Journey to Death

by Leigh Russell

  Coming across a group of Seychellois men sitting in the shade of a palm tree a short distance from the hotel, she asked the oldest man if he could help her. He shook his head, mumbling incoherently in Creole. A second man smiled up at her toothlessly without answering. She wondered if she was talking to people who were too old to remember Veronique, and approached a man who looked closer to her father’s age.

  ‘Ah, Veronique,’ he answered. A dreamy look crossed his face.

  He turned and jabbered to his friends in Creole. They all nodded and shrugged their shoulders.

  ‘Do you know where I can find her?’ Lucy asked. ‘Where is Veronique?’

  ‘Ah, where she go?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, where is she?’

  ‘Where Veronique?’

  Lucy despaired of getting any sensible response from him, but as she turned away, he called out to her. ‘You want Veronique?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ask Maria,’ he suggested, gesturing towards a track leading between the trees. ‘She live there. She friend of Veronique.’

  ‘She know all people’s business,’ another old man added.

  The other men grinned and muttered to one another, nodding their heads. Lucy thanked him and started along the narrow path with a flicker of anxiety. He might be sending her off the road so he could mug her. It was hardly a city, but no doubt people were robbed on Mahé the same as anywhere else. As she was considering turning back, a rusty sloping corrugated roof came into view through the bushes. Rounding a bend in the path she saw a ramshackle one-storey house, the paintwork on its blue walls faded and peeling. An old woman was squatting on the doorstep in the dappled shade, clutching a bag of breadfruit chips. Her face was hidden beneath a mess of frizzy white hair. Fragments of breadfruit were scattered on dark flowery fabric stretched taut across her ample thighs. As she picked up the bag of chips and brushed crumbs from her lap with the back of her hand, a scraggy chicken darted forward to peck eagerly at the morsels of food.

  ‘Maria?’

  The woman squinted up from her perch, black eyes glinting in a wrinkled brown face, before she turned her attention back to her bag of breadfruit chips.

  ‘Maria? Can you help me?’

  ‘I help you?’ the woman repeated, staring up at Lucy with a shrewd look in her slanting eyes.

  Lucy crouched down beside her and held up a note. Swiftly the woman seized the money, nodding and grinning, displaying a few yellowing teeth.

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘I’m looking for a woman.’

  ‘You found one, sweetheart.’ Maria cackled, slapping a brown knee with the flat of her hand. ‘I’m all woman.’

  ‘I’m looking for a particular woman who was living here over thirty years ago. She was employed by the Garden of Eden Hotel to clean the house of the accountant working there. Her name is Veronique. Do you know where I can find her?’

  Maria gazed past Lucy at the chicken pecking at the dry earth.

  ‘Find Veronique? Ay!’

  She heaved a deep sigh. Turning her attention to Lucy she stared at her blonde hair and reached out to touch her arm.

  ‘I would like to find her and kiss her hand. Tell her we were wrong to hate her.’

  ‘Who hated her?’

  ‘All of us.’

  ‘Why did you hate her?’

  ‘Eh, we were young. We wanted our share of attention.’

  She glanced over in the direction of the road where the group of men had gathered beneath the tree near the hotel.

  ‘Was she beautiful?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Oh yes, Veronique was beautiful. So beautiful. We called her the dark angel. So beautiful.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  The woman’s eyes glazed over as though she was looking straight through Lucy.

  ‘Maria, I need to speak to Veronique. I think she might be able to tell me where my mother is. Where can I find her?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘She went away.’

  ‘Went where?’

  A wild hope struck Lucy that Veronique and her mother had gone off somewhere together. Maria raised her hands from her lap, palms upward.

  ‘She went away many years ago. They said Mancham took her with him when he went into exile, but I never believed it. He was gone long before she disappeared. The men were all wild at that time, everyone saying life will be better, life will be better. But nothing changed. And that is when Veronique left us.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  Maria shrugged. ‘Who knows? We never saw her again. At the time none of us were sorry she went away, except her man.’

  ‘Her man? What happened to him?’

  ‘Some say he threw himself off the mountain. They say he did not die, only broke his back.’ Looking down in her lap, she picked out a large piece of breadfruit. ‘Others say the dark angel went mad and shot him, right here between his eyes.’ Pointing at her forehead, she munched on her chip. ‘They say she hid away on the mountain to escape punishment.’

  ‘How terrible!’

  The old woman looked up at Lucy with shrewd dark eyes, scrutinising her hair, her figure, right down to her feet. Then she turned her head away and spat. ‘Terrible? You know nothing of life.’ She stared into the distance. ‘Veronique went away, a long time ago.’

  Taking my father’s money with her, Lucy thought crossly. She felt sorry for her poor father. It seemed that everyone had fallen under Veronique’s spell. The old woman closed her eyes.

  ‘Where did she live? Before she disappeared?’

  Maria waved her hand vaguely. ‘She lived, like we all do.’ She leaned back against the wall of her house and closed her eyes.

  ‘Maria, one more question,’ Lucy said urgently. ‘Has anyone else been here recently asking about Veronique?’

  ‘Many searched for Veronique.’

  ‘I meant just a couple of days ago. Have you seen a blonde English woman, in her fifties, in the past few days?’

  Maria shook her head, eyes still closed. Murmuring her thanks, Lucy stood up and walked away. Veronique had gone into hiding on the island years ago. If her mother had been able to track her down, then so could Lucy. With the police unable to find her, Lucy was going to take matters into her own hands. She could not just sit around any longer doing nothing. She cursed herself for failing to notice the registration number of the van. It would have been a start. She needed to find out who had given her the message about Veronique.

  The local police station was not far from the hotel. It took her a while to walk there, with her painful toe, but she persevered.

  ‘Yes, madam?’

  ‘I’m looking for a white van.’

  The policeman looked puzzled. ‘A white van?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wish to report a theft?’

  ‘No. The thing is . . .’ She hesitated to launch into an account of her abduction. ‘I want to speak to the driver. He has a white van and it’s often parked near the Garden of Eden Hotel.’

  ‘You may find it helpful to ask the security guard at the hotel entrance.’

  Lucy nodded. She should have thought of that herself. ‘Yes, thank you. I’ll do that.’

  She limped back to the hotel as quickly as she could, concerned that her father would be worried by her absence. She had not intended to be out for so long. The khaki-clad security guard was polite but unable to help her.

  ‘We see many vans pass by,’ he told her.

  ‘If you see a white one, old and battered, can you note down the registration number for me, please?’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No, no problem. Actually, don’t worry about it. Forget I said anything.’

  She would keep a look out herself. It might be best not to alert the driver of the van to her interest.

  30

  RETURNING TO THE HOTEL, Lucy went straight to her father’s room to reassure him she was fine. She did not want to worry him and cause him to keep a closer eye o
n her, as she tried to track down Veronique. As she had expected, he was anxious about her. She thought he had been crying. What made it painful was his insistence that he was fine when she could see his one good eye was still bloodshot and puffy. It was hardly surprising. Her father attempted to start a conversation about the weather as though nothing was wrong, but he floundered at the first sentence. With her mother still missing, they were both beginning to crack under the strain. Looking nervous, her father tackled the subject of the attacks she had experienced. Gently he suggested she was displacing her anxiety about her mother on to herself. By imagining threats to her own life, he told her she might be unconsciously seeking to distract herself from the real worry that was too painful to think about. When Lucy protested, he merely shrugged and seemed to draw back into the shell he had begun to develop.

  ‘Lucy, I’m going to have a nap. Do you mind? I’ll see you later.’

  Since her mother’s disappearance, he seemed to be sleeping a lot. As she walked along the corridor away from his room, stepping awkwardly on her bruised toe, Lucy wondered if he had been drinking. That might explain why he was so sleepy. Now that she had proof her father had known someone called Veronique, she was convinced that she would be able to find her mother. But she was not going to tell her father yet. Unlike him, she had never lied to her family. He should have trusted her. She did her best to feel positive about the idea that he had wanted to avoid upsetting her, but there was no glossing over the fact that he had deceived her mother. The most difficult part of it all was coping with her father without her mother’s calming presence. When Lucy’s relationship had come to its catastrophic end, her mother had been there to support her. Now Lucy was afraid she was falling apart, and there was nothing she could do to stop her thoughts from spiralling wildly out of control. She could not talk to her father. Her mother would have known what to say, but she was not there.

  She lay on her bed, allowing the air conditioning to cool her, and tried to think through her immediate problems. At all costs, she had to hide her confusion from her father. His worry about her mental state, and his frustration at being unable to help her would be distressing for them both and would help neither of them. For the first time, Lucy glimpsed past her own anger to consider what kind of personal hell her father must be enduring. He had told her everything was his fault. That was more true than he realised. If Lucy could persuade him to talk to her again about Veronique, he might shed some light on where she was now living. One way or another, Lucy was going to find her, and when she did the truth would come out. His wife and daughter might forgive him his indiscretion. However this ended, she realised he would never forgive himself. Despite her anger, she could not help feeling sorry for him.

  Without a clue what she was going to say to him, she went up to her father’s room and knocked on the door. There was no answer. She tried again. Awful possibilities flooded her mind: her father had taken an overdose; he had suffered a worse injury than anyone had realised and had succumbed to delayed concussion; unable to see properly, he had slipped and knocked himself out and was lying on the floor bleeding to death as she stood in the corridor outside his room, paralysed with indecisiveness. It was not in her nature to be so fearful. A wave of exhaustion overwhelmed her. Leaning forward, she rested her head against her door pleading with him to open it. She did not realise she was talking out loud until someone called to her.

  ‘You are all right, madam?’

  She spun round, mortified. A young chambermaid had stopped pushing her trolley along the corridor and was staring at her curiously.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she stammered, aware that she must look dreadful, with tearstained eyes and sunburned face, and her hair a complete mess.

  ‘Too much?’ the chambermaid asked, smiling and miming a drinking motion.

  Lucy nodded gratefully and scurried back to her own room where she flung herself down on the bed. Lying prostrate with one arm across her face she lay inert with grief, unable even to cry. She was afraid she was going to snap again, as she had done when she had discovered Darren had been two-timing her. Distraught over her mother’s disappearance, her father would be unable to help her. Where the hell was her mother? Lucy needed her. They both did. She opened the drawer in her bedside table as though it held some clue to her whereabouts. There was nothing in it apart from the ubiquitous hotel Bible.

  Someone tapped at her door. Assuming it was the maid coming to do the room, she was on the point of calling out and telling her to come back later when her father called out.

  ‘Lucy, Lucy, are you in there?’

  She sat up so quickly her head spun. She felt her heart pounding, and blood pulsing behind her eyes. She realised it was past lunchtime and she was hungry. As soon as her father went for a rest, she would begin her hunt for Veronique.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she called back. ‘Hang on.’

  Hurrying to the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and studied herself, blinking. She did not look too bad, considering. Her hair needed a wash, but there was nothing she could do about that now. She slipped on her sunglasses and opened the door.

  After a late lunch her father suggested they go for a stroll. Their attempts at conversation over lunch had been stilted and neither of them spoke as they made their way down to the beach. Her father was preoccupied. Looking out at the sea, he spoke hesitantly.

  ‘Lucy, we need to talk.’

  She waited. Instead of broaching the subject of Veronique, as she expected, he took her hand and told her he was worried about her.

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He paused.

  ‘It’s OK, Dad. You can tell me.’ When he did not answer, she went on. ‘Are you all right? I mean, apart from, you know—’

  ‘Yes. That is, I think so. As far as I can be. How about you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ It seemed they could not help lying to one another.

  They looked at the ocean in silence for a moment.

  ‘I think I’ll go up and have a rest,’ her father said at last.

  Lucy nodded. Clearly her father did not feel able to talk to her. As soon as he had gone, she put her latest plan into action. First she borrowed some A4 paper, a box of pins and a thick black marker pen from the hotel reception. In the privacy of her room, she wrote a dozen signs in capital letters, going over the words until they were bold and dark enough to be seen from a distance: ‘Missing, blonde English woman, 53. Contact Mr Hall at Garden of Eden Hotel.’ Rolling up the sheets of paper, she made her way downstairs and out of the hotel. A broad walkway ran alongside the beach for a few hundred yards until it joined the road. Lucy walked down the path, stopping at intervals to pin a sign to a tree. No one took any notice of her. By the time she reached the road, she had displayed four of them. She walked along the road, fixing more notices to trees, until she ran out of them. Returning to the hotel, she saw that one of her notices had been torn down. The rest remained. Perhaps a local resident would come forward with information that would lead them to her mother.

  31

  WHEN HER FATHER WOKE up, he came downstairs and found her in the pool area, lying on a sun lounger as though she had been there all afternoon. Sipping a cocktail, Lucy tried to pretend that life was normal. That everything was far from all right was evident in the way their eyes shied away from contact with each other. Her father was tense. They sat in an awkward silence, facing the ocean. Still the waves washed lightly against the shore, trees rustled softly in the sea breeze, and the delicate scent of flowering shrubs mingled with a sharp salt tang of the sea. They watched the sunset flare across the ocean. Directly in front of them, Silhouette Island rose out of the rippling waters, its peak shrouded in clouds. Although she knew it was over twelve miles away, she had the illusion it was close enough for her to reach out and touch. As the sun set behind it, the island shimmered in hazy light before fading into the gathering darkness.

  They made their way down to the beach for a short stroll before go
ing back inside, falling into step as they walked. Drawing level with their hotel they paused, as though the same thought had struck them both.

  ‘Come on, then,’ George said, with a brightness he did not feel, and they returned to the hotel where the woman they both loved had disappeared.

  ‘George! George! There you are!’ a voice rang out across the patio.

  At her side, Lucy heard her father groan. Resplendent in lime green, Gloria strode towards them like an elephantine gecko. Billy followed her, looking around appraisingly as he crossed the patio.

  ‘You poor dears! We came as soon as we heard.’

  ‘As soon as we heard,’ Billy echoed, seizing George’s hand and shaking it vigorously.

  ‘We are all so upset.’ Gloria turned to Lucy. ‘The girls feel just terrible. They so wanted to be with you, but they already had plans. They both send you their love. You know their thoughts are with you.’

  Bangles jangling, she held out her arms to Lucy who submitted to a hug, rolling her eyes at her father over Gloria’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s Gloria all over,’ Billy confided loudly to George. ‘Whenever anyone’s in trouble, she’s right there.’ He smiled complacently at his wife. ‘Ain’t she something!’

  Gloria released Lucy and smiled at George with tears in her eyes. Although she was not in the mood for society, Lucy did not want to appear rude. She had already drunk one cocktail too many and was desperate to be rid of the overpowering American couple, but she understood her father felt obliged to offer their new friends a drink, since they had made the effort to come and offer their support. Sitting in the lobby, they sipped beer. Lucy was relieved to hear that the American family were leaving the island the following day.

  ‘We hate to think we’re abandoning you—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ her father replied firmly. ‘It’s not as if there’s anything anyone can do. The police are searching and they’re sure to find her soon.’