by Holly Watt
‘Here.’ Ed pulled Casey down behind a huge section of the Beauvallet’s hull. ‘Get down.’
They crouched down behind the lump of steel, and then peered back at the ship.
Men appeared at the top of the ramp leading down from the Beauvallet’s hull. They were shouting, waving torches. Casey could make out the silhouettes of Raz and Dylan.
Looking for footprints, she thought.
Unerringly, the torch beam swung round in their direction. The voices quietened.
Now the torches started towards the lifeboat, sweeping backwards and forwards over the mud as they did. They were not rushing, these men.
The lights came closer, flickering to and fro. A low call floated across the beach, met by a few sharp words.
They came nearer.
‘They’re coming for us,’ Casey gasped. ‘We can’t . . .’
‘Stay still,’ whispered Ed.
One torch beam crept closer. It flashed across the big propeller, gleamed over some old crates, and then stopped on the big chunk of hull. The torchlight shone straight into Casey’s eyes, dazzling her.
‘Run,’ Ed cried.
As soon as they moved there were bellows, and the crack of a gun.
The mud was hellish as she and Ed struggled away along the beach. Every time she took a step the mud sucked her down, insatiable. A step, a step, and another step and she tripped, floundering in the slime.
Ed dragged her up. ‘Come on.’
She threw herself forward again, and the mud took hold, each movement painfully slow, every step a pointless battle. ‘We can’t get away from them. There’s nowhere to go . . .’
In the dark the beach seemed endless. A few hundred yards away, Casey could see the next huge ship, slumped deep in the mud, but she would never reach it. Never. And even if she could, what then? She gasped for air, lungs screaming as a bullet ricocheted off a shipping container sagging on its side.
‘Hurry, Casey.’ Ed pulled at her arm. ‘Come on!’
She dragged herself on, the animal at the back of the herd that knows it’s the one to die. Lumps of metal lay half-buried in the mud and ripped at her legs as she lurched past. The gun blasted again.
The men were chasing them, excitement in their voices, almost glee as they scrambled through the mud. They were so much faster, inexhaustible.
The sand was firmer here, and for a few blissful seconds, Casey could run, feet slapping, freed from the oozing grasp. But then she plunged into the mud again.
The men were getting closer.
‘We’re never going to make it,’ she screamed.
There was the sudden judder of an outboard motor, just out to sea. A boat racing along in the shallows.
‘Help!’ Casey screamed, not caring who was steering it. ‘Please help us.’
The little boat turned sharply, heading to the beach. Past thinking, she dragged herself towards it.
‘Careful, Casey.’ Ed grabbed at her arm. ‘We don’t know . . .’
‘Casey!’ The yell reached out across the water. ‘Come on!’
‘It’s Hessa,’ shouted Casey. ‘And the girls from the ship. Oh, thank God . . .’
52
Hessa grinned down at them.
‘Guess you needed saving.’ She was almost laughing, a triumphant gleam in her eye.
Romida and the two other girls were sitting in the front of the boat, huddled up in the cool night breeze, Romida’s eyes shining with excitement. The little fishing boat was chugging north.
‘All three girls wanted to come back for you,’ said Hessa.
Ed and Casey had collapsed in the bottom of the boat, unable to sit up. Lying on her back, Casey stared up at the stars.
‘Tell them thank you,’ she managed.
They had come in under fire. The fishing boat was a big target for the men on the shore, and the bullets sent up explosions of water all around them.
Hessa had ignored it all, steering the boat straight to the beach. She and Romida had grabbed Casey’s arm and hauled her on board with startling strength, almost capsizing the little boat in their urgency.
Ed had scrambled onto the boat, half-pushing it round in the rush before Hessa rammed the outboard motor to its full speed, the little boat juddering away over the waves, painfully slowly.
‘Never again,’ Casey’s voice came out of the night.
‘You always say that,’ said Hessa.
Closer to the shore, Hessa could see a boat cruising to and fro. They had a huge spotlight hooked up to the bow, searing back and forth across the waves. There would probably be men waiting back at the pier, too. Veering from the beam of the spotlight, Hessa turned the little fishing boat further out to sea and headed south. Down this way, several huge ships lay anchored far out in the ocean, slowly swinging round with the currents. They were waiting for the highest tides, when they too would be rammed up onto the Bhatiari flats.
Other ships – newer vessels – were waiting to sail into the port of Chittagong. As she steered, Hessa kept a wary eye on the vast ships, in case the monsters started to move. She caught Romida’s eye, and smiled.
Slowly, the fishing boat made its way down the shoreline. Eastward, the lights of Chittagong glowed orange.
Finally, as the sky began to lighten, Hessa steered closer to the shore. At last, she saw what she was looking for. Patenga beach, just south of Chittagong, close to where the sweep of the Karnaphuli river meets the sea.
It was a broad, ugly beach. Busy, even at this time of the day, with bright plastic chairs and pushy hustlers. Huge planes from the Shah Amanat airport roared past every few minutes. As Hessa grounded the little boat on the dirty sand, two boys on skinny horses cantered up.
‘You ride?’
‘Not now,’ Hessa smiled.
They hurried up the beach, leaving the boat bobbing in the shallows. The boys on the horses would make the dinghy theirs within minutes.
They fell into two taxis, which crawled through traffic back to the hotel. Dropping with exhaustion, they stumbled into the hotel. As they banged on the hotel room door, it swung open as if the occupant had been waiting just the other side. And there was Miranda, gripping the baby with one arm, mobile phone in her hand.
‘Thank God,’ she said.
The three girls from the Tephi stood awkwardly just inside the hotel room as Casey told Miranda about the Beauvallet in half-sentences.
‘You stink,’ Miranda observed helpfully, at the end.
‘Did the girls from the building get to the safe house OK?’
‘Yes,’ said Miranda. ‘Despite my driving. I dropped off Layla too, and Savannah went over as soon as she’d handed over Poppy.’
Savannah had stayed in the hotel room with the tiny baby all night. ‘I miss all the fun,’ she had grumbled as they set off to the pier. ‘But I wouldn’t sleep anyway, waiting for you to get back.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ said Casey, feeling a flood of relief.
‘How,’ asked Ed, ‘the hell are we going to get out of here? Dylan and his lot will have the whole of Chittagong sewn up by now. They’ll be turning the city upside down.’
‘Did they actually see your faces? With any luck, they won’t have worked out who we are yet.’
‘But how are we going to get Poppy back to England?’ Ed asked. ‘We can’t possibly leave her.’
Miranda had handed the tiny girl over to him as soon as he walked in. She had cuddled into him, snug in a little pink blanket, tiny hands in fists.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Miranda. She was looking at her watch. ‘We’re all flying out of Chittagong in a few hours.’
‘But how can we get a passport for Poppy?’ Ed’s voice rose. ‘We still don’t know who’s been handing out the passports since William Cavendish retired.’
‘No,’ agreed Miranda. ‘But it’s far too dangerous for us to stay out here. Raz didn’t tell Casey how long it would take for him to bring a passport for Poppy, and waiting is too dangerous now. We’re too compromised
.’
Casey was looking stubborn. ‘I could stay though. I might be able to . . .’
‘No.’ Miranda’s voice was firm. ‘We’re going home.’
‘But’ – in her exhaustion, Casey was intractable – ‘we may never be able to work it out properly. Raz had never heard of Greystone, and Dylan was contemptuous of him. There’s someone else in control, and we might never find out who it is from the UK.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Miranda.
‘I need to go to the safe house,’ said Casey. ‘I want to talk to all the women.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ said Miranda.
‘I have to. We need to get Romida and the other girls over there anyway.’
‘I’ll come too,’ added Hessa.
‘I’ve been speaking to Dash,’ Miranda went on. ‘The Post’s Christmas appeal is going to fund a safe house for the girls from the Beauvallet.’
‘I suppose that’s something.’ Casey was still looking mutinous.
Every year, the Post picked three charities, and the journalists spent a day drinking brandy and eating mince pies, while readers rang up to donate their winter fuel allowances. The editor inevitably ended up being harangued for twenty minutes by a Mrs Pegg from Harrogate about moving the crossword from page 22 to 23; Casey once got quite a good story out of a Mr Ball from Colchester about a dubious local planning officer.
As Ed stood up to head for the bathroom, there was a knock at the door. Ed tensed, eyes flickering around the room. ‘Don’t answer it,’ he ordered.
But Miranda was untangling the locks and bolts, and then the door swung open.
Hessa grimaced as she looked up. ‘What is he . . .’
‘I can’t believe,’ the man said, ‘that I am doing this.’
It was Gabriel Bantham, stepping gingerly into the room.
‘Hello, Gabriel.’ Casey stepped forward, a cocktail-party smile on her face. ‘How nice to see you.’
Bantham’s mouth twisted into a smile as he looked at her. ‘And how lovely it is to see you again too, Miss Benedict.’
His light brown hair was smoothly in place, the shoes glossily polished. Even in the heat of Chittagong, Bantham wore a cream linen suit, a square of blue silk peeping out of his breast pocket. In his left hand he held a passport.
‘For a Pippa Lancaster,’ he said. ‘Who I gather will disappear soon after she gets back to the UK. Daughter of a Miranda Lancaster.’
‘That’s what my passport says,’ Miranda shrugged.
They shook hands, Bantham holding on to Casey’s for just a second too long.
‘Her date of birth is backdated,’ he said. ‘Some airlines won’t fly newborns, apparently.’
Casey had called him, as soon as Poppy was born. And he’d understood, without being told, that this would buy her silence for ever.
‘They’ll know though,’ he had said. ‘I can do it, but I can’t do it without being caught.’
‘But this way’ – and there was almost a laugh in her voice – ‘you will be the hero of the hour.’
‘You can’t do that,’ he had said. ‘You can’t make that happen.’
‘Every story needs a hero,’ said Casey. ‘And this one hasn’t got one yet.’
‘But it’s illegal.’
‘Not,’ she said, ‘until we say so.’
He could hear the icy arrogance in her voice. Bantham had been working in London when the Telegraph faced down the prosecution bosses, after brazenly sending tens of thousands of pounds to an anonymous Swiss bank account. Go on, they dared the politicians. Arrest us. Just try it. But the money was for the disc that contained evidence of the MPs’ expenses scandal, and by then the public was deep in a raging fury over duckhouses and moats and tennis courts and swimming pools. Quietly, the police looked the other way.
‘If I did help you, we’d have to have met somewhere before,’ Bantham had bargained. ‘Not in DC.’
‘Never in DC.’ Casey buried the Four Seasons smoothly. ‘Somewhere else, many years ago.’
‘You knew I would be able to get this baby out of Bangladesh.’ He was thinking aloud.
‘I’m turning to you because you’re the only person who can possibly help us,’ said Casey.
Bantham thought about it for a moment. ‘What happens to the baby when you get home?’ he asked.
Casey had asked Heather about the theoretical registration of a newborn in the UK. ‘There is a system for women who insist on having babies outside of the hospital system,’ the health editor had said thoughtfully. ‘Free-birthing, they call it. Not my cup of tea, but each to their own. There is a way of registering births after that. I can find out.’
‘We obviously can’t rely on the clinic’s systems any more,’ said Casey. ‘But we will manage, don’t worry about that.’
‘All right,’ Bantham had agreed, in the end. ‘All right.’
Now Casey looked at him straight. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for doing this.’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe I needed . . .’ He stopped talking. ‘Maybe you coming to Washington wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to me.’
There was a glimmer of a smile in her eyes, and a second later, it almost echoed in his.
‘And you promise . . .’
‘I promise,’ she said. ‘It would hardly help me now, anyway.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘That much is true.’
Bantham handed over the passport now. ‘I’ll come back in a few hours,’ he promised. ‘Get you to the airport.’
After he had gone, Casey stood up. ‘I have to go.’
Hessa stood too. ‘I’ll go and find a couple of tuk-tuks.’
‘Be careful,’ was all that Miranda said. ‘And shower first.’
Outside, a few minutes later, the blazing heat reached down into Casey’s lungs, choking her. Dust rose from the road, whirling in the hot wind. She felt exhausted, bruised by the fear of the night.
Hessa and Casey sat in an tired silence as the tuk-tuk made its way along the crowded streets, past rows of sagging shacks. A second tuk-tuk, carrying the three girls, puttered behind.
Idle dogs watched as their tuk-tuk creaked past, its motor like an angry wasp in a jar. Garlands of black wires criss-crossed the narrow street. There were street peddlers everywhere, crouching beside makeshift market stalls. Bags of crisps were carefully lined up under a tattered tarpaulin, next to stacks of oranges, or skinny, fatalistic chickens. Here and there, Casey saw trophies swiped – or sold on – from the refugee camps. A UNHCR blanket here, a Save the Children rucksack there. The black market always thrives.
On one corner, a small gang of street children waited patiently, nowhere better to be. A small boy, hair cropped close, held his little brother’s hand, swiping at his nose with the other. There was an adult slump to the older boy’s shoulders as he stood there in his ragged, oversized T-shirt.
As Casey watched, the boy glanced up, and she saw his expression shift from childish interest to calculation in a split second. Then the tuk-tuk pulled away, leaving the boys far behind.
Finally, they pulled up next to an ugly, low-slung building, and the driver gestured. They climbed out, Romida’s eyes wide and thoughtful.
A girl in a sari opened the door cautiously. She relaxed when she saw Casey.
‘I messaged Savannah,’ Casey explained to Hessa. ‘They knew we were coming.’
The girl led them down a tiled corridor, cool after the scorch of the street. In a blur, Savannah burst through a door. ‘They made it.’ She dragged Casey into a hug. ‘You made it. They got out. You found Romida!’
Casey couldn’t help but smile in the face of Savannah’s boisterous enthusiasm.
‘Where are the other women?’ Casey asked.
‘This way.’
They followed Savannah to a large, patchily painted blue room, with high ceilings and a white-tiled floor.
The women from the shipyard were sitting in a rough circle in the middle of the room. Layla was sitting to on
e side, cross-legged, talking to one of them. They glanced up as Casey and Hessa walked in. Casey looked around the room, and spotted Khadija, head bowed, stitching two small pieces of fabric together. She looked very young. Thirteen probably, Casey remembered with a jolt.
A row of iron beds ran down each side of the room, the white sheets carefully folded. A whiff of disinfectant in the air hinted at hospitals, while a ceiling fan purred overhead. The room looked out onto a tiny garden, the green almost a shock to Casey’s eyes.
Layla stood up. She nodded to Hessa and Casey. ‘You made it then,’ she smiled briefly.
‘How are they?’ asked Casey.
‘So-so,’ said Layla. ‘Shocked, mostly.’
‘How many of them are pregnant?’ Hessa asked bluntly.
‘All the women from the shipyard are pregnant,’ Layla said carefully. ‘Savannah is arranging for those girls to travel back to the camps and their families, if that is what they want. But first she wants to make sure they don’t go straight back to where they used to live, because they might be targeted again. The charity is helping Shamshun – Romida’s mother – move to a different sector of the camp, for example. It might help.’ Layla shrugged. ‘It might not.’
Moving cautiously, the three girls from the Tephi sat down on the edge of the circle. There was a murmur of welcome.
‘They only operated on one of them – Tasmina – three weeks ago,’ Layla said flatly. ‘She wants to get back to the camp as soon as possible. And, well . . .’
‘Abortion is mainly illegal in Bangladesh,’ Savannah broke in. ‘But they have other techniques, which work early on.’ She shrugged.
‘It’s her choice,’ said Hessa.
For a split second, Casey thought about the would-be parents, somewhere thousands of miles away. Desperate. Desperate for this, this end of a dream, this end of a nightmare. She pushed the thought away.
‘Can I speak to Romida?’ she asked. ‘I know she may be exhausted . . .’
Layla tilted her head, instinctively protective. ‘I’ll ask her.’
Casey watched as Layla crossed the room to crouch down by Romida, introducing herself. They chatted, and Romida turned to stare at Casey, the briefest of smiles flickering across her face as she nodded.