by Wilbur Smith
‘I still don’t get why they’d throw away valuable jewellery,’ Xander muttered, inspecting our find. ‘These rings are heavy. They must be worth a bomb. Why not just sell them?’
‘That’s unknowable,’ Amelia replied. ‘Though symbolic acts are a thing.’
I was stowing my kit, double-checking the straps very carefully indeed. Amelia was looking the rings over closely. ‘The hallmarks match, meaning they were made by the same jeweller, which supports my theory.’
‘How much do you think they’re worth?’ I asked.
‘Together, a few thousand pounds,’ said Amelia. ‘Maybe even as much as ten! Great, eh?’
I had a plan for my share. Raising awareness of the plight of the coral reefs costs money. I wanted to contribute to Mum’s work, but since the only cash I’d ever had came from her I’d just be giving her back her own resources. Now I could actually add to her much depleted – thanks, ‘Dad’ – war chest. I’d not yet told Mum this was what I intended to do. The idea was I’d hand over whatever I found at the end of the trip. And now I had something to give. A warm glow spread through me as I thought how happy she’d be when she realised that’s what all the detecting had been about.
‘It’s a good start,’ I said.
‘Because it’s a good plan.’ Xander shrugged modestly.
‘Self-evidently,’ said Amelia.
Turning to Pete I said, ‘Any idea when you might have that lucky feeling again?’
6.
We returned to Ras Nungwi and helped Pete sort out the boat before stepping ashore. Even after we’d tied up to the jetty and put everything down in the hold for the night, he fussed about wiping down the controls, seats and surfaces with a big chamois leather. This just made me feel worse about my carelessness earlier. He sensed as much: as we walked up the gangplank he put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Jack. A split boat seam can be mended. Think about what went right today.’
I saw my face reflected in his dark glasses, blinking, and the thought went through my head: if I’d trashed something of ‘Dad’s’ he wouldn’t have let me forget about it for weeks.
It was Pete who blurted out our success to Mum, as soon as we found her. ‘Not one but two rings, on the same dive. Platinum or white gold. Didn’t I tell you I’d take them to good spots?’
There had been more at stake in our search for him than I realised, I saw.
‘Bright and early tomorrow?’ asked Pete.
‘Stay for dinner. Celebrate,’ said Mum.
Pete mumbled something about errands he had to run.
‘We won’t actually be eating for an hour and a half,’ Amelia pointed out. ‘Plenty of time to do all that and come back.’
Once we’d persuaded him to return later, I headed to my room for a shower, and when I got back to the beachfront bit of the hotel Amelia, who’d beaten me to it, was talking with Mum and Xander about Mum’s coral reef destruction research. I arrived to hear Amelia say, ‘Oh yeah, fan coral. It looks a bit like marbled ham. Decimated by sixty per cent?’
‘You’d be interested in what I dug up online,’ said Mum. ‘I’ll get my laptop.’
I hadn’t yet sat down, so I offered to fetch it for her. She thanked me and handed me the key to her room. I ambled off through the palm trees, sand dusting the boardwalks, scratchy beneath my bare feet.
On my way I passed a young girl, no more than eight years old, carrying a pile of freshly laundered towels. She stuck in my mind as, when I entered Mum’s room, I came upon another girl who, though not as small as the first, was definitely younger than me.
She’d turned Mum’s bed down and was placing a wrapped chocolate on the pointlessly large pile of pillows. I waited awkwardly for her to leave. That she was younger than me somehow made the situation worse. She did a lot of smiling and nodding and saying nothing as she backed out of the door.
Mum’s laptop was on her dressing-table/desk. When I disconnected the mouse the screen came to life. I would never have intentionally invaded her privacy by looking at what was on it, but something on the screen caught my eye before I could look away. It was a new message box. The image was small, floating at the top left of the screen in front of whatever Mum had been reading, a headshot accompanied by some text.
The words read: Hard to say exactly. It’s only a short flight, I know, but I’ve a proper mess to sort out here first. Believe me, I’m doing my damnedest. This meeting is as important to me as it is to you and him.
Out of context this message didn’t mean much, and I like to think I wouldn’t have read it all if I hadn’t first noticed the face of the man I assume sent it, hovering next to the text. The headshot was all of a centimetre wide, so the man’s eyes were little more than pinpricks, but something about the set of them – wide-spaced in his face, watchful under a determined brow – together with his square chin, drew me up short. I couldn’t work out why to begin with. I recognised him somehow. I’m good with faces: I tend not to forget them. But I’d never met this guy, as far as I could remember. And yet I knew him. His face, or a version of it, swam in every reflective surface I’d ever seen.
This meeting is as important to me as it is to you and him.
I shut the laptop and carried it in a daze back to Mum. She didn’t blink at the message, just clicked it shut and got on with showing Amelia the coral reef research papers she’d dredged up. I’d already tuned out. I was thinking about Mum’s earlier promise, when I asked her to tell me who my real father was. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s time,’ she’d said. When would that be?
For some reason I couldn’t get the words hard to say exactly out of my head. I’ve a proper mess to sort out here first also reverberated, and so did it’s only a short flight. Mum had suggested this Zanzibar holiday to help us get away from everything, or at least that’s what she’d said.
Had she in fact been bringing us closer to the man who sent that message? To ask her I’d have to let on that I’d read it. Though I hadn’t meant to intrude, I didn’t want to admit I had and risk losing her trust in me.
‘You’re a lot of fun this evening,’ said Xander, turning to me. He’d also obviously lost interest in Mum and Amelia’s coral-cataloguing conversation.
‘Sorry, yeah. Miles away.’
‘I could see that. What are you thinking about so hard?’
‘Kids,’ I said. I hadn’t planned to. I just blurted it out.
‘Eh?’
‘They employ kids in this hotel, doing the laundry, cleaning the rooms. I just saw two girls who work here, both younger than me.’
Xander nodded. ‘There was a boy scrabbling about in the flowerbed out front when my cab pulled up. I thought he must have lost something. But he was digging weeds. He was tiny. Eight or nine at most.’
Amelia took a breath. I’ve heard her do so a million times. Generally, it’s a sign she’s going to set me straight on something. Now was no exception.
‘You realise kids our age have it rougher than us all over the place. We’re the exception, not the rule?’
‘Sure, but –’
‘The chambermaids and gardeners they employ here should still be in school, but many kids are even worse off. Those boys and girls we saw digging with their bare hands in the Congolese mines, for example. Remember how hopelessly exploited they were? Well, even they are lucky compared to some.’
‘How?’ asked Xander.
‘Most of the world’s nastiest conflicts involve child soldiers one way or another. Theirs has to be the bleakest existence. All sorts of evil gangs and militia and even state armies force kids our age and younger to run chores for soldiers, man checkpoints themselves, act as spies and in the worst cases fight on the front lines. It’s a fact: kids are pretty much used as cannon fodder, all over the place. For example, in Somalia, just up the mainland coast, there are children fighting for the government and every other warring faction, including the dreaded Al-Shabaab. They’re Islamic terrorists,’ she said, second-guessing
my blank look. ‘Jihadist fundamentalists, linked to Al-Qaeda.’
I looked out across the terrace, twinkling with fairy lights now, while Amelia expanded on the dreadful conflict in Somalia. She talked of the country’s problem with pirates, so desperate that they’d risk attacking international boats protected by armed guards.
Beyond the terrace lay the shifting surface of the sea, studded with reflected stars. It was a beautiful sight. So tranquil, in fact, that it made it hard to believe what Amelia was saying, though I knew she was telling the truth.
Lounging around in this luxurious resort, eating great food, with only the excitement of diving for treasure to worry about … we had it good, I knew that. But weirdly, although I felt sympathy for all those kids working for a pittance or being forced to fight in wars, I also resented having to think about them at all. Their problems weren’t my fault and I couldn’t do anything to help them, could I?
Luckily Pete arrived at that moment, distracting me. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, which immediately brought my uncle Langdon to mind. Pushing that unwelcome thought aside I said to Xander, ‘Actually, I was thinking about where we might dive tomorrow. What’s the plan, Pete?’
The dive instructor immediately launched in with suggestions. Xander had done his research. He seemed to know the spots as Pete brought them up. Either that, or he was doing his excellent-with-adults thing again.
I could tell he wanted to be as excited by our find as I was, and his enthusiasm spurred mine on: by the end of the evening I’d pushed aside the message I’d seen on Mum’s computer. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I went to bed so keen to get up and dive again in the morning that I found it hard to sleep.
7.
We worked our way around the island’s pristine coastline over the following days, expertly guided by Pete. He dropped us in all the best spots, close to the island’s honeymoon epicentres, and he tended the boat while we searched the seabed, kept a watch on what was happening above the water, warning away the odd speedboat and jet-ski that strayed too close, making sure nothing ran us down when we surfaced.
We searched and searched with our detectors. The three of us egged each other on to do more dives and stay out longer, meaning we spent the maximum possible time we could hunting for treasure in those turquoise shallows.
Why the intensity? Because we were successful again, and success was like a drug: the more we had, the more we wanted.
We never repeated the two-rings-in-one-dive result, and we turned up a hell of a lot of rubbish, from tiny fish hooks so small that only Xander’s detector spotted them, to a complete anchor and chain which somebody must have slung overboard without checking it was attached to the boat. The only way we could retrieve this hulking mess was to swim down to it with a bit of rope, tie that to the chain-end, and swim clear to let Pete winch it up into the launch.
He wasn’t best pleased to see the rusty thing bleeding out in his immaculate white hold. But he was as delighted as we were when we turned up a slim ring the following morning, and we were yet more excited about the one after that, a fatter ring studded with tiny diamonds flush to its platinum surface.
In all, over the next seven days, we found five valuable rings. Xander and Amelia found two each, and I found the last one, a single band of gold. Xander also pinpointed a gold earring that morning. Together with the engraved pair of wedding rings Amelia and I started with, that meant we’d sniffed out eight pieces of actual treasure in a little over a week and a half.
And we still had a bit of time left. But with the end of the trip in sight, I began to feel antsy, and not just because it meant an end to our metal detecting. If my hunch was right, and Mum had chosen Zanzibar because of what – or who – was nearby, we were running out of time to make use of that fact.
Mum seemed completely unconcerned: all she was worried about was how to further her coral conservation work beyond Zanzibar. Doubts crept in about the message I’d seen. How could I be sure of anything from a thumbnail-sized photograph? And the wording had been ambiguous: it could have meant more or less anything. Despite this, when I found myself alone at the breakfast table with Mum on our penultimate morning, I couldn’t quite hold my tongue. She was picking at a fruit salad; I had a plate of waffles swimming in maple syrup and cream. Amelia was churning laps in the hotel pool as she did every morning, even though we were going to spend much of the day underwater. ‘It’s exactly the opposite type of swimming,’ apparently. Xander hadn’t yet got up. I took a sip of iced coffee and felt the question simmering inside me. I didn’t want to ask it again, as I say, but as I stirred the ice cubes in their vortex of froth, it came out.
‘When are you going to tell me who he is?’
This time Mum didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. ‘When the time’s right, I promise,’ she said with a regretful smile.
‘That’s pretty vague.’ I fought to keep the frustration from my voice. ‘You have to admit.’
‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ she replied, without offering anything further.
‘Me as well.’
She spoke slowly, picking her words carefully. ‘It’s a sensitive situation. But trust me, I’m working on it.’
I had a strong urge to throw the remains of my coffee at the bamboo wall beside me. The ice would have clattered off it satisfyingly. But I didn’t. I took another bite of waffle instead, then pushed the plate aside: though hard to believe, there’s such a thing as too much syrup.
Xander arrived, having just stepped out of the shower by the look of him. His hair was scraped back from his forehead in wet black furrows. He and Mum immediately struck up a conversation about dolphins. We’d seen some the previous day. Xander had been closest, right in among the pod as they swam past us. Mum wanted to hear all about it again and Xander, true to form, entertained her politely, when I’m sure he’d have preferred to talk gibberish with me.
Amelia, who’d finished her laps in the pool, sat down with a huge bowl of banana-topped porridge. She tucked into it unhurriedly. The knot of tension tightened in my chest. Those ice cubes really needed chucking hard at something. What was with everyone? Why the lack of urgency?
‘I’m going to get ready,’ I said. ‘We don’t have much more time and I want to push our total finds above ten.’
‘What’s so special about the number ten?’ asked Amelia.
‘Nothing!’ I said. ‘It’s just a target. Better to have one than not.’
‘Sure,’ said Xander sceptically. He was eyeing Amelia’s breakfast. ‘Can I just eat something first?’
‘Whatever. I’ll be down at the jetty helping Pete.’
He looked at me quizzically then, and that was fair enough: he’d done nothing to annoy me so why was I being so short with him? Just … because. I didn’t need to explain myself. I stood up, said, ‘See you later,’ without looking at either of them, and walked off.
8.
The previous day Pete had mentioned an island set apart from the Zanzibar archipelago, with an exclusive resort where the truly fabulously wealthy stayed. I’d immediately wanted to search there.
But with his next breath Pete had said he thought there would be slim pickings off the little beach. ‘Exclusive’ meant small. The place only hosted a handful of guests at any one time, making it less likely that there’d be many lost valuables to detect on the seabed. Though disappointed, I had let the subject drop.
Approaching the marina now, I changed my mind. So what if only a few guests stayed at the place? Over the years that would still amount to a fair number of people. And they’d be properly loaded, dripping with bling probably.
How much did billionaires spend on jewellery? More than anyone else! We would only have to find one ring to make the trip worth our while.
Pete was polishing the boat’s fuel gauge when I arrived. I told him I wanted to dive off the island he’d mentioned, where the poshest of the posh stayed.
‘As I said, I think that’s a real long shot, sear
ching there.’
‘I don’t care. The longest odds often mean the biggest winnings.’
‘It’s a good hour away by boat. Even this one,’ he said.
‘So?’
He raised his sunglasses onto the polished dome of his head and looked at me askance. ‘You OK?’
‘Of course.’ I tried to soften my tone. ‘I just meant it’ll be a fun ride. The weather’s good. Why don’t we give it a go?’
‘You haven’t got a great deal of time to play with.’
‘I know. But like your good feeling the other day, I’ve got a hunch this will pay off.’
He was polishing the twin throttle levers now, though their chrome stalks were already gleaming.
‘It’s your call,’ he said.
I took that as a yes, and to show I was grateful I made myself useful preparing the boat for the day. It needed more fuel. Pete had magicked up a couple of big plastic jerry cans from somewhere. When I lifted one from the hold to pour it in, the thing weighed a ton. Warily, I asked for a funnel.
Correctly guessing that I was worried about slopping petrol all over his precious boat, Pete laughed and said, ‘Don’t bother with that. Use a siphon instead,’ and he showed me how to get the fuel running through the clear plastic tube kept in the stern locker for the purpose.
‘Be careful not to suck down a lungful,’ he said. ‘That’s bad news, though less of a pain than accidentally siphoning a can full of water instead of petrol into the tank, which I’ve seen done. Always check the can is full of the right stuff.’
I did that carefully, and I’d finished the refuelling without spilling a drop, and stowed the canisters carefully, and double-checked everything else was ready to go, by the time Amelia and Xander strolled up. They were laughing about something they’d seen en route, but I was obviously giving off the wrong vibe and they didn’t share the joke with me.
‘Finally,’ I said under my breath as they climbed aboard.