TBB: Chapter Eight
Mar. 13th, 2011 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caulkhead"Hello? Hi! Excuse me, but do you know a Marjorie Jameson?"
Servicing the winch had absorbed all Christine's attention. The girl on the quayside must have been trying to attract her notice for some time. Christine looked up, squinting against the sun.
"Marjorie Henderson as was? Yes, of course. Look, come aboard."
The girl made short work of the rusty, weed-hung ladder, dropping lightly onto the coach roof and moving aft with delicate care to avoid disturbing the winch's innards spread out on a towel on the cockpit seat.
"Thank goodness. Mrs Jameson said she thought your boat was a Nic 48, but she didn't seem all that sure. You must be Christine Dixon?" She extended a hand; fine-boned and narrow, but surprisingly firm when she shook. "Shusha Victor. But please call me Sue."
"Nice of you to look us up. And how is Marjorie? Is she starting to get over that terrible business with Julian?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean – that is, I don't actually know Mrs Jameson – I mean, she's sort of a friend of a friend – but she rang and said you were stuck in the Canaries looking for extra crew. Something about insurance?"
"Yes, worse luck. The policy insists on at least three people for the transatlantic leg. We've known plenty of people who've done it with just two – but when we rang up to get the policy changed the company dug its heels in and started making ludicrous comments about our ages and our having no qualifications. So, of course, Derek told them to Hell with all these stupid bits of paper, he'd done his first Fastnet in 1963 –"
"Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP?"
"Some of us bought the Beatles' first LP, young lady. In fact, the way the stock markets are going, it's probably the nearest thing I've got to a pension plan. But, yes, it did rather confirm the insurance company's view that we were a pair of mad old crinklies tottering recklessly to our graves.”
“So, about the crewing, then,” Sue said. “There's a couple of things I need to tell you.”
“Well, no need to rush things. Tell you what, I've had quite enough of this winch for the moment. Let's talk about it in a bit more comfort. Drink?"
"If you're having one," Sue said demurely.
"Never ship a lemonade man aboard a gin-and-tonic vessel," her father had always said. Regardless of the disembowelled winch and the other maintenance jobs on hand, Christine poured them each a good stiff one. Sue took an appreciative sip and curled up against the pushpit; her sudden relaxation made Christine realise how tense she must have been, before.
She really wants to sail with us. I wonder why?
Christine passed in mental review the parade of incompetents, self-important tossers and stoners (admittedly, it wasn't just for the sake of the cricket that they were planning to make their first land-fall in Barbados, but there was a time and a place for everything, and when trying to impress a cruising skipper with your competence emphatically wasn't it) who'd responded to their increasingly desperate postings on the crewsearch bulletin boards.
This one was, at least, clean, well-spoken and capable of distinguishing a Nic 48 from a bunch of other vessels of similar age and type. And she'd already survived an initial telephone call with Marjorie, who'd always been an excellent judge of character – with the exception, obviously, of Julian, but then that wasn't fair; they'd all been charmed by him.
As if by telepathy, at that moment Sue said tentatively, "Um – you mentioned 'that terrible business with Julian'. Not to be nosy, or anything, but – um – would it be fair to assume it involved someone dying rather unpleasantly?"
"You haven't heard of it? The tabloids seemed to be crawling over everywhere for months. After all, it isn't every day the Coastguard gets an anonymous tip-off that a sailing club's vice-commodore is about to leave port in the committee boat with a weighted sack full of dismembered human remains."
"Golly. Whose were they?"
"The commodore and his wife." Christine grimaced. "So much for Yachting Monthly, eh? They'd called it 'the friendliest club on the South Coast' two months before this all blew up."
She took a deep, reviving swallow of her gin. Neither she nor Derek were sailing club types; and the sailing clubs had returned the compliment. They hadn't, fortunately, known the people involved at all well. Apart, of course, from Marjorie. Despite the sun's heat she shivered, recalling that day in Winchester Crown Court's public gallery (friendliest club on the South Coast, my eye! Not one of the members had shown up to support either the Julian, the defendant, or his wife – who, not coincidentally, happened to be the chief witness for the prosecution).
"Poor Marjorie got caught right in the thick of it. The commodore and his wife were supposed to have gone on a long cruise for Ireland three days earlier – they'd all had a meal together the evening before they were due to leave, then Julian went down to the marina to help them load up their boat for the trip."
Christine grimaced. "They were never seen alive again. The police eventually found the boat on a pontoon up the Medina – of course, no-one bothered looking until the bodies turned up. Julian hadn't come home that night but, as we found out afterwards, Marjorie wasn't all that surprised. He'd had a girl on the side in Burslesdon for months."
"Only, the next day, she had to go into Southampton unexpectedly, and happened to glimpse Julian coming off the hi-speed ferry from Cowes in full oilies. And that got her thinking. And digging about at home, hacking into his computer, looking into his finances, the Club finances, that sort of thing. Getting more and more worried. But she daren't go to the police. As it turned out later, she'd already had – a bit too much experience of the police believing Julian, not her."
Sue leant forward across the cockpit, her eyes wide, her clear-skinned, unlined face nevertheless shadowed, haunted. Some trouble there, no doubt of it. Is she running away from some abusive man? Poor kid, if so.
"So what happened?" Sue asked.
"Oh, I discovered afterwards she'd found someone on the internet who could help her. Who believed her." Christine smiled a little, remembering the beautiful young man sitting beside her in the public gallery, favouring both Julian and his advocate with glances of such withering contempt ("And precisely which rock did you crawl out from?") that it more than once caused the defence to stumble in its attack. And watching him, after the jury had unanimously found Julian guilty, walking away with the Scotland Yard inspector who'd presented the case for the prosecution.
Sue leaned forward, murmuring something ("I would have done that" or, perhaps, "I should have done that") but at that moment the boat gave a slight lurch. Christine looked up to see Derek stepping from the ladder to the coach-roof, followed by a dark-haired, thin-faced young man in sawn off jeans, flip-flops and carrying a Kevlar duffle-bag.
"Chris! This young man here wants to sail with us. Grandmother runs a charter business out of English Harbour, Antigua. What do you think?"
"Oh, but –" She ground to an awkward halt. She could hardly tell Derek that the place was taken – not in front of both candidates, and not without having made sure he, too, thought he could get on with Sue for a month-long trip.
Sue saved her, looking up at the young man and grinning.
"So you did finally make it out here?" She turned to Christine. "May I introduce my brother Tim? I got sidetracked before I got round to mentioning him, but Mrs Jameson thought, if we did both manage to arrive before you had to leave, you might have space for the two of us. After all, it's not as if we'd mind hot-bunking; we've done it enough times. But – look – why don't we leave you to think about it? We'll be in Los Gatos, just at the top of the harbour. Don't feel you have to hurry about anything. After all, I haven't seen my big brother in ages. "
They did, after all, take some time. It included a Skype call to Marjorie ("Yes, of course. Nice girl. Friend of mine put us in touch. Some sort of tragedy. Car crash, I think, in the States. Someone died. Said it made her think, about who she really was and what she really wanted. Don't know a lot about the brother – Whitehall, I think. Or was it the City? Oxbridge, anyway. Supposed to be taking a career break – yes, I know. Redundant, I expect. Lot of it about. But you could do a lot worse.").
That had led to a second call, at Marjorie's instigation ("If it bothers you, I can let you have my friend's number – you'll perhaps remember him, from that ghastly business last year? I saw you two sitting next to each other. Anyway, he might be able to give you more details – I only know Sue to talk to.")
Christine had been amused to discover the beautiful young man possessed a voice even more enthralling than his looks. And, from what she'd seen in court, if there had been anything to know about Sue, he'd have known it. And it couldn't be too bad, since he'd suggested her in the first place. Marjorie, of course, had good reason to trust him, and – Julian always excepted – they both trusted her instincts.
So, if the conversation hadn't been as informative as she might have hoped – well, she wasn't going to blame a man for keeping a girl's confidence. After all, if Sue did come aboard, there was nothing like night watches for teasing out secrets. No doubt, it would turn out to be something and nothing; one learned with advancing age that the things one had agonized about so much in one's twenties dwindled into insignificance once viewed from the other end of the telescope.
So then, more gin and a good bit of arguing. Still, Christine never had any real doubt of the outcome. Nor, she suspected, did Derek. In less than three months the Caribbean would be in the heart of the hurricane season. After the next six weeks, outliers could not be ruled out. They should have left port a fortnight ago. Bugger overcautious insurance companies!
They walked into the little bar to see the brother and sister engaged in an intense discussion. They looked up; half-guilty, half-worried. But the essential openness of Sue's nature was still visible in her smile, no matter what secrets she had to hide, and any brother she was so glad to see couldn't be entirely a bad sort.
Derek looked at them both, and beamed. "Cava all round, I think. We sail tomorrow. I give you a toast: Serenity and all who sail in her."
Bizarre break-in baffles cops
Police are appealing to the public to come forward with information about a break-in at Manchester's Working Class Movement Library (WCML) last night, in which a gun was fired and the library vandalised.
The break-in appears to have taken place in the early hours of the morning. “There was a window broken when we came in, and a strong smell of gunpowder. The books were taken off the shelves and scattered around the floor. The mess is appalling,” said librarian Shirin Hirsch. “We do have several valuable volumes in the library, but as far as we can tell, nothing has been taken.”
Police are investigating the possibility that the burglars were disturbed before they could complete the robbery. Alternative theories include a student prank, a protest against library closures, and an attempt to remove compromising information about members of the previous Government.
Well-known consulting detective Sherlock Holmes told the MEN that the solution was “perfectly obvious to anyone with half a brain,” but declined to give further details.
The investigating officer was unavailable for comment.
Train Passengers in Mass River Suicide Plunge
Leeds commuters are reeling in shock following a spontaneous mass suicide bid by some 10-15 men who, without warning, left Leeds Central Station and plunged into the icy River Aire nearby. CCTV footage shows all the men to have been in the vicinity of platforms 14, 15 or 16 or on the flybridge linking these platforms when the Transpennine Express arrived from Manchester. Within fifteen minutes all the men were in the river.
No connection between the men has been established and no motive for this tragic and bewildering sequence of events has been established.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-18 04:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-30 04:44 am (UTC)And that last article is a real groaner. ;-P