Stormchild (35 page)

Not two hours before, in the wake of von Rellsteb’s ambush, I had been determined to take my revenge, but now I felt an immense hopelessness. Because, at last, I knew just why I had sailed ten thousand miles. The confusions dropped away. I had not come to take revenge for Joanna’s death, though revenge would indeed be sweet, nor had I come merely to find Nicole, but rather I had come for love. I had come to see the remorse on my daughter’s face. I had come to hear her speak my name. I had come to hear her say that I had not sent her brother to his death. I had come to wipe away her tears. I had brought her my forgiveness, and had never thought she might not want it. I had come to hug and to be hugged, to love and be loved. I had come to fill the void in my life that had been left by a bomb in the English channel. I had come for the worst of all sentimental and self-pitying reasons, but now, staring at my daughter’s snarling face, I knew I had wasted my time.

Standing there before the photographs I knew that the very best thing I could do was to creep away. I did not want to know the truth any longer, because the truth would be very hard, and very hurtful. It would be better to remember Nicole as she was in the smiling photographs, to remember her as a cheerful, hard-muscled, and tough activist who sailed the far seas to save dolphins and to raise the world’s consciousness by sacrificing her own comforts. That, no doubt, was how she thought of herself, and that was how I should think of her. If I pursued her further, and if I caught her, then I might discover that she had become someone who believed she knew better than the world, and who was therefore beyond the world’s rules and beyond its condemnation. I might find that my daughter had become the tyrant of that one unsmiling photograph. I took that picture down, tore it into scraps, and decided to abandon my hunt. I would leave Nicole to life, as we must all, in the end, leave our children. I smiled at Nicole’s happiness in the other photographs, chose two of them as keepsakes, and then I left.

I made a desultory exploration of the remaining buildings, but by now I was merely indulging my curiosity and did not expect to find anything useful, nor did I, though in one room that was stacked with coiled ropes I found an empty cardboard box that was lined with plastic sheeting and which carried the label “Dynamite.” The sight of the box encouraged horrible thoughts, so I closed the door of that room and tried to forget what I had seen. In the next room I found a pile of rusted anchor chain, while in a cupboard there was an ancient wooden-handled whaling harpoon with a corroded, but still wicked-looking barbed head. These were the old nineteenth-century storerooms. In the same room as the harpoon was a barrel of nails that had rusted into a solid mass and boxes of Hambro line that fell to pieces the moment it was touched. In yet another room was a cache of empty liquor bottles which had faded labels of long-forgotten brands of whiskey, rum, and aquavit; ancient solaces against the awfulness of a job at the earth’s end. The final rooms, closest to the old boat lift, were unused and held nothing but broken barrels, the bones of a rabbit, gull feathers, and hopelessness.

I left the quay, crossed the twin rails of the boat lift, and climbed the hill to the mine buildings where von Rellsteb had ambushed me. The buildings were empty now. I lifted the tarpaulin off the tractor’s engine only to discover that the ancient cylinder block was a mass of rust. There was nothing more to find, or nothing more that I cared to find, and so, in the teeth of a rising wind, I left the mine and, with the rifle slung on my shoulder, I climbed beside the quarry’s northern rim. A small, black-feathered and bad-tempered bird of prey screamed at me from a nesting ledge as I began to slog my way up the sodden hillside.

Once or twice I looked behind me, but the Desolate Straits stayed empty. The Genesis crews either were in pursuit of
Stormchild
or were celebrating her capture, and I was alone in a wilderness, doomed to a long, cold, soaking walk in the dying light, and then to a freezing night. I had stuffed my bag with some packets of the dehydrated stews I had found in Nicole’s kitchen, but without a stove the result would be about as appetizing as pigswill.

I looked behind again and saw that the gray water of the straits, even though sheltered on all sides by high hills and wooded bluffs, was being whipped into whitecaps by the wind, while the rain, which had now fallen all day, stung my face with a new and even colder spite. I felt empty and drained. My quest was over and I was tired and hungry. I had also chosen the wrong route home, for this northern flank of the quarry was much harder going than the southern flank down which I had approached the buildings. The northern slope was striated with rock ledges, broken by small ravines, and made treacherous by slides of scree that forced me to make wide and wearying detours.

Near the top of the slope was the largest and steepest field of scree I had yet encountered, and one which forced me to make a long detour to my right. Ahead of me now was the jumble of rocks that I slowly recognized as the distinctive peak which, only that morning, had so strongly reminded me of Dartmoor’s granite tors. I was now so tired that I began to hallucinate that I was back on that Devon moor, and that if I could just keep walking I would soon come to the hiker’s inn at Postbridge, where a huge fire would be blazing in the hearth and where I could buy a pint of beer and a deep dish of steak and kidney pie. It was only when I stumbled on a burrow, or when the torn muscles of my belly gave a foul twinge, that the comforting hallucination snapped away and I knew I was alone, wet, and hungry on a Patagonian island.

The torlike stones barred my path westward. I rested for a time at their base, sitting with my back against the rocks and staring at the Desolate Straits, which were now so far beneath me that low clouds, wispy and gray, broke my view of the wind-fretted water.

At last, fighting the temptation to remain in the small shelter of the high rock wall, I tried to go around it, but a steep slope of scree fell away to the north just as it did to the south, so, moving like a somnambulant creature in a nightmare, I clambered slowly up to where the wind and the rain shrieked their cacophony across the tor’s summit. The climb was simple, yet as my head poked over the crest the force of the wind almost stole my breath away. I dragged myself over the edge, banging the rifle’s butt on the rock as I clumsily moved, and then I went utterly still.

For a second I thought I was dreaming. Then, for another second, I hoped I was dreaming. Then I retched emptily.

A body lay in a cup of the rock.

For a few seconds, for a few whirling seconds of madness, I thought the body was Nicole’s, then I saw that this woman had hair as black as the feathers of the bird of prey that had screamed at me on the lower slope.

It was that black hair, which was long and gleaming from the rain, that told me this corpse was that of a woman, because her flesh had been stripped by scavenging birds and animals. The carrion eaters had left some sinews between the yellowing joints, but otherwise she was nothing more than discolored bones in a bleak place. She had been flensed.

I fell to my knees. My sore belly heaved with a last lunge of sour vomit. I wanted to weep, but instead I shuffled forward and made myself examine the skeleton.

There was a ring on one bone finger. I did not touch it. There was also a necklace, which I similarly left alone. The woman’s clothes had either been torn by carrion eaters or else had decayed in the weather, for her sweater and jeans were now nothing but faded and threadbare scraps that clung to her yellow bones. The only undecayed object in that high place was a common sack that was still hooked into the bony grip of her dead skeletal hands. One of her leg bones was broken, suggesting she had been unable to reach the shelter of the mine, and instead had died of exposure in this high, bleak place.

I pulled the sack out of her dead grip, making her bones rattle as the frail cloth came free. The first thing I found inside the sack was a blue Australian passport, in which was written the dead woman’s name, Maureen Delaney, and her age, twenty-three. The passport photograph showed a round, girlish face that smiled at the world with an astonished happiness.

There was a stub of pencil in the sack, but no sheet of paper or notebook, so I leafed through the passport until I found some faint penciled letters on a blank page that told me how wrong I was. This girl had not died trying to reach the mine, but escaping from it. She had crawled up here, and died, because such a fate was better than staying in the mine. Maureen Delaney had been murdered.

The blank page in the passport was headed
Naiad,
and under that boat’s name was a brief and pathetic message. “They killed John and Mark. There were four of them: two Germans, an American, and an English girl. They let others rape me. And rape me.” The words were ill-written and very eloquent, as eloquent as any voice that speaks from the grave. “It is November,” Maureen Delaney’s message continued, “they say they’ll kill me. The girls won’t help me.” I turned the passport’s stiff page to find some words addressed to her mother.

I closed my eyes as though I could stop the tears.

I tried to persuade myself that there might be another English girl in the Genesis community, or that this Australian girl’s dying testimony was mere imagination, but I had deceived myself for long enough, and there could be no more deception. Maureen Delaney’s companions had been murdered, and she had been driven to this cold, lonely death, which was as bad as murder, and my daughter had been a participant. For what? For a boat, I assumed, for possession of
Naiad,
because, like all terrorists, my daughter believed that the foulest means were sanctified by the nobility of the cause.

I turned back the passport’s pages until Maureen Delaney’s smiling, sun-tanned face again stared into mine. She looked, I thought, enthusiastic, like someone who had taken life with both hands as a gift. She must have been an adventurous girl, independent and tough, for she had sailed far seas, keeping the wind’s tune and knowing the sea’s measure, but then she had been raped and killed. With my daughter’s compliance. I imagined the Australian girl begging for help and Nicole’s cold face turning away, and that thought made me want to put the Lee-Enfield’s cold muzzle in my mouth and blow my brains out, but instead I put the murdered girl’s passport into my pocket. It would have to go to the Australian embassy.

I emptied the last contents of the sack and found the useless remains of a box of matches, and then evidence that Maureen Delaney had planned to take revenge on her tormentors. At the bottom of the sack were six sticks of dynamite, each one wrapped in a sheet of old, pinkish, greasy paper that bore the trademark “Nobel.” Maureen Delaney had never found her revenge; instead, after escaping from the buildings by the quay, where, presumably, she had stolen the sticks of explosive, she had fallen and died in this high place.

I said a prayer for her. It was inadequate, but my memorial for Maureen Delaney would be more substantial than prayer, to which end I put the six sticks of dynamite into my bag.

In the cottages, standing in the kitchen where Nicole’s photographs decorated the wall, I had persuaded myself that it would be best if I sailed away from the Isle of Torments. I had persuaded myself that I did not need to know what Nicole had become. I had hoped that
Stormchild
would still be free and that I could have sailed away in her and never looked back.

But I could no longer do that. I had found Nicole, and what I had found was evil. David would doubtless say I should give that evidence to the authorities and let the black-uniformed men of the Chilean
Armada
scour out this nest of killers, but one of the killers was my daughter. And a dead Australian girl had given me six sticks of dynamite. So I changed my mind again. I would not, after all, walk away in the solace of ignorance. Instead, as best as I could, I would be a good environmentalist. I would clean up the mess.

I crossed the marshland in the dusk. It still rained, and in places that rain had puddled into the tire tracks left by the two cross-country motorbikes.

I followed the tracks as far as the crest above the fjord. There the thickly ribbed tire marks slewed abruptly northward, almost as though von Rellsteb and his companion had reached this high vantage place and stared down to see that their hunt was over. I, too, gazed down the long, damp slope to see that
Stormchild
was gone. Lake Joanna lay empty, while the land on either bank of the fjord stretched away in broken and deserted folds toward the ocean.

I slid down the hill to the tree line, then charged recklessly through the undergrowth, not caring what noise I made. No one waited in ambush at the hill’s foot. I had half expected to find two discarded crosscountry motorbikes, but there was only the empty gray-black water that was being stirred into restlessness by the wind and pelting rain.

I looked round the rain-soaked beach until I found the pale, platelike rock, under which David had agreed to leave me a message. If
Stormchild
had been captured then I knew there would be no such message, and thus I lifted the stone with a sense of doom which evaporated into instant relief when I saw the piece of white card that David had protectively wrapped in a clear plastic bag. The existence of the message meant that
Stormchild
was safe, because David, clearly scared of the deteriorating weather, had taken her back to sea.

“08.46 hours.” My brother’s message was written with ink in block capitals, and began with a typical punctiliousness. “The glass is still falling alarmingly, so I propose to take advantage of the ebbing tide and take
Stormchild
to sea. To save your radio’s batteries I shall listen for your transmissions on the hour, every hour, for precisely five minutes, on our agreed channel. If I have not heard from you within seventy two hours, I shall assume that you have neither read this note, nor ever will, and I shall go north for help. In the meantime I have left you a cache of supplies, which I have concealed in the woodland. You will find the cache eleven paces due east of this rock. God bless you, D.” The last two sentences had been written in pencil, just as had the postscript, which David had evidently scribbled after he had brought the message ashore. “09.03 hours, Tim! I have just made my first confirmed sighting of a green-backed firecrown hummingbird. The bird had a disappointingly dun plumage, so was probably a female, but it was still a thrill to see! You might care to look for yourself. Mine was feeding on the wild fuchsias, which are growing among the trees just above your cache.”