Stormchild (39 page)

I wanted to say something, but could find nothing to say, so kept quiet.

“So I ran away,” Jackie went on, “because everything was confusing, especially with your brother there, and I felt in the way, and I thought that if I could just give myself a bit of space I’d find out what I wanted.” She stared bright-eyed and serious at me, and I wondered if ever, anywhere on God’s earth, a stranger situation had been found for two people to fall in love, and suddenly I began to dare that we were indeed falling in love. Jackie took my silence for an encouragement to speak on. “I mean it’s a big decision, isn’t it? You wanted me to give up my career, right? And live on a boat? That’s kind of a drastic life change! And if I’m going to make that kind of emotional commitment then I want to be sure that I’ve considered that commitment properly, and you’d want me to do that, too, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” I said, realizing I had forgotten just how much this girl could talk when she was nervous, “or no, perhaps,” I went on, and I saw the astonished Stephen was still listening to our every word.

Jackie shook her head in self-recrimination. “I should have explained it all to you on Antigua, but you always seemed so self-sufficient and I thought you’d probably be glad to get rid of me in the end. You see I thought you were just trying to be nice to me, and that you’d change your mind when you really thought about it.”

“You thought what?” I asked in astonishment.

“That you didn’t mean what you said, and that if you had a few weeks without me you’d think better of it. I mean I couldn’t blame you if you did, because—”

“Jackie!” I put a finger on her lips to stop her talking.

She must have thought we were in danger for she stared at me with very wide and very frightened eyes.

I kissed her tears. “I love you,” I said, and I think I was close to crying myself.

Only now it was happiness that filled me, and so I kissed her again and I felt relief surging through me as strongly as a flooding spring tide swelling over shoals to render them harmless, and I felt the same relief flood into Jackie as I put my arm about her shoulders and held her close.

Stephen gargled at us. I think he was attempting to be the first to congratulate us on our new found happiness, but I kicked him with my heavy right boot anyway, just to shut him up.

“Oh, Tim.” Jackie took a deep breath.

“Does that mean we’re sharing a boat now?” I asked her.

“I guess it does.” She smiled coyly.

“Whoopee,” I said, and just hoped I could get the boat back.

B
y midday the settlement was sufficiently worried about the missing Stephen to send two men to search the island’s interior on the cross-country motorbikes, while another four men, all armed with assault rifles, combed the ravines and rock piles of the high plateau, but no one thought to explore the escarpment’s crest immediately above the settlement where the three of us lay concealed. Instead the searchers all went further west, presumably on the assumption that Stephen must have pursued Jackie into the wild landscape that led toward the distant ocean. The search parties had a miserable time of it because the rain was an unending, drumming, thrashing tempest that slashed across the high country and beat the reservoir into frenzy and drowned the vegetable fields at the escarpment’s foot.

We kept dry in our crevice, and I told Jackie all I had learned about the Genesis community from Berenice and from my own exploration of the limestone workings. I told her about the Australian boat, and about the corpse I had found in the high rocks under the cold wind. I showed Jackie the passport, then un-gagged Stephen to discover if he knew anything about the Australian girl’s death. When Stephen had finished gasping and making a fuss about his strained jaw muscles, I unfolded the blade of my rigging knife and pressed its sharp tip into the soft tissue under his left eyeball. “My father was a surgeon,” I told Stephen, “and he taught me that the medical term for what I’m tempted to do is enucleation.”

He whimpered, which I decided was a request for further information.

“Enucleation,” I told him, “is the operation of removing the eyeball.”

He whimpered again, which I translated as an indication that he understood me.

“So unless you want me to begin my new career as an ophthalmic surgeon right here and now, Stephen, talk to me.”

What he told us about the Australian boat confirmed Berenice’s story. The catamaran
Naiad
had come unexpectedly to the settlement and von Rellsteb, desperate to acquire a fourth yacht, had invited the three Australians to a meal at the mine. Once at the mine the two men had been shot and the girl tossed into a storeroom. “Did you rape her?” I asked Stephen.

He hesitated a split second too long, so I drew blood with the knife’s blade. He gave a small scream that was echoed by Jackie. “You bastard,” I said to Stephen. “And Nicole? Was she there?”

He nodded.

“Tell me,” I said, and I put the point of the stainless steel blade into the newly drawn blood. “Tell me about Nicole,” I ordered him.

At the time of
Naiad’s
arrival, Stephen said, Nicole had been the navigator for the second Genesis boat, and Stephen had been a member of that same crew, but Nicole, he claimed, had been a difficult shipmate. She was not only a more competent sailor than their skipper, but she was also full of more energy and anger and resolve. Nicole, Stephen said, always wanted to sail the extra mile or take the extra risk. She was desperate to take over command of
Genesis Two,
and the arrival of the big Australian catamaran had seemed a heaven-sent chance for von Rellsteb to prevent a mutiny. Thus the
Naiad
had been pirated and given to Nicole.

“So who killed the Australians?” I asked Stephen.

He stared dumbly at me.

“Who?” I insisted, even though I knew the answer.

“She did,” he almost whispered the accusation. “The others hesitated, so she snatched the gun.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Jackie murmured in a stricken voice.

I stared hatefully at Stephen, wanting to murder him for being the messenger of such news, but then I decided I had better drain the cup to its bitter dregs, so asked him which boat had sailed to Europe two years before.

Again his hesitation was just a fraction too long, indicating not only assent, but guilt.

“
Genesis Two?”
I asked. “Your boat?”

“Yes.”

“And Nicole was with you?”

He nodded in terror.

“And you placed a bomb on my boat?”

It would have taken a nerveless creature not to feel terror at the tone of my question, or perhaps it was the cold, sharp steel that pricked at his eye socket that made Stephen shudder and begin to breathe in short, urgent gasps as though he suddenly had to cram a lot of oxygen into what was left of his miserable life. Jackie, fearing what I was about to do, turned away.

“It wasn’t me!” Stephen managed to say.

“Was it Nicole?”

“She and her lover.” He was gabbling now, eager to prove that he was cooperating with me, eager for my approval, eager to save his sight and his life.

“Her lover?” I remembered the photographs in the radio room at the mine which had showed Nicole with the tall, blond young man who had looked so uncannily like her brother, and I wondered what strange beasts prowled in our lusts when we let them through the gates of inhibition and fed them with our angers. “Is he fair-haired?”

Stephen nodded. “He’s called Dominic, and he’s her navigator now. They thought that if you died then they would inherit your boatyard and they could start their own group in Europe. Nicole wanted to prove she was better than Caspar, you see, but she needed a base to work from, so she picked your boatyard. Caspar didn’t mind, because he always found Nicole difficult, so he said we could take
Genesis Two
to Europe, but only on condition that Nicole called her new group Genesis and acknowledged him as its founder. It almost never happened because we arrived a day late and we thought you’d be gone, and the weather was bad, but Nicole pressed on. She never gave up, never.”

I stared into Stephen’s terrified face, hating him.

Except it was not this little creep, but Nicole. It had always been Nicole. I had tried to persuade myself that she had been duped by von Rellsteb, while in truth she had been the instigator of all the evil. Why was I so surprised? Fletcher had told me that the vast majority of murders were committed inside the family, and that money and inheritance were motives for murder as old as man, and, from the first moment when I had suspected inheritance as the motive of Joanna’s murder, I must have known it was Nicole and no one else. Von Rellsteb could not have profited from my death unless Nicole wished him to. I had tried to convince myself that von Rellsteb had manipulated Nicole, but I should have known better. Nicole had never been manipulated by anybody. It had been Nicole all along; Nicole had killed her own mother and tried to kill me.

“I didn’t plant the bomb!” Stephen said in a low, pleading voice.

“Of course not,” I said tiredly. It had been Nicole, probably with her lover, who had stolen up the river in that rain-slatted darkness. It did not matter how, only who, and it could only have been Nicole, for only Nicole would have known that Joanna and I sailed to Guernsey every Easter, and only Nicole would have known just where to find
Slip-Slider,
and only Nicole would have remembered exactly how to get inside the boat to plant the bomb. Had she heard my voice that night? Had she heard her mother and I talking? Had she seen us at that moment when I switched on the yard’s floodlamps?

“It wasn’t me! It wasn’t!” Stephen whimpered.

And, as I thought about Nicole crouching on my boatyard’s pontoons, my imagination balked. How could she have done it? Did she think that by saving seals and staunching oil spills and harassing nuclear tests she could atone for murdering her parents? What ungoverned engine of hatred or envy or passion had driven her to such an act? Was it just for money? If Nicole had asked us, we would have helped her, but she had wanted to take all there was and without strings. So she had killed, and if I had not stayed behind to sell
Stormchild
Nicole would be leading her own environmental crusade from my boatyard.

“Tim?” Jackie said very tentatively.

“It wasn’t me!” Stephen cried.

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” I told him. He had been there. He had been on the boat that had crept up the river to commit murder. This green creep, this self-righteous rapist, had helped sail the boat that took my daughter to kill my wife. “Fuck you,” I said tiredly, then pulled the rigging knife away and folded its blade. Hurting Stephen would achieve nothing.

Instead I listened as Jackie questioned him about Genesis. She had a journalist’s curiosity and a dogged patience, and elicited a sad, but oddly familiar tale of idealism soured and high hopes broken. Most of the Genesis activists, like Stephen himself, had joined von Rellsteb in Canada or on America’s west coast, where, convinced that emotional indignation was a valid replacement for informed thinking, and fired by the chorus of environmental doom-sayers, they had been attracted to von Rellsteb’s venomous gospel that only by the most ruthless measures could a polluted world be restored. For a time, fueled by youthful enthusiasm, von Rellsteb’s disciples were convinced their efforts were making a difference. Every press-cutting that described a drift net sabotaged or a tree saved encouraged them, yet, as they came to realize they were only doing what a hundred or a thousand other such groups were doing, von Rellsteb easily persuaded his followers that their unique contribution to the environmental crusade should be a paradigm wilderness community that would be a forerunner of a new and ecologically sound world. The Genesis community would show the way to a better planet. They would live in peace and organic harmony, hurting not a tree nor a beast, and loving each other freely.

Patagonia had been the setting for this new Eden, but, under the environment’s hammer blows of cold, rain, wind, and scarcity, the community’s passionate idealism had first decayed into petty jealousies and afterward into an authoritarian hell. Peace was enforced with punishment, the trees were cut for fuel and beasts killed for fur, and free love had turned to institutionalized rape, yet none of the community’s leaders, and not even the majority of its members, would confess to failure, for to do so would have been to admit that they were as fallible as other humans. Instead they had persevered in their losing battle, clawing small victories from decaying morale. They harassed the drift netters, and Nicole, Stephen told us, was even now patrolling the southern seas to discover which tuna fishermen still killed dolphins. “Nicole will never give up,” Stephen added with a grudging admiration, and he confessed that he had proved too feeble to join her crew; Nicole wanted only the hardest and most fanatical people on her boat.
Genesis Four,
Stephen told us, was crewed by the community’s hard-liners, who, almost alone now, were still fulfilling some of von Rellsteb’s original aims.

The other members of the community had given up the fight. Some had weakened and died, to be buried at the foot of the escarpment, while a very few had tried to escape, only to discover that their paradise was too remote and too far from other human traffic to make such escape possible.

I listened to the hopeless tale and, when Jackie was finished and Stephen had no more answers to give, I cut a strip of cloth from his jerkin and gagged him once again.

Then we lay in silence and stared down at the world von Rellsteb had made. This was his green dream. This was the harbinger of the new, pure, unindustrialized, unpolluted, clean, and lovely world, where man would live in loving tune with primal nature. Except nature had other ideas, and so Jackie and I were staring down at a rain-pounded, shit-stinking failure of flooded vegetable plots and broken hopes. This, then, was the eco-paradise—a place of misery and filth with my daughter at its evil heart. This was Caspar von Rellsteb’s fiefdom, his achievement, and tonight, under the cloak of darkness, I would destroy it.