Escape from Shadow Island (5 page)

“Did he say why he wanted to see you?”

“No.”

Penhall looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Penhall sniffed. “So this man you've never seen before asks you to go to his hotel and you go? I find that hard to believe.”

“It's true,” Max said.

“Describe to me what you found when you got there.”

“His door was already open,” Max said. “I went in and he was there on the floor. Dead.”

“Did you touch his body?”

“No.”

“Or anything in the room?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

Max wasn't going to tell him about the piece of paper with the numbers on it. He knew instinctively that he should be wary of Rupert Penhall.

“Why didn't you report it to the hotel manager?”

“I don't know,” Max said. “I was scared. I'd never seen a dead body before. I suppose I just panicked, got out as quickly as I could. I didn't want anyone to think I'd done it.”

“Why would anyone think you'd done it? A fourteen-year-old schoolboy?”

Max stared at him. “People get accused of things they haven't done,” he said.

“You're referring to your mother, I presume?”

Max didn't answer. He looked out of the car window. They were driving past the local shopping center for the second time. Max wanted to get out—he felt like a prisoner in the back of the car—but he knew Penhall hadn't finished with him.

“Lopez-Vega mentioned your mother, didn't he?” Penhall said.

Max hesitated, wondering how much he should reveal. He decided he had more to gain by seeming to cooperate. Perhaps Penhall would let something slip that would be useful. “Yes, he mentioned her.”

“What did he say?”

“That her trial was rigged.”

“He was lying, Max. He knew nothing about your mother's trial.”

“Didn't he?”

“Luis Lopez-Vega was a criminal and a con man. He was well known to the police in Santo Domingo. He had a conviction for drug dealing and spent the last two years in prison.”

Was that what Lopez-Vega had meant when he said he'd been “away” for a while? It was possible. But he hadn't looked, or sounded, like a criminal, much less a drug dealer. Max had a hunch that Penhall wasn't telling him the whole truth.

“You'd do anything to clear your mother's name, wouldn't you, Max?” Penhall said.

“She's innocent,” Max answered firmly.

“She was convicted by a court of law.”

“A Santo Domingan court. Where the judge had been bribed.”

“You don't know that. The evidence all pointed to your mother being the killer.”

Max rounded on him furiously. “That's rubbish. She didn't do it.”

“Your faith in her is touching,” Penhall said sardonically.

“She didn't do it!” Max yelled at him. “And
I'm going to prove it.”

The words just came out impulsively. But the moment he'd said them, Max knew that was exactly what he was going to do.

“And how exactly are you going to do that?”

“Why should you care? What have
you
ever done for her?”

“Her trial was a matter for the authorities in Santo Domingo. The British government can't interfere in the affairs of a foreign state.”

“Can't it?” Max said bitterly.

“Let me give you a warning, Max,” Penhall said, his voice low and menacing. “You're meddling in things you know nothing about. Continue meddling, and you may end up getting hurt. I'm sure that's something neither of us wants to happen. Do I make myself clear?”

He clicked on the intercom again and spoke to the driver. “Pull over here, Mason.” The car glided to a stop by the curb. Penhall looked at Max. “You can get out now,” he said, as if he were dismissing a servant.

Max pushed open the door, anger seething inside him. He glanced back at Penhall, who was lounging on the leather seat with a smug, self-satisfied smirk on his pudgy face.

Max slammed the door behind him and walked
away. The Mercedes pulled off and Max watched it purr past him, longing to pick up a stone and hurl it through the tinted back window at Penhall's head.

He was still furious when he got home. There was a note on the kitchen table from Consuela, telling him that she'd gone to the supermarket. Max was glad she wasn't there. He didn't feel like talking to anyone. He went upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed, thinking back over his conversation with Rupert Penhall. Conversation? It had been more like an interrogation.

A number of things didn't seem to make sense. A CCTV camera picked up a boy entering the Rutland Hotel. There were millions of teenage boys in London. How did Penhall identify him? Why, in any case, did Penhall have the tape? It was potentially important evidence in a murder inquiry. It might even show the killer entering or leaving the hotel, so why didn't the police have it rather than someone who was “connected to the government”? What did “connected to the government” mean, anyway?

There was also something suspicious about the way Penhall had just picked up Max. He had run out onto the street and the car had been there waiting for him. That was too much of a coincidence to believe. It was
almost as if Penhall knew Max would be arriving at that point, at that time. Had someone been watching him, noting his route home from school?

And what about Ross and his mates? Why had they picked on him today? Why had they searched his clothes and his rucksack?
Don't be stupid,
Max said to himself.
You're getting paranoid
. But maybe he had good cause to be paranoid. He'd found a dead body in a hotel room; he'd been threatened by some kind of government official. What the hell was going on?

Max bit his thumbnail pensively, his eyes flickering about the room.

Something wasn't right. His CD rack had been moved. He could see the slight indentations in the carpet where it had originally been. And some books on the shelf were out of place too. Max inspected the rest of the room, checking the chest of drawers and his desk. He wasn't the tidiest of boys, and when he bent down he could see fresh smudge marks in the dust where someone—certainly not he—had smeared the surface of the desk with a hand or an arm.

His whole room had been searched. Had whoever had done it been looking for the numbers? Thank God he'd been clever enough to dispose of the piece of paper.

Max sat back down on his bed. Now he was really
scared. More scared than he'd ever been. Someone had broken into his house and searched his room. No, they hadn't broken in. That was what made it even more disturbing. They'd got in without leaving any trace of their entry. If Max wasn't so observant, he would never have known they'd been there. But who were “they”? The government? Someone else?

Max shivered, remembering Penhall's final few words to him.
You're meddling in things you know nothing about. Continue meddling, and you may end up getting hurt.

THE NEXT DAY WAS SATURDAY, THE START OF the half-term holiday. Max had a show in the evening and spent most of the day at the London Cabaret Club, preparing himself and his equipment for the performance. He didn't have time to dwell too much on what had happened over the previous couple of days, but it was always there at the back of his mind, niggling away at him. Was his dad really alive? What did that mysterious sequence of numbers mean? Who was Rupert Penhall? Why had his bedroom been searched? Questions were going around and around inside his head without him finding any answers.

He was up early on Sunday morning. Max had mixed
feelings about Sundays. It should have been the one day of the week he looked forward to. His Saturday-evening show was out of the way; there was no school. He could see his friends, watch TV, do all those things that he never had time for during the rest of the week. But he didn't. On Sundays he went to visit his mother. He loved seeing her, but he hated seeing her in that place, seeing what prison had done to her.

This Sunday, however, he was eager to go. He had a lot of things to discuss with his mum. Consuela drove him there, northeast through the suburbs of London and then on into Suffolk. Levington Prison was a modern establishment, built only a few years earlier. It was a clean, relatively comfortable place—certainly compared to the old Victorian prisons in London where three or four inmates were shut up in one cell for twenty-three hours a day—but it was still a prison. It had a high mesh perimeter fence topped with razor wire and, inside that, a thirteen-foot-high concrete wall that was floodlit at night and monitored continuously by CCTV cameras.

The cells were all in a four-story central block. Max had never been in one, but he knew from his mother that they each contained a bed, a desk, a toilet, and a washbasin. She'd told him once that her small
cell window looked out over the rolling countryside toward the sea. She'd said it to try to cheer him up, to try and make him think that prison wasn't all bad. But to Max it seemed just another particularly cruel touch. To see the fields and woods around the prison and yet be aware all the time that she couldn't walk in any of them, to see the ocean on the distant horizon and know that she couldn't paddle in it or lie on the beach in the sun—that must be unbearable.

Consuela parked in the fenced lot outside the prison wall. Max left her in the car and went in alone.

Max was used to the security measures by now, but they still felt intrusive and humiliating. All bags were searched, and the contents of pockets had to be emptied into a plastic tray. You then had to walk through a metal detector and take off your shoes to be inspected before a uniformed guard gave you a pat-down search, looking for concealed weapons or other forbidden items.

After that, you were escorted through a locked steel door and along a windowless corridor to the visiting area. The visiting area was big, about the size of a school hall, and lined with rows of plain wooden tables that each had two plastic chairs drawn up next to them.

Max sat down at one of the tables and waited.
Around him, other visitors were also waiting. There was a wide range of people—middle-aged women, pensioners, young men, some alone, some accompanied by children. Max knew many of the regulars. A few nodded at him in greeting.

Five minutes later, a door at the far end of the hall opened and a group of prisoners was escorted in by a guard, Helen Cassidy among them. She smiled with pleasure as she saw Max and walked quickly across the room to meet him. Max stood up and they hugged—a long, tight hug that he never wanted to end. His mother broke away. There were tears in her eyes and Max felt his own eyes begin to prickle. He sat down again and blinked hard to stop himself from crying.

“How are you, Max?” his mother asked, sitting opposite him.

“I'm okay. You?”

“I'm fine.”

She didn't look fine. Prison was aging her. When she'd first come back to England, she'd looked drawn and haggard, her health eroded by the poor conditions she'd endured in the Santo Domingan prison. She had started to look better during her time at Levington, but she was still pale and thin. Her face was lined, her hair lank and unkempt. She had once taken pride in her appearance, but prison had destroyed it.

She smiled at him again. She always tried to be cheerful when he came to visit. Max knew it was just an act. Underneath, she was suffering badly.

“How's Consuela?” Helen asked.

“She's okay.”

“And your shows this week? How did they go? Did you do any new tricks?”

“They went well,” Max said.

He told her about his shows, though he didn't mention the water-tank escape going wrong on Wednesday. She had enough on her plate without worrying about him. Then they talked briefly about what he'd done at school, Max doing his best to cheer his mum up.

“What've you got on this week?” she asked.

“It's half-term.”

She sat back, her face falling. “Oh, yes, of course. I'd forgotten.”

Max could see the hurt in his mother's eyes. School holidays were particularly difficult for her. In the past they'd have done things as a family at half-term—gone away for a few days, visited the swimming pool, or gone to the cinema. Knowing Max would be off from school while she was locked up in her cell made her situation all the more distressing.

“What're you going to do?” Helen asked. “Have you and Consuela got anything planned?”

“No, haven't really thought about it.”

Max disliked this kind of small talk. It seemed so unimportant, so irrelevant next to all the unspoken things that were boiling up inside both of them. These visits were torture for him, and for Helen, too. Seeing each other for half an hour a week in a room full of other people, the prison guards always hovering in the background—it was agony. Max couldn't bear to think of his mother shut away in this terrible place for the next eighteen years. His mother, all alone in a tiny cell, slowly withering away. She was putting on a brave face, but prison wasn't just aging her. It was killing her.

Max glanced at the clock on the visiting-room wall. He couldn't hold it in any longer. “Mum, I need to talk to you,” he said. “About a man who came to see me after the show on Wednesday. His name was Luis Lopez-Vega. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“I don't think so,” she replied.

“He came from Santo Domingo.”

Helen Cassidy frowned. “From Santo Domingo?”

“He said he saw Dad's act there. He said he knew that you were innocent, that the judge in your trial had been bribed.”

“I've never heard of him. Did he say he'd met us in Santo Domingo?”

“No. We didn't have time to talk much.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall and thin with dark skin and black hair. A wig. Underneath he was completely bald. Oh, and he had two missing fingers on his left hand.”

Max's mother stared at him pensively, her brow furrowing again. “Two missing fingers?”

“That's right. You
do
know him, don't you?”

“There
was
a man,” Helen said. “In the hotel bar the day your father disappeared. He and Alex spoke briefly. I remember noticing his hand and wondering what had happened to it.”

“Do you know what he and Dad spoke about?” Max asked.

“I didn't hear. I was sitting at a table. Your dad went to the bar to order us some drinks. I wasn't really paying much attention. When I looked round, I saw them talking together. The man was gesturing with his hand—that's why I saw he'd lost two fingers—but I was too far away to hear what they were saying.”

“You've never mentioned him before.”

“Why should I? We spoke to dozens of people at the hotel during our stay. People were always coming up to your dad, talking to him about his act. It was a bit annoying, really, but he was always polite. He was doing the show in the hotel theater, as you know, so these people were his audience. He had to be friendly to them.”

“Did you see the man again?” Max asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“Did Dad see him again?”

“If he did, he never said anything to me. What is this, Max?”

Max glanced at the clock again. He didn't have much time. “Mum, I don't want to upset you. I know you've told me this many times before, but I want you to describe for me again exactly what happened in Santo Domingo.”

“Oh, Max, what's the use?” Helen sighed. “It won't make any difference. It won't change anything.”

“You'd forgotten about the man with the missing fingers,” Max said. “Maybe there's something else you've forgotten. Something that might be significant.”

“Everything significant has already come out, Max, and it hasn't made a difference, I'm still here,” Helen said. “The man at the bar was irrelevant.”

“Please, Mum. I know it's hard for you, but tell me again.”

She looked away across the hall, composing herself. Then she began to speak, her voice low and tremulous. She'd repeated this story so many times—to the Santo Domingo police, to her lawyer, to the judge at her trial—that the words came out automatically, as if
she were an actress reciting lines from a play.

Alex Cassidy had been invited to Santo Domingo to do two shows at a tourist resort named Playa d'Oro, just outside the capital, Rio Verde. Helen and Consuela had gone with him, Consuela to assist with the shows, Helen to have a holiday while Max was away on his school trip.

“We arrived on the Monday evening,” Helen said. “Alex had a show on Tuesday evening and another on Wednesday, in the hotel's theater. Playa d'Oro was a strange place. I didn't like it much, nor did your father. It had been specially built as a resort for wealthy westerners, but it was like a prison.” She smiled grimly. “It had a high fence all around it and a main gate with a checkpoint manned by armed guards to keep out the locals. The only Santo Domingans allowed into Playa d'Oro were employees—cooks, waiters, and cleaners. Everybody else was kept out.

“It felt wrong. On one side of the fence, you had the local people, mostly very poor, living in shantytowns without running water or drains. And on the other side, you had this incredibly luxurious holiday resort. And it was
really
luxurious. Huge suites that cost thousands of dollars a night, seven or eight different restaurants serving wonderful food, four swimming
pools, a golf course, a casino, riding stables…It had everything you could wish for.

“The theater was vast. It must have held two thousand people easily. And every night there was a show. The management flew in acts from all around the world—dancing troupes, magicians, orchestras, famous pop stars. And your father.”

“You'd never been there before, had you?” Max said.

“No, it was our first time. I wasn't sure about going there, but your dad was keen to explore a new place, see new things.”

“So Dad did his shows in the evening. But what did you do during the day?”

“Went to the beach, swam, saw the sights. I went riding one afternoon and your father went fishing.”

“Yes, I remember you telling me that,” Max said. “It's always seemed odd. Dad wasn't interested in fishing.”

“I know. I think he just wanted to get away from the resort—it was so exclusive, so unreal, like a theme park. He went into Rio Verde. There was a harbor there where you could charter a boat. He went out with a local skipper, Fernando Gonzales. Your father said he caught a six-foot marlin and threw it back, but I didn't believe him.”

Helen smiled briefly—a sad smile—as she remembered that moment. “You know how Dad liked to tell stories.”

“Did you meet this Fernando Gonzales?” Max asked.

Helen shook her head. “I know the police interviewed him. Apparently they interviewed almost everyone we'd met while we were in Santo Domingo. But he had nothing to do with your father's disappearance. He was just a poor local fisherman trying to supplement his income by taking western tourists out in his boat.”

“And the night Dad disappeared?” prompted Max.

“It was the Thursday evening,” Helen said. “We went back to our room. There were these straw-roofed bungalows down by the beach, and the hotel management had given us one for our stay. I was packing our cases—we had an early flight home the next morning—and your father left me and went over to the theater to check all his equipment was correctly packaged for the journey back to England. Consuela was waiting for him there but, as you know, he never showed up.”

Helen had finished her packing and was getting ready for bed when Consuela came to the bungalow
looking for Alex. Neither woman was unduly concerned that he hadn't arrived at the theater—not at that point, anyway. They assumed he must have been sidetracked. Perhaps he was having a drink in the bar, or maybe he'd gone for a last walk along the beach. It was only when it got past midnight and Alex still hadn't returned that Helen and Consuela raised the alarm. The hotel manager dispatched a team of security guards to search the resort, but they found no sign of Alex anywhere. It was then that the local police were called in.

This second, more thorough search of the resort was no more successful than the first. Max's father seemed to have vanished into thin air. The guards at the main gate—which was the only way in and out of Playa d'Oro—were certain that he hadn't come past. The perimeter fence was too high to climb, and an inspection confirmed that no holes had been cut through the wire. That left only the sea as a possible exit.

At dawn the next morning, the shoreline was closely examined by the police. Alex's jacket and wallet were found by some rocks near the Cassidys' bungalow, then traces of blood and, in a cleft in the rocks, a blood-stained knife. More blood was then discovered in a
small rowing boat pulled up on the beach—one of the boats provided for the use of hotel guests. Forensic tests later showed that the blood type matched Alex's and that fingerprints on both the knife and the rowing boat were Helen's. Helen was arrested, charged with the murder of her husband, and convicted by a Santo Domingan court, despite the fact that Alex's body had never been found.