“Daddy says it was impressive, anyway,” the girl said with airy politeness, then gazed up at the deep-keeled Stormchild which was cradled by massive metal jackstands. “Golly, isn’t it huge!”
“You must stop saying that to me,” the lawyer, who was no more than five foot two inches tall, guffawed at his own wit, then sternly told me he had expected to find the boat in the water with her mast stepped and sails bent on.
“Hardly at this time of year”—I was remembering Joanna’s instruction to be nice to this little man, and thus kept my voice very patient and calm—“the season’s scarcely begun and no one puts a boat in the water until they need to. Besides,” I went on blithely, “I thought you’d appreciate seeing the state of her hull.”
“There is that, of course,” he said grudgingly, though I doubted he would have noticed if the hull had been a rat-infested maze of rust holes. John Miller clearly did not know boats, and that ignorance made him palpably impatient as I ran down the list of Stormchild’s virtues. Those virtues were many; the yacht had been custom built for an experienced and demanding owner who had wanted a boat sturdy enough for the worst seas, yet comfortable enough to live aboard for months at a time. The result was a massive, heavy boat, as safe as any cruising yacht in the world, with a powerful brute of a turbocharged diesel deep in her belly. But Stormchild was also a pretty boat, with fine lines, a graceful rig, and decks and coach roofs handsomely planked in the finest teak.
“Which is why,” I told the lawyer a little too brusquely, “I’d be grateful if you took off your street shoes before climbing aboard.”
Miller scowled at my request, but nevertheless slipped off his expensive brogues. Mandy, who had begun to shiver in the unseasonably cold wind, discarded her stiletto heels before tiptoeing up the wooden boarding stairs and stepping down into Stormchild’s cockpit. “She’s ever so pretty,” Mandy said gallantly. The lawyer ignored her. He was peering at the cockpit instrument display and pretending that he understood what he was seeing.
“You’ll take a hundred thousand?” he challenged me suddenly.
“Don’t be so bloody silly,” I snapped back. My anger was piqued by the knowledge that Stormchild was horribly underpriced even at a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and I felt another twinge of regret that Joanna and I were not ready to buy her.
Miller had bridled at my flash of temper, but controlled his own, perhaps because I was at least fourteen inches taller than him, or perhaps because my fading fame carried with it a reputation for having a difficult temperament. One tabloid newspaper had called me the “Solo Seadog Who Bites,” which was unfair, for I simply had the prickly facade that often conceals a chronic shyness, to which I added an honest man’s natural dislike of all lawyers, frauds, pimps, politicians, and bureaucrats, and this lawyer, despite his pristine foul-weather gear, was plainly a prick of the first order. “We were thinking of keeping her in the Med”—Miller tapped the compass as though it was a barometer—“I suppose you can deliver her?”
“It might be possible,” I said, though my tone implied there could be vast difficulties in such a delivery for, eager as I was to sell Stormchild, I was not at all certain that her proper fate was to become a flashy toy to impress Miller’s friends and clients. Stormchild was a very serious boat, and I loved boats enough not to want this beautifully built craft to degenerate in the hands of a careless owner. “If it’s a warm-weather vacation boat that you want,” I said as tactfully as I could, “then perhaps you ought to think about a fiberglass hull? They need much less maintenance and they offer better insulation.”
“There are plenty of people willing to do maintenance work in the Med,” the lawyer said unpleasantly, “and we can always bung some air conditioners into her.”
My flash of temper had clearly not discouraged the little runt, so I tried warning him that cooling a boat the size of Stormchild would be an expensive business.
“Let me worry about expense,” Miller said, then bared his teeth in a grimace that I could, if I chose, translate as a smile. “In my line of work, Blackburn, I occasionally need to impress a client, and you don’t do that by being cheap.”
“Surely the best way to impress clients is to keep them out of jail?” I suggested.
He gave a scornful bark of laughter. “Good God, man, I’m not a criminal lawyer! Christ, no! I negotiate property deals between the City and Japan. It’s quite specialized work, actually.” He insinuated, correctly, that I would not understand the specialization. “But the Japanese are pathetically impressed by big white boats”—he glanced at his shivering girlfriend—“and by the girls that go with them.”
Mandy giggled while I, suppressing an urge to wring Miller’s neck, took him below decks to show off the impressive array of instruments that were mounted above Stormchild’s navigation table. Miller dismissed my description of the SatNav, Decca, radar, and weatherfax, saying that his marine surveyor would attend to such details. Miller himself was more interested in the boat’s comforts which, though somewhat lacking in gloss, nevertheless met his grudging approval. He especially liked the aft master cabin where, warmed by one of my big industrial heaters, Mandy had stretched her lithe length across the double berth’s king-size mattress. “Hello, sailor,” she greeted Miller.
“Oh, jolly good.” Miller was clearly anticipating the effect that Mandy’s lissome beauty would have on his Japanese clients. “Will you take a hundred and ten?” he suddenly demanded of me.
He had obviously smelled that Stormchild was a bargain, and I felt a terrible sadness for I knew that, once the boat had been used as the sweetener on a few deals, and once Miller had made his fortune from those deals, she would be left to rot in some stagnant backwater. “Why don’t you take a good look at the other cabins,” I said with as much patience as I could muster, “then we can negotiate a price in my office. Would you like some coffee waiting for you?”
“Decaffeinated,” he ordered imperiously, “with skim milk and an artificial sweetener.”
I planned to give him powdered caffeine laced with condensed milk and white sugar. “The coffee will be waiting in the office,” I promised, then left them to it.
Billy, who had just finished rigging the repaired four-and-a-half-ton yawl, ambushed me halfway across the yard. His chivalrous concern, like that of every other red-blooded male in the yard, was for the lubricious and goose-pimpled Mandy. “Bloody hell, boss, what does she see in the little fucker?”
“She sees his wallet, Billy.”
“Did you see the fucker’s oilskin coat?” Billy asked indignantly.
“It can get very rough on the boating pond in Hyde Park,” I said reprovingly, then I turned away because a car had just driven past the big sign that read “Absolutely No Unauthorized Vehicles Beyond This Notice,” and I was readying myself to shout at the driver, when I realized that the car was my brother’s antique Riley.
“They’re not racing today, are they?” Billy asked, and my own first thought was that David must have come to the yard to launch his 505 racing dinghy. My reverend elder brother was a lethal competitor and, like others who were addicted to the frail, wet discomfort of fragile racing boats, he pretended to despise the sybaritic conveniences of long-distance sailors like myself. “You mean you have a lavatory on that barge?” he would boom at some hapless victim. “You pee in windless comfort, do you? Next you will inform me that you have a cooking stove on board. You do! Then why not just stay in some luxury hotel, dear boy?”