“Harry, you don’t know that.”
“Like hell, I don’t.”
“Very well, then. You must tell the police and leave it to them.”
Crispin smiled pityingly at her. He unfurled his fist in order to release a finger to explore his left nostril.
The throb of subdued machinery was in the air. A wavelet moved across the water at their feet and slapped gently against the door of the refrigerated drinks locker.
“Ahoy, there!”
Unmistakeably the voice of Arnold Hatch, thin, dry, a little tinged with embarrassment over the uncustomary Jack Tar lingo, yet tight with secret triumph.
Daffodil, ticking over to hold steady against the gentle down-river current from Pennick weir, was less than ten feet off their starboard beam.
Hatch sat calm as a pharmacist before the controls, and surveyed what remained of Lively Lady above water. His wife looked pale and distraught. She kept feeling for stray strands of hair under the peak of her yachting cap, then nervously touching her lips. She shook her head. “Oh, but it’s dreadful, dreadful...”
“I reckon you’ve taken some water in there, skipper,” remarked Hatch.
Mrs Spain clutched Crispin’s arm. “No, Harry, don’t!” she murmured.
But Crispin was grinning. He shrugged. “I reckon we have, at that, old mate.”
Mrs Spain glanced at him, then quickly at Hatch and Mrs Hatch and at Crispin once more. Amiability still radiated from the knobbly, knockabout face. It scared her stiff. She heard Mrs Hatch’s tearful condolences only as a faint and distant bleat. “Don’t, Harry!” she whispered again.
He chuckled and honked one of her buttocks like an old-time motor horn.
“You’re a bit low for towing, I reckon,” said Hatch, after pretence of cogitation.
“We’re right on the sodding bottom, mate, that’s about the strength of it.” If Crispin had been announcing a prize in a lottery, he could scarcely have sounded more delighted.
“We’d better take you aboard,” said Hatch. “Chuck them a rope, Sophie.”
“That’s very decent of you, Arnie,” Crispin called.
“Least we can do, skipper.”
Crispin gave an elaborate, American movie lootenant style salute. He might have been accepting the surrender of an alien navy.
At her third attempt, Mrs Hatch managed to toss a rope near enough to Lively Lady for Mrs Spain to fish its end out of the water with her foot. She handed the rope end, dripping, to Crispin.
She made a final appeal, close to his ear. “You’ll not, will you, Harry? Promise me you’ll not.”
He took the rope. His face folded into a smile of reassurance.
“Don’t you fret, girl,” he said softly. “There’s more ways than one of skinning a bleeding cat.”
Chapter Nine
It was nearly three weeks before Lively Lady could be raised, patched temporarily and then towed down river to Shallop’s yard for the greater part of her hull to be replaced. Until then, she was the object of excursions along the bank by inquisitive townspeople and unashamedly delighted anglers.
There was much speculation as to the cause of the accident, which the Flaxborough Citizen unequivocally pronounced a “lamentable occurrence”, but the only official authority to show concern was the river board, uncertain of its liability in the event of another boat hitting the wreck.
The police were not notified, nor had anyone thought to associate the foundering of Councillor Crispin’s boat with the lodgement, a few days later, of an eight-feet-long timber beam against the sill of the weir near Henderson’s Mill. Two boys, hopeful of finding the beam buoyant enough to serve them as a raft, waded out and tried to pull it free, but one of its jagged iron bolts had stuck firmly in a fissure. They splashed back to shore and forgot about the lump of wood and about the two tangles of heavy duty fishing line that were so mysteriously attached to it.
Those who had jettisoned the line felt no regret at its loss, for they were not anglers at all, but gardeners.
One was called Joxy and he was a hard-jawed little man from Glasgow who, when he spoke, which was seldom, employed a sawn-off-shotgun sort of prose, each statement being propelled by a charge of obscenity. The result was so difficult to interpret that the few people in Flaxborough with whom Joxy thought fit to attempt communication were liable to assume that he was a foreigner and to speak back to him in painstaking pidgin.
The other gardener was a local man, a former agricultural labourer. He was nearly a foot taller than Joxy, with a big barrel chest and broad shoulders, between which was set a disproportionately small head. It looked like a lost ball, lodged in the fork of an oak tree. This man’s name was Todd.
Joxy and Todd were employed at the Floradora Country Club. They were gardeners by definition that satisfied Mrs Hatch’s winsomely horticultural logic. Their job was to cull the weeds from amidst the flowers, the weeds being offensive or obstreperous customers. The pair were, in more worldly phraseology, trouble-shooters, chuckers-out, or bouncers.
One day, not long after Joxy’s and Todd’s expedition to Pennick Reach, there arrived at the club three young men whom the gardeners would unhesitatingly have cropped on the spot had they not received strict orders from their employer to offer the newcomers not merely tolerance but active cooperation.
The three young men were field operators of the Mackintosh-Brooke organisation and they had come to conduct a preliminary feasibility survey of what Hatch had described, in his invitation to the firm, as “our little group of companies”.
They arrived at exactly the time that their firm’s letter of tentative acceptance had quoted, in an American-made station wagon.
Joxy and Todd, detailed by Amis to garage the thing (they had a curious twin-like propensity for being always jointly at hand whenever the service of either was required), stood together by the club entrance and watched, with sullen hostility, while the MB operators each seized a hard, square document case and athletically disembarked.
Their conversation, such as it was during this brief process, indicated that their names were Julian, Peter and Bernard.
Joxy waited until the new arrivals had marched with springy step into the reception lounge. He jabbed a thumbnail into Todd’s belly and the pair lumbered down the steps to the station wagon and opened the door. Inside was a lingering smell of “Camp David” deodorant. Joxy expressed his disgust partly in speech and partly in his manner of crashing into gear and aiming the vehicle for an open door in what once had been a stable for the horses of the Quality.
Julian, Peter and Bernard were being served dry sherry by Pansy, one of the club hostesses, brought in early for the occasion. Pansy did not share Joxy’s contempt; she considered that the guests, as she assumed them to be, were as suave, elegantly worldly and well-heeled a trio as ever it had been her privilege to lean low for.