Until Death (27 page)

Jonas licked his lips, trying to calculate the risk he was running in refusing. A moment later he decided he had no option and opened the door and picked up the rucksack.

‘And bring your coat.’

The Wolf led Jonas out a side door on the accommodation floor. The wind was still strong, blowing hard in their faces. Jonas shivered and pulled on his coat, his hood flapping hard against the back of his head. The rain had stopped, the grey sky beginning to be picked apart by small patches of blue.

‘How many years since you’ve been home?’ the Wolf asked as they began to walk along the side of the ship.

‘You tell me,’ he shot back.

The Wolf smiled. Jonas was turning into exactly the kind of guy he liked – but he wasn’t going to tell him that just yet. ‘I haven’t been home since you were trying to get your hand up the skirt of a girl in biology.’

‘I haven’t been home for five years.’

The Wolf nodded. ‘So how you planning to get yourself up and running again?’

‘I’ll look up a few old friends.’

‘Sell what’s in that bag …’ The Wolf stopped walking. ‘We need to turn back, go any further than here and they’ll see us from the bridge.’ Jonas said nothing. ‘You can work for me.’

Jonas snorted, but he was listening.

‘How much you got in that bag? Come on, there’s going to be a shitstorm when we dock, make no mistake. You’re running a risk. There’s nothing wrong in being bad, but you’ve got to be smart.’

Jonas was weighing up what he said.

‘Chuck it overboard.’

He looked horrified. ‘There’s nearly a grand’s worth of gear in there.’

‘I’ll pay you more if you do a job for me and you won’t even have to do anything illegal. Chuck it over.’

‘You don’t know what I had to do to get it.’

‘Not interested. Chuck it over.’ The two of them were staring at each other, tense, Jonas making calculations. ‘It’s not a choice.’

‘What are you offering me?’

‘More than you’d make in a year.’

‘A year in Bolivia or a year in—’

‘Quit quibbling. And it’s not a choice.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘Two or three days maximum. I need you to look after someone for me. You’ll be a chaperone, that’s all. Think of it as a triumphant return to the big smoke.’ They both looked off the side of the ship. A low grey smear was forming on the horizon, their first sight of home. ‘There she is. Fills your heart with joy to be back, does it?’ The Wolf’s fingers began to throb painfully, the waxy whiteness back again. ‘Act smart, Jonas. The risks you run always need to be less than the reward.’ The Wolf pulled out a bunch of hundred dollar bills and began counting them out. ‘A third now, a third in the middle, the rest in three days maximum.’

Jonas looked at the money, took the old rucksack off his shoulder and tossed it over the side. They both leaned over to watch it fall, swallowed up by the churning sea.

E
ven though Georgie had grown up near the river and had been doing this job for a year, watching the big ships come in was still an event. The small dot on the horizon that grew and formed detail and grew and grew more until the great towering beast was near enough to boom out its presence. The
Saracen
had ridden out a force 9 gale, but it had been a cursed voyage. Even in these days of muster drills, GPS and fully equipped lifeboats, they had still lost a man to the vastness of the ocean.

There was a blustery wind gusting off the Thames, the remains of the tropical storm out in the Atlantic that had tipped the man overboard. It was weather to make you agitated. Some of her hair slapped her in the face and irritated her eyes. She zipped up her cagoule and turned away. Mo and she were doing onboard checks before anyone was allowed off the ship. They boarded their small boat, dwarfed in size by the huge sides of the vessel before them. They crossed the hundred feet of open water, tied up the boat and got on board.

The captain met them, his face anxious and grey.

‘Not a good day at the office,’ Georgie said.

He swore under his breath. ‘Seventeen years I’ve been doing this job, never had a man overboard.’ Like a Tube driver with a suicidal commuter, it was what every captain dreaded.

‘Why was he on the ship?’ Mo asked.

‘He was coming back from a business trip to Brazil. I don’t know more than that. Malamatos employees travel for free, of course. He listened to the safety explanations, was there at the muster drill. Seemed calm, was sick, I think, but kept to his cabin most of the time. He was no problem. The crew’s gathering in the galley now.’

Georgie nodded. ‘We’ll talk to the passengers later. Lead the way please.’

The galley was a windowless room with stainless-steel surfaces and units. Numerous stainless-steel pans hung from hooks on a central hanger over a food preparation island. They clanged and bumped together like a discordant wind chime with the slight motion of the ship. Georgie and Mo said hello and began checking passports, matching everyone up.

‘When was the last time you saw the man who went over?’ Georgie asked a man with a Polish name, his birthplace listed as Gdansk.

He shrugged, big shoulders moving. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him. He kept to his cabin most of the time.’

She nodded, moving down the line, each man she crossed off bringing her closer to Mo, who was working from the other end.

‘He was sick a lot, complaining,’ the next man along, with an Irish passport, added.

‘When did you last see him?’

He shrugged. ‘Oh, Christ. Maybe Monday? It was a difficult crossing, the storm was big, we had a lot to do. Ask the Wolf, he’s a night walker, likes the danger of the open sea.’ He cocked his head at the man standing next to him in line.

Georgie glanced up at the man he referred to. He was tall and broad, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. She handed the Irishman back his documents and opened up the Wolf’s. ‘Clyde Bonnier. Born in Liverpool …’ She examined his passport carefully, glancing up at his face. He bared his teeth at her. ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you, I’m not in a good mood.’ She took a long look at his passport photo, then at the windburned face where a grin looked like it was about to explode across it, the dirty blond hair lightened from sun and salt.

‘How long have you been working for Malamatos Shipping?’

‘Four years.’

‘What did you do before?’

‘All sorts of things. We’ve all done something.’

‘Give me an example.’

‘I was a tree surgeon. Good with my hands.’ He splayed them for her as if he were being helpful, doing jazz hands.

She saw Mo look over. She glanced at his muscular forearms, product of a physical job. He stood right in front of her; she wondered if he was leaning in, butting in on her personal space. ‘Why’d you stop?’

‘Vibration white finger. It’s your body’s way of saying this is the end of the road.’

She looked at his strange, waxy-looking fingers. ‘You ever cut down any Brazilian rosewood?’

‘Of course. Plantations are where a lot of the—’

‘No – mature specimens. Amazonian forest trees.’

He looked at her for a long moment, wondering whether to frown. ‘The big fellas? Magnificent, they’d be. That’d be so much fun.’ He grinned at her, eager to play. ‘But that would be against the law.’

He was playing with her, trying to wind her up. She closed his passport and slapped it on his chest. ‘I hear you like walking around at night.’

‘I find it difficult to keep still. Restless legs.’

‘Were you out in the storm?’

‘A force 9 in the Atlantic in the winter? Of course. Best fun to be had, that is.’

‘Did you see him out there at any point?’

‘It’s hard to see a hand in front of your face in weather. Real weather, I mean. Most people have never experienced it so can’t imagine what it’s like. You can drown in the spray, do you know that?’

‘So you didn’t see him?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I didn’t.’

‘Born in Liverpool. Where did you grow up?’

‘Me? I hardly know. Everywhere and nowhere. We’re the rootless bunch, the merchant fleet. Aren’t we, lads? Making it up as we go along.’ He turned back to her, staring hard. ‘Maybe you can relate to that.’

She looked away because the truth was she could. He seemed so familiar to her, with his bravado and his magnetism. She knew why and she was ashamed. He reminded her of her brothers: when their darting eyes finally rested on you, you could do nothing but glow in their momentary approval. She found it hard to resist the pull of the dangerous ones.

She moved to the next man in line. She felt the Wolf’s eyes sliding up and down her body as she turned away.

Half an hour later the captain was showing Georgie and Mo the cabin of the man who went overboard. ‘Here’s his passport, toothbrush and razor, his wallet.’ He gestured at the small pile of personal effects on the bed.

Georgie looked around the room, bigger than a prison cell, but not by much. A small desk, a chair, a TV. A gloomy light struggled to filter in through the two portholes but any view was blocked by the metal wall of a dark blue container not two feet from the window. She looked into the small bathroom. A cream-coloured shower tray, basin and toilet. She knelt down and looked under the bed and was greeted by a ball of dust.

‘There’s nothing here,’ she said to Mo and he nodded in agreement. They got back on their tiny boat and were on shore a little while later. She made tea for her and Mo and waited in the customs area for the few passengers to disembark from the
Saracen
. The public customs area was visible from the office where Georgie sat and was made up of lines of dirty, scratched plastic screens and a dividing rope that looped lazily through movable metal posts, designed to corral tired arrivals into a queue. Once checked by Georgie’s colleagues, they pushed through a set of double swing doors, each with a round window made of scratched Perspex. The place was sad and unkempt; the cruise ships docked further upriver now, and the operation here was strictly functional. She heard the roaring of a cleaner’s polishing machine getting to work on the lino. She let herself be amazed that they still had the budget as she caught a glimpse of a figure through the scratched Perspex window on the other side of the arrivals door.

‘Is that Christos?’ She put her cup down.

‘He’s here with Sylvie,’ said Mo.

Georgie stood and moved to be able to see him better. ‘Who’s he waiting for?’ She turned round, trying to find a passenger list. ‘Who’s on this ship?’ Mo handed her a list and she scanned the names. None of them meant anything to her.

‘It’s not illegal to meet someone off a ship, last time I looked,’ Preston said. He lifted his shoes up on to the table, a gesture designed to irritate her.

‘I want every passenger and their luggage searched.’ She came out of the office and barked a series of instructions at the duty officer perched on a swivel chair.

The
Saracen
manoeuvred alongside a quay and half an hour later a thin straggle of people began to disembark with their luggage. Georgie was peering at them through the glass in the office window. She could hear Preston making a personal phone call behind her, yakking about cinema times to someone. She left the office and stood next to the customs officer. A young man with a pockmarked face shivered in the line, his backpacking clothing insufficient for a trip to northern Europe. Jonas Wyman. A man was next, then a young woman in a big parka with a fur-lined hood carrying a large plastic bag and a cushion. The customs officer was looking at her passport, inputting information into the computer from Luciana Nascimento’s landing card.

The doors to the UK swung forward and back as people passed through them. Georgie occasionally caught glimpses of Christos as the doors moved.

The woman in the parka took it off and the female officer ran her hands discreetly up and down the young woman’s body. Luciana put her parka back on as the officer carefully examined the cushion. She handed it back to Luciana, who stuffed the cushion down into her coat and shivered, doing her zip all the way tightly up to her chin and lifting the hood. She picked up her bag and walked away to the doors into the UK.

They turned to a man next in the line.

Twenty seconds later Georgie heard a woman screaming. She ran towards the swing doors and slammed them open. Luciana was on the floor, Sylvie on top of her pulling her hair. Jonas was shouting for them to stop and Christos was trying to pull his lover off the woman.

Georgie and Mo tried to pull the warring women apart.

Luciana was spewing Portuguese at Sylvie, who had gone puce in the face. ‘This bitch assaulted me,’ Luciana said, struggling to get away from Georgie.

‘She just went mad, jumped on her for no reason,’ Jonas added.

‘Don’t you fucking dare speak to me like that,’ Sylvie spat at Luciana, bringing an ‘oh’ of shock from the gawping bystanders.

‘Enough,’ shouted Georgie. ‘Calm down, everyone.’

Her entreaty was mirrored by Christos, who was white in the face. ‘For God’s sake, Sylvie, have you lost your mind?’

‘First she posed as Isabella, looking pregnant. I thought it was her until she came right up to me. Then she whispered that Isabella has been harmed—’

‘What a lie! Who is this Isabella?’ Luciana screamed.

‘Who’s Isabella?’ asked Georgie.

‘She’s fine, I spoke to the captain two minutes ago.’ Christos was aghast.

Everyone started shouting again as two policemen hurried in from the building next door. The next thing Georgie knew, Sylvie had broken free of Mo’s hold and swung her handbag high and fast at Luciana’s head. Christos jumped forward to stop her and careered into Jonas, bringing both of them to the floor in an untidy jumble.

‘That’s it. Get this lot out of sight.’ Georgie had had enough of the gawping crowd. She dragged Sylvie towards an interview room and shouted at Mo to take Luciana to another. The policeman took Christos by the arm and marched him into the room behind Sylvie.

Now it was Christos’s turn to be livid. ‘You can’t keep me in here. It is critical I meet someone off this ship.’