Medusa

by Hammond Innes

  ‘You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.’

  ‘Mebbe. But then this Navy fellow came looking for you, and the odd thing is that when he was a kid he was sent to stay with the Evanses. I’d see the two of you out swimming together, larking about, all over the place you were until you broke into a cabin cruiser, downed some drink and got pissed as farts. It was the other one fell into the ‘oggin, I remember, and Billie had to go after ‘im with the pilot boat, the tide fair sluicing and the poor little bugger carried right out towards the shingle banks.’

  Evans said something about it being time they were in bed and the sound of their voices faded as the two of them went out into the night. Shortly afterwards the outboard started up, the sound of it gradually dying away as Carp called down to me that I could come out now. He was grinning. ‘Couldn’t get away fast enough, could he? I reck’n it was him all right.’

  ‘The boy you knew as a kid?’ He nodded, and I said, ‘I thought you said he had red hair.’

  ‘That’s right. Real Tishan. But you can dye it, can’t you? Dye it black and it alters the whole look of a man. And that funny moustache. That’s why I couldn’t be sure, not at first. But the way he said it was ‘is bedtime … You know there was a moment when I thort he was going to call up his mate and have a go at searching that engine compartment without permission. That’s why I started telling him about Felixstowe Ferry. Pat Evans. That was the boy’s name. Same name, you see. And both of them sent off to Ganges. It was the nearest place, outside of the Borstal over by Hollesley, to instil some discipline into the young rascals.’

  He rubbed his hands on his denims. ‘Quite a dag up on deck, real wet, like a mist had come down. Care for some coffee?’ And before I could reply, he went on, ‘Had the nerve to ask me if we’d got any liquor on board. He’d run out, he said. What he was after, of course, was to start a drinking session, so as he’d get my tongue loosened up and mebbe learn something I wouldn’t have told him otherwise. I said we needed what little we’d got on board for the voyage over.’ He shook his head, rubbing his hands over the greying bristles of his chin. ‘Don’t ever change their spots, do they? Well, wot about you? Shall I brew some coffee?’

  He didn’t feel like turning in and nor did I. We’d lost a precious half hour’s sleep and already it was 01.37. ‘Coffee and a small glass of something warming,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll get under way.’

  ‘Didn’t like my reminding him he’d been at Felixstowe Ferry when he was a kid, did he?’ He grinned as he turned away towards the galley at the after end of the port hull. ‘It’ll be instant, I’m afraid.’ I heard the clink of metal, the sound of water running, then the plop of the butane burner igniting. ‘Funny about that hair of his,’ he called out. ‘Makes you wonder what goes on in a man’s mind, don’t it?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, how long’s he had it dyed, that’s what I mean. Can’t be just to conceal his identity, otherwise he’d’ve changed his name, wouldn’t he? You see, we didn’t reck’n they were married – Tim Evans and Red Moira. She was just a living-in girlfriend on a houseboat, that was our reck’ning. Partic’ly as she was pretty free with her favours. Well, not free if you know wot I mean. She charged – when she felt like it, or when she was short of cash.’

  The kettle began whistling, and when he returned with the coffee, he said, ‘They claimed they was married. Mr and Mrs Evans.’ He laughed. ‘But if they wasn’t, then that makes son Patrick a bastard. Reck’n that’s why he dyed his hair – not wanting to be tarred with his mother’s red brush?’ He was opening a locker beside the table. ‘Soberano or a real genuine malt that Lennie scrounged from one of the yacht skippers at the Maritimo.’

  He pulled out the bottle and poured two stubby glasses full of the golden liquor. It was Macallan twelve-year-old, a mellow dream after the sweeter, more fiery taste of Spanish brandy. ‘Little better than a whore,’ he went on. ‘And a tongue on her that could lash an East Coast barge skipper into silence. An’ she used it, too, whenever she was drunk, which was pretty often. No wonder the poor devil committed suicide. To be shacked up with a whore who’s been sleeping around with other men is one thing, but a red-headed Irish bitch with a tongue as coarse as a barge-load of grit …’ He shrugged. ‘Ah well, he’s dead now, so who cares?’

  Knowing the area, even the little mud creek back of the Ferryboat Inn with the dyke-top path running north to join the Deben riverbank, remembering the old houseboats I had seen there that cold, bleak spring day, their slimy bottoms sunk deep in the tide-exposed mud, I could picture what it must have been like for a boy to grow up in a home and a family atmosphere like that. And the father committing suicide. ‘How did he do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Drowned ‘isself,’ Carp answered. ‘Wot else? It’s easy enough to do at the Ferry with the shingle beach dropping almost sheer and a sluicing ebb tide that runs over five knots at springs. He was missing two days before anybody took Moira’s whimpers seriously. He’d done it before, gone off on ‘is own without her knowing where. Very unpredictable man. Once he slept out at Minsmere in the woods there two whole days. Bird-watching at the Reserve there is wot he said, but we all reck’ned it was because he’d ‘ad enough of it. They found ‘is body out by the Haven buoy … That’s right, the same buoy that young lieutenant was found clinging to. It was a yacht outward bound for Dutchland wot found ‘im. Helluva way to start a cruise, fishing a body out of the water that’s been dead – well, it must have been close on a week by then.’

  A horn blared from the direction of the quay and I poked my head out of the saloon door, thinking perhaps Soo had come back for some reason. There was a car parked there, its headlights at high beam and directed straight at the Santa Maria. The wheelhouse light came on and a moment later the dinghy slid away from her side, the outboard sounding as harsh as a chainsaw in the stillness.

  We watched from the doorway as the dinghy swung alongside the quay where the driver was waiting to receive the box or large carton that was handed up to him. The car drove off and the dinghy returned to the Santa Maria. The lights went out, everything still again, only the wind moaning in the trees and undergrowth of the protecting peninsula to the east of us.

  ‘Some more coffee?’ Luis had emerged and was holding the pot up in invitation. We had it with the rest of our Macallan at the chart table, checking the position at which we would finally turn on to our course for Malta. It was a straight run on a course of 155° that passed some thirty miles south of Sardinia. ‘Six hundred miles,’ Carp said. ‘We should make it without motoring in a little over three days.’

  ‘If the wind holds,’ I said. ‘Which it seldom does.’

  It took us only a few minutes to get ready for sea, then we hoisted the main, holding the cat head-to-wind and pulling the anchor warp in by hand until it was up and down. I didn’t start the engines, not even one of them, sailing the anchor out and hauling in on the main sheet until, with the wind abeam, we were headed to pass east of the island that lay across the inlet’s narrows like a cork in a bottle and separated Macaret harbour from the upper reaches of the inlet, which was Port d’Addaia. We passed within less than a cable’s length of the Santa Maria, slipping through the water quite silently, only a slight chuckle at the bows. Nobody stirred, no lights came on, and in a moment the bulk of the island hid her from view.

  Carp and Luis hoisted the jib, and as we hardened in on the sheet, Thunderflash picked up her skirts and began to move. Off Macaret itself we began to feel the weight of the wind, the speed indicator moving towards seven knots. There was movement, too, as we got the wind coming in through the entrance. ‘Everything stowed?’ I asked Luis, and when he nodded I told him to go below and check again. ‘It will be rough when we come out of the lee of Illa Gran.’

  Carp suddenly hailed me from for’ard. ‘There’s a boat coming in.’

  ‘Where?’

  But he was already pointing, his arm indicating a position straight over the bows.
By then the speed indicator was flickering on ten and a second later I saw it, a dark shape, with no lights. It was only the white of her bow wave that had enabled Carp to pick it out. ‘Bloody fool!’ he said as he landed on the teak grid beside my swivel chair.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him. ‘Coastal patrol?’

  ‘Don’t reck’n so. Bugger’s coming in without a single light showing. Could be Navy. An exercise. Otherwise …’

  I was thinking of the Santa Maria, lying at the head of the inlet, and the car that had met Evans on the quay. I was certain it was Evans who had taken that box or case ashore. ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said. Already we could hear the thump of her diesel, and at that moment she was picked out for an instant by the headlights of a car on a bend ashore. There were barely a dozen metres between us as she went thundering past, and caught like that in the sweep of the car’s lights, the dark silhouette of three men showed in the wheelhouse. She was a motor yacht of the fifties vintage or even earlier. ‘Saving her batteries,’ Carp said. ‘Either that or she’s bringing in a nice little present for somebody on the quiet.’

  I didn’t say anything, certain now that this clandestine arrival had something to do with the presence of the Santa Maria in the inner anchorage. But I had no time to dwell on that, for almost immediately we opened up the gap between the promontory of Macar Real and Illa Gran, the starb’d hull beginning to lift as the wind, funnelling through the gap, hit us. I had my work cut out then to keep her on course for the entrance.

  A few minutes more and we were out into the open, the sea short and very steep with a lot of white water. I was steering 040°, the speed risen to almost eighteen knots, and every wave that broke sent the spray flying, droplets of water that were hard as shotgun pellets driven against my face by an apparent windspeed that must have been well over forty knots. I called to Carp to get his oilskins on and take the helm while I went below to get a fix on the Faváritx light.

  It took us only twenty minutes or so to run our distance off Menorca, the bows smashing through the waves, spray bursting almost as high as the radar scanner at the cross-trees and the twin hulls slamming their way through the water at a speed that made it seem hard as concrete, the shocks of impact jarring every bone in our bodies. At 02.27 we went about on to the port tack, setting course for Malta, and with the wind tending to back in the gusts, the motion was easier, though we were still close-hauled. We changed down to the number two jib, took a couple of rolls in the main and went into two-hour watches.

  From my bunk I had periodic glimpses of the moon through the perspex hatch and when dawn broke I went up into the saloon on the chance of getting a last sight of Menorca and so fix our position. But there was no sign of any land, the catamaran now on a broad reach, driving fast and comfortably across a wilderness of broken water.

  It was a long day merging into night, intermittent sun and cloud. I was able to get a noon fix that was close to the sat-nav position and showed we had been clocking up an average of nine and a half miles per hour over the ground during the ten hours we had been at sea. The movement was very different to anything I had known before. A monohull does not bash into the seas, it accommodates itself to the rise and swoop of the waves. A multihull is much more uncompromising, and with no let-up in the wind, we were all of us very tired by the time night fell, the sun going down in a ball of fire and an odd-looking rainbow curling across a black rain cloud to the south.

  We had two days of force five to seven from between NNE and NNW and there were times when I thought for a moment she was going to start flying a hull. On the third day, the wind backed into the west so that we were able to shake out our reefs and for almost four and a half hours we had a spinnaker run. After that the wind fell light and we started to motor. From white, breaking waves the sea smoothed out till it took on an oily, almost viscous surface, only the low swell from the north to remind us of the hard weather that had been pushing us south-eastward down the Med at such a spanking speed. A pod of dolphins joined us and we spent over two hours watching them as they cavorted round the bows. Carp tried to take a picture of their underwater shapes, lying flat on the safety net that stretched between the twin hulls at the bows. He came back aft soaking wet, one of the dolphins having slapped its tail on the surface and showered him with spray. ‘I swear he did it o’purpose, because he rolled over on his side and looked me straight in the face, an’ he was grinning! Not sure ‘e didn’t wink ‘is eye at me. Talk about a sense of fun …’

  As suddenly as they had arrived, the dolphins disappeared. The sun was shining out of a blue sky as they left us, the spray thrown up by their speed and the arching curve of their sleek bodies glittered silver in the bright light. A noon sight put us within fifty miles of Sicily and by evening we could see the mountains standing pale in the sunset, wisps of cloud clinging to their tops.

  It had been a lazy day, hot and sleepy-making, a welcome contrast. I had spent part of it trying to explain to Carp how to calculate his position from sights taken with the sextant. He was a good inshore pilot, but he had never had occasion to learn navigation, had never handled a sextant before. We had sat-nav and Decca on board, everything as automatic as could be, which is fine so long as your batteries hold out and no electrical faults develop in the hardware. The joy of a sextant is that there’s virtually nothing to go wrong, unless you’re fool enough to drop the thing overboard or forget to bring your azimuth tables with you.

  That day I also began to think about our landfall. If we went straight into Grand Harbour, then it was unlikely I’d get ashore without being observed. The alternative, which was to slip into one of the smaller bolt holes like Marsaxlokk in the south of the island, or even drop off at the smaller island of Gozo, involved a risk that Carp could be in real trouble with the authorities if I were picked up by the police for having no papers and entering Malta illegally. In any case, when it came to leaving the island, I would have to do it secretly.

  I didn’t discuss the matter with Carp. It was something I had to make up my own mind about and in the end I decided to brazen it out and tell the authorities I had inadvertently lost my passport overboard, a very easy thing to do at night if one was stupid enough to leave it in one’s anorak.

  By late afternoon a heat haze was developing and we took in the clothes and bedding we had hung out to air. At six Luis relieved Carp at the helm and for the first time in three days the two of us were able to relax over an evening drink before putting the stew back on the stove. Two questions had clarified in my mind during the night watches, both concerning Gareth Lloyd Jones. First and foremost was the exact relationship between him and Evans, but all Carp said was, ‘If he’s bringing his ship into Mahon, then you’ll be able to ask’ im yourself.’

  ‘How long were the two boys together on that houseboat?’ I asked.

  ‘Not more’n three weeks, a month or so. If it’d been longer reck’n they’d’ve bin in real trouble, they was getting that wild. And Tim Evans accusing that Moira of all sorts of unnatural practices, accusing her publicly, right in front of everybody in the Ferryboat.’ He knocked back the rest of his whisky and poured himself another, staring down at his glass, lost in his recollections.

  ‘What do you mean – unnatural practices?’ I was intrigued by his extraordinary choice of words.

  ‘Well, can’t say I know exactly wot the women were clacking about, but the fact is that the boy Gareth was just about the age for it and he was there on the boat with Moira an’ nobody else for – oh, I forget now, but Tim Evans was away quite a while. Filming was wot Moira said. But I heard later he was so desperate for money he shipped as cook on a deep-sea trawler sailing out of Yarmouth for that Russian place, Novy Zembla.’

  ‘And he accused her of taking the boy into her bed – is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Well, I was in the pub there, wasn’t I? Heard ‘im say it myself. Shoutin’ at ‘er, he was.’

  ‘So what was the boy’s position? Why was it unnatural?’ />
  Carp shrugged. ‘There was rumours, you see.’

  I waited, and when he didn’t say anything further, I asked him what sort of rumours.

  ‘That they was half-brothers. That’s wot some people said.’ He gave a little shrug. ‘Place like the Ferry, tongues wag, partic’larly over people as strange as Tim and Moira.’

  ‘Which of them was supposed to be the common parent?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, the bloke of course. Moira was much too fly to get caught more than once. Least that’s my reck’ning. But that boy, he had hair as red as hers, an’ freckles, too. He was her kid, no doubt o’that. An’ older than Gareth. A year at least. The local paper gave their ages as thirteen and fourteen.’ And he went on to say that as he remembered it Gareth was the son of a couple named Lloyd Jones who ran a newsagent’s somewhere in the East End of London. Seems it happened when Tim Evans was working at a municipal theatre in the Mile End Road. It was then, at the theatre, that he met up with Moira. She was barmaid there, so rumour had it.

  ‘You mean Tim Evans was having it off with both women at the same time?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Story was that this Lloyd Jones fellow had to go into hospital for an operation and his wife was left running the newsagent’s on her own. By then Tim Evans was out of a job, so she got him into the shop to help her. That’s how he paid for ‘is lodgings.’

  ‘By giving her a son?’

  He grinned. ‘All I said was he helped her in the shop. As far as we was concerned it was the red-haired lad as was illegit.’

  Luis called down to us that he had just picked up the loom of a light almost dead over the bows. After about a quarter of an hour, when the white beam of it finally lifted above the horizon, we were able to identify it positively as the lighthouse on the highest point of the island of Gozo, which is 595 feet above sea level and has a range of twenty-four miles.

  With no vessel in sight, I stopped both engines and we lay to, so that for the first time in three days we could have our drinks and our evening meal together in the saloon. By then I had finally made up my mind to go straight in at first light and clear health, customs and immigration in the normal way. Grand Harbour was no more than forty miles away, five hours’ motoring at an economical eight knots, which meant three-hour watches for each of us, starting with Luis at 21.00.