Sea Fury (1971) by James Pattinson Read Free Book Online

one thing and another, never holding a steady job, using his charm, his glib tongue and the army background as weapons in the battle for money. To get money he was not above using practically any method, and that he had escaped going to gaol was due as much to good fortune as anything else, for he had been involved in a great variety of rather shady operations. He had steered very close to the line separating legality from illegality but had always got away without any serious collision with the law.
    Things had, however, become more and more difficult as he grew older and the personal charm became somewhat tarnished. He had tended to lose his touch also. He had come a cropper on a deal involving surplus army stores and had landed in the bankruptcy court. As an undischarged bankrupt his activities were severely limited; there were too many things he could not do. He decided that the time had come to get out of the country and try his luck overseas.
    Unfortunately, he was without funds, and no shipping company was likely to give him a passage for himself and his wife in return for anything as nebulous as a promise to pay when he had made his fortune abroad. In this dilemma he turned, with no great hope, to his mother-in-law.
    To his surprise the move proved successful. The auctioneer, when shown Lycett’s begging letter, came to the conclusion that the cost of two one-way steamship tickets was a small price to pay for the privilege of being rid of this plausible rogue. He was quite certain that it was only a matter of time before Lycett, if he stayed in England, found himself in the criminal courts. Which would be very unpleasant for anyone related to him, even if only by the ties of marriage.
    “So he wants to go to Hong Kong. Best place for him. With any luck he’ll stray across the border and be picked up by the Reds. Anyway, he’ll be off our backs.”
    “So you think I should send him the money?”
    “In the circumstances, yes.”
    Lycett had picked Hong Kong because the colony seemed to him the most promising area for the exercise of his peculiar talents. Plenty of Chinese had made themselves a pile, so why not an Englishman? Moira had no confidence at all in his chances of striking it rich anywhere in the world; she was thoroughly disillusioned; but Hong Kong at least offered a change of scenery and she raised no objections to the project .
    “It’s as good a place as any other, I suppose.”
    Moira Lycett’s disillusionment had begun very soon after the honeymoon. She had been immature when she married Lycett, but she matured quickly. Long before she was twenty she was perfectly well aware that the real Morton Lycett was something very different from the romantic hero she had, in her early innocence, imagined him to be. From the first there had never been any feeling of security. True, there were periods when the money seemed to be rolling in and they lived in style; but these were always succeeded by bad times, living from hand to mouth in scruffy lodgings, wearing last season’s clothes, sometimes even going hungry.
    And yet she had stayed with him, though she herself might have found it difficult to say why. It was not that she loved him; indeed she doubted now whether she had ever really done so; she had been infatuated by the mask, but the mask had slipped long ago. Nor was it a sense of loyalty that held her; she owed no loyalty to a man who had so misled her when she had been too young to know any better.
    So perhaps it was simply fear; fear of being on her own,of being forced to fend for herself. She had never been trained to earn her own living; she had no skill in shorthand or typing, no particular talents; and though, with her undoubted physical attraction, she should not have found any great difficulty in discovering another man willing to support her, she was too indolent, and indeed lacked the courage, to make the break.
    As for going to live with her mother, that was out of the question. It