Crackdown Read Free Page A

and white light, but, like the white light and the air-warning beacons, the green and white light was also said to be unreliable. The eastern part of the lagoon evidently offered good shelter, but the pilot book noted that the island had no facilities for visiting yachts. In other words, mariners were being warned to keep away from Murder Cay, yet the pencil line on Hirondelle’ s chart led inexorably to that island, and there it had ended.
    “The government decided the old name was bad for the tourist business,” Ellen remarked in an odd sort of voice, almost as if she was trying to reassert a commonplace normality over the sinister implications of that line on an abandoned chart.
    “Perhaps the islanders shot the crew,” I said, but in a voice that carried no conviction for, despite the missing crew and the all-too-present cartridges, I really could not believe that murder had been done on Murder Cay. I did not want to believe in murder. I wanted the boat’s fate, like I wanted life, to be explicable without causing me astonishment. I had been brought up in a house that specialised in giving astonishment, which was why I had run away from home to become a Royal Marine. The Marines had toughened me, and taught me to swear and fight and screw and drink, but they had not taught me cynicism, nor had they obliterated the innocent hope for innocent explanations. “Perhaps,” I amended my previous supposition, “it’s just an accident.”
    “Whatever happened,” Ellen said brusquely, “it’s none of our business.”
    “And Mr Mclllwanney varned us to stay avay from the island!” Thessy said.
    I remembered no such warning, but Thessy went to the shelves under the chart table and found one of Mclllvanney’s green sheets of paper. I hardly ever read Mclllvanney’s self-styled Notices to Mariners, and I had clearly overlooked this warning that was brief and to the point. ‘You will stay away from Sister Island. The Royal Bahamian Defence Forces have issued a warning that the island’s new owners don’t like trespass, and I don’t want to lose any boats to that dislike, so ALL Cutwater Charter Boats will henceforth keep AT LEAST five nautical miles from Sister Island until further notice.’
    I thought of the bullet holes that had shattered Hirondelle’ s once elegant hull. “Those poor bastards,” I said softly.
    “It’s not our business, Nick,” Ellen said in warning.
    I looked again at McIllvanney’s notice. “Do you think the island’s new owners are mixed up in drugs?” I asked.
    Ellen sighed. She is much given to long-suffering sighs which are her way of informing the male part of the world that it is ineradicably dim-witted. “Do you think they smuggle auto-parts, Nick? Or lavatory paper? Of course they’re into drugs, you airhead. And that is why it is not our business.”
    “I never said it was our business,” I spoke defensively.
    “So throw those cartridges overboard and lose that chart,” Ellen advised me very curtly.
    “The police should see them,” I insisted.
    “You are a fool, Nicholas Breakspear,” Ellen said, but not in an unkind manner.
    “I’ve already advised the Defence Forces that the police should look at the boat,” I said.
    Ellen gave another of her long-suffering sighs. “The dragons won, Nick, and the knights errant lost. Don’t you know that? You’ve delivered the message, so now forget it! No chart. No cartridges. It’s over. No heroics!”
    She meant well, but I could not forget Hirondelle, because something evil had stirred in this paradise of beaches and lagoons and palm-covered islands, and I wanted the authorities to take the damp torn chart and to find just what lay at the end of its carefully pencilled line. So I shrugged off Ellen’s cynical and doubtless sensible pleading, and went topsides to take the helm. Wavebreaker’s wake lay white and straight across a brilliant sunlit sea on which, far to our west, I could see a string of grey warships that