The doctor wasn’t meant to have been killed, just given a little face-alteration of his own to treasure, to really test his facial reconstruction skills (or those of his colleagues, he could hardly have operated on himself could he, especially without eyes!). But death or disfigurement, it was immaterial now. Nothing that was done to Fischer could make up for what Fischer had done to Drayle’s face. True, the point was that he no longer be recognizable (no problem on that score, thank you Dr. Fischer!). But with the swelling and the asymmetry… he looked like a freak.
And Asian? Since when was that in the brief? Asian. And now he looked like the Korean.
It was as if Fischer had done it on purpose. And for that – even the suspicion of that, it was what it looked like and that was all you could ever go on, wasn’t it? – for that, Fischer had forfeited his life…
One small consolation was his new identity appeared to be ‘taking’ (to use a medical analogy). He had a shiny new passport displaying his shiny new face (and oh how it was shiny) and a shiny new name too: Edward Lang (they should have made it Lee to complete the joke) – Edward Lang from London, the city that asked no questions.
He swallowed two Panadeine capsules with a glass of water. They helped, although imagining how Fischer died helped more.
The only real issue remaining was whether he was still attractive to women. He certainly hadn’t noticed many admiring glances on his way over from Bangkok. One or two if he was lucky, and from freaks, he could safely assume – attracted to pigfaces with squinty eyes and dark hair. Freaks, and now he was one of them.
The knock on the door would provide the first real test (Laska didn’t count, given the absence of consent). Would the person doing the knocking change her mind once she laid eyes on him? He knew, despite her circumstances, she would turn up. But would she still love him?
The mirror wasn’t so sure.
And then there were two sharp knocks on the door – just as the first sunbeams cleared the low ridge behind his hotel and hit the mirror-like waters of Vila Bay.
66. 33° 57' 0" S 151° 10' 37" E / 17° 55' 51" S 122° 13' 2" E
(Sydney Airport / Cable Beach, Broome)
1.15pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (02:15 UTC)
Saturday, 26 October
The jarring bump and shudder of the landing seemed worse than it was, but only because he’d been deep in thought. They were down. Another runway, another town. He hadn’t travelled this much in his life. And Sydney, wasn’t that the opposite side of the world to Paris? Its… antimeridian? its antipodes? It had to be close. He could hardly be further away if he tried. In terms of distance from everywhere though, Broome was hard to beat. And it was Broome that he was thinking of when the plane touched down. Because the last six days had been most… educational.
They’d given him a lot to think about. Who? The last six days. And them.
* * *
Six days earlier, on Sunday 20 October, Ruart arrived in Broome. He’d chosen to stay at the Blue Seas Resort at Cable Beach, supposedly one of the best, although it had really been the name that had appealed to him. It was only later that he’d seen the baobab trees on the hotel’s website – baobabs would forever give him a bad feeling, ever since the incident in the Jardin de L’État at least, and if he’d seen the website photos before he’d booked, he would have chosen somewhere else. At the resort’s reception, on his arrival, he struck up a conversation with a member of staff – a colourful Australian girl, literally, with flaming red hair, emerald green eyes and heavily freckled skin. She had none of the sophisticated airs of the blonde in Saint-Denis, but she was unbelievably friendly and had one of the loudest, broadest, strangest accents he’d ever come across: she brought to mind some beautiful, screeching, tropical bird.
The plane hadn’t landed in Broome until 6pm, just after sunset – fifteen and a half hours after leaving Saint-Denis. Ruart was having some trouble getting his head around the travelling times and distances in this part of the world (it made him even more tired just thinking about it) and so he decided to take it easy that evening and postpone the legwork until the following morning. And enjoy his first night on the “Pearl Coast” as they called it.
He rang his wife Marine. It was odd: he’d only been away two days – less if you took into account the time difference – yet already she was beginning to feel like a stranger. Was it her or was it him? Or was it the distance? Could distance alone do that? This time she didn’t ask about where he was at all, not a single question about Broome or Australia. Or perhaps she could tell there was stuff he wasn’t telling her (such as the unmentionable incident in Saint-Denis) and she was getting him back? No, he decided, it was simply the distance, it affected everything somehow. There was something Einsteinian about it.
Later, before he got into bed, he was brushing up on his English and glancing through a local paper – it was the previous day’s, Saturday. Big local news, it seemed, was the naming of a couple who’d gone missing in the desert: a Russian couple, it was reported, tourists. Aleksei Denisovsky, 37, and his girlfriend Lydia Korolenko, 28.
A warning, as far as he was concerned, not to be a stupid tourist.
The next morning, on the Monday, the first thing he did was establish that the Diamond Moon was indeed in Broome; that it was moored just off the ocean side of the peninsula (although not as close as it sounded: the yacht was nearly five kilometres away, as well as being about four hundred metres out from Cable Beach – he actually entertained a very short-lived idea that he might swim out to it). He was told he’d probably be able to hitch a ride out to it in a small boat (an aluminium dinghy or “tinnie” as they called it here).
After a buffet breakfast of satisfying percolated coffee, and pastries that looked deceptively like croissants (he was French, he was not just entitled but obligated to think like this; in fact they were perfectly edible if you thought of them as bagels), he got going. Out into the sunshine and a surprising heat for ten in the morning – the girl from the day before wasn’t around, but the trees were full of her kind. He ignored the baobabs and fired up his hire car, a red Hyundai Getz.
First stop was the harbour master’s office down on the point. Once there, he managed to get into contact with the Diamond Moon over the office radio. He spoke to the yacht’s captain who conveyed a jovial friendliness that seemed to belie his English accent. Ruart explained that he was a yacht enthusiast and buyer and was interested in either buying the yacht or at least speaking to someone there about where he might find a similar one. He was told he would be very welcome to come aboard, and he was instructed to make his way to the southern end of Cable Beach where he’d be picked up. The people in this part of the world were all so friendly!
(It now occurred to him, he may have made some mistakes, but if there was one thing on this trip he could congratulate himself over, it was the standard of his English. All those years of hard work – and American DVDs – were paying off.)
Half an hour later he found himself skimming over the cobalt blue waters of the Indian Ocean in a jetboat (the yacht’s tender), away from the white sands of Cable Beach and the red sandstone cliffs of the headland. Blue, white and red: a gigantic French flag – a drapeau tricolore – and he was in the middle of it. All very appropriate, because the headland was known as Gantheaume Point. He could scarcely believe it when he read the night before that Gantheaume Point, which had been named after the French admiral Joseph Gantheaume, had been given its name by Nicholas Baudin in 1801 – the very same French explorer whose ship had deposited Bory de Sainte-Vincente in Mauritius (on the very same expedition). For Ruart it was another in a series of beautiful connections. Not quite another ‘sparky coincidence’, but he always knew he was on the right track when these connections began popping up all over the place. He couldn’t explain why, but that was the way it always worked.
And there it was at last. The Diamond Moon. It was enormous, especially in comparison with the boats around it. Out there on the water, in
the tropical sun, its silver paint was dazzling. True to its name, it looked like a gigantic rock of a diamond, jutting out of the ocean. Like the tip of some precious, unmeltable iceberg…
He was welcomed aboard with the same friendliness he was extended over the radio. The captain greeted him – James Weston, call me Trim – and he was shown around the yacht. It was about as modern as you could get with sleek, metallic surfaces, flawless wooden decking and three levels: upper deck, lower deck and “down below”. “Trim”, who turned out to be Australian despite his English accent, was tall – well over 2 metres – and had a lot of ducking to do. On his tour, Ruart came across the other crew: two fit-looking young guys in boardshorts, Benoît and Tomas (who had picked Ruart up in the tender). Benoît, who was French, appeared moody, and despite being Ruart’s compatriot, had nothing much to say in any language. Tomas, a Dane, made up for Benoît’s surly silence with a mouth as big as a shark’s (quelle bouche!) which he used à fond, to the max, with his non-stop chatter. There was Felipe, a Spaniard with a fashionable nine-day growth sculpted around his chin and Nadine, a honey-bronzed Portuguese girl with auburn hair and large breasts. Ruart was able to guess almost straight away – through some pretty obvious body language – that Nadine was having it off with both the captain and Tomas, and that it was no state secret.
In the kitchen, or rather ‘the galley’, they came across one of the guests. Brian was a tanned, burly, bear of a man with a crew-cut and Popeye-sized forearms. Friendly, though. Like everyone, Ruart observed, except the Frenchman. And he couldn’t help but notice the coffee machine Brian was operating: it was a Marzocco.
So there was the Marzocco!
Brian’s wife, Diane, joined them. Diane was skinny, elfin and sweet with mousey hair and lovely, light-blue eyes the colour of shallow rock pools. She was wearing a see-through white dress over a black bikini and her skin was pale for someone on a yachting holiday. Ruart wondered if it was because she was spending all of her time in her cabin, but something told him that if she was, it wasn’t sex she was sacrificing her tan for. Or at least not sex with Brian.
As for Bob Walman himself: he’d left with his girlfriend for Perth two days earlier. Missed him again.
So Ruart chatted with Trim, the captain, but learnt little that he didn’t already know. Walman had bought the Diamond Moon in Réunion in early September, but Trim hadn’t had anything to do with it until he’d been instructed by Walman to pick it up in Bali and sail it to Broome. That was two weeks ago, he said. Since then they’d been on a trip to the Lacepede Islands – Bob, his girlfriend Peta, Brian and Diane on the Diamond Moon with Lena and Roy on the Seaking. Who?
Brian piped up and told Ruart about his Russian ex-wife Lena and her boyfriend Roy and how the other couple who were meant to have been with them on the Seaking – they were originally supposed to have been a party of eight – had disappeared.
‘Disappeared?’ Ruart asked.
‘Yeah. It’s been in all the papers. Lydia and, ah…’
‘Yes. Aleksei…’
‘Aleks, yeah. You read about it then. A bit of a worry, that. We’ve all just… been praying they turn up somewhere.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Tidy little shiner, by the way.’
‘Excuse me?’
Brian pointed to the side of his own face. Meaning Ruart’s face. The bruise. Ruart had completely forgotten about it. He had his excuse ready, though. ‘Yes, it was a, er, small climbing accident, back in―’
‘Not one of the local girls, I trust,’ Brian said with a smirk.
‘Er… no―’
‘Don’t worry mate, I know you wouldn’t tell us if it was!’
‘That’s true.’ Ruart forced a laugh. ‘Yes, but, I er, I want to ask about the other boat, about the, er… the er…’
‘You mean the Seaking? It’s Roy’s. He bought it from Bob.’
‘Ah I see, and Bob. Maybe I can speak to him? Maybe I will go to Perth.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s where he went. So you’re, what, looking to buy yourself?’
Ruart and his bruise flew to Perth that afternoon.
But he couldn’t find Bob Walman there either.
He made enquiries at the head office of Kensington Mines Limited, and was told that Walman had just left. He’d been in a board meeting and Ruart had missed him by half an hour. Walman’s secretary – or personal assistant – told him he was probably at lunch somewhere and his diary was empty for that afternoon, she wasn’t sure what his plans were… But he was the CEO, surely… No, she was very sorry, Mr Walman was a very private person, she could leave a message on his phone, but that was all…
He was starting to wonder if this Bob Walman actually existed, whether he wasn’t just a construct – even more so after spending almost two fruitless days in Perth – because by the end of it he’d still drawn a big blank. No-one could tell him whether or not Walman was even in the country.
Two noteworthy things happened however, during his time in Perth.
On Tuesday morning, he noticed an article of interest in the local newspaper. More disappearances. This time it was three police – a pilot and two forensics personnel – who’d vanished in Broome. The mention of the words “disappearance” and “Broome” piqued his interest immediately. And then the clincher: they’d been investigating the disappearance of the couple in the desert…
The connections were pouring in now, thick and fast.
The second noteworthy event was Ruart’s phone call to the Préfecture on Tuesday evening. He rang early, 6.30pm, which was 12.30pm in Paris – he wanted to get them before the lunchtime diaspora and the inevitable demis of Bordeaux. Conversations in the office were never quite as incisive in the afternoons. (Nor in the mornings before 10am for that matter, prior to the pandemic coffee intake.) When he heard what his Parisian colleague had to tell him, it became clear that his effort to ring earlier rather than later had been amply rewarded.
Paris had learnt from the Western Australian police two things that weren’t in the papers: the first, connected with the couple’s disappearance, was the discovery of an old ship in the desert, a galleon. In the desert! Initially it had been assumed it was Spanish (or a hoax). The name carved into the badly deteriorated wood of the stern appeared to be Destino En Distancia, but a more careful examination – in particular of the worn, right-hand side of the letter “n” in “En” – revealed it actually to be Destino Em Distancia, the “Em” making it Portuguese. And preliminary investigations suggested it was no hoax. The authorities though were keeping it all a secret for now, they didn’t want to attract treasure hunters and it still needed to be authenticated. It was potentially sensational – with current hunches placing it there around 1560, over forty years before the first known European landing in Australia (being by a Dutchman, Janszoon, in 1606).
More important, from Ruart’s point of view, was another discovery. Because the second thing the Préfecture had gleaned from the WA police was that in the vicinity of the old ship, a body and parts of another body had been found, and that the bodies in question were believed to be those of the missing couple.
And that wasn’t all. Ruart’s section at the Préfecture had obviously been busy (which made for a refreshing change) because they’d also found out more from the scholar at the British Museum. Delia someone or other – a woman, no wonder, women always worked harder. This Delia had, in turn, done a considerable degree of cross-referencing with a separate researcher based in Lisbon. During his phone call with the Préfecture Ruart took copious notes, his interest gradually mounting, as he moved from a state of initial indifference tinged with impatience to one of excitement, and finally to one of those “eureka” moments that kept him in his chosen career. To summarize what he was told:
It was difficult to confirm the existence of a Portuguese ship with the name Destino Em Distancia because the Portuguese at the time were extremely secretive about their trade routes and because the vast majority of their recor
ds were destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755.
Recently however (in what some – not Ruart – might call a “fortunate coincidence”), a record of a secret voyage in 1560 by a previously unknown ship, referred to as “the Destino”, had been unearthed in Lisbon, (literally unearthed, as it had apparently been buried at the time of the earthquake).
There was no indication of the Destino’s fate, but one theory was that if it really had ended up in Western Australia – and in the desert there, possibly along an ancient watercourse – it could well have been on the way to Goa and/or Portugal’s recent acquisition (as of 1557), Macau.
The Destino, which appeared to have been under the command of Captain Gaspar Duarte Dourado De Lacerda, may have sailed as far south as it did because it was blown off course, or was on a secret mission, or was simply on a frolic of its own. Perhaps this Gaspar Duarte decided to find the great southern land himself.
There was reference to an object carrying the ship’s instructions, whatever they were. The instructions have since been lost, but the object matched the description of the “decagon” which Drayle had recovered from the Prospero’s Dancer. Delia was firmly convinced they were one and the same (and, needless to say, the Préfecture by now had Ruart’s full attention).
Assuming all this to be the case, it meant that the decagon had somehow made its way from Western Australia in 1560 to Macau (from where the Prospero’s Dancer sailed with it in 1838). It was entirely conceivable that the shipwrecked sailors themselves, or perhaps local aborigines, carried it part of the way, and that passing sailors carried it the rest, possibly via the outpost of Portuguese Timor and then on through another of Portugal’s colonies in the region, Malacca.
Delia claimed there was evidence the decagon was owned by a Portuguese merchant and his family in Macau for much of the period from the late 1500s to the early 1800s (and used, predominantly, for storing spices). It was traded for opium with the English just prior to the Opium wars.
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