Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  Hannie said nothing. She was in pain. And everything Kyte was saying rang true. She had no defence. I don’t need to defend myself, she thought fiercely. I’m doing a job for money. What’s wrong with that? Meanwhile Kyte, still on his knees probing for fresh roots, said in the same calm tone, ‘You might recall the Bocca Island affair. It was on TV about a year ago. Remember the islanders sitting around outside their huts, all swollen up, with vacant expressions on their faces—questions in Parliament, neatly evaded, but someone at the Ministry of Health had to resign? That was Duncan, you know. They had a one-crop economy on Bocca Island, and a subsidiary of Duncan’s bought the crop. Just them and nobody else. Obviously, they ran the island. Then, as it happened, another company Duncan had an interest in wanted to test a new psychiatric drug they’ve developed. There was one hospital on the island, part-funded by Duncan Kyte, masquerading as the XYZ Banana Company or something similar, and one drug company, in which this same Duncan Kyte is a heavy shareholder, wanting to conduct tests on a new drug. There were a few words in the club and in the City, a persuadable doctor on Bocca Island and—bingo—the tests get organized, the adult population of Bocca played human guinea pig, the effects turned them into zombies with very unpleasant personal appearance—goodbye Bocca, goodbye people. Do you know what he’s doing now?’

  ‘No,’ said Hannie, without looking up from her trowel.

  ‘He’s importing a fresh population. Best part of the work force is no good now, you see. And if the work force can’t work what about the bananas and, therefore, what about Duncan Kyte’s investment and profits? That’s the man you’re digging away to save. You’d be doing more good to the world if you were digging his grave.’

  Hannie looked up and said, ‘Please be quiet. I’m here now. I’ve got a job to do. Just let me do it.’

  ‘They drove my mother off like a starving dog, you know,’ Kyte told her remorselessly. ‘It broke her heart. His second wife killed herself—Duncan’s, I mean. You’ve got to hand it to him, his public life and his private life have always matched. He wrecks and exploits wherever he is. His third wife was in and out of the bin most of the time during the marriage. He’s got two boys. One lives on an ashram in South India. The other’s as bad as his father. He’s corrupt as hell—goes for little girls. Not Duncan’s kind of little girls but real little girls, the ones in Brownie uniforms. He stinks. Duncan stinks.’

  Hannie stood up. By now she had filled a long plastic box with enough of the root of the tree to provide a proper sample and taken some earth samples. She began to cram the jars with purple flowers. She could hardly bear the sound of Roderick Kyte’s voice, dinning into her ears the kind of information about her employer she did not want to hear. She reminded herself that she was working for him because of Adam, the new house, the children. She screwed the cap on the jar and said, ‘Suppose he gets someone on the job who actually can use this stuff to cure him. That would upset you, wouldn’t it? Because you want to do it yourself. But just supposing he does it—think of all the other people who would be helped by it.’

  ‘Estimate the probabilities,’ said Kyte. ‘He’s got six, possibly nine months to live. Do you think any reputable scientist or even a team of them can come up with results in that time? And test them properly before risking the stuff on the boss? What’ll happen is that Duncan will get the samples. Then he’ll drive the team mad with demands for results. After all, his life is on the line. Finally, he’ll drive the better ones away. He’ll be left with the weak men, who will allow themselves to be persuaded into doing what he wants out of fear or greed. And what he will want is to use the substance they produce. And there’s every chance that if he does he’ll die anyway, and probably far more horribly than he would have done.’

  Kyte stood there in the clearing, looking at her. ‘You see what that means? If my brother dies unnaturally, in a terrible way, there’ll be publicity. Difficult to avoid an inquest, for example. A famous multimillionaire industrialist dies because of a substance his own brother has been working on unsuccessfully for years. Imagine what that will look like. My university is trying to make cuts—how long do you think I’d last if they had a cast-iron excuse like that?’

  Martin was saying at Kyte’s elbow, ‘They’re looking at us, doctor. We’d better go.’

  Hannie and Roderick Kyte both turned and looked at the Indians. Four of the men were staring incuriously at the party of Europeans near the edge of the forest. Kyte nodded. ‘We’ve done what we came for,’ he said. ‘Let’s just walk quietly back to the helicopter. You’d better come with us,’ he told Hannie. ‘It might be unsafe to set off back through the jungle.’

  And so they walked across the clearing, past the fire, the groups of Indians and the long hut. As they went, Kyte, evidently in no mood to let Hannie off the hook, continued, ‘I want to go on with my work. You can’t help my brother. Can I persuade you to return without the plants, tell him you couldn’t find them?’

  And Hannie, without hesitation, replied, ‘I can’t do what you ask. I see no reason to fail in my job because of what you think might happen if I return with the specimens.’

  Kyte sighed. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I suppose I was foolish to think that I might get a decent response from anyone hired by my brother.’

  ‘Is there any chance you could drop down on our camp so that I can pick up my stuff and then take me on to somewhere I can get transport in the direction of Rio?’ Hannie asked bluntly.

  ‘Your interest in science has ended now that you have the plants?’ Kyte suggested.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Hannie.

  She got into the helicopter and sat on the floor. Her arm felt as if it were on fire. She thought, Sod Spinelli and sod you, specially, Roderick Kyte. I’ve got the flowers and the roots, and I’m getting out of here.

  In the co-pilot’s seat Roderick Kyte turned round and looked at her. Hannie stared at the floor.

  6. The Luck Runs Out

  ‘You want it. Come on, you know you want it,’ came the voice again. Hannie wrenched away across the bed. A dozen floors below this room, she knew, tanned bodies lay idly on the sand of Copacabana beach. She could not believe the life of Rio was going on outside this hotel room while inside four walls this grotesque event was taking place.

  ‘Bloody get back!’ she cried and tried to slip off the bed. The huge blond-haired hand held her down, pressing into the small of her back. She turned her head. She saw he had raised the heavy belt of his uniform again. He swung it down. She buried her head in the pillow in case it hit her face. It hit her buttocks for the second time. She screamed and, while he was off balance, turned over and kicked him under the chin. Then she jumped off the bed. He was large, heavy and he must have been six feet four inches tall. The kick under the chin meant nothing to him. He reached over and grabbed her by her left shoulder, which was still painful, and shoved her down on the bed again. Pushing her into the mattress, his hand still on her shoulder, the man, Tomas Green, laughed at her, saying, ‘I like them like this—a little trouble, a little fire. More fun, eh?’ He had rather small, red-rimmed blue eyes.

  Oh God, thought Hannie, why did I tell him the name of my hotel? Because he looked all right last night, in the bar. Why did I let him in? He didn’t look all right this morning. Why did I let him in? She was saying, ‘Tomas, I’m well connected. I have a cousin at the Embassy. You could lose your job.’

  She felt him rip away her nightdress. He said, ‘For a little fun. Don’t tell me you don’t like it.’ She shut her eyes as the belt came down again. It lashed round her hips. The buckle tore her side.

  She forced herself to speak calmly. ‘Tomas, it hurts too much. You must stop.’

  ‘Stop?’ he said quite reasonably, as if talking to a child, ‘but we’ve only just begun.’ The huge hand moved from her shoulder to her rib-cage, driving all the breath out of her. She gasped, ‘Let me get up! Let me get up!’ He dropped the belt on the carpet and pulled back his other hand, balled up i
nto a fist.

  ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘No!’ Then he smashed his fist into her face. For a time she felt no pain, only shock, and as she lay there, staring up at him, he turned her over like a fish in a frying pan. Then perhaps the worst part of the pain began. He held her down with one hand and she heard him unzipping his trousers. Tears ran from her eyes as he forced his prick into her anus and began, violently and methodically, to bugger her. Hannie, desperate, could not even feel the pain of her bruised face for the agony of this rough entry and of the terrible, heavy onslaught. She was afraid he was tearing her open. She tried to make herself relax, knowing that if she did not the pain might be worse and the injuries dangerous. She told herself it would soon be over, but Tomas Green took a long time and, as he went on longer, his thrusts became more violent, more rapid and deeper. Sometimes there was pain. Sometimes all she could feel were the buttons of his tunic biting into her back. Hannie, her teeth clamped to her lower lip, prayed she might faint, and did not. Finally, with one long, agonizing thrust, he finished. She lay still, not daring to breathe, with his heavy weight on her. She moaned softly and was still again. In the silence that followed he got off her. She heard him pull on his trousers and zip them. She heard the clatter of his belt buckle hitting a button as he put it on. She heard him open the door. He said, ‘Goodbye’, and she heard the door close. She lay there with her eyes shut for a moment, too weak to rise. Then she got up cautiously and crept, doubled up, to the door. She locked it and, still bent double, went back to the bed. She lay down and wept, saying to herself over and over again, ‘Did it have to get like this? Did it have to get like this?’ and then, suddenly, she was asleep.

  An instinct awoke her an hour before her flight was due to leave for London. Her face, where he had hit her, throbbed. She hoped her nose was not broken. Her back, where he had hit her with the belt, was agonizing. Her anus hurt excruciatingly. She dared not move but raised her arm to look at her watch. For a moment she thought of cancelling the flight and staying where she was until the next one was due. But she knew that if she stayed she would feel worse. She had to get up, and out, somehow. So she got up and hobbled painfully to the bathroom. While the bath ran she looked in the glass. There was a huge mark on her cheekbone which would shortly turn into a large bruise, but she must have turned her head as his fist smashed into her face. He had missed her nose and her eyes were all right. She pulled her nightdress off painfully, for the belt had gashed her and it was stuck to her back with blood. She got in the bath and thought that she never wanted to get out. He had not, she thought, made any tears in her anus, and that was lucky. She made herself get out of the bath, dried herself carefully and automatically put on a white dress, a black jacket, in case any more blood leaked through from her back, a black hat with a floppy brim, to hide her face, and dark glasses. She did all this quite numbly as if her brain had stopped working properly because she could not bear to think any more. The porter came for her bags. She followed him downstairs, paid her bill and got into a taxi.

  It was in the taxi, for a fundamentally robust mind and body will not stay numb for long, that she found herself gasping, in a kind of hysteria. Her brain began to replay the scene at the hotel over and over again, from the knock on the door as she sat eating a late breakfast, through the peculiar conversation which had preceded his assault, the lashing with the belt, the gasping breaths as he laboured over her, tearing at her, rending her, as it seemed, in two. As she sat in the taxi she thought she could smell his hair oil, his sweat, the semen which had leaked from her as she crossed the door to fasten it behind him. She became, in the heat of the vehicle, very cold.

  At the customs desk her face, even with the worst of the damage hidden, must have looked strange and pale. It could have been the pallor, it could have been her shakiness of manner, it could have been some smell, like that of a beaten animal, which she gave off. Perhaps it was just sheer bad luck—but the official gazed at her curiously and, as she was about to board the flight, two uniformed airport officials came up to her and pulled her out of the line. She went off between them, anxious about the possibility of missing the flight but knowing that this time, for once, she was in the clear. Her suitcase contained only clothing. Her hand luggage, a shoulder bag, contained only a wallet, a passport, a make-up bag, a copy of Speedwell’s South American Flora and Fauna. She imagined the complication could be connected with the plant specimens, which she had taken to the airport and arranged to despatch separately to London, refrigerated and covered by arrangements made with the expedition some months ago. It should take no time to sort out, she thought, and the likelihood was that she would get her flight.

  In the office sat two policemen, one a short dark, tubby man and the other, Tomas Green. He was still in his uniform, wearing his cap. Around his waist was the belt. Hannie’s eyes moved to it automatically. When they returned to his face she saw that he was sweating. She was terrified; the sight of him made her flesh crawl. And then she had a sudden, sick knowledge that something else was horribly wrong.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ said the airport official. They went through the door of the small office into a larger one. The two policemen and the other airport official came after. Hannie stared at the desk. On it lay her suitcase. The contents, clothes, her jungle boots, a pair of shoes, underwear, were placed neatly to one side. The case itself lay open. It was a blue case with a red quilted lining. It was the case she took with her on family holidays. The airport official said, ‘May I see your passport, please?’ Hannie gave it to him. It was her own passport, not one of those she obtained by scouring graveyards for little girls who had died when she herself was a child and claiming passports in their names. It was the passport she took with her when she and Adam and the girls went to Spain in the summer, or to Austria skiing in the winter. He looked at it and put it to one side, on one of the piles of her clothes.

  Hannie, conditioned by years of guilt, realized that a normal person would here utter a complaint. But inside she had a bad feeling that for some reason it was pointless. She was also afraid. The official stood behind the desk, guarding her clothes, her passport, her perfectly innocent suitcase. Green stood behind her, where she could not see him. Nevertheless she said, ‘I don’t understand this. Is there something you think is wrong? I shall be too late for my flight in five minutes.’

  ‘This is your case?’ asked the official.

  Hannie said, ‘Yes. It is.’

  The airport official beckoned. Green stepped from behind her. He stood behind the desk. He did not like it. He glanced sideways at the heap of her clothes. Hannie stared at him.

  ‘Show her,’ said the airport man. ‘Step closer, Mrs Richards.’

  The atmosphere had turned bad. Hannie moved towards the desk and looked at the case. She saw now that the lining of the corner closest to her had been slightly unpicked. She could see that the small, cut threads were black.

  The man pulled back the flap of red quilted material. Underneath was a cellophane packet, about three inches wide. It was filled with white powder.

  Hannie closed her eyes, then opened them again. It must be heroin, or cocaine. It had been planted on her.

  The airport official said, ‘I propose to cut out the entire lining, in front of these witnesses and in front of you.’ At this point a small man, carrying a briefcase and wearing a business suit, hurried in. He said, ‘Luis, Mrs Richards has admitted to being the owner of the case.’ He said to Hannie, ‘This gentleman is a lawyer. We like to have him present because in the past airport staff have been accused by passengers of tampering with their luggage in order to smuggle goods into other countries.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Hannie wearily. ‘You’d better get on with it. But please note that I deny any knowledge of whatever it is.’ She scarcely knew what she was saying. She knew only, as the airport official, scrutinized by Green and the lawyer, carefully cut the stitches which held the lining in place, that she was being caught red-handed for something she had no
t done. Indeed, she thought sourly, if she had done it, she would have been more careful not to have been caught. Gloomily she watched them peel back the whole lining. The little plastic or cellophane packets, full of white powder, covered the whole of the bottom of the case. If it is cocaine, she thought, at about forty dollars a snort, the powder represented about £50,000. If it was heroin, less. She was not absolutely sure of current prices. She did not really care. What was certain was that she had been caught with prohibited drugs in quantity. It was her case all right. She recognized the stain made by a piece of chewing gum when she had put the bag down at Heathrow. She had scraped off the gum, but the mark remained. She stared at the round brown mark at the edge of the case. The man in charge said, ‘We’re going to open one of the packets.’

  She said, ‘Very well. But I don’t know anything about all this.’

  He said, as he stripped off the slip of scotch tape holding the flap of the packet down, ‘We found this during a routine search.’

  Hannie nodded. She could almost believe it. All they had to do was feel the bottom of the case. Their experienced fingertips would tell them all they needed to know. She wondered how she had not noticed. Perhaps the airport staff had planted the stuff. But she had arrived so late at the airport she had barely had time to get her case to the check-in. One lot would have had to slit the lining of the case completely, plant the stuff and sew it up again, and another lot would have had to inspect the baggage and find out what the first lot had done, all within the space of ten minutes to a quarter of an hour—it did not make sense. But if they had not done it, then who had? Meanwhile, the man had tipped some of the white powder into his palm. He smelt it, sniffed it carefully, licked his finger, picked some of it up on his fingertip, tasted it and said, ‘Cocaine. We shall have to analyse it, but there can be little doubt. I shall have to arrest you, Mrs Richards.’