Fflytte whirled, his eyes burning with need. “How do we get down there?” he demanded of Pessoa, who for once seemed prepared for the strange impulses of his temporary employer. He pointed so readily at the exit that he might have been expecting the director’s demand. Fflytte seized the translator’s arm and hurried him towards the exit. I glanced at Hale, whose expression was, as I’d feared, somewhere between irritation and amusement.
“Tell me he’s not serious,” I pleaded.
He looked after the back of his fast-retreating cousin, and the complicated visage settled into a sort of sad affection. “Of course he’s serious, Miss Russell. That’s how Randolph looks when he falls in love.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PIRATE KING: I sink a few more ships, it’s true,
Than a well-bred monarch ought to do.
SHE’D BEEN A brigantine, once upon a time – from the Italian for brigand-and if this was love at first sight, love truly was blind.
She was a wreck.
No, she was worse than a wreck: A wreck would at least carry a faint trace of romance from the by-gone days and the glory that was sail.
Her name was Harlequin, and she was every bit the hotchpotch that name suggested. Granted, her lines had once been clean, but that was before she’d been converted into a fishing boat and given an engine and strewn about with lines and props and cabins and God-knows-what-all. An Arab mare with bobbed tail and denuded mane, daubed with spots and hitched to a rag-and-bone cart, wouldn’t have had her beauty more thoroughly hidden than this boat.
But Randolph Fflytte saw it. He saw instantly through twenty years of cart-horse behaviour, two decades of make-shift make-do, thousands of nautical miles of heavy-handed adaptations to her original lines, to the sleek, quick beauty she’d been when she danced down the rollers from her birth dock to slip demurely into the sea.
He stood on the dock and gazed across the intervening water at her, his face transformed. He looked inches taller. I would not have been too surprised if he had stepped off the chewed-up boards and trotted across the oily, debris-clogged water, just to touch her scaley hull.
“But we leave for Morocco in six days!” I protested. Geoffrey Hale and I were standing back, keeping an eye on Fflytte and Pessoa, two unlikely outlines side by side at the edge of the dock nearest the Harlequin. “We’d have to write whatever scenes he wants and rehearse them and then film them – assuming that boat doesn’t founder as soon as three people board it.”
“With any luck, it’ll go down before morning.” Hale sounded no more pleased at the prospect of arranging to film on this floating anachronism than I was. I opened my mouth to offer my services as amateur incendiarist, then reminded myself that revealing unlikely skills was not compatible to an undercover investigation. I changed what I had been about to say.
“Maybe he can shoot whatever scenes he has in mind while it’s at anchor? Draping sheets where the sails are supposed to be?”
My only answer was Hale’s slow sideways glance and raised eyebrow. I had to agree: With a reputation for realism (God, that word!) to protect, bed-sheets would not meet Fflytte’s standards.
With a sigh, I took out my note-pad. “What are we going to need?”
“Pessoa can find out,” Hale answered. “He’s the one who drew Randolph’s attention to the boat; he’s the one who can wade through fish guts to find the owner. By the time he’s finished, he’ll regret not hurrying us past that view-point.”
Hale looked sourly at the two men: Mr Pessoa looked remarkably pleased with himself, smug as any match-maker. It had not yet occurred to him that the racket he heard in the background was the sound of a spanner clanging against the finely tuned machinery of a film-crew.
I gave a brief laugh. “Will-the-Camera may murder him.”
“I’d hold the camera while he did so.” A veil of rain moved towards us across the water, the dock, and then our hats. Hale sighed. “I need a drink.”
Fflytte shook his head, scattering rain in a wide circle, when Hale told him it was time to go, and insisted on accompanying Pessoa on his search for the Harlequin’s owners. Only when Hale pointed out that having a wealthy foreigner along, openly mooning over the ship, would drive the hire price through the roof did the director allow himself to be pulled away.
At the dock’s end, Pessoa pulled together his lapels and walked off towards what I assumed were the harbour offices. Fflytte watched him go, then turned and give a last soulful look at the once-proud ship. From this angle, one could see that even her name was not original, that beneath the fading letters some previous incarnation strove to peep through.
Even slapping on a rough coat of paint was going to cost Fflytte Films a fortune.
* * *
We returned to the Avenida-Palace just before three o’clock, and although Hale pulled Fflytte towards the bar, I was very glad to see that tea was being served. I peeled away my damp overcoat and wrapped my hands around my cup, welcoming the obscuring steam on my spectacles.
I could write Holmes another letter, bringing him up to date on the entrance of a sailing vessel into our lives, but I had to admit, the investigation I’d been sent to carry out had been rather pushed onto a back burner. And Fflytte and Hale would be in and out of their rooms for the rest of the day, making trespass hazardous. Perhaps there was some stray member of the crew, abandoned here in the hotel, ready to spill the beans about Fflytte Films.
As if my thoughts had been a wish and my personal genie was sitting bored at my side, a familiar figure appeared at the door, a wizened, bow-legged man in rumpled tweeds and a soft cap. Will retained the looks of the Welsh farm-labourer he had been when he first wandered onto the Fflytte estate some forty years before, a sixteen-year-old orphan seeking work that didn’t involve a mine-shaft. Now, he was clearly looking for someone, but I stuck my hand in the air and waved in a gesture too energetic for him to ignore. With reluctance, he came in.
“Will-the-Camera,” I said. “We were just talking about you.”
Will was not one of your garrulous Welshmen. He merely glanced his question at the empty chairs.
“I’ve been out with Mr Fflytte and Mr Hale. Here, sit down. Like some tea? Waiter, another cup,” I called, ignoring the cameraman’s protestations that no, he really- “We just got back from a sight-seeing trip around the town with Mr Pessoa, and you’ll never guess what we found?”
“A rhinoceros?”
I paused, taken aback by this unexpected note of levity from a man who looked not in the least like he was making a joke. “Er, no. A ship. A very old and beat-up brigantine that Mr Fflytte decided is just the thing for a couple of scenes.”
Will dropped his head into his hand with a mutter that sounded like, “Jaizus.”
“I imagine you’ve been involved with any number of, well, challenging situations. Haven’t you worked with Fflytte Films for a long time?”
“Since before it was Fflytte Films,” he agreed. He scowled down at the cup I’d poured for him, doubtless wishing it might turn into something translucent and more fortified.
“Really? What was it then?”
“It was young Master Fflytte with a camera. Which he didn’t know how to work so he hunted me down on the estate and shoved it at me, told me to learn how to run it.”
“Well, you certainly did that. You’ve filmed almost all of his movies, haven’t you?”
“A fair number.”