Laura Marlin Mysteries 1: Dead Man's Cove eBook (23 page)

Read Laura Marlin Mysteries 1: Dead Man's Cove eBook Online

Authors: St John Lauren

Neither Laura nor Tariq said anything, but each knew what the other was thinking. What happens to the last person? How do they get out?
The children went in order of size, the littlest first. Despite their ordeal, they shinned up the ladder like gymnasts. Laura admired their energy. It took every ounce of strength she had to lift child after child out of the freezing water. On several occasions, she thought she might just fall asleep standing.
Tariq’s jaw was set in grim determination, but it was obvious he felt as weary as she did or worse. He hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours. His stomach grumbled and great shudders of cold wracked his body.
When the last boy reached the top, Tariq said, ‘Come, Laura, I’ll lift you up.’
Laura licked her salt-dried lips. Either the current was getting stronger or she was getting weaker. The faces of the rescued children peered down at them. There was no sign of the Monk or Rumblefish. ‘If I go, what happens to you, Tariq? How do you get out?’
He scrabbled at the wall for a handhold as the current shoved him. ‘You can go for help and come back and rescue me. I’ll wait right here. I’ll be fine.’
‘But I can swim,’ protested Laura. ‘It makes more sense if you go for help.’ She cupped her hands. ‘Go on. I’ll lift you up.’
‘No way.’ His teeth were chattering. ‘This is all my fault. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even be here.’
‘Firstly, I wouldn’t be here if I’d hadn’t opened the door to Rumblefish,’ Laura pointed out. ‘Secondly, you’re only here because the Mukhtars are planning to turn you into a tapestry factory slave. I’m not leaving you and that’s final. One of the older kids can go for help.’
Tariq’s eyes were suddenly shiny. ‘You’re the best friend I ever had, Laura Marlin.’
‘I’m the best friend you still do have, Tariq Miah,’ Laura told him, struggling to resist the force of the water. ‘Present tense. We are going to get out of here, and when we do we’re going to eat ice-creams on the beach and have a brilliant St Ives summer.’
There was a shouted warning from the children above. Tariq’s eyes bulged. ‘Laura, look out!’
There was a crack like a pistol shot and then a portion of the shaft collapsed under the weight of the incoming waves. A wall of water cascaded from the tunnel mouth, building as it came. To Laura, it seemed to approach in slow motion, like a scene from a tsunami disaster movie. She had time to remember Matron’s words and to realise, with a mixture of regret and relief, that she was never going to have to do homework again. Then she and Tariq were ripped apart and swept into the catacomb.
The last thing Laura heard was a wolf-like howl and her own voice screaming over and over, ‘Skye. Skye. Skye.’
25
‘THE BEST NEIGHBOURS
anyone could have, Laura Marlin and Calvin Redfern. Wouldn’t hear a word against them. Devoted to each other, they are, which is hardly surprising what with her being an orphan and him having lost his wife in tragic circumstances. A lot of people around here had their suspicions about him, especially when he arrived in St Ives all wild-eyed and dishevelled, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that he’s was Scotland’s most decorated detective. He has that rugged, focused look about him.
‘As for Laura, she has a heart the size of England. Why, she took in Barbara Carson’s three-legged dog when no one else would have a bar of him, and look how he repaid her. They’re talking about some sort of animal medal.
‘Now the Mukhtars, I said from the beginning they were a bad lot, but nobody takes a blind bit of notice of me. It’s the blonde hair and multi-coloured clothes, you see. People think I’m not in possession of all my faculties. “Don’t be taken in by those Mukhtars,” I’d warn people. “They might have the freshest produce, but they’re up to something.” I mean, they were as thick as thieves with Mrs Webb. That alone was evidence of wrong-doing in my book. I’ve known seagulls with better housekeeping skills. But to think the North Star was a front for modern-day slavery, well, it makes your blood run cold. Thank goodness Tariq had a friend in Laura in spite of everything the Mukhtars did to stop it. I was their go-between, you know. One time Tariq gave me a tiger tapestry . . .’
Laura stifled a giggle as she and Skye slipped through Mrs Crabtree’s back gate down the alley behind Ocean View Terrace. None of the reporters noticed her go. They’d been ringing the doorbell at number 28 since the previous afternoon when Laura came home from hospital, but apart from posing with Tariq and Skye for the exclusive they’d given to Erin, the Sunny Side Up waitress who was also a cub reporter for
St Ives Echo,
she’d ignored them.
‘It’s Skye who’s the hero, not me or Tariq,’ she told her uncle. ‘If it wasn’t for him, we’d both be fish food by now. And you’re a hero for figuring out the code in the invisible letter.’
‘Skye is a pretty special dog and has earned a lifetime’s supply of dog biscuits and pats from me for saving you and Tariq, but the police and I wouldn’t have had the remotest chance of catching the Monk, Rumblefish, Mukhtar and the others if you and Tariq hadn’t done such great detective work,’ answered Calvin Redfern. ‘In months of searching, I’d found precisely nothing. I’ve taken a lot of teasing from my former colleagues in the Force about being outsmarted by a couple of eleven-year-olds and for employing a Straight A gang member as a housekeeper, I can tell you.
‘But you and Tariq are heroes, too, Laura. If you hadn’t risked your lives to save those children, they’d either have drowned or would be embarking on a career of toil and misery. It’s nearly one hundred and fifty years since slavery was abolished, but as shocking as it seems, these things still go on. If the Straight A gang and the Mukhtars had had their way, you, Tariq and the other kids would be starting work today in a factory sweatshop. Kidnapping my niece was to be their revenge on me. You’d have been working round the clock for slave wages to teach English and make tapestries that would be sold for a fortune. The Bengali boys and girls would have been told that the cost of bringing them to Britain and providing their keep far exceeded their earnings. Within days of arriving on these shores, they’d have entered a lifetime of debt-bondage from which there would be no escape.’
Laura was silent for a minute, remembering Mr Mukhtar’s threats on the beach. She’d come within a whisker of meeting the same nightmarish fate.
She asked, ‘What’ll happen to the children now?’
‘A group of local businessmen have agreed to provide them with a free two-week holiday in St Ives, after which they’ll be flown back to Bangladesh and reunited with their families. A local charity is going to ensure that both they and their parents are freed from debt-bondage and given a fresh start in life. Perhaps most importantly, a fund is being set up to give every boy and girl an education.’
He got up from the kitchen table to scoop another few cubes of steak into the husky’s bowl. ‘But, yes, you’re right, Skye has a wide streak of hero in him. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have paid the ultimate price for having a niece who takes after me.’
Walking along Porthminster Beach for the last day of school before the holidays, Laura wore a grin from ear to ear. Skye, loping beside her, had much the same expression. Passersby cast amused glances at the girl with the spiky cap of blonde hair and her three-legged Siberian husky as they played a game of chase on the sand. It would be the next day before Erin’s
St Ives Echo
exclusive on their adventure appeared on the newstands, so nobody recognised them or commented on their miraculous survival.
‘You’re the best dog on earth,’ said Laura, stopping for the hundredth time to hug Skye. ‘And the coolest thing of all is, you’re my dog.’
According to her uncle, Skye had been howling loudly enough to awaken the dead when Calvin Redfern returned to number 28 Ocean View Terrace with the police two nights previously. An irate Mrs Crabtree had been on the doorstep. He’d guessed immediately that Laura had been kidnapped.
A delay of several hours had then occurred because, although Calvin Redfern had seen the messages from Tariq on Laura’s bed, he’d dismissed the invisible letter as a blank piece of paper. It was nearly 3am when it occurred to him that it might not be. By the time he’d deciphered Tariq’s note, the children were already in the tunnel and the rising tide had made Dead Man’s Cove impassable. The best that he and the police could do was go to the general area of the old tunnel exit, now sealed up, and wait to see when, or if, anyone would emerge.
At 4.10am, Joe the boatman, Mrs Webb, and Mr and Mrs Mukhtar had driven over the horizon. They were handcuffed before they’d even turned off the engine. It turned out that Mr Mukhtar had been an ordinary, law-abiding shopkeeper until he and his wife became addicted to lavish living and shopping. Faced with having their home and business repossessed, they’d resorted to desperate measures to find the cash they needed. When Mr Mukhtar met the Straight A gang while obtaining Tariq’s false passport in Bangladesh, he’d mentioned his idea to start a tapestry and Persian carpet factory in Cornwall using cheap child labour. They’d introduced him to Mrs Webb, recently arrived in St Ives to spy on Calvin Redfern, and the plan had taken wing from there. They all saw it as an easy way to make millions. The twenty children were to be the first of many.
Dawn had been breaking when a sodden Rumblefish, Monk and Dino blasted their way out of the old tunnel exit using dynamite. They, too, were taken into custody. When they confessed to abandoning twenty-two children in the flooded tunnel, Calvin Redfern had to be restrained from strangling them.
All this time, Skye had been getting more and more distressed and excitable.
‘I was on the point of locking him in the police van when it struck me that he might know something, or hear something, that we couldn’t,’ Calvin Redfern told Laura. ‘He led us to a different set of mine workings, over the hill from where we’d been searching. There we found all these freezing, skinny, terrified kids peering into a shaft.
‘Skye reached them before we did. To my absolute horror, he ran straight past them and dived over the edge. How he survived the fall, I’ll never know, but I doubt we’d have found you if it hadn’t been for him. He swam through the catacomb of tunnels and hauled you and Tariq onto a dry ledge. Thanks to his quite remarkable courage, instincts and strength, the emergency services managed to save you both.’
‘What happens now?’ asked Laura. ‘What happens to Tariq? Does he have to return to Bangladesh?’
‘That’ll be up to the Immigration Department,’ said her uncle, ‘but my guess is that, as a thank you from the British Government for his role in helping to rescue twenty kids and bring the Mukhtars and several members of the Straight A gang to justice, he’ll be granted asylum to stay in this country if he wishes. The police are certainly pleading his case. In the meantime, he’s been offered a foster home by the couple who run the St Ives veterinary surgery, one of whom is from Bangladesh. They’re wonderful people and I know they’ll take good care of him.’
All Laura could think as she walked into St Ives Primary was: If Tariq stays in St Ives, he and Skye will be my best friends, and the three of us will have so much fun and so many adventures together. It’ll be perfect.
Mr Gillbert snapped: ‘Don’t get any ideas about bringing that three-legged menace into my class today. Have you any idea how much effort it took to replace the lesson plan files he chewed?’
Laura came back to reality to find her teacher barring the door of the classroom.

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