by Knight, Ali
Georgie shook her head. ‘You are not to do that again.’
‘The thanks I’ve just had,’ said Ryan, ‘I’m hardly going to go out of my way. But it’s still a useful trick to know.’ He put the phone away in his pocket.
‘It’s against the law, Ryan. That should matter.’
Her brother shrugged and roared away up the bus lane.
38
The storm was building in intensity, the slate-grey sky throwing flurries of rain at the windscreen, the ship careening down wave troughs and cresting skywards. The crew had worked for long hours, battening down everything that could move and cause damage. The Wolf was sweaty under his waterproofs and went back to his room to change. He found Luciana naked on the floor of the cabin doing the sun salute, the TV blaring. ‘You OK?’ he asked. ‘Not feeling sick?’
She didn’t even open her eyes as she pointed her perfect bum at the ceiling. ‘Never better.’
He smiled, came out and swayed down the corridor to Jonas’s door. It was closed. He was probably knees to the lino and head down the toilet, wishing he’d flown cattle class back to Heathrow. Sometimes these storms lasted for weeks, not days. He paused, wondering whether to knock. The door next to Jonas’s opened and the company security guy came out.
The door banged shut with force behind him as the ship listed. The Wolf narrowed his eyes. ‘That’s not your cabin. What are you doing in there?’
The guy drew himself up, quick to anger and quick to pull rank. ‘It’s none of your business,’ he shot back. He wasn’t prepared to be grilled by any old deckhand.
The Wolf was having none of it. ‘Cabins are off limits. So unless you tell me what you were doing in there, I’ll be forced to enter and take a look myself.’
The guy looked at him like he was something that had got trapped in the grooves of his shoe. ‘I’m moving cabins. I threw up in mine.’
The Wolf relented. You couldn’t expect everyone to adjust as well as Luciana had to being on board.
‘I was in number 23. I’ll enjoy knowing that you’ll be the one to clear it up.’ He walked away down the corridor as the Wolf stared at his retreating back, his fists opening and closing.
He went up to the bridge where the captain and the first mate were. The Wolf could see the rings of the storm on the weather chart had tightened, like a noose round a convict’s neck. The President was watching the might of the storm through the toiling windscreen wipers, standing with his legs wide to counteract the listing.
‘It’s going to be a cracker,’ said the Wolf.
‘Yes, stronger than we thought. Force 9 at least.’ The President looked grey and tired.
‘Should we have moved around it?’ The Wolf would be surprised if he said yes – the ship could ride through hurricanes without too much bother and this storm wasn’t that big. Yet.
‘We could have tracked further south, but that would have delayed us several days.’ He let out a grin, keeping the atmosphere light. ‘Let’s show our guests what this ship can tolerate.’
Their conversation stopped as the President took a call. The ship moved down a wave and they felt their feet and their stomachs lift. Spray hammered the windows and the white of a wave hit the prow.
The Wolf was surprised to see Jonas come on to the bridge. ‘I expected you would be calling God on the great white telephone.’
‘Me, I feel great.’
‘I’m glad you’re OK, seasickness can be really bad.’
The President was trying to explain to whoever was on the phone that the storm was fast-changing and unpredictable. But it sounded like he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. From the tone of his voice he was only a shade away from apologising, something the Wolf found surprising. He was captain of the ship. You stood by your decisions and defended them. You were in control. The President turned to the Wolf and rolled his eyes. He was being leaned on from on high. ‘Of course, I’ll—’ Another long pause. ‘The cargo is fine,’ he managed to say, before being cut off again.
Jonas was talking to the Wolf, but the Wolf wasn’t listening. ‘Who’s that?’ he mouthed at the captain.
The captain covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Head honcho, checking everything’s OK. He’s spending too much time looking at weather patterns. He’s getting stressed.’
‘The owner?’
The President nodded, the phone still to his ear.
A pen rolled across the bridge before the President caught it and clipped it back in his breast pocket. In this weather anything not tied down found a life and energy of its own. The Wolf looked out through the rain at the hundreds of tonnes of cargo surging north-eastwards to London. Christos was stressing about his ship in the storm. The contents had better have been fixed down securely inside those cans, or things would be damaged. He smiled.
‘Wolf, do you want to play ping-pong?’ Jonas was leaning on one of the rails with his elbows, completely unconcerned about the weather.
He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t work with this listing. I’ve got a much better game. Come on.’ A feeling close to joy surged through him as he jumped down the stairs of the bridge and out into the corridor. ‘You can’t do this on dry land.’ He took Jonas to a staircase of nine steps between the accommodation floors. ‘Here’s the challenge. How do you walk down those stairs without touching any of them or the walls?’
Jonas thought for a moment and then shrugged, stumped.
The Wolf grinned. ‘Watch this.’ He waited for a few moments as he felt the ship list to one side. ‘Here we go!’ The ship hit another huge wave and rolled back sideways, the staircase tipping up, becoming more horizontal with the lean of the ship. The Wolf took a long stride at the moment he judged the ship to be as far over as possible. Right then he staircase was at less than a twenty-five-degree angle and one long step could bring him to the bottom of what would be an impossible drop only moments before. A second later he was at the bottom of the staircase. ‘See? Walking on water. Now you do it.’
Jonas laughed nervously, his hand gripping the stair rail. The ship was leaning the other way now, the staircase an almost vertical drop. The Wolf could see Jonas’s hands were white where they clutched the rail. The ship rebalanced and began to careen back the other way.
‘Get ready,’ shouted the Wolf.
The Wolf saw Jonas take a deep breath and shout as he jumped along rather than down the stairs. As he landed he was screaming with exhilaration at the altered angles.
‘Now watch this. You can jump up them, too.’ The Wolf waited till the top of the staircase had tipped down with the ship’s movement and jumped back up to the top stair.
‘Man, that is better than an acid trip!’ shouted Jonas.
You’d know, thought the Wolf.
39
For Kelly every remaining moment with her children was precious. It was Tuesday and they should have been at school, but she kept them home on the pretence that they needed to pack and organise. Also, being indoors served another purpose, she wasn’t followed by Christos’s men. Now Yannis was on the kitchen floor playing with Lego and Florence was opening cupboards and pulling out ingredients.
‘Mum, I want to make cake batter and eat it all.’ Florence tried to extricate the mixer from a crowded shelf.
‘Let me.’ She pulled out the Magimix and set it on the counter. She needed to treasure these normal moments with her children. Suddenly a memory flashed before her and she smiled. ‘Do you remember, Flo, when Amber put Daddy’s watch in the cake?’
Florence turned towards her, her face a triumph of rediscovery. ‘Yes! “Watch cake, watch cake”.’ Her daughter laughed.
‘What?’ Yannis looked up, not understanding.
‘Amber would have been about two and you were four, Florence. We were making a cake. Amber was standing on the chair by the stove, and Flo and I kept saying that when the cake went in the oven we would have to keep an eye on it to make sure it didn’t burn. Dad took off his watch so Florence could tell us when the big han
d got to six and then a little later we came back to the stove and we couldn’t find the watch anywhere—’
‘Yeah! Yeah! And we were hunting all over the place for it and Dad was getting annoyed and eventually the cake came out of the oven and Mum cut it and in the middle was Daddy’s watch.’
‘That’s right,’ continued Kelly. ‘Amber had put it in the cake. She turned her little face to me and she said, “Watch cake, watch cake.” It must be one of your earliest memories.’
Florence nodded, looking at Kelly with her pale eyes. ‘I see her, you know. Sometimes I see her.’
‘So do I, honey, so do I.’ Kelly burst into tears. ‘She lives in you, a little bit of her is in you always.’ She sat down on a chair because the strength in her legs had drained away. Her children came and put their arms around her, the simple uncomplicated acts of love from those who were young.
‘Well, this is an affecting scene.’
Kelly pulled away sharply. Christos was in the doorway to the living room; she’d had no idea he was even home. Her love for her dead daughter was chased away by a visceral hatred for the man blocking a doorway in her home.
‘Florence, it’s important to remember to live life for now. You’ve got Yannis here, you’ll always have Yannis and me.’
‘And Mummy,’ said Yannis.
Christos turned to Kelly. ‘Yes, you’ll always have Mummy.’ But the way he said it sent a shiver down her spine. He turned back to his son. ‘You know what happened today? Someone gave me a polo mallet. Ever heard of polo? You play it on horses, just like you’re doing at Hyde Park in the mornings with Sylvie. Come on, I’ll show you.’
Yannis could sense something much more exciting than Lego was at hand and jumped up and ran out of the room and Florence followed. Kelly felt a part of her heart going with them.
She thought about her conversation yesterday with Georgie in the sauna. She needed to try and find something to use against Christos, but it felt like an impossible task she wasn’t capable of executing. Yannis’s shouts filtered through from the living room.
There was one thing she could do. She went down to the bedroom and put on a jacket, pulled at the armchair in the corner of the bedroom and dragged it under the lightshade. She was too short to reach the ceiling light, so she grabbed the stool by the dressing table and, balancing precariously on that, could just reach to unscrew the Sleepchecker. She didn’t care that she was being filmed by the green eye in the corner, she wanted to know what Christos had been doing while she had been sleeping. She threw the Sleepchecker in her bag and left the flat, heading through Bloomsbury to the Internet café. The man following her kept a discreet distance behind and waited in the street outside.
She settled down at the computer and watched the grainy images. There were five nights to look through. Thursday night she was recovering from being drugged, and she moved a lot, twisting and turning and thrashing in her sleep, the video a stop-start journey through the dark hours. Christos in contrast slept easily, jabbing a hypodermic into his wife’s thigh not seemingly troubling him. On Friday’s video she saw Sylvie walk into shot and lie a dry-cleaning bag on the bed. It was soon after this that she had discovered Sylvie in the flat after her collapse at the station. She was taken aback, Sylvie had put Christos’s dry-cleaning on the bed just like she did. That evening she was comatose in the bed while Christos worked for at least two hours on his laptop. He got up in the night to go to the toilet.
Saturday night there was little video; she and Christos must have been sleeping soundly. At one point the camera recorded them both turned away from each other, still. Something struck her. The camera was motion sensitive, so why was it recording now? She rewound and watched the video again. Nothing, bar a fleeting shadow to the right of the screen. She watched it again, couldn’t make out what it was, but it must have been big to trip the motion sensor.
Sunday night Christos was in bed alone. She was in the kids’ bedroom, processing the revelation that their father wanted them to go to boarding school. In the grey light of early dawn she saw herself come back into the room and crawl under the covers, defeat lying over her more fully than the duvet.
The video reached last night. Her husband seemed to have an untroubled conscience by the little tossing and turning he did, most of the night he was unmoving in the bed. She watched herself sleeping on her back, mouth open, saw that Christos was also asleep. The timer running across the bottom of the screen showed 3.55 a.m., the deepest time of night. The moment when an enemy attacks. Michael had told her that. They were both still, why was the video recording? She rewound and played the film again. And glimpsed a pair of legs walking through the edge of the shot. She flinched. The legs weren’t Medea’s, they were too thin. This body was lither and younger, tight trousers clinging to the calves. What the hell was happening? The legs stopped moving and walked to her shoes, lined up under the window. It was then that Kelly realised the woman was barefoot. The woman slipped on a pair of her favourite stilettos and walked out of shot towards the dressing room. She was sure now, the swaying walk in high heels had made it so: Sylvie.
Kelly got to her feet. This invasion could not stand. Did Christos know? Medea? The questions were coming too fast to process. Then something happened that made Kelly sit back down with a gasp. Sylvie reappeared at the other side of the bed, her side. She was still in the stilettos. Sylvie came up to the bed and leaned over, staring at Kelly, looming over her in the dark. Sylvie moved her head as if examining her from different angles. She was unhurried, her movements lazy and sure.
After a few minutes of scrutiny, Sylvie turned and put the shoes back, exactly where she had found them, and walked in the direction of the door. Kelly stood again, grabbed the memory card, and ran.
40
The storm was in full force, hurling everything it had at the Saracen. The waves were crashing over the prow of the ship, throwing spray far into the air. The crew was in a state of suspended animation, waiting, waiting for the weather to break. The temperature was dropping fast; the Wolf had already added layers of clothing, felt the cold fingers of the seas around Europe, the chill of an English autumn, reaching out to grab him.
He was scrubbing rust off a door lining with a coarse wire brush and a chisel, his hands chapped and red with cold – he preferred work to idleness in a storm – when he heard the President talking in hurried tones to some of the crew nearby. ‘Up to the bridge, now.’
The President rounded the corner. The look on his face told the Wolf something was serious. ‘You too, now.’
The Wolf dropped the brush on the floor, put the chisel in his pocket and they walked up the stairs. The entire crew was there on the bridge, including Jonas and some other travellers.
‘The company employee is missing,’ said the President. ‘He’s not in his cabin, he’s not been seen for eight hours. Unless we can locate him imminently, we’re looking at a man overboard.’
The Wolf heard someone swear in Polish. They all knew what man overboard meant. In a storm this severe, if you went in you survived less than two minutes.
The President outlined who was to look where on the vast ship, to see if the missing man could be located. The meeting didn’t last long and the group broke up, keen to bring this unsavoury situation to a conclusion one way or the other. The Wolf walked away, rounded a corner and jumped down the flights of stairs to the accommodation deck, running to cabin number 18. He didn’t have much time. The door was locked. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, then inserted the chisel’s thin end into the lock mechanism of the door, and turned.
41
The numbers ‘one eight two four’ had set up shop in Georgie’s brain and weren’t going anywhere soon. She tried fiddling round with the numbers, checking them against consignment numbers on shipping bills of lading, the unique BIC code that every container had, but drew a blank. She felt bad that she couldn’t brainstorm with Mo, but she was far beyond legal here and no one else could know what she was doing. S
he discovered 1824 was a UN number for sodium hydroxide, a substance that the United Nations had classed as dangerous for international transport purposes. Sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as caustic soda, she noted, was used in the production of wood and paper pulp. But why would Christos be pulping prized rosewood? She checked the paperwork for the Saracen and there was no record of any sodium hydroxide being aboard.
She repeated the message to herself: 1824 is no. The voice was emphasising the no, the negative, but that still didn’t help her.
She put her ear next to the table and tapped the top. She was listening to her fingers, trying to test Ryan’s suggestion that the sound on Christos’s voicemail might be something to do with fingernails. She could approximate the tappy sound, but not the scrapy bit that preceded it. She began to stroke the table.
‘If you’re looking for something hard to caress, I can oblige.’ Preston was grinning down at her, a cup of tea in his hand.
‘Ha ha.’ She scowled as she sat up.
‘Anguish wants us in there now.’ He nodded towards the boss’s office.
Georgie followed Preston and Mo into Anguish’s office for a post-lunch update on the case. Mo began. ‘The cans are logged as coming in, going out with the delivery companies and arriving. We’re seeing if anything’s slipped through the system. We’re about halfway through the paperwork and computer records for the dates we’re looking at.’
‘OK, keep going with that,’ Angus said.
‘I spoke to the wife again,’ Georgie added. ‘I think she’s keen to help us if she can, but she doesn’t know very much. The truth is she’s terrified of Christos, he has her followed everywhere—’
‘That’s way outside our job description,’ Angus said dismissively. ‘She needs Women’s Aid or something.’
Preston smiled in a self-satisfied way. ‘If you play with fire, you’re gonna get burned.’
