As Mick continued to watch, the two girls started kissing each other, started touching each other’s breasts. He had to walk away. It was too much for him. He felt unbearably cold and alone. He saw himself as though from a distance. He was a sad outsider peering in at somebody else’s good time, desperate for warmth and having to make do with revenge.
And yet he knew that when the moment came, punishing Sands would be particularly sweet. But that moment hadn’t arrived yet. It would only come after the girls had been finished with and packed off home. That was why he had to wait. That was why he was in the hotel bar, reading a leaflet about the Thames Barrier, waiting for Sands to finish.
♦
When the time was right Mick downed his drink and sauntered back to the marina. He was on time. When he got to the boat the girls had gone, the light was off in the aft cabin and Sands was again to be seen sitting alone in the wheelhouse saloon. He was wearing a nautical T — shirt, jeans, no shoes, and even though the hatch was open to the cold night he didn’t seem to feel it. Mick walked up to the hatch and said cheerfully, “Nice boat.”
“Oh, well, thank you,” Sands replied.
He was not surprised or startled by Mick’s sudden, unannounced presence but the politeness of his response was automatic, not to be taken as a willingness to talk. His thoughts were a long way away.
“This is the Turbo thirty-six, isn’t it?” Mick asked, having read the name on the side of the boat.
“That’s right,” Sands said.
“What’s your top speed?”
“It’s very happy doing twenty-five, twenty-seven knots,” Sands said, then realizing he might be sinking into an unwanted conversation with a dodgy stranger he said, “Do you own a boat here? If not I should point out that this is a private jetty and we have very good security.”
“That’s my boat over there,” Mick said, and he gestured with all possible vagueness towards the boats in the centre of the marina.
Sands was not convinced but he didn’t intend to cross-question this intruder. He just wanted him to go away. He decided to ignore him. He turned his body, said nothing and sank back into his brooding silence, and Mick seized this moment of weak acquiescence to step on to the boat and in through the hatch.
“I wonder if I can borrow a cup of sugar,” he said as he entered.
“What?”
“Isn’t that what new neighbours are always supposed to ask for?”
“I think you should get off my boat at once,” Sands said.
He moved towards Mick, his intentions vague though hostile, but Mick only smiled. He continued to smile as Sands tried to grab him by the arm and frogmarch him off the boat, but Mick wasn’t having any of that. He turned, slipped out of Sands’ grasp and kneed him in the balls with neat, well-directed force. Sands crumpled. He sagged. Mick took Sands’ outstretched arm and dragged him across to the wheel, and in one sharp, dexterous manoeuvre he handcuffed him to it.
“OK,” Mick said. “What’s going to happen is this. You’re going to get your boat in motion, get it on the river, point it upstream. Then I’m going to start asking you questions about London, twenty questions in all, from out of this book.” He waved the copy of Unreliable London that he’d bought from Judy’s shop. He’d always known he’d find a use for it. “Then, each time you get an answer right we’ll go forward to the next bridge and so on. If you get one wrong, don’t worry, there’s no penalty, you don’t have to go into reverse or anything.
“And so it goes on for twenty questions. Now, for our purposes I’m going to call the Thames Barrier a bridge as well, the final one, like the winning post. And I’m not going to count Hungerford or Cannon Street ‘cos they both look like poxy little bridges on the map. And if we’ve arrived at the Thames Barrier by the time you’ve answered the twentieth question I’ll ask you to put me ashore and you can go happily on your way. Look at it another way, there are eleven bridges before the barrier, so if you can answer twelve questions right out of twenty you’re home and dry. OK?”
Sands looked at him in frightened bafflement. He had no idea what was going on, but the handcuff on his wrist told him it was serious. Coming so soon after the session with the girls it had a preternatural air of divine retribution about it.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Oh yes, you can,” said Mick, and he clubbed him round the back of the head with his fist.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Sands said wretchedly, “but the fact is, the tide is out.”
Mick thought for a moment. He knew nothing about rivers and tides and Sands had no reason to be telling him the truth. But then he remembered that when he’d done a circuit of the marina earlier he’d walked past the lock and it had indeed been dry, and the river end of it had opened out on to nothing but a wide mud bank. It dawned on him that Sands was probably telling the truth.
“Oops,” said Mick. “Bit of a balls-up, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to think about this.”
He began to think, looking round the cabin for inspiration. He saw a stack of nautical charts and immediately saw that they offered possibilities, since a couple of them showed the Thames in a scale that he could deal with.
“OK,” he said. “It’s a shame about the tide, because I was really looking forward to the boat trip, but I guess we’re just going to have to do it theoretically, do it in miniature like a board game, OK? And I think we’re going to have to conduct it in one of the cabins so that you can’t try anything fanny like attracting a security guard.”
Mick unlocked one end of the handcuffs and Sands immediately launched himself forward away from Mick, trying to break free and escape from the boat. Mick yanked him back, grabbed his hair, smashed his face against the wheel, and dragged him into the aft cabin. The bed was still unmade from when he’d been there with the girls. The room smelled of women’s perfume, not cheap. Wine bottles and drug paraphernalia were scattered about the tiny area of unused floor. Mick clocked them with disgust and knocked Sands about a little more harshly as he handcuffed him to a suitable light fitting.
He stripped the covers off the bed to give himself a flat surface on which to lay out the charts. Sands felt the blood running out of his nose and watched Mick in continuing confusion.
“OK,” Mick said, jabbing the map with his finger, “you’re here. If you answer this first question right, then off we go upriver to Battersea Bridge. Here, I’ll make it easier for you to see where you are,” and he reached into his pocket and produced a tiny model ship, a counter from a game of Monopoly, which he placed in the centre of the river, outside Chelsea Harbour.
“Number one,” Mick began. “Who said that when a man is tired of London he’s tired of life?”
Sands looked at him suspiciously. Could he really be asking such a ridiculously simple question? Well, possibly. Perhaps that was only an overfamiliar quotation if you happened to be a Londoner.
“What on earth makes you think that I’m going to play this ludicrous game?” Sands asked.
Mick looked hurt, as though Sands’ failure to understand was a personal slight and a great disappointment to him.
“You’re going to play out of fear,” Mick explained. “Because if you don’t play then I’ll inflict all sorts of terrible pain on you, and I assume you’d rather I didn’t do that. Why not play a ludicrous game if it saves you getting a beating?”
Sands nodded. He wasn’t stupid. There was already no doubt that Mick could inflict a very efficient beating on him. If playing along was going to gain him even the smallest advantage he realized he might as well do it. He said, “As a matter of fact the answer is Samuel Johnson.”