Still Water (39 page)

The men took a break after setting a line, and lit cigarettes to smoke with their coffee. Penman joined them, aware of muttered conversations dying away. The men sipped from their mugs and avoided looking at each other, squinting instead as they stared across the sea. There were a lot of boats out, and many of them were trawling, hoping for a sighting of the bluefin.

“Give it a few more days and half of them will be gone,” Penman commented.

“Yeah, back to their goddamn fancy clubs,” one of the men said sullenly. He had a yellowing bruise underneath one eye which he rubbed absently while he watched a forty-foot launch half a mile away.

“Hey, didn’t that guy you had a run in with come off that boat?” one of the others said, winking and nudging the man next to him.

“What if he did?”

“From the way that eye looks I guess he wasn’t such a lard butt after all. That’s what you called him wasn’t it?”

Penman cut in before taunts turned into something else. “Quit it you two.”

The man with the bruise looked away and spat over the side. He glanced up at Jake. “What’s he looking for up there?”

The others all looked at Penman. It was kind of a subtle test, to see which way he would come down.

“What the hell do you think he’s looking for? The same as everyone else that’s what.”

“We ain’t gonna find any more blues out here. Those suckers are gone.”

“Is that right? What makes you such a fuckin’ expert all of a sudden.”

The man shrugged. “It’s just what I think.”

“Maybe he ain’t lookin’ for blues anyway,” another man said.

Penman threw his coffee over the side. “Are you gonna talk all day or are we here to catch some fish?”

The men finished up, and tossed cigarettes overboard, before starting back to work. They cast Penman sullen glances as he left them and went up to the wheel-house. He guessed he couldn’t be their buddy, as well as do his job properly, and at the bottom of the matter, he’d taken the job when it was offered and that was an end to it.

“We’re about ready to steam back to the first beacon,” Penman told Jake as he went through the door.

“Well, get on with it.” Jake didn’t look at him. He stared through his glasses, sweeping slowly back and forth. In the distance St. George rose against a clear sky, looking a pale shade of blue, rather than the lush green it became as you drew nearer. Jake hadn’t shown a shred of emotion when they’d passed the Santorini that morning. The men had stood at the rail, looking at her blackened shape. Maybe if Gordon hadn’t been on board nobody would have cared too much anyway. But the boy could have been killed, and that had unsettled everybody. Penman was troubled. What was going to happen next? How long before somebody got seriously hurt and then it wouldn’t just be Jake who was held to blame.

Penman brought the Seawind about and set a course for their beacon and punched in the autopilot. He stayed in the wheel-house for the next few hours, and during that time, Jake continued to scan the ocean without speaking. Eventually Penman went back down on the deck. The men were huddled in a group by the gantry and when they saw him coming they broke apart. One of them came forward, or the others melted back enough that it appeared he had.

“Calder, we’ve been talking. We think you ought to talk to Jake.” The man faltered and looked at the others before he went on. “We’re not happy about this thing between him and Ella.”

“Is that right?”

“He’s been acting a little weird, you gotta admit. I guess we know how he feels, but none of us want to get dragged into something that’s getting out of hand that’s all.”

Penman nodded. “I guess that sounds reasonable.”

The man smiled with relief. “You see,” he said to the others. “I told you Calder would understand. He’s okay, I told you that.”

Penman stared at him and the man’s smile faded.

“So you’ll talk to him?”

“If you want to talk to him, you go ahead and help yourself. I bet Jake would love to hear what you have to say.”

The man scowled. “You’re the goddamned mate, Calder, not me.”

“That’s right, I am. So get the hell back to work, all of you.”

The men turned away, and Penman went back to the steps and lit a cigarette. He watched them muttering amongst themselves.

“Shit,” he said, and tossed his cigarette over the side.

They were approaching the end of their line and the buoy housing the radio beacon. It was late morning, and hot. The sky was smeared with hazy cloud and the sun seemed to shimmer as it beat down. There wasn’t a breath of wind, not even a ripple on the surface of the sea, and the air seemed to press in close from all sides. The barometer was rising, and it seemed it wouldn’t be long before the front out over the Atlantic moved in and a storm broke. Penman looked at his palms, and even his fingers were sweating, He wiped them on his pants and put his hands back on the wheel.

He altered course a little, preparing to come alongside the buoy which one of the men was standing ready to retrieve.

“Penman. “Jake had his glasses focused on something, and he stood rigid like he’d just taken a shock from a cattle prod. “Bring her about.”

“What about the line?”

Jake turned on him. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I told you to bring her about. Leave the goddamned line. It isn’t going anywhere.”

Penman searched the ocean to the west. They were several miles out from St. George, directly parallel to the island which had now changed colour from blue to shades of dark green. A cluster of boats lay south of their position, but none of them was showing any signs of moving. “What do you see?” Penman asked.

Jake thrust the glasses in his hand and pushed him aside. “Move over dammit. I’ll do it myself.” He started turning the wheel, and the Seawind came about ninety degrees. At the same time he pushed forward on the throttle and the big diesel engines gained in tempo.

Down below the crew looked up in surprise. Penman ignored them and raising the glasses he searched for whatever it was that Jake had seen. He swept north and then south as the Seawind picked up speed, headed on a straight westerly course. The sea was ten different shades of colour. Here a patch of dazzling aqua, there a green like polished jade and in places swathes of Indian ink. St. George lay dead ahead of them but Penman couldn’t see anything else. He lowered the angle he was looking at, filling his vision with just the ocean, which temporarily made him lose his bearings, then he found range and distance and he started another slow sweep.

He caught a glimpse of something, and swung back.

He adjusted the focus and found it again. A dorsal fin rising black and clear against the sky, then partially obscured by the background of the swell. And then another. Slightly curled over to one side, bigger than the other and even from this distance it was possible to distinguish the double curved notch.

“Shit,” Penman muttered. He lowered the glasses and turned around to say something but the expression Jake wore took the words from his mouth and a disquieting premonition settled over him.

As they neared the heads Ella steered a course north to take them around the point towards the cove. She was looking for Ben Harper’s launch, and when she could see out into the channel and there was no sign of it she was both puzzled and relieved, though the tight knot in the pit of her stomach refused to go away.

So far she and Kate hadn’t spoken much. She wasn’t even sure what had prompted Kate to appear on the dock when she had, though she guessed they couldn’t avoid each other for ever. They had things to talk about, though so far neither of them had shown an inclination to be the one to begin. As Ella steered, Kate stood by the rail outside the wheel-house. They were worlds apart. Kate lived in a big house on the point for a few months each year, and typified summer people in many ways. She drove a Mercedes and wore expensive clothes and probably never had to give money a second thought. Ella wondered how old she was, and thought maybe there wasn’t that much between them. Kate had fine high cheekbones, her hair was as black and sleek as the surface of a pool of pure oil. She looked a little as if she might have European blood in her genes. It was her hair, the lustrous colour of it, that made Ella realize that Kate reminded her in some vague way of somebody. It was her mother, as she looked in photographs when she was younger. The same hair and cheekbones. Maybe she and Kate weren’t so far apart after all, which she realized she had always known.

Once they were out of the harbour the swell increased, and the Santorini rose and fell in the troughs, heading into the wind and the prevailing current. Spray flew back over the bow, and Kate steadied herself, gripping the rail with two hands. She looked at the water, deep and dark just a few feet away and glanced back at the wake behind the boat.

“Don’t worry,” Ella shouted over the noise of the engine. “The Santorini was built this way, low in the water. Makes it easier to haul traps over the rail.”

Kate smiled. “I guess I haven’t had a lot of experience with boats.” She widened her stance and began to move with their motion.

“You’re getting the hang of it.”

Kate regarded Ella frankly. “You know, I admire you.”

“Me? Why?”

Kate gestured around. “You have all this. This is your world.” She struggled to express exactly what she felt. “You’re in control of your life. What you have is from your own hard work.”

“Try saying that in the middle of winter when it’s ten below and you feel like you’ll never be warm again.”

“I suppose there’s that,” Kate agreed. She looked at the sky and the hot sun. “It’s hard to imagine it right now though.”

“I guess you have to live here year round.”

Kate shot her a look, and Ella realized her remark had sounded like a familiar summer people put down. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

“Forget it. I had to develop a thick skin a long time ago. But I don’t need to tell you what it’s like to have people talk about you behind your back in the street.”

Their eyes met, and Ella wondered which of them would broach the subject that was uppermost in both their minds.

“That night.” Kate hesitated, searching for the right way to say what she wanted to. “When I saw you on the point. I just want you to know that I didn’t tell anybody. The police I mean.”

“I figured you hadn’t.”

“Chief Baxter and Matt Jones came to my house yesterday. They know that I was seeing Bryan, and my husband told them that I was out that night, and that he heard shots. There’s something else. He told them he heard a boat.”

“I know,” Ella said. “Matt thinks that I helped you get rid of Bryan’s body.”

Kate frowned. “You helped me?”

Ella tried to interpret Kate’s expression. Some note, some emphasis struck a wrong chord and jarred. Just then the Santorini rounded the point and the entrance to the cove came into view and what she saw thrust their conversation from her mind. Kate followed her troubled gaze.

“What is it?”

Ella didn’t answer. Ben Harper’s launch was anchored several hundred yards off the shore. Ella stared at it confusion, and her thoughts were cast back to the night when she’d left the cove in darkness and stopped over the channel. She recalled how she’d been drifting when the Osprey had come into view, and Carl Johnson had hailed her. She pictured what had happened. How she’d started the engine and set a course towards the harbour, then waited until the Osprey was well under way before stopping again. She tracked the course she must have taken, and suddenly understanding dawned, tightening the knot in her stomach as she saw that she must have ended up in the general area where Ben Harper’s launch was now, where she knew the water was relatively shallow.

And then, while she was still trying to deal with this knowledge, Ella saw the Seawind approaching from the east.

The orcas were several miles from St. George, when the bull picked up the sound of fish swimming rapidly westward. He stopped in the water and raised his head. A ragged flock of seabirds was circling a hundred feet or so above the sea, diving and wheeling as they fed on a school of small fish near the surface. The school had been herded there as they were pursued by larger predators. From the returning echoes of the brief series of clicks the bull issued he knew the predators were around thirty pounds or so, tuna or some other species that would provide a good meal for the orcas. They were, however, already a long way off, and moving away, and the bull had to weigh the energy cost of pursuit against the likelihood of a successful hunt. The alternative was to continue north-east to a place where he knew they might encounter feeding mackerel at the edge of the shelf.

The bull issued another brief burst of clicks, this time more interested in the pattern of the seabed terrain. The returning echoes formed a map in his complex brain, and far ahead the island registered as a broad mountainous ridge that rose from the seabed, about a third of it being above sea level. The bull recognized the patterns of inlets and bays, and the deep harbour where many boats were based, and the deep water cove on the far side of the point that separated the two. The school was heading towards the cove, which, protected by its curving arm of rocky reef, made it a natural trap and one which both orcas and other, smaller predators, took full advantage of when the situation arose.

The orcas changed course and headed in silence towards the island, already forming the pattern of attack they had used so successfully before, with the smaller animals in the centre of a line whose flanks were made up of the biggest mature adults. For the moment the larger animals maintained a steady pace, they would not increase their speed to draw in the flanks of their trap until they were almost upon the cove. As he swam, the bull monitored the positions of the numerous vessels in their vicinity. Close to the island the very faint but unmistakable steady slap of water against the hull of a launch indicated that it was stationary, while a smaller vessel was heading out from the heads and turning north-east. Behind the pod were many other boats, each distinctive by the sound it made. The bull registered the direction in which each was travelling and when the Seawind altered course and her engine pitch suddenly changed, the bull was instantly aware. He recognized her particular sound signature, and aware that this vessel was a threat he signalled to the pod to increase their speed. Before long the bull began to feel the strain of their pace.