Scorpion Trail

by Geoffrey Archer

  McFee backed the van away from the terminal and drove it over some railway tracks to where the stern of the ferry Gloria loomed.

  A cursory check of the paperwork by the Italian customs – and they were waved on board. The first vehicle to do so, they drove the full length of the garage deck and parked by the bow doors. Then they climbed to the passenger decks and were allocated a two-berth cabin.

  ‘I hope you don’t have any curious nocturnal habits . . .’ Alex muttered as they walked down the corridor to deposit their bags. He’d never liked sharing rooms with other men.

  ‘Should have thought of that earlier . . .’

  A few minutes later they located the deserted bar. A harassed steward washing up glasses told them they’d have to wait another half-hour.

  Out on deck the air was pleasantly mild, compared with the icy March winds that had buffeted them in the English Channel. Alex hardly needed the thick, green pullover he’d put on.

  Behind them to the west, the memory of a sunset lingered on the horizon; ahead, the cathedral on its hill above the harbour floated like a floodlit phantom.

  Alex began worrying about Kirsty again. There was something about a sea crossing, about gazing back at the shore that made him think about what he’d left behind.

  Still that sense of guilt at leaving her, despite the certainty there was nothing he could have done to get her back. He resolved to phone her brother to see how things were. Maybe there’d be time on the other side.

  He shivered. The ‘other side’ was an unknown quantity.

  Diesel fumes rose from the quay as trucks bustled to board. Customs men glanced at their watches. Departure hour was near. Time for them to go home to their dinners.

  ‘A lot of heavy stuff down there,’ McFee remarked. ‘Some of it’s aid, some just commercial. Thing is, life’s pretty normal over in Split, as you’ll see. Croatia’s fine. It’s only when you drive up into Bosnia that it gets shitty.’

  A bus pulled up on the quay and disgorged a stream of fair-haired men in mud-green uniforms.

  ‘Swedes probably. Or Danes. With the UN. They come over here for a bit of R and R,’ McFee explained.

  ‘Does all the aid for Bosnia come through here?’

  ‘Oh no. Not at all. A lot of the NGOs drive down through Austria. And the UN brings stuff in by ship.’

  ‘NGOs?’ Alex queried, still struggling with the terminology.

  ‘Non-governmental organizations. Like us. Charities and so on. You’ll soon get used to it.’

  Patronizing sod, Alex thought. The man had only been here once before, yet he made himself out to be the world’s greatest expert.

  The last of the trucks was aboard and the loaders began to lift the ramp. Suddenly headlights appeared from behind the terminal, bobbing rapidly towards them. The deck crew didn’t notice, until alerted by the frantic blaring of a horn.

  A white-painted Toyota Land Cruiser skidded to a halt at the edge of the ramp, the driver leaning from the window waving her papers.

  ‘Typical bloody woman! Late as usual,’ McFee sneered. There was venom in his voice.

  ‘Who d’you think she works for? The UN?’ Alex asked.

  The Toyota driver was a blonde. Alex caught his breath, reminded suddenly of Lorna Donohue. Couldn’t say why. Too dark to see her clearly. Something to do with the toss of the head. The woman seemed to be apologizing.

  ‘Probably not UN,’ McFee guessed. ‘Might be Red Cross, anything. You’ll find those dinky little motors all over the place. There’s a “designer set” in Bosnia, who drive round in the trendiest off-roaders, wearing immaculate white jump-suits, and are sod-all use to anybody.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, they’re letting her on,’ Alex murmured. There was definitely something about the woman . . .

  ‘Shall we try that bar again,’ he heard himself suggest.

  As they headed below, the sea boiled at the stern and the ship shuddered with the rumble of the diesels.

  ‘Oh hell! Look at this lot,’ McFee moaned.

  The young UN soldiers had got to the saloon first, scrabbling at the bar and coming away with fistfuls of beer cans.

  ‘Told ye they were Swedes! Ah, well, faint heart ne’er won fair lady . . .’

  McFee torpedoed the throng of giants. Alex spotted two unoccupied chairs at a table and made a grab for them.

  He studied the faces of the soldiers. Jodie’s age, most of them. Some scrubbed and innocent, farm boys perhaps, out of their depth. Others noisy, leery, brought up in a harder school. None drunk yet, but the night was young.

  Across the saloon two Italians in business suits pressed themselves against the window, hammering words into their portable phones before the ship got too far from land.

  Alex kept a curious eye on the door in case the blonde woman came in.

  McFee returned with two cans each.

  ‘They don’t run to glasses. Not with this load of hooligans.’

  They peeled back the rings and raised the lagers in a toast.

  ‘Here’s to a safe trip,’ McFee declared.

  ‘And to a useful one.’

  ‘Aye, indeed.’

  Alex peeled open a new pack of Marlboros and lit one. McFee fiddled with his pipe.

  One more look, that’s all he wanted. Just to be sure that in the glare of the lights the blonde did not resemble Lorna. That his mind, fazed by the uncertainties ahead, had simply been triggered by a hand movement into seeking comfort from the past.

  The sound of reedy singing cut through the growl of the bar. The music of hymns and prayers, coming from the passageway outside.

  ‘Sounds ominous,’ Alex remarked. ‘Do people know something about this ship that we don’t?’

  ‘Sit tight a minute . . .’

  McFee weaved through the crush and disappeared. He returned a minute later, grinning.

  ‘Italians. They’re sitting in a little circle out there bloody praying!’

  ‘Christ! What are they going to Bosnia for?’

  ‘To pray for peace, I suppose. Worth trying. Nothing else works.’

  The ship’s public address system began to buzz. A bilingual announcement that the restaurant was open.

  ‘Come on,’ McFee ordered. ‘Grab your tins and follow me. Last time I was at the back of the queue and missed out.’

  In the dining room they took their plates of steak, chips and salad to a window table. The pin-pricks of the shore lights were disappearing fast.

  Alex half turned, checking faces. The pilgrims or whatever they were had secured an alcove to themselves. Most had brought their own food. Bread was broken and blessed. Men and women with ugly, pious visages.

  Then he saw her. In the alcove next to the pilgrims. Sitting with a man. The tilt of her head, the half smile. The cascade of blonde hair.

  The shock that it was her thumped through his body.

  No doubt, even after twenty years. Hair a bit shorter now, but the same magical eyes he’d twice fallen for. The same earnest hunching of the shoulders as she made a point.

  Lorna Donohue.

  He twisted away from her, blanching with panic. She mustn’t see him. Not yet. He’d waited twenty years, but now the moment had come he wasn’t ready.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’ McFee demanded. ‘You’ve gone grey, man. Are you sick or something?’

  Alex waved dismissively.

  ‘Is it the ship? Canna be. It’s like a mirror out there.’

  ‘No.’ Alex pushed the tray away and shielded his face.

  ‘There’s someone over there, someone I know.’

  McFee peered past him.

  ‘Ghost from the past, eh? Which one is it?’

  ‘The woman in the alcove beyond the pilgrims. But please don’t . . .’

  ‘Aha. Blonde hair? Not bad. Want me to bring her over?’ he needled.

  Alex waved a finger of caution and glared at him.

  ‘I think that means no . . . More of a skeleton than a ghost, eh?’

  ‘We w
ere both eighteen when we first met,’ Alex explained reluctantly.

  ‘Oh, a lovely age, a lovely age . . .’

  ‘Don’t . . . don’t let her see you looking . . .’ Alex fussed. ‘I don’t want her to recognize me.’

  ‘My! What did she do to you all those years ago?’ McFee asked, eyes burning with curiosity.

  ‘It wasn’t then. It was ten years later,’ he added, embarrassed. ‘We met again and . . . and it’s what I did to her that’s the problem.’

  McFee whistled softly, intrigued.

  ‘Naughty boy, were you?’

  Alex’s mind jumped back to the last day in Belfast Lorna, eyes smeared with tears, pounding his chest with her fists after she’d found out he’d been two-timing her.

  Sure, he’d been naughty, but there were reasons. And if she’d given him half a chance he would have explained them to her. Could have explained the second betrayal too, the one she hadn’t known about then. The betrayal that had put a price on his head and must’ve set Lorna baying for his blood.

  At the time, Lorna had been a courier for the IRA’s American bankers and had brought cash to Belfast to fund a jail break. He and she had literally bumped into each other at a funeral. Lorna had been walking with the Republican mourners, he with a TV crew filming it.

  When they’d met that second time, they already had a ‘past’, a teenage romance in which they’d pricked their fingers and bonded their lives in blood. To meet again like that could not be coincidence, Lorna had insisted. It was the ‘guy up above, making the breaks for them’.

  She’d given him everything after that. Her body, her soul – and her secrets. She’d told him of the jail break plan.

  Then Chadwick had turned up to put the squeeze on him and he’d betrayed her to MI5. Never had the chance to tell her why.

  Now, she was sitting just metres away and he hadn’t the words or the nerve.

  ‘She’s standing up,’ McFee whispered. ‘Coming this way, with the bloke. No sign she’s seen ye.’

  Alex felt his neck burn as she passed behind him.

  ‘All clear. I should have one of those sirens they blow when the bombers have gone,’ McFee chuckled.

  Memories. Painful memories flooding back.

  The fractured ribs after McNulty’s men had slipped into his hotel room and beaten him senseless for sleeping with the IRA man’s wife.

  The escape on an RAF Hercules, with Chadwick watching over his stretcher.

  The news a day later, that three IRA escapees had been shot dead by the police. Three men killed because of him.

  ‘How’s about a wee nightcap?’ McFee offered, snapping fingers to wake Alex from his dream. ‘Look as if you could do with a dram.’

  Alex’s mind returned to the present.

  ‘Moray, you’re dead right.’

  Then he hesitated.

  ‘I suppose you want me to go ahead and check she’s not in there?’ McFee growled.

  Alex grinned sheepishly. McFee shook his head in mock censure.

  ‘Some people I know will pull any old trick to avoid their round!’ He stood up. ‘If I’m not back in one minute, it’s all clear, okay?’

  ‘You’re a pal!’

  Alex let out a gust of a sigh.

  ‘God, what’s happening,’ he croaked.

  Jodie dead, Kirsty gone, and now Lorna. What game were the gods playing? Was this Lorna’s beloved Fate at work, or just some perverse, bloody coincidence?

  In the saloon some of the Swedish soldiers were worse for wear, ready to make a night of it. All the tables were taken. Alex and McFee leaned on the bar with their whiskies.

  ‘So, what about this lassie of yours then?’ McFee pressed, unable to restrain his curiosity. Over his checked shirt he wore a fawn jerkin with pockets. His pipe stem protruded from one of them. He hooked a thumb into another. ‘What would she be doing here?’

  ‘Don’t know. She was driving that Toyota. The one that nearly missed the ferry.’

  ‘Thought as much. The chances are she’s heading for the same place as us, then!’ His eyes twinkled.

  ‘You think so?’ Alex caught McFee’s look. ‘You’re enjoying this aren’t you, you bastard!’

  McFee’s face split into a grin.

  ‘Well, there’s not a lot to laugh about where we’re going. And you should’ve seen your face in there . . .’

  ‘You’re an evil sod!’

  ‘Och, come on! You’d do the same in my shoes.’

  ‘Probably.’ Alex burned his throat with the remains of the spirit. ‘That’s it. I’m turning in.’

  ‘What? Are ye no going to talk to her? You’ll have to, some time or other.’

  Maybe McFee was right. No time like the present. For a moment Alex considered taking a stroll round the ship. Bumping into her casually might be the simplest way to break the ice. But she’d probably gone to her cabin with that man she was with. Tomorrow would be better.

  ‘Not tonight,’ he announced. ‘Need to get my act together . . .’

  Away from the hubbub of the bar, the long, beige passageway to the cabins was silent but for the hiss of the ventilation.

  McFee let them in with the key and closed the door behind them. Alex took off his trainers and jeans and climbed onto the upper bunk.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be lying awake all night thinking about her . . .’ McFee joshed.

  ‘That would not surprise me . . .’ Alex sighed, knowing sleep would be almost impossible.

  ‘Waste of time, if you ask me. Still, it’s your life.’

  ‘Yes . . . That’s just the trouble,’ Alex muttered.

  ‘Good night!’

  McFee turned out the light and within minutes was snoring softly.

  The cabin was on an outside deck, with a window. A soft, grey luminance filtered through the thin curtain. Nearly a full moon. He could hear the swish of the wake. In the ceiling above him an air vent rattled. He reached to adjust it and the noise stopped.

  Lorna. Marriage to Kirsty had pushed her to the back of his mind, but she’d always been there.

  Chadwick’s minders had warned him contact with Lorna could be contact with death. And now she was here, maybe just centimetres away. He touched the partition, imagining for a second she was just the other side, breathing, sleeping – making love even.

  He’d been transfixed the first time he saw her, back in 1962. It had been celebration night in a Hampstead pub, a crowd of eighteen-year-olds just finished with school, the wider world beckoning. His attention had been caught by the snick of a billiard ball and there she’d stood, resting her cue, blonde curls tumbling about her face like water over pebbles, blue-grey eyes cocky with confidence.

  For Alex it had been like honey to a bear.

  He’d soon discovered they were from different worlds. In Lorna’s, money was taken for granted. In his own, every penny had to be counted. She was from the sort of old, American stock that had shaped the New World. Alex’s ancestors had slipped through life unnoticed.

  Living then with her English mother, Lorna had mixed with the Hampstead smart-set of socialist lawyers and academics who rode the nuclear disarmament bandwagon. Alex’s circle had been on a different plane where talk was of motorbikes, football and beer.

  Lorna had dressed like Ché Guevara, navy beret over her blonde curls, and taken Alex on protest marches. She had also introduced him to some ‘angry’ friends – anarchists and Trotskyites who favoured revolution through violence. It was their names Roger Chadwick had been after. He’d filled Alex’s ears with stories about ‘people in high places’ fearing British democracy could be destroyed by these thugs.

  Nearby on the ferry the sound of shouts and doors banging pierced the ventilator hiss. Alex lifted his head from the pillow, straining to hear.

  Italian voices. Not hers. He lay back again.

  From the lower bunk, McFee’s snores turned to grunts, followed by a jabber of gibberish as he talked in his sleep. Sounded like ‘chirrup’ repeated over an
d over again. The noise subsided into a mumble and a moan, then suddenly erupted in words that were sharply clear.

  ‘Shuddup! Shuddup will ye!’

  Then a sob.

  McFee snorted. He’d woken himself up. There was the rustle of bedding being rearranged, then silence. A shutter had opened on some torment in his soul, then closed again before Alex could guess what ghosts had frightened the man.

  He returned to the spirits of his own past.

  Betrayal, he thought to himself. That’s how it had been each time with Lorna. Never a betrayal of her though, just of her friends. And there’d been good reasons each time.

  Those anarchists were nothing to do with CND. They’d just wanted to throw petrol bombs at the police. And in Belfast, the men he’d helped get killed – they’d been killers themselves. No reason to be ashamed of what he’d done.

  The trouble was, Lorna’s hunger to follow the action kept leading her out of her depth. She’d hate to hear him say that, but it was true.

  He was remembering so much now. When they’d first kissed, her body was taut as a violin, electric with intensity. He’d had other girls before, but it was Lorna who taught him to love, taught him there was an art to touching a woman.

  Her breasts had been firm and small, hardly filling the palms of his hands. One night on the sofa at her home, her mother safely in bed, Lorna had taken his fingers and guided them to the moist, warm pip between her thighs that unlocked her ecstasy. He’d come in his pants.

  He was becoming aroused at the memory of it.

  Bloody stupid to be lying here like this. Should’ve spoken to her in the restaurant. Should be putting the bad bits of the past behind them and reliving the good ones.

  So long ago, yet still so close, so vivid. The perfume of her creamy skin. The half moan, half cry of pleasure, her cheek against his, sticky with sweat, as she came and came under his humping in the Belfast hotel room.

  Damn Lorna! For thirty years she had lodged in his soul. She’d warned him she would. Told him she knew their lives would always be linked. That one day even, he would weep by her grave.

  Load of rubbish. The fantasy of a fanciful mind. Yet, it hadn’t been rubbish . . . She was still with him.

  What would it be when they came face to face again? There was so much to forgive. Too much to forget. Would it be war, or peace?