Escape from Shadow Island (7 page)

“No, no idea at all. This man was murdered, Max. Someone shot him. Have you thought about that? You don't want to take this any further. I have very bad memories of Santo Domingo. It's a nasty, dangerous country. It's not suitable for children.”

“I'm not a child,” Max said.

“No, not a child. But not a grown-up, either.”

“You'll be with me.”

“No, Max.”

“
Please
, Consuela,” Max begged. “I can't do it without you. I can't fly alone, book a hotel, any of those things.”

Consuela shook her head. “It's not a good idea. I'm responsible for you, Max. It's better to leave these
matters to the lawyers.”

“But that's my
point
,” Max said in exasperation. “We
have
been leaving matters to the lawyers, and they've done nothing.”

“You don't know that there's any new evidence to find in Santo Domingo.”

“And we
won't
know if we don't look.”

He put down his knife and fork and gazed intently at Consuela. “Look, this is the ideal time to go. It's half-term. We have no shows this week. We could just fly out for a few days, talk to Mum's lawyer and the police. If we find nothing, okay, we just come home. But if we do find something, then the trip will have been worth it. What do we have to lose?”

It was a good argument, but Max could see that Consuela was going to need more persuading. “My dad could be alive,” he said.

“Or this Lopez-Vega could've been lying.”

“He came all the way to England from Santo Domingo to lie to me? Why would he do that? He wasn't a rich man. And he wasn't well. A poor, sick man traveled five thousand miles to tell me a lie about my dad? Why?”

Consuela said nothing. Max could sense that she was wavering. “We can't afford to pass up this opportunity.
If we go to Santo Domingo, find out more about Lopez-Vega, maybe we can discover what he knew about Dad. And maybe we can help Mum. She's rotting in prison. You know she is. If we don't do something now, she's only going to get worse. We have to go to Santo Domingo, Consuela. We have to do it for
her
.”

Consuela studied his face—the glow in his eyes, the fierce determination in the set of his jaw. She knew that he'd never forgive her if she refused him.

“Please, Consuela,” Max said. “Trust me on this one. Nothing is more important to me. Nothing.” He took hold of her hands and gazed imploringly into her eyes. “Please.”

Consuela looked away. Her anger had gone now. After a few moments, she finally spoke. “How do we buy the tickets?”

THERE WERE NO DIRECT FLIGHTS FROM Britain to Santo Domingo, so they flew British Airways from Heathrow to Miami and then changed to a Santo Domingan Airlines flight for the remainder of their journey. On the first leg to Miami, the plane was a standard 747 jumbo jet full of families traveling economy class for holidays in Florida. The second leg was completely different. This plane—a Boeing 767—had been specially modified so that most of it was first or business class. The economy section, where Max and Consuela were seated, took up only a few rows at the rear of the plane.

Max could smell the money around them even
before they boarded the flight. The passengers were mostly couples or single businessmen. There were very few families and no young children at all. The men all had millionaires' suntans and expensive Rolex watches. The women were younger than their partners and all looked the same to Max—blond, heavily made up, and dripping with jewelry.

Max and Consuela were in a row of three seats, Max by the window, Consuela in the middle. The aisle seat was occupied by a youngish, ginger-haired man in a suit and tie who introduced himself as Derek Pratchett, a sales executive from London who was traveling to Santo Domingo on business.

“It's my first time, but I hear it's a fabulous place,” he said. “Have you been before?” He leaned forward to address the question to Max.

“No,” Max said.

“So what are you going there for?”

“Nothing much,” Max replied.

“‘Nothing much'? It's an awful long way to go for
nothing much
. Are you on holiday?”

“Sort of.”

“What's your name?”

“Max.”

“Max, eh? I have a cousin called Max—sells
stationery in Northampton. Is that short for Maxwell, or Maximilian?”

“It's just Max.”

“My cousin is Maxwell, though no one calls him that. Well, except his mother. And is this
your
mother?” Pratchett looked inquiringly at Consuela, but the question was directed at Max.

“No, we're just together,” Max told him.

“Is that right? And your parents, where are they?”

“They're not here,” Max snapped, wishing this annoying little man would shut up.

“Where are you staying in Santo Domingo?” Pratchett asked.

“I can't remember.”

“Not at Playa d'Oro? That's where everyone else is going. I've read about that place. It's supposed to be the world's most luxurious holiday resort. Did you know that? There's a casino there where you can win a million dollars on a slot machine. Imagine that, eh? A million dollars. What would you do, Max—you did say your name was Max, didn't you?—what would you do with a million dollars? I can tell you what I'd do….”

Max switched off and looked out of the window as Pratchett described in minute detail exactly what
he would do with a million dollars. It was an hour-long flight to Santo Domingo, but it was going to feel like ten with this bloke rabbiting on next to them. Consuela, wisely, had taken out a book from her hand luggage and was deeply engrossed in it—or pretending to be.

Max gazed out at the hazy sky. He was thinking ahead to Santo Domingo, planning what they were going to do when they got there. He was excited, but apprehensive. He was going to the place where his dad had disappeared, where his mum had been convicted of murder. That was a daunting prospect.

On arrival at the Santo Domingo airport, they had to stand in line to get through Immigration Control. Most passengers were waved past with barely a glance at their passports, but Max and Consuela were stopped and questioned. The immigration officer—a small, unshaven man in a grubby white shirt—examined their passports at length, occasionally glancing up to compare their photographs with their faces. Max watched him nervously. Why were they being singled out for special attention? Suddenly, Penhall's sinister warning came back to him. Was someone on the lookout for them? Had the Santo Domingan authorities been tipped off about their arrival? Max felt sick with anxiety.

“You are here for how long?” the immigration officer said in accented English.

“Until the end of the week,” Consuela replied in Spanish.

“Purpose of visit?” The immigration officer lapsed gratefully back into his own language.

“Holiday.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, just holiday. Why else do people come to Santo Domingo?”

The immigration officer stamped their passports and handed them back. “Enjoy your stay.”

There was a bus waiting outside the arrivals terminal to take them into the capital. Derek Pratchett was sitting near the front of the bus. He gestured at a couple of empty seats across the aisle from him, but Max pretended not to see him and found two seats farther back instead.

It was a forty-minute journey along the coast to Rio Verde, the road twisting and turning past tiny coves in which huge waves broke over outcrops of rock, filling the air with fine sea spray. There were farms on the landward side of the carriageway, small, dusty fields of sugarcane and beans dotted with tumbledown farmhouses and toiling peasants in straw hats. Beyond
the farms, the hills ascended steeply into the sky, their flanks carpeted in thick, green rainforest.

As they neared the capital, the farms and rainforest gave way to sprawling shantytowns—huts built from scraps of timber and rusty metal panels, their roofs little more than plastic sheets flapping in the wind. Max could see the center of Rio Verde in the distance. There were old colonial mansions lining the hillside above the harbor, yachts moored in the shallows near the mouth of the river that gave the capital its name.

A couple of miles offshore, an island rose up out of the sea, its sheer cliffs topped by a massive stone fortress that had towers and battlements, just like an English castle.

“What's that?” Max asked Consuela, pointing out of the bus window at the island.

“It's called the Isla de Sombra—Shadow Island,” Consuela replied.

“It looks interesting. Can people visit it?”

“No, it's privately owned. By a rich businessman, I think, or maybe a multinational corporation. We were told about it when we were here before. It used to be a pirate stronghold back in the sixteenth century; then it was a Spanish fort and, for a time, an English one. More recently, it was used as a prison, I believe.”

There was a better view of the island from the main square of Rio Verde, where the bus dropped off Max and Consuela and a few of the other passengers. Most people stayed on board. They were traveling to Playa d'Oro, which was fifteen minutes farther on, in the wide bay to the north of the capital.

Max looked out to sea. Shadow Island loomed up on the horizon, its high walls catching the rays of the setting sun, the sea around it streaked with silvery light. It was a picturesque sight, but something about the fortress unsettled Max.

“Where's your hotel?” Derek Pratchett asked, suddenly popping up behind them.

“I'm not sure,” Max said vaguely.

“I've got a map here. Perhaps I can help you find it.”

“It's okay, we can manage,” replied Max.

“What's its name?”

“We'll be okay. Thanks—it was nice meeting you.”

“Maybe we'll see each other again. Rio Verde's only a small place,” Pratchett said.

God, I hope not,
Max thought. “Yes, maybe,” he said. “See you.”

They picked up their bags, and Consuela asked a passerby for directions to the hotel they'd booked over the internet. Most western visitors to Santo Domingo
went to Playa d'Oro, but that was too expensive for Max and Consuela. Besides, Consuela didn't want to go back to the resort. Not after what had happened last time she was there.

The Hotel San Rafael was in the Old Town, up a steep flight of steps on the hillside overlooking the river. It was a dilapidated place that had seen better days, but it was cheap and clean. Max and Consuela didn't need anything more luxurious.

They were tired and jet-lagged after the long journey, so they ate dinner in the hotel restaurant and then went up to their rooms. Max washed and brushed his teeth at the chipped washbasin, then wandered over to the window. The wooden shutters were partially closed. Max pushed them back and leaned on the windowsill, looking out over the dark city. The air was warm and humid. He could smell the aromas of onions and spices wafting up from a restaurant farther down the hill and, beneath that, the salty tang of the ocean gusting in on the breeze. Both sides of the river were speckled with pinpricks of light, lamps shining through the windows of houses and flickering on boats in the harbor.

Max turned his head, gazing over the rooftops toward the sea. There were lights burning on Shadow Island too. Some down by the water, some high up on
the walls. The towers and battlements were silhouetted against the paler backdrop of the skyline. It was dark all along the coast, but Shadow Island seemed somehow much blacker than anything else. Max looked at its somber outline and felt a shiver run through his body. He quickly pulled the shutters closed and moved away from the window. It was just an island.

He threw back the sheet and climbed into bed. He already had a schedule in his head of what he was going to do the next day, and he was impatient to begin. Sleep seemed a waste of valuable time. Still, in just a few minutes he had fallen into a deep sleep.

 

He was woken by the noise of a car tooting its horn and loud Spanish voices outside on the street. Max didn't know what they were saying, but he knew he wasn't going to get back to sleep again. He washed quickly and went down to the dining room.

Consuela wasn't up yet, so he ate breakfast alone—rolls and Coca-Cola, the only drink on offer apart from tea and coffee, neither of which Max liked. He was spreading apricot jam on his third roll when Consuela walked in. Well, “walked” was something of an understatement. Consuela always made an entrance. This morning she was wearing a vivid crimson blouse, open at the throat, with a black skirt and sandals. There were
only two other people in the room—a couple of men who looked like junior company executives—but they stopped eating and gaped at her as she went past their table to join Max.

The waiter was at her side so quickly he might have popped up through the floor in a puff of smoke. He pulled out a chair for her and fussed around, rearranging the cutlery and brushing breadcrumbs off the tablecloth.

“
Buenos días, señorita
. And what can I get you for breakfast?”

“Just coffee, please,” Consuela replied, smiling graciously at the waiter, who flushed with pleasure and scurried away to the kitchen. “You're up early,” she said to Max.

“I wanted to get going. How did you sleep?”

“Fine. You?”

“Not too bad. You want one of these rolls?”

Consuela shook her head. “So what are you planning to do first?”

“Go and see this lawyer, Estevez. Find out what he's doing on Mum's case.”

“And then?”

“We'll see. Let's concentrate on one thing at a time.”

 

Alfonso Estevez's office was in the center of Rio Verde, tucked away down a dark, narrow side street in an old
Spanish colonial building with a red-tiled roof and an ornate wrought-iron balcony outside the second-floor window. There was an outer office occupied by a swarthy middle-aged secretary wearing glasses and a shapeless black dress.

Señor Estevez was engaged with another client, she informed Max and Consuela, but if they wished to come back later, he might possibly see them then. Max wasn't going to be fobbed off with excuses, not after they'd flown five thousand miles to be there. He said they'd wait and plonked himself down on a chair, Consuela next to him. The secretary didn't argue but returned to reading the magazine she had open on her desk.

Max looked around. The office was far from impressive. The floor was dirty, the paint on the walls was peeling, and in one corner the plaster was so damp it had fallen away in chunks. Flies buzzed in through the open window and crawled lazily across the furniture. There was an atmosphere of idleness about the place. The secretary clearly didn't have any work to do, and even the ceiling fan seemed to be turning very slowly, as if it couldn't be bothered to keep the room cool. None of it filled Max with confidence in the lawyer who had been entrusted with his mother's legal affairs.

A full half hour went by before the inner door
opened and a young woman in a short skirt, tight top, and stiletto-heeled boots emerged. She said something in Spanish to the secretary and flounced out into the street.

“Is he going to see us now?” Consuela asked.

The secretary shrugged. “Soon.”

Another five minutes went by. And another. And another. Max had waited long enough. “This is ridiculous,” he said. He strode over to the inner door, threw it open, and walked into the lawyer's office.

Alfonso Estevez was leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk, a cigar smoldering in one hand and a large glass of rum clutched in the other. He started in surprise and stared at Max.
“¿Quién eres tú?”
he asked.

Max understood enough of the language to know what Estevez had said. “I'm Max Cassidy,” he replied in English.

“Uh?”

“You're my mother's lawyer. Or had you forgotten?”

Consuela came in behind Max. Estevez looked at her and hurriedly removed his feet from his desk. He put the glass he was holding down out of sight on the floor, but the smell of rum still filled the room.

“Did you make appointment?” the lawyer asked, speaking in English now.

“Why, are you
busy
?” Max said. He sat down opposite Estevez and glared at him. The lawyer was in his forties, a dark-skinned, fleshy man with a thick curving mustache.

“I don't know you coming,” Estevez said. He smiled at Max, revealing yellowish teeth and a lot of gold fillings. “You no tell me.”