The Night Ferry (37 page)

My mind goes further back. I should never have gone to Amsterdam looking for her. I have made things worse rather than better. That’s the story of my life—good intentions. And being a hundredth of a second too slow—close enough to touch victory in a contest where first and last were separated by the width of a chest.

How can they negotiate with Pearl? He can’t be trusted. The chief engineer hands me something hot to drink.

“Not long to go now,” he says, motioning to the windows. The lights of Harwich appear and disappear as we ride the swel . Massive cranes with four legs and oblong torsos seem to stand guard at the gates of the town. I stay at the window watching it approach.

The captain and navigator stare at screens, using external cameras to maneuver the ferry, edging it against the dock. We are so high up that the stevedores look like Lil iputians trying to tie down a giant.

DI Forbes is first on board, pausing just long enough to look at my clothes with a mixture of awe and disgust. He takes the phone from the captain.

“Don’t trust him,” I yel across the bridge. It is al I have a chance to say before the DI introduces himself to Pearl. I can only hear one side of their conversation but Forbes repeats each demand as it is made. The clicks in his throat are like punctuation marks.

Pearl wants the main ferry doors opened and vehicles moved to clear a path for his truck. Nobody is to approach. If he sees a police officer on the deck, or if he hears a fire alarm, or if anything is different or untoward, he wil kil Samira and the twins.

“You have to give me more time,” says Forbes. “I’l need at least an hour…That’s not long enough. I can’t do it in fifteen minutes…Let me talk to Samira…Yes, that’s why I want to talk to her…No, I don’t want that. Nobody has to get hurt.”

In the background one of the babies is crying—perhaps both of them. Do twins sound the same? Do they harmonize when they cry?

There are CCTV cameras on the vehicle decks. One of them is trained on the truck. Yanus can be seen clearly behind the wheel. Samira is in the passenger seat.

The rest of the passengers are being evacuated down gangways to the main terminal building. The port area has been closed and sealed off by armed response teams in black body armor. There are sharpshooters on surrounding rooftops.

The anguish of the past hours has swel ed up inside me, making it hard to breathe. I can feel myself sinking into the background.

Forbes has agreed to take a limited number of vehicles off the ferry, clearing a path for the truck. I fol ow the detective down the footbridge to the dock as he supervises the evacuation. Men in yel ow reflective vests wave the first of the rigs down the ramp.

Forbes has put Pearl onto a speakerphone. The Irishman sounds calm. Confident. Perhaps it’s bravado. He is talking over the sound of engines, tel ing Forbes to hurry. Slowly a clear lane emerges on the vehicle deck. The Mercedes truck is at the far end, with its headlights blazing and engine running.

I stil can’t understand how he hopes to get away. There are unmarked police cars waiting outside and helicopters in the air. He can’t outrun them.

Yanus is bleeding to death. Even with a bandaged leg and forearm his blood pressure wil be dropping. How long before he loses consciousness?

“You definitely saw a gun?” asks Forbes, addressing me directly for the first time.

“Yes.”

“Could he have other firearms?”

“Yes.”

“What is the truck carrying?”

“This one is empty. There’s another on Deck 5. I didn’t see inside.” I give him the vehicle number.

“So it could be a trafficking run. There might be il egals on board.”

“It’s possible.”

The last of the rigs has been moved. Yanus has a clear path to the ramp. Pearl is stil issuing instructions. The twins are silent.

In a beat of flushed silence I realize something is wrong. Pearl is too calm, too confident. His plan doesn’t make sense. As the notion occurs to me, I’m moving, pushing past Forbes and sprinting up the ramp. A hundred meters is not my favorite distance but I can cover it in less time than it takes most people to tie their shoes.

Forbes is yel ing at me to stop. He’s too late. Reacting to the new development, he orders his teams to move. Heavy boots thunder up the ramp after me, sweeping between the outer rows of trucks.

Yanus is stil behind the wheel, staring out through the windscreen, unperturbed by my approach. His eyes seem to fol ow me as I swing on the door handle and wrench it open. His hands are taped to the steering wheel. Blood has drained onto the floor at his feet. I press my hand to his neck. He’s dead.

Samira’s hands are also taped. I lean across Yanus and touch her shoulder. Her eyes open.

“Where are they?”

She shakes her head.

I swing down and run to the rear of the truck. A sledgehammer pulverizes the lock and the doors swing open. Guns sweep from side to side. The trailer is empty.

Forbes reaches us, puffing and wheezing, stil clogged with his cold. I snatch the phone from him. The line is dead.

Amid the commotion of the next few minutes I see things at half speed and struggle to find saliva to push around my mouth. Forbes is bel owing orders and kicking angrily at the truck tires. Someone wil have to pop him with a tranquilizer gun if he doesn’t calm down.

Teams of police have secured the ferry. Nobody is being al owed on or off. Passengers are being screened and interviewed in the terminal. Floodlights on the dock make it appear like a massive stage or film set, ready for the cameras to rol .

Yanus watches and waits, as though expecting his cue. My heart jolts on the reality of having kil ed him. Yes, he deserved it, but
I did this
. I took his life. His blood stil stains my clothes, along with Samira’s.

Paramedics are lifting her onto a stretcher. The towel is stil wedged between her thighs. The medics gently shunt me to one side when I approach. She can’t talk to me now. I want to say I’m sorry, it was my fault. I should never have left her. I should have stayed with them. Perhaps I could have stopped Pearl.

Some time later Forbes comes looking for me.

“Let’s walk,” he says.

Instinctively, I take his arm. I’m frightened my legs might fail.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Five thirty.”

“My watch says five fifteen.”

“It’s slow.”

“How do you know yours isn’t fast?”

“Because the ferry company has those big fucking clocks on the wal that say
your
watch is wrong in four different time zones.” We walk down the ramp, along the dock, away from the ferry. Refinery tanks and shipping containers create silhouettes against the brightening sky. Wind and smoke and scudding clouds are streaming over us.

“You don’t think he’s on the ferry, do you?” asks Forbes.

“No.”

There is another long pause. “We found a life buoy missing from the starboard railing. He could have gone over the side.”

“Someone would have seen him.”

“We were distracted.”

“Even so.”

I can stil smel the twins and feel the smoothness of their skin. We’re both thinking the same thing. What happened to them?

“You should never have put yourself on that ferry,” he says.

“I couldn’t be sure she was on board.”

Taking a packet of cigarettes from his pockets, he counts the contents.

“You shouldn’t smoke with a cold.”

“I shouldn’t smoke at al . My wife thinks men and women can have precisely the same ailment with the same symptoms but it’s always the man who is sicker.”

“That’s because men are hypochondriacs.”

“I got a different theory. I think it’s because no matter how sick a woman is there’s always a smal part of her brain thinking about shoes.”

“I bet you didn’t tel her that.”

“I’m sick, not stupid.”

His demeanor is different now. Instead of sarcasm and cynicism, I sense anxiety and a hardening resolve.

“Who’s behind this?”

“Samira mentioned an Englishman who cal ed himself ‘Brother.’ She said he had a cross on his neck. There’s someone you should look at. His name is Paul Donavon. He went to school with Cate Beaumont—and with me. He was there on the night she was run down.”

“You think he’s behind this?”

“Samira met ‘Brother’ at an orphanage in Kabul. Donavon was in Afghanistan with the British Army. The traffickers targeted orphans because it meant fewer complications. There were no families to search for them or ask questions. Some were trafficked for sex. Others were given the option of becoming surrogates.”

“The pregnant il egals you asked about. Both claimed to be orphans.”

Forbes stil hasn’t lit his cigarette. It rests between his lips, wagging up and down as he talks. He glances over his shoulder at the ferry.

“About the other night.”

“What night?”

“When we had dinner.”

“Yeah?”

“Did I conduct myself in a proper fashion? I mean, did I behave?”

“You were a perfect gentleman.”

“That’s good,” he mumbles. “I mean, I thought so.” After a pause. “You took something that didn’t belong to you.”

“I prefer to think that we shared information.”

He nods. “You might want to reconsider your career choice, DC Barba. I don’t know if you’re what I’d cal a team player.” He can’t stay. There is a debriefing to attend, which is going to be rough. His superiors are going to want to know how he let Pearl get away. And once the media get hold of this story it’s going to run and run.

Forbes looks at my clothes. “If he’s not on the ferry, how did he get off?”

“He could stil be on board.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No. What about the crew?”

“You think he took a uniform?”

“It’s possible.”

He turns abruptly and strides back toward the waiting police cars. The CCTV footage wil most likely provide the answer. There are cameras on every corner of the dock and every deck of the ship. One of them wil have recorded Pearl.

“Eat bananas,” I yel after him.

“Pardon?”

“My mother’s remedy for a cold.”

“You said you never listened to her.”

“I said almost never.”

There have been too many hospitals lately. Too many long waits on uncomfortable chairs, eating machine snacks and drinking powdered coffee and whitener. This one smel s of boiled food and feces and has grim checked tiles in the corridors, worn smooth by the trol eys.

Ruiz cal ed me from Hul , after his ferry docked. He wanted to come and get me but I told him to go home and rest. He’s done enough.

“Are they looking after you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Samira?”

“She’s going to be OK.”

I hope I’m right. She’s been asleep for ten hours and didn’t even wake when they lifted her from the ambulance and wheeled her to a private room. I have been waiting here, dozing in my plastic chair, with my head on the bed near her shoulder.

It is mid-afternoon when she final y wakes. I feel the mattress shift and open my eyes to see her looking at me.

“I need the bathroom,” she whispers.

I take her by the elbow and help her to the en suite.

“Where am I?”

“In a hospital.”

“What country?”

“England.”

There is a nod of acceptance but no hint of a journey completed or sense of achievement.

Samira washes her face, ears, hands and feet, talking softly to herself. I take her arm again, leading her back to bed.

Motioning to the window, she wants to look outside. The North Sea is just visible over the rooftops and between buildings. It is the color of brushed steel.

“As a child I used to wonder what the sea looked like,” she says. “I had only ever seen pictures in books and on TV.” She gazes at the horizon.

“What do you think now?”

“I think it looks higher than the land. Why doesn’t the water rush in and sweep us away?”

“Sometimes it does.”

I notice a towel in her hand. She wants to use it as a prayer mat but doesn’t know which direction to face toward Mecca. She turns slowly round and round like a cat trying to settle.

There are tears in her eyes and her lips tremble, struggling to form the words.

“They wil be hungry soon. Who wil feed them?”

Love and pain are not the same. Love is put to the test—pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love, “That was not true pain or it would not have disappeared so quickly.”

—WILLIAM BOYD,

“The Blue Afternoon”

1

In the nights since the twins were born I have drowned countless times, twitching and kicking at the bedclothes. I see tiny bodies floating in fields of kelp or washed up on beaches. My lungs give out before I can reach them, leaving me choking and numb with an obscure anguish. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a swol en heart?

Samira is also awake. She walks through the house at 3:00 a.m. moving as though her feet have an agreement with the ground that she wil always tread lightly in return for never encountering another path that is too steep.

It has been five days since the twins went missing. Pearl has soaked through the cracks of the world and vanished. We know how he got off the ferry. A CCTV camera on Deck 3