Chapter 83
Sometime in the night, Sabri had started biting her nails again, a habit she’d broken years ago.
Her insides were an odd combination of achingly empty and a breath away from throwing up.
Her lips were chapped, every joint in her body ached and she couldn’t stop reaching into her pocket for her missing phone.
Meanwhile, land was getting closer: a small, low-lying island that might or might not be St Helen’s.
‘Out of interest,’ said Tug, who was sitting with all the others in the cockpit. ‘Did anyone bring their token along for the ride?’
Sabri, who was still on the helm, could distinguish rocks from grass on the approaching island, even see the odd stumpy, twisted tree.
‘Not me,’ Robin was the first to reply. ‘Didn’t want to risk it.’
‘Me neither,’ Cheryl said. ‘It’s under a loose floorboard in my bedroom.’
‘Not sure you should have told us that,’ Tug said, but Sabri could tell from the tone of his voice that he was smiling. ‘Don’t worry,’ he went on. ‘None of us has a phone. Even if we wanted to nick it, there’s nothing we can do while we’re all the way out here.’
‘I’m not worried,’ Cheryl replied. ‘I trust you all.’
As the conversation in the cockpit continued, Sabri made an effort to tune it out.
The urge, almost the need, to speak to her family was verging on painful.
They phoned each other. It was what they did.
Several times a day she heard from her kids, the girls almost every school break, even Darren texted the odd personal triumph: a goal scored, a test mark above sixty per cent.
Jason called at least twice during the day, invariably when it was least convenient, but she knew she was never going to resent that again.
He texted her at night too, on the rare occasions they slept apart: sweet, erotic messages about how much he was missing her.
She really should be nicer to Holly, she told herself. Charlie was all the poor girl had.
‘Mine’s where no one will think of looking,’ Tara said. ‘Especially not my tosser of an ex-husband. How about you, Sabri? Still keeping it close?’
It took Sabri a second to realise she was being spoken to. ‘No, it’s at home,’ she lied. ‘Jason’s parents have a safe.’
‘Holly?’ Tara said. ‘Tug?’
Sabri turned to see both Tug and Holly shake their heads.
No one else, it seemed, had risked bringing their token with them.
She ran a hand over her right breast, felt the now-familiar shape pressing and knew she’d toss it into the ocean if it meant she could miraculously be back with her family, with none of this ever having happened.
She’d never, since Maddy had first had a phone, gone so long without hearing from them and now anything could have happened: another break-in at the house, an accident with that ridiculous gun, one of the kids taken like poor Charlie. She should never have left.
On the island, a long strip of beach had come into view, topped by grassland the colour of an emerald.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Tug, who’d come to stand directly behind her. ‘Is it St Helen’s?’
‘See that ruin?’ he replied. ‘That’s the pest house.’
Sabri had seen no ruins, no buildings in any state of repair, but staring now at the patch of island Tug was pointing out, there seemed to be a regularity about some of the rocks. An assemblance that wasn’t entirely natural.
‘Camped in it once,’ he told her. ‘On an exercise. Back in my navy days. I wasn’t much more than a kid.’
‘You were in the navy?’ Special forces, Tara had said. Sabri had assumed that meant SAS.
Tug’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a problem?’
She was on board a boat, in bad weather, with a naval man. Again.
‘Sabri?’ He was looking at her oddly.
‘What’s a pest house?’ asked Cheryl.
A naval man, a blonde nurse, a fat barmaid? Was it possible?
‘Long time ago, ships heading for England sometimes had the plague on board,’ Tug was saying. ‘They anchored here and the sick were taken ashore. The pest house was an isolation hospital.’
Sabri looked from one face to the other: Robin, Tara, Tug, Cheryl. It had been decades. Had they even exchanged names? And people changed so much.
‘It wasn’t the cosiest place to spend the night,’ Tug went on. ‘We were glad to leave it next morning.’
Sabri felt her legs give way beneath her and she landed hard on the helm’s seat.
One night, when her whole life had changed.
Reeling in the aftermath, consumed by guilt and haunted by nightmares, she’d failed her third-year exams and there’d been no money to re-sit.
All her plans had come to a crashing end that night.
‘Before we came, I looked up Logan Quick’s relationship with the Scillies.’ The new voice came from Holly, the first time she’d spoken in ages. ‘St Helen’s was uninhabited for a long time, but Quick did a deal with the Duchy of Cornwall to lease the island and build his own luxury home.’
‘Guys,’ Sabri began. I think I know what this is all about.
‘I can see something.’ Robin, standing on the side deck, holding tight to the spray hood, was at the highest point of the boat. ‘It’s modern, quite fancy,’ he went on. ‘It could be a house.’
I know what’s going on here and it’s really not good.
The towed yacht passed another small headland and ahead a pontoon had become visible, stretching out across the water.
It was pale, weed free, in perfect repair.
Moored to it were a black, high-performance RIB and a fancy motorboat.
Beyond, a familiar fair-haired woman stood on shore, watching them approach. Next to her stood a young boy.
Holly gave a high, thin cry and got to her feet. She raised her hand above her head. On the shore, the boy waved in response and set out for the pontoon. The woman grabbed his shoulder, holding him back.
The harbour master cut his engines and the sudden quiet was startling. Then the cabin door opened and the man himself emerged.
‘We’ll moor you up to one of the buoys here,’ he called back at them. ‘The bay’s too shallow to get the yacht much further. We’ll ferry you to the island once you’re secure. Have you got another line? And a boat hook?’
For a moment, no one on Gemini moved.
‘Give us a minute, mate,’ Tug called over the water before turning to the others. ‘Holly, is that Charlie?’
Without taking her eyes off her son, Holly nodded.
‘Right,’ Tug went on. ‘In that case, I suggest we wait till we’re all safely on land and Charlie is back with us before we ask these guys what the hell they think they’re playing at.’
Say something, Sabri told herself. Say something now.
‘Robin,’ she heard Cheryl say, in that rather annoying, little-girl voice of hers that could barely carry from one side of the cockpit to the other. ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this.’
Sabri turned to the other woman in time to see Robin drop an arm around her shoulders.
‘No one does, love,’ he replied. ‘But getting off this boat and reuniting Charlie with his mum feels like a priority to me.’
When Cheryl didn’t look convinced, he added, ‘We’ll be OK if we stick together.’
‘Touch to starboard,’ Tug called back to Sabri. ‘Bit more.’
The mooring was managed smoothly. Tug leaned over the side of the yacht and caught the loop of the buoy with the boat hook. Seconds later they were secure.
‘Prepare to abandon ship,’ he called back. ‘Get your stuff together, folks. Try not to leave anything behind.’
It was the work of moments to get their kit on deck. Robin went below and he’d soon handed everything up. The harbour master came alongside and, when the two boats were tied together, he stepped aboard. He was a grey-haired man in his mid- to late fifties, with a beard and a beer belly.
‘We thought we were going to St Mary’s.’ Sabri hoped she sounded annoyed and not scared. ‘Where is this and why are we here?’
The official seemed to gain an inch in height.
‘Mr Quick alerted us to your difficulties early this morning.’ Ignoring Sabri, he addressed himself to Tug, with occasional glances at Robin.
‘He explained that you are his guests, and that the yacht you’re travelling on belongs to him. He asked that we bring you here.’
‘Well, that’s news—’ Tug began.
‘Charlie!’ Holly called across the water. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Mum!’ the lad yelled back. He looked fine to Sabri, and it was obvious that all Holly could think about was getting to him. All the same … they’d been on Quick’s boat all along?
‘I believe Mr Quick is waiting for you up at the house,’ the harbour master went on. ‘The lady by the pontoon is a member of his staff.’
No, this was all wrong.
Tara spoke up. ‘Two members of our crew went overboard last night. A man called Craig Lewis and the boat’s skipper, Thomas Williams.’
Tara, unlike Sabri, seemed worthy of the harbour master’s attention. ‘Yes, yes, you told me that already. The alert has gone out.’
‘Well, that’s funny, because we haven’t seen any rescue helicopters,’ Sabri argued. ‘And I don’t know about anyone else, but I want to go to St Mary’s so that I can get a plane home.’
‘Me too,’ Holly said. ‘Just as soon as my son is on board.’
‘I have other business to attend to.’ The harbour master climbed onto the side deck, ready to go back to his own boat. ‘But I’m sure Mr Quick will see you safely to St Mary’s. Now, we really need to get you off this boat. Perhaps the ladies first?’
One by one, they crossed to the harbour master’s vessel.
Holly went first, followed by Tara, Sabri and then, with difficulty, Cheryl.
Robin and Tug practically had to lift her over the rails.
Tug was last to step onto the harbour master’s vessel and then the lines were slipped and the motorboat took them to the pontoon.
As they all climbed down onto the unsteady platform, as Holly raced towards her son, Sabri saw another figure emerge from beyond the sand dunes.
‘Tug,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s the skipper.’
Some fifty metres or so from the end of the pontoon stood their erstwhile skipper, Thomas. As Tug set off at a run, sending the pontoon swaying dangerously beneath his weight, Sabri heard the harbour master’s boat roaring away.