by Tim Weaver
Penny felt like her throat was closing up.
‘You ruined my life.’
‘Beth,’ Penny said, tears in her eyes, ‘I never meant to –’
‘I hate you.’
Suddenly, it was like the sound fell out of the night. There was no rain any more, no wind, no distant sounds from the harbour.
It was just those three words.
Beth’s gaze lingered on Penny – a flash of emotion, there and gone again – and then she threw her cigarette out into the rain, the embers dying instantly in the dark, and – without looking up – brushed past Penny and went inside the house.
Part Three
* * *
Extract from No Ordinary Route: The Hidden Corners of Britain by Andrew Reece
The Empress Islands cover an area half the size of Wales, but their two largest – Victoria Island, on which you’ll find the capital, St George; and Cabot Island, where Sophia and the harbour at Blake Point are located – are, combined, only fractionally larger than the city of Cardiff. St George is relatively modern and the heart of the tax haven’s banking industry, while Sophia is less pristine – in fact, really quite ugly in places – and home to a lot of the farming and fishing community. Separated from St George by the Wallace Strait and the imposing Mount Strathyde, Sophia’s location on its western flank also exposes the town to the full brunt of the South Atlantic, and that hard rain and constant biting wind has resulted in an average summer high in the town of just 8°C, making it significantly colder than the capital. Despite those differences, the archipelago’s 7,500 people do all have one thing in common: the same, slightly odd ‘Empress accent’, which linguists say has its origins in the first British settlers, who arrived here in 1766 and were a mix of farmers from south-west England and gentrified landowners.
It’s actually hard to underline just how extreme the islands’ isolation is. They are 2,461 miles from Buenos Aires and 1,903 miles from Cape Town, which makes it a four-day boat trip or around five hours on a plane, from either city, on the weekly charter flights. Wired Internet is, for the most part, slow, to the point where it becomes too frustrating to use; there’s no 3G (although there are, apparently, plans to address this by the end of 2014); and the few TV channels that do exist come from the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which usually transmits to military personnel stationed abroad. There’s never been any programming made on the islands themselves, with one exception: Kids’ Hour, a magazine-style children’s TV show that ran between 1985 and 1997. Its distinctive ‘TV mast’ intro became well known to the children of the islands, but eventually it proved too expensive to create.
In my time on the islands, it became clear that most tourists didn’t stay long enough to see the full picture. They’d come in from South America or Africa on two-day ‘eco-tours’, heading out to the breeding grounds to watch elephant seals and rockhopper penguins and fin, humpback and sperm whales. They’d watch terns and thrushes and albatrosses in huge colonies on the eastern islands, and whip past sheep, reindeer and guanaco farms on the way from the airport. They’d coo over the rose gardens in the towns (famously, the Empress Islands have no native mammals, trees, or flora like roses, so everything has been introduced), they’d have their photographs taken outside the non-working red telephone boxes, they’d buy Union Jack flags and have tea served up in William and Kate mugs, and then they’d pack into minibuses bound for the airport terminal or head back on tender boats to where their cruise ships are anchored a mile off the coast.
For an afternoon, a day, even two, this picture-postcard slice of old-world Britannia is fine. But after three days things start to take on a different perspective. It’s like a camera very slowly pulling into focus and, on the fourth day here, the fifth, the sixth, you start to feel claustrophobic.
You start to feel like you’re trapped.
Now imagine what it’s like living here.
38
The Olympia left Cape Town three days later.
After flying in, I spent a day killing time, revisiting places I’d come to know during my years here as a journalist. I got up early and went for a long run, along the edge of Camps Bay Beach – the sky cloudless and perfectly blue, the sand as white as chalk – and then into Clifton, where Derryn and I had once lived in a third-floor apartment. From the road, I could still see the roof garden, the part of the flat she’d chosen to spend the most time in as she’d tended to its plants. When we moved in, the flowers, even the cactuses, were all dying; by the time we left it was beautiful, so full of colour and life the landlord paid us back our last three months’ rent.
Later, I found a restaurant just off Kloof Road, in the foothills of Lion’s Head, and looked out at the mountains and the sea from under the shade of a baobab tree. I ate bobotie and drank Castle lager and leafed through a book I’d picked up at Heathrow called No Ordinary Route. It looked like a travel guide and started out like one, but then it mutated into something else, a work of gonzo journalism or something close to it, as a writer toured the furthest outposts of the British mainland, as well as some of its most remote overseas territories. I used it to try and understand more about the Empress Islands, about Sophia, about a community that existed as an image of Britain thousands of miles away from its coastline. And then late in the afternoon, I went back to my hotel – slightly unsettled by some of what I’d read in the book, unsettled too by the idea of being pursued, of Marek guessing where I was headed.
After the sun went down, I sat and had a meal at a restaurant in Victoria Wharf, out on its terrace, and called Annabel. We talked about her day, about Olivia, about the weather back home in Devon, about their dog, and I sought solace in the small, seemingly trivial details of my daughter’s life. They didn’t seem trivial now, the night before I got on a ship and headed out into the ocean with no clue what was awaiting me; in fact, they seemed more important than ever given everything I’d learned about Richard Kite.
When I was done, I went back to my room and returned to the copy of No Ordinary Route, underlining passages and zeroing in on the author’s account of Sophia. I sat on my balcony in shorts and a T-shirt, looking out at the sea. When I checked the weather forecast for the Empress Islands, it couldn’t have been more different from the weather in South Africa: a high of six degrees and an overnight low of minus two. Over the course of the next three days, it was set to get colder.
The day I was due to arrive, there was snow coming.
I hoped it wasn’t some kind of portent.
The boat had twelve decks and my cabin was all the way down, on the second. It was an inside room – a cabin with no view – but it was the best I could do at such short notice and on the kind of budget Richard Kite had.
Once I was aboard, I unpacked enough clothes for the next few days and left the rest in a suitcase in the cupboard. I returned to the sun deck in enough time to see Cape Town vanishing into the distance, a blur of white against the backdrop of green-grey mountains, and then I started walking the ship, its decks, staying alert for any signs of a tail or faces that I recognized.
The ship was immense, a maze of endless corridors, so it took me a while to find the place – on deck four – where Beth had been captured on CCTV. Once I did, I stopped to take in the frames on the walls, seeing them up close for the first time, and then the carpet, with its pattern and image of Poseidon lifting a boat from the water. I stood in the exact spot she had, trying to figure out why she had been in this part of the boat, but there was no compelling reason that I could see for her to have chosen this corridor over others. I walked the seven accommodation decks, bow to stern, to get a sense of them, of differences or things that looked and felt out of place, but the more I walked, the more they began to merge into one, eventually becoming just a bland parade of infinite doors, different only in the numbers on them.
I got the lift all the way up to the top, to the sports deck, which was about half the length of the others and contained a tennis court, a driving range and a ba
r. From there, I worked my way down again, first to the sun deck, then to the lido deck, then past the accommodation to the very bottom of the boat, where the restaurants, nightclubs and entertainment areas were. Quietly, without drawing too much attention to myself, I started asking around among the crew, using a picture of Richard Kite and a cropped-in CCTV still of Beth. I came away with nothing. No one knew them, no one had seen them on-board. Two hours in, if any of the staff showed an interest in who Richard and Beth were and why I was looking for them, I started giving them a vague version of the truth, to see where it took us, but it wasn’t long before those conversations petered out as well. Over the course of almost four hours, I got nowhere.
I was conscious that Marek could have been messaging someone on the ship, that the person known as LG might work here and be able to feed back to him what I was doing and the kinds of questions I was asking. If that happened, unless he was already on-board, there was nothing Marek could personally do about it until we docked at the Empress Islands in four days’ time. But I didn’t know who LG was, or what kind of threat they posed in Marek’s absence, and because I didn’t know them or if they were even on-board, or what they looked like and might do here, I felt on edge the whole time, unable to relax, conscious of every question I asked and decision I made.
That night, I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant on the bottom deck – in a booth at the back so I could face out at the crowds – and began cycling through the images of the case: Richard Kite, Penny Beck, Beth, screen dumps I’d saved from the Red Tree instant messenger, pictures I’d taken in Naomi Russum’s office, the collage Richard had made – from fragments of magazines – in an effort to remember the beach he’d looked out at as a child. I’d called him again before I flew out to Cape Town, quizzing him about the Olympia, about Beth, and spoke briefly to Howson as well to make sure they were somewhere safe. He said they were in a place on the edge of Folkestone. When Richard came back on the line, he asked me about Beth, for more details about her, and whether I’d managed to find any other, better pictures of her.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Do you feel like you might know her?’
‘I don’t remember ever meeting her, no.’
But that wasn’t the question I’d asked.
He seemed to know it too, because he said, ‘It might be something about the ship that’s set me off, or you saying I come from those islands, but I’ve just got this …’ He paused. ‘You remember how I said food is like a connector for me? As in, I always knew I’d like bananas, even before I ever tried them?’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘It’s like that.’
‘You have a strong feeling about something?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure why or what about.’
When I returned to my cabin, I lay in the darkness, the air con humming, listening to the soft noises of the ship. I had no idea what time I finally fell asleep, but the sun was already up, and as I dropped off I could hear people passing in the corridor and heading towards the lifts, talking about what they were going to have for breakfast. After that, I dreamed.
It started with me boarding a ship.
It finished with me lost in a labyrinth.
39
I woke at 11 a.m. and turned on the television. There was a static picture detailing the day’s weather, which looked pretty good until late afternoon when it slowly began to change. The sun disappeared and cloud moved in, getting greyer as day gave way to night. By tomorrow, as the boat followed the curve of the earth out into the Atlantic, further and further south, the temperature began to drop fast.
I got up, showered and headed down for something to eat. The restaurant crew were different from the day before, a separate shift, so I asked around again about Richard and Beth, but got the same response, just from different faces.
After I was done, I took the lift back up to the lido deck. It was hot and bright, the two swimming pools full, the bar in between packed too, but I managed to find a stool on the end of the counter, just about in the shade, and ordered a beer. As I waited, I set my notepad and my copy of No Ordinary Route down beside me, thinking about the process and practicalities of getting on-board the ship and how Richard had managed to stay so well hidden in the days and weeks after.
Judging by what I’d experienced at Cape Town, the security measures before boarding the boat weren’t as stringent as at an airport, but they were still pretty robust: passport checks, X-ray machines, metal detectors, random pat-downs. If you wanted access, you had to pass through a passenger holding area, and if Richard didn’t have a passport on him, which I’d always assumed was the case – and would certainly play into the idea of him being a stowaway – then I could only see a couple of ways he could have got on without raising any alarms: either he was pretending to be a member of the crew – a waiter, or a lifeguard, or maintenance – or he made out he’d been ashore and was returning, and was already a passenger on the ship. That way he wouldn’t have to check in any luggage or show a passport, and he wouldn’t have to steal a uniform. It did mean, however, that he’d have to obtain one of the ship’s ID cards, which were issued to passengers who wanted to go ashore when the boat was anchored.
There was a possible third option too: that Beth had managed to get him on-board somehow. But they still would have had to jump through the same hoops and, ultimately, all options represented big risks. If I didn’t exactly know the how, I was starting to get a feel for the why. This felt like a getaway, like the two of them were trying to break free of something on the islands; maybe for the same reason that had got Penny Beck killed half a world away.
I looked up from some scribbles I’d made in the margins of the travel book and felt the heat of the sun on my skin. The noise had begun to build even more, without me even really noticing: people on loungers, getting into the pools, in jacuzzis dotted at their corners, or ordering drinks at the bar along from me. I shuffled a little further into the shade, the smell of suncream and salt in the air, and returned to Richard Kite. The more I thought about it, the more I started to see that the cleanest route back to who he was, to the secret locked in his head, might actually be through Penny. At this point, I knew more about her than I knew about Richard, and the fact that it was her stepsister that was seen with him in the week before he turned up made the connection more compelling.
I’d made a list of the five things that Jacob Howson had found out about Penny during the year they’d dated. The first, that she was from a town called Sophia, I’d already figured out. The rest I started to look at, one at a time.
Her father became a sheep farmer.
He worked in London in ‘some boring office job’ until shortly after Penny was born in 1984, when he moved the family to the Empress Islands. In No Ordinary Route, it described a drive by the Empress Islands government, during the seventies and early eighties, to encourage British farmers to emigrate by paying big subsidies and relocation costs. The agricultural industry – at the time, one of the three mainstays of the economy alongside fishing and banking – was in decline, and there was a lack of experience in the next generation of native islanders. If Penny’s father had been a part of that, and it looked that way, it suggested he must have had some prior knowledge of farming before his switch to a desk job.
When she was three, he went missing.
She never saw him again. I didn’t have any evidence that his case impacted directly on that of Richard Kite, or even Penny’s murder twenty-something years later, but I couldn’t get on board with the idea that it was an unimportant footnote either. Maybe it was a residual sense of something just being off, an instinct I’d built up over years and years as I’d worked more and more missing persons cases.
Her mum remarried a man called Jack.
It was difficult to make any kind of judgement on whether that mattered until I was off the boat at Sophia and asking around in the town.
She had a stepsister called Beth.
I knew this a
lready. I even knew what she looked like and could put her in a definite place at a definite point in time at the start of the year. What I wasn’t so clear on was what Howson had told me next. They had a big falling-out. About what? Was the falling-out even relevant? I returned my attention to the CCTV shot of Beth, to her face, to the way she was looking back over her shoulder. Who are you? I traced the outline of her with my finger. How did you know Richard Kite? With no answers, the sounds of the deck crept in again, settling around me: music, people laughing at the bar, kids screaming with delight in the pools.
‘Another beer, señor?’
I looked up at the barman, a guy in his thirties with a badge that had GAEL MENDOZA on it and a Mexican flag. His hand was poised at my empty beer bottle.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
He smiled. ‘You’re on vacation.’
Not exactly, but I returned the smile anyway. He dropped the empty into a bin and grabbed a second bottle from a fridge behind him. As he set it down he gestured to my copy of No Ordinary Route. I’d left it open, midway through the chapter on the Empress Islands, a map on the right-hand page.
‘You doing the day trip to the islands?’ he asked.
I looked at him more closely this time. The answer was no, I wasn’t doing a day trip. I was planning to get off the boat and find somewhere to stay. I was going to watch the Olympia sail off into the distance without me, and – in the days after that, once I’d found out the truth about Richard Kite – I was going to catch one of the weekly flights back to either Cape Town or Buenos Aires.
