“Help me with the skiff,” I said to Thessy.

“You think someone’s on board?” he asked with a trepidation that matched my own, for God only knew what horrors might be concealed in the darkness of those cabins.

Thessy and I unlashed the skiff that hung from Wavebreaker’s stern davits, I climbed aboard, and Thessy worked the electric motors that lowered me down to the small petulant slap of the early morning waves.

Ellen appeared on deck just as I was casting off. She was dressed in a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt that served as her nightdress. She yawned, then scowled at the Belgian yacht.

“Morning!” I shouted cheerfully.

She scowled at me, but said nothing. Ellen was never at her brightest and best first thing in the morning.

I pulled the skiff’s outboard into life, then puttered across to the waterlogged yacht. As I got close I saw that her underwater hull had been holed by bullets which must have been fired from inside the boat because all the splinters had been driven outwards so that the hull looked like some giant and exotic sea urchin with red and white fibreglass spines.

I tied the skiff’s painter to one of Hirondelle’s cleats and climbed gingerly on to the foredeck where I cautiously lifted what was left of the forward hatch to peer into the bow cabin. I half expected to see a body, but there was only dark water sloshing a few inches beneath the deck. No blood had been diluted by the water, or none that I could see. I edged my way aft and stepped down into the flooded cockpit. I steeled myself to look into the main-cabin, but I need not have worried for the big saloon was as blessedly empty of horror as the forecabin. Hirondelle held nothing but flotsam; so much flotsam that the water in her main-cabin looked like sludge.