A Twist of the Knife

Sun over the yard arm

Tony Trollope was a man of routine. He would arrive home from the office at almost exactly the same time every weekday evening, other than when the train from London to Brighton was delayed; kiss his wife, Juliet; ask how the children were and what was for supper. Then he would glance upwards, as if at the masthead of a yacht, and announce, ‘Sun’s over the yard arm!’

That was Juliet’s cue to make him a drink, while he popped upstairs to change — and in earlier days, to see their children in bed.

‘Sun’s over the yard arm’ became, to Juliet, almost like Tony’s mantra. But she had no idea, any more than her husband did, just how ironic those words would be one day.

After a few minutes he would come back downstairs in an oversized cable-stitch sweater, baggy slacks and the battered, rope-soled deck shoes he liked to slob around in at home as much as on their boat. Then he would flop down in his massive recliner armchair, feet up, TV remote beside him and the latest edition of Yachting Monthly magazine open on his lap. A couple of minutes later, Juliet would oblige him with his gin and tonic with ice and a slice of lemon in a highball glass, mixed just how he liked it.

Over the years, as the stress of his commute and his job at the small private bank increased, the quantity of gin got larger and of tonic smaller. And at the weekend the timing of just when exactly the sun appeared over the yard arm steadily reduced from 1 p.m. to midday and then to 11 a.m., regardless of whether they were at home or away on the boat.

‘Eleven in the morning was when sailors in the British Navy traditionally took their tot of rum,’ he was fond of telling Juliet, as if to justify the early hour of his first libation of the day. Frequently he would raise his glass and toast 31 July 1970. ‘A sad day!’ he would say. ‘A very sad day indeed!’

It was the day, he informed her, that the British Navy abolished the traditional tot of rum for all sailors.

‘So you’ve told me many times, darling,’ she would reply patiently. Sometimes she wondered about his memory.

‘Yes, I know I have, but traditions are important, they should never be allowed to die. Now the thing is,’ he would go on to explain, ‘a tot is actually quite a big measure. Half the ship’s company would be totally smashed by midday. That tradition was there for two reasons. Firstly to ward off disease, and secondly, as with many military forces around the globe, to give the sailors courage in combat. Historically, many soldiers went into battle totally off their faces on alcohol or drugs. The Zulu warriors were sky high on drugs during the Zulu wars. Half the US troops in Vietnam faced the enemy stoned on marijuana or heroin. Dutch courage indeed! Didn’t get its name for nothing.’

Tony had never actually been in the Royal Navy, but the sea was in his blood. From the age of ten, when his father had bought him a Cadet dinghy, which he sailed out of Shoreham Harbour near Brighton, he had been smitten with the sea. On their very first date, when he was twenty-three and Juliet was just twenty, he had sat opposite her in the little Brighton trattoria and asked her if she had ever been sailing. She replied that she hadn’t, but was game to try it.

The following weekend he took her out into the Channel on his 22-foot Sonata, the entry-level yacht he had bought with a small inheritance from an uncle. She was instantly smitten — both with Tony and with being out on the open water. And Tony was smitten with her. His previous girlfriend had thrown up fifteen minutes beyond the Shoreham Harbour moles, and had spent the rest of the short voyage lying down below on a bunk, puking into a plastic bucket and wishing she was dead. Sitting in the cramped cockpit of the small boat, he fell in love with Juliet’s sea legs. And with — erm... well — her very sexy legs.

And with everything else about her.

Juliet loved that Tony was so manly. Loved that she felt so safe with him out at sea. He knew everything there was to know, it seemed, about the craft of sailing and seamanship. He taught her how to tie a reef knot, a bowline, a round turn and two half hitches, a clove hitch, and helped her create her very own knot board. She learned from him how to navigate with the satnav and then, far more basic, with a sextant. How to read charts. How to learn from the clouds to predict squalls and rain. Tony seemed capable of fixing anything on the boat, from taking the engine apart to sewing torn sails. Gradually, in their modest little craft, they ventured further and further afield. Down the south coast to Chichester, then to the Hamble and up the Beaulieu River, and then further afield still, to Poole and then Torbay.

A promotion at work, coupled with a large year-end bonus, enabled him to splash out on a bigger yacht, with more comfortable accommodation, and a larger stateroom — or master-bonking quarters — as he liked to call it.

A year later he proposed to her on the stern of the Juliet, the Nicholson 27 he had named after her, in Cowes Harbour on the Isle of Wight at the end of the year’s round-the-island race. She accepted without an instant of hesitation. She loved him truly, deeply, as deep as the ocean below them.

As his career advanced and he climbed higher up the corporate ladder and salary scale, their boats became bigger. Big enough to comfortably accommodate their three children as they grew older and larger, culminating in his dream Oyster 42 with hydraulic roller reefing. A substantial yacht that, thanks to all the electronic technology, the two of them could easily handle, with or without the help of their youngsters on board.

And then suddenly, without realizing how time had crept up on them, with two of their children at university and one married, they found themselves planning for Tony’s retirement.

And his dream. To circumnavigate the world. Spending time in each country on the way. America. Then Australia. Then Asia. South Africa. Up through the Suez Canal. Then maybe a couple of years in the Mediterranean. ‘Hey, what does it matter how long we are away?’ he said to her. ‘What’s time to the Irish?’

‘We’re not Irish,’ she replied.

‘So?’

She shrugged. It was a strange thing he had said, she thought. And he had become a little strange, if she was honest with herself, during this past year leading up to his sixty-fifth birthday. She couldn’t place a finger on what it was exactly. He seemed to have become a little distant. Distracted. Grumpier. He had always been good-natured. She used to tell her friends that they had the best marriage, that they never argued, that their sex life was still wonderful.

But there was a wrinkle. Deeper than the ones that gradually appeared over the years on their increasingly weather-beaten faces. Tony began to joke more and more about sailors having a woman in every port. And in his now senior position with the bank, he had become responsible for its overseas client development, which meant he regularly flew around the world. And with each trip, when he returned home, his interest in making love to her seemed to wane further and further.

She tried to put it down to a natural decline in libido as he aged, knowing from discussions with her girlfriends, and from looking it up on the internet, that a man’s testosterone levels diminished as he grew older. Nevertheless, she began to have nagging doubts about what he got up to on the trips, which were becoming even more frequent and often prolonged — very prolonged at times, with some two-day trips turning into a week or even longer. He also became a little furtive, guarding his mobile phone carefully, getting an increasing number of texts at all hours of the day and night, and frequently disappearing to his den to make or take calls.

At dinner one night, with friends, he told a jokey story, but one she did not find particularly funny. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that in naval-base towns like Portsmouth and Southampton, wives of seamen whose husbands were away at sea for long periods of time used to put a pack of OMO washing powder in their front windows to signal to their lovers, Old Man Overseas!’

Everyone laughed, except Juliet. She just stared quizzically at her husband, wondering. Wondering.

For Juliet, the day of his sixty-fifth birthday, and the big retirement party the bank held for him in the City of London, could not come soon enough. Because they had planned their round-the-world sailing trip to start soon after, and they were going to spend the next five glorious years away. They would be together for all that time, and Tony seemed really happy and had spent months planning every last detail and provisioning the yacht.

He told her, repeatedly, how happy he was at the thought of the trip and spending all that time together. She began to think that maybe she had misjudged him, and had been jumping to the wrong conclusions. All those long trips overseas in the past few years had, perhaps, been totally innocent after all. He had just been working as hard as hell to justify his worth to the bank. He was a good man, and she loved him, truly, deeply, as much as ever. More, perhaps. She realized that of all the choices that life had presented to her, nailing her colours to his mast had been the right decision. She began to prepare for the voyage with a sense of excitement and adventure she had not felt since she was a child.

And Tony told her, after a bottle of Champagne celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, and using one of the nautical phrases that were part of his language, that being spliced to her was the best thing that had ever happened in his life.

She and Tony pored over charts, looking at routes that famous round-the-world sailors had taken. Through the Bay of Biscay, around Spain and Portugal, then through the Med and down through the Suez Canal was one option. Another was to carry on after Spain down the coast of Africa. But the one they preferred was to cross the Atlantic first, cruise the East Coast of America, then head through the Panama Canal, down the coast of Ecuador, across to the Galapagos, then Fiji, then circumnavigate Australia, before heading up to Indonesia, then across to South Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, over to the East coast of South America, to Brazil, then across to the Canary Islands, Morocco, then home to England.

Finally the big day came. Their children, with their own young families now; a large group of friends, who had sponsored them on Just Giving to raise money for the Martlets Hospice in Brighton; a photographer from the local paper, The Argus; a television crew from BBC South, and a chaplain friend, Ish, from Chichester Cathedral, who had renewed their wedding vows on the stern of Juliet 3, were all there to wave them off and wish them luck.

The next two years were, for the most part, a blissfully happy time. They had plenty of scary moments, particularly when they lost their self-steering gear during one severe Atlantic storm, and another when they lost their mainsail off the coast of Florida. But, one by one, they made their destination ports and got things fixed or replaced.

Most importantly for Juliet, Tony and she were getting on better than ever. By the time they berthed in Perth, nearly three years into their voyage, she had never, ever, in all their years, felt so close to this man she loved so much. Enjoying the luxury of a hot shower in a deluxe hotel room, then making love to Tony afterwards and falling asleep in his arms in soft, clean hotel bedding, she decided she never wanted this voyage to end — although she did miss her children and grandchildren. He told her that he didn’t want it to end, either. And why should it? They were in the happy situation of being able to afford this life at sea — why not continue it for as long as they were both able-bodied?

They only had one real argument. That was when they were in Darwin, three years and six months on, and two more of their grandchildren had been born. Juliet realized that if they did not get back to the UK, at least for a short while, their grandchildren would be total strangers when they finally returned.

It didn’t seem to bother Tony, but it was an increasing concern to her. ‘Why don’t we take a straight route back home, spend a year there, bonding with the kids, then set off again?’ she asked.

‘I really want to go to Singapore first,’ he had replied. ‘We’ve never been and I’ve always wanted to sail there.’

‘But you’ve been there on business,’ she said. ‘Several times. And you always said it wasn’t that special. I asked you one time if I could join you on one of your trips and you said it was too hot and humid, and I wouldn’t like it.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes.’

He had shrugged. ‘It’s so totally different when you arrive by boat, darling,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine what it must have been like for Sir Stamford Raffles when he first arrived there? I’d love to experience that sensation with you.’

For the first time in the voyage, Juliet had bad vibes, which she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — explain. ‘I want to get back to England,’ she insisted. Then she pointed at the chart. ‘We could take that route, couldn’t we? Sri Lanka, then across to Oman, then up the Suez Canal?’

Momentarily he had a far-away look in his eyes. ‘Sri Lanka? I think you’d like it there.’

‘Didn’t you have a client there? You used to go there a lot.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ And suddenly his whole countenance lit up. ‘Sri Lanka’s a good plan!’

‘So let’s do it!’

‘Sri Lanka it is!’

Then he pointed at the chart again. ‘If we’re going to sail that route, it’s about three thousand, seven hundred miles. At our average speed of six knots that’s about thirty days sailing across open ocean, and there’s a risk of Somali pirates all the way. We’d have several days out of radio contact with anyone — we would be totally on our own — at the mercy of whatever happened.’

‘I feel safe with you. And besides, what interest would pirates have with us? They’re after big commercial ships — like in that film Captain Phillips.’

‘Not always. They take Western hostages, too. We’d be sitting ducks.’

‘I want to get home, Tony, OK? I’m prepared to take that risk.’

‘Right, fine, we’ll have to establish a watch routine all the way — like we had to do during some other crossings on this trip.’

‘Yes, no problem.’

For some reason he seemed particularly keen to get this idea of the watches across to her. ‘It will mean long, lonely vigils on deck,’ he said.

‘I’m used to that.’

‘Of course you are.’

There were a couple of occasions over the next two days, while they provisioned the boat, when Juliet’s old suspicions about Tony returned. He seemed to need the toilet on the harbour rather a lot, and always took his satellite phone with him. And he had become particularly irritable with her.

Once, she ribbed him, only partially in jest, saying, ‘You’re going to have a crap, darling. Does your phone help you or something? Do you have a crap app on it?’

He just gave her a strange look as he jumped ashore and strode up the quay.

God, she loved him. But there was something, always something, thinking back throughout their time together, that she felt he kept from her. And she hated that. She had never kept anything from him, not from the very first moment they had met. Her biggest wish was that she could trust him just as much as she loved him.

She stared at the chart over his shoulder and could see it really did look a long way. An awfully long way. They would be leaving Borneo, and then Singapore, hundreds of miles to starboard. There was just a vast, blue, fathomless expanse of Indian Ocean. Of course, they could just berth the boat here and fly home. They’d be back in England in twenty-four hours, instead of three months, minimum. But she thought about the huge send-off they’d had, and all the donations, some per nautical mile covered, that were still clocking up, and she knew they had to arrive home, just as they had departed, by boat.

Three days later they set off. Tony, with his tanned face and beard flecked with white, was at the helm, motoring them out of the harbour while Juliet stowed the fenders into the hatches. It was a calm day, with a gentle force three breeze. Once they were clear of the moles, Juliet, still spritely, energetic and agile, unfurled the roller jib. When it was set, with the breeze on their port beam, she pressed the button to raise the mainsail.

Then Tony cut the engine and they sailed, with smiles on their faces, in the blissful, sudden silence. Just the crunch sound of their prow through the water, the clatter of the rigging, and the occasional caw from the handful of seagulls that accompanied them, hopeful of a snack of any scraps that they might jettison overboard.

After their long stay in port, Juliet moved around the deck, tidying away or coiling loose ropes, and checking for any loose tools Tony had left lying around. Then when her chores were finished, she went aft, leaned on the stern rail and watched the coastline of mainland Australia slowly, but steadily, fading into the heat haze.

Suddenly she felt a prick of apprehension. As if she had a presentiment, which she could not define, of the horror that lay ahead. They faced a long, long, voyage ahead of them. It would be one of the longest times they had spent at sea, unbroken by any landfall. In many ways she had been looking forward to it. On a long sea voyage, routine took over your lives, and she liked that routine. Taking turns on deck at the helm, on watch for other craft, especially at night in bad weather, when you were in the shipping lanes and there was the constant danger that a container ship or supertanker with a lazy crew on the bridge might not spot you, and could run you down without ever even noticing the impact.

Then preparing meals. Sleeping. And plenty of time for her passion: reading. They had a good supply of books, and she had her Kindle loaded with all the books she hadn’t yet got around to reading, including War and Peace and the complete works of Charles Dickens.

The first two weeks passed without incident, and they had a steady, benign wind on the beam, giving them slightly faster progress than they had expected. If this continued, they could be home several days ahead of schedule. She was looking forward to seeing her family more and more with every passing day — and becoming increasingly excited. About two weeks to landfall in Sri Lanka, then up towards Europe.

The first inkling of what was to come happened while she was asleep in the stateroom with two hours to go until her turn on watch, when suddenly the yacht pitched violently, almost throwing her out of bed. She could hear the rigging clattering more than usual, and the yacht pitched again. It felt like the sea was getting up.

She slid out of bed, made her way across the saloon and climbed the steps up to the cockpit into the pitch darkness of the night, with Tony’s face looking grim and paler than normal in the glow from the instrument binnacle. For the first time since they had set sail on this leg of the voyage, she could see no stars above them. ‘Everything OK, darling?’

‘Wind’s getting up,’ he said.

The forecast earlier had said a mild depression was heading their way, but Tony had not been worried. Now he looked a tad concerned. ‘Take the helm, will you, I want to go below and get a forecast update.’

She could feel a strong, warm wind on her face, and the boat’s motion was now so violent she had to hold onto a grab rail as she stumbled over to the wheel. The bitumen-black sea was flecked with phosphorescence from white horses. ‘Are you OK, darling?’

‘I’m OK — well — I don’t feel that great, to be honest.’

‘In what way?’

‘I sort of feel a bit clammy. But I’m OK.’

‘Clammy?’

‘That curry we had — I think I may have eaten a duff prawn.’

‘You poor darling. Go below and I’ll take over for a while.’

‘I want to get an update on the forecast. But I’ll be fine.’

‘You don’t sound fine,’ she said, alarmed now. ‘You sound short of breath.’

‘I’m OK, really. All shipshape and Bristol fashion! We may have to reef in a bit if the wind gets up any more.’ He told her the course to stay on, advised her to clip on to the safety wire, gave her a peck on the cheek and disappeared down the companionway steps.

The wind was very definitely strengthening. The boat was heeling over, and pitching and rolling increasingly violently. They had far too much sail up. Reducing the mainsail was a matter of pressing a button and the reefing mechanism would wind it in. If necessary they could lower the main completely, as they had done on several occasions previously, and just sail on under a reduced jib — they could do that from the safety of the cockpit by winding in one of the sheets. In configuring the boat for this voyage, Tony had sensibly ensured that anything they needed to do at night to reduce the amount of sail could be done without leaving the cockpit.

Above her head, the rigging was clacking and pinging alarmingly. Suddenly, in a violent gust, the boat almost went flat on its side. She only just averted disaster by violently swinging the wheel, bringing the prow around into the wind. Below, she heard Tony bellow in anger — or shock or pain; she couldn’t tell which. Immediately she obeyed his earlier instruction and clipped herself on.

Moments later he reappeared, his face looking like thunder through the hatch, and blood pouring from a gash in his forehead. ‘What the hell are you bloody doing, woman?’

‘I’m sorry, darling, we’ve got too much sail up. Let me put some antiseptic on your head and a bandage.’

‘Bugger that,’ he said. ‘Get that ruddy main down, fast! We’re heading straight into the eye of a force ten!’

‘That’s not what the forecast said earlier!’

She didn’t like the panic in his voice. Tony never panicked, ever. But he was looking extremely worried now.

‘OK!’ She leaned over and pressed the button to begin the hydraulic roller reefing. The boom would rotate, furling the mainsail around it. With a force ten imminent, they needed to lower the main completely and take in the jib. The strength of the wind would power them forward just on their bare rigging. And they could do what they had done on two previous occasions, which was to go below, batten the hatches and ride it out. Fortunately they were well past all the major shipping lanes, and they could drift for days, if necessary, without any danger of striking land or rock. They had plenty of what sailors called sea room.

There was an alarming clanking sound from the boom, a loud whirr and nothing happened. The boat keeled over, and again, only her fast reactions on the helm prevented them from being knocked flat by the wind. Then it began pelting with rain, hard needles on her face.

‘Get that sodding main down!’ he yelled, clinging onto the companionway rail, unable to move with the angle of the boat.

‘It’s not working!’ she shouted back.

‘Turn into the wind!’

‘I am, I’m trying to hold us there!’

Tony ducked down, out of sight, then reappeared holding a large rubber torch. He shone the beam up the mast, to the top. And they could both immediately see the problem. The very top of the mainsail had torn free, and was tangled in the rigging; the Australian courtesy flag, which they had run up weeks earlier and forgotten to take down after leaving the country, was fluttering hard.

Also clipping himself onto the jackstay safety wire, Tony stumbled across the wildly pitching deck and stabbed at the buttons on the reefing controls. The sail jerked up a few inches, then down. Then up again. They both smelled the acrid fumes of a burning electrical motor.

‘Struth!’ he said. ‘Struth!’

He stabbed at the control buttons, but now nothing happened at all.

‘What’s happened?’ Juliet asked

‘Sodding motor — it’s either burnt out or fused.’

‘Put another fuse in!’

‘It’s not going to help, you bloody stupid woman! It’s all a bloody mess of knitting up there! I’ll have to go up in the bosun’s chair and sort it! You’ll have to winch me.’

‘You can’t, darling, it’s too rough, I can’t let go of the helm!’

They’d had the self-steering replaced last year in Perth harbour with a completely new system, but this, too, had failed in today’s storm.

‘We don’t have a choice. We’re going to go over unless we get that damned main down — keep her into the wind while I pull in the jib.’

A few minutes later, puffing and wheezing, and looking exhausted from the effort, Tony managed to get the jib completely furled. But with the wind rising, by the second it seemed to Juliet, it was making minimal difference, and she was fighting, with all her strength, to stop the boat being knocked flat. Rain continued pelting, and the troughs into which the prow was plunging were deepening. Each time it felt more and more like they were shooting down a big dipper. Spray roared over them, stinging her face.

‘I’ve got to go up!’ Tony shouted.

He pulled on gloves, climbed up over the cockpit onto the deck, holding on to the grab rails for dear life, and wormed his way forwards towards the mast on his stomach. He reached the webbing harness, which was like a trapeze attached to a pulley system, and managed, with difficulty, to haul himself into it and secure himself with two straps, forming a seat, and one rising up between his legs. Then he clipped everything securely in place and shouted out, ‘OK, darling! I’m going up!’

He released the safety wire attaching him to the boat, then slowly, inch by inch, hauled himself up the nylon rope by the handle. As Juliet did her best to hold the boat head-on into the wind, the mainsail thrashed at him with enormous force — so hard in one gust he thought it had broken his arm. The boat was pitching and rolling ever more crazily, and there were several moments on the way up when he was convinced he was going to get a ducking.

The boat could ride this out, he was confident of that. Even if they did get knocked over, provided the hatches were all shut, it would right itself. What he was most scared about was losing this mainsail. They didn’t have enough fuel to motor the 15,000 miles they still had to go to Sri Lanka. And if they had to rely on the jib alone, it would add weeks to their sailing time.

He hauled himself ever higher into the night sky, getting increasingly breathless. Almost at the top now! He was going to sort out this bastard! Then suddenly he felt a stabbing pain shoot up his right arm and his head swam. The darkness turned into a fairground ride. And suddenly it seemed as if a steel tourniquet was being tightened around his chest.

‘Darling! Darling? How are you doing?’ Juliet yelled. ‘Are you OK?’

He shone his torch at the tangle of wire and rope. As he did so the boat keeled over violently and the wind ripped at his face and hair. Below him, he heard Juliet scream. The bosun’s chair was swinging wildly, and suddenly, despite his efforts, it stopped. Tangled up in the mess, too.

‘Bugger!’ he shouted out in frustration.

‘What is it, Tony?’

There were times when you had to make fast decisions at sea. This was one of them. The companionway hatch, which he had climbed up through, was open. If they did get knocked flat, the sea would pour in and down into the saloon. If that happened, they were doomed. Juliet and he would stand no sodding chance of survival 15,000 miles out into the Indian Ocean in the little inflatable life raft with its emergency provisions of a small quantity of water and a couple of bars of chocolate. It was designed to keep them alive for a few hours, or a couple of days at the outside, before they were rescued. There was only one option.

He began to cut the mainsail, stabbing it, ripping it, then moving his knife as far as he could reach. Within seconds, the wind made the tear wider. Then wider still.

‘Tony!’ Juliet called. ‘What’s happening?’

He tried to shout back, but he couldn’t find the energy. Instead he spoke softly into the brutal wind. ‘It’s OK, we’re safe!’

‘Tony?’

The band was tightening around his chest.

‘Tony?’

He saw faces appearing out of the darkness. The faces of beautiful women. All of them were calling out, ‘Tony! Tony! Tony!’

Somewhere in the distance he heard Juliet’s voice, anxiously calling, ‘Tony? Tony! TONY!’

The yacht was easier to steer now, with the torn mainsail flapping around like laundry on a line above her. But the wind was so intense that whenever she tried to let go of the wheel, the yacht keeled over so sharply she was scared it would go flat, even on its bare rigging. She fought the wheel, trying as desperately hard as she could to keep the prow head-on into the strengthening and constantly veering wind, which seemed as if it was playing a weird game of catch-me-if-you-can, and constantly having to close her eyes against the stinging spray and rain. Again and again, she called out, ‘Tony! Tony! Tony!’

Finally, without the storm letting up, dawn began breaking, slowly, after the longest night of her life. She kept on shouting her husband’s name. As the sky steadily lightened, she could see Tony’s silhouette at the top of the mast appear intermittently, as a strip of torn mainsail alternately wrapped itself partially around him, then flapped away. Steadily he became more detailed. He sat up there, silent, strapped into the bosun’s chair, his head slumped forward, swinging to port and then starboard with each roll of the boat.

Her voice was hoarse from shouting. The rain and spray had long since stopped and now her eyes were raw from crying. This wasn’t happening, please God, this was not happening.

‘Tony!’ she called again. ‘Wake up, Tony, please wake up!’

He rolled around like a rag doll in his yellow T-shirt, blue denim shorts and plimsolls, the gloves making him look like some kind of mechanic.

‘Tony!’ she called again and again, with increasing desperation. The storm was beginning to ease. The swell was still very heavy, though, with the boat riding waves and almost pitchpoling. Over the course of the next two hours, the wind dropped steadily, and as it did, the sea slowly calmed down.

Finally, she felt able to leave the helm. She locked the wheel, clambered up onto the deck, still clipped to her safety wire, and stumbled on all fours to the mast. She stared up at her husband and called out again, repeatedly, her throat raw and her voice croaking, ‘Tony, Tony, TONY!’

She tried to climb the mast, but each time, swaying wildly, she only got a few feet above the deck before sliding down and burning her hands, painfully, on the raw wires. ‘Tony! Tony! Tony!’

There was no response. And now in full daylight, as the torn strip of sail flapped away from him again, she could see why not. His eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t blinking. They just stared, sightlessly.

Sobbing, she pulled at the wires, trying to free the bosun’s chair high above her from the tangle, but all that happened was the burns on her hands became worse. Finally, she gave up, crawled back to the cockpit and went below.

She switched on the radio and tuned it to Channel 16, the international maritime channel. But all she got was a buzz of static. She tried other channels, but the same buzz greeted her. All the same she returned to Channel 16 and sent out a Mayday distress signal. The satnav wasn’t working, and she could only figure out their approximate position from Tony’s last plot of the chart on the chart table. She gave their approximate position and asked for urgent medical help.

The only response she got was more of the same static buzz.

She went back on deck and looked up with a shudder, past her husband’s swinging body by the spreaders, close to the very top of the mast, where the radio aerial, transponder and satellite navigation receptors were — and where the yard arm would have been on an older boat. And she saw, to her dismay, that they had gone. Presumably torn away by the tangle of rigging in last night’s storm.

She wept uncontrollably. ‘Tony, please don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me. Not here. Don’t, please no!’

She stared up at the dark grey sky. And then at the expanse of dark green ocean all around them, which stretched out to the horizon in every direction. According to the chart, Christmas Island was a couple of hundred nautical miles behind them. Sri Lanka was still well over a thousand miles ahead of them. Indonesia was several hundred miles to starboard. It would be days of sailing to reach them, days taking her away from the most direct route home.

Tony was dead. She had to accept that, she knew. It wasn’t going to make any difference whether it was a few days now, or two weeks. Her best option, she decided, was to keep to their course, and hope that her Mayday had been heard. If she saw a commercial ship or another yacht on the horizon, or if a plane flew overhead, she would fire off one of the flares they had on board. Her best hope was that her distress signal had been picked up, but she wasn’t confident about that.

Maybe a helicopter would appear? But she was pretty sure they were out of range for one. Then, cursing herself for forgetting it, she swore aloud as she suddenly remembered Tony’s satellite phone.

‘Of course! How could I be so stupid?’ It didn’t need a mast! Tony had bought it for emergencies, justifying the expense by telling her that even if they lost all their electrics, they could still use it to call for help.

She clambered back down into the saloon, and found it safely stowed in the cupboard to the right of the chart table. She unclipped it, studied it for some moments, then pressed the power button. After a few moments, the display came on. Several symbols appeared, one showing that there was 80 per cent of the battery life left. Then, to her dismay, there was a request for the code.

And she had no sodding idea what that was.

‘For God’s sake, Tony,’ she cursed under her breath. ‘Why the hell did you need a pass code?’

Then she remembered a piece of wisdom Tony had once given her a long time ago, and that was to never panic. Panic was what killed people, he had said. Survivors of disasters were those who were able to keep calm and clear-headed, no matter how bad the situation they faced.

And bad situations did not get much worse than the one she was currently in.

‘Good advice, Tony!’ she said aloud. Doing her best to keep calm and clear-headed, she thought about the pass codes they had always used. The one for their burglar alarm at home was the first one that came to mind. Her year of birth: 1954. Whenever they had stayed in a hotel anywhere and there was a code required for the safe in the room, they had used the same one: 1954.

She tapped the numbers in expectantly. But all she got was an angry buzz and the display shook.

Sod it! Why the hell hadn’t he used that one? Just to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake she entered it again. And got the same response.

She stared at the phone, thinking. She knew there were settings on some phones that only permitted you a limited number of tries at a pass code before locking you out. How many did this allow?

What the hell might he have used? On such an important phone, it must be a sequence of numbers that he would remember easily. What about his date of birth?

She entered 1948, and instantly got the same angry buzz and short, sharp shake of the display.

‘Stupid bastard!’ she said, out aloud this time. What else? She tried the numbers backwards. Same result. She tried her own date of birth backwards. Same result again. Then she shouted at the phone. ‘Come on, you are my sodding lifeline! Give me your bloody code!’

It required four numbers. How many sodding combinations of four numbers could there be? She started trying, at random, different sequences. His birth date, day and month: 1607. Day and year: 1648. Then her own. Then 0000. Each time she got the same response.

‘Please!’ she said. ‘Oh God, please let me in.’

She took the phone up on deck and saw, to her alarm, that they had veered way off course whilst she had been below. She brought the boat back round onto the correct heading, but the wind had dropped so much that she was barely making any progress at all. She needed to get some sail up, or else start the engine and motor, but she was worried about the amount of fuel they were carrying. She had always left that to Tony, but remembered that he had always been careful not to run the engine for longer than necessary. He always told her that they needed to conserve their fuel for charging up the boat’s batteries and for entering and leaving ports. Juliet 3 was a sailing yacht, not a power boat. They did not have long-range fuel tanks. How far would their fuel take her, she wondered?

The mainsail was useless, way beyond repair, one large strip of it listlessly flapping around Tony’s body, like a shroud, before slipping away and fluttering around. She would have to sail under the jib, because when she did reach Columbo harbour at Sri Lanka, she would sure as hell need to motor in — she didn’t have the skills to go in under sail.

She freed the jib sheet from the cleat, then pulled hard to unfurl it. After a few minutes of exertion, the massive sail was fully extended and filled with the wind that was coming from the stern. She could feel the boat accelerating forwards, and watched the needle on the dial steadily climb from one knot to three. The mainsail, now a huge, tattered rag, flapped uselessly.

Three knots, she thought. How long would it take to get to their destination, sailing with only the jib, making seventy-two nautical miles a day? Somewhere between two to three weeks. She stared, warily, up at her husband’s motionless body. Then, in a sudden fit of anger, she shouted up at him, ‘You want medical help, Tony? Give me your sodding phone code!’

Then she wept again. She had not prayed for years, not since she was a child. But suddenly, she found herself pressing her hands against her face and praying.

‘Oh God, please help us. Please help us.’

As if in answer, she suddenly heard a horrible, ugly cry above her. ‘Aaarrrggghh! Aaarrrrggghh!’ She looked up and saw a gull-like bird with a sinister hooded face, as if it was wearing a mask. Spooking her, it circled the boat several times, unfazed by the sail that continued to wrap around Tony’s body then flap away, free, again. After a few minutes, slowly, unhurriedly, it soared away.

Did the bird mean she was closer to land than she realized, she wondered?

She watched it warily, until it became a tiny speck, remembering, suddenly, the albatross in the ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’. Was it bad luck to see a gull, too? There was a country superstition in England that it was bad luck to see just one magpie, you needed to see another quickly. Did the same apply to gulls?

Shakily, she went below again to try the satnav and radio once more, but the satellite navigation screen was just a mass of squiggly lines and the radio continued to produce nothing but a buzz of static. She gave up on them and instead tried to study the chart, to see how far they were from the nearest port. But for several minutes, sitting at the chart table, all she could do was cry, her grief pouring out. She felt so alone, so scared and almost as if nothing mattered any more. She had lost the man she loved. Lost their life. The easiest thing would be to climb back up the steps, go to the rear of the cockpit, haul herself over the stern rail and let go.

But then she thought about her children and her grandchildren, and dabbed her eyes, blotted up the tears that had fallen onto the chart and did her best to pull herself together. It was having no one to talk to — no one at all — that was the worst thing at this moment. No one to share her grief or fear with. And the prospect of two weeks like this. Two weeks of sailing, with Tony stuck up there by the spreaders, in the full glare of the sun when it came out. There had to be a way to get him down.

Had to. Please God.

She studied the chart carefully and took measurements. Indonesia was definitely a lot closer than Sri Lanka. Five or six days’ sailing instead of about fourteen. But she wasn’t confident enough about her navigation skills to risk changing course. She could have programmed the satnav if that had been working, but although Tony had taught her how to plot a course, calculating currents and, where relevant, tides, she didn’t trust herself enough to do it alone. And for a start, she didn’t even know her exact position.

If the sky had been clear, with the sun or stars out, she might have been able to figure out her exact position from the sextant. But there was only thick, unbroken cloud. Tony had drawn, in pencil, a circle around their last position, which he had plotted yesterday evening. There was no land showing, although she knew that if she just steered a course east she would be almost bound to reach somewhere on the Indonesian coast — the country virtually formed a barrier in that direction.

But that would be taking her off the planned course, and she could not be sure of landfall remotely near anywhere that had an airport. At least if she kept going towards Sri Lanka she would be heading closer to home. And when she reached there she could find an undertaker and fly home with her husband.

Although, she suddenly remembered in her misery, Tony had always told her that he wanted to be buried at sea, and she had promised him that if he pre-deceased her, she would arrange that. How ironic, she thought now, that he had died at sea, doing what he loved, and she wasn’t able to get him down and do at least that.

Perhaps, if the authorities permitted it in Sri Lanka, she could arrange it there?

Maybe, she wondered, they were closer to land than she thought. How far could gulls fly from land? Thousands of miles? Perhaps. Some birds flew great distances when they migrated, didn’t they? Where had that one, with its sinister hooded face, come from?

She went back up on deck, swung the wheel to bring them back on course, then looked at the broken self-steering mechanism, wondering if there was any way she could fix it. But she could see that a whole central cog had ripped away. Nothing short of welding was going to fix it.

She resigned herself to having to man the helm for as long as she could, and sleeping for as little as possible.

The sun was high in the sky now and, despite the light breeze, it was sweltering on deck. She tried to look up, but the sight of the lifeless body of the man she had loved so much swinging around in the bosun’s chair, and the creepy sail that kept furling around him like a shroud, was too much for her to bear. Instead she stared, steely-eyed, ahead, her gaze fixed on the far horizon beyond the prow of the vessel.

After half an hour, she suddenly saw two tiny specks, high in the sky, heading towards her. For an instant her hopes rose. Helicopters? But then, a few minutes later, her spirits sank again; she could see from their motion that they were birds.

And as they got closer still she could see their masked faces. Was it the one she had seen before returning with a friend? Keeping one eye on the compass binnacle, she watched the birds circling, soaring around in a wide loop, then a tighter loop. Then a tighter one still.

She felt a sudden prick of anxiety as they began to circle her husband’s body. Tighter and tighter, showing increasing interest.

‘Sod off, birds!’ she called out.

Then one darted at his face, made a pecking motion and flew away. Then the other flew in and pecked.

‘Sod off! Go away! Don’t touch him!’

Suddenly she saw more dark specks on the horizon. She counted five, six, seven, eight, ten?

Within minutes there were a dozen gulls swarming around her husband, all pecking at his face.

‘NOOOOO!’ she screamed. She swung the helm wildly left and right, heeling the boat over to port then to starboard. But it made no difference to the birds. They were crying out, a hideous caw-caw-caw shriek, batting each other with their wings, darting in, pecking at Tony’s eyes, lips, nose, ears.

‘NOOOOOOOOOO!’

She locked the wheel and hurried down below, opened the locker where they kept the six emergency flares, unclipped them and clambered up on deck with them. There were even more gulls now, hideous creatures with demon faces, all fighting each other for a morsel of his face.

She held up one flare, trying to read the instructions, but her hands were shaking so much the tiny print was just a blur. Finally she succeeded, aimed the flared directly at them and pulled the small plastic ring. There was a sharp whoosh, and it fired, sending something like a firework rocket shooting up, well wide of the gulls, high into the sky before exploding in a sheet of red light. They took no notice at all.

‘GO AWAY YOU BASTARDS!’ she screamed and seized another flare.

She aimed again, pulled the loop, and this time scored a bullseye, sending it right into their midst. It hit one gull in the belly, then arced down into the sea, exploding as it struck the water off her port beam. The gull spiralled downwards, helicoptering, unconscious or dead, and landed motionless on the water. As if in wild panic, all the other gulls, cawing in anger and confusion, scattered and flew off towards the horizon.

She was shaking uncontrollably. The motionless gull passed by the port side and soon was way behind her. ‘Bloody serves you right, you ghoul,’ she muttered.

Ten minutes later the gulls returned, some singly, others in groups. Now there seemed even more than before. She fired off another flare, but she was shaking so much she missed altogether. Ignoring it totally, the gulls were now on a feeding frenzy.

Tears were running down her face, blinding her as she fired off another flare, then another, with no effect. She realized now she had only one left. She couldn’t fire it, she needed to preserve it in case she saw a ship on the horizon. It would be her last hope, she knew. The nightmare of Tony dying, which she could not have imagined getting any worse, now had. She had to stop these vulture birds, but how?

She clambered forwards, gripped the mast and desperately, using all her strength, tried to climb the narrow aluminium pole. She felt a splat of bird shit on her forehead. Then another. The din of their cries above her was almost deafening.

She screamed at them, again and again and again. Gripping the mast with her arms and her legs she made it up a few feet, but then, obstructed by the rigging and parts of the ripped sail flapping in her face, she could get no higher.

She slid back down, weeping uncontrollably, and returned to the cockpit. They were heading wildly off course. She turned the wheel and watched the compass needle slowly swing back round. She shouted at the birds until she was hoarse, but it made no difference.

The gulls stayed until there was nothing left of his face to peck, and then, as dusk began to fall, they gradually, some singly, some in pairs, flapped away into the falling darkness.

High up above her, swinging in the bosun’s chair, was her husband’s skull, with a rictus grin and patches of hair on the scalp.

Her stomach was burning, but the rest of her felt numb. Totally numb. She prayed. Prayed that she would wake up and find this had all been just a nightmare.

The gulls returned soon after dawn. Now they were pecking through his clothes, bits of fabric from his orange Henri Lloyd yachting jacket fluttered in the air as they greedily found the flesh beneath it.

By the end of the third day, Tony resembled a scarecrow.

It was twelve more days and nights before, in the early afternoon, she finally saw the lighthouse, the long, welcoming concrete harbour arms of the port of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and a speed limit sign. She was utterly exhausted, almost out of her mind from lack of sleep, and during the past two days she had started speaking out aloud to Tony, holding imaginary conversations with him. The gulls had long departed, having, she presumed, picked his carcass clean. Some bits of his clothes still clung, raggedly, to his skeleton.

There was no wind on this searing hot afternoon, and fortunately, the strip of sail had once more furled around Tony, almost completely covering him. She was motoring, the fuel gauge on empty, praying there was enough left to get her to a berth in the yacht basin that she had found identified on the harbour chart and marked in red by Tony. She was thankful, at least, for his meticulous planning.

Through bloodshot eyes, behind sunglasses that were long fogged with salt, she watched the bunkering stations pass by, cranes, a huge lumber warehouse and an endless line of berthed container ships and tankers. Then finally, to her relief, she saw a whole forest of yacht masts through a gap to starboard and headed towards them.

Fifteen minutes later, passing a refuelling station, she saw a sign for visitors’ berths and, slowing her speed to a crawl, scrambled forward and removed a bow line from its locker, then pulled out several fenders and hung them over the side. She wasn’t sure how she was going to manage the actual berthing, though.

Then, to her relief, an elderly man in a battered peaked cap, with the appearance of a port official, suddenly appeared, signalling to her with his arms. She threw him the bow line, which he caught expertly and secured around a bollard. Moments later he caught the stern line and secured that, and steadily, as if he had done it a thousand times before, reeled her in alongside the pontoon.

Sobbing with relief, she did not think she had ever been so happy to see another human being in her life.

She jumped ashore and then, pointing towards the top of the mast at Tony’s remains, tried to explain what had happened. But he spoke no English and failed to take any notice of her gesticulations, nor did he look up. All he kept saying, repeatedly and insistently through a sparse set of yellow teeth, one gold and several missing, was ‘You Passeport? Passeport? You papers? Papers, documentation?’

She went below, found the boat’s papers and her passport and handed them to him. Signalling he would be back, he hurried off. She stood on the deck, watching him head towards a cluster of buildings, shaking with relief that she was no longer at sea. As she had sailed in, she had passed several yachts flying British flags. If she walked along, with luck she would find someone who could tell her where to find the British consul, or at least let her use their phone.

But before that, she badly needed a drink. She went below and pulled one of the bottles of rum that Tony had been fond of drinking at sea out of the booze cabinet. Just as she was pouring herself a glass, she heard a female voice above her, calling in broken English, ‘Hello? Tony? Hello?’

Frowning, Juliet looked up and saw a very attractive-looking Indian woman, in her early thirties, peering in.

‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

‘This is the Juliet?’ the woman asked. ‘The yacht Juliet?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I’m meeting Tony.’

Now Juliet frowned again, more severely. ‘Tony Trollope.’

‘Yes!’ Then she hesitated. ‘You are the cleaner?’

Bloody hell, Juliet wondered. Did she look that bad after all this time at sea? Without commenting she replied, ‘Might I ask who you are?’

‘Yes, I am Tony’s fiancée.’

‘Fiancée?’ Juliet could barely control herself.

‘Yes, Tony was sailing here to meet me, to get married here.’

‘Who was he sailing with?’

‘He said he was sailing alone, solo.’

A sudden chill rippled through Juliet. Was that why Tony had chosen this route? Three weeks at sea, away from land. Three weeks out of radio contact. Three weeks where anything could have happened to either of them, and no police would have had any evidence that a crime had been committed?

Had that been his plan? To push her overboard and then sail on to a new life with this beautiful young woman.

The bastard.

‘What is your name?’ Juliet asked.

‘Lipika.’

‘That’s a very pretty name!’

‘Thank you. Is Tony on board?’

‘Yes, he’s just a little tied up at the moment. You know what, I think we should have a drink, Lipika, to celebrate your engagement!’ She pulled a second glass out of the cupboard.

‘No, thank you,’ Lipika said, and smiled sweetly. ‘I don’t drink.’

Ignoring her, Juliet filled the second glass. ‘You’re going to need one, dear, a very large one!’

She carried both glasses up into the cockpit and stared at the woman in daylight. She really was very beautiful indeed. Beautiful enough to kill for?

But what did that matter any more? It was over now. The past. She raised her glass and clinked the young woman’s. ‘Cheers!’

Lipika hesitantly clinked back.

Then Juliet said, ‘Sun’s over the yard arm!’ and raised her glass high. ‘Here’s to the happy couple. Tony and Lipika! He’s all yours!’

The woman raised hers high and followed Juliet’s gaze. And at that moment, a light gust of breeze unfurled the strip of sail that had wrapped around Tony’s body, and it flapped free, exposing his ragged skeleton, his skull picked clean apart from a few sinews and a small patch of hair.

Lipika’s glass fell to the deck and smashed.

Her scream shattered the calm of the afternoon.