signs were all still there: WH Smiths, Boots, Nationwide, Waterstones . . . but the storefront windows were long since gone. If he half-closed his eyes, let them soft-focus, and used a little imagination, he could almost see the high street busy once more; the soft creak of swinging signs replaced with the hum of traffic, the boom of music from the back of a passing car, the pedestrian thoroughfare filled with mums pushing buggies, the jingle of a newsagent’s door opening.
His smile turned into a cheerful grin. ‘Shore run,’ he announced happily, as he hauled the net over the rail, ‘cool.’
Chapter 4
10 years AC
Bracton Harbour,
Norfolk
Walter Eddings dropped the sails twenty yards out from the concrete quayside and let the thirty-foot yacht glide forward under its own momentum. The boat drew parallel as he steered her to a gentle rest. He watched as, on the foredeck, Jacob and his friend Nathan flipped tethered buoys over the side to cushion the boat’s fibreglass hull. As they bobbed gently, drifting the last few yards to a standstill, both young men equipped themselves with boat hooks and reached out to snag the moorings.
Jacob hopped across onto the quayside, Nathan tossing him a couple of lines which he secured fore and aft.
‘Good enough,’ shouted Walter, a ruddy face half hidden by the thatch of a grey-white beard and framed by thick salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a ponytail that fluttered in the breeze like a battle standard. He looked like an aging biker, like an old roadie who’d happily tell you how many groupies he’d once banged in the back of Status Quo’s tour bus. However, in the Sealed Knot uniform that he kept safely tucked away and took out and wore on very special occasions, he looked every bit a musketeer from the King’s Royal army, snatched from the seventeenth century and dumped into the twenty-first.
Jacob loved listening to him describe the battles of Nazeby, Edgehill, Marston Moor, as if he’d actually been there. He could almost smell the acrid smoke of gunpowder, feel the thud of cannons firing and the grunting of massed pikemen going toe-to-toe . . . and he could certainly imagine Walter, thickset and ruddy-faced, in the middle of it, pouring powder from a horn down the long barrel of his musket.
It was gone two in the afternoon. They’d made good time from the rigs to Bracton Harbour with the wind behind them. Walter had got them across without needing to turn on the engine once. Something he preferred to do whenever the wind was in their favour. Even though they’d discovered a diesel tank still half full in the marina from which they topped-up each time they visited, and promised to last them a good many years yet, he was determined to use as little of it as possible.
Walter looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got about five hours of daylight left,’ he announced.
Enough time for them to forage for most of the items on the very long shopping list, whilst Walter did a water-run. Across the marina was a tugboat moored on a side canal. It was tethered up to the delivery jetty of an old ale brewery. The brewery had its own well, tapping the very best of ‘natural Norfolk drinking water’, or at least that’s how it was described on the labels of their traditional brown glass bottles. It was in fact clean enough to drink and showed no sign of running out any time soon. Every time they did a shore run Walter filled the several dozen brewery drums in the back of the tug with well water, piloted the tug out to the rigs and exchanged the full drums for empty ones. It supplemented the rainwater they managed to catch in their water butts.
He’d usually returned, refilled the tugboat’s fuel tank and moored it back down the canal by the time the others had returned from their foraging. They’d then overnight at the quayside aboard the yacht, spending a few hours the next morning looking for whatever was left on the list, before heading home.
‘All right then, gents, it’s gun time,’ said Walter.
Four guns in the cockpit, the community’s entire arsenal. Jenny had appointed Walter - her right-hand man - as sole custodian of them a long time ago, fed up with being pestered by the boys, Jacob included, to get them out so they could hold them.
Walter picked up a shotgun. ‘As normal, we’re pairing off. One gun per pair.’
He handed the shotgun