The Shipping Forecast

Thames - Part 8

Here, fate took an interest, played its hand, and the cards fell squarely on the side of one Carter 'Fruity' Smith, so called because of the posh accent he sometimes affected when raging about his dislike of upper-class British toffs. He hated everything about the class system. Private education and old-boys networks were anathema for him, and if anyone asked (or even if they didn't) he had particularly choice views on inherited peerages.

Unfortunately for me, 'Fruity' Smith had also recently been working undercover, and had returned from a short stint abroad, to lead an operation to catch a smuggling ring, which expected a shipment to arrive in the Medway on the 25th, aboard a yacht that had left Wilhelmshaven a week earlier. At the same time I was discovering the truth about boxes of gold, precious stones and a girl called Isabelle, Smith was standing on the deck of a fast motor-launch making its way out of the Thames, accompanied by ten of his fellow Flying Squad officers.

Two hours later, his launch was stationed at the southern end of the Kentish Knock, waiting for any sign of the Bandit heading into the estuary. Keen eyed officers took it in turns with binoculars, watching the lights of Margate for any sign of an unlit yacht passing across them. But when their vigil bore fruit, it was a crewman having a sneaky smoke on the stern that saw it first. Seeing a bright light suddenly appear a couple of miles away, he shouted to the others, and 'Fruity' and his pals turned and stared; those with binoculars seeing the white hull and sails of the Bandit caught in the spotlight's glare, and a moment later the bright red glow of a distress flare soaring high into the night sky, altering all and sundry to our position - and our plight.

I imagine Smith said something like "Tally Ho chaps!" or "That's the ticket!" before the launch started up it's huge engines and roared off to catch it's prey. And had they gone up the west side of the Knock instead of the east, that would certainly have been it for us, and maybe a lucky escape for von Moyton.

But fate, as it turned out, hadn't finished kicking us in the teeth yet. At the north end of the Kentish Knock, in a quiet navigational backwater, the motor yacht It Pays was slowly making it's way south with the intent of arriving at the Medway a couple of hours before dawn, whereupon its owner, one Barker 'Mad Dog' Brigham, expected to find a small yacht called Bandit at anchor with a load of tobacco and spirits destined for the east-end black market, and a cache of long-forgotten second world war weapons that a shady acquaintance of his uncle's nephew's father in the Irish Republic was really quite interested in.

Like von Moyton's trawler, the It Pays was also running dark, not wanting to attract attention to its clandestine activities. As 'Fruity' Smith and the Flying Squad were heading north at a fair clip to investigate the activity around von Moyton's trawler, the It Pays, with 'Mad Dog' Brigham and his disreputable crew of east-end thugs was coming straight towards us.

Von Moyton, no doubt rowing back to his trawler as fast as possible, must have had some momentary luck too. The tide, which had risen enough to allow Bandit to cross the sandbank, did the same for his trawler shortly after our departure, and on regaining his vessel it wasn't long before he was back in pursuit. That this would occur should have been obvious to me.

Henry and I were cautiously celebrating our close escape by sharing a bottle of something indecently alcoholic - it was probably French brandy, but in the dark and with my mind on other matters, I can scarce remember what it really was now. I can remember the effect though. By the time we'd travelled a mile or two to the north, my head was swimming and the shaking had subsided somewhat. We both thought we might have got away with it, in fact.

I was telling Henry how we would make for Canvey Island, taking the Bandit up one of the numerous remote creeks where no-one was likely to see us arrive or observe us unloading the cargo. I was confident that we could find somewhere to hide it all with a manic enthusiasm that could only have been the result of extreme tiredness, adrenalin and booze. I can recall leaning forward at the tiller, peering ahead into the dark and telling Henry how with a will and a dose of British backbone we could pull off the trick of stashing the contraband, disposing the weapons in the deep mud where no-one would find them anytime soon, and then - and this really must have been the drink talking - taking the gold and the rest of the ill-gotten Nazi loot to London and offering it to dear Elizabeth, as a present for her first year as Queen of our great nation.