It was all very peculiar. A Belgian boat in Bahamian waters with Warsaw Pact cartridges? What was clear to me was that someone must have stood in this cockpit and fired a machine-gun down the companionway into the main-cabin. They had hoped to shatter the bottom of the hull so that Hirondelle would sink without trace, but they had not reckoned with the foam sandwiched in the boat’s hull, and thus the evidence of their crime, if crime it was, still floated.

Thessy had started Wavebreaker’s engines. The wind had been driving the big schooner down on to Hirondelle so now Thessy gave the schooner’s propellers a burst of power that churned the sea white and drove her clear. The schooner’s shadow vanished, letting the new day’s sun slash at me with brilliant force and lance through a line of bullet holes that had pierced the side of Hirondelle’s coachroof. The shafts of new sunlight lay like spears of gold in the cabin’s muck-ridden gloom. I wondered if I should explore the boat further, but decided that such an exploration was best left to the police.

I tossed my handful of cartridge cases into the skiff, then went forrard along Hirondelle’s flooded deck to where an undamaged whisker pole lay in its foredeck clips. I tied the red shirt to the pole’s top, then rammed my makeshift flagpole into one of the bullet holes so that the treacherous hulk would be visible to any other mariner. Then I climbed back into the skiff, feeling oddly desolate. There is something very sad about mindless destruction, especially of a boat.