Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 16

"Me? What was I doing?"

"Nothing," I said, burying my face in her neck. "You were just making the most of your natural advantages: this, and this, and this . . . "

"Mmmm . . . ooh. What's that?"

"You mean you don't know what that is? Here, let me show you-"

"Not that." Firmly, she brushed the possibility aside. "That thing behind you. It's beeping."

"Beeping . . . ?" I disengaged myself awkwardly and looked around. "Oh, that. That's the fish-finder. Didn't think it was me."

"The whatter?"

"Fish-finder: it's sonar, like in the movies, ping-ping, ping-ping? It shows you the sea-bed underneath the vessel-down here, look-and then where the shoals are. Look, there's something: that blob there, coming up now."

"So is that fish, then?" There was another ping. The target was rising, moving closer to the boat, so far as I could tell. Or it could have been the boat was sinking, I wasn't an expert.

"Must be, I suppose. Hang on, Jack knows this kit better than I do-Jack?"

Jack's grinning head popped up from below: the original Jack-in-the-box. "Aye, aye, mateys-here you go, I've done up a little dragon each for you, all cla.s.sy-like." He swarmed up the short companionway to join us in the wheelhouse. "h.e.l.l's teeth, now, what's this?" He flipped a switch up and down on the fish-finder. "Have you been pressing b.u.t.tons again, Billy-thick-lad? b.l.o.o.d.y cabin boys, Claire, I tell you-"

I dug him in the ribs, and we wrestled amiably for a moment. "It's nothing to do with me, that-I never touched it. It just went off."

"I see. Big boy done it and ran off, is that it?" He smiled at Claire. "No, you're in the clear for once. I'll tell you who'll have left this on-b.l.o.o.d.y Captain Birdseye down there. You can't trust him to do anything properly: That right, Will?"

From down below came a smothered counter-accusation: Jack showed it his middle finger and grinned again, even more roguishly. I put an arm around Claire, just so's Jack didn't get carried away. "Claire wants to know is that a shoal or what?"

"Let's have a butcher's . . . what, that there? No, that's not a shoal." He bent over the screen. In its faint green glow he looked a little perplexed. "Too small, see? And it's right up on the surface, practically-I don't know what that is. Sometimes you get seals round Puffin Island, off the Orme even . . . I dunno. It might be a seal, I suppose." He glanced up, through the cabin window. "There isn't any moon, worse luck, but if we look over, lemme see . . . that way-" he pointed out on the starboard side-"we might be able to see something, if we get out on deck and stay quiet-like."

Which we did, joined by Danny, who'd just appeared from below decks with more beer; and perhaps I should mention at this point that Claire and I had only had a couple of cans each by that time. I'd been hitting on the majority of the joints as they went round, Claire hadn't, but we were both completely on the case so far as our shared perceptions went. Given what happened over the next hour or so, it's important you know that.

Out on the aft deck, Jack explained to Danny what we'd seen on the fish-finder. We were all of us whispering, in case we scared the seal; we were still expecting seals at this point. Danny nodded, and pottered over behind the wheelhouse on the port side. Claire cupped her hand around my ear and whispered, "What's he up to?" At that time I didn't know. Soon enough it would become clear.

The three of us on the aft deck-Jack, Claire and I-gazed out over the waves. It was difficult to make much out on the surface, even with the light in the wheelhouse switched off and our eyes accustomed to the darkness. Away off in the far distance was a glitter of sh.o.r.e-lights: Anglesey to the north-west, Penhirion and the mainland south-west. Between the lights on land and where we lay at anchor was mile after mile of still dark ocean. The green navigation light danced on the tops of the soft sluicing wavelets near the hull; all the rest was a vast murky undulation, slop and ebb, slop and ebb, featureless, unknowable.

Suddenly light sprang out from the Katie Mae, swinging through the darkness, settling on the waves in a rough rippling ellipse. I jumped a little, tightened my grip on Claire, looked round: there was Danny, all but invisible behind the spotlight on the wheelhouse roof, directing the strong beam through and beyond us to light up the slow dark waves. "s.h.i.+t," swore Jack under his breath, then, louder, hissing: "Turn it off, man, you'll frighten it away! b.a.s.t.a.r.d's left his nav-lights on as it is," he added sotto voce.

"I thought you wanted to see!" Danny sounded a bit smashed already. Claire looked at me, and I read the same judgement in her eyes. The harsh light from the Katie Mae's spot made her look even paler than usual; almost translucent.

"We do, but we're not gonna see anythin' if you frighten it away, you k.n.o.b! Turn it off and come back here-no-wait a minute . . . " Jack's voice trailed off, and I turned back to the water, trying to see what he'd seen. If anything, the spotlight made it harder; it was total illumination or total blackout, vivid purple afterimages blooming on your retinas whenever you looked outside its magic circle. I squinted, tried to s.h.i.+eld my eyes. Beside me Jack was doing the same thing. "Hold it steady, over there-look-what's that?"

A slumped low shape in the black water. Dull and dark, the waves was.h.i.+ng over it as it dipped and rose on a tranquil tide; then Claire gasped and dug her fingers into my arm as a slight swell lifted it far enough out of the water for us to see a gleam of white. A face, all tangled round with lank dark strands like seaweed.

Jack had seen it too. "Christ almighty," he breathed; then to Danny: "Hold it! Hold it there!"

"What?" shouted Danny.

"Look where you're pointing it, man! Forget about the b.l.o.o.d.y seal-there's someone in the water!" Abruptly Jack was gone from beside me, over to the aft lockers, flinging them open one after another. His voice came back on the quiet night air as Claire and I clung to each other and watched the body floating towards us in the spotlight: ". . . find anything on this b.a.s.t.a.r.d boat . . . " Then he was back, a long boathook under his arm like a jousting lance. "Right." He called to Danny: "Listen up. Claire's gonna come up and get that light, okay?" He glanced at Claire; she nodded. He smiled briefly at her and resumed: "You get down here and give Will a hand. I'm gonna hook him when he gets close enough in, then you two'll have to pull him up."

And we did just that: Danny and I knelt down in the scuppers, braced against the capstans while Jack leaned perilously far out from the side, one hand grasping the side of the boat, the other waving the boathook back and forth till the waterlogged shape drifted within reach. All the way in, until it was so close to the boat the spotlight wouldn't go far enough down on its mount, Claire never wavered: she knelt on the wheelhouse roof and trained the light dead straight on the bobbing body in the waves. Danny had got a torch from somewhere, and that gave us light enough for the last part of the job.

Jack's hook snagged in the clothing of the body; he hauled it in like a fish on a gaff, and Danny and I managed to get a grasp underneath its arms. Together we dragged it out of the water and up on to deck, where it plopped down as if on a fishmonger's slab, a cold dead weight of waterlogged clothing and wrinkled flesh.

I think we all thought at that time it was a dead man. It had been lying, after all, face down in the water; it was clammy cold to the touch; and we hadn't felt anything like a heartbeat as we heaved it aboard. The three of us stood around it as the salt.w.a.ter drained off into the scuppers; no one quite knew what to say, or do. A hand touched my shoulder, and I nearly jumped off the side.

Claire had come down from the roof of the wheelhouse and was standing behind me. "Jesus," I muttered fretfully, and she squeezed my arm remorsefully, peering around me at the body on the deck. "Sorry," she whispered; then, quite unexpectedly, she buried her face in my shoulder. "Has anyone looked to see . . . " she began, and couldn't finish. Danny just looked at me, his tanned, weather-roughened face as pale as Claire's. It was left to Jack, as ever, to take care of the practicalities. "She's right," he said, grimacing; "suppose we'd better have a look who he is and that. Do us a favor, Danny boy; get that torch down here, will you?"

He knelt on the deck, and gently turned the body over by its shoulders. What we'd thought was seaweed around the head we could see now were long, damp locks of hair. Danny brushed them away from the face, a thing I doubt I could have done myself right then. He wiped his hand several times on the leg of his jeans, and straightened up a little. We could all see the face now: it was a man in his early twenties, unshaven, startlingly pallid. "s.h.i.+t," Danny said, and the torch he was holding wobbled for a moment. "Just look at his face a minute, Jack . . . "

"I'm looking at his face." Jack sounded stressed. "What the f.u.c.k d'you think I'm doing down here-" and then he drew in his breath sharply.

"It's him, isn't it?" Like the torchbeam, Danny's voice was wavering slightly. "That lad we were talking to in the Liverpool Arms on Regatta Day that time, what's his name . . . "

"Andy." There was a slight roughness, a catch, to Jack's voice. "Andy something or other; crews on that boat out of Bangor these days, doesn't he? Andy, Andy . . . Christ, I must be going senile in my old age." He slapped the side of his head, and Claire jumped a little at the sudden noise in the midst of all that illimitable stillness. "Andy Farlowe, that's it. His old feller used to have a fis.h.i.+ng boat in Conwy harbor; he's retired now, lives up Gyffin somewhere. Christ. I'll have to go round, I suppose, tell him what's happened-"

"Wait." Claire's nails dug into my arm. "Wait. Look at him, Will."

"What?" I looked at her instead; she was staring fixedly at the body, her mouth slightly open. "What?" I asked her again, and she whispered it, no more, so quiet you would have missed it in the normal run of things: "He's moving . . . "

I was going to say, impossible, you're imagining it; but now as I looked I could see the limbs twitch, just a little. The hands clenched, unclenched, the head moved ever so slightly from side to side. It-he-gulped a little, and his jaw sagged open. A little trickle of seawater came out in a splutter. All at once his eyelids opened, and the eyes rolled back from up inside his head. He blinked once or twice, and seemed to be trying to speak.

Jack was down with him in a shot, finger probing the airway for obstructions, ear pressed to his mouth to gauge the breathing. "f.u.c.k," he said, looking up as if unable to believe what he was seeing or feeling: "he's still alive, you know."

Not only that: within a few minutes he was conscious, talking, the lot. With Jack and Danny helping him we got him on his feet and down below decks, where Danny had the best part of a bottle of rum held against emergencies, like when we ran out of lager. He coughed and spluttered a bit, but it seemed to do the trick; he looked round at us, shook his head and cleared his throat. "Who are you lot, then?" he croaked. We all burst out laughing, I think from sheer relief as much as anything.

He couldn't say how long he'd been in the water: "I must've been spark out of it," was all he could manage. "You were that," said Jack, one arm round his shoulders in a bracing grapple. His att.i.tude to the younger man seemed almost fatherly, most un-Jacklike: it was altogether more responsibility than I could remember him showing towards anything or anyone before.

"How about the boat?" asked Danny, and it suddenly occurred to all of us: how had he got out there in the first place? We looked at him: he closed his eyes briefly, as if trying to remember. "We gone out . . . " he began, and paused. Jack nodded encouragingly. "We gone out in the evening . . . in the straits past Beaumaris . . . " Every word seemed to be an effort; not so much physically, though he still looked very weak, but an effort of remembrance. It was like watching someone being asked to remember what he did on his birthday when he was seven.

"What happened, Andy? Did you fall overboard, or did the boat go down?" Danny seemed anxious to clear up the technicalities of it all.

"I was out on deck," Andy said slowly. He pushed his lank black mane of hair back, looked round helplessly for words. "It was . . . it was cold." Jack nodded, as if Andy had just given him the temperature down to the nearest degree centigrade; Andy hardly noticed. "In the water. It was cold." He s.h.i.+vered a little, and Claire said, "Have you got any spare clothes on board? We should get him out of those; he'll be freezing. He's probably in shock already: we should get him warm. Get some blankets round him as well if you've got them."

Jack sprang to it. "s.h.i.+t, why didn't I think of that-see that locker under the seats there, Claire? You have a look in there; that's blankets. I think I've got a few things, jumpers and such, in there too, haven't I?"

Claire rummaged down in the locker, came up with a thick fisherman's sweater and a couple of blankets. "Right, mate," Jack rapped out a little paradiddle on the table-top. "Get you into these, shall we? Danny-let's have the engines on and home James, what about it?"

"Yeah . . . " Danny was a little slower to react; he was staring at Andy as if he was having trouble taking it all in. At first I put it down to him still being a bit smashed; I'd have thought what had happened in the last ten minutes would have sobered anyone up, but it all depended on what sort of state he'd been in in the first place-he was always a pig when it came to spliff. "Yeah: you come up too, Will. Get on the s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e, just in case, let them know there might be a problem with the . . . with the . . . what is it, Jack?"

"Wanderley." This over his shoulder as he turned the balled-up sweater right way out. "Better get on to them; nice one, Danny boy."

"The Wanderley, out of Bangor. Okay?" With one long last look at Andy, he turned and went up the companionway to the wheelhouse. I went to follow him; stopped, and said irresolutely, "Claire?" She looked up at me, reached instinctively for my hand.

"Never mind Claire-it's crowded enough in here." This from up in the wheelhouse. "Get up here, Will, I need you."

"You can give us a hand, Claire," said Jack, "give our boy here the once-over." He nudged Andy. "How about that for luck, eh, Andy lad? Floating in the water all night, and the first boat to come along's got a posh lady doctor on it!"

"I'm not a doctor, Jack," Claire told him patiently, correcting this mistake for no more than the third or fourth time that night. "I work at the hospital; I'm a junior pharmacist."

"Well, it's all the same, innit?" Jack wasn't listening. He smoothed the last of the folds out of the sweater, turned to face us with a determinedly bright smile. "You've done all the first aid and that, haven't you?"

"I might not have been paying attention, though," Claire said, in an uncharacteristically small girly-voice; but she knew she was beaten. Better women than her had been powerless in the grip of a full-on Jack attack. I squeezed her hand and turned to go up the companionway. She held on to it for a moment longer than I thought she would; I glanced back, and she was looking at me, her violet eyes dark and smudgy-looking in the lamplight. I raised an eyebrow, what? She bit at her lower lip, shook her head slightly, nothing, and gave my hand one last squeeze. I squeezed back, and smiled encouragingly. "See you later," I said, and Jack, overhearing me, said "yeah, yeah, get up there Will man."

Beside him on the bench, Andy looked up, silhouetted in the lantern light, running a hand through his sopping merman's mane. He did seem to be in some sort of shock; bewildered by it all, withdrawn almost, as if part of him was still floating out in the water, in the long night reaches where no boats came. He tried to smile; I smiled back, then trotted up the short companionway to join Danny in the wheelhouse.

"About time, Will." He sounded edgy, about half a beat off a full-scale Danny fl.u.s.ter. "s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e, there: get a move on."

There was a limit to how much I could stand of Danny playing Captain Bligh, but this was not the time to bring it up. I said nothing, and flipped the switch on the radio. Nothing. I tried again: still nothing. "VHF's down," I said in a neutral tone, hoping Danny wouldn't take it the wrong way.

He did, of course. "Down? It can't be down, no way, I had it up and running this afternoon. Here-" He pushed past me in the constricted s.p.a.ce. "It's simple, look. On, off . . . " He did exactly what I'd done: joggled the switch a few times. No gray-yellow glow on the LED frequency readout; no power-up, no nothing. Danny swore, and tried the other great standby of the non-technical layman, slapping the top of the set. The handset fell off its rest and dangled on its cord; besides that, nothing. That was Danny finished, then. "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," he muttered under his breath. "b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, b.o.l.l.o.c.ks . . . " He seemed disproportionately panicky, I thought. After all, it wasn't the first thing that had ever gone wrong on his old tub of a charter boat: most of the equipment was second-hand or obsolete, or both, and something or other was always conking out on us. So how come he was so hyper now? He shouted down the companionway: "Jack?"

"What?"

"s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e's out."

"Out? What you mean, out? Channel eight for comms, channel sixteen for emergencies. Have I got to do everything on this poxy boat?"

"It's not coming on." Panic rose in Danny's voice, sending it high and querulous.

Silence for a second down below decks. Then, Jack's exasperated head thrust up the companionway: "Is it the batteries?"

Quickly I tried all the rest of the gear. The fish-finder, our newest piece of kit, ran off its own nickel-cadmiums, but everything else came off the main batteries, and it was all down, no power on board the whole of the Katie Mae. "Oh, brilliant," I said under my breath.

"There's no juice," Danny told Jack, who had watched me all the way round the wheelhouse and didn't need telling.

"What you think I am, Blind Pew? I can b.l.o.o.d.y see there's no juice-get your a.r.s.e down that engine hatch and find out why there's no juice, Danny. Make yourself useful for once, 'stead of standing round giving other people orders."

That last bit didn't go down too well, but Jack had already vanished back below. Danny stood a moment by the wheel, breathing heavily, then barged past me out on deck. The engine hatch was in the stern: I could hear Danny swearing as he banged it open and clattered down the short ladder. A few seconds later, Jack came swarming up the companionway and out on to the aft deck. "b.l.o.o.d.y typical," I heard him mutter, before he let himself down through the hatch to see what he could do.

I stood in the dark wheelhouse and tried to work out our options in this, our newly powerless state. Down below decks there were the hurricane lamps, and right now they were the only light we had, apart from Danny's torch. I looked at the inert console: without electricity, the head-up radar wouldn't work, and more to the point, neither would the s.h.i.+p-to-sh.o.r.e VHF radio. Most worryingly of all, we could forget about the electric starter motor for the diesels; and without the diesels, we were going nowhere in a hurry. True, we might be able to start them using the auxiliary power supply, but we'd had trouble with that before when the main batteries had run down flat-which they had a habit of doing. It had been one of the things Danny had been meaning to get around to, for which read: one of the things he was going to get Jack to do for him.

At least there was the fish-finder, I thought sarcastically. That was still doing a grand job there on the side of the console, beeping away occasionally, mapping out the gently shelving bottom below the boat. Here and there on the display stray sonar returns stirred lethargically; if we'd been on a charter the punters would have been wetting themselves in antic.i.p.ation of a big haul. My attention was distracted from the slow drifts and patterns on the electronic screen by Claire coming up the companionway.

"All right?" I smiled, to show her that everything was okay, just a few minor hiccups here, absolutely no-problemo. The dauntless crew of the Katie Mae coping with an emergency, just watch 'em go. "How's Andy?"

She didn't answer me straightaway. "Danny's gone to sort the batteries out," I explained, a.s.suming she was worried about the power being out; then I looked at her more closely, and realized it was something more than that. She was shaking from head to toe-quite literally shaking, gooseflesh standing out on her bare skin.

I was ashamed of myself. It had been a long fifteen minutes or so since we'd first had an inkling of something floating out there in the water: we'd all been through the mill a bit, emotionally speaking. No wonder Claire was still a bit freaked. I put my arms around her, but she didn't stop s.h.i.+vering. "What's the matter?" I muttered into her soft-smelling hair. "No need to worry now. It's all right."

She put her hands on my biceps and held me slightly away from her. "No it's not, Will," she whispered urgently. "It's not all right-you don't know the half of it."

"What is it?" I could tell it was bad from the intensity of her response. "Why are you shaking like that?"

A huge reflexive tremor shook her all over. "It's down there." She indicated the short companionway with a glance. "It's . . . it's cold. Don't you feel it?"

Now she mentioned it, I did. It was pleasantly cool in the wheelhouse, but standing at the top of the companionway was like being in front of an open walk-in fridge. "It's water-level down there," I explained, less than sure of my own explanation. "The water's always a few degrees colder than the ambient air temperature."

"It's not that." Claire shook her head vehemently, lips pursed. I had the feeling she knew very well what she wanted to say, but couldn't quite bring herself to say it: it was like watching someone with a stutter trying to spit it out. "It's . . . " she glanced back down the steps, "it's him." She hissed the last word, lips almost touching my ear.

"What do you mean?" I was whispering too.

Again she glanced down below; shook her head. "Not here," she said, and practically manhandled me backwards out of the wheelhouse: I had to brace my foot against the gutters to avoid going overboard. From aft came the clas.h.i.+ng sounds of metal on metal, and of Jack and Danny arguing down the engine hatch. Claire and I went and knelt down on the foredeck, face-on to each other, knees touching.

"Should we be out here?" I wanted to know. "I don't think we ought to leave Andy on his own."

Claire took a deep breath. "Listen," she said, "that's the trouble. I've been down there with him just now, and there's something not right."

And here we were with the radio down, I thought. Brilliant. "How do you mean? Is he injured? Has he gone into shock or something?"

"Worse than that," she said, and my heart sank. "Didn't you feel anything down there?"

I looked at her, trying to work out what she was getting at. "Feel anything? Like what? I don't know: I was still a bit hyper from getting him out of the water and all that, you know?"

Claire frowned. "You were sat the other side of the table from him, weren't you?" I nodded. "So you couldn't-" A seagull swooped low over the boat sounding its harsh staccato alarm cry, a flash in the darkness over our heads. Claire jumped; if I hadn't been holding on to her she'd have probably gone over the side. She held on to me for a moment or two, then tried to tell it another way. "Listen. When you and Danny went up Jack was fussing round him like an old mother hen. He got him to take his clothes off and put dry ones on, towel himself off and what have you. I picked up the wet clothes; I was going to put them in one of the lockers, but I didn't like to-the touch of them . . . " She paused, controlled herself and carried on. "They were coming apart, Will; they were rotting away."

I didn't know what to say. "We were grabbing on to his clothes when we were trying to fish him out. I think we tore a few of the seams . . . "

"I didn't say torn," she said; "they were rotten, Will. Like they'd been in the water . . . I don't know. A long time."

"How long?" The voice behind me made me flinch. Danny had crept up on me again. I wished people would stop doing that; it had been a long night already, and I was getting edgy. Claire looked up. I could see the whites of her wide round eyes.

"The fabric was . . . disintegrating," she said. "A long time." Danny nodded. He seemed to be about to say something, but Claire went on: "And that's not all. Jack got me to look him over, see if he was injured at all." Again the full-body reflex tremble. "It was like touching dead meat: he didn't have any warmth in him whatsoever. What his core temperature would have been . . . I was s.h.i.+vering just touching him, but he wasn't." She glanced between the two of us, to make sure we registered her emphasis. "He wasn't s.h.i.+vering, the way you would be if you'd been hauled out of the water in the middle of the night. He never s.h.i.+vered, not once. He was just sitting on the bench, looking at us . . . " She started to shake again, and I tightened the grip of my arm around her. She squeezed it gratefully, and continued: "Then Jack followed you up into the cabin thing, and I was left down there with him." She clutched at both her shoulders, arms crossed tightly across her chest. "He hadn't put the dry clothes on or anything; he was just looking around, as if-as if he'd never seen anything quite like that before, you know? As if there was something he couldn't get his head around; like when you're in a dream, and the details are just, I don't know, out . . . wrong somehow. And everything's slowed down, and your reactions are like, you're trying to move, but everything's going like this-" She mimicked slow-motion, moving her head laboriously from side to side.

Yes, I thought, that was it; Claire had put her finger on it. I could see it now, the way he'd looked with a stupefied sort of incomprehension from one to the other of us as we'd gathered round him down below; the way he'd gazed at the lanterns hanging from the bulkheads, at the pictures of mermaids on the ceiling up above. Beside us on the deck Danny was nodding; he'd recognized it too.

"So, "Claire resumed: "I said to him, come on, better get these dry clothes on, or you'll catch your death. And he just; he looked round at me, and he nodded, but it was as if he couldn't really work out what I was asking him to do. I thought he might've taken a knock to the head or something, maybe he was still concussed, so I said, here, I'll help you, and I went over to him and sort of got his arms up above his head, you know, like when you're trying to put a jumper on a little kid?

"I was trying not to touch him too much, 'cos-" she looked at me, and I nodded yeah, go on-"and I got the dry jumper and slipped it over his head, and then . . . " She started s.h.i.+vering again, her voice suddenly tremulous. "And then I felt the back of his head, and there was all his hair, you know, all long and wet, and underneath it-" the words came out all in a rush "-underneath it there was this big dent in the back of his head, it was huge, like the size of my fist, and it was like the whole back of his head had been caved in, and you could feel the edges of the bones grinding together." She wrung at my arm, as if to make my own bones grind. "And I s.n.a.t.c.hed my hand away, and I thought there'd be blood, but there wasn't any blood, and he just kept on looking at me, like he didn't understand . . . " She was crying by now, and I hugged her, as much to stop myself from shaking as to stop her.

Danny was still nodding his head. "I was trying to tell Jack down the engine hatch just now," he said slowly, and if he'd been drunk or stoned before, he sounded dead straight now. Scared out of his wits, but straight. "I heard something about a lad going missing off one of the Bangor boats-I couldn't think of the name, though. It might have been the Wanderley." He stopped.

"When did you hear that?" It didn't sound like my voice; it sounded like the voice of someone much younger and much, much more nervous.

" . . . Two or three days back," said Danny miserably, and none of us said anything for a minute or two there on the foredeck. Eventually I broke the silence.

"He can't . . . that can't be him. No way."

"You didn't touch his skin," said Claire stubbornly. "I did. He's been out the water fifteen minutes now, and he still hasn't got any body heat. That's not natural. Even in the middle of winter that wouldn't be natural. It's summer, a hot summer night. And he's freezing."

"You saw him," was all Danny said to me. "You saw what he was like."

"So he's still cold-so he's a bit out of it still-so what?" I was only resisting for fear of what might follow, because even to admit the possibility of what Claire and Danny were suggesting would be to kiss goodbye to anything resembling sanity, or safety. "He can't get warm. It doesn't make him a f.u.c.king zombie." Well, the word was out now.

Danny was shaking his head. "You don't last three days in the water, Will. If he went off that boat Sat.u.r.day night, he'd 've been dead for Sunday. Sunday at the latest-and even then he still wouldn't 've been lying round waiting for us to come by. The coast guards would've been crawling all over this stretch, and the choppers from RAF Valley: they'd have got him if he'd been floating on top of the water, man . . . what is it?"

My mouth must have been open; it's a bad habit I have. I was thinking about back before in the wheelhouse, when Claire and I had been necking, and she'd asked me what was that thing going beep. The fish-finder, I'd said; and now I remembered it, that large echo we'd all thought was a seal. By the time we asked Jack, it was already up on the surface; but before that-I swallowed. Before that, it had been rising, slowly, from off the sea-bed. That's what corpses do, after a day or so. The gases balance out the dead weight, and they rise . . .

"What?" We were all extremely nervous now, Danny as much as anyone. "Spit it out, for Christ's sake."