'That is the island, where we go.'
'Brilliant, Dean. Bloody brilliant,' Ricky gasped.
'And how do we go?'
They went down the slope, slithered and slid, and more sheep ran from them. They climbed another fence and then they were on the shoreline. Away to the left, a mile and a half or more, they saw the fierce, shining lights of a harbour, and out in that part of the emptiness there were navigation lights, but not in front of them. Too bloody easy to go where the lights were, where a ferry boat sailed from – not a clever place to be for a man with his face plastered all over the front page of a newspaper. There was the stink of the sea, and Ricky's eyes were better now in the darkness than they had been in half-light. He could see white caps in front of them that seemed to ride into little gullies.
'How do we go? We have to find a little boat.'
'What if, Dean, we don't find a little boat?'
'We walk and we swim – but I think we will find a little boat.'
They did.
It was up on grass. It was as small as the boat, twenty years back, that Mikey might have hired for an hour down at Folkestone or Margate – if he'd been out of Wandsworth or Pentonville on a nice summer Sunday – and no way Sharon would have gone in it.
The rowing boat was upturned on the grass and a frayed rope tied it to a rotted stump. Ricky thought the man had faith in luck, or faith in God, for thinking he'd find a boat. They had damn near walked into it. When they'd tipped it over, the man took the flashlight, switched it on for a few seconds at a time and ran his hands over the planking as if that way he'd find a hole in it; there were oars too.
They dragged the boat away from the grass and down on to mud. The man pulled it by the rope and Ricky pushed it. The mud clung to him. Next it would be his bloody shoes going down in the mud and bloody lost. He took them off, and his sodden socks, and shoved them into his outer pockets. At each step the mud seemed to pull him back, but he had his shoulder against the wood of the boat; funny, but Ricky Capel, who could strut in any company, found that he needed not to fail, had to show his worth to this man, was not going to be found bloody wanting. For two whole hours, with one rest time of not more than five minutes, they scraped the boat over the mud and then they reached the water. The surf came in spurts up to their knees, then ran back.
When they floated off, when the man dragged on the oars, Ricky lay in the floor of the boat and water sloshed round him. He found, under his back, a saucepan tied with string to the boat's side, and began to use it to ladle out the water. As fast as he did so, the boat filled. The water level crept up – the saucepan could not compete with it. It lapped at the top of his knees and up his hips, but he kept bailing because he could not let the man see him fail.
They grounded across the channel. The moon had come up and he could see the line of a shallow hill in front of them. They stepped out, water up to their thighs, went down in a hole and crawled out.
'Well done, Ricky. That was good.'
He flushed at the praise, and a little of his exhaustion fled.
If she had asked, Malachy would have said, 'Perhaps Timo Rahman'll drop them by the ferry or have them brought over in a fast craft. They'll link up with a boat offshore, use a radio for it. The size of boat that can get across the North Sea would be too large to come in close, so it'll have to launch a dinghy and come right in to the beach, somewhere along the stretch we walked. They can use a radio for the final contact with the boat but they'll have to signal an exact spot for the dinghy, and my guess is that they'd use flashing lights to guide it in. That won't be easy – of course, I'm not a seaman and don't have exact knowledge – because of the surf that the storm's knocking up. I hope to see them when they've put the light on. It'll be when their plan is most vulnerable, but they'll know with the weather that no living soul is going to be out and watching for them, which will give them confidence.
I'm not reckoning, where we are, that we can miss the light they'll use, could be tonight or could be tomorrow night – maybe right now they're lying up.
We'll see that light. I want to hit them when they think they're on the last leg – they're coming down from the dunes and they're out on the beach without cover…
I want to screw it up for Ricky Capel. You've your own target and that's your business – mine is with Ricky Capel. I want him out there in the sand and unable to get to his dinghy – for him the whole thing is failure on a mind-blowing scale. It's only a gesture, but it's what I want… I want to hear him scream, and then I can walk away.'
She was beside him and her sleeping-bag was already half buried in the sand that the wind pulled off the beach. He could hear the steady rhythm of her breathing. He sat hunched, and his eyes raked the shoreline and the upper points of the dunes as he watched for a light. The same sand that covered her was caking on his chest and shoulders, on his lips, cheeks and around his eyes. He would have liked to listen to his voice telling her that he would hit Ricky Capel, then walk away, but she slept and would not have heard him.
Chapter Seventeen
He sat on an upper point of the dunes, and the rain was back, and the pledge made to Malachy was broken.
He watched and she was huddled on her side in the sleeping-bag, eyes clamped shut, sand carpeting her hair. When the drizzle had started, he had carefully lifted the bag's neck so that her mouth and nose were covered; through her misted spectacles he could see that her eyes stayed closed. The pledge, broken, had been that he would watch till two in the morning, and then she would take her turn, and he would sleep. He had not roused her.
He glanced regularly at her, a few seconds in each two or three minutes, but his focus was on the sea, where a boat would come. More likely the boat would reach them at night, guided by lights, but he thought the weather – rain that drove up on to the dunes, mist, low cloud that shortened the horizon – gave enough cover for a dinghy to be launched. It was as if the few clustered houses by the harbour where the ferry docked were detached from the rest of the wilderness of the island. The voices he heard were those of gulls that ducked and dived in the wind. The tide was up and they had fewer acres of sand to feed from, so their hunt for shells to split open was harder and more frantic. Other sounds were from the wind's thrust in the dunes, and its singing in the low branches of the few trees behind him. He thought she would wake soon because her breathing was less regular than it had been during the night.
The expanse of the beach was being steadily sub-merged. The tide rolled in. In the gloom, sometimes, he saw the light of a buoy, but no boats came past it.
She woke. Sudden movement. Wriggling in the bag and fighting to get an arm clear, trying to see a wrist and a watch. Cursing. Head lifted. Spectacles snatched off and wiped crudely on the underside of the bag. Spectacles replaced. Looking around, eyes fastening on him.
'Damn you.'
It amused Malachy to see her annoyance. 'Good morning, Miss Wilkins.'
'You promised.'
'An earthquake wouldn't have woken you.'
Her fingers were in her hair and sand flew clear. She shook her head violently. 'Damn you because you promised to wake me. If you didn't know it, that is insulting.'
He turned his eyes back to the sea. What had he seen? Nothing. What could he now see? Nothing.
Why had he not woken her?
'There was nothing worth waking you for.'
'We were supposed to share the watch. You half and me half.'
'I thought you needed the sleep,' he said vaguely.
'That is what's insulting. I need the sleep and you don't? That's a cheap shot.'
He remembered Roz, remembered manufactured arguments, remembered vicious, spiky arguments coming out of a clear blue sky, remembered her ability to rouse a dispute from a half-thought-through remark. He watched the surf where the gulls danced, and saw the buoy's light.