.

  Petrol-bombing might be out but ramming was definitely in. The lobster boat was the larger of the two and of much the heavier construction. They were nearing the shore but there was still time and water enough to sink them and then to kill the two somehow, anyhow. If all else failed, he was ready to rip them to pieces with his teeth and toenails.

  Even in his wrath at the infringement of his copyright, Skoll had more sense than to approach again on Lonely Lady’s lee. Although the petrol on the sail had burnt away and the damp and salty canvas was unwilling to do more than smoulder, sparks were still raining onto the water. But the petrol fire had taken a large bite out of the mainsail which now hung and flapped loosely, spilling the breeze. Lonely Lady was slowing and sluggish. Skoll had time to circle to windward. Then he opened the throttle of his diesel and let his speed build up.