Grave Island: a compelling mystery thriller

by Andrew Smyth

‘It’s an iPhone, right?’ the boy said. ‘Cost a lot?’ He was clearly taunting me, but I said nothing and watched them carefully. The others seemed to be waiting for a sign from the leader, so I should take him out first. It was then that he brought out the knife.

  I couldn’t believe that he intended to knife me for an iPhone. I thought about trying to dial the police with the phone in my pocket, but that would leave me vulnerable with only one free hand. I realised that I should probably hand it over, but I felt the familiar drumming in my temple as the adrenaline coursed through my veins. The boy took a step towards me, which was his mistake, he was now in reach. But I had to make sure that the others didn’t jump me.

  ‘Thank God you’re here!’ I shouted, waving at an imaginary person behind them. Obvious, but it seemed to work. The others turned around to see who I was calling to, but the boy with the knife showed why he was the leader and only hesitated fractionally. But it was enough. I feinted a punch with my left hand, hoping he would think I was a southpaw.

  As he went to parry it, I twisted around and grabbed his wrist. He fought back, and he was strong. He still had the knife in his hand and was trying to kick me. I yanked his arm forward and got two hands on his wrist and flipped it backwards. He gasped, but turned into me, still hanging onto the knife.

  I glanced up at his friends who were clearly intending to join in. I had to finish this in the next few seconds. I stamped on his foot with my heel, and chopped at the nerve centre at the side of his wrist which should have left him without feeling in his arm. He didn’t seem to notice and his grip on the knife was to be as strong as ever. We pulled apart and he faced up to me. ‘Get him boys,’ he shouted and lunged forward. As he thrust forward I pulled his arm and twisted it around until I had my other arm around his neck. I dragged him backwards and in his effort to keep his balance he relaxed his grip on the knife which fell to the floor. I kicked again at the back of his legs and as he fell to the floor I reached down and picked up the knife. I kneeled over him and put the knife to his throat and looked up at the others. ‘Stay where you are, or I’ll kill him. To make sure they understood I grabbed his hair and pulled his head up so I had a better angle for the knife.

  One of the boys started forward and I cut into his friend’s neck where I knew it wouldn’t be fatal. The boy stopped and I could see in his face that he wasn’t prepared for such violence. All he knew was that everyone else had given up. The boy on the floor was still struggling but I tightened my grip around his neck and pulled him to his feet so we were both facing the rest of his gang. They were clearly undecided, but the blood trickling from his neck made them hesitate.

  ‘You wanted a fight,’ I said. ‘So watch this.’ I spun the boy around and landed two heavy punches to his gut. He gasped and fell forward and I hit him on the side of his face. I could barely see him as the red mist almost covered my eyes. I hit him again with a punch to the kidneys and could feel that all resistance had gone out of him but this still wasn’t enough. I threw the knife over my shoulder into a garden behind me and hit him again on the side of his face. His head spun around with a sickened crack and I steadied him up for what should have been his final moment.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ It took a moment before I was aware of someone shouting at me. I’d forgotten the other boys and through the red haze, I could see that they’d gone, but still someone was shouting at me and I became aware that I knew the voice from somewhere. ‘Stop,’ he said again. ‘You’ll kill him. He’s finished, let him go.’

  Slowly I looked around but at first my vision was blurred. Eventually I recognised Sayed standing next to me and shouting. I let go of the boy who fell to the floor. I shook my head to try to clear it and looked down at the apparently lifeless boy who’d attacked me.

  Sayed kneeled down next to him and took his pulse. ‘He’s still alive,’ he said, but I think we need an ambulance.’ He brought out his phone and looked behind me and gave the name of the street. ‘He might have internal injuries so we need to be careful,’ he said, but there was still a lot of blood on the boy’s neck. He took out a tissue and examined it more closely. ‘No, it’s only superficial. At least his pulse is steady,’ he said holding the boy’s wrist. ‘I think he should be okay.’ He turned and looked up at me. ‘What the hell happened here?’

  I looked down at my hands which were still shaking. I realised what would have happened if he hadn’t turned up, but I didn’t want to admit it. I hadn’t started it. ‘The boy got what was coming to him,’ I said, but as I said it I realised that again I’d gone too far. Much too far. ‘He tried to steal my phone,’ but I realised that this wasn’t enough reason for him to lie unconscious on the floor. ‘He had a knife,’ I added.

  After the ambulance came and took the boy away, I followed Sayed back up the street and recognised the park up ahead. We walked together in silence and we crossed the road and sat on our usual bench.

  ‘That’s what they teach you in the army is it?’

  I didn’t reply. I’d shown weakness and didn’t see how I could recover from it, but Sayed didn’t seem to notice. ‘He had a knife, you say?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You were lucky.’

  I was slowly coming to my senses and realised that if he thought it was luck I wasn’t going to tell him otherwise. I took a grip on myself and tried to change the subject and asked him how he’d been.

  It clearly took him an effort to respond – he’d obviously been shaken at what he’d seen but then I was pretty shaken myself. ‘Are you alright?’ I asked.

  It took him a while before he relaxed and finally told me about his recent trip back home to Afghanistan. It seemed that Ali had managed to get Sayed a seat on a plane after all, so that meant he was quite well disposed towards our service. ‘Things have improved so much,’ he said. ‘They’re still far from perfect, but at least people are now able to have some kind of normal life. They’ve even managed to rebuild the clinic and have restarted the vaccination programmes so people shouldn’t have to suffer like my brother did.’

  Perhaps we managed to do some good after all, I thought, as he carried on telling me about his visit – he was becoming quite animated – and I didn’t try to interrupt – he’d get around to telling me what he’d wanted to tell me in his own time.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said finally. ‘Thanks for arranging the seat on the plane. I couldn’t have got there without it.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. It was Ali. He can’t come, but I’ll pass on your thanks.’ I hesitated, I still didn’t want Sayed to think I was pushing him. ‘And your mother? How is she?’

  ‘She’s doing well, although things are never going to be the same for her. She was very happy that you’d managed to track me down and arrange the visit. It’s created quite a lot of goodwill out there.’

  ‘Are you still wanting to go back when your course is finished?’

  ‘I think so. There’s so much to do out there. The international agencies are getting better at organising their vaccination programmes and there’s a huge amount of charitable money floating around to push them forward. It’s a really exciting time to be involved.’

  ‘There’s a lot of fakes around as well. That’s the sort of difference you can make, to ensure that the drugs you administer are real.’

  16

  It was late at night when I finally arrived at Unguja, Zanzibar’s international airport. A reservation had been made for me at the Africa House Hotel which had once been the English Club. It had recently been restored to its former magnificence – a level of luxury that the British colonial masters had probably created to remind the locals who was in charge. But those days were long gone and Zanzibar’s turbulent history continued without much effort spent in achieving a national consensus.

  It lost its nominal independence when it joined Tanganyika to form a self-governing part of the Republic of Tanzania, but that only served to exacerbate tensions on the islands. Since then conflict between the factions had simmered close to the su
rface, occasionally threatening to break out into civil war. Coupled with its position out in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast, it was an ideal base for smuggling – particularly from India. The encroaching Somalian pirate activity further up the coast only made the atmosphere even more febrile.

  I’d been told to wait at the hotel until the local man from Mombasa, Dickson Kogo, made contact so I went straight there, checked in and went up to my room. Following the warnings from my controllers, I took out a scanner and checked the room for bugs. I couldn’t see why anyone was expecting me, but it was a routine precaution.

  The next morning I woke early and decided to investigate the town. Zanzibar had been an important trading post for hundreds of years and the ancient carved doorways betrayed their Arab influence. The rising sun threw long, intricate shadows onto the narrow streets which were busy even at this time and the balconies nearly closed over me, forming an arch of intricate wooden trellis work.

  Many of the men wore white kofia caps on their heads, often with startlingly white full-length robes and although a few of the women were almost completely covered by sombre black chadors, in contrast many others had the confidence to wear brightly coloured headscarves. The main trade had been in slaves – a business the Europeans took over with alacrity when they arrived. Some slaves were even taken overland to Africa’s west coast before being shipped off to the Caribbean sugar estates, or the American cotton plantations of the Deep South. One of the old slave markets was now a moving monument to this trade and I stayed there awhile before heading back to the hotel.

  I was finishing breakfast in my room when there was a light tapping at my door. ‘Dickson,’ I said. ‘I was told to expect you. But they gave me a password just in case.’

  Dickson laughed. ‘Grave Island.’ He walked past me onto the balcony. ‘You can’t quite see it from here, it’s around the docks there, but you’ve got a great view over the ocean.’ He sat on one of the metal chairs. ‘The islands over there are kept as nature reserves. It’s one of the few things the political parties can agree on.’

  I glanced across at the low-lying islands surrounded by a skirt of white sand. I hadn’t come to admire the view but had to agree it was a pretty stunning place. I turned back to Dickson. ‘Have you been able to locate the warehouse?’

  ‘It’s a company called Ansaar Enterprises,’ Dickson replied. ‘A few miles north of here, set back from the main road.’

  ‘Muslim owned?’

  ‘Everyone in Zanzibar is Muslim.’

  ‘Have you seen anything? Any indication of what they’re doing?’

  ‘I’ve been watching. They’ve got the container on a trailer outside. That must have been delivered from the airport and they’ve been unloading it into the warehouse, but from the road you can’t see what’s going on at the back.’

  ‘You haven’t seen anything going in or out?’

  ‘I can see the masts of the boats, but unless we can watch from the sea, we can’t tell what’s happening.’

  I went over to my bag and pulled out the satellite printout and put it down on the table. ‘We know that the most recent consignment has been delivered and unloaded here because of the tracker, but we needed to get in there somehow and find out what else they’ve got stored. This could be a major distribution centre.’

  ‘If it is then it would be dangerous for you to go anywhere near it. Especially after what happened in Mombasa. I heard someone nearly got killed there, so it makes sense to go carefully.’

  ‘Yes, but we’ve got no choice. We have to get in there. My guess is that the switch is being orchestrated by the transport company, so if I say they sent me then that should get me in.’ Dickson said something I didn’t quite catch. ‘What was that? Did you say, “straws in the wind”?’ Dickson shrugged. ‘Oh. Never mind,’ I said. ‘Let’s get on with it. Wait for me downstairs. I’ll make everything secure here and then you can show me the layout.’

  We headed out of town and, as Dickson had said, it was only a few miles before he turned off down a dusty, unmade track and parked. I followed as he got out and pushed his way into the bushes. He stopped at a small clearing. ‘It’s over there,’ he said, pointing towards the coast.

  I crouched and peered through the branches. Above the foreshore was a long, low ramshackle building with a corrugated iron roof. In front of it, the container they’d unloaded at the airport was still on its trailer with its door folded back, although the tractor that had brought it had left. The door into the warehouse was half open but I couldn’t see inside because of shadows. But there were boxes on the ground and it was clear they were unloading. Despite the dilapidated condition of the building, I could see that the doors and windows were barred and secure. Floodlights and infrared cameras were positioned around the compound, looking incongruous against the apparent neglect of the building they were monitoring.

  As I watched, someone came out pulling a pallet of boxes which he set down and proceeded to load into the container. ‘See that?’ I said. ‘They’re loading and unloading. They must be rearranging the consignment to be taken onto Mombasa.’

  ‘You think the container’s going to be sent to Kenya?’

  ‘Where else would it go? It’s supposed to be a direct shipment – from the Bakaar factory in Mumbai, to the Tau distribution centre outside Mombasa. But it looks as though they’re rearranging the contents en route.’

  ‘But what about the tracker?’ Dickson asked. ‘Isn’t that still sending a signal from inside the warehouse?’

  ‘The Oxaban consignment? Yes, so we know it’s been unloaded. But we still don’t know whether it’s full strength or a counterfeit. It looks as though they’re breaking up the contents and sorting through them before sending them on.’

  ‘The container’s still outside so I guess they’re intending to put back what they don’t want and send it onto Mombasa as shown on the manifest.’

  ‘There’ve got to be fakes in that container, otherwise what’s the point of taking it off the plane here in Zanzibar? Somehow the fakes must be mixed up with the real pharmaceuticals.’ I thought about this. ‘It’s got to be Comar. Otherwise I don’t see how they’re doing it.’

  ‘The fakes are sent in the same consignment and then the fakes are removed here in Zanzibar and the real ones put back.’

  ‘So what do they do with the fakes? We know that the container’s heading for Bakaar’s distributor in Mombasa, so we need to find out where they’re sending the stuff they’ve taken off.’

  Dickson suddenly grabbed my arm. ‘Wait. There, look.’ He pointed out to sea where a boat was approaching the beach, but all I could see was the sail being dropped. ‘I bet they’re loading up from the other side. It makes sense. It’s a perfect place to break up shipments and distribute them along the coast.’

  ‘But in a sailing boat?’

  ‘A dhow,’ he corrected me. ‘With the steady winds they have around here, it’s as fast as a motorboat. You’d be amazed at the way the skippers handle them – almost everything along this coast is carried by dhow.’

  It was a frustrating wait but nearly an hour later, we saw the top of the mast move and head off away from us to the north. ‘The island over there,’ I said, ‘is that Grave Island? It must have a perfect view of the front of this place. I was told it was private – do you know who owns it?’

  ‘It’s owned by an Italian – a woman. Apparently she’s quite some force around here. But she’s built a small resort with huts along the beach on the other side, so we could go there if we booked one of the huts.’

  ‘Why Grave Island?’

  ‘The locals know it as Chapwani Island but to the Wabenzies they call it after the war grave site on the island. Twenty-eight British people drowned when their ship was sunk by a German light cruiser in the First World War, and they’re buried on Chapwani.’

  ‘Wabenzies?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, you know, Europeans who drive Mercedes Benzes.’

  I shrugged.
That went a bit past me. ‘How do we get there?’ I asked, getting back to the subject in hand.

  ‘By dhow from Stone Town. Apparently the island’s being run partly as an eco-resort so we could say we wanted to stay to observe the wildlife. It would give us a good cover story if we go in with binoculars.’

  ‘Okay. We’re not going to find out what’s going on by standing around here. Let’s go back and find ourselves a dhow.’

  We headed back to the car.

  ‘I think we’ll have to book ourselves in for the night,’ Dickson said. ‘We could say we want to look at the graves, but they won’t be happy if we wander around and then leave without spending any money.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Give them a call and make a reservation. We might even treat ourselves to a decent meal.’

  We went back to the Africa House and I threw a few things into an overnight bag and we headed for the sea. Stone Town’s foreshore doubles as its high street – without worrying about docks or jetties, all the boats simply sail right up the beach to unload their cargo. The car ferries lower their ramps onto the sand and the cars and trucks drive off into the maze of streets that border the sea while tourist touts wait on the beach, surrounding arriving visitors like a swarm of flies.

  I’d left Dickson to negotiate with the numerous boatmen who were hanging around until he agreed a price with one and I met him on the beach. He’d left the car in one of the side streets and went back to get the equipment that would qualify us as dedicated observers of the local fauna. He threw the backpack into the dhow and the skipper pushed us off and hoisted a threadbare sail which had more patches than a chessboard. But Dickson was right, it had quite a turn of speed and the shallow draft meant that we were able to get quite close inshore to the island even at half-tide. After that, it was a case of sliding through the muddy coral towards the resort’s reception area.

  The receptionist checked us in and asked if we wanted to go straight to our rooms but I said that we’d go later.