Then a horrible thought struck him. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be a boat race, or at least not yet. He pulled off his earphones and leant back to talk to the man from the brewery which was sponsoring the event, and who seemed to know more about it than anybody else. “Excuse me,” he asked, “have they started yet?”
The brewer shook his head. “Not for five minutes,” he said. “Everyone’s just getting into position.”
“Oh.” Danny drove his fingernails into the palm of his hand. “What’s the starting signal, then?”
“They fire off a cannon,” said the brewer. “From that big white yacht.”
“I see,” Danny said. “Which big white yacht?”
The brewer shrugged. “The starter’s yacht, naturally. Shouldn’t you have a camera on it, by the way?”
Danny cast a frantic eye over his bank of monitors. No big white yacht. “Haven’t I?” he said.
“No.”
Danny grabbed the headphones and jammed them on. “Terry!” he shouted. “Stop arsing about and get a shot of the starter’s yacht. Don’t you realise they’ll be starting in five minutes?” Then he switched frequencies as quickly as a rattlesnake. Miraculously, a big white yacht appeared on one of the monitors. It worked!
Danny turned back and smiled at the brewer. “Amateurs!” he explained. The brewer looked at him but said nothing.
“Chris,” Danny was off again, “I can see the seagull, pack it in, will you—Dear God, what’s that?”
On one of the monitors there was the most remarkable ship Danny had ever seen. It wasn’t just another reconstruction of a tea-clipper or overgrown yacht; it was a whacking great galleon, like a pirate ship or something left over from the Armada Year. It was extraordinary.
“Phil,” Danny bellowed, “zoom in, I want a closer look. What is that?”
Phil did what he was told, and Danny could see little men in funny costumes running up and down rope ladders. The ship looked like it was in a bad way; its sails were in rags, and some of the wooden bar things the sails were supposed to hang down from were broken off or dangling precariously from frayed ropes. Surely they weren’t proposing to enter it in the race?
Danny was aware of someone sitting beside him. It was the brewer. He was staring.
“Odd,” he said. “I don’t remember that being on the list of competitors.”
Danny stared too; there was something magnetic about this very old-looking old ship. He tried to think if any film companies were releasing spoof swashbucklers this year, and were trying to crash the race to get coverage. But the ship didn’t look as if it was trying to attract attention to itself; if a ship can have an expression, it was looking more embarrassed than anything else, as it had come to the party wearing the wrong thing. Which it had, at that.
“Phil,” Danny said, “get in closer.”
♦
“All right then,” Vanderdecker shouted, “if any of you bloody intellectuals think you can do any better, you’re welcome to try. Come on, then, who’s going first?” Total silence. “Right then, let’s have a bit less of it from now on.”
Righteous indignation is a useful thing; it was galvanising Vanderdecker into an uncharacteristically assertive display of authority at a time when, left to himself, he would be curled up in his cabin wishing it would all go away. But, because the crew were all muttering about him and calling him names behind his back, in spite of the fact that he had managed a quite spectacular feat of seamanship in just getting his shattered ship this far, here he was, doing his best. It probably wasn’t going to be good enough, but that was just too bad.
They had started shipping water badly just off the Isle of Wight, and soon after that it was clear to Vanderdecker that he was going to have to be very clever and even more lucky to get this miserable remnant of a sailing-ship to Bridport in one piece. There would be no time to lie up and sidle into their usual sheltered and discreet cove under cover of darkness; they were going to have to go in in broad daylight, and the hell with it. That’s if they could get that far. For the last six hours it had been touch and go, and Vanderdecker had amazed himself with his own brilliant resourcefulness and skill in managing to cope. Nobody else was impressed, of course; they all seemed convinced that it had been his fault to start with. But that couldn’t be helped.
Vanderdecker had groaned out loud when he saw all the ships in West Bay; there was no way they could make themselves inconspicuous now. So far they hadn’t been intercepted, but it couldn’t last. He had considered not using the deodorizing water from Dounreay, so that the smell would keep them at bay, but he recognised that that would cause more problems than it would solve. Better to get it over with.
♦
Danny Bennet got up from his place in front of the monitors. He felt that peculiar tingling at the base of his skull that meant “story”.
“Julian,” he said, “I’m just popping out for a minute. Film the race for me, will you?”
Julian said something, but Danny chose not to hear it. Partial deafness ran in his family. The brewer got up too.
