Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  Delia also shed light on the possible significance of this “decagon”: she believed it to be a relic known as the Isfahan decagon, now more than five hundred years old. If so, and if the various historical accounts of it were to be believed, it represented a highpoint of medieval Islamic geometric design and, it would appear, mathematics. The geometry of the “girih” tiles as they were known involved an advanced form of mathematics not discovered by the West until the 1970s, but the decagon took it a step further. Not only was the tiling “non-periodic” (meaning there was no repeating pattern – a pattern of no patterns in other words, and thus “chaotic” in one sense), but it was of a far more complex kind, and the design was more intricate than anything yet created. And on top of that, the design, if extended out far enough, was believed, or rumoured, to contain hidden images, including a portrait and even a treasure map. If that were true, the decagon represented not only the first known example of non-periodic tiling containing such images (whatever their nature), but probably also the only known example. (And it raised questions such as was its genius essentially mathematical or artistic? Was it encountered by pure luck or by clever, premeditated calculation?)

  Delia doubted whether any of the decagon’s possessors – prior to Drayle at least – were aware of its true significance, and surmised they traded it for its face value only: for its craftsmanship and silver and gemstones.

  One thing was obvious to Ruart: this decagon was enormously valuable and in the context of Drayle, there was your motive right there.

  Another, more tangential, thought occurred to him: if the decagon were human, would you say it had had an unlucky life (having been shipwrecked, traded for opium, sunk and stolen) or a lucky one (with all its narrow escapes)? That was using “luck” in its colloquial sense of course, because as Ruart well knew, there was no such thing as luck. Who we are is simply a result of everything that’s ever happened to us. Nothing more, nothing less. You’re not lucky or unlucky. You’re only ever just the result of a series of events. You’re only ever just you.

  More importantly though, he now had his ‘sparky coincidence’. Drayle, the decagon, the Destino, the missing couple presumed murdered… and their friends, up there in Broome. Including one of them in particular. Lena. A Russian…

  The connections were too big to ignore and he decided to head back up to Broome the next day.

  The next morning, Wednesday, before heading out to the airport to catch yet another flight, he saw in the paper there’d been a further development in the case of the missing police officers.

  Mikkel Backstrom, 33, had been found in Sydney the previous day.

  Dead.

  His body had been discovered in a park, and it was believed he’d died of a drug overdose (technically, he’d drowned in his own vomit). According to the Broome police who were asked to comment, given that the other two police officers were still missing in the area, there was no ascertainable link.

  No ascertainable link? Ruart doubted that very much. Of course there was a link.

  As far as Ruart was concerned though, the stranger this business got, the more the dogged nose of accusation pointed to one man. Dominique Drayle. And he was going to find Drayle if it was the last thing he did. And as he said it to himself, he meant it. No exaggeration.

  That afternoon, up in Broome, he was on the Diamond Moon again, on the pretext that he couldn’t find Walman (which was true) and that he needed to ask a few more questions about the yacht (preparation for which had, unfortunately, involved more sleep-depriving research the previous night to shore up his cover as a boat broker).

  Brian was once again hard at work on the Marzocco, and offered Ruart an espresso (which Ruart silently dedicated to Éric). In fact Brian and Diane were packing up, about to leave and head back to Perth. So Ruart had arrived just in time to learn more about Lena, Brian’s ex, and her missing (or rather, as it now looked, dead) friend Lydia. He had to steer the conversation there first, without raising suspicion. Brian made it easy.

  ‘And the other boat, the Seaking…’ Ruart was saying, ‘…You said, maybe, that your ex-wife and her, er…’

  ‘Lena,’ said Brian, ‘is such a piece of work. My God.’

  The comment hung there for a moment. Brian looked at Diane, reassuringly Ruart supposed. Ruart looked at Brian, inviting him to expand.

  ‘From Russia,’ Brian went on, ‘which probably tells you something. From Siberia, there you go. From a place called… what was it?… Nov… Novosibirsk, I think. She and that Lydia are thick as thieves, you know. Lydia, that’s the one that’s missing.’

  Ruart had already decided to say nothing about the discovery of what was probably her body.

  ‘Both Russians so I s’pose it figures,’ Brian added.

  He and Diane then had an argument about whether Lydia was Ukrainian or Russian. Brian reckoned she came from Kursk, on the Russian side of the border. Diane pointed out that Lydia’s boyfriend Aleks was a Ukrainian. Brian said Aleks was a fuckwit.

  On his way back to the beach in the tender, Ruart persuaded the endlessly talking Tomas to take a detour via the Seaking. No-one was home. He cursed himself for having neglected to follow up this lead earlier. He’d had the occasion to do so on Monday when Brian had effectively let slip the connection between the missing girl – a Russian (or Ukrainian) – and the Diamond Moon. He was fixated on trying to find Bob Walman, and now he may have missed his opportunity. That’s the thing with coincidences, they’re never expected. Which was why, as a cop, if you were any good, you had to ask a lot of stupid, seemingly irrelevant questions. And on this occasion at least, he’d slipped up.

  And then the plot “thickened”, as the English say.

  In the papers the next day, Thursday, it was reported that the bodies of the remaining missing police officers from Perth – Dean Howard, forensics officer, and Travis Seward, police pilot – had been recovered from Roebuck Bay in Broome. According to the Senior Sergeant Brad Hanson of the Broome police, they were participating in a suspected boating adventure involving alcohol – and as some would say, were out on a ‘bender’ – and there were no suspicious circumstances.

  No suspicious circumstances! Well maybe not to them. Not to the Broome police. What sort of people did the police employ in this country? In any event, Ruart decided to give Roy and Lena one last try before he gave up. This time he managed to borrow his own tinnie.

  And this time, they were there. As he approached, Roy was scrubbing the deck. And Lena…

  Oh la vache.

  Lena was sunning herself, topless, rubbing tanning oil into her brown… so very brown, beautiful skin.

  Ruart felt like some sort of voyeur, as he cut the engine and drifted in. Like he was dropping round for a ‘perv’ as the Australians seemed to call it. Luckily you could blush as much as you liked in the tropical glare and no-one would ever notice. Which was just as well, because when they invited him on board and he launched into his yachting spiel with Roy, Lena made no attempt to cover up. They didn’t make it easy, these girls, for a cop just trying to do his job. Especially a French cop! A French cop who knew his croissants and jam and his breasts and his tanning oil.

  Eventually the sailorly chitchat petered out and it was time for him to leave. Lena, finally, put her bikini top on and joined them. Her top was small enough to still cause him problems but it was, literally, better than nothing.

  It was now or never.

  ‘Brian, on the Diamond Moon, he told me that you know Lydia and Aleksei. Aleks.’

  They were looking back at him blankly. Not sadly exactly, but freeze-framed – it was as if someone had just paused the film. He actually had to blink to convince himself that it wasn’t his brain that had frozen.

  ‘The missing couple,’ he added. ‘That must be very… terrible for you. The… lack of… knowledge.’

  He looked at Lena, looked into her eyes, but there was nothing. Nothing, that is, but a wall.

  ‘It is,’ said Roy, turning to L
ena. ‘Lydia is Lena’s…’ Roy seemed to be waiting for her to finish his sentence. Eventually she did.

  ‘She was… She’s my best friend, yes, so… I am very worried.’

  Was that a mistake? “She was”? Had she heard something the papers hadn’t? He made a mental note and pushed it just a little further.

  ‘And the police still have nothing?’

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘It is difficult, no?’ he went on. ‘Wanting to do something but… you do not know what. You must want to drive out there yourself, but I suppose…’

  There was an odd silence, again for no obvious reason, then Roy suddenly jumped in, a little defensively he imagined.

  ‘It’s certainly a difficult time. And now we have to go to Vanuatu…’

  Ruart didn’t miss the sharp look from Lena.

  ‘… but at least,’ Roy went on, ‘you know,… the police, you have to assume, are doing―’

  Lena interrupted. ‘And of course you cannot interrupt police investigations, you don’t want to be getting in the way. But we thank you for your concern, Mr Vincent. It is difficult… For all of us.’

  It was the name Ruart had been using all week, the name he always used in such situations. (Réunion was different. It was French, he’d assumed the clout that came with being a Paris cop may have helped him there. Clearly not.) The surname Vincent was common enough to be unmemorable, but not so common as to smack of invention (like Dubois, for example). And Vincent was also a Christian name, which was an advantage: if the surname was interchangeable with the first name, it maximised forgettability.

  ‘Call me Robert,’ he said, using the French pronunciation.

  ‘You should be more careful,’ Lena said, indicating his face.

  ‘Er, yes, I know, it was a little climbing accident.’

  ‘They can be nasty, those little climbing accidents.’

  ‘They can, and I should have been more careful. As you say. OK. So. You’re going to Vanuatu? That’s so great. Are you sailing there?’

  ‘No no, we’re flying,’ said Roy. And then another pause, something was out of alignment.

  ‘Well then I had better let you… get on with things then,’ said Ruart. ‘It’s a holiday?’

  ‘Well we had better get on with things, yes’ Lena said. ‘Nice meeting you, enjoy the rest of your trip. And don’t forget to be more careful… Robert.’

  It was a good attempt at the correct pronunciation, but the look she threw him was one he couldn’t decipher. Surely she couldn’t have known his real name, he hadn’t used it since Réunion. Was she something more than a Russian trophy wife? In the circumstances he had to assume she was. Her connection with this Lydia, the awkward silences, the comments about having to be careful… But either way, she was a mystery. A mystery for sure.

  He spent the rest of the day poking around, looking for more clues, more evidence, getting nowhere, wishing he was back on the Seaking asking Lena and Roy more questions. He wandered around the town centre, passing endless shops offering tacky souvenirs, Kimberley tours and fishing trips, camel rides… There were pearl traders reminding him that this was indeed the Pearl Coast – the front of one shop was decorated with a gigantic mural depicting naked mermaids prompting distracting visions of Lena and her tanning oil. He bought an orange t-shirt which announced “Broome: It’s One Pearl Of A Town”, he recognized the slogan, although it didn’t occur to him until afterwards that he’d only bought it to help convince Marine that he really had travelled to Broome. Orange wasn’t really his colour anyway.

  All this foraging, this casting about, was really only his way of killing time before deciding on his next move. Deep down, he knew what to do, but it took him until the next morning to admit it to himself.

  He knew the answer as soon as he woke up. There was only one option. The Lena-Lydia thing, it didn’t make sense. Something about it. Something about Lena. And as if to shine a spotlight on his suspicions, the morning’s paper made it public: a body had been found and it was confirmed to be that of the missing woman, Lydia Korolenko.

  It was staring him in the face. Lena had something to do with Lydia’s death. And she probably had something to do with Drayle too, given the link between the Destino and the Prospero’s Dancer.

  If Lena had gone to Vanuatu, that was where he’d have to go as well. Because that was where he’d stand a chance of finding Drayle or a clue to his whereabouts. It was far from a sure thing, but for the first time in his life, Ruart acted on a gut instinct without running it past his head first. (Was he turning into an instinctive cop at last? Like on all those TV shows?). Because whichever way you looked at it, there were simply too many coincidences.

  And these coincidences, they weren’t just ‘sparky’. They were incandescent.

  * * *

  ‘Cabin crew disarm doors and cross check.’

  It dawned on him, preparing to disembark in Sydney, that this was possibly the very same flight taken by the murdered forensics officer, Mikkel Backstrom, precisely a week earlier. Could Backstrom have been running from someone? From Drayle, or one of his men? And what about the other two dead police officers? Did Drayle’s tentacles really spread that far? Across the continents and the oceans? Could Ruart really stop such a man? Trip him up?

  But he, Ruart, had come too far to turn back now. He was “in too deep” as the English liked to say. But deep was good. Deep was where you had to be if you wanted to find a man like Drayle. Because men like Drayle, it was what they did, they plumbed the depths. The depths of humanity. And Ruart was more than happy to meet him there, in those depths.

  For sure.

  67. 17° 44' 31" S 168° 18' 51" E

  (Grand Hotel and Casino, Port Vila)

  Ten minutes later

  1.30pm Vanuatu Time (02:30 UTC)

  Saturday, 26 October

  There was something about the noise coming from Room 404 that made him stop. He should never have stopped – just stopped his ears – but then again would it have made any difference? They would have come for him, in all likelihood, whatever he’d done.

  Roy was on his way back to their room at the Grand Hotel and Casino after a long, frustrating morning. Frustrating, every second of it, starting with the moment he’d woken up and discovered Lena wasn’t there. Not in the bed, not in the bathroom, nowhere, and early morning walks weren’t exactly her thing (he’d woken with the sun, just after 5am, so, yes, early was what it was). His first thought was she’d gone over the balcony and he actually went out there and looked over the edge, terrified, truly expecting to see her crumpled, naked body on the pavement below by the pool, and in a bloody pool of her own. But the pavement was bare. All that greeted him was the view. It was a big view, a GoPro, wide angle lens view of the oblivious, preening waters of the brightening bay, but he hardly noticed it.

  Even though, as he assured himself, Lena was a curious creature, and there was no shortage of exotic sights and smells nearby (the fish market for example) – exotic, especially for a girl from the frozen Siberian plains – by mid-morning he was worried again, as worried as he’d been when he’d stepped onto the balcony hours earlier. And then he finally got a text message reply. Saying she was shopping. Zipping his fury, he responded politely and spent the rest of the morning wandering, expecting to bump into her and get things ‘back on track’, get the bad taste out of his mouth. Because there was no doubt about it, Lena had been acting strangely ever since they’d landed in Port Vila the day before. Distracted. She’d never been to Vanuatu and by rights she should have been, if not goggle-eyed, at least a little bit enthusiastic, a touch curious. But it was as if she still hadn’t arrived.

  He shouldn’t have even been on the fourth floor – their room was on the fifth – and he certainly shouldn’t have been walking past Room 404. Was it just bad luck? That his preoccupied state had haphazardly led him there? Or, deep down, did he know something he didn’t realise he knew?

  Sound was easily escaping the
room because the door, Roy noticed, hadn’t closed properly, obstructed by the end of a towel or bath mat. (Another piece of bad luck, or was this all connected?) The noise itself was barely noticeable, and, at least at first, unrecognizable. Barely human, but possibly a well-disguised sigh or cough. Barely audible. But it stopped him dead in his tracks. And as he stood there, outside Room 404, he heard it again and this time he knew what it was. He had, after all, heard it many times before. Heard Lena grunting into a pillow. On the other occasions though, without exception, he’d been in the same room at the time.

  Roy didn’t hesitate. He pushed open the door to Room 404, stepped over the damp towel and walked straight in. He didn’t have to walk far. After passing a brightly-lit, rumpled bathroom (well-used), the short corridor, in two or three short strides, gave way to the main room, the ‘bedroom’, and in it, the queen-size bed, and on top of it, the throbbing fleshy tangle of arched back and splayed limbs, looking like a multi-legged brown ‘thing’ dragged up from the ocean depths, writhing on the deck of a boat.

  Lena, though, was easily recognizable, despite being on her stomach and partially hidden by the not insignificant mass of flesh crushing down on top of her. Her head was turned in Roy’s direction, with the side of her face now pushed into a flattened pillow, the same pillow her mouth had obviously been jammed into moments earlier (a girl had to breathe). Lena was naked of course, and between her well separated legs (she should have been a ballerina), thrusting his clenching buttocks in the forward and back yet circular motion reminiscent of a coupling rod on a steam train was a tanned, thick-set, black-haired man, his triumphant bare arse hungrily grabbing centre stage and his clutching arm muscles pulsing to the rhythm and impressively defined, all chiaroscuro, darkness with light – like a painting he was, he was like a painting, this latter-day Caravaggio-comes-to-town…