by Tim Weaver
I held up a hand, trying to get her attention, but she was already gone, two or three feet ahead of me, working her way through a route laid out by the desks.
I’d never been in the office before and Beth had only been in to rip the phones out of the walls, nothing else. After she’d locked Marek in, she’d thrown the key away. I was too far away at the time, at the opposite end of the corridor, checking out the restaurants, the passengers beyond the security suite; Beth would have been focused on the phones and then on Marek himself, on making certain he couldn’t get out.
Not on what was above him.
I looked up.
The ceiling – a series of eighteen square panels – was being replaced, and three of the panels were missing. Above the ones that had been taken out, in the cavity, I could see insulation, covered in shiny black plastic, and rows of white iron joists. I had a second to glance at the desk directly beside me, a footprint visible on the top, and then I saw him: he was on one of the joists, shrouded in shadow, ready to jump.
Shit.
He landed on top of me.
We crashed into the nearest desk. A computer went tumbling off the side, smashing against the floor, and as Marek’s full weight pounded against me, it was like every breath of air left my body. Shock forked up my chest, stomach to throat, and then I felt an explosion behind my eyes. White spots. Blurring. Noise.
So much noise.
I tried to focus and, as I did, I realized that I couldn’t feel Marek at all. He was gone, somewhere else, and I was hanging off the edge of the desk, bruises burning everywhere.
Where had he gone?
I tried to stand up, slightly dazed, unsure in which direction I was supposed to be facing, which direction he would come at me from, so I looked to where Beth had been.
The blood froze in my veins.
She was standing opposite me, the gun still up in front of her. Her arms were tremoring.
There were tears on her cheeks.
I realized then that the noise I’d heard as Marek landed on me wasn’t in my head; it hadn’t been a reaction to his body slamming against mine, or to the migraine I couldn’t shift; it hadn’t been dehydration or surprise.
It had been a gunshot.
In between us, Marek lay on his side, half slumped against the desk. His hand was clutching a wound at the bottom of his throat, blood spilling out between his fingers and running down his shirt. His eyes juddered, tried to shift to me, but he couldn’t move them.
Slowly, his hand began to slip away.
His body slid sideways.
By the time he hit the floor, he was dead.
55
After a while, she started to calm down.
‘You saved my life,’ I said gently, but I wasn’t sure if it really helped or not. I touched a hand to her arm, wary of making her uncomfortable. ‘We need to get rid of him before the security team return. Are you able to help me?’
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I need you to go and get something.’
I told her what we needed, and she climbed back up into the vents. After she was gone, I filled a bucket full of water and started to scrub away the evidence of what had happened, cleaning up blood and dirt and debris.
Fifteen minutes later, Beth returned through the door of the security suite, wheeling a housekeeping cart. Together, we loaded Marek into it. It was awkward, difficult work, and – even knowing the sort of man he was, the things he’d done; even feeling like this kind of ending was everything he deserved – I felt guilt I couldn’t quite suppress. As we folded him into the cart, compressing him enough that he fitted, Beth and I looked at each other and I saw her thoughts so clearly they might as well have been written on the wall behind her: This is what Marek did to Penny. He took her body and he squeezed it into an unnatural space, somewhere dark and narrow where he hoped it would never be discovered.
She became tearful again and this time I left her alone, checking over the office once more, making sure I hadn’t missed anything. I went into the interview room too, cleared any mess I’d left, and wiped down the surfaces – the doors, the desk, the chair. I spent some time with Marek’s mobile phone, which was connected to the security team’s Wi-Fi network, going through his inbox and emails, but there was only one message that caught my attention: it was from Roland Dell, received an hour ago, telling Marek that he was back on the Empress Islands and just about to take off on the Gulfstream. He said he would send the Gulfstream back for Marek once he’d landed in Cape Town and, after that, would be catching the 6.30 p.m. flight to Heathrow.
When Marek didn’t turn up at the airport north of Sophia, and Dell’s people there let him know, Dell would start to get a whiff that something was up. Whether he found out while he was still on the ground in Cape Town, or he found out once he was back in London, either way he would find out. But I couldn’t worry about that for now. Instead, I pocketed the phone and waited for Beth to regain her poise again, even as the impact of what had happened remained bludgeoned across her face.
I dressed in a security outfit, Beth used a housekeeping uniform, and we left through the main door. She walked ahead of me as I pushed the trolley, eyes everywhere, focusing on the corners and corridors of a boat she’d come to know so well. I watched her survival instinct kick in as the adrenalin overrode any memories of what had gone before, and that carried us for a while. But then, in the silence of the elevator, we relaxed for a moment, and I saw a reflection of myself in the mirror and didn’t like what looked back: this man who had cold-bloodedly loaded a human being into a cart; this man who was about to dump a body in the sea so no one would ever find it. When I glanced at Beth, I saw her wrestling with the same thoughts, her expression haunted.
We emerged on to the fourth accommodation deck, the place where I’d found the carrier bag in the laundry room, and Beth directed us down to the stern of the ship where she said there was a balcony, a kind of viewing gallery, that no one ever realized was there. She was right: a set of double doors led out to an empty terrace with some chairs at either end, none of which was overlooked by cabins.
I stared out across the dark ocean. The sun was coming up somewhere behind the clouds, and there was the merest hint of daylight, but mostly the morning was ashen and achromatic, and there was so much rain in the air, running in lines down the windows behind me, that it was hard to see much further than a mile out. We were still a couple of hours from Blake Point, but we were closer to the South Pole now than to Africa.
‘What’s the matter?’ Beth said.
She sounded afraid, so I told her nothing was wrong even as the guilt still wrenched at me, and while she kept watch, I unloaded Marek. When his body flopped out on to the floor, I looked into the glaze of his eyes, wondered again if I would ever find peace in what we were doing, and then hauled him across the floor to the railings. I lifted him up, feeling the strain in my back, my legs, in the bruises on my arms and ribs; and after I pushed him over and threw his phone in after him, I looked down into the sea, into its churn, the waves forming and swelling and flattening out, and saw Marek vanish into the darkness of the ocean.
‘I can’t go back there,’ Beth said quietly.
We were sitting inside my cabin. It had been ransacked. My laptop had been smashed to bits, notes that I’d left had either been ripped up or taken, and my clothes were strewn everywhere. But I still had my phone and the notebook I’d been carrying on me. Grobb and the security team hadn’t bothered taking the phone because, in the belly of the boat with no signal and no Wi-Fi connection, it was a worthless lump of plastic. The notebook was the same: it represented no threat to anyone while I’d been locked in the room. Once Marek had finished with me and I was dead, he would have taken both and gone through them.
‘I can’t go back to the islands,’ Beth said again. ‘I can’t go back there. When I left that place, I left it for good. I’d rather spend my days living in an air vent, eating leftovers
from people’s tables, than ever set foot in that town again.’
‘It’s not safe on the ship now.’
‘It’s not safe in Sophia either. They’ll kill us both. They’ll make you suffer.’ She looked at the closet, at the door, back to me. ‘Penny was as much of a daughter to my dad as I was, and they murdered her. I don’t know how much he knew about it, but he knew about it. They left her body on that railway track, chunks of her skin cut out of her. I don’t know why, or what she found out about Dad, about Bill Presley, about Roland Dell and what they did, but I’m telling you this: if they killed her to stop her from talking, you’d better believe they’d do the same to us.’
She was right. Beth didn’t know what lay at the edge of the tarn in that cabin, but she knew her sister was killed for what she’d found out about Caleb Beck. She knew Penny’s father had disappeared the same year Roland Dell came back to the islands on his summer break. She knew Dell had grown up with her dad, Bill Presley and Anthony Jessop. She already knew too much.
We both did.
A little while later, the sound of the ship like a low groan beyond the walls, she started pulling up the sleeve of her top. It took me a moment to work out what she was doing. She shoved it past her elbow and kept going, and then, finally, I saw it: the same tattoo Richard Kite had on his arm. The same one Penny had, that all three of them had.
A silhouette of a bird in flight.
‘Penny got this tattooed on her arm a couple of months before she left,’ Beth said. ‘She was only sixteen at the time, but we had a guy on the islands who would do it for cash and never ask too many questions. I always wondered why. Why this image. We weren’t really talking then, so I never asked her what it was, or what it meant, or why she’d got it done. But then I found out a few years later that it’s a silhouette of an Arctic tern. Do you know what’s special about them?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘They’ve got the longest migration in the animal kingdom. They fly further than any other animal to get where they need to go.’ She paused, looking down at her own version of the tattoo. ‘So that’s why me and Rich got one before we left. We were all migrating. We were all trying to leave this place.’
We sat there for a while, neither of us saying anything, both of us thinking about the tattoo, the reasons for getting it, and the ways in which the next three hours, twelve hours, a day, two days, were going to work. Whatever happened, though, we’d both made our positions clear: Beth was staying on the boat and would have to return to hiding until this was all over; and I was going ashore and needed a plan where I wasn’t going to get stopped, spotted – or worse.
Because I’d travelled seven thousand miles.
And now I wasn’t going back without the truth.
Part Four
* * *
Extract from No Ordinary Route: The Hidden Corners of Britain by Andrew Reece
A weird thing happens a month after I get back to the UK. I have dinner with my old friend, the journalist and broadcaster Tomas Cassell – the man who’d basically kick-started my interest in the Empress Islands in the first place, and whose father had once been a pilot stationed at the now-defunct RAF base there – and he tells me he’s mentioned the trip I made to some colleagues of his from a Spanish production company. One of the crew is from Argentina.
‘He says you should look into Selina Torres,’ Tomas tells me.
‘Who?’
‘Selina Torres.’
‘I’ve never heard of her.’
‘Exactly,’ Tomas says. ‘That’s the point.’
Intrigued, I get him to set up a meeting with his Argentinian friend, a cameraman called Juan Cota. As we sit down a few days later, Juan hands me what looks like a police interview transcript and says, ‘She was a friend of a friend. Her case was quite famous for a while, but only in Argentina.’
I read the transcript.
OFFICER: When was the last time you saw your sister?
EMILIO TORRES: Two weeks ago. Thursday 16 July.
OFFICER: Did she seem okay?
EMILIO TORRES: Yes. She said she had to make a trip, but that it was only a short one. Two, three days, no more.
OFFICER: Was this a work trip?
EMILIO TORRES: Yes.
OFFICER: What does Selina do for a living?
EMILIO TORRES: She’s an air hostess.
OFFICER: For which airline?
EMILIO TORRES: I don’t know.
OFFICER: You don’t know?
EMILIO TORRES: She never talks about her work. I’ve never seen her in uniform. I ask her what airline she works for, what routes she flies, and she doesn’t want to talk about it.
OFFICER: Why would she do that?
EMILIO TORRES: Because I don’t think she’s really an air hostess.
‘Rumour is,’ Juan says, ‘she went to the Empress Islands.’
Here’s the truth: I never do look into Selina Torres, not properly. I try for a while, but then I start to hit dead ends and other things crop up – other paying jobs – and I kind of forget about her. So I don’t know if Selina Torres went to the Empress Islands and disappeared there. I don’t know if it’s just another rumour birthed in an isolated community at the edge of the earth.
But put it this way: after everything I experienced there, especially in towns like Sophia, somehow it wouldn’t surprise me.
56
In the rain, the islands were like ghosts.
They seemed to drift in the early morning light, there and gone again, the lights at the harbour blinking in and out of existence. I sat at one of the windows in the tender, an enclosed catamaran that doubled up as a lifeboat, and watched through a swipe I’d made in the condensation. Around me, some did the same, others talked among themselves. There were a few bursts of laughter, a hum of conversation, but mostly there was just the sound of the engine and the weather.
There were about eighty people on the boat. Almost all of them would be heading straight out of Blake Point to the breeding grounds, picking up organized tours that would take them to the whales, seals and penguins; to huge colonies of birds gathered in the clefts and ridges of the eastern islands. I looked around the boat, wondering if I was going to be the only one who wasn’t doing that, whether it might raise suspicions, and then I returned my gaze to the harbour. The closer we got, the more I could see of what awaited: other, smaller boats tied to the jetty, bobbing on the waves; and then a group of men in red oilskins, beacons against the grey of the rain, waiting for us to arrive.
Or maybe just waiting for me.
It was just after 8 a.m. and, inside the hour, a Gulfstream jet with Roland Dell on-board would be coming into Cape Town. Once it had landed and refuelled, he’d send it back to the islands to collect Alexander Marek. He’d probably also call Marek from the ground in South Africa to make sure everything went to plan. When he got no response from him, when none of the security team he’d paid off could find Marek anywhere on the ship, that would set the wheels in motion. Dell would guess that I was still alive, and he’d then get back in touch with his people on the island. And it seemed certain that those people were Bill Presley, Jack Kilburn and Anthony Jessop, because they were the ones that knew what he was hiding. I thought about whether I should have sent a message to Dell on Marek’s phone before I’d tossed it into the sea – everything’s taken care of, or it’s done, or it’s been sorted; something to try and buy myself time, or – even better – dupe Dell entirely. But it was too late now, and I wasn’t convinced he’d have fallen for it anyway. I probably had ninety minutes, two hours at the most, before Presley, Kilburn and Jessop were put on alert, so it meant no one at the harbour would be waiting for me yet.
But despite that, as I returned my attention to the figures standing at the jetty, it didn’t really settle my nerves.
Blake Point was built around a tiny curved bay: a few warehouses and workshops were off to the left, compacted into an area full of slipways and seaweed-strewn harbour walls; cluster
ed to the right were a row of six fishermen’s cottages, painted different colours, but salt-blanched and tired. There was a small patch of grass with a seven-foot stone recreation of Big Ben in the middle, some benches too, but as the rain swelled like the folds of a curtain, everything receded into the pallor of the day.
As we all started to file off, I kept my head down while taking in the faces that awaited. None of them looked familiar as we were directed down the jetty to a wooden prefab building with TOURS written on one of its windows. As most of the passengers began to head inside, I kept going: the jetty connected to a small stretch of road running the length of the harbour and, directly behind the cottages, I found a taxi rank. There was only one car, a mud-spattered Citroën estate, and when I approached, the driver’s eyes followed me all the way to the back door of the vehicle, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was getting a fare.
‘How you doing, pal?’ he said, as I got in. He was late forties, completely grey on top with a beard that was going the same way. ‘Where can I take you?’
‘Sophia,’ I said.
We headed away from the harbour, following a two-lane road that slowly climbed its way into the mist which obscured Sophia from view. The higher we went, the thicker it got, but occasionally I could see dots of light up ahead, fluttering in and out of existence. Once or twice, something else became visible too: the hills above the town and the ridges of Mount Strathyde.
Mostly, though, I just watched fields passing on my left and right, endless squares on repeat, some empty, some filled with sheep. Two miles from Sophia, I saw reindeer for the first time, and then guanaco, their long necks poking out over the top of a line of bushes. In No Ordinary Route, I remembered reading that there were no native mammals on the islands; everything had been introduced. People could own dogs, but had to apply for a permit, and there were no cats as they posed a threat to the indigenous bird population. I knew all of those things made the islands different from the UK, but as I watched the farmland and pasture go by in a blur of green, it was hard to separate the two: I was seven thousand miles away, but from the windows of the taxi, I could easily have been at home.
