Its burned sails were gone. The mast was down. Heavy tarpaulins covered the booms and rigging. The yacht rocked gently against its mooring lines in the late afternoon light.
Completely silent. Completely ordinary. And entirely deserted.
Kitty sat down beside the gangplank. The Highland cow slipper remained firmly in her mouth.
For several moments nobody moved.
Then Swashbuckled drew her sabre. “Right,” she said calmly. “Boarding party. Gerbils, Auntie, Hussie. With me. Scandinavians, guard the pontoon. If anyone rushes out, tackle them. Everyone else, wait here.”
Three gerbils immediately saluted. Nearby, one of the serious Scandinavian rowers cracked her knuckles with quiet enthusiasm.
“Oh goodness,” murmured Octavia Briefcase. “Are we actually doing piracy again?”
“We never really stopped,” said Hedgehog.
The yacht’s deck creaked as softly beneath Swashy’s boots.
AuntieDamsonCrumble crouched beside the companionway hatch. “Recently used,” she said. “No dust on the runners.”
Hussie leaned past her, examined the lock briefly, then produced something slender and metallic from inside her coat.
“Honestly,” said Octavia, “I no longer even wish to know.”
The lock clicked almost immediately. “Very poor cylinder,” Hussie replied with dignity.
The cabin smelled faintly of damp canvas, diesel, coffee.
And Tunnock’s Teacakes.
Everybody stopped.
AuntieDamsonCrumble lowered her lantern slightly. “Well,” she said, “unless the international smuggling ring is being run by a Scottish confectionery company, Boiledbeetle is here.”
The interior was cramped but orderly in the manner of small yachts occupied by competent people for extended periods. Charts remained folded neatly beside the navigation table. Mugs stood drying beside the sink. One bunk still contained a half-rolled thermal blanket.
Swashbuckled scanned the cramped quarters. “Three crew at most,” she said.
Kitty leapt onto the galley counter and purposefully batted a drying mug into the sink with a sharp clatter.
AuntieDamsonCrumble moved to check the noise, and her gaze dropped to the low cupboard directly beneath the draining board. The latch wasn’t fully caught. She pulled the door open.
Stuffed inside, alongside three empty Tunnock’s wrappers and a small, improvised sleeping nest of tea towels and shredded marina brochures, was a single Highland cow slipper. She exhaled. “Well,” she said, “that rather settles the matter.”
The search became substantially more systematic after that.
The gerbils spread through the yacht with terrifying efficiency carrying tiny notebooks and lanterns while Hussie focused on the compartments the smugglers had almost certainly believed were impenetrable.
The deep bins beneath the cabin floorboards revealed nothing but empty space and bilge water. Every cavity had been cleaned out.
From the depths of the starboard pilot berth, a panel swung outward to reveal a cramped hold. Hussie called, “False backing here, and I can see a folder of papers. I think we need Hedgehog and Octavia.”
Hedgehog and Octavia climbed down into the cabin just as Hussie pulled out the weatherproof binder. It was stuffed with paperwork, shipping tags, and customs declarations. Hussie could now clearly see the label on the crate. It read, LOW-GRADE BIRD FEED — NON-PREMIUM.
Hussie prised open the lid and brushed aside a layer of dry wood shavings. Before anybody could stop them, six gerbils launched themselves headfirst into the packing material with tiny screams of delight.
Wood shavings exploded across the cabin.
“Oh splendid!” cried an unseen voice from somewhere beneath the surface. “It’s diggable!”
The crate immediately vanished beneath a frenzy of ecstatic tunnelling, industrious scratching and flying sawdust as tiny bodies disappeared and resurfaced like particularly overexcited otters.
Hussie slowly removed a wood shaving from her sleeve. Bracing herself, she reached down through the swirling chaos of fur and sawdust to pull out one of the heavy blocks beneath.
It was a tightly-packed brick of thick, vacuum-sealed outer foil designed to protect the contents from the salt air. She peeled back the foil to reveal rows of small, pristine packets made of dark green, heavy, textured paper that felt like expensive stationery. Each one bore the same elegant gold leaf lettering, Vesper Gold Monastery Helianthus.
Instantly, every gerbil froze. Tiny noses emerged from the shavings and lifted toward the opened foil brick. For one extraordinary moment the cabin became completely silent.
“...Oh,” whispered Galliard reverently.
Then all remaining operational discipline collapsed.
Gerbils launched themselves bodily at Hussie from multiple directions with tiny shrieks of ecstasy, scrambling up her sleeves, hanging from her coat and attempting frantically to claw their way toward the dark green packets.
“GOOD LORD!” shouted Hussie as three of them reached her shoulder simultaneously.
“VESPER GOLD!” screamed somebody near her elbow.
“MOVE YOUR TAIL!”
“I WAS HERE FIRST!”
The brick itself had apparently become the single most important object on the Eastern seaboard of North America.
Hussie staggered backwards beneath the assault while holding the cargo aloft and watched helplessly as two or three loose packets spilled from the torn foil, and tumbled downward. Gunwale and Galliard immediately dove after them, scrambling to claw at the paper. Hussie tried desperately not to drop the rest of the expensive contraband into the cabin bilge.
“Tariff evasion,” said Octavia immediately, leaning over the chaotic crate.
“Mm,” said Hedgehog, already sorting paperwork into evidential piles. “Deliberate undervaluation through agricultural recategorisation. They’ve logged the entire manifest as low-grade chaff.”
“People commit international fraud over sunflower seeds?” asked MagpieComplex incredulously.
“At two hundred and fifty pounds a packet retail? Yes,” Hedgehog said without looking up. “With forty packets in a brick, fifty bricks in a crate, that’s half a million pounds sitting in this box alone.”
MagpieComplex glanced down the length of the cabin at the five identical wooden crates stacked neatly against the bulkhead. “And there are six of them on board.”
“Give or take whatever the wildlife manages to eat before we scarper,” Octavia murmured, watching a gerbil joyfully shred a piece of dark green paper worth more than a bespoke suit. “I make that three million pounds.”