I think perhaps it was the ugliness of that speedboat which convinced me of Bannister’s guilt. Anyone who owned a boat so flash and sharp could not be as considerate as his decent image suggested.
To me, suddenly, he became just another rich bastard who thought his money gave him privileges beyond the law.
So sod the bastard. He’d wrecked my boat, stolen my wharf, but I was damned if he would steal my dinghy. I decided I would take the tender back into my ownership, then row myself on the ebb tide to the village pub. “Hello!” I shouted aloud. No one answered. I thumped on the side of the houseboat, but no one was on board.
The boathouse could either be entered by water or by a single door which led from the garden. I had to use the garden door which was padlocked. I paused for a moment, balancing the legalities in my mind, but decided against the possibility that Bannister had rescued the dinghy and was keeping it against my return. The presence of his filthy houseboat on my wharf suggested otherwise, and so I decided to break in.
My back ripped with pain as I lifted a heavy stone and hammered at the brass lock. The sound of my attack echoed dully from the manicured grass slope beneath my father’s old house. It took six sharp blows before the hasp came away from the wood and the door splintered open.
I stepped inside to find Wildtrack II rocking gently to the falling tide. She had a green tarpaulin cover which stretched from her forward windscreens back to the massive twin engines on her stern.
Her bows, sharp as a jet fighter’s nosecone, were slicked with chrome.
She was a monster, spawned by greed on vulgarity, and my father would have loved every inch of her.
I walked round the boathouse’s internal dock. My cotton sails, still in their bags, were heaped against one wall next to my fisherman’s anchor. The name Sycorax was stencilled on the canvas sailbags. I stooped, hissing with the pain, and felt the treacherous dampness in the bags. God damn Bannister, I thought. God damn his greed.
I found two oars and tossed them into my dinghy, then climbed gingerly over Wildtrack II’s stainless steel guardrail. She shivered as I stepped on her deck. I saw that the two springs which held my dinghy close to the speedboat’s flank were cleated somewhere beneath the tarpaulin, so I began by unlacing the stiff material and peeling it away from the windscreens. Once the cover was folded back, I stepped down on to the helmsman’s black leather chair.
And found my brass scuttles.
And my radios. The VHF and the short-wave were both there, and both with their aerial and power connections snipped short.
The radios were among heaps of similar items that were piled in two tea-chests which had been hidden beneath the tarpaulin. Most of the items had come from other yachts. There were echo-sounders, electronic logs, VHF sets, compasses, and even Lewmar winches that must have been unbolted from the decks of moored boats.
There’s little profit in stealing boats in England, not when the registration is so good, but there has always been a profit in plundering them of valuables. I stared down into the chests, guessing that the value of their contents must be three or four thousand pounds at black-market prices. Why in God’s name would a man as rich as Bannister meddle with bent chandlery?
“Don’t move.”
The voice came from the door which I’d broken open.
I turned.
“I said don’t move, bastard!” The man shouted it, just as we used to shout when we went rifle-butt first into a backstreet house in Northern Ireland. The first command always made the people inside jump in alarm and we would then scream the second order to freeze them tight.
I froze tight.
The man was silhouetted in the doorway. The sun was bright on the pale lawn behind him while the boathouse was in deep shadow, so I couldn’t see his face; only that he was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with muscle-humped shoulders and a cropped skull. It certainly wasn’t Bannister who faced me. The man carried a double-barrelled shotgun that was pointed at my chest.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He had a harsh and grating voice which clipped his words very short. The accent was born of that bastard offspring of the Dutch language, Afrikaans.
“I’m taking my property,” I said.
“Breaking and entering,” the South African said. “You’re a fucking thief, man. Come here.” He jerked the gun to reinforce his command.
“Why don’t you piss off?” I shouldn’t have been belligerent, not in my weakened state, but I was feeling mad as hell because of what had happened to Sycorax. I stooped to my tender’s bowspring and jerked it off the stainless-steel cleat.
Wildtrack II rocked violently as the man jumped on to her bows.
The movement made me stagger, and I had to clutch the radar arch for support just as he reached over the windscreen with his left hand.
I caught his hand with my own, instinctively trying to unbalance him by hauling him towards me.
I’d forgotten how little strength there was in my legs. I pulled him so far, then my right knee gave way and I staggered back into the tea-chests. The South African laughed and I saw the gun, brass-butt towards me, coming forward.
I was off balance, I could not parry, and the butt thumped like a piledriver into my ribs. I jabbed fingers at his eyes, but my co-ordin-ation was lost. The gun came again, throwing me back, then he contemptuously reached for my jacket to haul me out of the speedboat’s cockpit.
I heard myself scream as he scraped my spine over the windscreen’s top edge. I hit at him, and he must have found that amusing for he gave an oddly feminine, high-pitched chuckle before he threw me like offal on to the dock. I sprawled on my own sailbags which were not soft enough to prevent the pain forking down my legs like blazing phosphorus. The gun slammed down again into my ribs.
He stood over me and, confident that I had been battered into submission, discarded the gun. “Get up,” he said curtly.
“Listen, you bastard…” I tried to push myself upright, but the pain in my spine struck like a bullet and I gasped and fell again.
I had been going to insist, not necessarily politely, that the South African help me remove my property from the boathouse, but the pain was gagging me.
He must have been worried by my twitching and gasping body.
“Get up!” he paused. “You’re faking it, fairy.” There was worry in his voice. “You’re not hurt, man. I hardly touched you.” He was trying to convince himself.
He must have leaned down to me, because I remember his hands under my shoulders, and I remember him yanking me upright. He let go of me and I tried to put my weight on to my right leg, but it buckled like jelly. I fell again, and this time my wounded back must have speared down on to the upturned fluke of the fisherman’s anchor.
And I screamed myself into blessed unconsciousness.
When I woke up I could see a cream-coloured ceiling. There was no hairline crack, instead there were two brilliant fluorescent tubes which were switched on even though daylight seemed to be coming from a big window to my right. I could hear the pip of a cardiograph.
To my left there was a chrome stand with a saline drip suspended from its hook. There was a tube in my left nostril that went thick and gagging down my windpipe. Two earnest faces were bent over the bed. One was framed in a nurse’s white hat, the other belonged to a doctor who had a stethoscope at my chest.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Don’t talk.” The doctor unhooked the stethoscope and began to feel my ribs.