‘It’s funny how life can change in the blink of an eye,’ Tariq said. He was thinking of his nightmarish existence as a modern day slave before a chance encounter had brought him into contact with Laura.
Laura turned over onto her stomach so she could watch the activity in the wave pool from beneath the brim of her baseball cap. ‘Yes, it is. We’re pretty lucky.’ She was thinking of how, in just a few months, she’d gone from a dreary orphanage, where she’d been bored half to death and had nothing in common with anyone, to a Caribbean cruise ship adventure with her best friends.
From the other side of the pool came a screech that ended in a gurgle. Jimmy Gannet had exuberantly dive-bombed an inflatable dinosaur, not realising until he was in mid-air that there was a small girl floating dreamily on its back. His mum and dad rushed to inspect the damage. From a distance, they resembled a pair of excitable parrots.
‘Every silver lining has a cloud,’ quipped Laura.
‘Tariq! Laura! My dear children, how are you?’ cried Rita Gannet. She came rushing over, leaving Bob to deal with the irate mother of the crying girl. ‘Oh my goodness, we simply could not stop talking about you and your uncle after you left last night,’ she said, whipping off sunglasses the size of small planets. ‘Jimmy’s imagination has been quite fired up by it. I’ve never seen him so excited by anything.’
Laura fought the urge to run away. Jimmy’s father had fished him out of the pool and was escorting him in their direction, wrapped in a huge flowery towel.
‘Are you sure she’s okay, Dad?’ he was saying. ‘I feel terrible. I didn’t see her there.’
‘Sure she is, son. Some people have nothing better to do than complain, that’s all,’ complained Bob, striding over and flopping down on a candy-striped lounger. The lounger collapsed in the middle, trapping him in its the depths like a Venus flytrap swallowing a bug.
Tariq, Rita and Jimmy rushed to help, but most of Laura’s energy went on trying to stop a fit of giggles. In the end, she had to stuff a corner of towel into her mouth.
‘Damn this cheap and nasty pool furniture,’ Bob mumbled when he finally crawled scarlet and sweaty from the clutches of the chair. ‘Rita, add that to the list of things we’ve found wrong so far, and we’ll try to get some money back.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said his wife. ‘How are you enjoying the ship so far, kids? Is your uncle on the mend, Laura? What’s wrong with him, anyway? Is he seasick?’
‘He’s much better, thank you,’ responded Laura, ignoring the question.
‘Great, great. And what are your plans for tomorrow?’
Laura glanced quickly at Tariq. She knew what was coming next. The Gannets wanted a playmate for Jimmy. She wracked her brains for an excuse. ‘Well, we hadn’t decided … We’re not sure …’
Then she remembered Tariq’s words. She knew he was right, they should give Jimmy a chance. ‘Actually, we were thinking of trying the rock climbing wall.’
Bob poked his son. ‘Rock climbing! Awesome. You’d love that, son, wouldn’t you? Didn’t you once say that you dreamed of being a mountaineer?’
‘Dad, Tariq and Laura don’t want me hanging round and anyway I’d rather be with you and Mum.’
‘Nonsense,’ retorted his father. ‘They don’t mind at all, do you kids? The more the merrier. It’ll be fun for you to be with children your own age.’
‘You’d be very welcome, Jimmy,’ Tariq said politely. ‘We’d be glad to have you along.’
‘See, what did I tell you?’ Bob boomed, clapping Jimmy on the back. ‘Now how about it, son? It’ll give you a chance to discuss all that detective stuff with Laura.’
‘Can’t think of anything I’d like more,’ Laura said insincerely.
Jimmy looked as if he’d rather stand knee-deep in a tankful of piranhas, but he gave a weak smile and said, ‘Sure, Dad. That would be great.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Rita. ‘It’s a date.’
‘WE’RE DOING THE rock climbing with him and that’s it,’ Laura told Tariq as they headed back to their cabin after taking Skye for his early morning walk on Wednesday. ‘There’s no way I’m having Jimmy Gannet hanging around and ruining our whole holiday. He’s a disaster waiting to happen, that boy.’
She stopped. ‘What is it, Skye?’
The husky had halted abruptly at their cabin door, hackles raised.
‘It’s probably the cleaner,’ Tariq said, nodding at the housekeeping trolley parked two doors down, but he hesitated before slipping his key card into the lock. ‘That’s weird, the door has been locked from the inside.’
Laura pushed past the growling husky and knocked hard. ‘Is anyone in there?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your key as well?’ demanded a pink-faced maid, emerging from cabin 130. ‘You kids! What am I going to do with you?’ She had a cheerful smile and a roly-poly figure all but sewn into her blue and white uniform.
Laura placed a warning hand on Skye’s collar. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. For some reason, Jimmy’s words about the ‘insect’ man watching them board the ship came into her head. ‘As well as what?’
The maid unlocked the door with a master key. ‘As well as your young brother. Now don’t forget it again, because I’m leaving now and have the rest of the day off.’
Skye almost wrenched Laura’s arm from its socket, so keen was he to burst into the cabin. But his growl soon changed to a whine. Stretched out on Laura’s bed, reading her Matt Walker book and listening to the iPod Tariq had been given for his birthday, was Jimmy.
Far from appearing embarrassed to be caught in their cabin, Jimmy grinned at their expressions. It was barely nine o’clock but already he looked as if he’d been through a wind tunnel. His hair was sticking up in all directions and there was ketchup on his shirt.
‘Hello, Laura and Tariq and big wolf dog,’ he said, removing the headphones from his ears. ‘Surprised to see me? I must say that, for a detective, you’re pretty lax about your security, Laura.’ He held up the book. ‘I don’t think Matt Walker would approve.’
Laura snatched it from him. She was trembling with fury. ‘What do you think you’re playing at, Jimmy Gannet? Or is this normal behaviour for you? Are you in the habit of breaking into people’s rooms and going through their things? Do you realise that we could call security and have you arrested?’
Jimmy propped himself up on the bed and regarded her with amusement. ‘You get all red when you’re cross. Now that I’ve decided to be an ace detective myself, I wanted to see how easy it would be to get inside a locked room. And it was. Very easy. It only took about two minutes.’
‘But why our cabin?’ asked Tariq. ‘Couldn’t you have experimented with your parents’ cabin or something?’
Jimmy said coolly: ‘Where’s the challenge in that? Anyway I was hoping to meet your famous uncle. Where is he anyway? Hiding under the bed?’
Laura glared at him. ‘So how did you get in?’
He snorted. ‘Easy as pie, wasn’t it. I told the cleaner that I’d locked myself out and that I couldn’t find my mum or my sister, and she let me in straight away. Well, I’m a kid, aren’t I? She’s not going to think that a ten-year-old is going to make up a story like that – not on a fancy cruise ship. She did ask me if I had any ID, and I told her that the best proof I could give her was that she’d definitely find a Matt Walker book in the cabin. And sure enough, there was.’
Tariq laughed. ‘That is pretty gutsy.’
‘No, it’s not,’ Laura said indignantly. ‘It’s called breaking and entering. I’m going to call security.’ She reached for the phone and began to dial.
Instantly Jimmy’s bravado crumpled. A minute ago, he’d seemed much older, wiser and more confident than his ten years, but now he just was a scared kid. He sat up and hugged his knees, one of which was badly grazed. It had two crossed plasters on it. Tears brimmed in his eyes but he blinked them away.
‘Oh, please don’t do that. Please. Dad will cause a scen
e and it’ll be hugely embarrassing. Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just …’
‘You just what?’ demanded Laura. ‘You just thought you’d steal my book, help yourself to Tariq’s iPod and frighten the life out of us?’
Jimmy picked at the bedcover. ‘I wanted to prove to you that I could be a detective too.’
Laura was not yet ready to forgive him. ‘A detective fifty times as good as my uncle?’
He flushed. ‘You didn’t like that, I suppose.’
‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ said Tariq.
Jimmy looked sheepish. ‘I guess I wanted to see what it was like to be you for a while.’
Tariq sat down beside him. ‘Us? Why on earth would you want to be like us?’
‘Well, you’re best friends, aren’t you? I saw you and your cool dog on the dock before you boarded the ship. We were standing quite near to you for a while. There was something about the way you were talking to each other and laughing, it was obvious that you’d do anything for each other.’
‘Yes, we would,’ said Laura, softening a little now that he’d praised Skye, ‘but that’s no excuse for breaking into our cabin.’
Jimmy hugged his knees harder. ‘I’ve never had a friend. Not a real one. And my life is so boring compared to yours. You live by the sea and you have a husky and investigate things. Your uncle is a famous detective. My life is really, really dull and my mum and dad, I love them, right, but they’re embarrassing. My dad, he’s loud and makes people stare. And my mum sometimes treats me like I’m a baby.’
Laura’s eyes met Tariq’s. All of her anger drained away. It was true what Tariq said. You never could tell what was inside a person.
‘First,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how much Tariq and I envy you.’
Jimmy stared at her. ‘Me? Why?’
‘Because you have two parents who adore you. That’s worth any amount of embarrassment, trust me. Both Tariq and I are orphans. Tariq is from Bangladesh and his parents were basically worked into an early grave. My mum died when I was born and I don’t know who my father was. Some people say he was an American. But that’s okay because my uncle is the best person in the world and the only father I would ever want. All I’m saying is that a booming voice and being overprotected are a small price to pay for having a mum and dad who love you.
‘Secondly, your life is exciting. You’re on a cruise ship with dolphins jumping all around and submarines and giant squid sliding underneath, and you’re about to come rock climbing with us.
‘And lastly, you do have friends. You have Tariq and me. But if you ever pull a stunt like this again, we’ll be ex-friends. Got it?’
A smile broke like a new day across Jimmy’s face. ‘Got it.’
THE BIG COUNTRY adventure centre was run by a rugged instructor called Russ. His bronzed hands looked strong enough to grind golf balls to powder.
‘The first three rules of rock climbing are check, double check and triple check your equipment,’ he told them. ‘Your ropes are your lifeline. When all else fails, you need to be able to depend on them. You won’t hear us talk a lot about safety here, although nothing is more important to us. But we can’t guarantee it. Any time you leave the ground it’s a high-risk activity.’
Laura craned her neck to gaze up at the wall. It was the height of two decks of the ship and made to look like a real rocky cliff. It had several overhangs. She didn’t think she’d be trying those.
Towards the end of Russ’s lecture on the basics of climbing and terms such as rappel, anchor and belay, Jimmy got cold feet. ‘To be honest, I’m a bit scared of heights,’ he admitted to Laura. ‘Plus I’m kind of accident-prone. I think I’ll sit on that bench over there with Skye and watch.’
‘Are you sure?’ she said, but she didn’t push it. He had enough of that from his father. Besides, it would be nice for Skye to have the company while she and Tariq were climbing.
Russ was equally relaxed. ‘Whatever you feel comfortable with, Jimmy. No pressure at all. If you change your mind, let me know and we’ll kit you out.’
The doors of the adventure centre burst open and a crowd of teenagers came swaggering in. One was carrying a digital radio blaring ear-splitting rock.
Russ groaned. ‘Something tells me we might have a booking mix-up here,’ he said. ‘Bear with me, kids, while I sort this out. Laura and Tariq, grab yourself some rock shoes from that box over there and then head over to the gear store. Ernesto will sort you out with helmets and harnesses.’
The teenagers were dispersing noisily when Skye sprang up and raced over to a door beside the gear store. He began to scratch frantically at it. Jimmy rushed after him and tried, without success, to haul him back.
Laura picked up her harness and ran over, with Tariq following. ‘What’s going on?’
Jimmy gave up his struggle to stop the husky’s desperate clawing. ‘I don’t know. One minute he was sitting peacefully and the next he was tearing over here. He seems agitated. What’s behind that door?’
‘Is gear store backroom,’ answered a wiry dark man with an anxious face. ‘Hi, I am Ernesto. What seem-us to be the problem?’
Laura had hold of Skye’s collar and was trying to coax him away. ‘My dog is convinced that something bad is lurking in there.’
Ernesto chuckled. ‘The only bad thing that lurks in thees place is me. Is where I sort out the equipment and check the ropes. Nothing to interest your husky. No bones, ha ha.’ He opened the door and waved grandly to Skye. ‘Here, my friend, take a look if is a gonna make you feel better.’
But the store was empty. Skye rushed around sniffing, but it soon became clear that whatever - or whomever - he’d detected was long gone.
‘You were meestaken,’ Ernesto informed Skye. ‘There is no bogey man here.’ He sniffed. ‘There is something strange though. What is thees smell? Is chocolat, no?’
‘Chocolate peanuts,’ said Tariq. ‘It smells of chocolate peanuts. The Mukhtars used to sell them in their store.’
‘Noots, of course,’ agreed Ernesto. ‘I no eat noots – very allergic – so is not me.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing is disturb so is okay. Probably is one of those teen-agus.’
He steered Skye out of the way and went to close the door, but Laura stopped him. ‘Wait. Where does that hatch go to?’
‘Is for deliveries only. He go out to passage near restaurant.’
He shut the door. ‘Now, let us see which of you will be best climber.’
‘I will,’ Jimmy said with a grin. ‘I’ll be the best mountaineer that’s ever been, better than Edmund Hillary. He climbed Mount Everest back in 1953.’
Tariq raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve changed your mind about coming with us?’
Jimmy was pale but he nodded vigorously. ‘As long as you let me go first.’
An hour earlier, his cheeky bravado would have made Laura want to throttle him, but now she recognised it for what it was and smiled warmly at him. ‘Good for you. It takes real courage to overcome a fear of heights. Here, take my harness. Ernesto can find me another one.’
What the children didn’t know about Russ, and what he didn’t advertise, was that he was a former member of the SAS, had climbed Everest three times and, two decades before, had been one of the world’s elite mountaineers.
Yet all of that experience was of no use to him when Jimmy Gannet reached the highest, most treacherous part of the climbing wall, sat down in his harness in preparation for being lowered back to the ground, and let out a yell of pure terror. ‘My rope, I felt it slip. It’s breaking, it’s breaking.’
Ordinarily, Russ would have the last, and most vital person in the human chain of safety, on the ground. First in line was Tariq. He was the belayer. He had a belay device clipped to his harness and he’d been shortening the rope as Jimmy climbed. The rope went through Jimmy’s harness, up to a metal loop called a karibiner at the top of the wall, which acted as an anchor, and back down to Tariq.
Jimmy had c
limbed without assistance, using his hands and feet. Laura had watched him with her heart in her mouth. He’d insisted on going first, despite being so scared he was trembling, but even so she worried that his mind was not on what he was doing. He’d been so affected by the chapters of the Matt Walker book he’d read that he’d been talking non-stop, pressing Laura for every detail about the detective’s methods.
‘What’s the best ever tip you learned from Detective Inspector Walker?’ he’d pressed.
It was a difficult question because Detective Inspector Walker had hundreds of ingenious tips and tricks, but Laura had finally decided that one of her favourites came from The Case of the Missing Heiress. Matt had observed that a common weakness of criminals in general and kidnappers in particular was that they were so preoccupied with trying to get the details right that they often overlooked the ordinary, mundane things. They messed up because they didn’t notice the things that were staring them in the face.
‘Like what?’ Jimmy had pressed. ‘Give me an example.’
But right then Russ had interrupted them. They were ready for Jimmy to climb the wall.
When Jimmy reached the top Russ had explained that he was to indicate he was ready to descend and Tariq would lower him with the help of the belay device, something which reduced a climber’s weight to a couple of kilograms. Laura was second in the chain. She held the dead rope – rope that had already been paid out – and was there to help Tariq if Jimmy fell. Russ was there for professional backup. When working with children, he always held the very end of the rope so that he could step in quickly in an emergency.
Unfortunately, at the instant that Jimmy’s rope was sliced through almost to its kern, as its core was known, the instructor was on the other side of the centre attending to a woman who had fainted.
‘Help!’ Jimmy yelled, but as he did the spindly twists of nylon that held him snapped so that only one remained. The sudden jolt caused him to pitch backwards into space.
Tariq and Laura had a split second to act. They used it. Russ was already sprinting towards them, but he’d taught them well. Before he reached them they’d halted Jimmy’s fall in mid-air. The boy crashed against the wall and swung like a human pendulum, but after that they were able to lower him gently to the ground.
Laura Marlin Mysteries 2: Kidnap in the Caribbean Page 5
