Back on solid earth, Ernesto examined Jimmy’s ropes with incredulity. ‘Is impossible, I check thees rope myself,’ he told Laura and Tariq while the ten-year-old was being treated for shock by the ship doctor. Skye, who seemed to sense that Jimmy was in need of comfort, was licking him at intervals. ‘Not even Superman could slice the mantle on thees one. He has been cut I am sure.’
To prove his point, he shinned up the wall like a monkey and began examining the top minutely. Even from a distance, the children could see his face change. He prized something from the wall. It glinted in the light. Putting it carefully in a side pocket of his cargo trousers he clambered back down. When he came over to them, he was almost shaking with rage.
‘Is no accident. Is stupid meestake.’ Opening his pocket, he withdrew a Stanley knife, a small, wickedly sharp blade often used by carpenters. ‘Someone wedge this in joint of wall, maybe carpenters who come to fix it yesterday. Maybe they is talking too much – these workmen nowadays, they is not reliable – and forget it. Unfortunately, is in place where rope will be most – how you say – taut. When thees small boy Jimmy sit down in his harness, it cut and rope is snap.’
Rita and Bob tore in, hands flailing. They’d come directly from a ballroom dancing class and her sequinned gown and his velvet suit contrasted sharply with the general scruffiness of most of the climbers.
‘Oh, my poor, sweet baby,’ Rita cried, throwing her arms around Jimmy. ‘I can’t believe you’re in one piece. And to think that we encouraged you to do this.’
She turned on Russ. ‘What kind of cowboy outfit are you running here? My son could have broken his neck.’
Russ was mortified. ‘Mrs Gannet, I must point out that we have impact matting beneath the wall so broken bones are extremely rare, but there is no doubt Jimmy has had a terrible fright. I can’t apologise enough. I simply cannot explain how this happened. Ernesto, who checks our equipment, is meticulous. Safety is our watchword here. But it seems there might have been some oversight on the part of the company that built the wall. In thirty years as an instructor—’
‘I’m afraid words are not going to be enough on this occasion,’ interrupted Bob. ‘We’re talking a major lawsuit here. My boy might not have broken a bone, but there’s stress … psychological trauma, perhaps years of counselling …’
‘NO!’
Everyone turned in surprise. Jimmy’s face was red with exertion and his hair was wilder than ever, but his eyes were bright with excitement. ‘Nobody is going to be suing anybody, not today or ever. Mum, Dad, look at me. I’m happy. I climbed a cliff. I was a bit scared but I did it. For the first time in my life, I’ve had a proper adventure. And do you know what the best part was? My friends saved me.’
‘It was nothing,’ Laura said with a smile. ‘If anything, you should thank Russ. His safety training was excellent. We’d rehearsed the drill and we knew what to do.’
‘If the drill helped I’m grateful,’ Russ said, ‘but the truth is that your lightning response saved the day. All three of you showed courage and calmness in a crisis way beyond your years. There were many times on Everest when I could have done with friends like you.’
‘Tariq and I just did what anyone would have done,’ Laura said. ‘It’s Jimmy who’s the brave one. Jimmy, when I’m a detective, you can be my sergeant any day.’
He flashed a grin. ‘Umm, I’m going to be the great detective, remember, and you can be my sergeant!’
‘All right, you two, stop with the rivalry,’ teased Tariq. ‘We’ve had enough excitement for one day.’
Bob and Rita stared at their son in astonishment. Minutes after a fall that could have been critical he was bantering with his new friends as if nothing had happened.
Laura decided to take advantage of their temporary silence to beat a hasty retreat. ‘See you tomorrow, Jimmy. Come on, Skye, let’s go for a walk.’
‘See you,’ said Tariq, shaking the boy’s hand.
‘See you,’ Jimmy responded. ‘Hey, Laura, don’t forget about our plan.’
‘I won’t.’
‘What was that all about?’ Tariq asked when they were out in the corridor.
‘A challenge.’
‘A challenge?’
‘Sort of a dare. Yes, I know, this morning I wanted to have as little as possible to do with him, but he suggested this game and, well, it sounded like fun. I said I’d talk it over with you. His idea is that we spend a day practicing being detectives.’
‘How would that work?’
Laura’s face lit up. She always leapt at any chance to talk about her detective hero. She immediately became so caught up in her story that she temporarily forgot about Jimmy’s near death experience in the adventure centre.
‘As you know, Detective Inspector Walker has had to spend a lot of time being someone he’s not in order to crack a case. Once, he posed as a doddery old gardener at a castle; another time, he worked as a chef in a restaurant. He’s brilliant at it and he’s very convincing. The villains rarely suspect a thing. Sometimes he’ll pretend to be a random passerby at a murder scene, for example. He picks up all sorts of clues because people don’t realise he’s a policeman.’
Tariq grinned. ‘And Jimmy thinks we should try the same thing on the ship where nobody knows us and we can be anyone we want?’
Laura looked at him. ‘Yes. Do you think it’s silly? I was worried that people might get upset if they find out we’ve lied to them, but Jimmy said that we could explain to them afterwards that we were only playing. On our last morning at sea or something. He dared us to do it for a day and whoever convinces the most people gets a free piece of chocolate cake.’
Tariq laughed. ‘We’d get a free piece of chocolate cake anyway.’
‘That’s not the point. It’s about the challenge – about seeing whether we could really convince people.’
They’d reached the door of their cabin.
‘I’m game if you are,’ Tariq said.
‘Cool. Then let’s do it.’
Laura opened the door and was relieved to see that Jimmy had not let himself in again. The cabin was peaceful. Through the French doors pillowy waves heaved and surged. A seabird swooped on an unseen fish. She hopped onto the bed and Skye snuggled up beside her.
‘About what happened,’ Tariq said. ‘You were supposed to be the first climber, right? If Jimmy hadn’t insisted on going up, it would have been you on the wall. You would have been the one to fall. The carpenter who left his Stanley knife in the joint, he could have put you in the hospital.’
Goosebumps rose on Laura’s arms and she tugged the sleeves of her sweatshirt down. She’d talked animatedly about Jimmy’s challenge on the way back from the adventure centre in the hope of distracting Tariq – and herself – from precisely that thought. There was a ninety-nine per cent likelihood that the knife had indeed been left behind by some inept, dangerously forgetful carpenter, as Ernesto had suggested. But there was no escaping the fact that it might also have been put there on purpose, perhaps even with the aim of hurting a specific person. After all, the rope was only severed because the knife was in the precise spot where it became taut. And Laura had been down in Russ’s appointment book as the first climber of the day.
‘You don’t think …?’ Tariq picked at a thread on his jeans. He was reluctant to say the words out loud for fear of lending them power. ‘You don’t think it was …?’
‘Intended for me? No, of course not,’ said Laura with a lot more confidence then she felt. ‘Apart from Russ and Ernesto, how could anyone have known that I was due to climb first? It was coincidence.’ She didn’t want to say that, for days now, coincidences had been piling up to the point where it was starting to feel as if there was a lot more to them than chance. The last thing she wanted was to worry her best friend and spoil his special holiday.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s take Skye to cheer up my uncle.’
ON THEIR LAST morning at sea, they took Calvin Redfern a cup of coffee and
a croissant and couldn’t wake him. Usually he slept with one eye open but today he was dead to the world. After five minutes of trying to rouse him Laura was sufficiently concerned to consider defying her uncle’s orders and call the ship’s doctor.
She had the phone in her hand when he stirred and blinked sleepily at them. Seeing the time and their anxious faces, he said, ‘Sorry if I’ve overslept, but it is your fault, you know. Laura, what were you doing creeping around my cabin in the middle of the night?’
She replaced the receiver. ‘I wasn’t.’
A small frown creased her uncle’s brow but he was still smiling. ‘Yes, you were. I heard you opening the bathroom cabinet. I spoke to you but you didn’t answer and before I knew it I was asleep again. Were you checking up on me again?’
The uneasy feeling returned to Laura with full force. With a quick glance at Tariq, she said: ‘Oh, I totally forgot. I had a headache and I came in to get some aspirin. In fact, I think I’ll get another couple of tablets so if I need them another time I won’t disturb you.’
She went to the bathroom cabinet and rattled the tub of aspirin. As far as she could tell nothing had been touched, but all her senses were on red alert. Her uncle had one of the sharpest minds she’d ever known. He was not in the habit of imagining midnight visitors. If he thought he’d heard someone in his cabin, he had. And what’s more, he knew he had. Laura hadn’t fooled him with her headache excuse.
Back in the cabin, her uncle had woken up sufficiently to read Tariq a few paragraphs from his Matt Walker book. They were both laughing. But it didn’t last long. Before he’d even finished the page, Calvin Redfern’s eyes were drooping.
He apologised again. ‘I’m not sure why I’m so exhausted. Before I went to bed last night I was walking around my cabin and feeling so alert and ready to escape into the fresh air that I fully intended to surprise you by being dressed and ready for breakfast when you came in this morning. Now my head feels like cotton wool. Laura, would you mind making me an extra strong cup of coffee?’
It took Laura a couple of minutes to do as he asked, but by then her uncle was already snoring softly. No amount of shaking would wake him.
Tariq was amazed. ‘I’ve never seen anyone doze off so quickly. He fell asleep in mid-sentence. I know his hard work back in Cornwall has worn him out, but over the past few days he’s been like a caged lion, desperate to get out and start enjoying his holiday. He was laughing and joking. Now he’s an invalid again. And what was all that about you being in his cabin in the middle of the night? I didn’t hear you get up.’
Laura smoothed the covers over her uncle. ‘I didn’t. Maybe he dreamt it, but I don’t think so. Tariq, something weird is going on with my uncle. I can’t put a finger on what it is.’
Briefly, she told Tariq about her uncle’s mysterious 3am meeting and about the hooks on the stairs that made her think of a tripwire. He immediately wanted to see them.
‘They’re here,’ Laura said, leading him into the corridor and up to the second step. She stopped. ‘At least they were.’
Not only had the hooks gone, there was nothing to indicate they’d ever been there. The paintwork was immaculate. There were a couple of specks of white on the steel of the stairs, but no way of telling how long they’d been there.
‘I believe you,’ Tariq said, seeing Laura’s crestfallen face, ‘especially since the light was broken at the time. Do you remember how it was working perfectly just a few minutes later? It’s almost as if someone wanted it to fail so your uncle would fall. But who would do such a thing? It doesn’t make any sense. Do you think your uncle suspected foul play?’
‘Let’s search his cabin while he’s sleeping,’ suggested Laura. ‘There’s bound to be a simple explanation for everything. Seriously, what are the chances of someone setting out to rob, harm or kill my uncle on a ship like the Ocean Empress?’
‘Close to zero?’
‘That’s what I think. Besides, even if a thief did get into my uncle’s cabin he or she wouldn’t have found anything of value because Uncle Calvin’s passport and money are in the safe in ours.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Tariq said. ‘But let’s search the cabin just in case.’
It was Tariq who found the pot of sleeping tablets on the bedside table. The reason Laura hadn’t spotted it earlier was because the little brown container was identical to the one in which Calvin Redfern kept his pain medication. That bottle was on a shelf in the bathroom cabinet.
Laura studied the label, which was dated a year earlier and had her uncle’s name on it. ‘Now I’m confused. On the one hand, I’m relieved because it explains why he seems drugged. It’s just that I can’t imagine him making such a silly mistake. That makes me think there really was an intruder in his cabin last night and that that person swapped the bottles.’
Tariq looked over at Calvin Redfern, who was snoring softly. ‘But why would anyone want to keep your uncle asleep? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘The only other explanation is that someone wants him out of the way. And why would they want that? Who would want that?’
‘Maybe we should have Skye watch over your uncle,’ Tariq suggested. ‘Calvin Redfern will be glad of the company when he wakes anyway.’
They were on their way to fetch the husky when the ship’s siren sounded and four breathless words burst from the tannoy: ‘Pirates ahoy! Pirates ahoy!’
UP ON DECK every able-bodied passenger was hanging over the side, watching a black galleon approach. Its skull and crossbones flags billowed in the wind. Black-shirted pirates toiled on board and shinned up ropes and ladders.
‘Is this a joke?’ Tariq asked, unsure whether to laugh or be alarmed. ‘Surely we’re not about to be captured by modern-day pirates?’
‘Well, there are modern-day pirates in Somalia and places like Indonesia who kidnap people all the time,’ Laura told him. ‘But from what my uncle says, they wear ordinary clothes and go about in small boats. I think these are actors.’
The Ocean Empress put down anchor, causing the sea to boil. Laura and Tariq found a quiet area near the lifeboats, and watched as the men shinned up the side of the ship on specially lowered rope ladders. They began playacting the part of swashbuckling pirates, taking passengers hostage. There was lots of laughter, particularly when a boy who’d snatched a cutlass from an unsuspecting pirate was ‘captured’. He and the other captives were lowered down to the black galleon in a special basket.
At one stage, a treasure chest was manhandled on board. It turned out that it was a trick chest, like a conjurer’s box, and there were gasps of amazement when a passenger who volunteered to climb into it vanished for several minutes. The pirate magician demonstrated for all to see that the chest was empty. But when he shut the lid and then reopened it, there she was, as large as life.
‘Mind if I go and get us a couple of milkshakes?’ Tariq wanted to know.
‘Ooh, great idea. I’ll have a strawberry one, please.’
Laura had been alone for barely a minute when a voice behind her growled: ‘Ah, a lone captive!’ She turned to see a gnarled pirate with a fake moustache and a permanent sneer, who also happened to be one of the tallest men she’d ever seen in her life. Close on his heels was a small, gangly man with an eye-patch and greasy black ringlets. He was gripping the handle of a large laundry hamper on wheels.
‘Ever been curious to see a pirate’s lair?’ the tall man asked, flashing a gold tooth.
‘No,’ said Laura, ‘I haven’t. And I’m not interested in being captured. I’m only standing here while I wait for my friend.’
The pirate chuckled. ‘I’ve got news for you. Captives don’t usually have a choice, do they, Lukas?’ He took a step towards her.
There was something in his manner – a nervous aggression – that made Laura’s heart start to pound. If this part of a game, then the game had gone too far.
‘I’m curious,’ she said, playing for time. ‘Why do so many pirates wear eye-patches?
Do you deliberately gouge out each other’s eyeballs or are you just really bad sword fighters?’
‘Hear that, Lukas? We got ourselves a feisty one. Well, well, well. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Last chance, young lady. Are you going to come with us willingly?’
Before Laura could move or respond, he’d lunged for her. Grabbing both her wrists in one enormous hand, he covered her mouth with the other – a hairy mitt reeking of fish. As Laura fought and kicked for all she was worth, Lukas dragged the laundry hamper closer.
Next thing she knew she’d been abruptly dropped on the deck and Lukas and the tall pirate were staggering around wiping strawberry milkshake from their eyes.
Tariq, who’d thrown it, helped Laura up and shielded her from the men.
‘What’s going on here?’ demanded Fernando, appearing out of nowhere with Skye. The husky bounded over to Laura and she threw her arms around him. Never had she been so overjoyed to see him.
‘Aww, tere’s nutting goin’ on,’ whined Lukas, still blinking away milkshake. His eyelashes and brows were thick with it. ‘We were having a bit o’ fun, tat’s all.’
‘It wasn’t nothing,’ Laura said furiously. ‘They were trying to stuff me into that basket.’
Fernando glared at them. ‘Is that true?’
‘’Course not, what do you take us for?’ The tall pirate’s lip curled and his gold tooth winked in the sun. ‘You know as well as I do that we’re not real pirates. We’re a tourist attraction sent to welcome people to the Caribbean and make them laugh. I thought the young lady might like to see a trick we do with the basket, but she suddenly got scared. I was trying to comfort her.’
‘By covering my mouth with your stinking hand? It’s hard to laugh when you’re being smothered.’
Laura Marlin Mysteries 2: Kidnap in the Caribbean Page 6