The Vanishing (11 page)

Getting here safely had gone more slowly than expected. They had waited until light because the jungle was full of potentially fatal hazards. They hadn’t dared use the road either, so she had led them a very long route, right around her beloved, picturesque East Bay – now reduced in her eyes to nothing but a series of irritating obstacles and exposed areas – before cutting inland. This meant they had also had to pass very close to the area that was infested with the golden dart frogs. A major part of their programme to save the black mandrills involved an effort to wipe out this non-indigenous population. They had calculated that about forty per cent of the mandrill decline was due to contact with the frogs, and Sara knew exactly how unpleasant it could be to come into contact with their skin. The effect was far from fatal – they lacked the toxins their native Amazonian cousins could produce – but it was enough to incapacitate.

When she could breathe normally, she went down on to her belly and inched forward to the crest. She was pushing through the last fronds and getting the gun into position before she realised Tom was no longer with her. Nevertheless, she spent a few minutes looking through the powerful scope. The satellite dish was clearly visible, a few hundred yards distant – along with the shed there, the relatively bare hilltop, the stony path up that they had only recently resurfaced with rubble. Her heart started to beat faster, her spirits picking up. For a fleeting second she was almost hopeful. There was no one in sight, no one there. So they could get up there quickly, call for help. They could do it. For the first time since all this had started she felt that she might actually be able to get out of it.

She edged away and then picked her way back down the treacherous incline. She found him at the bottom, gulping greedily from a tiny spring he had found. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her strangely. ‘But I can’t function unless I drink some water … no choice …’ He was shivering like he already had a fever.

‘It will make you ill,’ she said quietly.

‘Not right away,’ he said. ‘And maybe not at all. It’s a calculated risk.’ He straightened up with difficulty and tried to smile at her. ‘I was going to pass out. It’s the lesser of two evils.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not. I’ve had dysentery twice. It can kill you.’ She went over and looked at the source he was drinking from. It came straight out of the rocks in a tiny trickle. It looked pure, beautiful, tempting. But that didn’t guarantee much. ‘You should have listened to me,’ she said, feeling a little angry. What was she going to do when he collapsed? He shrugged, said sorry again, but seemed distracted.

‘I’ve seen the hill,’ she said, getting her mind off it. ‘It’s clear.’ She almost smiled at him. Her heart jumped inside her as she told him.

But he just frowned. ‘Let
me
look,’ he said.

That annoyed her as well – the lack of trust he’d shown all morning, despite this being
her
island, despite him not having a clue – but she led him back up the slope.

They both lay flat in the grasses and ferns, side by side. He took the gun off her and spent ten minutes staring through the scope, moving it around. He was breathing in short little breaths and looked like he was struggling to keep his eyes open. Finally he laid it aside and asked her to look. ‘Down by the bend in the road. I think it’s a car.’

She put the scope to her eyes, suddenly frightened again, and focused it where he directed. She saw it at once. She couldn’t understand how she had missed it first time. It was a Land Rover, one of hers. ‘It could be one of the security staff,’ she said. ‘It must be.’ They’d talked about the security staff a few hours ago. He had thought that they’d been bought off, probably by the man who she knew as a policeman from Mahe. The second one she’d shot. He couldn’t see how people could have come ashore otherwise. But she hadn’t liked that idea. ‘They knew I would come here,’ she suggested now. ‘They’re covering it for me.’

‘The car is certainly covered,’ he said. ‘Covered in leaves and branches, so we can’t see it. Would they do that?’

He took the gun again, spent another few minutes staring ahead, at the hill this time. ‘The dish is there,’ he said, as if wondering whether she could be right. ‘If it was the Somalis they’d have trashed that, maybe. Just to be sure.’

But she already knew he was right. Her security people wouldn’t camouflage the car. They were all former police officers from the islands, which meant they were of limited intelligence. The truth was they wouldn’t even come here. If they were nowhere to be seen it was more likely they had taken her boat and fled at the first sign of trouble. She started to get emotional again, and took the gun off him quickly. The fear was like something physical, rising up in her throat. She put the crosshairs on the dish and examined it carefully. It looked intact. She moved to the shed, the windows, the door lock. Everything looked normal. She slid it up to the twin solar panels, then followed the cabling running away from them. Nothing to see. A couple of degrees higher were the cables coming out of the dish. She stared at them. She put the gun down, feeling it flooding over her. She started to cry.

‘What?’ he whispered, nervous now. ‘What is it?’

‘The wires from the dish,’ she spluttered. ‘They’ve all been hacked through.’

He checked. Then they both lay there, in silence, breathing too fast.

‘They’re already here,’ she said. ‘They’re watching us. They know we’re here.’

He pulled her back, away from the exposed edge. ‘OK,’ he said, squinting his eyes against the sunlight. ‘Plan B. We can’t call for help. But we must be able to find a boat.’

‘All the boats are back by the house,’ she said, trying to think about it. ‘At the dock. But they must have boats too. So even if we could get into one of ours without them seeing, they could follow us out …’

She watched him chewing his lip, thinking furiously. ‘And you’re sure the pilot was one of those bodies?’ he demanded.

She nodded. They had carried Philippe out of the house, tossed him on to the ground.

‘So they killed him,’ he said. ‘So we can’t use the fucking plane …’

‘I can fly the plane,’ she told him.

He looked startled. ‘You know how to fly?’

‘Yes. If we can get to it. Flying it isn’t the problem …’

‘You know how to fly and navigate?’ It looked like he didn’t believe her.

‘Yes. Of course.’ She had taken a course, two years ago. She had a full private licence, though hadn’t kept her hours up. ‘That’s not unusual …’ she started, then stopped. Not unusual in her world, she thought.

‘So why didn’t you say you could fly when we were back at the other end of the island, where the fucking plane is?’

‘What good would that have done? They were trying to kill us, remember? They were all over the dock, all over the house.’

He sighed. ‘Well, we’ve no option now. We have to get to it. We have to try.’ He looked back towards the brow of the hill. ‘We take the Land Rover,’ he said quickly. ‘Drive back to the dock. That way we leave at least some of them here. They will be waiting in a spot that covers the hill, not the car – that’s why they’ve put the branches on it, because they’re not covering it. So we can get to the car and get away, leave them here, on foot. That will be enough of a head start.’

‘You think they were stupid enough to leave the keys in the ignition?’

‘I can start it without keys. It’s an old Land Rover, right? No security systems?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can handle that. You cover me, from here. I work my way down. I start the car, drive it to the road right below where you are. You run down. We drive off.’

‘What do I do if I see someone?’

‘Shoot them.’

‘Kill them? You want me to kill them?’

‘If they’re coming at me and they’re armed. Fuck, yes. Kill them.’

He was gone before she could object, stumbling quickly to the base of the slope, movements filled with a sudden urgency. She didn’t understand it at all. They had just spent hours laboriously toiling through the thickets just so as to avoid the road, in case it was covered. Yet now he wanted to take a car and drive along it. What had changed? Too much heat, not enough food and water?

She went after him a couple of steps, hissing at him to stop. He turned back and waved at her, telling her to get going to the top again. He was in a half-crouch, face lathered with sweat. For a moment she wondered whether to chase him, or trust that he knew what he was doing, but he was already cutting left, skirting the thicker bushes to put him on a level with the Land Rover. She would have to shout to slow him, and she didn’t dare do that. In a few seconds he would be past the shoulder of the slope they were on and fully exposed to view. When that happened she had to have the rifle ready, she had to be able to cover him. She started to move quickly back up the slope.

Rachel could feel it passing. It was leaving her. Same thing every year, the same process she had to go through. The frantic fear – all her nightmare scenarios about what might be happening to Lauren – giving way to a numb desperation. She was in her garden now, standing barefoot, in her pyjamas, at three in the afternoon, staring fixedly at the clematis which completely covered the crumbling brick wall between her property and the next, though without really seeing it. The sun was hot on the back of her head, she had a pounding headache. A bright, clear sky, too warm for the time of year, like it was summer already.

Behind her John was in the house, still sleeping in her bed. They had gone to bed at eight o’clock this morning. She couldn’t think about that now, couldn’t think about what she was to make of her relationship with him. That would count as dealing with normal life, or what passed for normal these days. John had kept her going through it this year, as he had last year and the year before. Close to her, but not too close. Were they moving into something more intimate? Was that what was happening? She couldn’t even contemplate it. She shook her head to get rid of the thought.

She remembered that she had stood out here like this twenty-two years ago, two days after Lauren had vanished, and the weather had been the same. Same garden, same sunlight. Same lost hours between. But it was Roger who had been inside the house then. Dealing with things, on the phone, with the police, the press. She had collapsed inside herself, stopped functioning. There had been no sleep at all between the disappearance and some point about seven days later, when she had literally collapsed and been taken into hospital. But before that she had stood out here, as she was now, and as she had every year since, silently staring at nothing, numb. She was caught in an endless behavioural loop. It would never be over. Not until Lauren came back. Or until she accepted it. Accepted what everyone else was convinced was true.

That day – the first time – twenty-two years ago, it had been worse, of course. Everything had been horrifically overpowering, pushing her under, suffocating her. She hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten. Her digestive system wouldn’t let her eat. She had tried – because Roger had told her that she would need strength – but it had been futile.

It was the day of the interview, the famous TV interview. The police were behind it, thinking it could only help – to get as much publicity as possible, as quickly as possible. And the only way to really get widespread coverage was TV. So Roger had persuaded her. But before they had all arrived, invading their house (
their
house – it had still been Lauren’s house then too) with their lights and their cameras and microphones and false concern, before all that she had been out here, sitting on this lawn in her pyjamas, shivering.

She couldn’t remember all that she had been thinking, fifty-five hours into the nightmare. Not exactly. It was a blur now, the continuous knife edge, waiting and waiting and waiting for news that never came – the impossible, compressing mental tension. She had come out here with the thought that she would smash her head on the tree at the bottom of the garden – she recalled that. The tree had been cut down now, but she hadn’t reached it anyway. She had collapsed in the middle of the lawn. Roger had come out and found her, to tell her the TV producers were here already, and she had stood up very unsteadily, looking at him, but hardly seeing him.

‘We have to go in,’ he said. ‘We have to get ready for them. It’s important.’ Then he had screwed his face up and looked strangely at her. ‘Christ above, Rachel,’ he had said. ‘What have you done?’

She had realised only gradually what he was talking about. She had soiled herself. She had sat there on this grass and it had just come out, without her knowing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she had mumbled. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t notice.’

He had leaned into her and hugged her, tried to comfort her. She had thought, at first, that he was going to shout at her or get angry. But he didn’t. He had just put his arms around her, not caring. Had they cried for a while, standing here, on the lawn, with the TV producers waiting in the living room? Probably.

The nightmare had been everywhere, including inside her guts. They were living within it. A lifetime of overwhelming emotion expended in a few hours, then on and on and on, with no end. There was nothing left for afterwards, for the rest of their lives. It had sterilised them. That was how she thought of it now. Everything afterwards was seen from a perspective that trivialised the ordinary details of life. Because nothing could match the absence of Lauren.

She was tired of it. Exhausted. If it could be got rid of, somehow, now, she would do it. But she didn’t know how. Still, twenty-two years later, she didn’t have a clue.

Tom was functioning on adrenalin. His head was on fire, the headache like a drumbeat behind his eyes, his heart too fast and too loud. He was shaking like he had a fever, sweating, clumsy on his feet. But he had stared through the scope and seen the car. He had spotted it. So his eyes were OK, his brain was still working. He was doing what he had to. They were trapped here. The phone was cut, covered. So there wasn’t another option to consider. If he hung around in the sunlight any longer, without water, waiting for them to find them, he would crack. So he had to act.