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Authors: St John Lauren

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BOOK: Laura Marlin Mysteries 1: Dead Man's Cove eBook
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‘Laura Marlin?’ he enquired, and then the world went black.
22
‘LAURA! OH, LAURA
,
please
wake up.’
Laura opened her eyes. The room was shrouded in a pea-soup fog and it stayed that way when she blinked. She shut them again. When she woke some time later, the mist had cleared, but she was in a rocking chair. At least, that’s what it felt like. She had a splitting headache and her skin burned as if it had been rubbed with fresh chillies. A blurred brown figure lurched towards her and she flinched in terror. Then, mercifully, darkness descended again.
After a second, or perhaps it was an hour, a familiar voice said, ‘Laura, I’m begging you to wake up. If you don’t, we’re dead for sure.’
Laura’s eyes flew open. ‘Tariq! I thought you’d been kidnapped.’
He gave a laugh that was somewhere between relief and a sob. ‘I have been, stupid. So have you.’
The fuzzy edges around his thin, kind face and shining black hair dissolved. The room came into view. Only it wasn’t a room, but the cramped, airless cabin of a boat. A powerful swell rocked the grubby mattress on which Laura was lying, adding to her discomfort. Her ankles were taped together and her wrists bound with a blue nylon rope. Her skin burned with a slow, tormenting fire and she would have done anything for a drink. She tried to make sense of her surroundings. The last thing she remembered was answering the door to the pizza boy.
Tariq was roped to a chair, but he was craning forward as far as his bonds would allow, his amber eyes wide with concern.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine - I was blindfolded when they brought me here. From what I’ve overheard, we’re on a boat moored near Zennor, just off the coast of Cornwall. We’re waiting for something. A delivery.’
It was a shock to hear him speak English, especially in such a clear, educated way. A lilt in his speech was the only trace of an accent. Temporarily forgetting they were in a life-threatening situation, Laura wriggled upright and glared at him. ‘You
lied
to me, Tariq. Well, I suppose it’s not called lying when you never say anything, but the whole time we were friends you pretended you couldn’t speak English. Now I feel like an idiot.’
Beneath his dark skin, he flushed crimson. He squirmed in his chair and looked so ashamed that Laura immediately felt awful.
‘Sorry, Tariq, I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘No, it is I who is sorry,’ he said. ‘You will never know how much I hate myself for what I have done. I’m sorry for hurting you, for the notes in the bottle, and most of all for deceiving you. It is because of me that you are here. If they harm you, I will never forgive myself. My only excuse is that, for me, the North Star was a living hell. Some days I felt that I might die of loneliness if the work didn’t kill me first. Then you walked in - the kindest person I have ever known - and the sun shone for me for the first time since my father died. I knew that, for your safety, I should have nothing to do with you, but I couldn’t help myself.’
‘But you told Mr Mukhtar to say to me that I was boring and my stories were boring and you never wanted to see me again. You
laughed
at me.’
Tariq burst out: ‘That’s because he threatened to kill us both if I didn’t find a way to get rid of you. He told me that slaves couldn’t have friends, only owners. He said they were like pets or furniture. He told me, “Once a slave, always a slave.”’
‘I think,’ Laura said, ‘you’d better start at the beginning.’
It had all started innocently enough in Bangladesh, a densely populated country on the Indian subcontinent prone to watery natural disasters. Tariq’s grandfather, a teacher’s son, borrowed seventy-five cents from a quarry owner to pay the bride-price of Tariq’s grandmother. They were very much in love and he was afraid another would marry her if he hesitated.
‘That debt is now thousands,’ said Tariq.
‘But how?’ asked Laura. ‘Even with interest, how could they have had to pay back more than a dollar?’
Tariq sighed. ‘My grandparents’ story is a common one in Bangladesh and India. Millions of people are in this situation. They borrow money from quarry or factory owners who make them pay by working them up to twelve hours a day. My grandfather and later my father slaved from dawn to dark breaking rocks in a quarry, but the owner of the pit charged him rent to live in a small grass hut on the site. He also charged them for the use of water drawn from a dirty pool and for the flour for our chapattis. On special occasions, we ate a scrawny chicken, and he charged us for that too. In the summer, the boulders heated up to the temperature of fire. From the age of six, I joined them, and we were soon covered in burns and calluses. Even so, our debt grew each month. We were locked in bondage.’
When Tariq’s grandparents died their debt was inherited by Tariq’s father, who in turn passed it on to Tariq. With one difference. Tariq’s mother, Amrita, was descended from a line of gifted tapestry artists. When the quarry owner’s wife discovered Amrita’s lineage, she pulled her from the pit. Frail Amrita slaved for even longer hours, this time making tapestries, which were worth much more than crushed gravel. The quarry owner’s wife demanded she train Tariq, then six, to take over from her if anything should happen to her.
‘I was eight when my mum was rushed into hospital. She died three days later. She had never received a cent of compensation for her tapestries, yet the quarry owner told us our hospital bills and funeral costs meant that my dad owed him so much money we would never be free if we lived five lifetimes. Not long afterwards, my father had a heart attack while smashing a boulder. Before my ninth birthday, I was alone in the world and responsible for my family’s debt.’
Tears were running down Laura’s face. Never in her life had she heard such a horrific story. But Tariq’s eyes stayed dry.
‘Two and a half years later,’ he went on, ‘the quarry owner’s wife passed away after floods caused a cholera outbreak at the pit. Her sister arrived for the funeral. No prizes for guessing her name.’
Laura dried her eyes on her sleeve and gasped as she made the connection. ‘Mrs Mukhtar?’
His expression told her the answer. ‘At first, I believed she was different. She looked like the Bollywood stars I’d seen on posters, like an angel. She was nice to me. It was years since I’d been praised or treated like a human being, but she raved about the tapestries and told me that I was very talented. The day before she and Mr Mukhtar were due to leave, she came to me and said that they could not bear to think of a boy such as I “going to waste” in the quarry. They were going to pay off my debt and take me to England, where I would be educated and live with them as their own son. She described golden beaches, cobbled streets and quaint artist’s studios, and said that in exchange for doing some tapestries and helping out around their grocery store, I’d live a life of luxury few in my situation could dare to dream of.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘I wanted to believe her,’ said Tariq. ‘To me, anything was better than a lifetime in the heat, dirt and thunder of the quarry, with me making tapestries on my own while my friends broke rocks in the baking sun. I could hardly sleep for imagining sunny beaches, blue sea, and ice-cream. I thought I might be a servant to her and Mr Mukhtar. I didn’t realise I’d be a slave. I know now that slavery comes in many different forms.’
Footsteps passed their cabin and Laura steeled herself. Very shortly, they would learn their fate. But the corridor went quiet again and soon she could hear nothing but the waves slapping the bottom of the boat. She asked: ‘How much of what Mrs Mukhtar promised you actually happened?’
He shrugged. ‘Some. In the quarry, I’d slept on hay and a ragged blanket. I’d eaten food that pigs would not touch if they were starving. I’d worked fourteen-hour days - sometimes longer. Here I slept on a mattress in a storeroom and ate dhal or curry and rice. Compared to my old life it was luxury. But in the quarry, I’d had many friends. Here I was alone. The tapestries were much more popular than the Mukhtars anticipated. Along with cleaning their apartment and minding the store, I often had to work twenty-hour days to keep up with the demand.’
Laura felt ill. It was painful to discover that the whole time she’d been visiting Tariq and feeling overjoyed to have made a friend, he’d been a prisoner worked to the bone. He had not received one penny for his labours - not so much as an ice-cream - because the Mukhtars had told him he owed them thousands of pounds for paying off his family’s debt, for flying him from Bangladesh to Cornwall, and for his rent and food.
‘And yet you still found time to make me a tiger.’ Laura had a lump in her throat. ‘I love it, by the way. It’s exquisite.’
Tariq’s weary face creased into a smile. ‘Did you find it? Mrs Webb told the Mukhtars she’d thrown it into the gutter. They were livid with me, but it was the least I could do to say sorry. Your friendship meant the world to me and when they forced me to hurt you, it was torture. I had to do something to try to make amends. So many times I was tempted to tell you my secret. But I was afraid to trust you. Plus the Mukhtars had told me that if I let slip to anyone what was going on, they knew people who could make both of us disappear.’
It was on the tip of Laura’s tongue to say that the Mukhtars threat might be about to come true, but she thought better of it. ‘I wish you had trusted me.’
‘So do I, but my secret had been sealed in my heart for so long it had become a habit.’
‘The secret of your slavery?’
Tariq flexed his wrists to try to restore circulation to his hands. ‘No, the secret of my education. Do you remember me telling you that my great-grandfather was a teacher and that my grandfather considered himself to have bright prospects before he borrowed the seventy-five cents from the quarry owner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, my grandfather knew that education was the only way he or his family would ever escape from debt-bondage. He also knew that it had to be hidden from the quarry owner or it would be exploited, just as in later years the quarry owner’s son exploited my mum’s tapestry skills. At night, in secret, my grandfather taught my dad to read, write, do sums and speak English, and my father did the same for me.
‘When I came to live with the Mukhtars, I realised straight away that my education would either save me or get me killed. I had to keep it a secret until I’d learned enough about your country to try to figure out how to escape. I spent hours reading the newspapers while I was minding the store. Through them I learned that millions of people are free and I can be one of them. But I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed help.’
‘So you came up with the idea of putting messages in a bottle?’
‘It seemed the easiest, safest way to get a letter to you. I knew you liked to walk to school along Porthmeor Beach and the Island path. All I had to do was put the bottle in a place where only you would see it. It took a few days to get it right, but finally I managed it. When you wrote back to me and said I could trust you I was nearly insane with joy.
‘But I took too many chances. After Mrs Webb told the Mukhtars about the tiger tapestry, they became increasingly suspicious. They were paranoid that it would somehow get out that their supposed son was a slave. A couple of times they had me followed.
‘Yesterday morning, after I saw you with your wolf dog, I decided to tell you the truth. I was waiting outside your school when a muscle man dragged me into a car. He’s called the Monk. I tried to yell to you, but he drugged me with something. Laura, this gang - the Straight A’s - they’re evil.’
BOOK: Laura Marlin Mysteries 1: Dead Man's Cove eBook
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