Caroline Minuscule

by Andrew Taylor

  They left the car in the coach house and spent an irritable ten minutes (‘Why didn’t you bring a torch?’) getting Malcolm’s bundle down from the rafters, collecting the shopping and extracting from their luggage anything which wouldn’t be useful on the boat. Dougal realized, but decided not to mention it to Amanda, that what they had packed for a winter weekend in a country hotel might not be altogether appropriate for a few days on the Sally-Anne.

  They would have to make two journeys. Dougal shouldered Malcolm’s bundle and led the way down the path. It was muddy underfoot, and he could hear Amanda swearing softly to herself.

  At the end of the second field, they had to clamber over a stile. Dougal politely went first. As he stood with one leg on each side, he caught his first sight of the graceful outlines of the Sally-Anne, riding at her mooring fifty yards away.

  He was glad they had got there before the light had entirely faded. It looked as if the boat was floating on a sea of grey ink.

  Amanda nudged him. ‘Come on. I’m freezing.’

  18

  Dougal had always identified boats with people, usually females. Punts, for example, reminded him of the squat, black-browed bedmaker who occasionally did his room during his first year at Cambridge. The Sally-Anne, however, suggested a lady in reduced circumstances from the provinces; she was elderly and dowdy, but possessed an in-built individuality; she was quiet, quirky and reliable.

  She was a gaff-cutter of clinker construction, dating from the thirties. White’s of Brightlingsea had built her for the son of the beer baron who owned Havishall Place at that time. When he died ten years ago, the boat was put up for sale and Malcolm abused his credit to buy her.

  Dougal, then sharing lodgings in Cambridge with Malcolm, had absorbed the Sally-Anne’s history, specifications and qualities through constant exposure to them. Sometimes he suspected he knew more about the boat than he knew about Malcolm.

  Malcolm found the Sally-Anne ideal for his purposes. She was twenty-six feet long and held four berths: sturdy enough for the North Sea and small enough for him to handle by himself. Three years ago he had replaced the elderly Stewart-Turner petrol engine with a more reliable Volvo Penta. Dougal knew he would have to use the diesel engine if they left the mooring – he mistrusted his ability to manage the Sally-Anne under sail, particularly if there was any sort of wind blowing. It would also be difficult to make a quick getaway: it had taken half an hour to get up the mainsail alone the last time he had tried without Malcolm’s assistance. He wished to God he’d invested more effort in learning from Malcolm. It might have been very useful to be able to leave the Alben estuary – if Lee turned up with a small army, for example – and sail away up the coast. The Sally-Anne was well equipped with navigational aids, including a Seafix radio direction finder which was Malcolm’s especial pride, but Dougal’s knowledge of the art of navigation was limited to dim memories about the constellations in the night sky.

  These thoughts were chasing through his mind as he and Amanda lifted the Sally-Anne’s dinghy from the blocks of wood on which it lay near the stile, and staggered with it between them towards the bank of the creek.

  The Sally-Anne was moored in the middle of a brief cul-de-sac off the main estuary. She lay with her bows towards them, for the tide was beginning to ebb. Fortunately the water was high enough still for them to turn the dinghy and get it into the water without having first to lug it across the grey and greedy mud of the bed of the creek. Dougal, it was true, managed to get his boots and the bottoms of his trousers soaked with the icy water, but Amanda remained reasonably dry-shod. He clambered in and, holding the boat to the bank, told Amanda what to pass to him. They spoke in whispers, which was strange: the twilight and the emptiness of land and water somehow forced them to lower their voices.

  At the last moment Amanda said she would go back to the car for the rest of their luggage. ‘I’m cold enough as it is, without going out of my way to get colder before it’s absolutely necessary.’

  Dougal let go of the bank and pushed off with one of the oars. Their belongings in the boat left no room for his feet: he was forced to spend a moment reorganizing them, during which one of the carrier bags disgorged the tins it contained. Dougal ignored them; it was less arduous than swearing at them. He was worried about Amanda, a feeling which overlay the deeper worry of what was going to happen with Lee. He tried not to resent the fact that she was obviously uncomfortable here but only succeeded in feeling bewildered.

  He began rowing, using short experimental strokes with pauses between them; rowing was like riding a bicycle – once learned, never forgotten – but it took a little time to get used to the process again. His hands felt raw and blazing – chafed on one side by the oars, and on the other by the breeze which was springing up.

  The Sally-Anne’s bulk loomed up behind him. He paddled round to the stern. The delicate but cumbersome business of transferring himself and their belongings to the cockpit took longer than he had expected (he remembered belatedly that everything does on a boat). By the time he got back to Amanda it was fully dark. He wished they had come in daylight.

  For the next two hours they tried to keep moving. The cold and the damp were in everything, constant goads to activity. It was difficult to disagree with Amanda when she remarked bitterly, ‘Words like freezing and cold have a completely different meaning on a boat.’

  The first thing they did was to raid the oilskin locker, where Malcolm kept a collection of clothing, including sea-boots of various sizes.

  Amanda lit the small, solid-fuel heater in the saloon, using three fire lighters in her haste. Dougal, knowing the electric lights they were using were draining the battery, lit the gimballed oil lamps and drew the blinds down over the portholes. He then pumped out the bilges; the exercise warmed him as the pumped water, running over his hands, chilled him.

  The next necessity was to turn the engine over. Just in case Lee came out of the night like a bogeyman to get them. It wasn’t likely, true, but things had stopped being likely for some time now. He used a blowtorch to warm the cylinder head. He turned on the fuel, lifted the compression switches and cranked the engine violently. With a silent prayer, he pushed down the compression and, miraculously, the engine mumbled into life.

  Amanda, meanwhile, had been unpacking and boiling water.

  ‘If you’ve finished playing, there’s some tea here. Where’s the loo?’

  ‘The heads,’ Dougal began, some pedagogic instinct surfacing even now, only to be rapidly suppressed, ‘I mean it’s opposite the oilskin locker. Just before you get to the berths in the bows.’

  The tea improved everything. They had two mugs each, destroying its flavour with sugar and brandy. The heating was beginning to take effect, and the soft yellow radiance of the oil lamps added to the illusion of warmth. By tacit agreement, they ignored the things they should have been doing – making a meal and deciding how to kill Lee, for example – and were exaggeratedly gentle with one another. They were sitting on either side of the collapsible table in the saloon, halfway through the second mug, when Amanda suddenly suggested playing cards.

  The absurdity of the idea appealed to them both. Dougal found a greasy pack – his oily hands soon made them greasier – and they played a couple of hands of picquet, choosing the game because it seemed more out of place than any other.

  When Amanda started dropping her cards and Dougal knocked over his brandy, they decided to go to bed, despite the fact it was only eight o’clock. One berth held a large American down sleeping bag. They pulled off their boots and struggled into it together, fully clothed. Dougal had to extract himself to turn off the oil lamps.

  Cramped in the single berth, they cuddled together for warmth. He could feel the stubble on his chin tangling with the dark, sweet-smelling mass of Amanda’s hair. As they drifted through the no-man’s-land between waking and sleeping, they made love in a gentle, detached way. As if, Dougal thought sleepily, they were absentmindedly pandering to a whim on t
he part of their bodies.

  With the ghost light which preceded the dawn came fear. It nibbled its way into Dougal’s mind. At first it was merely a sense of something wrong, a malaise which had nothing to do with physical discomfort. Each time he awoke, a detail of it became clearer, as if a pencil in his mind was joining up the dots which marked the outline of the picture. It hardened into a savage headache.

  Today was the day they had to try to kill Lee.

  Today, it occurred to him, was the first day in his life that he knew might not be followed by tomorrow. Panic hovered over him: I don’t want to die, he screamed in the silence of his thoughts, I’m too young, there are so many things I want to do. It’s unfair, all these things left undone. The word, undone, had an echo of memory attached, and he suddenly remembered the service at Charleston Parva on Sunday morning: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us . . . The words seemed appropriate – not that he was in tune with the sentiments of the general confession as a whole (quite the reverse), but because they expressed the feeling that he was stupid to have got himself in such a position as this; it was unhealthy to be in this particular here and now . . . Malcolm would have shaken his head over the business and delivered his most severe verdict: ‘Uncool, William, it’s just uncool.’

  He had to stop this; the best way was to get up and do something. It was fully light, now. He could make out the condensation which had collected overnight on the glass of the portholes. The saloon must be full of stale air, but his nostrils were still blocked from sleeping.

  He levered himself out of the sleeping bag. Amanda groaned and spread herself more comfortably. His socks, thick though they were, were no protection against the cold which crept up from the deck to the soles of his feet. The act of standing up made his headache worse: it savaged the middle of his forehead at the spot traditionally reserved for the third eye. His tongue felt twice its normal size and rasped against the roof of his mouth. It must have been the brandy, he thought. Always a mistake to buy cheap stuff. Rémy Martin wouldn’t have had this effect.

  He edged round the table to the tiny galley in the corner by the companionway up to the cockpit. There was enough water in the kettle, but he had to try four matches before finding one which was sufficiently free from damp to light. The little stove beside the galley was still alight; he rested his hands gratefully close to its warm top.

  A tin which had once held Oxo Cubes contained Malcolm’s supply of medicines. There were paracetamol among them; Dougal took three and followed up this shock to his system by brushing his teeth as gently as he could. While waiting for the water to boil, he fed a few lumps of coke into the heater, noticing with distaste that his fingers were grubby and his nails were rimmed with black. He considered washing, but decided he couldn’t face it yet. In any case the water had boiled, and coffee was infinitely more important.

  After a few mouthfuls of coffee, his outlook on life improved. He felt relatively clearheaded and considerably less fragile than he had half an hour before.

  Twenty minutes later, just after 8:30, he took the dinghy ashore to telephone Lee. The morning was cold and overcast, but seemed unexpectedly spacious after the saloon of the Sally-Anne. He walked up to the stable block, his feet crunching on the frosty grass. Nothing was stirring. The desolate, smoke-blackened facade of Havishall Place heightened the sense of isolation; it was a landscape that was fundamentally indifferent to humans – it couldn’t even be bothered to be hostile to them.

  The car, an emissary from another civilization, took him in efficiently padded comfort to Albenham, two miles up the road. He found a telephone box outside the post office. It seemed to be a local forum of debate. IPSWICH RULES had been scrawled in heavy-duty black felt-tip over the glass protecting the list of local exchanges. IPSHIT ARE WANKERS had been scratched on the grey metal above the coin slots.

  Dougal dialled Lee’s number. It was answered at the second ring. He fed in a coin and the pips gave way to silence.

  ‘Mr Lee? Massey here.’

  ‘Good. Where do we meet?’ Lee sounded brusque, almost surly, as if he too had had a bad night but, unlike Dougal, had not been up long enough for its effects to have receded.

  Dougal gave him detailed instructions about how to reach the boat, advising him to leave his car in the stables. ‘When you reach the mooring, I’ll row you over to the boat.’

  ‘No.’ Lee’s voice was unemphatic but final. ‘There’s no need for that. I’ll come to the river bank and we’ll make the exchange there. I’ll be there at three.’

  There was a click as the line went dead. Dougal was left clutching the phone and feeling foolish. More than foolish – scared. He went back to the car and sat watching his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel.

  Any planning they had done had rested on the assumption that Lee would come to the boat itself, which would ensure, at one stroke, a degree of privacy, Lee in an unfamiliar element and both Dougal and Amanda being physically close to him.

  On land they would lose these advantages. Lee would be wary if they were both on the bank; he would be armed, and would probably insist they kept their distance. The usefulness of their weapons depended on being close to him. There would now be no chance of catching him with both arms occupied. It would have been so easy to hit him as he levered himself in or out of the Sally-Anne.

  The only consolation was that Lee had implied he was coming alone – he had said I, not we. Dougal shied away from the possibility that he would not be alone. They had to rely on Lee believing them to be even more insignificant than in fact they were.

  For a moment he toyed with the idea of backing out. They could take the car and vanish – the world was large enough, surely? The trouble was, nowhere was large enough to get away from the idea of Lee: they would carry his avenging image in their minds always; it would be a life on guard against the potential threat of every unexplained shadow.

  There was still time, of course, to drive to Cambridge, collect the diamonds and fulfill their side of the bargain. Dougal seriously considered this idea before rejecting it. In this case, there was no honour among thieves. He knew, with a cold, hard certainty, that Lee had no intention of honouring his side of the deal. Why should he? Why should he waste his money on people he not only hated for tricking him, but also despised? Everything they knew about the Irishman, from Hanbury onwards, argued that he had as little respect for the rights of other people as a hungry bedbug. Or a man-eating tiger. If they gave him the diamonds, he would laugh in their faces; the only thing he was likely to give them was a bullet.

  Another point: if Lee did get them under his control at Havishall, their one chance of staying alive would be if they didn’t have the diamonds. Not much of a chance, admittedly, but he would hardly kill them if that destroyed his access to Vernon-Jones’s legacy.

  Dougal lit a cigarette and sucked on it with mindless fervour. He felt feverish, as if he existed in a wholly private universe of febrile conjecture. Out of which, somehow, he had to make a decision. If he was thinking rationally, and he had to pretend he was, there was only one solution, the same one as before. Lee had to be killed. They would have to rethink their methodology, that was all. There was no alternative.

  When he got back to the Sally-Anne, Amanda was cutting the rind from rashers of bacon with one of the knives from Ipswich. Dougal told her what Lee had said.

  ‘Well we’ll just have to do something else, won’t we?’ she said in a tone of voice which decided Dougal not to tell her of the pros and cons which had been swirling through his head like the particles of a sandstorm. Sometimes the directness of her responses, the way she cut effortlessly through to what, for her, were the essentials of a decision, made him feel like a prehistoric animal – a survivor from an era when choices took more time to evolve.

  ‘The best place to do something,’ said Dougal hesitantly, ‘would be the stables. Lee’s bound
to go there either when he arrives or when he finds we’re not down here at the mooring. He’ll be looking for the car.’

  ‘Okay, we’ll fix up an ambush there,’ said Amanda, as if she was deciding that, since the butcher hadn’t any joints of beef left, they would make do with a leg of pork. ‘Come on. We’ve not got all day.’

  No, they hadn’t, thought Dougal. It was the rest of their lives he was worried about.

  19

  The Lancia was too distant, and moving too swiftly, to be much more than an element in a rapidly changing pattern of black and shades of grey. It had just reached the junction of the road from Ipswich with the road from Albenham. Staring through Malcolm’s powerful Zeiss field glasses, while sweeping them in a slow arc to keep the car in view, was like looking into a kaleidoscope from which all the colour had been drained. The stunted trees and neglected hedges which lined the lane from the junction to the entrance of the drive of Havishall Place made it impossible to get a clear view of the vehicle – let alone to see how many people were in it. The branches and twigs which blocked the view formed a chaotic winter tracery. Behind it lay the strip of tarmac along which the Lancia moved with jerky spurts of speed, implying an aggressive driver on a narrow, unknown road.

  Lee.

  It was two thirty-six.

  He was early, perhaps trying to catch them off-balance. In a way, Dougal was glad. He had already been here for nearly half an hour, perched uncomfortably on what had once been a window seat in a bay window on the first floor of Havishall Place. The house was built on a low knoll which, by virtue of the flatness of the surrounding land, was the best vantage point for miles. At the back, you could see down to the estuary, even from the terrace. Here at the front, if you climbed to the level of the first floor, it was possible to command the approach roads. And Lee – fortunately enough – was the kind of man whom it was impossible to imagine divorced from his car.