The Sunken Sailor

by Patricia Moyes

  Anne suddenly came out of the galley, and it occurred to Henry that she must have overheard the whole conversation. She looked angry and a little frightened.

  “I’ve never heard such childish rubbish,” she said. “You know very well that none of us could have rowed ashore. We were all much too far off the bank.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Colin. “I was only about thirty yards from the bank at low water, and I’ve got a light nylon line sixty yards long. The one I use for—”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Anne. “I don’t think it’s funny. In fact, I think it’s beastly, and in very bad taste. I wonder where Rosemary and Alastair have got to?”

  Like a stage effect that comes promptly on its cue, there was a bumping sound as a dinghy drew up alongside. Rosemary and Alastair climbed aboard, Emmy came out of the galley, and the conversation became general.

  After an excellent dinner, the crew of Ariadne took to the water again, having arranged a rendezvous with Mary Jane for the following day. As they settled themselves into their green sleeping bags, Emmy said to Henry, “That was a curious conversation yon had with Colin.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Henry. “I don’t like it one little bit.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Emmy. “You mean it’s getting serious.”

  “Too damn serious,” said Henry. “And the worst of it is that I’m not the only person who thinks so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Henry, “that someone has been expecting me. Or at least has considered the possibility of someone like me turning up. And, if I’m not mistaken, a pre-arranged plan of action is coming into operation.”

  Emmy shivered. “You don’t mean...?”

  “I don’t know exactly what I mean,” said Henry. “It’s just something I feel, supported by a few odd facts. Oh, God, why do these things always have to happen to me? I don’t want trouble.”

  “You never do,” said Emmy, “but you always seem to walk into it.” She smiled in the darkness. “Can’t you see, darling, that you go out of your way to look for it?”

  “I don’t. I’m a quiet-living man.”

  “I seem,” said Emmy, “to have heard that somewhere before.”

  She leant over and kissed him, and then snuggled down into her sleeping bag. Lying in the dark, listening to the soft lapping of the water against Ariadne’s hull, Henry reflected bitterly on the policeman’s lot, decided that he would not be able to sleep, and almost at once drifted into a wave-rocked slumber.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, Ariadne and Mary Jane set sail on an ebbing tide, headed for Walton Backwaters.

  “It’s a stupid place to go today,” Rosemary remarked at breakfast. “The tides are all wrong. We’ll be against the ebb going down and against the flood coming home. What’s the matter with going to the Deben?”

  “Anne’s set her heart on Walton,” said Alastair.

  “She would have,” said Rosemary, with more than a touch of asperity.

  The sun shone, fitfully, through a thin tracery of very white clouds, and a light easterly breeze ruffled the blue-gray surface of the river. With the wind abeam, both boats skimmed merrily downstream, with Mary Jane drawing inexorably ahead, until her sail was only a white speck in the distance.

  “I just can’t compete,” said Alastair. “She’s bigger and faster than we are, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Perhaps she’ll go aground,” said Emmy, with amiable malice.

  “Not a hope. Not with a beam wind and Colin at the helm. He knows what he’s doing.”

  By the time they reached the river mouth, the clouds had been swept neatly away onto the horizon. Henry, pulling off his heavy white sweater in the warm sunshine, was not surprised to see Priscilla’s bright, varnished hull throwing up a creamy arrow of spray as she roared out towards them from the Berry Hall boathouse.

  “Sir Simon’s out,” he remarked. “Don’t blame him. Gorgeous day.”

  “He’s got somebody with him,” said Rosemary. “Riddle, probably. They often go fishing together.”

  “Can’t see from here.” Alastair screwed up his eyes into the sun. “Might be anybody.”

  “We’ll see in a moment, when they get closer,” said Rosemary.

  At that moment, however, Priscilla quite suddenly turned to starboard in a tight arc, and headed noisily upriver.

  “Unsociable types,” said Alastair. Henry gazed thoughtfully after Priscilla’s retreating stern. Two blue-jerseyed back views were visible in the cockpit, but they were too far away for identification.

  Ahead of Ariadne, the North Sea stretched dazzlingly to the horizon, the foreground dotted with the dark shapes of the buoys that marked the entrance to the River Berry. In the distance, a low-slung, black oil tanker ploughed solemnly down the coast towards the Thames Estuary, while to starboard the Harwich-Hook steamer made her way out of harbour. The salty breeze was fresh and invigorating. Emmy sat in the cockpit, poring over a chart, and deriving a ridiculous amount of pleasure from identifying the various buoys as they slipped astern in measured, silent procession. At the helm, Alastair puffed at his pipe and kept a wary eye on the sails. Nobody spoke. After half an hour, Alastair said to Henry, “I do hope you’re not bored.”

  “Bored? Good heavens, no.”

  “Good. Some people get bored in fine weather.”

  Emmy looked up from the chart. “Then they must be mad,” she said. “Is that Harwich down there on the right?”

  “No,” said Alastair. “What you can see on the starboard beam—which is I presume what you mean by ‘down there on the right’—is Felixstowe. Harwich is on the opposite side of the river mouth. We’ll see it soon when we turn down the coast.”

  A mile out to sea, Ariadne rounded the last of the cylindrical red buoys, and Alastair freed the sheets and put the helm to port. The big white mainsail, now nearly at right angles to the boom, filled with the following wind, masking the jib, which flapped idly on the forestay. Once again, Henry and Emmy noticed the strange effect of turning down-wind. The boat, riding on an even keel, seemed becalmed: only the rapid retreat of the red buoy astern showed that she was, in fact, making progress.

  “I wish to God we had a spinnaker,” said Alastair. “We’ve got another two and a half hours of ebb to plug.”

  “Told you so,” said Rosemary, sleepily.

  “I don’t care how long we take to get there,” said Emmy. “This is my idea of heaven.” She leant back luxuriously and closed her eyes. Silence reigned once more.

  Slowly, Ariadne forged her way down the coast. The estuary of the River Orwell opened up to starboard, marked by the thin steeple of Harwich church and the distant, angular shapes of the cranes and derricks on Parkstone Quay. At half past twelve, Rosemary roused herself and went below with Emmy to open the bar, while Alastair scanned the water ahead with more than usual concentration.

  From Dovercourt, the coastline swings southward in an arc which terminates in the Naze. As far as Henry could see, Ariadne was now sailing straight into the centre of this bay, and could only end up on the beach. He said as much.

  Alastair smiled. “Don’t worry. The entrance is there, all right, but it’s almost impossible to see it until you’re right on top of it. What I’m looking for now is a small black buoy that marks the centre of the channel.”

  Rosemary and Emmy had just distributed mugs of beer all round when the black buoy bobbed into sight, ahead and to starboard. It was followed by a red buoy, inscribed “Pye Hill,” which lay stranded on a bank of sand to port. From then on, the channel was clearly marked, and Henry could see that a wide-mouthed inlet was opening up ahead of them. In the centre of it were two more buoys, red and black respectively, apparently only a few feet from each other.

  “What are those two doing so close together?” he asked.

  “That’s the entrance,” said Alastair. “We go between them.”

  Emmy surveyed the wide expanse of water a
nd grimaced. “You mean,” she said, “that all that lovely water—”

  “Is less than a foot deep at low tide,” said Rosemary. “The channel widens once you’re inside, but the entrance is murderously narrow. That’s why Walton is so nice and quiet.”

  “It’s easy enough with a following wind,” said Alastair, “but beating in and out can be amusing, to say the least of it.”

  Ariadne slipped smoothly between the entrance buoys, and Alastair said, “Stand by to gybe. Mind your head, Henry. Gybe-oh.”

  The boom came across with very little fuss: Alastair quickly paid out the sheet and put the helm to port. As Ariadne turned her nose obediently to starboard, Henry realized for the first time that there were two separate channels ahead of them, converging just inside the entrance.

  “The port-hand channel goes up to the club and to Walton itself,” Alastair explained. “Not that you can get right up there at low water except in a dinghy. The starboard one, which we’re taking, is called Hamford Water, and it goes nowhere. Just meanders about for a bit and then gets lost. That’s the beauty of it.”

  As they made their way upstream, deeper and deeper into the land-locked channel, green meadows stretched on either side of them, laced with spinneys of feathery trees. Small water birds bustled busily among the rushes at the water’s edge, and called pipingly to each other. The sun shone hotly.

  “There they are,” Rosemary said suddenly, and then, as loudly as she could bellow, “Mary Jane ahoy!” She stood up on deck and waved both her long arms above her head.

  Mary Jane lay quietly at anchor on the port-hand side of the channel. At Rosemary’s call, two supine figures on deck sat up and waved back. Alastair raised his beer mug significantly. This signal was evidently received and understood, for Colin and Anne were in their dinghy even before Rosemary had let go Ariadne’s anchor. The sails were lowered, the mainsail lashed neatly to the boom, and the helm secured amidships. Colin and Anne clambered aboard, and Rosemary brought up a fresh supply of beer.

  “Did you know,” Colin was saying, “that this place is the original of Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water?”

  “Is it really?” Emmy was vastly intrigued. “I was brought up on those books. I adored them.” She looked round her with a new, respectful interest. “Now that I’ve actually been here in a boat, I’ll have to go back and read them all over again.”

  “Kid stuff,” said Anne. She was wearing a swimsuit the colour of a peeled grape, which displayed to full advantage the tanned perfection of her small body. “If you’re interested in sailing, read something useful, like Peter Heaton.” She sat up suddenly. “I’m going for a swim before lunch. Anybody coming?”

  Alastair jumped up. “Wait for me!” he shouted. He plunged down into the cabin, and emerged a minute later in his bathing trunks. As Alastair dived in, Anne sped away downstream, doing a very efficient crawl. Alastair surfaced, shook his wet hair out of his eyes, and set off in hot pursuit.

  Rosemary watched them go without pleasure. Then she said, in a strange, clipped voice, “Well, somebody’s got to get lunch. I suppose I’d better do it, as usual.”

  “Let me help you.” Emmy quickly followed her below.

  In the cockpit, Henry said to Colin, “Aren’t you going in?”

  Colin shook his head. “I don’t swim. Never learnt. No proper sailor can swim. It only prolongs the agony if you’re wrecked.”

  “That sounds a gloomy philosophy,” said Henry.

  Ignoring this, Colin said, meditatively, “Anne’s quite right, you know. You ought to do some technical reading if you’re going to take up sailing at all seriously. Heaton, certainly, and Illingworth and Voss. Not to mention Reid’s Nautical Almanack. They run good navigation courses in London during the winter, too.”

  “My dear fellow,” said Henry, “don’t try to tell me that you need celestial navigation to get a small boat from Berrybridge to Walton.”

  “True,” said Colin, “although it’s well worth learning just for the fun of it. All right, we’ll let you off the navigation courses, but Voss you should read. You never know when you’ll get caught out in a blow and need to rig a sea anchor. Besides, it’s an immensely entertaining book, full of the old boy’s adventures...” His voice trailed into silence, and a sharp, speculative look came into his dark eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you’ll find it very interesting indeed. Then there’s Illingworth’s Offshore: that you mustn’t miss. I can lend it to you in London. And Ashley’s Book of Knots, to keep you happy through the long winter evenings. Can you do a Turk’s Head?”

  “I doubt if I could do a reef,” said Henry humbly. “It’s a long time since I was a Boy Scout.”

  “I get a lot of fun out of knots,” said Colin. He picked up a length of light rope. “Let me demonstrate the clove hitch. One of the most useful knots of all. You make a loop here...”

  Henry watched with interest. He noticed that Colin had not even once glanced downriver at Alastair and Anne. When Henry had mastered the clove hitch and was struggling with the intricacies of the running bowline, Colin suddenly remarked, “Apropos of our conversation last night, I wasn’t joking you know. I’m convinced there was something funny about Pete’s death.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. All sorts of loose ends don’t tie up. I’ve got an idea, too, but it needs some working out.”

  “I wonder,” said Henry, “why it didn’t occur to you sooner that things weren’t as straightforward as they seemed.”

  Colin raised a face full of bland innocence, under which a secret amusement pulsed, rather frighteningly.

  “Oh, but it did,” he said. “It occurred to all of us, except perhaps Alastair, who’s a simple soul.” He permitted himself a brief look in the direction of the swimmers. “Poor Alastair,” he added, “he’s very easily fooled, you know.”

  In the cabin, Rosemary was tossing salad with hot, angry tears in her eyes.

  “Where’s the butter?” Emmy asked.

  “In the...the...” Rosemary’s voice broke, and she turned her head away. “Oh, blast,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Rosemary,” said Emmy, embarrassed, “I know it’s none of my business, but—”

  Rosemary buried her face in an inadequate handkerchief. “I’m so frightened,” she said, in a voice muffled by tears and Irish linen. “So terribly frightened.”

  “What of?”

  “Alastair and I...we’ve been married six years now...we’ve always been so happy...”

  Emmy, who could think of no useful reply to this, tried to say nothing in a sympathetic way.

  Rosemary blew her nose loudly, and then said, shakily but with some violence, “I believe she’s a witch.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Emmy. “Surely—”

  “All of them,” said Rosemary. “Colin and Pete and...and David...and now Alastair. She sends them crazy. It’s uncanny.”

  “Pete?” said Emmy. “I thought Pete jilted her.”

  “Pete was just as badly bitten as the rest of them,” said Rosemary more calmly. “But he was older and more sensible and he saw the red light before it was too late. So he got out. That infuriated her. She’s not used to that sort of treatment. If anybody killed him...” She tossed the salad with unnecessary force. “I’m sorry I made an exhibition of myself. It’s just that with this business of Pete’s death and...and everything...”

  “I know it’s hell,” said Emmy, “but, seriously, don’t worry. Alastair adores you.”

  “I wonder,” said Rosemary. There was a long silence, and then she said, briskly, “The butter’s in the starboard cupboard in a polythene bag.”

  After lunch, Colin announced his intention of going back to Mary Jane and getting his head down.

  Alastair looked shocked. “And waste a perfect afternoon’s sailing?” he demanded indignantly.

  “Certainly,” replied Colin, with some dignity. “I want to think.”

  “You’re very welcome,” said Alastair.
“I personally intend to explore the upper reaches of Hamford Water. Coming, Anne?”

  “No,” said Anne. “I’m going ashore to pick buttercups. Coming, Henry?”

  “I’d love to,” said Henry promptly.

  Emmy and Rosemary exchanged the briefest of glances, and Emmy was annoyed to feel a distinct and sickening pang of something very like jealousy. She shook it off angrily. She said quickly, “Have a lovely time. I’m staying with Rosemary and Alastair.”

  “Rendezvous here at four o’clock,” said Alastair. He seemed none too pleased with the afternoon’s arrangements. “No later. We’ve got a foul tide all the way back to the Berry and the wind’s falling away light. That gives you just an hour.”

  So Colin rowed back to Mary Jane, and Ariadne got smoothly under way again, leaving Henry pulling for the green, reedy shore, with Anne perched like a water sprite on the transom of the dinghy. She had changed out of her wet bathing dress, and was now wearing minuscule shorts of blue denim and a blue and white striped cotton shirt. Her feet were still bare.

  They beached the dinghy on the shingle shore, and set off across the dappled green meadow. For some time they walked in silence. Then Anne said, “I wish you didn’t dislike me so much, Henry.”

  “Dislike you? Why on earth should you think that?” (“But it’s true,” muttered his conscience. “Why?”)

  “You don’t trust me,” Anne went on. “You think I’m wicked... I suppose you think I’m marrying Colin for his money.”

  “It hadn’t even occurred to me,” said Henry untruthfully. “It’s no business of mine.”

  “But I want to tell you,” said Anne. “I like you so much, Henry.”

  “All right,” said Henry. “Go ahead. What do you want to tell me?”

  “Let’s sit down,” said Anne. She dropped onto the sweet-smelling grass and began to pull up long, feather-topped blades one by one. Henry sat beside her and waited. At length she said, “I don’t pretend that I’m wildly in love with Colin. Not as I am—as I was—with...with Pete. That was something quite different. I don’t suppose that’ll ever happen to me again.”