Marine C SBS

by David Monnery

  ‘Which day is Winnie arriving?’ Sibou asked, breaking the spell.

  Franklin lifted himself on to his elbows. ‘Next Wednesday.’ He had to admit he enjoyed his mother’s visits. And if only she would stop trying to set up her own School of Nursing in the middle of theirs he would enjoy them even more.

  ‘Great,’ Sibou said. ‘I’ve missed her. Maybe this time you can persuade her to come and live here.’

  ‘She won’t leave Everton alone in the big city.’

  ‘Everton’s thirty-two, with a new wife and enough money to build himself a fortress.’

  Which was true. Franklin’s younger brother, who had once seemed so firmly mired in Brixton’s angry counter-culture, had managed to climb one of the few greasy poles available to him: he had become a highly successful record producer.

  ‘He’s still her little boy,’ Franklin told Sibou. ‘And she’s hoping for grandchildren,’ he added, and instantly wished he hadn’t.

  If there was one cloud in their sky it was Sibou’s inability to have children.

  This time though she just smiled. ‘We’ve also got the second visit from the adoption agency next week,’ she said. ‘Winnie may find herself with some grandchildren here.’

  He got out of bed and took her in his arms. ‘I hope so,’ he murmured.

  ‘Me too. Now go take a shower,’ she said, pushing him away.

  He grinned and did as he was told. When he came out she was gone, probably down to the canteen, where they usually ate breakfast with each other and assorted students and staff. Franklin dressed in his usual T-shirt, shorts and sandals and left the bungalow, pausing outside the front door to yawn and rub the remaining sleep out of his eyes. Then he strolled slowly down the path towards the central area.

  The clinic grounds spread over several of the island’s acres, and had been laid out, largely at Sibou’s direction, on the pattern of a similar establishment in the Gambia. Long, one-storey buildings surrounded a large central square of grass studded with ornamental trees, and behind these to the south and east more scrubland had been cleared for staff bungalows and student dormitories. On the west side of the square lay the buildings of the research wing, which was mostly concerned with seeking a reliable detection test for ciguatera fish poisoning, a Caribbean-wide scourge associated with coral reef-derived toxins. The two long-term wards for TB and Aids patients were on the south side, the canteen, nursing school classrooms and daily clinic on the east. The small admin block was just inside the gates, from which a palm-lined lane led out on to the Leeward Highway.

  In the canteen Franklin found Sibou working her way through a bowl of fruit salad as she read a newly arrived patient’s history. He went for his usual cornflakes, and sliced a banana on top of them. There were about a dozen students scattered round the room, most of them bent over ring files – Nick Russell was probably giving them a test in their first class of the day.

  Franklin wondered where his friend was. Nick was usually in the middle of his third cup of coffee by this time.

  Still, the clock said ten to eight, so maybe he was already in the classroom setting up the exam. Franklin turned his thoughts back to the classes he was giving that afternoon. Infectious Diseases had never been one of his favourite subjects, but he enjoyed the Emergencies class.

  Half an hour later he was searching for a mislaid computer manual when there was an apologetic knock on his open door. He looked up to see one of the students.

  ‘Nick . . . Mr Russell hasn’t come to class,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh,’ Franklin said, surprised. He looked at his watch, but only from habit. Nick was never late for anything.

  He accompanied the student back to the classroom, and found it full of adults doing their best to relive their adolescence. He asked what the subject was for that lesson, and set them some reading. Back outside, he started off down the path in the direction of Nick’s bungalow.

  He hoped that he wasn’t going to find his friend sleeping off a drunken binge. When Nick had first come to work at the clinic Sibou had been worried by his alcohol intake, but had gradually come to accept that it never compromised his work. Franklin didn’t want her worst fears coming true at this late date. Particularly since Nick seemed to have cut back substantially over the last couple of years.

  His bungalow was the farthest from the central compound, and one of the most attractive, its veranda shaded by a stand of beautiful Cuban pines. The red mountain bike was leaning against the veranda steps, so Nick wasn’t out on that. The screen door was shut, the door behind it open. There was no noise coming from inside, no screaming riffs from Nick’s beloved Clapton, Hendrix or Page.

  Franklin let himself in quietly, more from SAS habit than any sense that danger was present. The living-room and kitchen doors were open, and both rooms looked as tidy and well organized as usual. The bedroom door was closed. Franklin rapped on it lightly, received no answer, and edged the door open. The room was full of sunshine, the bed half-wrecked but empty, as if someone had got up in a hurry.

  Most of all, though, Franklin noticed the smell.

  He stood there for a moment, worry lines prominent on his forehead, before walking over to close the window. Nick’s incense jar – a souvenir of his Hong Kong days – was on the sill, and maybe that was the source of the familiar odour. He hoped so.

  Franklin left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked back through the village of bungalows to the medical treatment block. Sibou was in her office between the two wards, talking to two of the trainee nurses.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Franklin said, ‘but I need the doctor for a few minutes.’

  ‘What for?’ Sibou asked, surprise in her voice. One of the nurses giggled.

  ‘Can you come with me,’ Franklin said, ‘it’s important.’

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked once they were outside.

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. First I want your opinion on something.’

  She heard the trouble in his voice, and didn’t ask any more questions as he led the way back to Russell’s bungalow. Once inside he took her into the bedroom and closed the door behind them.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ he asked.

  ‘Chloroform,’ she said immediately.

  Franklin sat down on the unmade bed. ‘That’s what I thought. I just wanted to make sure.’

  ‘But . . . where’s Nick?’

  ‘He didn’t turn up to teach his first class, so I came looking for him.’

  She sat down too. ‘You don’t think . . . ?’

  ‘Someone drugged him with chloroform and took him away?’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. Why would anyone do that?’

  Franklin shrugged. ‘God only knows.’

  Slightly more than a hundred miles away, Nick Russell was experiencing more than a little difficulty in regaining consciousness. His mind seemed to flicker on and off, like a light with a switch containing a loose connection. And though one voice in his brain was all for trying to keep the light on, others were more interested in losing the headache and the nausea and the vague sense of terror which consciousness seemed to involve.

  This battle went on for some time, until the need to throw up forced him into greater wakefulness. Between periods of retching over the side of the bed – an iron cot, he realized, with a thin mattress – he managed to focus his eyes sufficiently to pick out the whitewashed cement-block walls, the small window high up behind the bed, and the bare, white-painted door.

  The next thing he noticed was someone coming through the door, carrying a tray. It was a grey-haired black man, and he seemed to be angry about something, though the actual words sounded like gibberish.

  No, French. The man was speaking French.

  ‘Where am I?’ Russell asked, sounding to himself like a man in a bad movie.

  The man either didn’t understand him, or didn’t care to answer. In fact he was already on his way out of the door. A key clicked loudly in the lock, and then silence envel
oped his cell once more.

  Worrell Franklin nursed the minivan along the Leeward Highway towards the cluster of new shops and offices which was collectively known as Downtown. The island’s only police station was on the other side of this development, only a stone’s throw from the newly lengthened airport runway. He wasn’t expecting much in the way of help from the local constabulary, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to turn.

  Downtown seemed almost deserted, with only a trickle of tourists making use of the banks and new shopping mall. The police station didn’t seem much livelier. There was only one officer present – Sergeant Oswald.

  Franklin had seen the man before – as he had most of Provo’s five thousand inhabitants – but couldn’t remember ever talking to him. Over the next couple of hours he came to regret breaking this mutual silence.

  Sergeant Oswald, though unimpressed by the short space of time for which Nick Russell had been missing, did agree to visit the scene of the possible abduction. Once there he sniffed appreciatively, and announced that there was definitely a hospital-type smell in the room. ‘It is a hospital you have here, Mr Franklin, yes?’

  ‘The smell is of chloroform,’ Franklin insisted. By this time the odour was growing decidedly faint.

  ‘It smells like the dentist I once went to,’ Oswald decided, before abruptly sinking to his knees and looking under the bed. The missing man was not there. He then looked round the room with a professional air. ‘There are no bloodstains, no signs of a struggle. You can think of no reason why anyone should kidnap this man. He has no money, you say?’

  ‘Nothing worth kidnapping him for.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. And you say his boat is where it should be . . . ?’

  ‘So the marina man told me on the phone . . .’

  Oswald nodded wisely. ‘I think you will find he has stayed with some woman friend, and they lose track of the time. It is easy to do when you are young,’ he added wistfully.

  ‘And the chloroform?’

  Oswald sniffed again. ‘I can’t smell anything now.’

  Franklin couldn’t either.

  ‘If he has not returned by tomorrow I will take this further,’ the sergeant concluded. ‘He was a diver, you say?’

  ‘One of the best.’ An SBS Swimmer-Canoeist First Class, no less.

  ‘Even the best sometimes get careless.’

  ‘But . . . ’ Franklin began, and gave up. He was going to ask how Nick’s boat had reached port without him, but decided that there was no point in antagonizing the man at this stage. Maybe there was some less dramatic explanation of the chloroform and the disappearance. Whatever had happened, he had no way of making any sense out of it with the information currently at his disposal. Maybe he could gather some more, and give Oswald’s brain something to chew on.

  After shepherding the policeman back to his car, and watching it accelerate down the lane to the Leeward Highway like a racing car emerging from the pits, Franklin turned to find Sibou coming towards him, white coat flapping in the warm breeze.

  ‘Well?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘I would have got more joy out of talking to one of the pelicans,’ Franklin said.

  She sighed. ‘I saw who it was. Someone told me he was one of the family appointments during the Saunders administration.’

  ‘A professional blind eye.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Franklin grunted. ‘He seemed willing to be helpful. Just not able to be.’

  ‘All he ever has to do is wag a finger at the odd drunken tourist. I doubt if he’s ever seen a real crime.’

  ‘He looked under the bed.’

  She laughed, but only briefly. ‘Something bad really has happened, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ Franklin agreed, his face grim, ‘I can’t see any other explanation. And I don’t know what else I can do.’

  She put an arm through his, and they stood in silence for a minute.

  ‘Missie,’ she said suddenly. ‘He often goes to see her after his day out on the reef.’

  ‘She’s not on the phone.’ Franklin looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a class in ten minutes . . .’

  ‘I can take an hour off,’ Sibou said. ‘Give me the keys,’ she added, offering up her palm.

  Russell’s next waking thought was that perhaps he had gone to heaven. A face of such loveliness was leaning over his own, large-eyed, small-nosed, with a mouth that, even pursed with concern, seemed almost angelic. Curls of raven hair were slipping out from their confinement behind the ears. Huge earrings dangled half out of sight.

  He became aware of something metal against his skin. It was a stethoscope, not earrings.

  ‘Who are you?’ he tried to ask, but only a murmur seemed to emerge from his lips. He tried ‘where am I?’ with somewhat better results.

  ‘L’Ile de Tortue,’ she said.

  It sounded French. He had a memory of something else sounding French.

  ‘What’s the matter with me?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘They used too much chloroform,’ she said in French-accented English.

  He closed his eyes. The bike ride home, pissed out of his skull. The shot of terror in the night. Had that been . . . ? He opened his eyes again, struggling to keep the lovely face in focus. ‘Where is the . . . the place you said?’

  He saw the surprise on her face. ‘It is an island near the coast.’

  ‘Which coast?’ he enunciated carefully.

  ‘The north coast,’ she said patiently. ‘De Haïti.’

  ‘I am in Haiti?’

  ‘Oui, yes.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘I am a doctor,’ she said, but there was a bitterness in her voice he couldn’t begin to understand. ‘My name is Alabri, Emelisse Alabri,’ she added, in a tone that seemed inexplicably defiant.

  ‘Nick Russell,’ he said thickly. ‘Who brought me here?’

  ‘No more questions now,’ she said, smiling to make up for the curtness in her voice. It was as lovely a smile as he could remember, and it seemed to hang in his mind, before receding slowly into the distance, in a manner which somehow reminded him of the Tardis.

  Sibou had seen the look on Franklin’s face as she headed out of the clinic gates, and spent the next couple of miles resenting it. Certainly she drove fast, but she had never had a serious accident, unlike her husband, who had driven a rental car into a coconut palm soon after their arrival in the Turks and Caicos. The car’s bumper had been bent like a boomerang, its roof severely pitted by the resulting shower of dislodged coconuts. Her worst mishap had been to drive through the clinic’s gates while they were still closed, and that could have happened to anyone with as much on their minds as she usually had.

  She grinned at herself, and forgave Franklin his scepticism. He was only worried about her, after all.

  She turned right on to the Blue Hills turn-off just before Downtown, and a few minutes later was following the road which ran behind the beach north from Thompson Cove Point. Inside the dark line of reef the waters were their usual pristine turquoise; beyond it the ribbon of breakers gave way to the deeper blue of the ocean proper. Every couple of hundred yards a group of white tourists was encamped on the white sand.

  Sibou shook her head, and wondered for the hundredth time why the European races were so frightened of being close to each other. Twenty years before, when she had first been a student at St Thomas’ Medical School in London, she had gone on to the upper deck of a bus, seen only one passenger, and naturally sat down next to him. He had muttered to himself for a minute, and then got off the bus. Looking back, she had been able to see him waiting for the next one.

  She was still smiling at the memory when the first dwellings of Blue Hills loomed into view. This was one of the three pre-tourist settlements on the island, and like the other two it hadn’t changed very much. It was more scattered than an English village, more like a random spread of homes on which the road had later been superimposed.
/>   Missie’s house was down by the beach. Sibou had been there a couple of times with Franklin, in the days when Nick and Missie were toying with the idea of being a couple. She had liked Missie’s no-nonsense personality and felt vaguely guilty for not keeping up the acquaintance over the last few months. She told herself that there was always so much to do at the clinic, and so little time, but knew that was not the real reason. Missie was a mother, and Sibou was still trying to come to terms with the fact that she would never be one.

  She left the minivan by the side of the road, and walked down the shaded path towards the house. It was unusually hot, and the moment she emerged from the trees the sun resumed its business of trying to burn a hole through her straw hat.

  Missie was on her veranda, kneading Johnnycake dough on a wooden board that was perched across her thighs. She looked just the same as Sibou remembered: a tall, big-boned woman with a long neck and beautiful African head. She was dressed in shorts and a Miami Dolphins T-shirt. Her feet were bare.

  Her first reaction to seeing Sibou was a look of surprise, the second a warm smile of welcome. ‘Come into the kitchen,’ she said, getting up. ‘You can pour us some coffee while I finish this.’

  Sibou did as she was told while Missie shaped the dough into balls, flattened them out and greased a tray for baking. Once they were in the oven, the two women went back out on to the veranda, where the shade and slight breeze offered some respite from the heat.

  Sibou took a deep breath and explained why she was there.

  ‘He sure was drunk when he left here,’ Missie said. ‘I’ve still got a headache myself. Maybe he just fell off that bicycle somewhere, and . . .’

  ‘The bicycle came home.’

  ‘That sound bad.’

  The two women sat in silence for a moment, looking out to sea. It all seemed completely unreal, Sibou thought.

  ‘He didn’t say anything to you?’ she asked. ‘He wasn’t worried about anything?’