Flying Dutch Tom Holt Read online

  Chris replied that he could hear him perfectly well, thank you.

  ‘Chris,’ Danny said, ‘what the hell am I meant to do with this close-up of a seagull you’re giving me? This isn’t bloody “Naturewatch”, you know.’

  Not unreasonably, Chris asked what he should be filming instead, and Danny was at a loss for a reply. Then he had an inspiration.

  ‘Chris,’ he yelled, ‘use your bloody common sense, will you? This is supposed to be a boat race, right?’ Then he switched to another frequency quickly, before Chris had a chance to argue.

  ‘Don’t let’s play silly buggers, Terry,’ he was saying now, glorying in this marvellous new formula he had found, ‘this is meant to be a boat race, okay? Just use your common sense and get on with it.’ Click. ‘Derek, can I just remind you we’re supposed to be filming a boat race here?’ It was as easy as that.

  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.

  ‘Are you going to have a look at that ship?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Danny replied. ‘Coming?’

  The brewer nodded. ‘They aren’t on the list of competitors,’ he said. ‘My company is very strict about things like that. For all I know, it could be demonstrators or something.’

  Danny jumped down from the van and called to a camera­man who was sitting on a packing-case reading a newspaper. They hired a boat and set out to take a closer look.

  For the record, Julian filmed the race, and he did it very well. Remarkably well, considering that he had only dropped in to take orders for pizzas. Even D.W. Griffiths had to start somewhere.

  ‘Right then,’ said the Flying Dutchman, ‘gather round, let’s get a few things straight before we go in to land.’

  It wasn’t a particularly brilliant speech — not in the same league as King Henry’s address at Harfleur or something by Churchill — and it got the reception it deserved. Vanderdecker wasn’t in the least surprised.

  ‘You will have noticed,’ he continued, ‘that the bay is full of boats. What you may have overlooked is the fact that most of them are sailing-boats, not motor-boats. I think we’ve been lucky, and pitched up in the middle of some sort of yacht-race or regatta or something, so if we act naturally and mind our own business, perhaps nobody will take any notice of us. Meanwhile, it’s quite important that we should get this ship over to Jeanes’ Boatyard in the next half hour, because if we don’t we’re all going for a swim. Got that?’

  A rhetorical question. With an exquisitely fine mixture of apathy and contempt the crew of the Verdomde slouched back to their positions and got on with their work. They were going to make it, but only just.

  ‘Captain,’ Vanderdecker turned round to see the first mate behind him, looking worried.

  ‘Not now, Antonius,’ Vanderdecker said.

  ‘But Captain...’

  ‘Please,’ Vanderdecker said, as gently as he could, ‘I know you mean well, but just now...

  ‘Captain,’ Antonius said, ‘there’s a boat coming alongside.’

>   Vanderdecker stared at him for a moment in horror. ‘What?’

  ‘I said there’s a boat..

  ‘Where?’

  Antonius pointed proudly at the boat, which was about thirty yards away and closing fast. ‘There,’ he said, as if he was point­ing out a new star in the Crab Nebula. ‘I saw it just now.’

  ‘Oh God,, Vanderdecker muttered, ‘not now, we haven’t got time.

  ‘Haven’t we?’ Antonius said. Vanderdecker had almost for­gotten he was still there. ‘Time for what?’

  ‘That’s bloody marvellous,’ Vanderdecker went on, mainly to himself. ‘We’ve got to get rid of him somehow, and quickly.’

  Antonius beamed. ‘Leave it to me, skipper,’ he said, and disappeared down the companionway before his commanding officer could stop him. He was heading towards the gun deck, where the ship’s entirely authentic sixteenth-century culverins were lined up. Vanderdecker called after him but he didn’t seem to hear. He had thought this one up all by himself. It was his big chance.

  ‘Fire!’ he shouted down the hatch.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Fire!’ repeated the first mate impatiently, ‘and less lip off you.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said the voice, and a moment later there was the unique sound of an entirely authentic but hopelessly corroded sixteenth-century culverin blowing itself to shrapnel, followed by disappointed oaths from Sebastian van Doorning.

  In the bay, the competitors in the Bridport Old Ships Race jumped to their positions and cast off. The motor-boat, which contained Danny Bennet, a representative of a leading brewery, a cameraman, the boat’s owner, thirty thousand pounds worth of camera equipment and a roundshot from an entirely authentic sixteenth-century culverin, sank. As the water closed over Danny’s head, he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten something. Swimming lessons.

  ‘You’ve got to do something,’ the brewer said. ‘I’m telling you, they shot a cannon at us. They were trying to kill us.’

  The coastguard smiled a sort of ‘well-yes-quite-possibly smile’. ‘What exactly happened, then?’ he asked.

  The brewer shuddered and pulled the blanket closer round his shoulders. ‘I went out with the producer in a launch — he wanted a close-up of the ship, and I wanted to see their entry form. They weren’t on the list of competitors. We came in along­side and bang! They shot at us.’

  ‘Shot at you,’ repeated the coastguard. ‘With a cannon.’

  ‘With a cannon, yes.’ The brewer had the feeling that his word was being doubted. ‘They shot a hole in the boat and we sank. We swam back to shore.’

  ‘I see,’ said the coastguard. ‘And which ship exactly was that?’

  The brewer scowled. ‘The galleon,’ he said. ‘The Tudor galleon.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the coastguard, ‘but there isn’t a Tudor galleon anywhere on the schedule.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the brewer.

  ‘Exactly what, sir?’

  ‘Look,’ said the brewer, who had not expected Socrates, ‘you ask the rest of them, they’ll say exactly the same thing.’

  ‘I might just do that, sir,’ said the coastguard. And he did.

  The cameraman said that he’d heard a bang, sure. What he wanted to know was who hired that perishing boat in the first place, when it was obvious that the man driving it was as pissed as a rat. He must have been, or he wouldn’t have run into that buoy. The buoy we collided with. Just before we sank.

  The owner of the boat said that he had almost certainly heard a bang, and he would be suing the BBC for every penny they’d got. It was definitely the last time he hired his boat out to film people. They should have warned him that all that electrical gear was liable to blow up when it got water on it. Some people have no consideration for others. They just don’t think.

  Danny Bennet didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there. He was on the deck of the Verdomde, drinking a can of Skol and think­ing ‘Oh no, not again.’

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Never a particularly dressy man, Vanderdecker had not taken much trouble choosing an appropriate outfit to visit Jeanes’ Boatyard. He hadn’t even stopped to consider whether his shirt went with his trousers; he’d just flung open the lid of his sea-chest and grabbed. As a result, he was wearing a good, solid herringbone overcoat which had blossomed on the loom when George V was on the throne, a pair of flared slacks, a coarse Venetian doublet from the early seventeenth century, and Hush Puppies.

  Jane Doland, on the other hand, didn’t share this lilies-of-the-field attitude to clothing. By nature and inclination she was very much a baggy pullover and pleated skirt person, but she had realised quite early on that accountants are not as other women are; that it stands as an edict in destiny that unless you wear a suit nobody will believe you can add up. She therefore affected the imitation Austin Reed look, and wore her light grey dogtooth check as if it had broad arrows running down the sleeves.

  Most people who frequent Jeanes’ Boatyard either buy their clothes in the army supplies shop or find them in the corners of fields. As a result, both callers at the yard looked rather out of place.

  The problem of dealing with the House of Jeanes had been a constant source of worry to Vanderdecker for longer than he could remember. Usually he only went there once every genera­tion, so there was no danger of being recognised and rebuked for not being dead yet; on the other hand, there was the equally difficult job of explaining himself from scratch every time he called. By now the words flowed out of his head without conscious thought; but the worry was still present, like a submerged rock.

  The speech, as perfected over the centuries, went like this:

  ‘Mr Jeanes? My name’s Vanderdecker, I wonder if you can help me. I have this very old ship, and it needs some work doing on it.’

  So far, so good. Mr Jeanes is expecting, at the worst, some­thing that was last a tree in the 1940s. He says something non­committal, like ‘Oh.’ Although it was completely wasted on him, Vanderdecker had over the years acquired enough research material to write a definitive study of heredity among the seafaring classes; the only part of which that had registered with his conscious mind was the fact that every Jeanes since 1716 had said ‘Oh’ in precisely the same way.

  ‘Yes,’ Vanderdecker now replies. ‘She’s down in the cove half-way to Burton at the moment. Do you think you could come out and look at her?’

  The invariable reply to this suggestion is ‘No.’ If by some wild sport of genetics a stray proton of politeness has managed to get itself caught up in the Jeanes DNA this quarter-century, the ‘No’ will be coupled with a mumbled excuse concerning pressure of work, but this is not to be taken too seriously. The truth is that deep down in their collective unconscious, the members of the Jeanes tribe believe that the world outside the Yard is populated by werewolves, particularly if you venture out beyond Eype, and consequently they try to go out of the curtilage of their fastness as infrequently as possible. Once a week to the bank is plenty often enough, thank you very much.

  ‘Right then.’ Vanderdecker replies, ‘I suppose I’d better bring her in. There’s not a lot needs doing, actually,’ he adds, ‘just a general looking-over, if you could manage that.’

  This rarely gets a reply from a Jeanes, and Vanderdecker goes away and comes back with a sixteenth-century galleon. This is where the fun starts.

  ‘Here she is,’ Vanderdecker will now say. Jeanes will stare out of small, ferret-like eyes and say nothing. We have reached the unsolicited explanations stage, the trickiest part of the whole undertaking. The knack to it is not to look as if you have anything to explain, and it is best achieved by seeming to boast. The preferred gambit is something like ‘bet you haven’t worked on anything like this before?’

  A flicker of a Jeanes eyebrow will communicate ‘no’, and we re away. We explain that the Verdomde is either: (a) a film prop; or (b) a rich man’s toy; or (c) part of a ten-year project by the University of Chicopee Falls History Faculty to
prove that Columbus was a liar; or (d) the entire naval strength of Monte Carlo; or (e) a fishfingers advertisement; depending on what this particular Jeanes is likely to believe. From then on, it’s just a matter of waiting for the work to be done and parting with an extremely large sum of money at the end of it.

  The presence of so many Old Ships in West Bay dictated that it was rich man’s toy time once again, and Vanderdecker quietly rehearsed some patter about how he had been all set to wipe the eyes of those cocky Australian so-and-so’s with their fibre-glass hulls when the storm hit him, and now look at her. It wasn’t perfect, but it ought to do well enough to get him out of here in one piece. Another consistent feature of the House of Jeanes throughout the ages is a notable lack of intelligence, which probably explains why they are still in the boat-building business after all these years.

  With that characteristic shrug of the shoulders that you see so much of among fighter pilots and professional lion-hunters, Vanderdecker walked towards the yard entrance and put his hand on the gate. As he did so, he saw a face that he recog­nised. Not an everyday occurrence for the Flying Dutchman.

  The last time he had seen it had been in Scotland, on the A9 near Dounreay. The time before that, his memory rather irrele­vantly informed him, was in a pub in Covent Garden. I never forget a face, lied his memory smugly, but he wasn’t listening.

  The girl was staring, and Vanderdecker’s heart froze. It wasn’t a friendly stare. For a part of a second that only a scientist could accurately quantify there was silence and still­ness. Then, very softly, the girl spoke.

  ‘You’re standing,’ she said, ‘on my foot.’

  Many years ago now, when he had still been a force to be reckoned with in the jute business, Vanderdecker had been con­demned to death. He couldn’t remember the details — some­thing about exceeding the permitted tariff in a Hanseatic League town in election year but he could remember the flood of relief when the jailer came into his cell on what he had been led to believe was going to be his last morning on earth and told him that the sentence had been commuted to a seventy­ groschen fine. Ironic, really, when you thought of what was going to happen to him a few years later; but the feeling had been just like coming up after being underwater for rather too long. The same sensation caught Vanderdecker somewhere in the windpipe, while his brain registered the apparent fact that the girl hadn’t recognised him after all. When his respiratory system started working again, he apologised and lifted his foot.