Both women were by now visibly alarmed, but each sedulously avoided catching the other’s eye. Mrs Hatch allowed herself instead to be fascinated by the terrifyingly fast approaching portals of Pennick Lock, while Mrs Spain, convinced that her captain had indeed let slip his reason, fumbled with the fastenings of her life jacket and tried to relate sensibly her present peril with things she had read in sea stories about bursting boilers, undertow and threshing screws.
The calmest figures in the scene were the two solitary fishermen who sat facing each other across the river. They showed none of the dismay that had sent the anglers along Pennick Level clambering to the bank top.
Each took his attention off his line just long enough to give the approaching craft a brief but careful scrutiny.
One nodded. The other made a small acknowledging movement with his hand.
The first angler glanced again at Daffodil and Lively Lady, then quickly back at the water before him. He reeled in a couple of feet of line.
The second angler paid out a similar length of his line.
Both looked once more quickly downstream. The two boats, roaring nearer, beam to beam, had their prows almost clear of the water. Lively Lady was beginning to adopt a lengthwise rearing motion, like an animal at full gallop.
Forty yards to go.
The fisherman on Lively Lady’s side of the river took measure of the situation with one eye screwed nearly shut. He pulled a little on his line.
Something long and heavy and black that was discernible only at close quarters rolled sluggishly just beneath the surface. It looked like a crocodile.
Twenty yards.
Ten.
Of all the disconcerting things that happened in the next few seconds, perhaps the oddest, if not the most obvious, was a simultaneous action by the two fishermen. Each drew from his pocket a small pair of scissors and calmly, neatly, cut his line.
With a roar and a great flurry of spray, the two boats rushed by.
In that instant, signalled by a sound like a house roof being torn off, their courses dramatically diverged.
Daffodil shot forward on level keel towards Pennick Lock.
Lively Lady rose into the air.
The fishermen gazed admiringly at her levitation, but it was not maintained.
A quarter of the length of her fibreglass bottom ripped open by the crocodile that was not a crocodile but a great baulk of waterlogged timber warty with iron bolt heads, Lively Lady flopped back into the water like a gutted fish.
She sank at once.
The river was not very deep along that stretch, and by the time Lively Lady had settled stolidly into the slime of its bed the wheelhouse and part of the deck were still above water.
Mrs Spain, who had screamed a good deal and clung desperately to the rail during the boat’s last moments of mobility, now appeared possessed of stony calm. Slowly she looked up from the waters that lapped the skylight of the rear cabin. She turned towards the wheelhouse and waited, like a prosecuting counsel confident of the accused’s imminent confession and collapse, for Crispin to meet her eye.
Commodore Crispin still held the wheel. Indeed, he was giving it half a turn this way and that every few seconds and muttering to himself. Mrs Spain’s righteous wrath gave way to anxiety. She edged her way towards him. The movement made the boat suddenly settle lower into the mud on that side. Water flowed over her shoes. She grabbed a corner of the wheelhouse and pulled herself inside.
She noticed first, and with much chagrin, that a cuckoo clock which she had installed in the forward cabin to make the place look more homely was now floating, cuckoo down, in company with three or four cups and an aerosol tin of fly-killer. She lent closer ear to Crispin’s mutterings. They were reassuring. The calamity had not, after all, bereft him of reason, but merely strained his command of language to the point of near-aphasia. She allowed just condemnation its head.
“Well, I hope you’re satisfied. That’s all. I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.”
“What I’ve done! Good God, woman, are you so bloody thick that you can’t see what’s happened?”
Crispin’s eyes were bullock-like in their indignant protuberance.
Mrs Spain pushed past him and retrieved her cuckoo clock as it was about to float out into the river. She prised open the door above the weed-streaked dial. Its glue softened by immersion, the little wooden bird leered lopsidedly at her for a second, then toppled out and was lost in the flood.
Mrs Spain’s pent-up shock and misery found expression at last. She threw the ruined clock at Crispin, whom it missed widely, and wept with long, noisy sobs.
“Oh, Christ!” said Crispin. He abandoned the wheel and put his arm round her shoulders. “I’ll kill the bastard!” he said, apparently by way of comfort. “I will. I’ll kill that sod if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Wh-wh-what s-s-sod?” inquired Mrs Spain when emotion had subsided enough to allow articulation.
Crispin grasped her shoulders and held her at arms’ length. He peered at her tear-streaked face.
“You didn’t honestly think that was an accident, did you?”
“You were going too fast. I told you. I asked you to stop. And now see what’s happened.” The floating into view through a partly submerged companionway of a cushion, embroidered with anchor designs, inspired a fresh onset of weeping.
“Oh, shut up, woman. I’ll get you another bloody boat.”
She shook her head vigorously. “I never want to see this river again.”
“All right. I won’t get you another bloody boat. But at least let’s get off this one.”
She grabbed his sleeve.
“Harry, you’re not to do anything stupid.”
“Hell, what’s stupid about getting off a sunken ship, for God’s sake?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. I don’t like talk about killing. Not even in fun. Now promise me you’ll not do anything you’ll be sorry for.”
Crispin made one of his huge hands into a fist and turned it about, examining it with a sort of gleeful exasperation.
“Look,” he said slowly, “I don’t know how he did it, but that bastard set this up for us. It stands out a mile. He’s got enough horses in that bloody overblown engine of his to leave us standing. But he stuck right there, alongside. Why? Because he wanted us to be going all out on that particular course, close in. He was crowding us, the sod. And why? Because he knew what was waiting. He’d fixed it. I tell you he’d fixed it.”