Dead Tomorrow Read Free

could remember. He listened fondly to the rumble of the idling engine now, deciding that he could hear a bit of tappet noise, that he would need to take the cylinder head off on his next leave and make some adjustments.
    ‘You OK?’ Jane asked.
    ‘Me? Yep. Absolutely.’
    It was a fine morning, crisp blue sky, no wind, the sea flat as a millpond. After the late autumn storms that had made his last spell on board pretty grim, theweather was set fair, at least for today. It would be chilly, but glorious.
    ‘Are you going to miss me?’
    He wormed his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze. ‘Madly.’
    ‘Liar!’
    He kissed her. ‘I miss you every second I’m away from you.’
    ‘Bullshit!’
    He kissed her again.
    As the lights turned to green, she depressed the clutch, crunched the gear lever into first and accelerated down the incline.
    ‘It’s really hard to compete against a ship,’ she said.
    He grinned. ‘That was a great bonk this morning.’
    ‘It had better last you.’
    ‘It will.’
    They turned left, driving round the end of the Hove Lagoon, a pair of artificial lakes where people could take out rowing boats, have windsurfing lessons and sail model ships. Ahead of them, adjoining the eastern perimeter of the harbour, was a private street of white, Moorish-styled beachfront houses where rich celebrities, including Heather Mills and Fatboy Slim, had homes.
    The salt in the air was stronger now, with the sulphurous reeks of the harbour, and the smells of oil, rope, tar, paint and coal.
    Shoreham Harbour, at the western extremity of the city of Brighton and Hove, consisted of a mile-long basin, lined with timber yards, warehouses, bunkering stations and aggregate depots on both sides, as well as yacht marinas and a scattering of private houses and flats. It had once been a busy trading port, but the advent of increasingly large container ships, too big for this harbour, had changedits character.
    Tankers, smaller cargo vessels and fishing boats still made constant use of it, but much of the traffic consisted of commercial dredgers, like his own ship, mining the seabed for gravel and sand to sell as aggregate to the construction industry.
    ‘What have you got on in the next three weeks?’ he asked.
    Trusting the wives they left behind was an issue for all sailors. When he had first started in the Royal Navy he’d been told that the wives of some mariners used to stick a packet of OMO washing powder in their front windows when their husbands were away on a tour of duty. It signalled Old Man Overseas .
    ‘Jemma’s nativity play, which you’ll just miss,’ she answered. ‘And Amy breaks up in a fortnight. I’ll have her moping around the house.’
    Amy was Jane’s eleven-year-old by her first marriage. Mal got on fine with her, although there was always an invisible barrier between them. Jemma was the six-year-old daughter they had together, with whom he was much closer. She was so affectionate, so bright, such a positive little person. A complete contrast to his own strange, remote and sickly daughter by his first marriage, whom he was fond of but had never really connected to, despite all his efforts. He was gutted that he would be missing Jemma playing the Virgin Mary, but was long used to the family sacrifices that his chosen career entailed. It had been a major contributing factor to his divorce from his first wife, and something he still thought about constantly.
    He looked at Jane as she drove, turning right past the houses into the long, straight road along the south side of the harbour basin, going almost deliberately slowlynow as if eking out her last minutes with him. Feisty but so lovely, with her short bob of red hair and her pert snub nose, she was wearing a leather jacket over a white T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. There was such a difference between the two women. Jane, who was a therapist specializing in phobias, told him that she liked her independence, loved the fact that she