‘Yes. He’s on the front now in his landrover taking a look.’
‘I’ll meet you there—at the end of Beach Road.’
‘Right you are.’
Macready poked his head round the dining-room door. ‘I’m away to the boathouse. Looks as if our hoaxer’s on the loose again.’
‘He means you having a busy weekend, Mr Macready,’ Howard said.
‘Aye, it looks like it,’ Macready replied shortly.
Julie was on her feet, ‘Oh Dad …’ The worried look on her face caught at the big man’s heart.
Softly he added, ‘Don’t wait up, hen. ’Night.’
He turned away and left them together.
Macready reversed his car into the parking-spaces marked in white paint on the left-hand side of the wide Beach Road leading from the fountain to the sands. The road had been extended eastwards beyond the actual promenade, or sea wall, as the build-up of sand pushed the sea farther and farther out. Only in winter did the high spring tides occasionally reach the roadway.
Jack Hansard, binoculars to his eyes, and Bill Luthwaite were already at the end of the tarmacked surface staring out to sea.
‘Anything?’ Macready asked as he joined them.
‘Only the oil-rig lights to the northeast and an odd trawler or two, and the ships moving towards St Botolphs. Here, take a look.’
Macready put the glasses to his eyes and focused them. It was barely dusk yet already the lights were winking out at sea, bright specks on the darkening water.
‘Of course we can’t see round Dolan’s Point from here,’ Jack murmured. ‘ I’d better go down there, I think.’
Macready lowered the glasses thoughtfully. ‘ I really don’t know what to say. Let’s go back to the boathouse and I’ll have another word with the police before you go down there. Jack.’
The three men walked back up the road and turned left towards the boathouse.
Macready dialled the number of the local police station ‘Anything else on that report of a red flare?’ Macready asked the sergeant on duty.
‘Ah yes, Mac. We’ve been trying to get hold of one of you. About five minutes ago another call came in. A girl’s voice this time. Said she’d seen a funny light shoot into the sky over the sea.’
‘Did she give her name?’
‘No. I asked her where she was, when she had seen it and so on. She replied near the marshes, but when I got to asking her name, she rang off.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Of course it could be a hoaxer with an accomplice, but you know we do get a lot of people—specially during the holiday season—who report things but don’t want to leave their name. They’re frightened of getting involved.’
‘Aye.’
He turned away from the phone as the conversation ended and looked towards his two friends and colleagues. Then he related the fresh piece of information to them and ended by asking, ‘Well, what do you reckon now?’
‘It complicates it further now there’s been another phone call. And we’ve no proof it’s a hoax—not even this morning’s report.’
‘Well, we couldna find anything this morning, and we were able to have a good look round the area before we went after those wee laddies. Maybe we should take another look though.’
‘I’m not happy about it, but yes, we’ll launch,’ Bill Luthwaite agreed.
Pete Donaldson was in the bath, soaping his back vigorously with the loofah and singing loudly, the volume intended to make up for the deficiency in the tuneful quality of his voice, when Angie in her nightie, and negligee opened the door. ‘Pete … Whew, must you have it so hot, it’s like a sauna in here.’
‘You’ve just come right, slave. I need my back scrubbed.’
‘I’m not here for games …’
‘How can you say that, wench, dressed like that!’ He gave her a wicked look out the corner of his eyes.
‘Mr Macready’s just rung—there’s a service …’
The bath water sloshed from end to end like a tidal wave as Pete shot upright and almost jumped straight out of the bath. The water cascaded from his lean body, soaking the pink carpet. He snatched a towel from the rail and began rubbing himself quickly. ‘Angie love, fetch us me clothes. Two pairs of socks and an extra sweater,’ he shouted after her. ‘ Why do I have the bath so hot. I’ll be frozen out there now,’ he muttered crossly to himself.
Angie was back with his sweat-shirt and his navy sweater and holding out a new, thick Aran sweater he hadn’t seen before.
‘Hey, what’s this?’
‘I knitted it for your birthday next month, but I think you’d better have it now.’
‘Aw, sweetheart. That’s lovely.’ Pete pulled it over his head and thrust his arms into the sleeves. ‘It’s great. Angie.’ He patted the thick Aran sweater on his chest. ‘Smashin’. Thanks, love.’
He gave her a peck on the cheek, put his hands on her waist and spun her round so that she ended up in the bathroom and he on his way out the door. ‘I’ll thank you properly later.’
‘Promises, promises,’ she shouted after him, but she was smiling as she picked up the wet towel from the floor and let the water out of the bath. She leant against the side of the bath for a moment watching the water gurgle and swirl. Her smile faded as she whispered her usual little prayer and remembered the coxswain’s words on the phone.
‘We’re a bit afraid it’s a hoax, Angela. We reckon that first call we had this morning was one. It could be him again …’
Who, thought Angie, angrily, in their right mind would play such a mean trick. Every time the lifeboat was launched it cost a lot of money—all out of the funds donated. And the crew and launchers and boathouse personnel—all except the coxswain—were unpaid volunteers. True, the actual crew members received a small launch fee but it by no means constituted any kind of wage.
And did the hoaxer realise he could be actually putting people’s lives at risk? Not only the lifeboat crew, but the lives of others who may be in real need when the lifeboat was out hunting a phantom of some sick person’s twisted imagination.
Angie sighed. Not that anything she could say would alter her Pete. Like all the rest of the lifeboat crew, it wouldn’t even cross his mind not to answer a call—hoax or not!
Deep down she was proud of that fact. But just let her get her hands on that hoaxer and she’d tell him a thing or two!
As the twin beams of the tractor’s headlamps probed the eerie shadows of the beach in the deepening dusk, in a shelter on the promenade two figures clutched each other, hands to mouths to stifle their giggles as they watched the procession across the sands towards the sea.
The coastguard’s landrover arrived at the end of Beach Road and the two youngsters drew further back into the darkness.
‘Come on, Mel, let’s see if we can nick any more flares. We’ll keep ’em out there all night!’
Like wraiths they slipped away from the shelter and strolled along the promenade—two seemingly innocent holidaymakers out for an evening stroll.
Chapter Eight
Karl Schlick, Captain of the West German coaster, the Hroswitha, hauled himself up the gangway and stepped on to the deck of his ship, wincing as he did so. It was there again, the gnawing pain in his stomach that refused to go away entirely.
He was a big man, with a craggy face which creased into a dozen wrinkles when he smiled. His blond hair was thinning a little now, but his shoulders were as broad, his arms as strong, as they had ever been.
Ill? He scoffed at the idea. Karl Schlick ill? Never! Whenever the pain threatened to become unbearable, he swallowed a mouthful or two of rum. Deliberately he ignored the fact that he might have something really wrong with him for the first time in his life. Just a little indigestion after years of indeterminate culinary expertise by numerous ship’s cooks, he told himself.
He gave his deck cargo of packaged timber a cursory glance. It was lashed with wire, covered with tarpaulins and roped. One of the Turkish deckhands was ty
ing off the last rope. He looked up and grinned at his Captain, showing uneven yellow teeth.
‘Iss tight, Cap’n.’ Expressively the thin, black-haired deckhand slung out his arm to encompass the packages of timber neatly stacked on the deck.
Schlick nodded. ‘ It had better be,’ he growled in German. The deckhand smiled and nodded and almost bowed at the big man. The Turk could not understand a word of German.
Captain Schlick headed for the bridge.
An hour later, at high water on the Saturday evening, the Hroswitha, eighty-six metres long, dead weight 2400 tonnes and with a crew of First Mate, engineer, cook and three Turkish deckhands, nosed its way out of Gothenburg harbour bound for the Port of St Botolphs on the East coast of England.
Schlick opened the bottle of rum he kept in a locker on the bridge and took a mouthful, savouring the taste. It promised to be an easy trip with nothing much to aggravate his stomach pains.
As the ship reached the open sea and the pain was dulled by the spirit, Captain Schlick handed the helm over to the First Mate, Heinrich Droysen.
Whistling through his teeth the tune at present top of the West German hit parade, the Captain watched Droysen’s handling of the ship. This was his first trip as Mate and the first time too with Schlick.
‘She takes a bit of getting used to,’ Schlick grinned as he watched Droysen’s slim hands wrestling with the wheel. Droysen glanced at the Captain, a worried frown on his face.
‘It’s her fifteen-second roll that does it,’ Schlick explained.
When most ships the size of the Hroswitha averaged a thirty-second roll, a vessel with one of half that time took some getting used to for someone newly aboard. Relief showed on the First Mate’s face. ‘Ah, that explains it. I was beginning to think she didn’t like me!’
Schlick’s hearty laugh rang out and then he turned to lock away the bottle of rum. With a bit of luck he wouldn’t be needing too much of that for medicinal purposes on this trip.
The Mary Martha Clamp was a thirty-seven-foot Oakley Class Lifeboat powered by twin 52-horse-power, diesel engines and was sixteen years old. It had been provided at a cost of something over £40,000 by a legacy of Miss Mary Martha Clamp, who, during the three decades from the 1920s to the late forties, had been a leading figure in the Saltershaven community. A wealthy spinster, thin, wiry and energetic, with no family, she had found her vocation in the love of her town and the people of Saltershaven had benefited in diverse ways. During the First World War she had been one of the youngest VAD nurses to go to the Front, and, undaunted, in the Second World War she had driven an ambulance in the coastal area around Saltershaven.
It had been on duty as an ambulance driver that she had first come into direct contact with the lifeboat service. The lifeboat, with Mary Macready’s father, Bob Randall, as coxswain, was called out two or three times a week throughout the war years to search for the crews of both allied and German aircraft which had either crashed or ditched within the area of the North Sea patrolled by the Saltershaven lifeboat.
Miss Mary Martha Clamp soon became deeply involved. As soon as word came that the lifeboat had gone on a rescue mission, she could be found sitting at the end of Beach Road, hour after hour, often right through nights of total blackout, huddled in the cab of her ambulance. Often the search was fruitless, the weary crew beached, cold and saddened by the fact that they had not been able to save the crews of the aircraft. Some died of terrible mutilation as the plane crashed. Some drowned and others just died from the dreadful cold of the North Sea. But there were many occasions when the lifeboat succeeded and Miss Mary Martha Clamp would be waiting to take the survivors straight to the nearest R.A.F hospital.
In 1950 Mary Martha found she had leukaemia and had only a year or two to live. It was indicative of this amazing woman’s fortitude that her immediate action was to make a will leaving her entire estate of some £47,000 to the R.N.L.I with instructions that a brand-new and most up-to-date lifeboat should be provided for the Saltershaven station.
Now the self-righting Oakley had all the modern aids—a mediumand high-frequency radio/telephone, a radar scanner, a searchlight, and a day and night signalling lamp plus all the other necessary first-aid and rescue equipment. She was soundly constructed with an oak and teak frame and a hull of mahogany with an alloy top. She was manoeuvrable, easy to handle and steady and Macready had a deep affection for the boat he now ‘mastered’. After the war, he had met Miss Clamp but by then she was tired and ill and merely a shadow of her spirited real self. But Macready remembered her and never failed to be thankful for the little woman’s generosity that had given Saltershaven such a fine lifeboat.
As he climbed aboard the lifeboat at the water’s edge in the gathering dusk, he shouted down to his head launcher, ‘ Don’t wait about, Jeff, we could be all night. Let the lads go home and we’ll put a call out for recovery when we’re coming in.’
‘Okay, Mac’
Jack Hansard watched the launch from his landrover and as soon as he could see that the boat was safely away from the shallows he called up the Mary Martha Clamp.
‘Saltershaven lifeboat, Saltershaven lifeboat, this is Saltershaven mobile, Saltershaven mobile. Do you read me? Over.’
Pete Donaldson’s voice over the radio/telephone pierced the stillness of the night. ‘Saltershaven mobile, Saltershaven mobile, this is Saltershaven lifeboat, Saltershaven lifeboat. Loud and clear. Go ahead. Over.’
‘… I am now leaving the seafront to go to Dolan’s Point to keep a look out from there. Over.’
‘… Roger, Saltershaven mobile. Out.’
Whilst Pete reported to Breymouth coastguard the details of the service and the conditions at sea, and requested radio and time checks, Macready headed the lifeboat directly eastwards for a distance of about a mile and a half until it was clear of the sandbank known as the Saltershaven Middle and then he set a southerly course until he came level with the Lynn Well Lanby, the marker buoy all shipping bound for St Botolphs made for. Then he turned starboard on a southwesterly course to bring them to the huge sandbank. Long Sand, on the western shores of the Wash.
For the second time that day, Jack Hansard’s landrover sped along the narrow coast road towards Dolan’s Point. On his right lay the flat farmlands of Lincolnshire. On his left lay the undulating sand-dunes now given over to a Nature Reserve and beyond that the sea. He met no other vehicle for the road led only to the Point and the Nature Reserve and thence to the marshes. Though the road was quite busy during the days of summer, at night the area was deserted.
The wind whistled across the saltmarshes as Jack Hansard parked his landrover and hunched his collar around his ears and began his search on foot. Away from his landrover he could not keep in touch with the lifeboat and his search was the loneliest.
Aboard the Mary Martha Clamp the crew prepared themselves for an all-night vigil. At Macready’s request Tony Douglas, the signalman, fired a white flare every fifteen minutes. This illuminated the area of the sea all around the lifeboat and the crew scanned the surface of the water for the few seconds that the flare lit up the sea. Then they waited and watched for an answering red flare, but nothing was to be seen.
Macready kept glancing at the echo sounder as he guided the lifeboat through the Freeman Channel and turned northeastwards into the St Botolphs Deeps.
The last thing they needed at a busy August Bank Holiday weekend, he was thinking, was a hoaxer on the loose.
‘Oy, Mel. Will yer look at this bloody great posh car an’ boat parked on this driveway?’
At that moment the front door of the house opened and voices drifted into the night air.
‘Eh, watch out, Vin,’ Mel hissed. ‘There’s someone coming.’
The two youngsters ducked down behind the wall and waited, listening.
‘Well, just how far is it to the nightclub?’
‘Not far. Half a mile,’ a girl’s voice answered.
‘Half a mile! Good Lord, and you expect me to wal
k!’
‘Oh Howard, it’s not far. Besides, you’ll never find a parking-space.’
‘Don’t tell me this place we’re going to doesn’t even have a car park!’
‘Of course it has a car park, but at this time of the year the town is packed.’
‘Oh well, come on. I suppose we’ll have to walk.’ His laughter drifted through the night air. ‘At least you might let me put my arm round you if we walk there.’
They moved on up the road together, the girl’s high-heeled sandals tapping along the pavement.
‘Come on—they’ve gone. Right toff, ain’t he?’ Vin mimicked Howard’s refined tones. ‘I say, don’t tell me this here place h’ain’t even got hay car park! Stuck-up git!’ He made a rude gesture into the darkness after the couple, though they could no longer be seen. ‘Come on, Mel, let’s’ see if Little Lord Fauntleroy has any flares hidden in this posh boat of his. Keep a look out, will you?’
Nimbly, Vin vaulted on to the trailer and over the side of the Nerissa and scrabbled in the lockers in the bows of the boat. ‘ I’m beginning to know where to look in these ’ere boats now, Mel. Ah, here we are, all neatly stacked away, all ship-shape.’ Triumphantly the boy jumped down from the boat. ‘Look what I’ve got, Mel, more pretty lights! Won’t his nibs get a shock next time ’ee goes sailing and wants rescuin’? There’ll be no bloody flares!’
They leant against each other laughing, then the boy stuffed the flares into the front of his leather jacket and zipped it up. ‘Come on, let’s get the scooter and go back to the marsh.’
Jack Hansard blew into his hands. It might be August and a Bank Holiday too—but at one o’clock in the morning out here on the marshes it was still damned cold!
He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his great-coat and turned to go back to his landrover parked near the bridge over the River Dolan about half a mile inland from where the river ran into the sea. As he approached the vehicle he heard the steady high-pitched noise of a scooter coming along the narrow road towards the bridge that led to Dolan’s Sands and Haven Flats. The engine noise slowed as the scooter negotiated the bridge and the sharp left hand turn in the road immediately after it.
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