Deception!

by Elizabeth Ducie

  ‘So where’s the famous Copacabana Beach?’ said Mercy.

  ‘Infamous, more like,’ said Hawkins. ‘You need to keep your wits about you and your hand on your valuables when you go there.’ He turned from the front seat and smiled at the two women. ‘It’s in the other direction, south of the bay. And Ipanema is the other side of it. But I think you’ll find your options for sunbathing are going to be a little less crowded and a little more exclusive than that.’

  They left the highway behind and turned into a small marina, where tiny dinghies jostled for space with much larger yachts. The minibus pulled up at the jetty of one of the biggest vessels. Charlie and Mercy gasped. Hawkins turned to them, grinning like a schoolboy whose party trick has just gone very well indeed.

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d be impressed.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Mercy, ‘when you told me we were staying on a yacht, I was thinking much smaller than this.’

  ‘This isn’t yours, is it?’ asked Charlie.

  Hawkins nodded his head.

  ‘Well, we don’t own it, if that’s what you mean; but for the next few days, this is the humble abode we can call home.’

  The boat looked to Charlie to be brand new, or at the very least, recently refurbished. It was at least seventy metres long, painted cream and blue, with highly polished wooden railings and trim. The name on the prow was Pride of Kharkov. A row of crewmen, together with the gold-braided captain, stood to attention on the jetty waiting to welcome the guests aboard. Wait until Suzanne hears about this, thought Charlie. Mercy grabbed her arm and pulled her towards the gangplank.

  ‘Come on, Rose, let’s go and explore,’ she said, back in excited child mode.

  The two women quickly found their way around the boat, and within a short time, they had settled in and were lying beside the swimming pool on the sun deck. Hawkins strolled along the deck to join them, wearing a straw panama, tailored shorts and deck shoes. He threw himself into a lounger next to Charlie, who felt herself suppressing a shudder.

  This was surreal. This man had masterminded an operation making and selling counterfeit drugs in Africa—and probably beyond; was responsible for the deaths of numerous people, especially children; and on a more personal level was connected to a plot to kidnap and imprison her sister in the African jungle. Yet here she was, lounging around next to him on a luxury yacht. And still with no plan for how to unmask him and bring him to justice.

  ‘I’m going to spend the rest of the morning getting some work done,’ Hawkins said, ‘and I have a quick meeting this afternoon.’ Mercy looked up at him and pouted. ‘Yes, I know, sweetheart, we’re supposed to be on holiday, but this is the end of it, I promise. From tomorrow, I’m all yours.’ He thought for a little while then went on. ‘You girls can go and explore the city a little; I’ll arrange for a car and driver to take you around and keep you out of trouble. Then this evening we’ll have dinner and watch the fireworks from here. You’ll get a great view.’

  ‘But what about the carnival?’ asked Charlie, ‘Isn’t that what we’ve come to see? Won’t we miss all the fun from here?’ If she and Mercy were going to put their plan into action, they needed to be mixing with the crowds in the streets, not watching from afar on an isolated boat. Hawkins raised an eyebrow at her and she wondered if she had gone too far. But to her surprise, it was Mercy who responded, looking quite put out.

  ‘If my father wants to eat dinner here, than that’s what we’ll do,’ she said. She turned to Hawkins. ‘What time do you want us back here, Tata?

  ‘Well, we won’t be eating until after nine pm, so there’s no hurry,’ he said, then turning to Charlie ‘and don’t worry, Rose. Carnival goes on for another three days and we’ll have plenty of time to mix in with the hoi polloi. I’ve got tickets for the Sambadrome for tomorrow night and we’ll drop in one of the balls after the parade. Trust me, my dear, by Tuesday you will welcome a quiet evening out here on the boat.’

  Somehow, Charlie doubted if it would come to that, but she kept her mouth shut and just smiled at Hawkins and his daughter, who for some reason, suddenly appeared a much tighter unit than she’d realised. What on earth was going on in Mercy’s mind?

  ‘Okay, what was that all about?’ she asked her companion an hour later as they sat in the back of an air-conditioned Mercedes that collected them from the jetty and headed for the city.

  There was no reply. Mercy was staring out of the window, picking at the handle of her shoulder bag with nervous fingers. She jumped as Charlie touched her arm and the eyes that turned towards her were unfocussed. Charlie didn’t think she’d heard the question.

  ‘Mercy, are you okay?’ She shook her arm gently and the girl blinked once before flashing her old smile.

  ‘Of course I am. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well you seemed miles away—and I was asking why you jumped to your father’s defence like that? I would think you would prefer to be out in the crowds, rather than on the boat. How are we going to manage to break away from him out there?’ But Mercy just smiled and patted her hand.

  ‘Relax, my friend,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fine. I’m beginning to think everything is going to work out just perfectly.’

  After that, the driver rolled down the screen separating him from the passengers and started an explanation of where they were going and what they were going to see. His rapid Portuguese was beyond Charlie’s level of competence and she gave up trying to follow him. She would let Mercy bring her up to speed if there was anything she needed to know.

  It seemed to Charlie they’d walked for hours! And shopped for hours too. She had never considered shopping for clothes as a pastime. Her regular approach, if anything so rare could be considered regular, was to decide what she wanted, pick a single venue and if, as was often the case, she couldn’t find what she wanted, give up in disgust and wear something she’d had in her wardrobe for years. But Mercy was the complete opposite.

  They’d visited every clothes shop in the Rio Sul shopping centre—and some of them more than once. Mercy had tried on dresses, skirts, tops, and shoes. So many shoes. And she’d given her credit card a good bashing.

  Charlie questioned Mercy’s logic in buying a load of new clothes she was never going to wear, but her companion only laughed at her.

  ‘This is what my father would expect me to do,’ she said, as they piled the bags into the boot of the limo and threw themselves back into the soft leather-clad seats. ‘We’re in one of the best shopping centres in South America. Why wouldn’t I take advantage of it?’ She stared at Charlie for a few moments in silence then went on. ‘And you know, it might help confuse the issue when I do go.’ Charlie didn’t understand this point and her face must have shown that, as Mercy continued. ‘We’ve been talking about my running away and about how we do it before my father has a chance to find me?’ Charlie nodded. ‘But how about if he thinks I’ve been kidnapped—or worse—won’t that muddy the waters and give me more time to get away?’

  No, Charlie thought, that won’t help things at all. It will simply make Hawkins all the more determined to get his daughter back. But she was unable to convince Mercy it didn’t make sense. In fact her companion seemed to have stopped listening to her. Charlie was starting to get a really bad feeling about all of this. And she still hadn’t come up with a plan for trapping Hawkins. She knew she was running out of time.

  They’d chosen a shopping centre in Botafogo, as it was close to Ipanema, where they planned to watch the afternoon’s street band parade. Charlie looked longingly at the iconic statue of Christ as they passed it in the distance, and Mercy smiled and patted her arm.

  ‘The afternoon’s really not the time to go up there,’ she said. ‘It’s way too hot and it’ll be much too crowded.’ She’d been chatting to the driver and seemed to have everything worked out. ‘We can come back early in the morning and take the funicular up to Corcovado to watch the sunrise. It will be like Iguaçu all over again.’

&
nbsp; CHAPTER 28 (Lourenço Marques, September 1969)

  For two years, Grace and I were blissfully happy. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. It was like I was two different personalities. During the day, and often in the evenings as well, I was Stefano’s right hand man. I ran important projects on my own, although not the biggest ones; he held them back for himself. I sorted problems. In fact I made problems go away. And there were quite a few at that time. But when my working day was over, I would go home to our little apartment—we had long since moved out of the digs near Stefano’s HQ—and be the perfect husband. It was idyllic, it was safe, it was different—but in the end, it became boring.

  I met Honey one evening when Stefano was holding a meeting in the casino he owned. She waltzed in with a couple of young men in tow. She was coloured—the result she told me later of a long-term liaison between a Portuguese trader and his housekeeper. She was high octane, sparkling, laughing at everything. I wanted her from the minute I saw her. But there was one big problem; well, two if you count the fact I was married to Grace—but somehow that didn’t seem to matter. No, the big problem was that Honey was the mistress of a local army leader. He was a man who ran our part of the city with a rod of iron. He used a private gang of thugs to deal with anything he couldn’t do legitimately with his official troops. It was only by his grace and favour we were able to operate as we did. It cost us a lot of money each month to keep him happy, and it was worth it. But suddenly none of that mattered either.

  Stefano introduced us and she offered me her hand. I bowed, kissed the back of it and would have let it go, but she held on to my fingers just that bit longer than was necessary and looked me straight in the eye, with a challenging look on her face. The message couldn’t have been clearer if she’d written it down. Then she removed her hand, blew me a kiss, and turned back to her companions. She didn’t speak to, or even look at, me again, all evening, no matter how much I stared at her. Stefano noticed the direction of my eyes.

  ‘Oh no you don’t, my boy!’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder and steering me towards the bar. ‘You’ve been a fool over a woman once already, and you’ve got away with it. This is completely different. You can’t afford to go there.’ I nodded at him and laughed.

  ‘Yes, I know, Stefano,’ I replied, ‘but there’s no harm in window shopping, now is there?’

  As Honey left the casino that night, she walked over to our table and bade Stefano goodnight. Then she held out her hand to me and as I returned the gesture, I felt a small card sliding into my palm. I pushed it into my pocket and as soon as I could, excused myself and headed for the men’s room.

  The card was printed with her name and an address in the best part of the city. On the back was printed in large, childish writing: He’s away. Tomorrow, 3pm.

  My head told me I should throw the card away, destroy it even, and forget all about the bewitching woman who’d given it to me. But I was listening to my heart, not my head at that moment.

  I kept that appointment the next day, and again the day after, and the day after that. Then she told me her patron was returning to the city that night—and it was all over. I bowed over her hand one last time and returned to the casino and Stefano, somewhat relieved. It had been heady, wonderful, too much to take in—and I didn’t think I could have carried it on much longer. Each evening I’d returned to Grace, feeling sadder than the day before. That night I took her in my arms as we went to bed and swore to myself I would never do anything again to harm this woman who loved me so much and deserved to be treated with respect.

  Honey’s body was found floating in the harbour two days later. She had been brutally beaten, raped and then strangled. Stefano called me to his office that same afternoon.

  ‘You know I have to kill you, don’t you, Michael?’ were his first words. I looked around wildly, but there were only the two of us there. I was ten years younger than him, much stronger and in better shape. I thought I could take my chances against my old friend physically, but mentally, would I be able to harm him? Maybe I was about to find out. But then he laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘I always knew it would come to this at some point, my boy. I think it’s time you went home, don’t you?’ I must have looked as puzzled as I felt because he laughed again. ‘England! I think it’s time you went home to England.’

  The next morning, Stefano picked me up from home and took me to a warehouse he owned down on the docks. He left me hiding there while he sorted everything else out. He arranged for a homeless drifter, who sometimes came to the restaurant kitchen door for scraps, to meet with an untimely accident. Then he dressed the body in my clothes, slipping my cigarette case into the jacket pocket, and had it dropped over the side of a boat outside the harbour, leaving the tides and the fishes to do their work.

  He found me new clothes, arranged for papers in a new name, and reminded me of everything he’d ever taught me about archaeology and fossils during our early days together in Cape Town. Then one week after Honey’s murder, he handed me papers for the Queen Katherine, a cruise ship due to sail from Cape Town for Southampton. Under cover of darkness, he sent a car to collect me and take me to the South African border.

  Three days later I walked up the gangplank of the newly commissioned liner and went to find the purser in his office.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’

  ‘Michaels,’ I said, shaking his hand, ‘Fredrick Michaels. I’m your archaeology lecturer for the upcoming voyage.’

  CHAPTER 29

  The driver dropped them at Ipanema beach and agreed to return for them in a couple of hours. It was approaching five o’clock and the crowds were jostling for space along the boardwalk.

  ‘Come on,’ Mercy said, grabbing Charlie’s arm, ‘let’s go and get a drink; you must try the coconut water. We can watch the parade from there.’ They dived into a kerbside bar and Mercy called for drinks. Then she wriggled her way through the crowd until she was leaning on the railings overlooking the street. Charlie followed in her wake. The crush was so great, the women were pushed against one another. Mercy linked her arm through Charlie’s and gave a contented sigh.

  As the parade drew near, the excited chatter of the crowd swelled to a cacophony of sounds. People spilled out of the bars and cafés onto the street to join in with the dancing and singing. There was every skin tone from palest white to deepest black. A brass band, shirts emblazoned with their name, played trumpets and trombones. A solitary figure, like a modern day Tin Man from Oz, blew a whistle repeatedly while striking his metal chest, turning himself into a living instrument. Costumes in bright colours, some made entirely of feathers, flitted like exotic birds among the crowd. To Charlie’s eyes, it began to merge into a seething rainbow-coloured living tapestry. Her head buzzed as the smells of coconut, beer, pancakes and fried pastries mingled with the sweat of the crowd. And above it all was the throb, throb, throb of the samba drums.

  As her senses reached overload, Charlie realised her companion was no longer watching what was going on in the street, but was staring at her. Mercy lifted her hand to brush a strand of dark hair away from Charlie’s damp brow, then leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were cool, dry and very soft. Charlie remained quite still. She didn’t return the kiss, but she didn’t pull away either. The sounds from the street faded and all Charlie could hear was a rhythmic drumming sound. She wasn’t sure if it was the samba drums or her own heartbeat she was listening to.

  Mercy pulled away and smiled at her. With one hand she continued to stroke her face, while the fingers of her other hand feathered softly over Charlie’s leg, slowly moving upwards towards her thigh. Then she leaned forward once more, only this time her lips brushed Charlie’s ear.

  ‘I’m so glad you agreed to come with me,’ she whispered. Then she turned her attention back to the parade.

  This can’t be happening. This mustn’t happen, thought Charlie. But almost of i
ts own volition, her hand moved across to Mercy’s and gripped tightly. The wandering fingers wandered no more, but the two hands, one white, one coffee coloured, remained melded together as the parade continued on its way.

  When it was time to return to the boat, Mercy linked her fingers with Charlie’s as they strolled along the edge of the beach. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the water glowed dully like liquid gold. In the bars and cafés, lights were beginning to appear. In the distance, they could see their car waiting for them.

  ‘You don’t have to go back,’ Mercy said. Charlie glanced across at her companion and saw she was staring intensely at her.

  ‘Back to São Paulo? Of course I do. I’ve got research to do, I’ve only got a short while left here in Brazil...’

  Mercy was grinning widely.

  ‘No, silly, I mean you don’t have to go back to Britain. You have no ties there. You could stay here.’ She swung round in front of Charlie, blocking her path and grabbing her hands. ‘Stay, Rose. Stay here with me. We could have such wonderful times.’

  She put her arms around Charlie, pulled her to her and kissed her. But this wasn’t the cool kiss of before. This was full of passion, demanding a response. And Charlie felt that response beginning to blossom. Her arms were around Mercy’s shoulders and she could feel the other woman’s taut body pressed against her. She returned the kiss, mouth open, tongue exploring.

  But at the back of her mind she could hear a voice urging ‘no’. A quiet Scottish voice; the voice of someone who desperately wanted to trust her. She grabbed Mercy by the shoulders and pushed her gently but firmly away.

  ‘No, Mercy. I can’t. We can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’