“Petrol,” the driver said, tapping the gauge on the display which crept towards empty.
Leo woke as the bright white light of the petrol station flooded into the car. He looked at the two white painted pumps, labelled in curvaceous Nepali script, their analogue dials showing a row of zeros. Two garlands of yellow flowers draped across the top hung in the still air.
The driver got out of the taxi and walked to a small cabin across the forecourt, the window of which lit up before he got there. Leo watched as he started to talk to the man behind the glass. Switching on the pump looked like more of a complex transaction than it might be in Europe.
Tau got out too, taking the opportunity to stretch and Leo followed. It felt good to be out. He pushed his arms skywards and straightened his legs. Allissa did the same, rubbing her eyes and smiling towards Leo.
The cool, fresh, night air was welcome. The smell was different here, the jungle and the humid night mingled with the spice of local cooking and burning incense. Leo felt his muscles relax and his mind calm.
Leo stretched again, tilting his head backwards and pushing his shoulder blades together. It was then he noticed the sky. Gone was the orange glow of Kathmandu. It was black now, the darkest, purest black he’d seen in a long time. And between the clear expanses of blackness, stars peppered the sky as though dust had floated from the earth and was burning in the atmosphere. In Brighton, if you looked closely, you could see a dozen or so stars whose bullish light got through the clouds. But here you could see stars between stars. Stars circling stars in great swathes of brilliance. It occurred to Leo that they were always here, like a universe of possibilities, only sometimes they couldn’t be seen. He supposed in those times you just had to believe that they were there. That the night sky isn’t just a few bright lights, but thousands of them, each in its own unique cycle of resurrection and decay.
A car pulled into the petrol station behind their taxi. Its lights cast long shadows as it swerved, scanning the jungle, the cabin and dazzling Leo who looked straight towards it.
The engine stuttered to a halt and the lights died. The silence thickened.
Leo didn’t think anything of it until he saw Tau’s figure tense. Something worried him. The car was the same as the one they were travelling in, a body of white and pink – another taxi from Kathmandu. Not unusual in the city where the roads teemed with them, but this far away, at this time of night…
They didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
“Allissa Stockwell?” A voice from the darkness. A man’s voice.
Leo looked at Tau, Tau looked at Allissa. Their driver was still talking at the window. The petrol station canopy was an island in the night, and the surrounding darkness was solid. There was nowhere to go. The three stood, silent and motionless.
A man climbed from the back seat of the small car, his face still hidden by shadow.
“Are you Allissa Stockwell?” he asked again, stepping forward into the light, bringing his face into view.
He wasn’t the sort of person Leo expected to be doing Stockwell’s dirty work. Slight, short, with an intelligent gaze and light hair. He was well preened and dressed, an unusual quality for Europeans in Nepal. He spoke confidently, sounded expensively educated.
No one answered.
Tau was at the back, Allissa in the middle and Leo nearest, where he’d been leaning against the back wing of their taxi.
The man sensed their reaction.
“I’m sorry, let me introduce myself,” he said without moving any further forwards. “I’m Marcus Green, I’m a journalist.” He looked directly at Allissa. “I’m currently investigating your dad for fraud, extortion and blackmail over the last thirty years. I know about your mother and would like to talk to you. I imagine you’ve got a lot you could say.”
The group started to breathe again. They exchanged glances, but still no one moved.
“How can we trust you?” Leo said, knowing they couldn’t relax yet. If the last few days had taught them anything it was that they had to keep their guard up until they were sure.
“I have ID,” Green said, passing a leather wallet across to Leo. “But that only tells you who I am. You’re going to have to decide to trust me or not yourself.”
Leo flicked it open; a yellow and blue press card was in the place where people often kept photos of their families. He had a look through the other cards, all of them corroborated his name. He passed it back.
“Lift your shirt up,” Tau said. “Show us you haven’t got a weapon.”
“Seriously?” Green said, looking from face to face and seeing no retraction. Lifting his shirt, he turned, showing a pale, slim stomach.
“Can we talk now?” he asked. Leo and Tau nodded.
Green explained how he’d first heard of Stockwell when investigating MPs misusing their expenses. But with a little bit of digging he found there to be a lot more going on than just a few bogus claims.
“There was a case of bribery within the party, the blackmail of a local business owner and some unsavoury investments,” he said, listing off a few of Stockwell’s shady activities.
“But that’s not all.” The three looked towards Green in expectation. “Stockwell used a phone box to make calls he didn’t want traced, he’s old school like that, but we managed to overhear a few of those calls. And in one of them he talked about you.” The register of Green’s voice dropped, his eyes locked on Allissa. “He talked about ‘dealing with you’. At first I thought I was jumping to conclusions but when I heard the recording of the conversation myself, there was no other option.”
Leo looked from Green to Allissa, waiting for a reaction. There was none.
“Of course, we were worried for you. People go missing all of the time, and if we didn’t have the call it would be impossible to trace the link. That’s partly why I’m here, to make sure you’re safe.”
A motorbike rattled past, its engine sinking back into the noise of the jungle.
“In the next week or so,” Green said, “all my work on Stockwell will be published and all my research will be handed over to the police. I want the story to be as full as possible, so I wanted to talk to you first.” Still Allissa said nothing. “There will most likely be charges brought against your dad for this. For his financial misdealings, for what I just told you, and something else which I’m not sure you’ll know.”
Their taxi driver arrived back from his negotiation with the man in the cabin and started to fill the car with fuel. No one noticed that Green’s driver had joined him at the window. Leo looked over and wondered if they had any idea what was going on.
The driver squeezed the nozzle and the pump shuddered to life, protesting against the arduous task with knocks and bangs. The canopy’s lights dimmed and flickered with the strain on the electric current.
The four moved away to the back of Green’s taxi.
“First, if it’s okay with you,” Green said to Allissa, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Just to check I’ve got the full story. Then you can ask me anything you want to know. I wouldn’t want you to learn anything from the paper.”
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Allissa said, angling a challenging stare at him.
The knocking from the pump trailed to a stop and the lights bounced back. Tau stepped towards the taxi driver and explained they needed a few more minutes to talk to the man. The driver nodded and walked back towards the window.
The four moved back into the light and Green got his phone from the back seat of the car. He started the recording and placed it on the roof of the taxi.
Without preamble, Allissa told her story, every painstaking detail of it. She was calmer this time, more detached from the moment her family was torn apart by stratospheric lies. It was as though she had started to leave the past where it was. Green asked a couple of questions. He was doing a good job, Leo admitted, giving her the freedom to speak and prompting for details when needed.
Midway through, the taxi
driver came back over with four china cups of sweet-smelling chai. He put them on the roof of the car.
Allissa continued until every detail had been exposed. Lie by lie, blow by blow.
“Thank you,” Green said, picking up and switching off the phone. “I realise that wouldn’t have been easy. Particularly against your father. But he really is an evil man.”
Allissa nodded.
“There is something I need to tell you, something you don’t know,” Green said. Leo thought he appeared nervous as the three hung on his every word. “The real reason your dad wanted to go to such lengths for you not to go home.”
“What?” Allissa said, her eyes emotionless, detached.
“We noticed some time ago that Stockwell was making rather large monthly payments to someone which there was no reason for, we couldn’t work out why. Then the vault of a private bank in Brighton was broken into and the payments stopped. We figured…”
“Get to it,” Allissa said. “What do you know?”
“I think I know what was in that box, although as yet I can’t prove it. Your mother,” Green said, his voice low, his eyes fixed on Allissa. “Her death wasn’t an accident.”
Chapter 94
“I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere as beautiful as this,” Leo says as colour drains from the sky and the noise of the island swells. Birds flash through the twilight streaks of pink and purple.
“I knew you’d like it,” Mya replies in a whisper, her feet kicking the water which laps beneath the jetty.
“How did we get here? I mean this is crazy, it’s like a different world,” Leo says, pointing towards the inky ocean in front of them, undisturbed, unbroken. They’ve been travelling for two months but this is the first time they’ve seen an ocean like this.
A bird squawks, the light of a boat creeps across the horizon.
“Kao Tao is a special place because it’s hard to get to. When things are hard to find, that’s when they’re precious,” Mya says, looking out into nothing, her hands on the side of the jetty and her feet swinging freely. She looks beautiful in the way confident people do, her smile is currency across the world.
“I’m just glad to be here… with you,” Leo says, looking at her profile in the light of the setting sun. “Even the extra month – I’m so happy to be here.”
This is the time, he knows it, tonight. He’s had the ring hidden in his wallet for over a month now, waiting for tonight. This time, this place, this woman.
Mya turns to face Leo as he lies backwards on the jetty. Water slaps the supports under the platform. Somewhere nearby, people speak in an unknown language.
“I knew you’d like it,” she says.
“Yeah, I’m struggling to take it in, I’ve never been anywhere as beautiful as this,” Leo says, resting up on his elbows.
Now would be the perfect moment.
Mya leans forward.
“To be… to be here with you is so special…” Leo says as Mya turns to look at him. “And we, I mean, I hadn’t even planned to come here…”
“Yeah, it’s been great,” Mya says, turning back to the water. A chill passes across her body, blowing her loose fitting top tight against her profile. Leo’s eyes follow, he can’t help it.
He turns and fumbles the ring from his wallet while Mya looks out at the ocean. The one-kneed stance that tradition dictates isn’t possible on the jetty, but Leo hopes the setting and moment will make up for it.
This needs to be perfect. It will be perfect.
Leo takes a deep breath, the sea air, the smell of tamarind, lime, of love, hope and opportunity.
Then he exhales.
“Will you marry me?”
An eddy of wind skips past, rushing towards the curving palm trees on the shoreline. The bay shivers. Time hangs. Leo holds his breath, unblinking.
“I…” Mya says, following a train of thought, but cutting it before it starts. She looks from Leo’s expectant expression to the ring in his hands. “Oh my gosh, that’s so beautiful,” she says, plucking it from his fingers.
For Leo, time crawls as Mya holds up the ring, admiring the refracting colours of twilight.
“Come to our room in five minutes,” she says, climbing to her feet. “Then you’ll get your answer.”
As Mya stands, Leo sees her eyes sparkle, then she turns and walks towards the beach.
Settling back on his elbows and watching the bruised horizon, Leo tries to ignore the sting of disappointment. That’s so typical of Mya, he thinks as he watches the silhouette of her shape grow small, doing things her way.
Chapter 95
“They always just seemed so normal.”
Listening to Green speak, Allissa thought of those TV interviews in which surprised neighbours describe how shocked they are that the person next door has done something terrible.
“It’s so unexpected.”
But for her it wasn’t like that at all. Somehow she knew exactly what Green was going to say.
“Your father paid a group of people in Kenya to kill your mother and make it look like an accident, make it look like she was caught up in a protest. And your father thought he’d got away with it.”
“I can’t imagine how people would do that.”
For Allissa it wasn’t like that at all. She could picture it all, chubby fingers dialling the call, rolls of flesh wobbling as instructions were given, sweaty brow wiped ceremoniously after hanging up the phone. She was just disappointed she’d not worked it out for herself.
“Then there was a regime change in Kenya and one of the men he’d hired liked the idea of living all expenses paid in the U.K. With the evidence he had about what your father had done…”
What surprised Allissa the most, listening to Green explain beneath the swathes of shimmering stars, was that she still didn’t feel anything. She thought that maybe she should feel shocked, or horrified, or scared, or surprised, or useless.
But she just felt nothing. She felt empty.
She wished she could feel something, Allissa thought, climbing back into the taxi a few minutes later, but she didn’t. She just didn’t.
With the squeal of engines and the crunch of tyres the two taxis headed opposite ways down the narrow strip of tarmac. Green turned back towards Kathmandu, where he’d said he hoped to get the first flight back to London. Allissa, Leo and Tau pushed on towards Pokhara.
It wasn’t until the taxi again started to wallow through the darkness that Allissa started to feel, although it was not shock or horror. All she felt was relief. Just relief. Suddenly she realised she was not the only one who knew the true nature of the man who called himself her father. At least one other person, the journalist heading the other way, knew what he had done and soon would publicise it to millions.
Would this mean she would be free from carrying his secrets around with her? She didn’t know, but as the road stretched out boundless and bare, she felt a positivity that the destination was there somewhere, and somehow she knew it would be good, even if she didn’t know why.
After a few minutes of driving through the insipid darkness, the driver started to talk to Tau. He spoke in Nepalese but made an effort to use the English words he knew.
In the back, Allissa and Leo listened intently, the tiredness of hours past had evaporated and the floundering of the car against the road hadn’t yet hypnotised them.
The word “home” was mentioned a number of times. Home.
Tau turned to the others to translate.
“Horan’s,” he indicated to the taxi driver by name, “family home is nearby, ten minutes further down this road. He suggests that we stop for a few hours and get some rest. They’ll have food, somewhere we can sleep. We’ll continue tomorrow.”
There was no reason not to. The road had been empty since they’d left the petrol station and all were tired. Leo and Allissa nodded in agreement.
A few minutes later, they turned from the main road and continued up a track barely big enough for the taxi.
After five minutes, Horan pulled the taxi to the right and killed the engine. There was no sound but the murmur of insects and the whisper of wind through the trees.
“This way,” he indicated.
“This is where his family lives,” Tau translated.
Around them the darkness was faultless. As Allissa got used to it she began to see the outlines of trees and a dark shape against the ocean of stars up ahead. Horan walked towards it, avoiding plants, trees and uneven ground. The others followed his quick footsteps.
Reaching the building which looked as though it was on the crest of the hill, Horan pushed open the door. Instinctively, he found a switch and warm light swamped them.
The room looked comfortable, a light dampened by a wicker shade hung in the middle and three wicker chairs surrounded a table.
Horan shouted a greeting. A young woman appeared from a door at the back, squinting against the light. Seeing Horan, her face brightened and she rushed across to greet him. She looped her arms around his thin neck and pulled him close.
Noticing he was not alone, she straightened her posture and smiled. An older man and woman followed from a different door with the same bleary expression. They too brightened as they welcomed Horan home. He introduced them one by one and Tau translated for Leo and Allissa.
“This is Horan’s mother, father and wife. He says we should sit. He will find us something to drink and eat.”
Seeing the greeting, Allissa felt like an intruder, as though she had to look away. They were a real family, working together, supporting each other. Two children were woken up and brought from one of the bedrooms. They rubbed their eyes with limp hands and beamed at their father.
“These taxi drivers work so hard, he has not seen his family for a month. You have given him this great opportunity to see them tonight,” Tau said.
Allissa was offered one of the chairs but refused, letting Horan’s father have it. A pile of cushions collected from a bedroom were stacked against one of the walls. Leo and Allissa sat together, listening to happy conversation they didn’t understand. Tau sat on the opposite side of the room, shouting across some translations.
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