‘Because—’
‘We’re both adults. I want you. And I know you want me too.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Once we’re free of my father, we can do what we want; be what we want.’
Charlie took a deep breath and shook her head slowly, hating herself for what she was about to say.
‘It won’t work, Mercy. I lied when I said I had no ties. I have a partner back home. She—’
The blow came so fast, there was no time to duck. Mercy lashed out and back-handed Charlie across her cheek. Then she turned on her heel and marched towards the car.
Stunned, but unwilling to be left alone on a Rio street at night, Charlie shook her head to clear the ringing in her ears and then ran after Mercy, catching up with her at the car.
As the two climbed into the back seat, the African woman pushed herself into the corner and stared out of the window. They sat in silence as the driver started the engine and began the drive back to the marina.
Charlie’s thoughts were in turmoil. She needed to placate Mercy before they reached the boat and then just had to hope she wouldn’t say anything to Hawkins, although given her comments about being free of her father, that that was probably a safe bet.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been in this situation. On several occasions, her undercover roles had called for her to fake emotions. Once she’d even been engaged briefly to an Eastern European smuggler. So why was this so different? Partly it was that Scottish voice in the back of her head. Annie was special. Annie was for keeps and Charlie didn’t want to screw that up.
But if she was honest, she was frightened. Frightened that the emotions wouldn’t be fake. And she wasn’t sure she would be able to deal with that when the time came to part.
As the car drove into the marina, Charlie was still no closer to an answer, but Mercy turned to her and put her hand out to touch Charlie’s bruised cheek.
‘Rose, I’m so sorry. I was wrong to assume you would feel the same as me. And I was wrong to hit you.’
‘That’s okay, Mercy. I shouldn’t have led you on. And in other circumstances—’ but the African woman rested her finger gently on Charlie’s lips.
‘Hush,’ she said, ‘we’ll say no more.’
While they were getting changed for dinner, Charlie heard noises and bustle coming from the engine room and the bridge. Then a whistle blew and she felt, rather than heard, the engines starting up. By the time she joined her host and his daughter on deck, they were moving out of the marina and heading to the edge of the bay.
‘Mercy suggested we take a bit of a tour,’ Hawkins explained, ‘and we’ll have an even better view of the fireworks from further along the coast.’
They anchored in a small, deserted bay just north of Copacabana beach and Hawkins told the captain they would stay there until morning. The crew seemed happy at the opportunity for a night off duty and, leaving one young sailor behind ‘in case the boss needs anything’, they climbed into the motor boat and headed for the shore. In the distance, the lights of Rio shone brightly, but once the noise of the outboard motor had faded, all was silent and dark around the Pride of Kharkov.
The crew had laid a table out on deck and a gentle evening breeze blew, relief from the burning heat of the day, as the three helped themselves to lobster, pasta with truffles, and a delicate lemon mousse. Afterwards, Mercy poured brandy into three cut crystal glasses and handed one each to her father and Charlie. The three settled in companionable silence, just as a rocket arched across the sky, signalling the start of the evening’s firework display. When it finished fifteen explosive minutes later, Hawkins reached across and patted Mercy’s arm.
‘All a bit different from Mozambique, isn’t it?’ he asked. His daughter turned her face towards his. Charlie could see the boat’s lamps reflected in her eyes and wondered if it was tears that made them shine so brightly.
CHAPTER 30
‘What was it like, Mercy?’ asked Charlie. ‘Tell me about your childhood.’
The other woman stared out into the darkness and said nothing for a long time. Charlie wondered if she’d not heard the question. But then, she shook herself and turned towards her, giving Charlie a gentle smile as she began to speak.
We didn’t have much when I was first growing up. My mother worked in a bar to earn enough to feed us. From as long ago as I can remember, she would take me with her each evening and leave me in the back room while she worked. To start with, I was in a Moses basket, sleeping most of the time. There was an old nurse, the mother of one of the waiters I think, who used to keep an eye on me. If I woke, she would tell me to shush, or give me a piece of biltong to suck on to keep me quiet.
As I learnt to walk, they put a rein on me so I could wander around the room but not get out. Sometimes she brought an old toy for me to play with: a stuffed lion with only one ear; or a rattle carved from cedar wood and bound with leather straps, with peas inside to make the noise. Once I remember there was a puppy. I think it had lost its mother; we fed it with warmed milk and they let me hold the bottle. Afterwards, I would play with it; the two of us tumbling together in the dirt. I pulled at my mother’s hand as we walked towards the bar each night, eager to get there and see my little friend. But then one night, it was gone. The old woman told me it ran away. I never saw it again!
Then when I was seven, everything changed. My mother found herself a new job, working as a hostess in a fancy club down on the main street. And she introduced me to her boss, Rene Lopez. He had a young brother, Guido. He was about fifteen, I think. As part of her wages, Guido agreed to teach me to read. My mother always regretted she hadn’t learned her letters when she was a child and she was determined I would have a better chance in life than her.
‘I don’t want you working in no bar or club, child,’ she said to me when she told me about the deal with Guido.
I don’t think either of us was particularly happy about the arrangement, but Guido was scared of his brother, and I always did what my mother told me to. So we started meeting two or three times a week in the evenings—and within a short while, I was able to read.
For my birthday, Rene gave me a Bible. It had an embossed cover and really nice paper for the pages and he suggested I keep it at the club. He thought it might get damaged if I took it home to our shack. But I could read it whenever I wanted to; and of course, I did—at every opportunity. From then on, I could be found each evening, curled up in the storeroom, or in the dancers’ dressing room, reading, reading, reading.
I was fourteen when my mother first got ill. She was unable to work and spent most of her days in bed from then on until she died. I got a job in an office, leaving her on her own during the day and then hurrying home to her as soon as my day’s work was done. I didn’t have many friends anyway, and those I’d made—mostly from the district where we lived—got fed up with me turning down all their invitations and stopped asking me out.
But I didn’t mind. Mama and I were perfectly happy. If she was having a good day, she would go to the market to buy food and might even start preparing the evening meal. I would finish it when I got home and then we would sit together outside our front door, watching the sun go down and chatting about my job, the neighbours, the government; about anything at all. Or I would read to her. She loved stories and could remember all sorts of details. We would sit there together happily until the light faded and then I would help her get ready for bed before going to sleep myself.
When I finally lost her, I cried myself to sleep every night for months. Some of the neighbours tried to comfort me, but I was lost without her. For a while, I had to leave the city altogether; there were just too many memories in that little shack.
I found work in other offices, other places; one boring job after another. There was nothing to get home for, nothing to work for. There were times when I thought I should just throw myself under a train. That way, I reasoned, I would be able to see my beloved mother agai
n.
With time, the memories began to fade a little. Not completely, of course. I wouldn’t want that. But there was a little less pain each night. Sometimes I found myself laughing at something on the television, or something someone had said. And I’d realise that for a whole hour, or afternoon, or even a day, I was able to forget all about my mother and that I’d lost her. I went back to the city, found myself another boring job, making a little money, with somewhere suitable to live—and I even started making a few friends.
Mercy stood, walked over to the rail and stared out into the darkness once more. Then she turned and directed her sparkling eyes once more towards Hawkins.
‘So, Tata, how right you are,’ she said. ‘I think you can certainly say life was never like this. No, indeed.’
CHAPTER 31 (Queen Katherine, out of Cape Town, October 1969)
On long cruises, the lecture programme is always an important part of the entertainment. After all, there’s only so much time a passenger can spend staring out to sea. And if I say it myself, the lectures by Fredrick Michaels on fossil hunting were one of the highlights of the trip. Of course, I’d never actually been on a fossil hunt, but I’d spent so much time over the past nine years listening to Stefano Mladov’s stories and handling the samples in his collection, I had a fair few anecdotes I could use. And of course I also had a vivid imagination. Throw in the occasional Latin term—real or otherwise—and, providing there were no Classics scholars in the room, I was home and dry. For my first lecture, the audience was a little sparse. But by the second one, word had started to spread, and by the third one, every seat was filled. There were even a few disgruntled people who didn’t manage to get into the hall—and I had to run some of my lectures twice in the same day, just to accommodate everyone.
I was timetabled to speak every three days—and the rest of the time I was free; free to roam the ship, to leave behind my little bunk in the crew’s quarters and find myself some company. Strictly speaking, I was only supposed to use the second class areas, but as a guest of a bona fide passenger, I could go anywhere. And there were plenty of takers for the role of companion. Especially the ladies. Most of them were the blue rinse brigade, old enough to be my mother, if not my grandmother; and although I wasn’t above a bit of cross-generational fraternising if I could see an advantage in it, there were also a sprinkling of younger women who were only too happy to relieve the boredom of the long voyage. And for the first few days, that was enough to keep me occupied.
Pauline Wilson was more of a challenge. She came to my lectures and sat at the back, never asked a question and slipped out on her own as soon as we finished. She didn’t seem to have any friends. One of the other women, always happy to gossip, told me Pauline was recently widowed and was returning home to the UK. I wasn’t really listening to the stream of chatter, until she uttered the words:
‘I understand she’s loaded. Her husband was a prospector; left her pots of money.’
From that moment on, I was determined to get to know Mrs Pauline Wilson. I started ‘bumping into her’ several times a day; we progressed from a nod, to a smile, to a greeting; and within a week, she invited me to dine with her at her table in the first class lounge. It was a very quiet meal; quiet on my side, that is. I asked the occasional question to keep the story going and then sat back and listened as she poured out her heart.
Samuel Wilson had been a South African prospector, living and working in the diamond region somewhere in the Transvaal. She was a secretary in a diamond firm in London, unmarried and with both her parents dead. They met when he went to England to sell some of his stock; he courted her, captured her heart and carried her back with him to Cape Town three weeks later. They’d not been particularly happy. She’d found him to be a bully once they settled down to married life, but he at least provided her with security and she’d stayed with him for ten years. Then he caught malaria and died very suddenly. She was horrified and was going back to England, because, ‘I can’t stay in Africa; it’s too dangerous. Look how quickly it stole my husband.’
That first night, I walked her back to her cabin after dinner, kissed her hand and bid her a goodnight. I could feel her watching me as I walked away, but resisted the temptation to look back.
For the next few days, I made sure I was around her quite a lot of the time, but only in the distance. I didn’t push it. I didn’t need to. The line was baited; all I had to do was wait for the fish to bite. Five days later, she waited for me when my lecture was finished and invited me to dine with her again. She told me she found my company relaxing and appreciated the fact I was happy to listen to ‘an old woman talking about her lost husband.’ I told her she couldn’t be more than three years older than me. And although there was actually a ten-year age gap, she didn’t correct me. And from there on, it was easy.
The captain married us on the last day before we arrived in Southampton. He seemed a little uncertain about the rush, and was a bit sniffy with me when I raised the subject, but Pauline Wilson was a rich, influential woman and once she pointed out she was a shareholder in the cruise ship company and a personal friend of the owner, there was no more argument. We joined the cruise in Cape Town as strangers; we arrived in England as man and wife. Fourteen years after I’d been tricked into a journey to South Africa, I was back. I had a new name, a new wife and a considerable fortune behind me. Life was beginning to look up.
Arriving back in England as Michael Hawkins the runaway would have been dismal; and even as Fredrick Michaels, archaeology lecturer and fossil hunter, I would have had difficulty getting established in 1960’s Britain. But as Fredrick Michaels, second husband to Pauline—deeply in love heiress—doors opened as if by magic.
The following October I enrolled at King’s College, Cambridge as a mature student to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics. We bought a bijoux cottage on the outskirts of the city where we spent the weeks. During the day, Pauline played at keeping house—or at least harried the cleaner and the gardener as they attempted to keep house for her—while I attended lectures and tutorials. In the evenings, I worked on my assignments while she read or sewed in the background. And at the weekends, we returned to the apartment in London where we wined and dined with her first husband’s old friends and I schmoozed my way into the best circles in town. When I graduated in 1973 with a First Class Honours degree, it was but a small step into the Civil Service and from there I was on my way.
Pauline was in many ways a very silly woman and I quickly grew bored with her company, if not with her money. But she loved me, and our daughter, born just ten months after we docked in Southampton. She never complained if I was late home or stayed away for a night or two occasionally. We were, to my mind, the perfect couple.
I didn’t expect to hear from Stefano Mladov again and was just grateful our friendship was strong enough for him to defy his powerful patron and smuggle me out of Mozambique. But one day, three years after I’d joined the Civil Service, I received a letter, postmarked Kharkov. We kept in touch over the next ten years, as he divided his time between two continents. In 1985, life finally got too hot for Stefano in Africa, especially as Mozambique had recovered from the War of Independence only to slip into civil war instead, so he put one of his cousins in charge of the African ‘projects’, and returned to Ukraine, and his long-suffering wife; by this time, they had three children, two boys and a girl. The youngest, Nico, was born in 1978.
The Mladov family became quite prominent in Kharkov. They were involved in all sorts of industries, including the pharmaceutical business, which was quite big in USSR, and at the time Stefano made contact with me, they were making a fair living with semi-legal activities in Russia and Ukraine. In 1991, the Soviet Union burst apart and Ukraine became an independent state. Changes in regulations and the aftermath of independence pushed the Mladovs to look elsewhere for income and they started setting up counterfeiting operations in Africa.
They used small factories in rural parts of
Zambia and Tanzania to make drugs which were distributed to neighbouring countries. In time, Nico was given the job of managing the schemes ‘on the ground’ in Africa. He spent most of his time over there. But a couple of weeks a year, he would come to visit me in England. It wasn’t that easy for a Ukrainian to travel to Britain, but there were always trade delegations or other official trips being arranged. By this time, I was working in the health ministry and we began to work together on projects and schemes that made me a tidy sum. I began to see there might be a time when I would be independent of Pauline, maybe be able to walk away and live life as I wanted for a change.
It was all going so well. And then I made a mistake and misjudged someone. Someone I thought would be useful, pliable and easy to manipulate. But she turned out to be anything but.
The International Health Forum was first mooted in 2002, just after 9/11. There was a spirit of co-operation around that seemed to be born partly out of guilt. How could we have let those things happen, in America, in this day and age? The effect on counter-terrorism was obvious, but it also spilled over into other global issues, and counterfeit medicines was one that came in for a lot of publicity.
I’d been in the health ministry for years; I’d recently been knighted for services to international welfare, and I was just a couple of years off retirement. I was seen as a safe pair of hands. The job was advertised in all the usual channels, but I’d indicated my willingness to serve and the position was mine even before the advertisement went out. Banda was already up and running in Zambia and talking it through with Stefano and Nico, we could see great advantages in my being at the helm of the anti-counterfeiting project.
But I wasn’t going to do the day-to-day work. There was far too much dashing around involved. So I advertised for a project leader, to act as my deputy. And that’s when I met Suzanne Jones. On paper, she was perfect for the role. Her background was in industry before she’d transferred to the Medicines Control Agency and then been fast-tracked into the European Medicines Agency. She was a smart cookie; I knew that. But I assumed that with her lack of experience, she would be conscientious but ineffectual. After all, she would be dealing with some of the most bureaucratic and male chauvinist countries in the world.
Deception! Page 16