Caroline Minuscule (20 page)

Once Primrose had been brought to see that acceptance was more gentlemanly than refusal, the matter was quickly settled. Amanda schooled him in what he had to do – parking the Mini, posting its keys and a postal order to the hire firm, hiring another car in his own name and going to the bank – while Dougal went upstairs to wrap up the diamonds and count out the cash.

He begged materials from Philip and constructed a misleadingly shaped package of cardboard and brown paper, secured with string and several yards of Sellotape. It remained to write a brief covering letter to the bank. They decided to use Philip's local branch for simplicity's sake. Dougal requested two keys for the safe deposit box and enclosed specimen signatures from himself and Amanda.

Primrose left the house in a flurry of excitement. The collar of his overcoat was turned up and he insisted on wearing a muffler which obscured most of his face.

The house was secure and tranquil without Primrose in one or other of its rooms. They had some Shreddies in the kitchen, feeling too lazy to cook breakfast. Amanda questioned him about Malcolm's boat, the potential refuge which had occurred to Dougal over the first cigarette of the day.

The
Sally-Anne
was more than Malcolm's boat; it was his home and his livelihood. He lived on it for eight or nine of the warmer months of the year, financing a leisurely outdoor life for himself by importing hash from Holland. He kept clear of its distribution and relied on a few trustworthy black market contacts at either end of the operation.

Last summer, one of his most reliable Amsterdam connections had asked him, as a personal and extremely well-paid favour, to deliver half a pound of cocaine to what Malcolm described as the Fortnum and Mason of British dealers. The consignment was urgent and he flew from Amsterdam to Heathrow with it. There he was unlucky – he fell foul of a spot check by customs officers on the green, nothing to declare channel.

In October a judge, who was shocked to find that Malcolm had been an undistinguished junior member of his own Cambridge college, called him a sore on the body politic and sentenced him to twelve months' imprisonment.

Dougal had promised to keep an eye on the
Sally-Anne
in her owner's absence. The boat was moored in Suffolk, in the Alben estuary, one of five fingers of the North Sea which dig deep into the East Anglian coast, as if a large and powerful child had spread his hand and gouged the earth out in a fit of absentmindedness.

The responsibility was not an arduous one. Every month or so, Dougal would go down to pump out the bilges and turn the engine over. So far, he had kept these visits brief; he was an amateur among amateur sailors at the best of times and, though he enjoyed boats of all types, he preferred to enjoy them with people who knew what they were doing. Nor did winter encourage nautical experiments – Dougal had once accompanied Malcolm on a trip up to Lowestoft in November and had spent most of the voyage convinced he had frostbite.

But now the
Sally-Anne
seemed the most attractive object in the world. The loneliness of the mooring and its approaches was ideal. There would be few people on the river at this time of year; and even fewer would be around midweek.

There were other advantages besides privacy. If Lee had little experience of small boats, he would face all the physical difficulties of an unfamiliar element – the cramped space, the constant shifting of a small boat in water and an ignorance of what might be used against him as a weapon. If Lee tried to rush them with overwhelming force, they would have an infinitely extendable moat between them and him. You can't follow a boat in a car.

If they did succeed in getting rid of – the euphemism still came more easily to his mind – Lee, the
Sally-Anne
gave them a good chance to dispose of the corpse. A weight would take it to the bottom and an ebb tide would sweep it out into the chilly depths of the North Sea.

It was odd how trifles could be important at a time like this. In the middle of planning a murder, Dougal found himself feeling smugly virtuous at the thought that visiting the
Sally-Anne
would have the additional benefit of allowing himself to discharge his obligation to Malcolm. He hadn't been down to the boat since the week before Christmas and had been beginning to feel slightly guilty.

In theory, the one problem remaining was the method of killing Lee. It would have to be done cleanly – it would be awkward to have Lee's blood spattered over the saloon, for example. And God knew what Malcolm would say if he found his beloved home had been doubling as an abattoir in his absence.

Straightforward poisoning would be simplest. But where would they get the poison? And how could they find a way of introducing it into Lee's system? The man could hardly be expected to ask for a cup of cocoa to keep out the cold.

Using knives was a possibility: Lee would not be able to prevent one of them getting behind him. The tidy, fairly bloodless nature of Cedric's death had impressed Dougal, but it had been due to luck alone. Sticking a knife in some nonvital part of Lee's body would only outrage him and in any case there might be an uncontrollable spurt of blood.

They could not hope to obtain a gun unobtrusively. On the whole Dougal favoured a blunt instrument. There was a tool kit aboard the
Sally-Anne
which included a monkey wrench and a large spanner. They could always buy a couple of knives in case anything went wrong. Or to use for the
coup de grâce
once Lee had been safely stunned.

Discussing the details of Lee's forthcoming death gave the entire plan a welcome unreality. Concentrating on physical details – knives, spanners and so on – blurred the outline of what they were actually planning to do. Dougal wondered if soldiers on the eve of an offensive forgot the possibility of deaths, their own included, in the mundane rituals of cleaning weapons and studying maps. His father must have done the same thing dozens of times. Once the initial decision was taken – whatever one's reason for it – the process of trying to destroy somebody acquired an irresistible momentum of its own.

Assuming it was irresistible. And that they didn't meet the immovable object.

The rest of the morning and most of the afternoon must have passed in the usual way, one after the other, but Dougal found afterwards that his memories of the period were incomplete and jumbled. It was as if a cinefilm had been reduced to a few clips and stills.

Philip came back to the house with a bright yellow Ford Escort, his various missions successfully accomplished, radiating a certain coy smugness. Amanda cut him short when he was trying to render an exact account of his stewardship, down to the last half pee. Amanda was notoriously uninterested in financial details, but Primrose didn't know this, and his mouth drooped like that of a reprimanded child.

About an hour after that – it must have been around two o'clock – Dougal and Amanda left Cambridge. Amanda pecked Philip on the cheek as she said goodbye, returning his self-esteem to him as quickly as she had removed it.

Amanda drove them down to Ipswich on the A45. Dougal dozed for most of the journey, vivid and uncomfortable dreams about nothing in particular, except they all shared the hypnotic whine of the car's engine and the rushing movement of air. His head kept dropping down on his chest and swaying painfully against the window.

Amanda parked in a side street in Ipswich. Dougal woke up sharply when she turned the engine off. They spent half an hour rushing round shops. Neither of them had a clear idea of what they needed. Amanda thought Dougal should have been making a list in the car instead of sleeping and said so. Uncertainty about the length of their stay on the
Sally-Anne
didn't help. They acquired three carrier bags and filled them with a variety of tins and bottles. Dougal bought a bottle of brandy in the vague belief that it would be the right thing to drink during an emergency.

They passed an ironmonger's and Amanda remembered they needed knives. Their choice fell on a model with a slender blade about eight inches long. Dougal felt they should be signing a pointed instruments' equivalent to the poisons' book; the knives were purpose-built for murder. They were served by a stooping man with grey and greasy hair in a grey and greasy coat, who merely expressed surprise that they were buying the most expensive knives in the shop. He was not a natural salesman. Amanda said firmly that they were for a friend's wedding present and they wanted the very best. ‘Don't say I didn't warn you,' he replied mysteriously.

Dougal grew happier and more alert as they left the anonymous outskirts of Ipswich behind them. They drove up the A12 towards Woodbridge. It was growing dark now, and when they turned right into a B road leading to Albenham, the evening closed around them with a rush. The land on either side became flatter and bleaker, the temperature seemed to drop perceptibly.

‘Where the hell are we?' asked Amanda irritably.

‘Somewhere south of the Deben estuary and north of the Alben. Not far now. When you get through this village, take the next right. There's no point in going through Albenham itself.'

After a mile on a lane which had evidently been designed with tanks or tractors in mind, during which they met no traffic, which was just as well as there wouldn't have been room for two vehicles abreast on the road, they reached the entrance of the drive of Havishall Place. A roofless lodge cottage marked the spot.

Amanda inched the Escort into the drive and drove slowly along its uneven surface. ‘Only another half mile,' Dougal told her.

‘Shit.'

The grounds of Havishall Place included the creek where Malcolm kept the
Sally-Anne
. The house itself was a substantial but plain Edwardian building which had been derelict since a fire had gutted its interior just after the war. Both house and land were owned by a prosperous builder in Albenham, who planned to turn the site into a marina when funds and planning permission were forthcoming. In the meantime he had leased the mooring to Malcolm, and the handful of fields which went with the house to a neighbouring farmer.

The stable yard had hardly been touched by the fire. The roof of the coach house was intact and Malcolm left his car there when he was on the
Sally-Anne,
and a bundle of oars, sails, rowlocks and miscellaneous essentials when he wasn't. A footpath led across a couple of fields to the creek.

They left the car in the coach house and spent an irritable ten minutes (‘
Why
didn't you bring a torch?') getting Malcolm's bundle down from the rafters, collecting the shopping and extracting from their luggage anything which wouldn't be useful on the boat. Dougal realized, but decided not to mention it to Amanda, that what they had packed for a winter weekend in a country hotel might not be altogether appropriate for a few days on the
Sally-Anne
.

They would have to make two journeys. Dougal shouldered Malcolm's bundle and led the way down the path. It was muddy underfoot, and he could hear Amanda swearing softly to herself.

At the end of the second field, they had to clamber over a stile. Dougal politely went first. As he stood with one leg on each side, he caught his first sight of the graceful outlines of the
Sally-Anne,
riding at her mooring fifty yards away.

He was glad they had got there before the light had entirely faded. It looked as if the boat was floating on a sea of grey ink.

Amanda nudged him. ‘Come on. I'm freezing.'

D
ougal had always identified boats with people, usually females. Punts, for example, reminded him of the squat, black-browed bedmaker who occasionally did his room during his first year at Cambridge. The
Sally-Anne,
however, suggested a lady in reduced circumstances from the provinces; she was elderly and dowdy, but possessed an in-built individuality; she was quiet, quirky and reliable.

She was a gaff-cutter of clinker construction, dating from the thirties. White's of Brightlingsea had built her for the son of the beer baron who owned Havishall Place at that time. When he died ten years ago, the boat was put up for sale and Malcolm abused his credit to buy her.

Dougal, then sharing lodgings in Cambridge with Malcolm, had absorbed the
Sally-Anne
's history, specifications and qualities through constant exposure to them. Sometimes he suspected he knew more about the boat than he knew about Malcolm.

Malcolm found the
Sally-Anne
ideal for his purposes. She was twenty-six feet long and held four berths: sturdy enough for the North Sea and small enough for him to handle by himself. Three years ago he had replaced the elderly Stewart-Turner petrol engine with a more reliable Volvo Penta. Dougal knew he would have to use the diesel engine if they left the mooring – he mistrusted his ability to manage the
Sally-Anne
under sail, particularly if there was any sort of wind blowing. It would also be difficult to make a quick getaway: it had taken half an hour to get up the mainsail alone the last time he had tried without Malcolm's assistance. He wished to God he'd invested more effort in learning from Malcolm. It might have been very useful to be able to leave the Alben estuary – if Lee turned up with a small army, for example – and sail away up the coast. The
Sally-Anne
was well equipped with navigational aids, including a Seafix radio direction finder which was Malcolm's especial pride, but Dougal's knowledge of the art of navigation was limited to dim memories about the constellations in the night sky.

These thoughts were chasing through his mind as he and Amanda lifted the
Sally-Anne
's dinghy from the blocks of wood on which it lay near the stile, and staggered with it between them towards the bank of the creek.

The
Sally-Anne
was moored in the middle of a brief cul-de-sac off the main estuary. She lay with her bows towards them, for the tide was beginning to ebb. Fortunately the water was high enough still for them to turn the dinghy and get it into the water without having first to lug it across the grey and greedy mud of the bed of the creek. Dougal, it was true, managed to get his boots and the bottoms of his trousers soaked with the icy water, but Amanda remained reasonably dry-shod. He clambered in and, holding the boat to the bank, told Amanda what to pass to him. They spoke in whispers, which was strange: the twilight and the emptiness of land and water somehow forced them to lower their voices.