Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
I asked him if it was possible to get across the water.
He didn’t reply, so I added that I meant without using the regular ferry service.
Still he didn’t reply, but finished his pint, and then nodded at a rough man sitting in the corner. I watched him for a while, and then, when the landlord called last orders, I wandered over and offered to buy him a drink.
He swore at me and called me queer, and I was reminded of that private who’d thought I was after the same thing. It made me angry; I wondered why these stupid men had to be so coarse, or if there was something about me that gave off such signals.
I held up my hand and said I wasn’t offering the drink for free, but in return for some information, and that was how I found a man crazy enough to sail me across the Channel in the middle of the night in a small fishing boat for fifty pounds.
His name was Dyer and I didn’t trust him in the slightest.
I’d offered him twenty-five pounds to begin with, and he’d easily haggled me up to fifty. He knew I was desperate, and I also guessed he knew I had more money on me than fifty pounds.
He told me to meet him, the following evening, outside the Falstaff.
He arrived on a pushbike very late, and told me it was off for the night. The weather was rough and he didn’t fancy it. He told me to meet him again the following night, which I did, and the one after that, until finally he was ready to chance it.
‘Get on,’ he said, and I must have stared at him.
‘We’re not moored here,’ he said, and so I climbed on the parcel rack of the bike as if we were two kids mucking about, and he set off grimly out of Dover, wordlessly pushing the pedals and hauling both our weights down the coast, to Folkestone.
Just outside the harbour was a headland known, appropriately enough, as Little Switzerland, and he’d beached his boat, the
Margareta
, on the shore there.
He explained it was far too risky to put out from Dover, which was crawling with customs men and the harbour patrol. He’d sailed the boat round earlier that afternoon and borrowed the bike from a mate of his.
We both had to work hard to shove the
Margareta
back out into the shallows, soaking ourselves, then I clambered aboard as he got the diesel motor chugging into life.
‘Where are we going to put ashore?’ I asked.
He shrugged.
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘A lot of things.’
I was getting more and more suspicious the more time I spent with Dyer. I knew he knew I had a bit of money in that little suitcase of mine. Maybe he had no intention of putting a few hundred yards out to sea and then ditching me, and heading home with the easiest catch he’d ever make, and the most lucrative.
He’d get a surprise when he opened that case. Not just a few more quid; I still had enough money left for Dyer to buy himself a new boat.
I pictured the events in my mind, and worked out where to put myself to be safest, and I grew afraid.
But then, he didn’t know I had a revolver.
‘Get below,’ he said, nodding at the hatch in the wheelhouse. It would mean passing him, and turning my back on him.
‘I’m fine here,’ I said.
‘Dry clothes in there,’ he said. ‘You’ll freeze.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘So am I,’ I said, and leaned back, across the tiny wheelhouse from him, my hands in my pockets, my right clutched around the handle of Hayes’ Webley.
Dyer gave me a look that saved him the bother of telling me to suit myself, and he pointed the nose of the
Margareta
out to sea.
The journey was slow, and Dyer was tense. I think only then did I start to realise that what we were doing was dangerous, not just illegal. We were crossing the busiest shipping lane in the world. It was a dark night, though we could see a few stars, which was how Dyer was navigating, I supposed, along with the compass in front of him.
Where we ended up on the French coast was likely to be as much by chance as by design.
But it was a calm night, the sea was smooth and black and the only sound was the constant drumming of the
Margareta
’s engine below, and the shush of water on the prow.
An hour had passed, and we could still see the lights of the English coast, and nothing as yet from France.
‘Fog,’ Dyer grunted, a little while later, and we headed into a bank that seemed to roll on to us without warning. The stars went, and we were alone in the sea, with only the hope that we’d hear a big ship in time to steer clear of it. Dyer now watched the compass in the binnacle more than ever, and I wondered how good a sailor he really was.
Another half-hour passed, maybe more, and we heard the sound of foghorns in front of us, and away to one side.
‘Gris Nez,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘We’ve come too far south. Cap Gris Nez.’
He turned the wheel and corrected our course.
Then he began to talk to me.
‘You in trouble then?’
My lips tightened, my fingers reached for the trigger of the revolver in my pocket.
‘Eh? You must be. Crossing the Channel at night. What did you do?’
‘Nothing . . . I’ve lost my passport.’
It was a terrible lie, and he laughed so suddenly then, I nearly pulled the trigger.
‘And you didn’t want to go to the post office and get another,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm.
‘Is it much further?’ I asked.
‘Depends.’
‘So you said.’
‘Kill someone, did you?’
I started to get angry. I was paying him a small fortune for a few hours’ work. Why couldn’t he just mind his own business?
I said nothing.
‘Or maybe there’s something in that suitcase? Something you don’t want seen, eh?’
‘Just shut up and drive the bus,’ I snapped.
Then he turned away from the wheel, and let it go, and stood looking squarely at me.
‘Don’t fucking tell me what to do,’ he growled.
I was terrified. I tried not to show it. I pulled the gun from my pocket and levelled it at him, at waist height.
‘I’ll tell you whatever I want,’ I whispered, my voice stuck in my throat. I think it sounded tough, but I felt the trickle of urine warmly down my wet leg, and I wanted to cry.
As he saw the gun, he stiffened. I thought he was going to jump at me, but he stared at it, and put one hand back on the wheel.
But he didn’t take his eyes off me, and I knew I needed to do something more, so I lifted the gun, and carefully keeping my distance, I pointed it straight at his eyes.
‘Get us to shore,’ I said. ‘And don’t talk to me again.’
He did as he was told, but kept himself half turned towards me the rest of the way.
Another half-hour, and we heard the sound of the waves on a shingle beach somewhere ahead.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
He said nothing.
‘Where are we?’ I shouted, and he actually flinched.
‘France,’ he muttered under his breath.
The boat skimmed the shallows and he spun the wheel, pointing the nose out to sea again, but as he did so a wave breaking for the shore caught the side of the boat and sent me staggering off my feet. I put one hand down to get myself up but before I could Dyer was on me.
He pounded me backwards into the rear of the boat, and brought his knee up into my chest, wrapping his arms around me.
The breath had gone from me, but I acted instinctively, somehow knowing I had just one moment to make this all right, or I would be dead. He was feeling for my wrist, for the gun, and I held on to it tightly, more tightly than I had ever held anything before. My fingers locked like a vice around the handle, even as he swung a fist twice into the side of my head, and then I managed to twist the gun, just enough, and put the tip of it against his stomach.
It was point-blank range; there was no way for me to miss.
The bang of the gun was muffled by his body, so it was strange the way he flew backwards, almost silent in the roar of the noise from the sea.
I hadn’t killed him. But there was a very large hole from which blood was flowing rapidly. His eyes bulged with fear as he tried to press his hands over the wound, and his feet scrabbled against the deck. I stumbled as the boat tossed free in the waves, and fell to my knees. He watched me, stared at me, and tried to speak but couldn’t. His eyes turned back to the blood pouring out around him, and I knew he didn’t have long.
I looked at the shore.
I looked at the little ship’s wheel turning wildly.
I looked at Dyer.
I put the revolver in my pocket, stepped forward and knelt by him.
He was trying to speak again and as I reached for him his hands pawed me, but gently. I undid his belt buckle, slipped the belt from out of his waistband, and stepped back to the wheelhouse, where I used it to fix the wheel straight, just as the boat was pointing out to sea.
Then I opened the throttle a little further, grabbed my case, and threw myself overboard. As I went, I took one last look at Dyer, whose eyes were dull now, though fixed on me. There was no anger from him. No rage, nothing. Just the loneliest look on the face of a man that I have ever seen.
Touching the bottom with my toe tips, I half swam, half waded to the beach, where I pulled myself above the tideline, and then crawled for the cover of the dunes.
There were no lights, and though dawn was coming soon, I was freezing, and I shook violently from the cold.
I lay wretched on the French sand.
As the sun came up, the fog was quickly burned away. It was now a clear May morning and the temperature rose. I lay still till I felt alive again, letting the sunshine bring me back. When I shut my eyes, all I could see was Dyer. I was aware at last that he had hurt me before I’d pulled the trigger, and then I was thinking that I had killed someone again. Unlike Hayes, this wasn’t an accident, though as I lay on the beach, I knew I had had no choice. It
was
an accident in a way, because he had forced it on me. He would have killed me for what he guessed was in my case, that was certain, and I’d had no choice but to pull the trigger. He was stronger than me and in a few seconds more would have finished me, easily. All that was true, and yet it left a bad taste in my mouth.
A long while later, feeling warmer and stronger, I stripped to my vest and trousers and swung my shirt and jacket over my shoulder as I climbed up the beach and headed inland, swinging my suitcase as I went.
There was a short stand of trees just behind the beach, which I pushed through to find some fields, and then a small coastal road. I didn’t know which way to go, but I knew I was heading east in the long run, so that’s the way I went.
Chapter 9
I didn’t know it was him, the philanthropist who was going to help poor Giovanna. I didn’t know, but I felt it was. I was starting to understand the way his mind worked, feeling the way
it
felt, and the prospect of a girl who bled spontaneously would be too much for him to ignore.
But why come out into the public eye? There were only two reasons, as far as I could see. The first, he had to. I didn’t know what he was planning, but I could guess. He meant to abduct her, presumably once she arrived in Lausanne, though he might try it before. Either way, my only hope was to make it to Switzerland before she did, and hope that I could track him down.
And the second reason was the one that gave me fear, because this was the thought that it was all part of an elaborate trap, to lure me out of hiding, and it had worked.
I didn’t know any of this, but I felt it. I felt that I knew him. I saw inside him and knew what he meant to do, and why.
I saw what he had in mind for Giovanna too, and what excitement it would cause him, in the time that she had before her own blood killed her.
What a prospect.
I had been following the case as closely as possible while struggling to leave England, gleaning what I could from amongst the garbled and extravagant reports in the press.
The girl’s bleedings were under control, I assumed, or she’d be dead already. Where her priest took the bleeds to be the miraculous stigmata of Christ’s sufferings, I read signs of the disease I’d been trying to cure. While some papers loosely spoke about bleeding palms, I noticed that there was no categoric statement that that had been happening to Giovanna. The only thing that was clear was that her wounds would not heal, and while there was nothing to suggest this in what I read, it was also possible that some form of purpura, or bleeding into the skin, was present as well as her rare form of haemophilia. Such bleeding often accompanies various coagulation disorders of the blood, and it would take little to set off a pronounced bleed through the skin.
There was of course the possibility that the girl was now initiating her own bleeds. She was a tiny girl from a tiny Italian village; now she had priests and doctors and the rich of the world interested in her. It would not be the first time an impressionable youth had created a mystery to attract attention. I was reminded of the girls who started the Salem witch trials, and the Fox sisters, those girls who heard mysterious rapping sounds and so founded the Spiritualist Church, despite the fact they later admitted they’d made it all up. In Giovanna’s case, all it would take would be a small scratch, something that could be done secretly in a moment, and she would have the whole world at a buzz around her.