“The customer will be with you at midday”—Harry ignored everything I had said—“and he’ll try to knock you down to a hundred and ten, but I told him you wouldn’t go a penny below one-thirty.”

“Hang on!” I protested angrily. It was not the suggested price that was making me bridle but rather Harry’s bland assumption that I would be available to show Stormchild to his customer. “I’ll be halfway to the Channel Islands by midday tomorrow. Why can’t you show the boat yourself?”

“Because I shall be in Majorca, selling a triple-decked whorehouse to a Sheik of Araby,” Harry said carelessly. Then, after a deliberately worrying pause, “OK, Tim, if you don’t want to sell your sloop, what about that big German yawl at Cobb’s Quay? Do you know if she’s still available?”

“Sod you,” I growled, thus provoking an evil chuckle from Harry, who knew Joanna and I should never have taken Stormchild onto our brokerage list. The big yacht was out of our league, but she was an estate sale and the widow was an old friend of the family, and we had been unable to refuse her request that we look after the sale. Out of sentimentality we had even waived our brokerage fee, but not even that concession had shifted the big sloop off our jackstands, and thus, for over a year now, Stormchild’s fifty-two-foot hull had taken up precious space in our yard, and she looked like she would be staying for at least another year unless we found a buyer who was immune to Britain’s sky-high interest rates. Harry Carstairs knew just how desperately I needed to make room in my cramped yard, which was why he was so blithely confident that I would change my Easter plans. For a few seconds I contemplated letting Billy handle the London lawyer, but I knew my foreman was neither good at nor happy with such negotiations, which meant I would have to stay and deal with the sale myself. “OK, Harry”—I resigned myself to the inevitable—“I’ll be here.”