Escape from Shadow Island (6 page)

“What more can I say?” Helen said to Max. “You know the details as well as I do. The prosecutor said I stabbed your dad, put his body in the boat, and rowed out to sea, where I dumped him overboard. The judge had already decided I was guilty. My fingerprints were on the knife, weren't they? Well, of course they were. The knife had been taken from our bungalow. I don't know when. We had a small kitchenette where we could make drinks or light snacks. I'd used the knife several times to cut up fruit.

“And my fingerprints on the boat? I'd touched it earlier that same evening. Your dad and I had gone down at dusk to watch the sunset, and we'd sat on the edge of the boat together. There were witnesses who'd seen us there, but that didn't make any difference. The judge didn't want to hear any evidence that might contradict the prosecution's case. As if I'd
kill your father. As if I'd do anything like that….” Helen's voice cracked with emotion. She lifted a finger and brushed away a tear from her eye.

Max took his mother's hand in his own and squeezed it. “I didn't mean to upset you, Mum. We both know you didn't do it. I just want to examine the facts again, see if there's anything we've missed.”

“I've been examining them inside my head for the past two years,” Helen said. “I've missed nothing. But I'm no nearer to working out what happened to your father, and no nearer to proving that I didn't kill him.”

“There must be something,” Max said. “Why would anyone want to murder Dad? If that's what really happened.”

Helen gazed at her son gently. “Oh, Max. You're not still hoping he's alive, are you?”

“Luis Lopez-Vega said he was.”

Helen stared at him, her mouth gaping. “He said your dad was alive?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Max.” Helen took hold of his other hand and gripped it tight. “Don't get your hopes up. If he is alive, where has he been for the past two years? Why hasn't he come home, gotten me out of prison?”

“I don't know, Mum. I just know I miss him. I miss him so much.”

“We both do, Max. But you have to accept he's gone.”

Helen held his eyes for a long time, until Max could bear it no longer and had to look away.

“Maybe Luis Lopez-Vega was telling the truth,” he said.

“What exactly did he say?”

Max glanced around the room. There was no prison officer nearby, but he lowered his voice anyway, telling his mother about seeing Lopez-Vega at the theater and then his visit to the Rutland Hotel.

Her eyes opened wide in horror.
“Dead!”
she exclaimed. “Oh, my God! Max, I don't want you getting mixed up in this. It's not safe.”

“I'm mixed up in it already,” Max said. “It's too late. The room at the hotel had been searched, but I found something under Lopez-Vega's wig—a piece of paper with eight numbers on it. One-one-one-three-eight-three-five-two. Do they mean anything to you?”

“Give them to me again.”

Max repeated the numbers. “I think they might be a code, or a combination,” he said.

Helen thought for a while, then shook her head. “I
don't know what they are.”

“Keep thinking about them. Whatever they are, they're important. If anything comes to you, let me know next week.”

A guard walked past their table and murmured, “Two minutes.”

“One last thing,” Max said quickly. “Have you ever come across a man named Rupert Penhall? Small, fat, red-faced, says he's connected to the government?”

“No, I don't think so. Look, Max, I don't know what you're doing, but I want you to stop. I'm worried about you.”

“I'm okay.”

“You found a dead body. That's not okay.”

Max leaned forward over the table, his eyes alight with determination. “We have to get you out of here, Mum. We have to clear your name.”

Helen gazed back at him. She could see the fire in Max's face, but there was nothing in hers save a weary resignation. “What's the use, Max?” she said dejectedly. “They're never going to reopen my case. We have to face up to reality. I'm going to be in here for the next eighteen years.”

“No, no you're not,” Max said forcefully. “I'm going to get you out. I promise.”

“You're such a good boy, Max. But it's not going to happen.”

“It is,”
Max insisted, so violently that the other prisoners and their visitors looked around at him.

The guard was coming across the hall now to take Helen back to her cell.

“It is,” Max said again more quietly.

They stood up.

“Thanks for coming. I'll see you next week,” Helen said. “Look after yourself. And I mean it about not getting mixed up in anything. You're all I've got, Max. Take care. I love you.”

They hugged once more. Max watched his mother being led away, fighting back the tears. Over the last two years he'd come to terms with his father's disappearance. But each time he left his mother behind in prison, he felt as if he were losing her again.

It was all becoming too much for him. He wanted the pain to end. He wanted to find out what had really happened to his father. He wanted to get his mother out of prison.

And he would.

CONSUELA DIDN'T TALK TO MAX MUCH ON the drive back to London. She could see he was absorbed in his own thoughts. He was often like this after visiting Levington. Seeing his mother made him pensive, introverted. He'd be quiet and withdrawn for a few hours, but Consuela knew he would snap out of it if she gave him some time to himself. It was understandable. Who wouldn't get depressed by visiting his mother in prison? Particularly a mother who shouldn't have been there in the first place.

When they got home, Max went upstairs to his bedroom and sat at his desk, gazing out of the window at the garden without really seeing anything. All his
energy, his thoughts, were focused on the events of the past few days and all the unanswered questions troubling him.

Today, after everything that had happened, Max didn't feel down—he felt angry. His body was tense and he clenched and unclenched his fists. His mother's situation was so wrong, so unjust, but what could he do? Where should he direct his fury? At the Santo Domingan police? The Santo Domingan courts? The British government? Max was angry with them all. But what use was anger? Anger wouldn't get his mother out of prison. It wouldn't clear her name. It wouldn't help him find out whether his father was still alive. Only action could do that.

He'd waited long enough. At the beginning, he'd thought that somehow everything would sort itself out. That the Santo Domingans would realize they'd made a mistake and release his mother. Or that the British government would see she'd been wrongfully imprisoned and do something about it. But nothing had happened.

His mother had a lawyer in Santo Domingo who was supposed to be representing her, trying to get her case reopened, but he was getting nowhere. The British government was equally useless. Despite several
appeals from his mother, they had made no attempt to put pressure on the Santo Domingans to look at her conviction again.

Max knew now that he'd been naïve. He'd spent too long relying on others. If anything was going to happen, he was going to have to do it himself.

But how?

Where did he begin?

He reflected for a moment, then turned on his computer. He'd done some research on Santo Domingo when his mother had first been imprisoned there, but he'd forgotten a lot of it. He needed to refresh his memory, remind himself how the country worked, how its political and legal systems operated.

He clicked on a few websites and read through them. Santo Domingo was a tiny country in Central America, so small that most people had never heard of it. Fifty miles long and about half that in width, it was dwarfed by the nearby, much larger states of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Santo Domingo seemed to have kept its independence only because there was nothing much there that anyone wanted. It had no oil, no natural gas, no minerals, no timber, just swamps and a lot of mosquitoes. The Spanish had conquered it in the sixteenth century, stripping it of its gold and
other valuables and wiping out most of the native population in the process. It had then remained a Spanish colony until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was granted independence and the freedom to manage its own affairs.

For more than a hundred years thereafter the country was run by a succession of military dictators, each as brutal and incompetent as the last, until, in the 1970s, a nationwide uprising removed the last of the generals and brought democracy and fair elections to Santo Domingo. The leader of the Partido Democrático Popular—the Democratic Popular Party or PDP—was a teacher named Juan Cruz, who became the president and spent two years reforming the country. He established a national health service, provided free education for all children, and took land away from the rich and gave it to peasant farmers. This made the generals, who also happened to be wealthy landowners themselves, decide that democracy wasn't such a good idea. They staged a military coup, assassinated Juan Cruz, and seized back control.

Then followed a period of savage repression. The PDP was banned, political opponents of the ruling regime were rounded up and imprisoned or shot, and the country returned to the squalor and poverty that it had
endured under every previous military government.

Once the generals were firmly back in power, they restored the land to the rich landowners and took their revenge on the peasants. A large area of coastal territory near the capital that had belonged to small independent farmers was confiscated and sold to an international consortium of property developers, who proved just as greedy as the Spanish conquistadors.

Santo Domingo didn't have much going for it in terms of resources, but it did have two things that rich western tourists could appreciate—sun and sand. So the developers built the resort of Playa d'Oro, which meant “golden beach,” and turned Santo Domingo into a haven for the wealthy. Some came there simply for holidays, but many more came to live in the resort, for Santo Domingo's other major advantage was very low taxes for the superrich. In fact,
no
taxes for the superrich, if they knew who to bribe—and that wasn't very hard, as
everyone
in the government was on the take.

This last bit of information wasn't on any official Santo Domingo website but on one set up by the PDP. Though the party was still banned, it was apparently active underground. It was from this source that Max gleaned several other interesting pieces of information. The average annual salary of a Santo Domingan worker at Playa d'Oro was the equivalent of two hundred
U.S. dollars. The average room price per night for a guest at Playa d'Oro was five hundred dollars, and the “President's Suite” cost ten thousand dollars a night. The annual profit of the corporation that owned Playa d'Oro—in which the generals were leading shareholders—was two hundred million dollars.

The free health and education services that Juan Cruz had established had been abolished by the military regime, with the result that three children in ten died before they reached the age of five, and 50 percent of those under fifteen couldn't read or write. But there were more millionaires per square mile than anywhere else on earth.

There were no elections, the local police were thugs who tortured prisoners, and the judges—all appointed by the generals—openly demanded bribes to “fix” the cases that appeared before them.

Max read all this with a mounting sense of dismay. If it was true—and it had a horribly plausible ring to it—then getting justice for his mother in Santo Domingo was not going to be easy, or cheap. In fact, it looked to him as if there was no such thing as justice in the country. It was simply a question of who could pay the most.

He gazed out of the window again, thinking about where he went from here. He knew a bit more about
Santo Domingo now, and if he'd learned one thing it was this: He was never going to be able to help his mother from here in London. If he was going to secure her release, he had to go to Santo Domingo.

 

At dinner that evening, Max set to work on Consuela. He could do nothing without her help.

“I'm sorry I was a bit off with you today,” he said.

“That's okay, I understand,” she replied.

She smiled at him affectionately. Max smiled back, thinking how important she was to him. He had no memories at all of the time before she'd become his father's assistant as a girl of eighteen. She was a former gymnast and dancer who had been working in a traveling Spanish circus when Alexander Cassidy spotted her and asked her to come and work for him.

Now in her early thirties, she was a very attractive woman with the slender, lithe build of a dancer and flamboyant Mediterranean good looks. She received dozens of fan letters every week, some of them proposing marriage, and there was always a crowd of attentive well-wishers hanging around the stage door of the London Cabaret Club on show nights—and the men weren't there to see Max.

She had had several boyfriends over the years, but
none recently—not since Max's mother had been imprisoned. She'd put her personal life on hold, waiting for Max to grow up and become fully independent before she resumed her own life. She'd never said as much, but Max knew that was what she was doing.

“I've been thinking,” Max said. He took a mouthful of the seafood paella Consuela had made. “This is really good, by the way.”

“What about?” she asked.

“My mum. I'm worried about her. She's not coping well with prison. I can see her health is getting worse.”

“That shouldn't be happening,” Consuela said. “We can ring the prison, tell them to get a doctor for her.”

“It's not a doctor she needs,” Max said. “It's her freedom. She puts on a show for me every Sunday, but I can tell she's really depressed. I can see it in her face. She's not going to improve until she gets out, and that could be a long time.”

“We're doing all we can for her.”

“Are we?”

“You think we could be doing more?”

“I think we're relying too much on other people,” Max said. “These lawyers who are supposed to be acting
for her—Malcolm Fielding here in London and the one in Santo Domingo…what's his name? Estevez?”

“Yes, Alfonso Estevez.”

“What are they actually
doing
? Apart from charging us a lot of money.”

“The law is expensive,” Consuela said. “It takes time to make things happen.”

“It's taking too long,” Max insisted. “I don't think they're trying. The months are ticking by, the
years
are ticking by, and what have they achieved? The case hasn't even gone to appeal in Santo Domingo yet, the Foreign Office here is refusing to intervene, and Mum's still stuck in prison. By the time anything happens—and we don't know it will—it's going to be too late for Mum, and me. I'm not going to wait around any longer. I want to do something. Now.”

“Do what?”

“Go to Santo Domingo and speed things up.”

Consuela looked at him, frowning slightly. “It's not that easy, Max,” she said gently. “I've been to Santo Domingo. It's not the kind of place where anything happens quickly.”

“But we stand a better chance of doing something there than we do here,” Max said. “We can talk to Estevez face-to-face instead of by email and letter. We can look
for new evidence to prove that Mum is innocent.”

“New evidence? What makes you think there might be new evidence?”

Max ate some more paella. It was time to tell Consuela about Luis Lopez-Vega.

“Promise you won't be angry with me,” he said.

“About what?”

“You remember on Wednesday night, after the show, there was a man in my dressing room?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“He came from Santo Domingo. He told me not to tell anyone about his visit. That's why I haven't mentioned him before.”

“From Santo Domingo?”

“His name was Luis Lopez-Vega. Mum didn't recognize the name when I told her this morning, but she recognized his description. He had two missing fingers on his left hand. She said my dad spoke to him in the bar at Playa d'Oro.”

“I don't know the name either,” Consuela said. She paused. “At least, I think I don't. Just a moment.
Luis Lopez-Vega?
That rings a bell.”

She got up from the table and came back with the Sunday newspaper they'd picked up that morning on their way to Suffolk. She leafed through the pages for
a while. “I knew I'd seen it somewhere. Here.” She folded the newspaper and showed Max.

At the bottom of the page was a short article headlined
DRUGS LINK TO BODY IN HOTEL ROOM
. Max read the article.

Max felt relieved as he finished the story. There was no mention of a teenage boy having been seen arriving at or leaving the hotel. For the time being, at least, he was safe.

“Is that the man who came to your dressing room?” Consuela asked. “A drug dealer?” Her voice was rising, her cheeks starting to flush.

Max recognized the familiar signs of anger and tried to placate her. “He wasn't a drug dealer.” Rupert Penhall had told him that, but he still didn't believe it.

“And how do you know that?”

“I could tell.”

“Oh, you could
tell
, could you?” Consuela said. “How? There are a lot of drugs in Santo Domingo, you know. They bring cocaine up from Colombia and then ship it out from there to Europe and America.”

“The police are wrong, or someone's lying to them. Lopez-Vega wasn't a drug dealer.”

“How can you be sure?”

“A gut feeling. I met him, talked to him. He was an honest man, not a criminal. Now please, stop getting cross with me. I'm sorry I didn't tell you this earlier.”

“But what has this man got to do with your mother?” Consuela asked.

Max described his encounter with Lopez-Vega, then told Consuela about his visit to the Rutland Hotel. He got the same horrified reaction as he'd had from his mother.

“Dear God, Max, what are you playing at? This is terrible. You must go to the police at once.”

“I can't. I can't get involved,” Max said. “It's too late; I'd get into big trouble. Besides, I don't know anything that would help them.” He was uncomfortable. Consuela didn't get angry very often, but when she did, you knew about it. “I panicked. The dead body frightened me,” he told her. “You have to understand. He said that Dad was alive, that Mum was innocent. That's why I went there. I had to find out what he knew. Those numbers under his wig—one-one-one-three-eight-three-five-two—have you any idea what they might be?”