‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘How can I decide? A child’s life is at stake.’ But then a little voice whispered in her head: ‘But it’s your life too, do you want to see it destroyed? Haven’t you already suffered enough?’
The next day she went to her local Anglican church – the Holy Trinity in the nearby village of Slad – to pray for guidance. Annie had been baptised there and it had always seemed like a refuge to her. The church was a place of peace and serenity. And that was what she needed right now, she thought, some balm for her tortured soul. And when she left more than an hour later, feeling fortified and resolute, Annie had made her decision.
84
BANGBANG BUDIMAN was holed up in Bali in a budget hotel on the outskirts of Padang Bai on the island’s east coast. It was costing him less than eleven dollars a night. It wasn’t much, but compared to Jembatan Besi, it was the Ritz. Besides, he would not be here long. He was en route to Sydney.
That morning he had asked the young guy behind the hotel’s reception desk to look the mongrel writer up on the internet. BangBang knew little and cared less about the web but he was aware that it had its uses. In less than a minute he was riveted by an image of the smiling blond man on the screen. He felt a black, poisonous rage engulf him. The fact that he could not read the English words and headlines on the page ratcheted it up even higher. Frustrated, he asked the young guy to give him the gist of the story.
Later he sat in a roadside café close to the ferry port, smoking a clove kretek and sipping a kopi tubruk, a hot sugary coffee. So, he thought, the dog who stole my money and my life is now in Sydney, Australia. The hotel guy had pointed to the picture of the man on his boat and said it was berthed in a place called ‘Rose Bay’.
His pitted face broke into a horrible caricature of a smile. He noticed that the café owner who had been looking at him turned away with a shake of his head. BangBang didn’t care. He had a purpose again. He would track down this motherfucker in his fancy boat who had destroyed his dreams. And make him pay. Big time.
I’m gonna find you, Mr Dog, he thought with satisfaction. And I’m gonna get my money. He smiled again, his mind already picturing how he would make Jonno Bligh suffer.
85
IT WAS nearly dusk and the golden red sun was dropping low on the western horizon as I sat on The Scoop’s foredeck with a glass of chilled Cloudy Bay in one hand and Wagga purring happily under the other. I felt tired but mellow. Dire Strait was virtually complete, done and dusted in just ninety-four days. It might have taken less than half the time to write that Hard News had, but I felt it was twice as good.
I put this new creativity down to my drug-free state and the new lease of life my poor old addled brain had been given.
It wasn’t that there hadn’t been any distractions. Lurid stories in the local media about my pirate adventure had caught the public imagination and I had been bombarded with offers to appear on TV and give magazine interview, as well as invitations to parties and events galore. I’d even had a text message from the weather girl, whose name I had forgotten, asking if we ‘could get together for another evening of stormy passion’. To my shame, I hadn’t recognised her name at first. Hammo was a distant memory.
To Dru’s disgust, I turned everything down. Despite my confidence that I would never get hooked on drugs again, there was no point putting myself in temptation’s way. So I simply got my head down and worked. And worked.
My entire focus had been on attacking the keyboard, just getting the words down. I had hardly thought of anything else. But now that it was almost over, I realised that, far from acting as a catharsis, the book had stirred up emotions that intensified my feelings of confusion and bitterness. I felt relief that I had kicked the coke into touch and that Annie and I had escaped; I felt deep love for this woman who had briefly and dramatically entered my life before exiting it again; and I felt an utter, seething hatred for the bastards who had harmed her.
I held a particular loathing for their leader, BangBang. Jesus Christ, how I detested that psychopath. The cops had never found his body after he attacked me. Well, mate, if you are alive, I hope you are feeling like a hunted animal and I pray your bosses find you and put you down like the savage beast you are.
I thought again of Annie. What’s she doing right now? By my calculation, it must be about breakfast time in the UK. She had emailed me the day before. Was the message a good sign? I wondered. She had rarely responded to my daily missives. But she wouldn’t have let me know she was coming back if she didn’t intend seeing me, surely? I finished the wine and went below, carrying Wagga with my free arm. It was time to call Dru and give her the good news about the book. She was characteristically upbeat.
‘Darling, that’s fabulous! You are a fucking star.
‘And now that you have some time on your hands, sweetheart, you can do all those interview requests you turned down. Every last one of them!’
‘Ah shit, Dru, do I have to?’
86
IT WAS a cold, crisp morning in late May when I stepped back aboard The Scoop. Something caught my attention right away – the door to the saloon was open. A bit odd. ‘Cody,’ I shouted, ‘you still here? I thought you were . . .’ I stopped. I could smell something burning. Something spicy, cloying, sickly sweet. What the fuck?
I was exhausted after a couple of days at a writers festival in Melbourne. Too much meet and greet, too little sleep. But I was happy: tomorrow I’d see Annie again.
It was early, the city just beginning to cough and splutter into life. My 6 am flight from Melbourne had touched down in Sydney just over an hour later. I was keen to get home, have a decent kip back on The Scoop and generally chill out. Cody had planned to stay on board for one more night to look after Wagga and sort out one or two remaining technical glitches, but he should be halfway up the Hawkesbury in a Princess cruiser by now with a fund manager and his latest mistress.
Dropping my bags, I walked through the cockpit and down into the saloon. There was a man sitting at the table smoking a foul-smelling cigarette. And it wasn’t Cody. ‘What the fu—’ And then I realised who it was. Ah shit, he was alive! I felt a cold dread squeeze my guts like a wet dishrag. But searing anger overcame any fear that I felt. This was the bastard who had caused Annie so much distress and despair. Fists clenching, I said: ‘You’ve got a fucking nerve, you evil bastard. What the hell do you want?’
That seemed to amuse him. A malevolent smile appeared on his scarred, ugly face. He stood up, stubbing the cigarette on the light oak tabletop. Annie had described him well: he was shorter and wider than me but he had an intimidating presence. His head was an odd shape. He was wearing baggy denims, white trainers, a dark brown windbreaker and a stained white cap. Despite his nondescript appearance, an aura of menace surrounded him, something about those lizard eyes. The epitome of evil, I thought.
Then I noticed something else – a wicked-looking knife with a wide blade lying on the table beside him. A machete. His hand curled around it and my guts felt another squeeze. He waggled the weapon, gesturing me to move. I hesitated, pondering my options but then he bulldozed forward and put the blade to my throat. My body jerked back and I was off balance when he grabbed my arm and then manhandled me down the two steps to the small galley kitchen. Now I was trapped. He stood on the top step, giving him a height advantage, his rictus smile appearing once again.
‘Mr Dog, now you give my money, other things.’ His voice had a curious high pitch to it. It was in shocking contrast to his heavy-set, brutal appearance. I might have laughed if the situation wasn’t so serious. I put my palms up and out to face him.
‘I don’t have your money. It’s not here.’
Not the right response. The ferocious blade crisscrossed twice in the air as he thrust it towards me and his ugly face turned a dark red. He falsettoed a few words in what was presumably an Indonesian dialect, saliva spraying his ravaged cheeks. Then he steadied himself.
‘You give. Now.
Or I cut you.’ The knife glinted in tandem with his gold tooth. My synapses were in overdrive. How the bloody hell do I get out of this? I didn’t doubt for a moment that he intended to kill me, cash or no cash.
‘I have money. But most is in bank.’ I found myself speaking in a loud, precise voice, as if he were an idiot, the way the Brits routinely do to foreigners. The truth was that some of his cash, and all of his diamonds, was still here on board the boat. I would have been happy to give him his stuff if I thought he’d be satisfied. But I knew that he would kill me whether I gave him any of his treasure back or not. So I had to find a way to stall him.
Think! Perhaps if I could somehow get him off the boat, take him someplace out in the open where I could regain the advantage, I might still have a chance of getting out of this in one piece. I looked around the galley for something I could use to defend myself but there was only a stainless steel kettle. Not exactly a lethal weapon. The heavy Oscar would have been handy, I thought wryly, but it was now being used as a doorstop in the loo.
‘We go bank now?’ I said hopefully. The pirate’s ugly face darkened again, his eyes narrowing to slits. He raised his right arm, reversing the knife handle, ready to strike downwards and gut me like a fish. It came to me then, sharp and searing: you’ll never see Annie again. Well fuck that, I thought savagely and my brain seemed to snap; it was like a box of fireworks suddenly going off inside my skull: popping and fizzing and exploding, shrieking and whistling.
Then my body seemed to move of its own accord: I reached over, grabbed the kettle and threw it at him. It was a pretty feeble tactic but he started to duck. I was just getting ready to go at him when, out of nowhere, I heard a shrill shriek and Budiman suddenly seemed to grow an extra pair of legs and arms. For a moment he looked like a weird parody of the goddess Kali but then hands and fingers were groping for his eyes as the impact catapulted him off the step towards me in the small, narrow galley.
His momentum toppled me back against the door to my cabin and I fell to the floor. The combined weight of him and whoever had jumped on him from behind crashed down on me, crushing the air out of my body. Stunned, my startled eyes briefly flashed on something familiar. Annie? What? How? The thoughts came and died in the same moment as I felt a sharp pain in my chest and my forehead collided with the pirate’s rocklike skull. Then all the fireworks in my head fizzled out.
87
THE THOUGHT of seeing Jonno again made Annie’s heart race a little faster in the cab on her way to Rose Bay. In the serene quiet of the church back home, she had been resolute about her decision regarding the baby but she was still tortured by the potential consequences. She had thought of nothing else on the flight from London to Dubai and then on to Sydney. He was in for a big surprise: she was arriving a day earlier than she had told him; she wanted to reduce the effects of jet lag before her inquest appearance. She giggled . . . I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I turn up on his doorstep a day early. One thing’s for sure: his reaction will tell me immediately if he loves me or not, she thought.
A little doubting voice in her head had kept saying, ‘What if he has moved on? Decided that he doesn’t love you anymore?’ That’s silly, she decided, he wouldn’t have emailed me every single day for months saying he loved me if he didn’t mean it. But the little voice persisted, ‘Maybe he was just saying that to make you feel better while you were receiving treatment. Maybe he doesn’t want to get tangled up with a basket case.’
Predictably, Maddy had shushed away her fears: ‘If he’s half the man you think he is, he’ll greet you with open arms. If he doesn’t, he’s not worth a bit of you anyway.’
As she looked out the window of the taxi as it took her to the marina, she imagined what the future might hold. Here in Sydney? With Jonno? What might it be like to be a normal couple?
Ten minutes later they came to a halt on the road above the marina. She paid, clambered out and gazed at an island in the near distance, the pale morning sun sharpening the contrast of its greenery with the blue sea. She breathed in the fresh, briny air. Just then, off to her right, a seaplane rose from the glittering water and soared heavenwards. Lovely. She made her way down to the marina, her eyes searching the scores of boats for a glimpse of The Scoop and her heart soaring like the seaplane when she spotted the familiar vessel berthed at a distant pier. Even sitting among a bevy of expensive boats, the sloop stood out. Its sleek grey lines, tall mast and proud persona gave it a lustre all of its own.
There was no sign of anyone when she arrived at the berth. Good, she thought, the element of surprise will be greater. Slipping off her shoes, she stepped on board and made her way quietly through the cockpit to the saloon. She heard voices and stopped. One of them was Jonno’s but the other was an eerily familiar singsong tone that electrified every nerve in her body. She shuddered and then peeped through the open door. Inside she could see the back of a squat figure standing at the far end of the saloon looking down into the galley. Her worst fears came flooding back like a tsunami. Oh my God! It was the pirate boss, Budiman. But where was Jonno? Then she realised he must be trapped below in the galley. Just then she saw the monster’s arm come up above his head brandishing a huge knife.
Without a second thought, Annie hitched her kaftan-style dress up to her thighs and ran through the saloon with a shriek that would have put Sharapova to shame. She launched herself at the pirate’s back, her limbs wrapping around his torso and her fingernails seeking out his eyes, gouging and digging, the way her self-defence teacher had shown her. She focused her energy: this was the fucking bastard who had made her life hell, who had thrown her to his pirate dogs like a piece of meat. And this animal was threatening the man she now knew she loved with all her heart, the man who had saved her life, who had helped restore her dignity and her faith in humanity. And, just like the day she had rushed to the aid of her pet dog Paddy when he had been attacked, without thinking of the consequences, Annie’s thoughts now could only focus on one thing – saving her man.
As she crashed into the stocky figure, her momentum carried them both forward and down the steps, knocking Jonno over like a bowling pin. She was still screaming in anger as all three bodies concertinaed on the floor, their collective breath squeezed out like a bellows. She thought she heard Jonno grunt and then there was a surreal silence.
After a moment, she tried to clamber up but one of her arms was pinioned below the pirate’s body and she had to wrench it free. Budiman didn’t move. Crouching down, she saw Jonno’s eyes were squeezed closed, his creased face a mask of pain. He had a nasty gash in his forehead. Then she felt something warm trickle over her toes. She looked down. A puddle of thick red blood was seeping out from between the two entwined bodies and pooling on the walnut floor.
EPILOGUE
IT WAS a hot, sunny day and I was busy putting up the Christmas decorations in our new Rose Bay penthouse apartment. Wagga was making a bloody nuisance of himself trying to paw the shiny baubles on the Christmas tree. I heard Annie banging about in the kitchen preparing food for the next day’s Christmas dinner. Against my protestations, she had invited my parents. ‘You need to kiss and make up,’ she had scolded me.
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’
‘Never too late. Did you know that your mother has given up alcohol? It’s because of Percy. Says she does not want to make the same mistakes with him as she made with you.’
I capitulated. How could you argue with a woman like my wife? A woman who had saved both my life and my soul? Sometimes I just looked at her and marvelled at my good fortune.
Down below, The Scoop chafed at anchor in the marina, her hull glinting in the sunshine. The apartment had cost a fortune but the initial success of Dire Strait helped pay the mortgage, along with the pirate diamonds that I had quietly converted to cash. I had also wanted to use the bearer bonds but Annie had dug her heels in; muttering something about ‘blood money’, she insisted on donating the proceeds to a rape survivors charity.
The little guy was grizzling in a pram parked in the shaded corner of the wide, expansive deck. I picked him up. He’s getting to be a hefty little bugger, I thought. He gurgled happily as I swung him in the air, his face wreathed in smiles, but I felt a sharp pain. BangBang’s machete had nicked a kidney and I had lost a lot of blood. It still hurt when I laughed.
At least I don’t have to worry about that bastard anymore, I thought. The newspapers said a fellow inmate had cut his throat in a Jakarta jail after he had been extradited back to Indonesia. A contract killing, it was alleged . . . Triad stuff, according to the media. I bet his mafia bosses were less than happy that he lost those blueprints, I mused. It tickled me that I had a little something to do with that. Rot in hell, you evil bastard, I thought to myself.
I gazed at the baby looking up at me. What a handsome little devil you are, I thought. You’ve got your mother’s lovely lips and her gorgeous big green eyes. And, of course, my blond hair. His little fingers tried to grab the bronze token on a chain around my neck – the priceless gift that Percy Mimms had bequeathed to me.
‘Now listen, son,’ I said, holding him up to my face, ‘when you are a little older I had better teach you how to fight. You might have some trouble at school. Isn’t that right, Percy?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I OWE a great deal to the thousands of authors I have read, enjoyed and been inspired by throughout my life, from Enid Blyton to Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan to John Sandford and Bernard Cornwell.
Grateful thanks also to Adam J. Young and Stefan Eklof for useful background information on modern piracy in South East Asia. And my sanity was maintained thanks to DI.FM’s Chillout radio, providing a daily soundtrack to my scribbling.
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