My eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw that the sludge was really a thick layer of floating cornflakes, loose cigarettes, and a million scraps of foam that must have been shattered out of the hull by the gunfire. Embedded in that heaving mess were a plastic mug, some wooden clothes pegs, a broken pencil, a red shirt and a mutilated, sodden chart. There was a dark smear on the lip of the coachroof that might have been blood, but could just as easily have been a spill of varnish.

“What happened to her?” Ellen shouted. Wavebreaker had now drifted so close to Hirondelle that the schooner’s huge hull was casting a shadow over me.

“God knows.” I pulled the flimsy remnants of the chart out of the water.

“Are we going to salvage her?” Ellen was leaning over Wavebreaker’s rail and the sun, rising behind her, turned her mass of red hair into an incandescent haze.

“She’s beyond help!” I called back. The waterlogged Hirondelle was much too heavy for Wavebreaker to take in tow, and I had neither the time nor the equipment to patch the hull and pump it dry. Besides, Hirondelle had been so badly damaged that no yard would ever think of trying to rebuild her. Not only had the Belgian boat been riddled with bullets, but I could see great gouges where an axe had been taken to the boat’s decking. It all seemed so pointless. Hirondelle had clearly been a beautiful boat, yet someone had wantonly tried to destroy her.

I tossed the soaking chart into the skiff and stooped to see if there was anything else I should take from the cabin. I was not searching for plunder, but rather for any clue as to who might have owned this boat or what might have provoked its destruction. I found nothing, except that as I stepped back from the companionway my bare feet trod hard and painfully on some lumpish sharp objects. I ducked down in the cockpit, groped on the grating underfoot, and came up with a handful of cartridge cases. Some were brass, but most were green-lacquered steel. They were 7.62 millimetre cartridges, military issue, and I had a half-memory from the dozy days when I had slept through the perfunctory Warsaw Pact familiarisation lectures that only a few East European countries lacquered steel cartridges green.