Journey to Death

by Leigh Russell

  Angela turned to face him. Her eyes were burning with an anguish she struggled to express. ‘She couldn’t write to you, could she? Because he shot her. Right between the eyes. I can’t stop thinking about that poor woman, George, killed because she loved you all those years ago, and I knew nothing about it.’

  George bowed his head and took his wife’s hand. Lucy could see his eyes were filled with tears. They had survived Baptiste. Veronique had not. She had been a young woman, perhaps the same age as Lucy was now. They had both fallen in love with the wrong man, but Veronique had suffered a terrible fate as a consequence. In all the time Lucy had been distraught over Darren, it had not once occurred to her to appreciate how lucky she had been. Her relationship with Darren was over. Her life was not.

  48

  WHEN LUCY’S PARENTS RETIRED to their room for a siesta, she walked out of the hotel on her own. Without having told anyone what she was planning to do, she drove towards Victoria. When she reached the track that led into the forest of Morne Seychellois, she turned off the road. It was early afternoon. With five hours of daylight left, she had enough time to complete her task and be back in the hotel before her parents realised she was missing. Her mother would never need to find out where she had gone. The journey did not take as long as she had expected. Spotting the flattened patch in the bushes where the old man’s moped lay, she climbed out of the car and continued on foot. She had brought some red beads with her. Every few yards she dropped a bead to help her find her way back to the car. After all the trouble she and her parents had suffered, she did not want to add to it by getting lost on the mountain.

  On foot, she climbed for such a long time that she thought she must have followed the wrong path. She was wondering whether she ought to turn back when the hut appeared in front of her. Half hidden in overgrown moss and ivy, the door wedged open with the wooden shrine, it looked abandoned. Dismissing a mental image of her mother chained to the wall, she entered the hut. The white curtain had been ripped off the wooden box which still lay across the threshold, where she had left it. The floor was covered in a thick layer of shrivelled petals, their delicate scent overpowered by a foul stench. Suspended from one wall, her mother’s manacles remained fixed to the hut. In a corner where the shrine had stood, the small white curtain had been draped over the skull.

  Stepping over petals, avoiding the place where Baptiste had fallen when she hit him, Lucy made her way across the hut. Peeking beneath the curtain to make sure she had found what she wanted, she picked up the skull, still wrapped in its cover, and left the hut. Unless some stray hiker on the mountains stumbled across it, no one would ever enter that hut again. She turned and began her trek back down the mountain. Following the trail of beads, she found the car easily and placed the skull, still in its wrapping, in a bag.

  Arriving back at the hotel, she hid the bag inside her wardrobe. Before dinner, her mother went up to her room to shower. As her father stood up to accompany his wife, Lucy put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Come for a walk on the beach with me, Dad,’ she said, adding in an undertone that she needed to speak to him alone.

  Her father nodded. ‘I’ll be up in a bit, Angela. I’m just going for a short walk with Lucy, down to the sea and back.’

  Lucy led him through the gardens down to the beach where they sat on a wall. Gazing at the serenity of the ocean, she told him how she had gone back to the hut to retrieve Veronique’s skull.

  Her father turned to her, visibly shocked. ‘You did what?’

  She was taken aback by his expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered, ‘I should have asked you first, but it was difficult, with Mum around. I just thought you might not want to leave it up there in that dreadful place. You were wrong to write to Veronique without telling Mum, but I think I can understand why you did it. And even if I can’t, Veronique still deserves to be treated with some decency.’ She hesitated. ‘I thought you might want to bury her.’

  Her voice trailed off. Her father sat perfectly still, staring at the sea, making no sign that he had even heard her. When he turned to her, she saw tears glistening on his cheeks.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I thought . . .’

  Her father reached out and put his hand on hers.

  ‘It’s in a blue bag in my wardrobe,’ she muttered. ‘You can go and get it any time you want.’

  With a nod he turned away, his shoulders shaken by silent sobs.

  Over breakfast next day, her mother announced she intended to spend the morning packing. Her father said he wanted to drive down to the airport to print out their boarding passes, which the hotel had explained could only be done there.

  ‘Why make a special journey?’ Lucy’s mother said. ‘You can do all the checking in when we get there later.’

  He insisted he wanted to make sure everything went smoothly.

  ‘Let him go if that’s what he wants to do, Mum,’ Lucy interrupted.

  ‘I just want to look after you, and make sure everything goes smoothly,’ her father repeated, leaning down to kiss his wife on the cheek.

  Lucy accepted her father’s invitation to accompany him. ‘Are you really sure you want me to come?’

  ‘He’s only going to the airport, Lucy,’ her mother said.

  Lucy knew that was not true. She was surprised to see her father looking cheerful as they set off. It seemed to her to be quite a grim undertaking. But as they drove away from the hotel, he fell silent and his features set in a stern expression, as though he was steeling himself for the task ahead.

  Before they reached the road to the airport, he turned off onto a track that meandered between tall palm trees and masses of shrubs covered in flowers, pink, white, yellow and purple, stunning against the dark green foliage. He had brought Lucy and her mother there once before. The flowers were even more lovely than she remembered. Leaving the car in a passing place beneath the overhanging branches of a takamaka tree, he took the blue bag from the boot and started to descend the incline. A short way down he stopped to look at the view. Lucy thought he had forgotten about her, walking a few paces behind him, but he turned and beckoned her. He put his arm round her and side by side they gazed out over the sparkling ocean, far below.

  ‘I remember dreading your mother had drowned,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how I ever dared fall in love for a second time.’ He paused. ‘Wait here.’

  She watched him walk down the path towards the property where strangers had lived for thirty years. He did not even glance at the two-storey white house with its verandah where he used to sit as a young man, looking out at the ocean. She knew he had been happy there, perhaps happier than he had been at any other time in his life, but the building was just stone and cement. The only warmth he would find there now would come from the sun beating down on him. Halfway down the path he stopped under a frangipani bush, its white flowers delicate against the dark foliage. Opening the blue bag, he lifted out the skull wrapped in white fabric. Laying it gently on the ground beside him, he began to dig.

  He had brought an assortment of children’s spades, designed for the beach. Lucy guessed that was all he had been able to find, without making a special trip into Victoria. The first spade was not up to the job of digging earth and after a few jabs the delicate wooden handle snapped. He threw it to one side and picked up a red plastic spade that looked more robust. Rhythmically, he dug until he had cleared a hole in the earth. The handle of the spade kept juddering as the end hit against woody roots of the frangipani bush. In the end he abandoned the spade and gouged the earth out with his bare hands, shovelling it from the slowly deepening hole. It took a long time, but he persevered. Lucy wondered what the residents would think if they returned to find him digging beneath the bushes like an animal. He toiled on, until his shirt clung to his sweating body, and at last the hole was deep enough. Reaching up to gather fresh frangipani petals from the living bush, he lined the hole with them.

  In the shade of the frangipani she had loved, he let
go of the woman he had lost a long time ago.

  ‘I would have come back,’ he whispered, ‘but I don’t know if it would have been enough.’

  Lucy knew what he meant. There was no way of knowing whether he would have been able to return in time to save her from Baptiste’s bullet. It was strange to think that if his passion for Veronique had turned into a long-term relationship, he would not have married her mother, and she would never have been born.

  She watched him sprinkle the skull with more frangipani petals, before shovelling earth into the hole. Walking over to stand next to him, she placed a flower on the spot where Veronique was now buried.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered as he knelt and patted the earth down. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘None of this was your fault, Dad.’

  He sighed. ‘Rest in peace, my dark angel.’

  49

  LUCY TOOK HER LEAVE of the barman, Eddy. He gave her a wink before turning his attention to a girl, slim and blonde, with the telltale pale skin of a new arrival. When they were ready to leave, she went round with her father, saying their goodbyes. Her father disagreed, but Lucy had the impression the manager was relieved to see them go. They even stopped to speak to the reporter from Seychelles Live in the lobby. Hovering beside them, the manager brightened up when Lucy’s father praised the Garden of Eden Hotel for its first-rate accommodation, food and service.

  ‘We couldn’t fault it,’ her father said.

  ‘How did you feel when you saw your wife again, after she had been found?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘We were happy with her stay in hospital, and of course very pleased when she was able to leave hospital. She’s been well looked after here. Like I said, we can’t fault it here.’

  ‘They even sweep away the petals outside so no one can slip,’ Lucy muttered to her father.

  The reporter turned to her eagerly. ‘I’m sorry? I didn’t catch that.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ her father answered, ushering her away.

  Lucy drove to the airport with Adrian, her parents following behind in the hire car. Adrian had insisted on coming with them, despite Lucy’s protestations that he should not drive all that way.

  ‘You really don’t need to do this, Adrian.’

  ‘You know you’re turning into your mother?’ he laughed. ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be driving at all yet.’

  ‘If I only did what I was supposed to do, I would never have tried my luck that night, and come up to your corridor just in time to save you from a maniac with a gun.’

  She smiled and turned to gaze out of the window. The scenery was so beautiful, it would be a wrench to leave it all behind for the grey skies of England.

  ‘I’m going to miss all this,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  A building blocked her view. They rounded a bend in the road and a clear panorama of a deserted beach opened out below them. Turquoise water sparkled in the bay beneath a glaring sun, and far away tiny white boats bobbed in the water, like toys.

  Lucy turned to Adrian. ‘I don’t want to leave.’

  ‘I’d love you to stay,’ he replied seriously, ‘but I don’t think my nerves could cope with looking after you for longer than two weeks. You need to get on to Superman, or perhaps James Bond would be up for it, not some dull accountant who isn’t even supposed to risk driving a car.’

  She laughed. She was going to miss his sense of humour. ‘There’s so much I don’t know about you.’ All at once she was steeped in regrets, conscious their time together had almost run out.

  ‘Ask me anything you like. If you find out anything remotely interesting, please let me know. I could do with a good chat up line. Not every girl I meet gives me so much scope to play the hero.’

  ‘OK, here goes. Twenty questions.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  She learned that unlike his peers in the shanty town where he had grown up he had worked hard at school, and he did not regret the time he had spent studying. He had no siblings, or at least none that he knew about, did not know who his father was, spoke three languages fluently, and had never been in love. He told her he did not know what that meant, and she dismissed his remark as typical of a man. When she had finished questioning him he admitted she had seen little of his real existence.

  ‘Man of mystery then?’

  ‘No, what I mean is, the time I’ve spent with you wasn’t in any way typical. This has been the most exciting time of my life. It’s been incredible. Think about it, Lucy. I’m an accountant. I spend my days at a desk, checking figures. Meeting you has been a real adventure for me!’

  ‘For me too. I’ve only ever read about other people’s adventures in books. I never had one myself before this.’

  They smiled at one another.

  ‘My turn to ask the questions,’ he said.

  Lucy agreed reluctantly. She was taken aback by his first question but Adrian had answered her questions honestly so she tried to be truthful.

  ‘I loved him, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m glad you put that in the past tense. So you’re over him now?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Good. I know we only met a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve been through a lot in that time, more than most friends go through in a lifetime. I think of you as a real friend, Lucy.’

  He paused as though expecting an answer.

  ‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘I’d say right now you’re the best friend I’ve got on Mahé.’

  ‘I’m being serious,’ he reproached her. ‘We won’t see each other again for a while, and I’d hate to think of you being miserable.’

  Touched by his concern, she was not sure how to respond. ‘From now on, I’m going to appreciate every minute of every day,’ she promised him. ‘I’m lucky to be alive, thanks to you.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to think you’re going to make the most of your life. You’re young and intelligent, and beautiful. There’s no knowing where you might end up.’

  ‘Young, gifted and talented?’ She laughed. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. I just wish I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I feel like I’m drifting.’

  ‘Well, you’re highly intelligent, you see connections other people miss, you never give up, and you’ve definitely got more guts than anyone else I’ve ever met.’ He paused. ‘And I suspect you can pick locks.’

  ‘So you’re telling me I’d make a good burglar,’ she laughed.

  ‘You could be a spy!’

  She thought back over the adrenaline rush of the past sixteen days, and the dangers she had faced.

  ‘I don’t think a life of adventure is for me,’ she laughed. ‘Two weeks was enough.’

  ‘I know what you mean. It’s been quite an adventure though, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Normal life is going to seem dull after everything that’s happened.’

  ‘You could join the SAS?’

  ‘Too many rules and regulations for me. And I’d need to be fit.’

  ‘You could be a private detective.’

  ‘Like Miss Marple,’ she said and they both laughed.

  They said goodbye in the car park of the small airport with its runway bordering the ocean. Before she followed her parents to check in, Lucy ran back and threw her arms around Adrian’s neck one last time.

  ‘Ow,’ he complained. ‘My shoulder!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Her mother was calling her.

  ‘Make sure you keep in touch,’ Lucy called out as she ran after her parents.

  Adrian shouted in reply but she did not hear what he said. By the time she realised she did not have his email address, it was too late. Her mother found them seats in the waiting area and they sat looking out at the runway and beyond that the ocean stretching away to the horizon. Her father put his arm round her.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon be safely home, and then no more hair-raising escapades for you, young lady. Fro
m now on I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you and your mother, taking care of you both.’

  Despite his well-meaning words, Lucy knew that he was no longer responsible for her. She was ready to take control of her own life. Thinking about what had happened, she was more determined than ever to forget about Darren and move on with her life.

  With a roar, the plane gathered speed. Lucy stared at low white buildings and lush green hills flashing past the window. A granite mountain peak towered above the forested slopes. Concealed in that idyllic landscape a dilapidated hut sheltered a wooden shrine, surrounded by heaps of dry petals. Those that were not blown away on the wind would be consumed by insects, or rot into the forest floor. The plane rose rapidly, the ruffled turquoise surface of the sea far below them now. They turned and a green island appeared, framed in the window. She could not be sure but thought she recognised the curve of the coastline before the plane wheeled once more and the island disappeared. Her parents were laughing together, finding a way back to their quietly affectionate relationship. Smiling, Lucy returned to the email she was writing. She would send it care of the hotel, knowing Adrian would reply as soon as he was back at work. When she next glanced out of the window, they were flying above the clouds. Along with the island, the time she had spent with Darren was already fading into memory. On her own for the first time in her life, she felt ready to face whatever challenges the future might hold.

  Acknowledgements

  Producing a book is a team effort, and I am fortunate to be supported by many talented individuals. I am particularly indebted to Emilie Marneur and Sophie Wilson. No author could wish for more consummate expertise and sensitivity from editors who are not only brilliant, but inspiring to work with.

  I would also like to thank the Seychellois Police and the British High Commission in the Seychelles for their assistance and generosity with their time, and my contact in UK Ballistics Intelligence for his advice.

  Finally, I am lucky to be represented by Annette Crossland, a fantastic agent and a true friend.