Meanwhile work proceeded during daylight hours until in mid March he paid
Duffy forty-six thousand dollars in cash and the Ocean Dream was lowered into the
water.
MID MARCH: A WATERY INCIDENT
Susi was finding it difficult to sleep. A wind was blowing up the creek bringing squally
rain that battered onto the foredeck just above her head and raised a chop that rubbed
the boat against the dock with an annoying squeak. She’d never liked sleeping in the
vee berth. That low tunnel right up in the forward end of the boat was claustrophobic,
and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep there when they were on the open sea. If
anything went wrong, it was a long way back to the cockpit. Li, however, had made it
clear this was her permanent berth.
Meanwhile he slept in a more comfortable berth amidships. There was room
for her in that berth too but Li preferred to sleep alone these days. He’d complained
that she snored, but she was sure she didn’t. It was just an excuse, which brought her
to another reason why she was so wakeful tonight. Li was getting tired of her. There
could be no other reason for a guy not wanting to sleep with her, could there? She was
an attractive girl, wasn’t she? He’d been quite amenable for a brief period when the
Ocean Dream had been put back in the water, but the rot had set in again very quickly.
Now he barely spoke except to talk about selling the Volvo, which had become her
lifeline to civilization.
She couldn’t go to sea with him in this mood. Then again, she couldn’t not go
to sea, because he’d spent all her money on boat repairs and was now doling out small
amounts for provisions and such, and demanding an accounting when she got back.
And she certainly couldn’t go crawling back to her parents. What could she do?
Her only financial hope was an IOU that Li had signed when she’d first allowed
him to put the little leather wallet containing her money in the strong box. The money
was gone, ruthlessly extracted from the wallet to pay for part of the boat repairs, but the
IOU remained tucked into a side pocket. Perhaps Li had forgotten about it.
Another unhappy thought occurred. Suppose it was all taken out of her hands?
Suppose when the big day of departure arrived Li simply told her he didn’t want her,
and sailed off alone with the strong box and the IOU, leaving her destitute on the dock?
He was quite capable of a dirty trick like that. She’d learned a few things about him
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 29
lately. Not just his changeable moods, but his general shiftiness. There was that business
with Higgins, doing a moonlight flit like that. Other things, little things.
No, Li wasn’t one hundred percent straight.
He’d taken her money, he’d had months of hard work out of her.... Surely he
couldn’t just dump her. Or could he?
With these unhappy thoughts she finally fell asleep.
When she next awakened the wind was still howling, the boat was still bumping
against the wharf, and she needed to use the toilet. The head, Li called it. That was the
problem with sleeping so lightly, you were forever wanting to use the head. She
guessed it was about one o’clock. She peered through the tiny porthole beside her
berth. The dock lights were out and all was dark. Did she really have to use the head?
Yes she did; if not immediately, then in half an hour’s time. Best to get it over with.
It was difficult to get out of the vee berth because of the limited headroom. She
slept with her feet toward the narrowing bow end because it was just too claustrophobic
the other way around. Now she had to wriggle and squeeze around the other way
in order to drop her feet out of the berth. Finally she achieved this, and lowered her
feet to the floor.
She let out an involuntary scream and drew them back again.
“What the hell’s going on?” came a furious shout from the main cabin.
“The boat’s full of water!”
“Eh?”
“Li, we have to get out of here! We’re sinking.”
He groaned. “The hell we are. You’ve been dreaming. Go back to sleep, for
Chrissake.”
She splashed through into the main cabin. It was pitch black and the water was
agonizingly cold. Floating things bumped against her shins. She pressed the galley light
switch. Nothing happened. The batteries were under water.
“Lionel! For God’s sake put your hand out of the bed and feel down around, if
you don’t believe me. I’m not kidding.” Desperately she cupped a handful of water
and threw it in his direction.
“Shit!” He’d grasped the situation at last. She heard him fumbling around on
the shelf beside his berth, knocking things over. “Shit! What did you do with that goddamned
flashlight?”
“I never touched the rotten flashlight.”
“Oh, Jesus.” He seemed to be thrashing around aimlessly. She realized he was
trying to put his clothes on without lowering his feet to the floor. Li always slept in the
buff. At first she’d thought this an endearing trait, but more recently she’d felt it was
vaguely disgusting.
“There’s no time for that! We’ve got to get out of here, Li!”
“Don’t be stupid.” His voice was muffled; his head was probably inside his
vest. “It’s March, for Chrissake. I’ll freeze out there. It’s all right for you. You dress
for bed like an goddamned Eskimo.”
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 30
“Lionel! The boat’s sinking! ” How could he sit there chatting at a time like
this? She waded to the hatch and hooked her fingers around it to pull it back. It
wouldn’t come. “Li! The hatch is stuck.”
“Of course the fucking hatch isn’t stuck.” He arrived at last, shoving her
roughly aside. She heard him grunting and the boat wallowed to his struggles. “Shit, the
goddamned thing won’t budge. It’s that hasp. Somehow it’s dropped over the whatsit.
I’ve told you time and again not to leave it pointing up, for Chrissake! Now you’ve
drowned us both.”
“Try the fore hatch.”
“ You try the goddamned fore hatch.”
She didn’t know whether he was being obstinate, or dumb, or was simply paralyzed
with fear. What she did know, was that the last thing she wanted to do was wade
back forward and try to lift the fore hatch. And if this was a foretaste of his manner
during a crisis on the high seas, she didn’t want to go with him. She struggled forward.
By now the boat was behaving strangely, wallowing uncertainly instead of its normal
solid bouncy feel.
The fore hatch was a foot or so aft of her vee berth. It was about two foot
square, hinging outwards onto the deck. Plenty of room to haul yourself through; she’d
done it several times when under sail. She found the safety bolt, slid it back and pushed
up against the hatch.
It wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t budge a goddamned inch. It was stuck just like
the main hatch. Then she remembered. There was a whole load of equipment piled on
the foredeck, waiting to be installed. Sobbing, she battered at the hatch with her fists.
“I can’t shift it, Li! There’s all stuff sitting on it. It’s stuck!”
He didn’t reply, and she heard a series of crashes from back aft. He was
probably bashing at the little doors that led out to the cockpit. Normally these wouldn’t
open until the hatch was slid back, but Li must have given up on the hatch. She waded
back to join him. The water had reached mid-thigh.
“Got it!”
A final splintering and she could see a scattering of blessed lights in the distance.
Houses where sensible people slept warmly in sensible beds. Li became a silhouette
working to clear a way through the wreckage of the cockpit doors. Finally he climbed
out. She followed, and they stood together in the cockpit. The water hadn’t reached
this far yet.
“Mr. Duffy couldn’t have repaired the hull very well.” The toppling incident had
crushed an area of fiberglass at the widest part of the hull.
“Don’t be stupid! I checked the repairs thoroughly. Do you really think I’d let
him put the boat back in the water with a botched repair job right on the waterline?”
He was calling her stupid a bit too often, these days. He was not so goddamned
infallible himself. “You were working on the engine yesterday,” she said.
“Yes, I took a hose off to replace it. Are you suggesting I left the sea cock
open, for Chrissake?” The words sounded funny. His teeth were chattering.
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 31
“I’m sorry, Li. I just can’t think of anything else. We’ll find out in the morning.
There’s no point standing here freezing. We’d better get up to the village and bang on a
door and wake someone up, and borrow some clothes.”
“The hell with that. It’s too far. We’ll break into the clubhouse. There’s all
kinds of spare clothes there for people coming in wet off boats. There’s mattresses
too.”
Susi sighed. There was nothing wrong with Li’s proposal, given the emergency.
But why did so many of his ideas have just that slight taint of illegality?
“What about the boat?” she asked. “We can’t just leave it to sink.”
“The boat’ll be fine. It’ll be low tide soon. The keel will be resting on the bottom
by now. She won’t sink any further.”
She felt a flash of temper. “Well, you might have told me that when I was
scared shitless down there. You mean you knew we weren’t in any danger, all the
time?”
“I can’t help it if you haven’t bothered to learn about the tides. Good grief, it’s
basic seamanship.”
And so the sailing date was delayed for another couple of weeks while the boat
was dried out. Little of note happened during this period, which was a relief for Susi
because the day after the sinking, Duffy’s diver found the sea-cock had in fact been left
open. Li’s rage was terrible to behold and accusations flew in all directions. Then over
the days his mood improved. She guessed the approach of their departure — Li was
aiming for mid-March — was raising his spirits.
But it didn’t raise her spirits. She would soon have to make a hard decision.
Could she go on a long sea voyage with a man she now disliked, whose moods frightened
her? Who she was, let’s face it, beginning to hate? But if she let him sail off alone
he would take a lot of money with him, some of which was rightly hers. Could she persuade
him to give her a reasonable share if she opted out of the voyage? Somehow she
doubted it. Several times she’d caught a glimpse of the contents of the strong box.
There were dollars in there; lots of them. She’d helped him for weeks with the fitting
out; surely she was entitled to a reasonable wage?
It was a hellish dilemma, one which kept her awake night after night.
MID MARCH MONDAY MORNING: THE HOME INVASION LECTURE
“‘Home Invasion in These Troubled Times,’” Constable Marsha Dobbin announced.
“And here to put your minds at rest is our speaker for the morning, Staff Sergeant
Devoran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”
Devoran stood and coughed. It was a bad start, Dobbin misleading the audience
like that. Far from putting their minds at rest, the talk was designed to put the fear
of God into them, if that was necessary in These Troubled Times. He surveyed his audience
with a proprietorial air. This was Noss Cove; these were his people. He wore
the Red Serge, although Constable Dobbin was in working uniform. Nobody had
laughed. The audience had sat subdued since Dobbin’s introduction and now they were
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 32
hanging on his every word. It was gratifying, although as usual he wished they weren’t
almost exclusively women.
It was quite a different matter from addressing an audience of men during a police
investigation. True, even then there were the usual possibilities of disaster. Did he
have dried food stuck to his collar? Was his zipper undone, his member dimly visible
like a hamster in its nest? But those horrors were outweighed by the satisfaction of having
men actually listening to his words. Outside of police investigations, men rarely
listened to his words for more than half a sentence before, clearly bored, they began to
talk among themselves.
He launched into the talk, based loosely on Lockhart’s exhaustive guidelines on
safety following ruthless editing by himself and Constable Dobbin. What was left was
pure unadorned common-sense; an insult to the intelligence of the audience, occupying
all of five minutes. As a result the talk had been looking a bit scanty, so Devoran had
composed a new main section. This assumed that the invader had gained entry despite
all Lockhart’s precautions and was now standing armed and muscular in the living room,
threatening mayhem. The new section, Devoran and Dobbin believed, should eke out
the talk for a further half hour.
“Talk to him,” Devoran was saying. “Try to get on common ground. If he has a
gun don’t make any sudden moves, and above all don’t play the hero or heroine. Give
him anything he wants.”
This last part was greeted by little squeals of distress from the more imaginative
members of the audience.
“But supposing....” somebody quavered.
It was the signal for Constable Dobbin, six foot of powerful womanhood, to
rear up and inspire confidence. “If he makes, uh, advances, you resist his approach.
You make a noise. You scream and throw things. You make things difficult for him.
The incidence of physical assaults during home invasions is almost negligible. Remember,
he’s probably just as frightened as you.”
As usual, it was Dobbin’s personality rather than her words that silenced the
outcry, just as she had silenced the Port Jackson loggers. She possessed a physical
presence and a stentorian roar that would silence a troop of baboons, given an appropriate
occasion. Now the audience was goggling up at her silently, like a field of rabbits
spotting the shadow of a hawk....
Devoran’s mind wandered to the rabbits his son Bill had kept a couple of years
back. It was astonishing how rapidly they could multiply. Becoming bored with mere
empire-building, Bill had begun to display alarming neo-Nazi tendencies, segregating the
bunnies according to color and breeding for intelligence. Devoran felt the results had
been disappointing, although Bill maintained they were open to interpretation. Bill had
loved those rabbits as though they were his own children, right up until the day he sold
them to a butcher in Victoria for a good price and bought a fishing rod, and a club with
which to brain any fish he caught.
It would be good to be home with Bill, once this nonsense was over. He hoped
the young wastrel had been attending school regularly; a father never knew these days.
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 33
Bill spent far too much time with Devoran’s dreadful mother-in-law. He’d never understand
what the old dragon had in common with Bill. Even his late wife Veronica had
admitted that her mother could be difficult.
Lost in thought, his gaze played idly over the audience. It numbered all of
seven. Privately, he’d hoped that nobody would show up and he’d be able to cancel;
hell, it was Sunday morning and these elderly Noss residents should be in church,
shouldn’t they? The seven consisted of four members of the Noss Cove James
Spooner Appreciation Society and three of the Noss Cove Tapestry Guild. The Tapestry
people were familiar faces, but three of the Spooner appreciators were strangers
to him: two small, slender women of late middle age, and one younger woman of slightly
sleazy aspect. His mother-in-law would have said she was no better than she should
be; an expressio n he’d never fully understood.
The fourth was familiar enough: May Vinge, recently installed as village librarian.
But what exactly was the James Spooner Appreciation Society, anyway; and who the
hell was James Spooner? Proud of their individuality the two groups sat at opposite
sides of the room, as far from each other as the dimensions of the hall would allow.
“Sergeant!” A hiss from Dobbin and a dig in the ribs nearly threw him off the
stage. He’d been woolgathering again.. Where was he? Oh, yes, he’d reached that
stage in the talk where the intruder had gained entry and was dominating the victim’s
living room.
“There are people who feel the need to tackle the intruder physically, to play the
hero, but frankly we do not think this is a good idea.”
May Vinge’s hand shot up. She was about Devoran’s age, with bright blue
eyes in a tanned and somewhat leathery face, slim and well-dressed, and she exuded an
air of no-nonsense competence. Devoran could visualize her barking commands from
the helm of a large yacht. The early spring sunlight was illuminating her hair in a most
attractive way. Her sparkling blue eyes regarded him distractingly. The plump and
shapely lips moved. She was speaking.
“What about the knee in the groin?”
“What?”
“The knee in the groin. You mentioned several deterrents, but you haven’t
mentioned the knee in the groin. I’d think that was an effective way of countering the
would-be burglar. Or rapist.”
Helpless in the thrall of her diamond-bright eyes, he muttered, “We don’t altogether
favor the knee in the groin. As a weapon it has its supporters, but remember you
may just have woken up from a deep sleep. You’ll be drowsy. The consensus is that
unless it is delivered with perfect accuracy, the knee in the groin will enrage the recipient
rather than disable him. In the ensuing tussle, the woman will be at a disadvantage.”
“Garbage!” she shouted.
The forthright comment caused the rest of the audience to shift uncomfortably
on their hard institutional seats and look around for avenues of escape. This wasn’t
what they’d come for. Their monthly talks had previously dealt with safe topics such as
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 34
quilting and flower arranging. Sex and violence, in this raw form, was out of place in
Noss Cove community hall.
“Please….” one of the Tapestry women murmured.
“I invite Sergeant Devoran to step down here,” pursued the blue-eyed one angrily,
“and judge for himself whether he becomes enraged or disabled.” Devoran remained
rooted, clutching the lectern for support. What was the approved response to
such an invitation? Help came in the form of Constable Dobbin who boomed, “Calm
yourself, madam! There will be time for questions and coffee at the end of the lecture.”
Devoran, trying to ignore the tingling in his lower parts, said firmly, “I’m sure
you’d do a good job with your knee, personally. But several people here are considerably
older than you, and probably not so nimble. So my advice is, do whatever
seems appropriate at the time.” He glanced at Dobbin and saw a brief grin of approval.
“Now, as I was saying….”
Fifteen minutes later he was able to pass the ball to Dobbin for a summing-up.
A coffee maker was trickling promisingly at the back of the hall, flanked by sturdy white
mugs and Coffee-Mate. Overall, it hadn’t gone too badly. Perhaps now he could get
back to being a proper Mountie again.
Two members of the Tapestry Guild stood nearby. It occurred to Devoran that
his mother-in-law’s friend Thelma Drost wasn’t present. Had she quit the Guild?
“Where’s Miss Drost?” he asked.
They glanced at each other guiltily.
“It was, uh, the subject matter,” little old Muriel Perks said, smiling at him
apologetically. “Thelma is so very apprehensive, Mr. Devoran. Running a Bed and
Breakfast, I mean. The strangers in the house, don’t you see? But she needs the
money.”
“She thought she might find your talk off-putting,” Ellie Fitzchambers added.
“None of us are getting any younger, and being advised to knee people in the groin at
her age—”
“I didn’t advise that!”
“—or being advised not to knee people in the groin. It comes to the same
thing. It arouses, uh, specters. Thelma has quite enough specters already, running a B
& B. All the same, I’m sure she would have come,” she said anxiously, assuming
Devoran felt slighted, “but of course it’s her regular coffee morning with Mrs. Rooke-
Challenger. She could hardly put that off. A person doesn’t put Mrs. Rooke-
Challenger off, oh my goodness no. Good grief, it would be tantamount to—” Receiving
a vigorous nudge from her companion, she recalled that Adelaide Rooke-Challenger
was Devoran’s mother-in-law. “It’s been a very nice talk,” she concluded weakly.
“Well, I’m glad Thelma is still with the Guild,” Devoran said heartily.
The Guild was in trouble. Two years ago amid a fanfare of trumpets they’d announced
that they were preparing a giant tapestry depicting the Last Supper, which
would be hung in the church as a source of wonder and enlightenment to all worshippers,
not to mention as a tourist attraction. The Times Colonist had referred to it with
breathless reverence as the ‘Noss Tapestry’ as one might refer to the Bayeux Tapestry.
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 35
At the time the Tapestry Guild had numbered some two dozen zealous souls
and the project had been seen as prestigious and not unduly onerous. It was to be
based on Da Vinci’s painting and would surely be completed within the year. But a
problem arose almost immediately: who would have the honor of working on the face of
Christ? Six members resigned during the bitter dispute that followed and eventually the
remaining members drew lots. Mark Thomas Severin, a road maintenance worker in
his fifties and one of only two male members, drew the winning ticket and was killed
within the week when lightning struck his shovel during a storm.
Eight further members resigned during the wave of superstitious terror that
swept the Guild. The survivors struggled on but the matter of Christ’s face was left in
abeyance, presumably in the hope that it would be completed by Divine intervention.
Over the next year two members died and five more resigned, overawed by the
magnitude of the task faced by the truncated Guild. Each resignee felt as though a great
load had been lifted from her shoulders, and thereafter they met weekly in Wynn’s Tearoom
to share their relief and discuss their new lives. Gradually they were joined by the
earlier resignees and others, and before the year was out they’d formed a loose-knit
group known as the Dropped Stitches and developed a common interest in water colors.
This had blossomed into the Arts Council, now under the control of May Vinge
who was nothing if not pushy, for a Noss Cove newcomer.
The four remaining members of the Guild were Thelma Drost, Ted Westaway,
Muriel Perks, and Ellie Fitzchambers. The latter two had backed away from Devoran
and stood huddled together wide-eyed, pale and frail, visualizing a tussle with an enraged
burglar or rapist, their imaginary knee having missed its imaginary target.
Devoran felt sorry for them. When Dobbin had finished her closing remarks, he
felt obliged to utter words of reassurance. “Of course you must realize all this is hypothetical.
The chances of being attacked here in Noss Cove are slim. Statistics prove
you’re much more likely to be electrocuted by a home appliance or, for that matter, to
die from a heart attack.”
As reassurance it failed. If anything, Muriel Perks and Ellie Fitzchambers clung
even closer, Muriel darting a frightened glance at the coffee machine while Ellie fumbled
a tablet from a bottle and slipped it under her tongue. Even the James Spooner Appreciation
Society showed signs of unease.
The situation was not improved by a heavy nearby explosion which might have
been blasting at the Pentreath quarry — although Devoran’s mother-in-law, the eccentric
Adelaide Rooke-Challenger, would have assumed it to be the first salvo in a native
uprising. Subsequent events were to prove it was neither of these things. The community
hall trembled, the coffee cups set up a sympathetic jingling and Muriel uttered a little
squeak.
All this was drowned out by Dobbin’s stentorian roar. “Coffee time! We’ll
mingle in an impromptu manner, and the Sergeant and I will be only too pleased to answer
any questions you may have.”
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 36
Muriel Perks whispered to Ellie Fitzchambers, “I know I’m a bit of a coward,
but that sounded like a bomb to me. I do hope we don’t have terrorists in Noss Cove.
It’s bad enough with all these burglars and rapists, don’t you think?”
SUNDAY MORNING: COFFEE BETWEEN FRIENDS
Adelaide Rooke-Challenger was born in India, the only daughter of Major-General Sir
Wilberforce Rooke and Agatha, nee Emmett. Later the family spent time in Africa.
Her parents died in 1944 during the Japanese invasion of Singapore as a result of salmonella
poisoning following a meal of curried chicken. Adelaide had married Brigadier
Rodney Charles Challenger, considerably older than herself, in 1942. In 1948 they
moved to Surrey, England.
The ill-fated Suez adventure accounted for the Brigadier in 1956, by which time
he had bequeathed his genes to their daughter Veronica, born the previous year. In
1964 another tragedy befell Mrs. Rooke-Challenger: the election of the British Labor
government. She emigrated immediately, taking Veronica with her, and took up residence
at Noss Cove on Vancouver Island, as far from the Labor Government as she
could get.
Even then, in this quiet outpost of ex-Empire, fate had not finished with her.
Veronica married Eric Devoran, a totally unsuitable policeman in Mrs. Rooke-
Challenger’s eyes. Despite Veronica giving birth to Wilberforce Devoran — a fine
young fellow — this hardly compensated for the spineless characteristics of his father.
To make matters worse, Veronica died in 1995 while driving her ambulance in response
to an emergency call that turned out to be a hoax. This meant Mrs. Rooke-
Challenger’s contact with Wilberforce, now a lad of fifteen, was often contaminated by
the lurking presence of his father.
All that, Mrs. Rooke-Challenger mused, was by the by. Now, in her delightful
trophy-filled living room, she eyed Thelma Drost speculatively over her coffee cup.
“Surprised to see you this morning. Thought you’d be dozing with the rest of the Tapestry
Club at my wretched son-in-law’s lecture.”
Thelma hesitated. Sometimes she appeared intimidated by the most casual observation.
“What? Oh, I had thought of it. But….”
“You’ve done the right thing. Stuff and nonsense, that lecture. What on earth
does my son-in-law know about home invasion? If you ask me, they’re trying to manufacture
jobs for wastrels on the dole. Next thing, we’ll have Home Invasion Grief
Counselors. For that matter, why do we need to be taught? All you need is a loaded
shotgun beside your bed, for God’s sake! Not even that, if you know what you’re
about. The last man who came creeping into my house got a damned good kick in the
crotch for his pains. Tell the truth he wasn’t a burglar at all. My husband was out at the
time and he fancied his chances with a defenseless woman. Anyway, I soon discouraged
him, I can tell you!” She chuckled at the memory. “I was on the bed taking my
afternoon siesta but I was up and at him in a flash. He didn’t try messing with me again.
God, how it takes me back! That was a good few years ago.”
Foul Play at Duffy’s Marina – Michael Coney 37
“I’m sure it was, Adelaide. It was back in India, I expect.”
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