LITMIR.BIZ

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went through the living-room and opened a window to the verandah. Rain dripped from the roof and out to sea lightning crackled. He drank a little more of his beer then put the can down and closed the window. Better to try and get a little more sleep. He was taking a party of recreational scuba divers out from Caneel Bay at nine-thirty which meant that as usual he needed his wits about him, plus all his considerable expertise.

      As he went through the living-room he paused to pick up a framed photo of his wife, Karye and his two young children, the boy Walker and his daughter, little Wallis. They’d departed for Florida only the previous day for a vacation with their grandparents which left him a bachelor for the next month. He smiled wryly, knowing just how much he’d miss them and went back to bed.

      At the same moment in his house on the edge of Cruz Bay at Gallows Point, Henry Baker sat in his study reading in the light of a single desk lamp. He had the door to the verandah open because he liked the rain and the smell of the sea. It excited him, took him back to the days of his youth and his two years’ service in the navy during the Korean War. He’d made full lieutenant, had even been decorated with the Bronze Star, could have made a career of it. In fact they’d wanted him to, but there was the family publishing business to consider, responsibilities and the girl he’d promised to marry.

      It hadn’t been a bad life considering. No children, but he and his wife had been content until cancer took her at fifty. From then on he’d really lost interest in the business, had been happy to accept the right kind of deal for a take-over which had left him very rich and totally rootless at fifty-eight.

      It was a visit to St John which had been the saving of him. He’d stayed at Caneel Bay, the fabulous Rock Resort on its private peninsula north of Cruz Bay. It was there that he’d been introduced to scuba diving by Bob Carney and it had become an obsession. He’d sold his house in the Hamptons, moved to St John and bought the present place. His life at sixty-three was totally satisfactory and worthwhile although Jenny had had something to do with that as well.

      He reached for her photo. Jenny Grant, twenty-five, face very calm, wide eyes above high cheek-bones, short dark hair and there was still a wariness in those eyes as if she expected the worst, which was hardly surprising when Baker recalled their first meeting in Miami when she’d tried to proposition him in a car-park, her body shaking from the lack of the drugs she’d needed.

      When she’d collapsed, he’d taken her to hospital himself, had personally guaranteed the necessary financing to put her through a drug-rehabilitation unit, had held her hand all the way because there was no one else. It was the usual story. She was an orphan raised by an aunt who’d thrown her out at sixteen. A fair voice had enabled her to make some kind of living singing in saloons and cocktail lounges, and then the wrong man, bad company and the slide had begun.

      He’d brought her back to St John to see what the sea and the sun could do. The arrangement had worked perfectly and on a strictly platonic basis. He was the father she had never known, she was the daughter he had been denied. He’d invested in a café and bar for her on the Cruz Bay waterfront, called Jenny’s Place. It had proved a great success. Life couldn’t be better and he always waited up for her. It was at that moment he heard the Jeep drive up outside, there was the sound of the porch door and she came in laughing, a raincoat over her shoulder. She threw it on a chair and leaned down and kissed his cheek.

      ‘My God, it’s like a monsoon out there.’

      ‘It’ll clear by morning, you’ll see.’ He took her hand. ‘Good night?’

      ‘Very.’ She nodded. ‘A few tourists in from Caneel and the Hyatt. Gosh, but I’m bushed.’

      ‘I’d get to bed if I were you, it’s almost three o’clock.’

      ‘Sure you don’t mind?’

      ‘Of course not. I may go diving in the morning, but I should be back before noon. If I miss you, I’ll come down to the café for lunch.’

      ‘I wish you wouldn’t dive on your own.’

      ‘Jenny, I’m a recreational diver, no decompression needed because I work within the limits exactly as Bob Carney taught me and I never dive without my Marathon diving computer, you know that.’

      ‘I also know that whenever you dive there’s always a chance of some kind of decompression sickness.’

      ‘True, but very small.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Now stop worrying and go to bed.’

      She kissed him on the top of his head and went out. He returned to his book, carrying it across to the couch by the window, stretching out comfortably. He didn’t seem to need so much sleep these days, one of the penalties of growing old, he imagined, but after a while, his eyes started to close and sleep he did, the book sliding to the floor.

      He came awake with a start, light beaming in through the venetian blinds. He lay there for a moment, then checked his watch. It was a little after five and he got up and went out on to the verandah. It was already dawn, light breaking on the horizon, but strangely still and the sea was extraordinarily calm, something to do with the hurricane having passed. Perfect for diving, absolutely perfect.

      He felt cheerful and excited at the same time, hurried into the kitchen, put the kettle on and made a stack of cheese sandwiches while it boiled. He filled a thermos with coffee, put it in a holdall with the sandwiches and took his old reefer coat down from behind the door.

      He left the Jeep for Jenny and walked down to the harbour. It was still very quiet, not too many people about, a dog barking in the distance. He dropped into his inflatable dinghy at the dock, cast off and started the outboard motor, threaded his way out through numerous boats until he came to his own, the Rhoda, named after his wife, a 35-foot Sport Fisherman with a flying bridge.

      He scrambled aboard, tying the inflatable on a long line, and checked the deck. He had four air tanks standing upright in their holders, he’d put them in the day before himself. He opened the lid of the deck locker and checked his equipment. There was a rubber-and-nylon diving suit which he seldom used, preferring the lighter, three-quarter-length one in orange and blue. Fins, mask, plus a spare because the lenses were correctional according to his eye prescription, two buoyancy jackets, gloves, air regulators and his Marathon computer.

      ‘Carney training,’ he said softly; ‘never leave anything to chance.’

      He went round to the prow and unhitched from the buoy then went up the ladder to the flying bridge and started the engines. They roared into life and he took the Rhoda out of harbour towards the open sea with conscious pleasure.

      There were all his favourite dives to choose from, the Cow & Calf, Carval Rock, Congo, or there was Eagle Shoal if he wanted a longer trip. He’d confronted a lemon shark there only the previous week, but the sea was so calm that he just headed straight out. There was always Frenchcap Cay to the south and west and maybe eight or nine miles, a great dive, but he just kept going, heading due south, pushing the Rhoda up to fifteen knots, pouring himself some coffee and breaking out the sandwiches. The sun was up now, the sea the most perfect blue, the peaks of the islands all around, a breathtakingly beautiful sight. Nothing could be better.

      ‘My God,’ he said softly, ‘it’s a damn privilege to be here. What in hell was I doing with my life all those years?’

      He lapsed into a kind of reverie, brooding about things, and it was a good thirty minutes later that he suddenly snapped out of it and checked on his position.

      ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I must be twelve miles out.’

      Which was close to the edge of things and that awesome place where everything simply dropped away and it was two thousand feet to the bottom, except for Thunder Point and that, he knew, was somewhere close. But no one ever dived there, the most dangerous reef in the entire region. Even Carney didn’t dive there. Strong currents, a nightmare world of fissures and channels. Carney had told him that years before an old diver had described it to him. A hundred and eighty feet on one side, then the ridge of the reef at around seventy and two thousand feet on the other. The old

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