Here, fate took an interest, played its hand, and the cards fell squarely on the side of one Carter 'Fruity' Smith, so called because of the posh accent he sometimes affected when raging about his dislike of upper-class British toffs. He hated everything about the class system. Private education and old-boys networks were anathema for him, and if anyone asked (or even if they didn't) he had particularly choice views on inherited peerages.
Unfortunately for me, 'Fruity' Smith had also recently been working undercover, and had returned from a short stint abroad, to lead an operation to catch a smuggling ring, which expected a shipment to arrive in the Medway on the 25th, aboard a yacht that had left Wilhelmshaven a week earlier. At the same time I was discovering the truth about boxes of gold, precious stones and a girl called Isabelle, Smith was standing on the deck of a fast motor-launch making its way out of the Thames, accompanied by ten of his fellow Flying Squad officers.
Two hours later, his launch was stationed at the southern end of the Kentish Knock, waiting for any sign of the Bandit heading into the estuary. Keen eyed officers took it in turns with binoculars, watching the lights of Margate for any sign of an unlit yacht passing across them. But when their vigil bore fruit, it was a crewman having a sneaky smoke on the stern that saw it first. Seeing a bright light suddenly appear a couple of miles away, he shouted to the others, and 'Fruity' and his pals turned and stared; those with binoculars seeing the white hull and sails of the Bandit caught in the spotlight's glare, and a moment later the bright red glow of a distress flare soaring high into the night sky, altering all and sundry to our position - and our plight.
I imagine Smith said something like "Tally Ho chaps!" or "That's the ticket!" before the launch started up it's huge engines and roared off to catch it's prey. And had they gone up the west side of the Knock instead of the east, that would certainly have been it for us, and maybe a lucky escape for von Moyton.
But fate, as it turned out, hadn't finished kicking us in the teeth yet. At the north end of the Kentish Knock, in a quiet navigational backwater, the motor yacht It Pays was slowly making it's way south with the intent of arriving at the Medway a couple of hours before dawn, whereupon its owner, one Barker 'Mad Dog' Brigham, expected to find a small yacht called Bandit at anchor with a load of tobacco and spirits destined for the east-end black market, and a cache of long-forgotten second world war weapons that a shady acquaintance of his uncle's nephew's father in the Irish Republic was really quite interested in.
Like von Moyton's trawler, the It Pays was also running dark, not wanting to attract attention to its clandestine activities. As 'Fruity' Smith and the Flying Squad were heading north at a fair clip to investigate the activity around von Moyton's trawler, the It Pays, with 'Mad Dog' Brigham and his disreputable crew of east-end thugs was coming straight towards us.
Von Moyton, no doubt rowing back to his trawler as fast as possible, must have had some momentary luck too. The tide, which had risen enough to allow Bandit to cross the sandbank, did the same for his trawler shortly after our departure, and on regaining his vessel it wasn't long before he was back in pursuit. That this would occur should have been obvious to me.
Henry and I were cautiously celebrating our close escape by sharing a bottle of something indecently alcoholic - it was probably French brandy, but in the dark and with my mind on other matters, I can scarce remember what it really was now. I can remember the effect though. By the time we'd travelled a mile or two to the north, my head was swimming and the shaking had subsided somewhat. We both thought we might have got away with it, in fact.
I was telling Henry how we would make for Canvey Island, taking the Bandit up one of the numerous remote creeks where no-one was likely to see us arrive or observe us unloading the cargo. I was confident that we could find somewhere to hide it all with a manic enthusiasm that could only have been the result of extreme tiredness, adrenalin and booze. I can recall leaning forward at the tiller, peering ahead into the dark and telling Henry how with a will and a dose of British backbone we could pull off the trick of stashing the contraband, disposing the weapons in the deep mud where no-one would find them anytime soon, and then - and this really must have been the drink talking - taking the gold and the rest of the ill-gotten Nazi loot to London and offering it to dear Elizabeth, as a present for her first year as Queen of our great nation.
Henry was similarly sloshed and agreed wholeheartedly, so, of course, that became our goal to the exclusion of all else. Including keeping a good look-out. In fact, by the time the first bottle was finished, we had all but completely forgotten about von Moyton and were verging on the brink of singing. So when we shaved down the port side of the It Pays, we reacted in a manner that was totally inappropriate to the seriousness of the situation.
"What ho, old chap! Nice s'night for a sail what!" yelled Henry as the Bandit glanced off the motor yacht and exchanged paint amidships.
"Oops!" I shouted. "Why've you got no lights on? Make's it hard to see you in the dark!"
It took less than a second for Brigham to realise that the yacht he'd just collided with, running with no lights itself, was the Bandit - the very yacht he was expecting to find in the Medway. "HENRY!" he shouted, with a voice that sounded like thunder itself.
Everything went absolutely silent. I could vaguely make out Henry next to me, his face ghostly white in the dark, an expression of abject terror frozen upon his features as he stared astern. The moment was broken by the sound of the motor yacht's engine revving up as it began to swing around. Even my befuddled brain put two and two together quickly enough to realise this must be the owner of the contraband goods on board the Bandit, and that he would be mighty unhappy when he found that we'd chucked a fair portion of the good overboard ...And we certainly didn't want anyone like that to get their hands on the nazi loot.
Henry and I moved at once, both of us heading for the cabin, obviously with the same thought in mind. We collided together, Henry dropping the bottle onto the deck with a crash of broken glass, both of us intent on being first to the cache of weapons in the bunk below.
Henry was cursing continually, a stream of really quite shocking language that somehow served to make the situation a little more bearable. Once we got below we pulled out the canvas wrapped bundles, ripping off the covers to reveal two Sten machine guns and three german rifles.
"Are you certain there's no ammunition, Henry?"
"What? Ammo? There's no ammo, Charles. Just the guns."
I gave Henry an incredulous look and said, "Then why in hell are we getting these things out if we've nothing to actually shoot with!"
"I'm sorry Charles! I never - but they don't know that! Maybe we could bluff it."
I could have given Henry a right earful right then if time hadn't been so short. The motor yacht would almost certainly be alongside in a minute, the Bandit having come to a stop as with no-one on the tiller, there was no way to stop the yacht turning into the wind. The sails flapped as they spilled the wind. If we didn't do something soon, we were lost. "Open those boxes and see what's inside. Maybe there will be some bullets or something."
Bluff it, Henry had said. Yes, perhaps that would have to do. I couldn't think of anything better, other than just giving up and surrendering, but surrender had never been something I'd done all through the war and I was damned if I was going to do it now. I left Henry rummaging in the locker and went back on deck, a trusty - but empty - Sten gun held in my hands.
The motor yacht was approaching as I emerged from the cabin. Someone pointed a search lamp at the Bandit - a somewhat less powerful and more discrete one than that on von Moyton's trawler - and a hail came across the water.
"Don't come any closer!" I yelled, brandishing the Sten gun so that the crew of the motor yacht could see it clearly. "We don't want any trouble, but if you try to board us, I'll rake you from bow to stern!" The threat felt weak, even to me, yet the motor yacht came to a stop some thirty feet away.
"Who are you? You're not Henry. Where is he?" The voice that came across the black water was the same one that had called out for Henry earlier.
"He's er... indesposed ... down below ... seasick," I said, lamely. "Who are you? if you don't mind me asking."
"I'm the man who's going to rip your head off if you don't put that down and let me onboard. I want my stuff! I haven't got all night and you can't stand there poncing around with that piece of old iron all night, neither, so do us all a favour and put it away."
The brute was right of course. Eventually I would either have to capitulate to his demands or suffer the consequences of taking the bluff to the bitter end, and I suspected that other guns with bullets to spare were pointed at me in the darkness. It was a futile situation, and only a miracle could save us now.
And a miracle was what we got. Fate had presumably gotten bored by then and shuffled off to bother someone else, leaving Luck to sweep in and dance merrily across the sea to find us in need of a huge dose of it. Not that it appeared that way at first...
"Don't do anything rash, gentlemen, or my men will shoot!" That shout had come from behind! I turned around and saw von Moyton, backlit by the lights onboard his trawler as it edged towards us from the other side. He must have made it back to his boat and come across the bank as the tide rose, following in our wake once more. Damn the man. Damn them all and their bloody silly criminal games. It looked like the game was up, and no matter what happened next, Henry and I seemed to have lost.