Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
There was a gentle sigh beside me, then a tongue softly traced its way from my ear lobe and along my jaw.
I let out a sleepy groan and turned my head over on the pillow, hoping to be left alone after my late night.
Instead, I was treated to a cold wet nose which started its campaign with a pointed sniff, then escalated to a persistent shoving at the back of my neck.
‘Later, Hilda,’ I muttered. ‘Go back to bed. It’s still sleepy time. I know it’s light, but the alarm hasn’t gone off yet.’
I really could do with another couple of hours of sleep.
After making things up with Flick, Liam had invited me to appear live on his socials doing a tour of the Oxford Bookship.
I’d thought it would feel unnatural interacting with a virtual audience, but I’d soon forgotten they weren’t there in front of me and had darted around the cabin taking books off shelves and eagerly matching members of what had turned out to be an international audience with their new favourite reads.
Sadly most of them hadn’t followed through by placing orders to acquire the books from me, but I’d comforted myself with the thought that maybe the exposure would turn out to be more valuable in the long run.
Hilda gave me another shove then breathed heavily on my face for good measure. Her early-morning doggy breath was nearly as effective as smelling salts in rousing me from my semi-conscious state.
‘Why is canine toothpaste liver-scented rather than minty?’ I grumbled, sitting up and running a hand through my hair.
I frowned as my fingers caught in the tangles and quickly decided to give up on trying to make myself presentable.
I reached out and picked up my phone to check the time instead, but the screen was blank.
‘Great, that’s all I need,’ I said. I’d got so tired last night I’d obviously forgotten to turn the switch on when I plugged my phone in to charge overnight.
I swung my legs out of bed and leaned down to reach the socket.
But as I ran my fingers over the switch, I realised it was already in the on position.
‘Shit.’
Suddenly I felt wide awake. I hurried across the cabin and scrabbled through my drawers until I found my watch.
It was nearly nine o’clock. No wonder Hilda had been pestering me for her breakfast. She normally had it at half seven on the dot.
Even a 7:31 a.m. mealtime usually resulted in baleful looks and telegraphed threats to report me to the RSPCA for doggy cruelty.
‘One minute, one minute I promise Hildy-girl,’ I said, moving to the doors and trying to click on the main cabin lights, more out of hope than expectation.
As I’d feared, nothing happened. Even though I knew there was no point, I repeated the exercise in the bookshop, but everything was dead in there too.
The power was most definitely off. And no power meant more than no lights.
I could survive without lighting at this time of year.
But it also meant a useless fridge, a freezer, albeit tiny, stuffed with food which I couldn’t afford to replace once it thawed out, and most importantly of all, it meant no Wi-Fi.
I could live without checking my emails and scrolling through my social media, but I couldn’t open my shop without being able to process payments and search for orders online.
And I couldn’t even use my phone to do any of those things because that was dead too.
How could I run my business without that basic facility? The answer was I couldn’t.
I quickly pulled some clothes on and got Hilda her breakfast, then while she was munching contentedly on her kibble, I set about trying to work out why on earth my boat was experiencing a complete loss of power.
I inspected the fuse box, but everything was as it should be.
But that was where the similarities between a land-based power cut and a water-based one ended.
There were a couple of systems which kept the lights on for the Oxford Bookship.
Being at a permanent mooring meant I was in the privileged position of having access to shore power, so running out of juice wasn’t usually a problem I encountered.
I needed to check the connection. It worked by means of a heavy-duty cable, one end of which plugged into a socket on my boat, and the other into the junction point on shore.
I tried not to have it plugged in all the time for economy reasons, mostly using it to charge up the boat’s storage batteries overnight and relying on those for as much of the day as they lasted.
For none of the power outlets on the Oxford Bookship to be functioning right now, the problem must have started not long after I turned the lights off and went to bed, my phone charger and other electrical outlets draining what little had been left of the boat’s batteries after a full day of use.
If I could afford solar panels, I wouldn’t be facing this problem, but it was pointless dwelling on that thought.
I went out on deck and inspected the connection point where the cable should have been plugged in, but there was no sign of it.
I frowned in confusion. Heavy-duty cables didn’t just disappear into thin air.
I looked across to the shore in case the cable had somehow detached at my end but was still connected to the power bollard on land which I shared with the neighbouring mooring, but the Bookship’s socket was neatly closed off by the plastic cover and there was no sign of the thick cable which had been plugged in last night.
The Jericho Wine Barge’s cable on the other hand was still firmly in position.
I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this.
I examined the connection point on my boat more closely, frowning at the scratch marks around it.
I could have sworn they weren’t there before.
It would be highly unusual for one end of the cable to come loose accidentally, but for the whole thing to vanish…
That couldn’t be by chance. I jumped ashore and checked all round for other signs of anything wrong, but aside from the missing cable, everything looked as I would expect.
I shook my head. I was no Sherlock Holmes.
What had I been expecting to find? A trail of muddy footprints along the towpath leading me to the guilty party who’d pinched the cable?
Who would bother to do such a thing? It was a bit of kit designed for use on boats only.
The average person walking past on the canal wouldn’t have a use for it and surely there were far more obvious items to nick for someone who was carrying out a prank or a dare, which was always a possibility in a university city.
No, I was getting carried away. The more obvious explanation was that I was mistaken.
Plugging into shore power was such a routine thing that I’d conjured up the memory of doing it on another night and convinced myself it was yesterday evening.
I was under a lot of stress at the moment.
I’d open up the storage locker under the stern deck and find the cable there in its usual place.
I’d be able to plug it in, get everything working again and continue with my day as normal, albeit a little behind schedule.
Accompanied by a now-sated Hilda, I fetched the key from my cabin and opened up the locker.
Usually I found it strangely calming looking in there because of the way I had everything neatly stowed in place.
Nana Rose had always impressed upon me the need for order on a boat, ‘You never know when you might need to find something in an emergency.’ And yes, as I knew it would be, everything was in its proper place.
Everything, that was, except the missing power cable.
‘No, this cannot be happening,’ I muttered, lifting each item out of the locker and checking underneath it: the heavy metal windlass which worked like a key to open and close canal locks; a box of spare light bulbs both for internal lights and the headlight which I was legally obliged to have glowing when navigating the canal after dark; a couple of thick ropes neatly coiled; a retractable boathook which was the backup for the one stowed on the roof.
All very useful and important items, but not the extremely vital bit of kit I was searching for.
Apart from startling a couple of stowaway spiders, I achieved precisely nothing with the exercise.
I sat back on my heels and stared at my surroundings in an attempt to quieten my racing thoughts, but for once the serene environment of the Oxford Canal did not work its magic on me.
I tried to quell the rising sense of panic by telling myself that maybe I’d absent-mindedly put it elsewhere for the first time ever in my boat-owning existence.
I opened up the other lockers on deck and then continued my search in the cabins, rummaging through my clothes, books and even food cupboards with an increasing sense of desperation.
My beloved, formerly beautifully neat living space looked like it had been ransacked, which felt nearly as violating as the theft of the power cable.
Because that must be what had happened. My first horrified instinct had been the correct one.
However much I wanted the cable to be hidden away somewhere on board, it quite clearly wasn’t.
The scratch marks around the connection point told the tale – someone had disconnected the cable on land and then yanked very hard to detach it from my boat too.