Java Spider

by Geoffrey Archer

  Bowen picked up the Jakarta Post to see if his picture was in it. Certain to be. When the president met a visiting minister, no paper here dared ignore it. The photo was on page two. Full face of the president, but just the back of his head. He read the copy.

  President supports 1750 Billion Rupiah arms deal for ABRI. Britain will supply two ex-Royal Navy submarines and four new-build corvettes, together with special equipment to upgrade the Hawk fighter jets delivered in the 1980s. British Foreign Minister Stephen Bowen was yesterday honoured by a reception at the Presidential palace.

  An honour indeed for a junior minister like him, but Bowen knew the reason. The DefenceCo agent for the arms deal was a very close associate of the president. Bowen had been given a hint the old man himself might be on a percentage.

  He smiled. This was the most extraordinary country. Conventional economics didn’t apply here. Contracts went not to the lowest bidder, but to the highest, to ensure the price included a commission big enough to line the dozens of pockets involved.

  The door burst open.

  ‘Come quick! They wait for us.’ Selina was flushed from running.

  ‘Right. Where’s my suitcase?’

  ‘They load already. Come quick.’

  He pursued her on to the tarmac where a uniformed official hustled them to the jet fifty metres away. The air was thick and hot, the humidity rising.

  ‘Why the sudden panic?’ he panted.

  ‘I don’ know. Control tower, maybe.’

  Air traffic. Always air traffic. He looked at the HS-125 and shivered. Why did they make those planes so darned small?

  Ducking, he climbed inside, fighting his terrors. His eardrums popped as the door closed. When the engines began their whine, he felt he was being buried alive.

  Cream leather. Two large armchairs and a long, soft bench which he eyed with interest. Selina strapped herself in on the other side of the narrow aisle.

  ‘Nice plane, yes?’ she smiled, eager to please.

  ‘I rather prefer jumbos,’ he confessed.

  The aircraft swung towards the runway. He knew he’d feel better once airborne. He sank back into the soft leather and closed his eyes. He kept them closed until the plane had climbed above the early morning turbulence. Then he looked through the glass and saw the capital spread out below under its shroud of pollution. Six hundred square kilometres of urban sprawl – in the centre a golden triangle of corruption and wealth, but around it slums.

  When he turned to look at the girl, she was gone. He unclipped his belt and glanced behind. She was leaning into the cockpit, talking to the co-pilot. The hem of her T-shirt rode up, exposing the ridge of her spine, her skin the colour of dark honey. The thin denim of her skirt was tight across her small, firm behind. Bowen began to feel better.

  ‘Now where’s this champagne you promised me?’ he chuckled as she sat down again.

  ‘You want I look in the ice-box?’ The refreshment cabinet was on the floor behind her seat.

  A waft of lilies again as she crouched beside him. He’d explode if he didn’t have her soon.

  Suddenly the plane banked to the right. Bowen looked out. They were in a long, steady turn. He frowned. They were changing course, heading east, along the Javan coast. Singapore was northwest.

  ‘What’s going on, Selina? We’re heading east.’

  ‘Ye-eh,’ she laughed. Her eyes betrayed her nerves, but all Stephen Bowen could see was her soft mouth and her perfect, perfect teeth. ‘Yeh, it all change again. He just call pilot from Singapore to say he take Garuda flight to Bali. We meet him there after all.’

  ‘Good. Straight to Bali, then,’ he smiled. Ninety minutes flying time. Ninety minutes alone with her.

  ‘Yes,’ she purred, lips parted. Her eyes spoke to him – fuck me now if you want.

  He reached out and slipped his hand round the back of her silky neck. He glanced towards the cockpit to check the door was closed.

  She laughed again and shook herself free from his fingers.

  ‘First, we drink champagne.’ She held out the bottle for him to open.

  As he picked at the foil and untwisted the wire, the skin crawled on the back of his neck. In a flash of insight he saw Selina and himself as performers in some play. The trouble was she seemed to have seen the script, but he hadn’t.

  Two

  South Devon

  Sunday 12.35 hrs

  THE FIRM ESTUARY sand exposed by the retreating tide crunched under their bare feet like meringue. The river itself had shrunk to a stream. They waded it to reach the broad bank beyond, which curved like a brown belly towards the open sea half a mile away.

  Charlotte Cavendish watched gulls squabble over mussels in the autumn light, but hardly saw them, her mind a blur since yesterday when her mother had revealed that her father was dying. The tumour operated on a year ago was no longer in remission. The consultant talked of months, or even weeks.

  Charlie walked in front, Jeremy a pace behind. She felt bad about bringing him. Crises turned families inwards and against outsiders. Jeremy had offered to leave, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. He was a guest, her daughter’s friend. More than a friend maybe. Hospitality was due, whatever the circumstances. She’d made a bed for him in a room on his own. During the night however, he’d come into Charlie’s room to comfort her.

  She stopped and scraped at the sand with her toes. They’d walked far enough. Jeremy slipped his arm round her waist. Yes, he’d been sweet to her. A support she badly needed. She was an only child and he felt like the brother she’d always wanted.

  The October air was much milder down here than in London. She wore a dress of white cotton, which a gust of wind flattened against her stomach. In the distance a curlew mewed. She stooped to pick up a baby crab left high and dry by the tide. She loved this place for its tranquillity, but hated it for what it signified.

  ‘Y’know, it’s fantastic that old pile,’ Jeremy breathed, looking back at the house. ‘People would pay a fortune for it today.’

  ‘Not for sale. Belongs to the estate. The one my father managed.’

  Sandpiper Cottage was the only building for half a mile. Almost a mansion, it stood rooted to rocks just above the high tide mark. Solid grey stone, a steep pitched roof and a tall, red-brick chimney for the fires which kept the inside snug. Her father’s fortress. For twelve years they’d lived here, the house being part of his pension.

  He was a recluse, a man dogged by a past he could never discuss. This was his hide-out, a cave where he’d withdrawn from the world to keep his secrets safe until he could take them with him to his grave. And now he was about to.

  He’d been a colonel in the army. Forty-seven when Charlie was born, he might never have married if it hadn’t been for the persistence of her mother, a brigadier’s daughter twelve years his junior.

  Ambrose Cavendish had served in the Second World War as a second lieutenant, but for some unexplained reason wouldn’t talk about it. Only once had Charlotte asked why, when she was fourteen, a day engraved in her memory. The blood had drained from his face, he’d shut himself in his bedroom and not spoken to her for days. Only then had her mother revealed he’d been a prisoner of the Japanese.

  It had shocked her. Not the imprisonment itself, but the fact that she’d never been told about it.

  Across the estuary she saw her father walk from the house to the terrace. She waved, but he couldn’t have been looking. Her mother would lose Sandpiper Cottage when Ambrose died, she realised. She’d have to move. But not in with her. Not at any price.

  ‘We’d better go back,’ Charlotte murmured. ‘Verity’ll be wanting sherry and won’t dare start without us.’ She headed for the bank on which oaks and beeches bore the first specks of autumn gold.

  ‘Just time for a ciggy,’ she said, stopping again. Her mother didn’t allow smoking in the house. Jeremy reached into his trousers for her Silk Cut, gave her one and took another for himself.

  They turned at the sound of f
eathers on water, a pair of swans struggling into the air. They watched the birds pass low overhead, wings sighing like harmonica reeds, then waded back across the stream.

  They entered the house through a fragrant conservatory stuffed with chrysanthemums. In the pine kitchen Verity was pulling the joint from the oven to baste it.

  ‘Hmm, smells good,’ Charlotte hummed. She rested an arm on her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Lamb. It is Sunday,’ her mother said.

  Verity had spent her life suppressing her feelings, but this crisis over her husband’s illness had all but defeated her. She slipped the meat dish back in the oven and closed the glass door with a bang.

  ‘Another quarter of an hour …’ she gulped, removing her apron and looking away to hide her face. ‘Time for a sherry, don’t you think?’

  Charlie could see her mother needed to talk. ‘Jer?’ She touched Jeremy on the arm. ‘Know anything about cricket?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ His face lit up. ‘Everything.’

  ‘Good. Go and pour my father a drink – the decanter’s on the sideboard – then talk to him about stumps or silly-mid-whatsit.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked uncomfortably.

  ‘Soon, yes. Just want to help my mum a bit.’

  ‘But everything’s done, dear,’ Verity protested.

  ‘Then we can chat instead, can’t we?’

  Charlie jerked her head towards the living room. Jeremy fixed a smile and left the kitchen.

  ‘What’s there to chat about?’

  ‘Oh, I … I don’t know. Everything, I suppose.’ Where to start, that was the problem. ‘How … how do you think he is?’

  ‘Your friend, you mean?’

  ‘No, Mother. Your husband. My father. How’s he coping? Has he talked to you about …’ Still hard to say it. ‘About dying?’

  ‘Of course not …’ Verity flopped on to a wheelback chair at the kitchen table. Hair almost snow-white, eyes a watery grey, she looked defeated. ‘I want a sherry, even if you don’t. There’s a bottle in that cupboard.’ She pointed to the right of the cooker. Charlie filled two small tumblers.

  ‘He’s not said a word about … about what’s going to happen?’ Charlie queried, hardly surprised. Not easy for a man to unbutton his feelings after a lifetime of keeping them private. So much she didn’t know about him. In fact, the more she thought, the more she realised there was almost nothing she did know.

  Verity was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Let it out, Mum,’ Charlie coaxed, touching her hot cheek. ‘It’s good for you.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Verity wailed, pulling away. ‘If I do I might never stop.’ She bit her lip.

  Charlotte turned towards the living room. She heard a rumble of voices. The men had clicked at last. The key for them had been easy – the freemasonry of cricket. If only she could find such a route to her father’s heart, she might yet free him from his nightmares and let him die in peace.

  ‘What happened to him, Mum?’

  Verity didn’t understand.

  ‘In the war. In the Japanese POW camp. He must’ve told you something.’

  ‘No. Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she whispered. ‘You see it was understood from the moment we were first introduced that he’d had a dreadful time and couldn’t talk about it. And, well, I knew I wanted to marry him from the moment I set eyes on him, so there was a sort of unspoken agreement that I would never ask about it. He knew that and trusted me because of it.’

  ‘But since?’

  Verity shook her head. ‘It was up to him, wasn’t it? If he’d wanted to tell me about it he would have done,’ she said defensively. ‘In those days there were lots of things people simply didn’t talk about. Not like now when you get counselled for everything.’

  ‘What if I were to ask him about it?’ Charlie pressed.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘How can you say why not?’ she gasped. ‘You know perfectly well what the reaction was last time.’

  ‘I’m going to ask. After lunch I’ll sit with him on the terrace. He needs to tell someone before he dies, Mother.’

  ‘I forbid you!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. I’m nearly thirty.’

  ‘I don’t care how old you are you must not ask him about it!’

  Charlie trembled. She’d never seen her mother so animated, the pale eyes awash with fear, the lines round her mouth drawn tight.

  ‘You know, don’t you, Mum? You know what happened to him?’

  Verity shuttled her head.

  ‘No I do not. But …’ she dithered, wondering whether what she was about to say could be construed as betrayal. ‘I … I do know your father well enough to realise that whatever it was, it’s something he is deeply, deeply ashamed of. To bully him into talking about it now would be an act of the utmost unforgivable cruelty.’

  Charlie felt a lump in her throat big enough to choke on. Her eyes filled with tears, not because of the reprimand but because she saw for the first time that her mother’s unswerving loyalty to her father had done nothing to help him, but had simply reinforced the bolts on his prison.

  A shrill beep pierced the stillness of the house.

  ‘Good Lord! What’s that?’ Verity clutched at her chest.

  ‘My pager, Mother,’ Charlie explained. ‘Jeremy’s got it. The office is sending me a message.’

  She scraped the chair legs on the terracotta tiles as she stood, then collided with Jeremy in the hall. She read the display on the messager.

  Need you in soonest. Please ring. Mandy.

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘What’s happened?’ her mother called from the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know. Can I use the phone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Jeremy hovered as she dialled the News Channel newsdesk.

  ‘Mandy? Charlie here. What’s the prob …’

  ‘Oh, thanks for ringing, love. Look there’s a story brewing. Could be big. I know it’s your weekend off but we’re desperately short. Ted’s specially asked if I could track you down.’

  Ted Sankey. The editor.

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘That’s the trouble, love, we’re not quite sure. Could be another political sex scandal.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Any story involving sex got priority on the News Channel. ‘What d’you mean you’re not sure?’

  ‘We got this odd call from a stringer in Warwickshire. He said Foreign Minister Stephen Bowen’s gone missing. Should’ve turned up in his constituency on Saturday – a weekend with the family, local surgery, all the usual. But he never arrived.’

  ‘You’ve confirmed this?’

  ‘Oh yeah. It’s straight. Wouldn’t have buzzed you if it wasn’t, would I, luvvie?’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose you would.’

  Mandy was a temperamental news editor not famed for her reliability, but whom it was best not to cross.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve spoken to his agent. A real prat. No comment of course. But he did confirm he’d had to cancel the surgery. And I’ve tried Bowen’s wife but I think she’s taken the phone off the hook.’

  ‘Bowen was in Indonesia a few days ago,’ Charlie frowned. ‘For that arms deal. There were Reuters pictures of him signing.’

  ‘You’ve got it. But it’s extraordinary! Nobody seems to know if he ever came back.’

  ‘The Foreign Office?’

  ‘Well, if they know, they’re not telling us. Said they were still expecting him in on Monday.’

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘Not involved, they say. A family matter. Which could be the giveaway. Down at the Commons they say Bowen’s a bit of an old lech. He also likes gambling. Has all the makings for a good scandal, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, yes. Are we running it?’

  ‘Not yet. Ted’s trying to get something firmer from his mate at Downing Street. The point is we need you in to work on it. When can you get here?’

  ‘I�
��m down in Devon, Mandy. It’d be hours, and frankly I’ve got family problems of my own at the moment. Isn’t there anybody else …’

  ‘Devon? And of course you don’t drive, do you? Hang on a minute. There’s someone else down there this weekend …’

  At the other end Charlie heard Mandy shout across the newsroom. Her heart sank.

  ‘Jeremy,’ Mandy came back. ‘Jeremy Maitland’s down there somewhere. You know … the video-editor?’

  Charlie glared up at him. And she’d thought him discreet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know who you mean …’

  ‘Tell you what. We could do with him in too. If we can find out where he is, maybe he can give you a lift. Not seen him by any chance, have you?’ she asked facetiously.

  ‘Ummm …’ Telling lies, even little white ones, was something Charlie had always found absurdly hard to do.

  ‘Not with you by some chance, is he?’ Mandy mocked.

  ‘Ummm …’

  ‘Hey! You’re not serious?’

  ‘Well it just so happens …’

  ‘My God! Since when? You dirty little devils. I had no idea. Well put your knickers back on and get in that bloody car of his. See you here in about three hours, OK?’

  ‘Mandy!’ Charlie felt herself blushing. ‘I’m at my parents’. My dad’s ill. I can’t leave just like that.’

  ‘Really?’ Disbelief. ‘Look, there’ll be big gold stars from Sankey if you can get back quick. Let me know when you’re on your way, OK?’

  ‘Sod you, Mandy. All right.’ Deflated, she hung the phone back on the kitchen wall. ‘Big mouth,’ she snapped at Jeremy, then marched into the living room.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked, his face a picture of offended innocence.

  Her father stood in the big window bay overlooking the estuary. Tall but somewhat stooped, with a thin, angular face and silver hair, the soft brown eyes which Charlie had inherited unable to hide their fear.

  ‘Why do they want you?’ he asked, his voice like a rake on gravel. ‘Another bomb?’

  ‘No, Papa. It’s a politician gone missing. Stephen Bowen – he’s a junior minister at the Foreign Office. The newshounds have caught the whiff of scandal.’