“Did you kill his wife?”
“No!”
“You are a bastard, Fanny.” I managed to kneel upright and un-shackle his lifeline from a D-ring. He watched me, not sure whether I intended to push him overboard or save his life. I grabbed a braidline rope out of the tangle of wreckage in the cockpit and pulled forty or fifty feet free before the line jammed. “Knife!” I shouted over the sound of wind and sea. “Give me your knife!” He handed me a sheath knife which I supposed had been the murder weapon. I used the heavy blade to slash off the length of braidline, then clung to the handrail as another sea hissed about us.
I tied a small bowline, then shackled the line of Mulder’s safety harness to the bowline’s loop. The other end of the rope went round my waist. Once Angela returned I would scramble on board Sycorax, then haul Mulder to safety. I explained that to him. “It’s going to hurt you,” I added, “but if you want to drown, then cut yourself loose.” I tossed the knife back to him, then pulled myself to the lee rail.
I stood there, clinging for dear life to the guardrail stanchion, and willed my right leg to take my weight. I searched the broken sea for a glimpse of Sycorax. Wildtrack rolled slow as we were washed by a wavecrest, then we dropped again and I thought, just as I lurched with the downwards roll, that I saw a mast’s tip beyond a saw-edged crest. I waited, I prayed, and a moment later, as once more we heaved slowly upwards, I saw Sycorax’s stern with its bright flash of the frayed Red Ensign. I knew Angela must be struggling to turn the old boat. She was already a quarter-mile off and I hoped to God she did not lose sight of us. I looked for a boathook, or oar, or anything that I could jam upright as a signal for her, but anything of use had long been swept overboard.
I crouched back into the small shelter of the aft cockpit. “You’re going to have to wait, Fanny.”
“Who’s sailing your boat?”
“A friend,” I said.
Mulder shrugged. He looked worn down to his last reserves; grey-faced, red-rimmed eyes, and with pain creasing his cheeks. “They lost us in the night,” he said.
“Who lost you?”
“Kassouli. Who do you think?”
Who else? I should have known that Yassir Kassouli would be here at the kill. I clung to the handrail as a sea thundered and crashed over the coaming. I thought for a second that the waterlogged hull was sinking, dragged down by the weight of her engine and ballast, but somehow the sleek hull came up again. I found a length of rope that I wrapped as a crude bandage around my cut hand.
“If Kassouli finds you here,” Mulder said, “he’ll bloody sink you, Sandman.”
“He’s deserted you, Fanny. He’s left you here to die.” Down in the wave troughs the wind’s noise was lessened, though I still had to shout if Mulder was to hear my words. “He’s left you, Fanny, but I’m going to save your miserable life. I’m taking you to where I can stand up in a courtroom and tell them about Bannister and his cut throat.”
The South African stared at me with loathing, then shook his head.
“Kassouli won’t desert me.”
“He already has.” I flinched from another tumble of water, then pulled myself upright to search the southern horizon. Sycorax had turned, but she was still far off and I prayed that Angela was not having trouble with the engine. There were no other boats in sight.
A gasp of pain made me turn. Mulder, the knife in his hand, had tried to lunge towards me, but a combination of his broken leg and the obstruction of his inflated lifejacket had stopped the murderous thrust. It seemed he really did believe that Kassouli would return for him, and that it was better to risk waiting for that salvation than to be turned over to justice. In that hope he had lunged at me, and now I kicked at the knife in his hand to stop him trying again.
My kick missed, and once again the effort toppled me. My bandaged left hand slipped off the handrail so that I fell forward towards Mulder. I tried to regain my balance, but only managed to drop my right knee on to the thigh of Mulder’s broken leg.
He screamed, and the sound was whipped away by the wind and searing foam. Wildtrack heaved up as I collapsed. Mulder was still moaning with the pain, but the strength of the man was extraordinary. He wrapped his left arm round my neck, and I knew he was reversing the knife in his right hand and that any second the blade would be in my ribs. Water sloshed up about us.
I rammed my head forward, smashing the bridge of his nose with my forehead, then I screamed myself from the pain that clawed at my back as I twisted away from him. I glimpsed the knife against a background of water and I reached for it with both hands and my right caught his wrist as my left was slashed by the blade. I jerked his knife hand towards me, then sank my teeth into the ball of his thumb and bit down until I could taste his blood in the back of my throat.
His hand tried to jerk away, but I clung to him. He hit me with his free hand, then tried to loop his lifeline about my neck. I was kicking with my left foot; not in any attempt to hurt him, but rather to gain a purchase in the flooded cockpit. The lifeline rope was around my eyes and he hauled it back, making me let go with my teeth. Then my left foot rammed against the coaming and I used all my strength to force myself up, dripping and bleeding. I let go of his knife hand and drove my bunched fists down, falling with all my weight on them, down on to the broken bone in his shin.
I hit him like a pile-driver, and the force of my blow was made worse by an upward lurch of the boat. I fancied I felt the broken bone grate as I hit him.
He screamed and twitched, the knife forgotten. I plucked it from his nerveless fingers. I could never have disarmed him if he had not been so weakened, but now, because of his leg, and because he was half dead with exposure and thirst, he could not fight properly. I saw blood on his face, then the sea washed it away and I was scrambling desperately backwards, the knife in my hand, and I jammed myself in the corner of the cockpit by the wheel and held my breath to let the pain ebb away.
Mulder had given up. He lay exhausted and hopeless. I struggled upright, still holding the knife, and saw the spray bursting apart from Sycorax’s bows. Angela was fighting towards us, still four hundred yards off, and still struggling against wind and sea. The storm jib was now nothing but tattered streamers.
I put my left foot against Mulder’s broken leg. “Now,” I said,
“you’re going to tell me what happened.”
“Piss off.” He would be defiant to the end, stubborn as a cornered and wounded boar.
I felt no remorse for the pain I would give him. He’d tried to kill me, now I would take the truth from him and one day give it back in a court of law. I slammed my heel forward.
When he stopped screaming I asked him again, and this time, because I still threatened and had proved that I would use pain, he told me of Kassouli’s revenge. The story came slowly, and I had to tease it out of him between the slashing assaults of the breaking waves.
Mulder, obedient to his paymaster, had brought Wildtrack to this waste place in the ocean where, two nights before and under the cover of the night watch, Mulder had sheared a port shroud. He had sabotaged a shroud before, trying to cast suspicion on me, and he had known that as soon as he put weight on the shroud the mast would bend and break. He had gone aft, tacked ship, and let the chaos overtake the long hull. The crew had tumbled up from their bunks to find disaster and salvation.
The salvation was Kerak, the supertanker. A Kassouli ship that had loomed with blazing lights from the darkness, and I imagined the terror Bannister must have felt when he heard, on the radio, the identity of the ship that had so fortuitously appeared.