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skylight which was propped open. Now she stood beside me and watched the white Lincoln drive out of the boatyard. “Didn’t I say you’d be wasting your time?”
    “Sod my time,” I said angrily. “Did you hear what he asked about you and me?”
    “Of course I heard.” She seemed quite unfazed by Billingsley’s impertinent question whether we slept together, doubtless translating the policeman’s particular curiosity as a general confirmation of men’s innate tackiness. Ellen was more irritated by my answer than by Billingsley’s question. “Why didn’t you just tell him the truth?”
    “I did.”
    “I mean the truthful explanation.” Which was that Ellen had sworn herself to celibacy while she worked as a cook, a decision that was to me as eccentric as it was both incomprehensible and frustrating.
    “I shouldn’t have told the arrogant bastard anything.” I stared at the empty yard where Billingsley’s car had stood. “My God! But I ought to report him! I know what I’ll do! I’ll bloody well call the Belgian Embassy!”
    “Don’t be so stupid, Nick!” Ellen was genuinely frightened for me, but she was also indignant at me. “Report him, and you’ll be thrown off the islands before the week’s end! Don’t you understand what’s going on? Are you entirely blind? Don’t you understand that in small countries power is more likely to remain undisguised because there isn’t sufficient societal depth to conceal the realities of institutionalised brutality beneath a respectable fiction?”
    But I was not listening to the professor’s explanation. I was feeling disgust at myself. It seemed to me that the stench of Billingsley’s cigar smoke clung to the boat like the sulphurous reek of the pit, and with it lingered the realisation that I had been twisted into dishonesty as easily as a length of rope could be coiled into hanks. I had lied, and I had let myself be used by evil. But all for Masquerade.
     
    Masquerade is my boat. She’s a beauty; a forty-foot ketch built of mahogany on oak. She had been constructed in Hampshire before the Second World War by craftsmen who had taken pride in their work, but fibreglass had made wooden boats redundant and Masquerade had been laid up and left to rot at a boatyard on the River Exe.
    I had found her when I was a Weapons Instructor at the Royal Marines’ Lympstone camp in Devon. I had bought her for a song, then spent a fortune restoring her and, when my term of service expired and I could afford to become the gypsy-sailor I had always wanted to be, I left the Marines and made Masquerade my new home. For a couple of years she and I had knocked around the Mediterranean, then I had sailed her across the Atlantic. That voyage had been the first leg of a planned circumnavigation, but those dreams had been brutally shattered when Masquerade was stolen from an anchorage in the Florida Keys. She turned up ten days later, stranded on a coral reef in the Bahamas with most of her gear missing and her starboard bilges half ripped out by the savage coral heads. The thieves were never found.
    That theft and recovery had taken place just over a year ago. Now, laboriously rescued by Thessy’s father, a fisherman, Masquerade was standing in the sandy backyard of Thessy’s house where she was cradled by timber props among the casuarinas and palm trees, and where chickens roosted in her cockpit. She needed repairs and she needed love. She needed to feel the sea about her long deep keel again. Her timbers needed to swell with the salt water. She needed me. Which was why I had bowed to the imperative of Deacon Billingsley’s dishonesty, because otherwise I would have lost her.
    And I would have lost the chance to sail across the Pacific with Ellen, because Ellen was on the verge of agreeing to come with me, and if I had not yielded to the policeman’s blackmail I would have lost Ellen as well as my boat.
    And so I had lied.
     
    A few moments before sundown I extricated