Deep Water

by Whitcroft, Isla;

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Miles. Before she could ask him about Matthias and whether he had had any more problems at the Eco Trust HQ he had grabbed her hand and marched her towards the cabin, his soaking wet hair gleaming under the porch light. ‘Hey guys,’ he said, walking into the room and pulling Cate behind him. ‘It took me hours to hitch from Passande airport and walk down that goddam track – in a storm, no less – but I did it. I’m back!’

  There was a scream as a blond whirlwind rushed past Cate and threw herself into Miles’s arms.

  ‘Thank God,’ sobbed Josie. ‘I’ve been so worried.’

  Above her head, Miles rolled his eyes at Noah and Jacob who had got up to greet him. ‘Come on, Josie,’ he said good-naturedly patting her on the back. ‘I always come back. You know that.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Cate slept badly, the sounds of the dying storm disturbing her dreams. She tossed and turned, worrying about what she had seen on the beach. She was glad of Mitsu’s company, even though the Japanese girl, true to her word, had snored throughout the night.

  When she did finally wake up, her head was pounding and her mouth felt dry. To her amazement, it was gone eleven o’clock and there was no sign of Mitsu now, although there was a note on her bed from Michel. Gone out on the boat. See you later, sleepyhead.

  Just then, Cate’s phone buzzed with a text. Skype me asap, Sis.

  She quickly got out her laptop. Even though it was late at night in Switzerland, Arthur was still up and running. ‘Cate, your Rafe,’ said Arthur, his voice squeaking down her headphones. ‘He hasn’t gone travelling. I don’t think he’s gone anywhere.’’

  Cate looked at him in amazement. ‘What do you mean he hasn’t gone anywhere? Rafe cleared out two weeks ago and took everything with him. That’s what everyone says.’

  ‘Well, everyone is wrong,’ said Arthur triumphantly. ‘His phone is switched off but I was able to track the co-ordinates of its location. And guess where it was coming from all that time?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘For the last two weeks Rafe’s iPhone has been located in Snapper Bay. Which means that either he left without his phone or . . .’ Arthur paused.

  ‘He never left at all,’ Cate finished.

  As Cate packed away her laptop her mind was in a whirl from the information Arthur had found out, mixed with a heady dose of jetlag. There was only one thing to do when she felt this rough, Cate decided. She had to go for a run. She threw on her running gear, took a swig of water from her bottle and left the tent.

  She passed Tuyen, who was lying in a hammock, reading, and spotted Maria walking down the beach, a bucket in her hand. Off collecting herbs again, thought Cate. She had only been there two days but it was amazing how quickly she had come to love the place and the people in it. They were all young but most of them were so committed, so passionate about what they did. Cate couldn’t help but compare them to some of her school friends who did nothing but moan about their lives and who had no idea what they wanted to do after university.

  At first she followed a wide path that led into the forest from the back of the shower area. It looked as though it had been laid professionally and, making the most of it, Cate increased her stride. Within a few hundred metres, though, the track narrowed. The trees closed over her head, vines tangling around them and hanging down like thick strands of spaghetti, and Cate was in semi-darkness. Even the downpour of the previous night had hardly penetrated the canopy and only in small patches was the ground damp.

  As always the run helped clear her mind. Cate decided that her worries were completely unfounded. As soon as she got back, she would tell Michel what she had seen on the beach and he would tell her that they were probably just recreational divers they saw all the time.

  After a few kilometres the track narrowed again. Now Cate was running along a small path, less than half-metre wide that twisted and turned through the trees, forcing her to stoop under low hanging branches. The forest was almost silent now, only the odd squawk of an unseen bird flying high overhead and the croak of the ever-present cane toads disturbed the peace.

  Now and again, the long, coarse grass beside the track suddenly moved and wriggled as an animal made its escape from Cate’s approaching footsteps and once Cate saw the black head of a snake a couple of metres away, his bright beady eyes watching her as she ran by.

  She had been running for about half an hour when the track suddenly came to an end in a clearing of dry, red earth. Out of breath, Cate looked down at her GPS. It showed that, although she had run over five kilometres, she was actually less than two direct kilometres from the camp, and only a few hundred metres from the main track that she had come in on. Unless she could get through the bush to the track, her only option seemed to be to retrace her steps for the return leg, something that Cate always hated doing.

  Still panting she looked around her at the wall of trees and twisted plants, trying to see if there was another route she could take. She pushed aside a particularly large-leafed plant and with great satisfaction saw a narrow passageway curving away from her through the undergrowth. Flattened leaves and grasses showed it had been used very recently.

  The width and condition of the track made it too dangerous to run now and Cate, nervous of twisting an ankle or worse, decided to indulge in a bit of wildlife spotting instead. She moved carefully, quietly, choosing her footsteps with care.

  Suddenly she heard the sound of grunting, panting, and then a loud angry curse. Cate stopped dead in her tracks, then instinctively dropped down to a crouch in a section of long grass before crawling very slowly towards the sound. She took cover behind a fallen tree, her heart racing. Through the foliage she could make out a man, half turned away from her. His podgy hands were wielding a small, sharp spade as he tried to make inroads into the solidly packed earth.

  He was huge to the point of obesity. Through his T-shirt she could see rolls of flesh hanging over his enormous waistband, his thighs so wide that he was struggling to bend as he dug. He was mumbling to himself and she listened hard, trying to work out what he was saying. He was talking to himself in Spanish. But not the European Spanish she had learnt when she had spent six months in Gibraltar while her dad tried to defuse yet another diplomatic row about the ownership of the colony. This was a faster Spanish, higher, with different swear words from the ones she and Arthur had picked up behind her dad’s back. He was speaking the Spanish of South America.

  There was a ringing sound as his spade hit something metal and he got down onto his hands and knees to scrape the peat away. A metal handle appeared in the earth and he grabbed it, pulling hard, huge beads of sweat running down his heavily tanned face.

  After what seemed like an age of cursing, a khaki-coloured box suddenly shot out of the earth and the man sat back on his heels. He fumbled with the catch, the lid sprang up and the man peered eagerly inside. Still muttering, he pulled out an EU passport, an iPhone and a small stack of clothes. Cate caught a quick glimpse of what looked like a Levi jeans logo on a bright blue T-shirt, a pair of suede RM Williams bush boots and a wide-brimmed leather hat. An akubra, she thought it was called. She shook her head, puzzled. A passport, an iPhone and clothes? He reached down into a small leather bag that lay by his side and brought out a huge wad of money – tens of thousand of dollars, Cate reckoned.

  Then her heart jumped. In his other hand, glistening in the sunlight, was a Colt 1911. Cate knew all about these guns. Whenever Cate and Arthur visited their mother in LA, she had insisted that they took shooting lessons. The Colt 1911 was the weapon Cate had practised with and, later on, taking a short cut through a poor part of town, she saw kids carrying them as casually as their British counterparts would carry mobile phones.

  The man put the gun and the money into the tin box, shut the lid, raked the soil back over it and stamped down hard. Then he stood up, rubbed his back and, bag in hand, turned and began to push his way back through the undergrowth. As he disappeared from view, Cate made sure she kept low i
n the undergrowth and began to follow him. It wasn’t hard to do. The man made so much noise crashing through the forest that he wouldn’t have heard ten Cates coming behind him.

  Cate soon heard a car starting up and she started sprinting. She was just in time to see a large jeep disappearing and to catch the numbers on the plate as the black vehicle juddered along the bumpy track. Gotcha, thought Cate pulling out her phone and texting the number to Marcus. Gotcha.

  It only took a few seconds to go back and unearth the metal box. As she flipped open the lid, Cate hesitated. She didn’t want the money and she really didn’t want the gun. But she knew she couldn’t just leave the gun there. She had no idea who it was meant for, but she could take a pretty good guess that whoever was going to pick it up wasn’t on the side of the good guys.

  As she headed back towards camp, the implications of what she had just seen began to sink in. She had stumbled across some sort of drop-off point, an exchange. The question was, who for? Either it was complete coincidence that it was sited so close to the turtle sanctuary or – and Cate felt sick at the thought – she had to face the almost unthinkable truth: the drop-off point was being used by someone in the camp. She shook her head. For now she had to believe it was the former – was desperate to believe it – and, to be fair, she had no reason to think otherwise. But with a sinking heart Cate knew that the seeds of mistrust had already been sown in her mind. She couldn’t risk confiding in anyone at the camp about what she had seen, that day or the night before. Not yet anyway. Not even Michel – he might talk to someone, or try to convince her to stay out of it.

  Just outside camp, she stopped by a large rock. A small, weird-looking tree was growing on top of it, its thick clawlike roots overhanging and reaching down to the ground. A dark moss had grown over the roots, providing a series of arches and tunnels.

  Cate picked up a thick stick and wiggled it into one of the tunnels. She wasn’t in safe old England now, where the worst thing that was likely to get you was a wasp or a grass snake – this was Australia, the natural habitat for some of the most poisonous creatures in the world. It felt wide and was at least half a metre long and when she withdrew the stick she saw it was still bone dry. It was good place to hide something.

  She brought the gun out from her pocket, checked that the safety catch was still on, and pushed it deep into the tunnel. It would be safe there. It would be missed by someone of course, but that wasn’t her problem. They wouldn’t know who had taken it, and they could hardly go around asking questions. At least for now it couldn’t hurt anybody.

  Her phone bleeped with a text. Number check you requested returned. Hire vehicle currently on lease to someone with a Cotian passport. Name to be filed later. Keep me posted. M.

  First the divers, now this. It seemed that Marcus had been right. Something very strange was happening in Snapper Bay. It was probably good, she decided, that she was getting away for a couple of days. It might give her space to think.

  The tiny seaplane hovered gracefully over Purbeck Island, the propeller engines humming as the pilot waited for his instructions to head down into the horseshoe-shaped bay that lay beneath them.

  The twenty-minute flight from the mainland had been amazing. From the moment Cate had walked out onto the wooden jetty and seen the neat blue and white plane bobbing on its ropes, she had been almost beside herself with excitement.

  ‘Ready for take off, Miss?’ The pilot, an affable, gum-chewing Aussie had grinned at her and she nodded happily as she put on her seatbelt next to him.

  Cate could see Michel through the porthole, still holding his motorbike helmet and waving at her and then, as the plane began to taxi away from the jetty and out into the bay, he vanished as the glass was covered with a fine spray from the sea. As the seaplane began to power its way across the waves, Cate sat back, feeling the tug of gravity as the plane lifted slowly into the air.

  ‘It’s a bit bumpy on the water but once we’re in the air, it’s just like any other light aircraft,’ the pilot said. ‘She might be an old girl but she just keeps on going. She’s a classic, you see. They don’t build them like this any more.’

  She looked around at the walnut fittings, the art noveau stained-glass lights on the wall, and breathed in the heady smell of well-polished old leather. Photographs of celebrity passengers boarding the plane hung on the bulkhead walls behind them; black and white pictures from the golden age of Hollywood when people dressed as if they were permanently going to or from an impossibly glamorous party. Cate looked down regretfully at her light blue cotton cut-off trousers and scoop-necked white linen top. Luckily she had the outfit that Nancy had given her tucked away in her bag for the gig, but still, she couldn’t help wishing that she was wearing a long floaty dress, possibly with satin stiletto heels and a dash of red lipstick.

  And now the island was beneath her, the large low-roofed villas all but concealed beneath the lush green vegetation, each one beside a swimming pool. Some of the villas were situated on small crescent-shaped beaches, others had their own pristine lawns boasting streams and summer houses. Wooden paths ran from one villa to another, some crossing little lakes and rivers. Dotted in the clear waters, Cate could see yachts sailing lazily along the pristine beaches. As the plane climbed up over the centre of the island, Cate saw the heart of the resort and gasped.

  ‘Some view, huh?’ said the pilot cheerfully. ‘I’ve been doing this run for two years now and I’m still not tired of it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Cate, trying not to get a crick in her neck as she goggled at the view. ‘This place is beyond amazing.’

  The estate was vast, the pool alone covering, Cate estimated, at least a couple of acres. Small pools merged into lakes and then fell away back into the sea. There were several waterfalls and numerous islands. There was even a small mass of what looked like rainforest. Beyond that, a large cricket pavilion presided over a perfect oval of a green complete with a large scoreboard, while several pristine grass tennis courts nestled in the bottom of a lush green valley.

  As the plane headed over the far side of the island, Cate found herself laughing out loud. ‘Did I just see a castle?’ she asked incredulously. ‘With turrets and those crenellation thingies. On an island off the coast of Australia?’

  The pilot nodded. ‘Amazing, huh? Fifty years ago a mega-rich American decides that he wants to recreate Edwardian England on an island off the coast of Australia, complete with a castle, a stable block, dairy, and working farm. Then when he dies from eating too much, his family sell it to this Aussie newspaper magnate who thinks it would be the place to bring all his super-rich and powerful mates to relax, so he builds the pools, and the tennis courts and the yacht marina and all these tropical villas complete with every mod con needed for today’s discerning guest. And this . . .’ he waved expansively, ‘. . . is what you see before you.’

  ‘Wow,’ was all Cate could say.

  ‘The castle’s used as a hotel and conference centre now, but there are still no cars or golf buggies to get around. You walk or take a pony and trap,’ he chuckled. ‘But make no mistake, the men who stay here are the type of men who run the world. They make decisions over breakfast that can make or break entire economies and governments, all the while having a massage, playing golf or enjoying the finest haute cuisine from around the world.’ He sniffed theatrically. ‘Smell that?’ he said. ‘It’s the sweet smell of power.’

  ‘Any women allowed in this hallowed bunch?’ asked Cate, her hackles rising at the casual inference that all world leaders must be men.

  ‘I think Hilary Clinton has been here a few times,’ said the pilot, looking apologetic, ‘and Angela Merkel, and your Margaret Thatcher once in the early days. But mostly the wives and girlfriends watch couture fashion shows and get spa’d to within an inch of their lives.’

  There was an unintelligible squawk from the radio and then Cate felt the plane shifting and rolling as it slewed back out to sea.’

  ‘Going do
wn,’ said the pilot, more to himself than to Cate, as the plane turned sharply again to begin its final descent.

  A few minutes later, the plane bounced and slapped down on the water, throwing up a fountain of spray before coming to a halt next to a wooden jetty. The pilot pushed the door and gallantly held it open for Cate.

  As she stepped out, she saw two figures standing up ahead of her. Dark and completely bald, dressed, despite the heat, in immaculate black suits and shiny shoes, they were clearly impatient to board the plane. Before Cate had even stepped down from the wooden boarding plank, they were barking orders to the pilot in heavily accented English.

  They barely looked at Cate but she looked at them. And then looked again. There was no mistaking that scar that ran right across the top of one of the men’s head, the mutilated hand of the other. She had seen these men just a few days before. They had attempted to burn Matthias to death. And now they were right here on Purbeck Island.

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘Pleasant dudes, huh?’ the pilot said to Cate as he walked down the jetty behind her. ‘Security guards. Always the same. Think their muscle gives them the right to push everyone else around.’

  Cate slowed down to let the pilot catch up with her. ‘Have you seen them before, then?’ she asked as casually as she could. ‘Are they regulars?’

  He snorted. ‘No way. Otherwise I might have to have a word with Mr Lake – the guy who owns this plane company. Nah, these guys only turned up here a few days ago. They flew in from the mainland just like you did. You haven’t been here before, have you?’ he said, his grey eyes looking at her keenly.

  ‘No, I’m visiting Nancy Kyle. She’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Wow,’ said the pilot. ‘I heard she was here. She’s gorgeous! I don’t s’pose you could get me an introduction, could you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cate, smiling. ‘I’ll try.’ She was keen to keep the conversation going. ‘Got far to go with those two guys?’