'Charming!' I murmured, but he picked me up on that.
'It wasn't viciousness, you understand. It was a question of marksmanship. Later he acquired an airgun. It was the challenge, you understand. He didn't think about the cruelty of it. He hasn't that sort of imagination.' He shook his head, staring vacantly at his empty glass, his mind back in the past. 'Perhaps he doesn't have any imagination at all. I'm not sure.'
'What happened?' I asked. 'You were going to tell me what happened there.'
'Oh yes.' He nodded. 'Over four years ago now. I was on leave, the first since my wife and I split up. I thought it would be fun to go back to Suffolk, stay at the Ferry, particularly as it was November, a good time for bird-watching.' He leaned back, his eyes half-closed again. 'The second night I was there, after the evening meal, I took some chocolate biscuits and a Thermos of coffee and rum and walked along the Deben bank to the King's Fleet. Halt a mile or so in from the river there's a series of little Broads-type lakes. The farmer had parked a trailer there part-loaded with bags of fertiliser. It made an ideal hide and I hadn't been propped up there, my back against the bags, more than half an hour before I heard the beat of wings. They passed almost directly over my head, five dark shapes against the Milky Way, the beat fading, then strengthening again as the birds circled. Suddenly I had them in the glasses, coming in low, the wet glimmer of the Fleet shattered, a flurry of water as they breasted it then only ripples and the five shapes gliding ghostly white Five Brent, and if nothing else happened that night it would have been worth it just to see the way they touched down. It was magic.'
Recalling the pleasure of that night was, I think, a sort of displacement activity for him. It helped to relieve some of the tension, his eyes half-closed, his mind totally concentrated and the Welsh lilt in his voice suddenly quite pronounced, the words with a poetic touch: '… a slow, heavy beat, a single bird this time and quite invisible until the splash of its touchdown showed white on the black pewter surface of the Fleet. It was a swan, but it carried its neck stiff like a column, with none of the graceful curve of the ubiquitous mute. It looked like a Bewick, a juvenile, the feathers drab instead of white. And then I thought it might possibly be a whooper. It would be unusual, but by then it was past midnight and I felt anything could happen, having already had a very good night with the sighting of a goosander as well as three grebes among the coots.'
He was smiling to himself, reliving a night that was indelibly etched on his mind. 'I drank the last of my coffee and rum with the buildings of Felixstowe Ferry sharp-etched against the light of the rising moon, the dark line of the sea's horizon just visible. When the moon finally rose above the sea the patches of water close by me were full of shadow shapes, coots bobbing their white-blazed heads, mallard and pochards motionless, the swans gliding slowly; no zephyr of a breeze, everything frozen still, a light winking far away in the approaches to Harwich. I remember I started thinking about another night, when I had come out to the Fleet with Pat and his father; then suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine.'
His eyes flicked open, dark pupils with the glazed look of jet. 'It came from beyond the hill where an old farmhouse stood among some trees, a low hill that marked the limit of what had once been the great marsh that was part of the vanished port of Goseford. I waited for the sound of it to fade away towards Kirton village and the main Felixstowe-Ipswich road, but instead it gradually increased, no lights and a shadow moving on the road down from the farm.'
Through his glasses he had seen it was a van, the engine quieter as it coasted without lights down the slope to the Fleet. Duck shooters was his first thought — poachers. There were two of them in the van and they had driven straight on, finally parking against the high grass bank that shut the Fleet off from its entrance into the Deben. 'I didn't worry about them after that, presuming they were fishermen. Now that the moon was clear of cloud I could see that what I had thought was a goosander, the pinkish breast showing pale and the down-turned bill just visible, was in fact a red-breasted merganser, a much more likely bird to see close by an East Coast estuary. I watched for another half-hour, and then a breeze sprang up, blowing in little gusts off the North Sea and bitterly cold. There was a dampness in the air, too, so that a rime of frost formed on my anorak. My fingers were numb by then and I got to my feet, climbing down off the trailer, and after picking up my knapsack with the Thermos flask in it, I headed down the track towards the Deben. Several times I stopped to watch the Fleet, my breath smoking and the birds mostly hidden now among the reeds, or still shadows fast asleep. It was just after one when I reached the grass-grown bank of the river.' He paused. 'That was when I heard the sound of voices and the clink of metal on metal, the clatter of a halyard trapping.'
He was staring straight at me, his eyes blacker than ever in the glare of the wall light. 'It was a little unnerving really. I was alone, you see, and yet I couldn't help it. I had to know what it was all about. So I clambered up the bank, and as soon as my head cleared the top of it, I stopped.' He paused again, and it was almost as though he did it for effect. Then he went on, his voice very quiet: 'Tide was at the full, and it was a spring tide, the river and the inlet of the King's Fleet almost brimming over with water, otherwise they would never have got it in there. I just stood there, gaping at the thing, it was such an incredible sight — a large catamaran, black-hulled, its single aluminium mast gleaming like silver in the moonlight. It was moored stern-on to the bank with an anchor out in the middle of the Fleet, and there were men passing cases up through a hatch in the starb'd hull to others on the bank.'
His hand was gripped on the edge of the table, the stub of his cigarette burning unheeded in the ashtray.'
'The quick furtiveness of their movements, their faces covered by stocking masks, gave a weirdness to the scene, the moon bright now and everything very clear and sharp in the frost. I snuggled down in the whitened grasses. Smugglers! I wasn't sure, but clearly something was being run ashore at dead of night, and that meant contraband of some sort.' His eyes flicked up at me. 'What the hell do you do in a situation like that?' And he went on, softly as though talking to himself. 'I was alone, you see. I trained my glasses on them. There were three on deck, two ashore, and another passing the cases up. Six altogether, and one of them standing with his hand on his hip… I focused the glasses on the case being passed up over the stern, searched the growing pile on the bank. That's when I began to be really scared.'
He was silent for a moment, staring into space. 'It wasn't drink, you see, nor drugs. It was arms! I wasn't in any doubt. There were long cases that could only contain hand-held rocket-launchers, others that looked more like rifles, but it was the ammunition boxes — I'd seen too many of those not to recognise them instantly.'
He stopped then, stubbing out his cigarette, and in the silence I was conscious again of the ship's sounds, and of the movement, too. 'Maybe he caught the glint of my binocular lenses in the moonlight,' he went on slowly. 'Whatever it was, he was suddenly looking straight at me.
Then he said something to the others and they froze, their stockinged faces all turned towards me.' He shook his head. It was unbelievable. The coincidence of it. The two of us…' His voice faded into silence.
'You mean it was Evans?'
'Yes. Pat.' He nodded. 'And now — again. Out here. It's as though some devilish fate…' He left the sentence unfinished, and when I asked him what had happened, he shrugged. 'What you'd expect, considering the cargo they were running. They had a man in the outfield, hidden in the tall grasses by the sluice. I ran straight into him. Big fellow. Rose up right in front of me and knocked me out, cold. Next thing I knew I was lying on the wooden grating of the catamaran's steering platform with Pat bending over me.' And after a moment he said, 'Lucky for me. They'd have killed me if he hadn't been there.' He lit another cigarette, his eyes closed, his mind far away so that I had to get the rest of it out of him by question and answer.