The Night Ferry (49 page)

There is a tone of finality to the sentence. Greenburg’s job is done. Getting to his feet, he straightens his jacket. “I promised my wife lunch. Now it wil have to be dinner. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Samira shrugs me away, pushing past people, stumbling toward the lift.

“I’m sorry, Alisha,” says Spijker.

I can’t answer him. He warned me about this. We were sitting in his office in Amsterdam and he talked about Pandora’s box. Some lids are best kept closed, glued, nailed, screwed down and buried under six feet of earth.

“There is a logic to it, you know. There is no point punishing the guilty if we punish the innocent,” he says.

“Someone has to pay.”

“Someone wil .”

I gaze across the paved courtyard where pigeons have coated the statues with mouse-gray excrement. The wind has sprung up again, driving needles of sleet against the glass.

I phone Forbes. Gusts of wind snag at his words.

“When did you know?”

“Midday.”

“Do you have Pearl?”

“Not my show anymore.”

“Are you off the case?”

“I’m not a high-enough grade of public servant to handle this one.”

Suddenly I picture the quiet man, standing by the window, tugging at his cuff links. He was MI5. The security services want Pearl. Forbes has been told to take a backseat.

“Where are you now?”

“Armed-response teams have surrounded a boarding house in Southend-on-Sea.”

“Is Pearl inside?”

“Standing at the window, watching.”

“He’s not going to run.”

“Too late for that.”

Another image comes to me. This one shows Brendan Pearl strol ing out of the boarding house with a pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers, ready to fight or to flee. Either way, he’s not going back to prison.

Samira. What am I going to say to her? How can I possibly explain? She heard what Greenburg said. Her silence spoke volumes. It was as if she had known al along it would come to this. Betrayal. Broken promises. Duplicity. She has been here before, visited this place. “Some people are born to suffer,” that’s what Lena Caspar said. “It never stops for them, not for a second.”

I can see Samira now, smudged by the wet glass, standing by the statue, wearing Hari’s overcoat. I want to teach her about the future. I want to show her the Christmas lights in Regent Street, tel her about the daffodils in spring, show her real things, true things, happiness.

A dark-colored car has pul ed up, waiting at the curb. Photographers and cameramen spil out of the court building walking backward, jostling for space. Julian Shawcroft emerges flanked by his barrister and Eddie Barrett. His silver hair shines in the TV lights.

He laughs with the reporters, relaxed, jovial, a master of the moment.

I spy Samira walking toward him in a zigzag pattern. Her hands are buried deep in the pockets of her coat.

I am moving now, swerving left and right past people in the corridor. I hammer the lift button and choose the stairs instead, swinging through each landing and out the double fire doors on the ground floor.

I’m on the wrong side of the building. Which way? Left.

Some track athletes are good at running bends. They lean into the corner, shifting their center of balance rather than fighting the g-forces that want to fling them off. The trick is not to fight the force, but to work with it by shortening your stride and hugging the inside line.

A Russian coach once told me that I was the best bend runner he had ever seen. He even had a video of me that he used to train his young runners at the academy in Moscow.

Right now I don’t have a cambered track and the paving stones are slick with rain, but I run this bend as if my life depends upon it. I tel myself to hold the turn, hold the turn and then explode out. Kick. Kick. Everything is burning, my legs and lungs, but I’m flying.

The 200 meters was my trademark event. I don’t have the lungs for middle distance.

The media scrum is ahead of me. Samira stands on the outside, rocking from foot to foot like an anxious child. Final y she burrows inside, pushing between shoulders. A reporter spies her and pul s back. Another fol ows. More people peel off, sensing a story.

Samira’s overcoat is open. There is something in her hand that catches the light—a glass elephant with tiny mirrors. My elephant.

Shawcroft is too busy talking to notice her. She embraces him from behind, wrapping her arms around his waist, pressing her left fist against his heart and her head against the middle of his back. He tries to shake her loose, but she won’t let go. A wisp of smoke curls from her fingers.

Someone yel s and people dive away. They’re saying it’s a bomb! How?

The sound of my scream disappears beneath the crack of an explosion that snaps at the air, making it shudder. Shawcroft spins slowly, until he faces me, looking puzzled. The hole in his chest is the size of a dinner plate. I can see right inside.

Samira fal s in the opposite direction, with her knees splayed apart. Her face hits the ground first because her left arm can’t break her fal . Her eyes are open. A hand reaches out to me. There are no fingers. There is no
hand
.

People are running and yel ing, screaming like the damned; their faces peppered with shards of glass.

“She’s a terrorist,” someone shouts. “Be careful.”

“She’s not a terrorist,” I reply.

“There could be more bombs.”

“There are
no
more bombs.”

Pieces of mirror and glass are embedded along Samira’s arms, but her face and torso escaped the force of the blast, shielded behind Shawcroft.

I should have realized. I should have seen it coming. How long ago did she plan this? Weeks, maybe longer. She took my elephant from my bedside table. Hari unwittingly helped her by buying the model rocket engines ful of black powder. The fuse must have been taped down her forearm, which is why she didn’t take off her overcoat. The glass and mirrors of the elephant didn’t trigger the metal detectors.

The frayed lining of her coat sleeve is stil smoldering, but there’s surprisingly little blood. The exploding powder seems to have cauterized her flesh around a jagged section of bone.

She turns her head. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.”

Satisfied, she closes her eyes. Two paramedics gently take her from me, placing her on a stretcher. I try to stand but fal backward. I want to keep fal ing.

I thought I knew everything about friendship and family; the happiness, simplicity and joy within them. But there is another side to devotion, which Samira understands. She is her father’s daughter after al .

One hand is enough to sin. One hand is enough to save.

I had a dream last night that I got married in a white dress, not a sari. My father came storming up the aisle haranguing me and the congregation burst into spontaneous applause thinking it was some sort of Sikh floor show.

Samira was there, holding up Jasper, who kicked and giggled and waved his arms excitedly. Hari held Claudia above his head to watch. She was far more serious and looked ready to cry. My mother was shedding buckets, of course. She could cry for two countries.

I am having a lot of dreams like this lately. Perfect-life fantasies, ful of ideal matches and soap opera endings. See how wet I’ve become. I used to be a girl who didn’t cry at sad endings or get mushy over babies. Nowadays I have to bite my lip to hold back the tears and I want to float through the ceiling I love them so much.

Jasper is always happy and laughs for no apparent reason, while Claudia watches the world with troubled eyes and sometimes, when you least expect it, she produces tears of abject sorrow and I know that she’s crying for those who can’t.

Their names have stayed. That happens sometimes; something is given a name and it just doesn’t seem right to change it. I won’t be changing mine when I get married, but other things are already different. It used to be
me
; now it’s
we
and
us
.

Rol ing over on my side, I run my fingers across the sheet until they touch Dave’s chest. The duvet is wrapped around us and it feels safe, cocooned, shielded from the world.

He’s letting his hair grow longer now. It suits his new lifestyle. I never thought I’d fal in love with a man who wears Aran sweaters and waterproof trousers. His hand is lying between us.

There are cal uses forming on his palms from working the sheets and raising sails.

There is a snuffled cry from the next room. After a pause, I hear it again.

“It’s your turn,” I whisper, tickling Dave’s ear.

“You’re getting up anyway,” he mumbles.

“That makes no difference.”

“It’s the girl.”

“How do you know?”

“She has a whiny cry.”

I jab him hard in the ribs. “Girls do
not
whine. And since when has there been any demarcation?”

He rol s out of bed and looks for his boxer shorts.

“You just keep the bed warm.”

“Always.”

Although it was only three weeks ago, the events of those days have become a surreal blur. There was no custody battle. Barnaby El iot withdrew gracelessly when faced with charges of withholding information from the police and being an accessory after the fact.

Judge Freyne found Samira to be the mother of the twins, however the DNA test threw up another twist to the story. The twins were brother and sister and the eggs came from Cate, as expected, but they had been fertilized by some third party, someone other than Felix. More than a ripple went round the courtroom when that little piece of information became public.

How was it possible? Dr. Banerjee harvested twelve viable embryos and implanted ten of them in IVF procedures. Cate took the remaining pair to Amsterdam.

There could have been a mix-up, of course, and someone else’s sperm may have contaminated the process. According to Dr. Banerjee, the primary reason why Felix and Cate couldn’t conceive was because her womb treated his sperm like cancerous cel s and destroyed them. In another womb, with stronger sperm, who knows? But there was another issue: the recessive gene carried by Cate and Felix that caused a rare genetic disorder, a lethal form of dwarfism. Should she conceive, there was a 25 percent chance that the fetus would be affected.

Cate would never have cheated on Felix in the bedroom or in her heart, but she desperately wanted a child and having waited for so long and taken such risks she couldn’t afford to be disappointed again. Perhaps she found someone she trusted, someone Felix would never meet, someone who looked a lot like him, someone who
owed
her.

It is just a theory of course. Nothing but speculation. It first occurred to me as I watched the twins sleeping and glanced at the dream catcher above their heads, letting my fingers brush the feathers and beads.

I doubt if Donavon had any idea what Cate planned. And even if he is the father, he has kept his promise to her and never revealed the fact. It’s better that way.

I slip out of bed, shivering as I pul on my track pants and a fleece-lined top. By the time I step outside the cottage, it is beginning to grow light over the Solent and the Isle of Wight.

Taking Sea Road past Smuggler’s Inn, I turn left through the car park and arrive at a long shingle spit that reaches out into the Solent almost halfway to the island.

Wading birds lift off from the marshes as I pass and the beam from the lighthouse flashes every few seconds, growing fainter against the brightening sky. The sound of my shoes on the compacted shingle is reassuring as I cover the final mile to Hurst Castle, which guards the western approach to the Solent. Some days when southeasters have whipped the sea into a foaming monster, I don’t reach the castle. Great white-tipped rol ers arc upward and smash against the seawal , exploding into a mist that blurs the air and turns it solid. I can barely walk against the wind, bent double, blinking away the salt.

The weather is kind today. There are skiffs on the water already and, to my left, a father and son are hunting for cockles in the shal ows. The sailing school wil reopen in May. The skiffs are ready and I’ve become a dab hand at repairing sails. (Those years of watching Mama at her sewing machine weren’t entirely wasted.) My life has changed so much in the past three months. The twins don’t let me sleep beyond 6:00 a.m. and some nights I bring them into bed, which al the experts say I shouldn’t. They have pushed me around, robbed me of sleep, fil ed me up and made me laugh. I am besotted. Spel bound. My heart has doubled in size to make room for them.

As I near the coastal end of the spit, I notice a figure sitting on an upturned rowboat with his boots planted in the shingle and hands in his pockets. Beside him is a canvas fishing bag and a rod.

“I know you don’t sleep, sir, but this is ridiculous.”

Ruiz raises his battered cap. “You have to get up early to catch a fish, grasshopper.”

“So why aren’t you fishing?”

“I’ve decided to give them a head start.”

He slings the bag over his shoulder and climbs the rocky slope, fal ing into step beside me.

“Have you ever actual y caught a fish, sir?”

“You being cheeky?”

“You don’t seem to use any bait.”

“Wel that means we start as equals. I don’t believe in having an unfair advantage.”

We walk in silence, our breath steaming the air. Almost home, I stop opposite Milford Green and get a newspaper and muffins.

Samira is in the kitchen, wearing pajamas and my old dressing gown with the owl stitched on the pocket. Jasper is nestled in the crook of her left arm, nuzzling her right breast.

Claudia is in the bassinet by the stove, frowning slightly as if she disapproves of having to wait her turn.

“Good morning, Mr. Ruiz.”

“Good morning.” Ruiz takes off his cap and leans over the bassinet. Claudia gives him her most beatific smile.

Samira turns to me. “How were they last night?”

“Angels.”

“You always say that. Even when they wake you five times.”

“Yes.”

She laughs. “Thank you for letting me sleep.”

“What time is your exam?”