‘Yes. Someone’s taken your car.’ He looked bewildered, but the whole afternoon must have seemed so unbelievable to him that hopping into a boat would seem to be all of a piece. In any case, he made feeble efforts to help me get him to his left foot, and with my almost total support he made the few hops to reach the boat, though I could see it hurt him sorely. I helped him sit down on the one centre thwart and arranged his legs as comfortably as possible, Harry cursing and wincing by turns.
‘Hang on tight to the sides,’ I said. ‘Tight.’
‘Yes.’
He didn’t move, so I pulled his hands out and positioned them on the boat’s edges.
‘Grip,’ I said fiercely.
‘Fine.’ His voice was vague, but his hands tightened.
I tugged and lugged the dinghy until it was sliding backwards down the bank, and then held on to the painter, digging my heels in, leaning back to prevent too fast and splashy a launch. At the last minute, when the stern hit the swollen water and the dinghy’s progress flattened out, I jumped in myself and simply hoped against all reasonable hope that we wouldn’t sink at once.
We didn’t. The current took the dinghy immediately and started it on its way downstream, and I edged past Harry into the stern space behind him and retrieved my piece of pole.
‘What’s that?’ Harry asked weakly, trying to make sense of things.
‘Rudder.’
‘Oh.’
I made a crook of my left elbow on the back of the boat and laid the pole across it, the shorter end in my right hand, the longer end trailing behind in the water. The steering was rudimentary, but enough to keep us travelling bow-first downstream.
Some of the traps described how to arrange for the prey to fall through seemingly firm ground into a pit full of spikes beneath.
Everyone had read the guides.
‘John?’ Harry said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Maidenhead, possibly. I’m not quite sure.’
‘I’m bloody cold.’
There was some water in the boat now, sloshing about under our feet.
Shit.
Nowhere on the Thames was far from civilisation, not even Sam’s boatyard. The wide river narrowed abruptly with a notice on our left saying DANGER in huge letters, and a smaller notice saying LOCK with an arrow to the right.
I steered the dinghy powerfully to the right. DANGER led to a weir. A lock would do just fine. Locks had keepers.
At about then I took note that there weren’t in fact any other boats moving on the river and I remembered that often the locks closed for maintenance in winter and maybe the lock-keeper would have gone shopping...
Never mind. There were houses in sight on the right.
They proved to be summer cottages, all closed.
We floated on as if in a timeless limbo. The water in the bottom of the boat grew deeper. The current, away from the mainstream, was much weaker. The lock cut seemed to last for ever, narrowing though, with high dark trees on the left; finally, blessedly, on the right, there were moorings for boats wanting passage through the lock to the lower level of the river below. No boats there, of course. No helping hands. Never mind.
I took the dinghy as far as we could go, right up near to the lock gates. Tied the painter to a mooring post and stepped up out of the boat.
‘Won’t be long,’ I told Harry.
He nodded merely. It was all too much.
I climbed the steps up onto the lock and knocked on the door of the lock-keeper’s house, and through great good fortune found him at home. A lean man: kind eyes.
‘Fell in the river, did you?’ he asked cheerfully, observing my soaked state. ‘Want to use the phone?’
I went with Harry in the ambulance to Maidenhead hospital, both of us swathed in blankets, Harry also in a foil-lined padded wrap used for hypothermia cases; and from then on it was a matter of phoning and reassuring Fiona and waiting to see the extent of Harry’s injuries, which proved to be a pierced calf, entry and exit wounds both clean and clotted, with no dreadful damage in between.
While Fiona was still on her way the medics stuffed Harry full of antibiotics and other palliatives and put stitches where they were needed, and by the time she’d wept briefly in my arms he was warm and responding nicely in a recovery room somewhere.
‘But why,’ she asked, half cross, half mystified, ‘did he go to Sam’s boatyard in the first place?’ Like a mother scolding her lost child, I thought, after he’s come back safe: just like Perkin with Mackie.
‘He’ll tell you about it,’ I said. ‘They say he’s doing fine.’
‘You’re damp!’ She disengaged herself and held me at arms’ length. ‘Did you fall through the floor too?’
‘Sort of.’ The hospital’s central heating had been doing a fine job of drying everything on me and I felt like one of those old-fashioned clothes-horses, steaming slightly in warm air. Still no shoes or boots; couldn’t be helped.
Fiona looked at my feet dubiously.
