Michael Robotham - The Night Ferry

“You shouldn’t smoke with a cold.”

“I shouldn’t smoke at all. My wife thinks men and women can have precisely the same ailment with the same symptoms but it’s always the man who is sicker.”

“That’s because men are hypochondriacs.”

“I got a different theory. I think it’s because no matter how sick a woman is there’s always a small part of her brain thinking about shoes.”

“I bet you didn’t tell her that.”

“I’m sick, not stupid.”

His demeanor is different now. Instead of sarcasm and cynicism, I sense anxiety and a hardening resolve.

“Who’s behind this?”

“Samira mentioned an Englishman who called himself ‘Brother.’ She said he had a cross on his neck. There’s someone you should look at. His name is Paul Donavon. He went to school with Cate Beaumont—and with me. He was there on the night she was run down.”

“You think he’s behind this?”

“Samira met ‘Brother’ at an orphanage in Kabul. Donavon was in Afghanistan with the British Army. The traffickers targeted orphans because it meant fewer complications. There were no families to search for them or ask questions. Some were trafficked for sex. Others were given the option of becoming surrogates.”

“The pregnant illegals you asked about. Both claimed to be orphans.”

Forbes still hasn’t lit his cigarette. It rests between his lips, wagging up and down as he talks. He glances over his shoulder at the ferry.

“About the other night.”

“What night?”

“When we had dinner.”

“Yeah?”

“Did I conduct myself in a proper fashion? I mean, did I behave?”

“You were a perfect gentleman.”

“That’s good,” he mumbles. “I mean, I thought so.” After a pause. “You took something that didn’t belong to you.”

“I prefer to think that we shared information.”

He nods. “You might want to reconsider your career choice, DC Barba. I don’t know if you’re what I’d call a team player.”

He can’t stay. There is a debriefing to attend, which is going to be rough. His superiors are going to want to know how he let Pearl get away. And once the media get hold of this story it’s going to run and run.

Forbes looks at my clothes. “If he’s not on the ferry, how did he get off?”

“He could still be on board.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No. What about the crew?”

“You think he took a uniform?”

“It’s possible.”

He turns abruptly and strides back toward the waiting police cars. The CCTV footage will most likely provide the answer. There are cameras on every corner of the dock and every deck of the ship. One of them will have recorded Pearl.

“Eat bananas,” I yell after him.

“Pardon?”

“My mother’s remedy for a cold.”

“You said you never listened to her.”

“I said almost never.”

***

There have been too many hospitals lately. Too many long waits on uncomfortable chairs, eating machine snacks and drinking powdered coffee and whitener. This one smells of boiled food and feces and has grim checked tiles in the corridors, worn smooth by the trolleys.

Ruiz called me from Hull, after his ferry docked. He wanted to come and get me but I told him to go home and rest. He’s done enough.

“Are they looking after you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Samira?”

“She’s going to be OK.”

I hope I’m right. She’s been asleep for ten hours and didn’t even wake when they lifted her from the ambulance and wheeled her to a private room. I have been waiting here, dozing in my plastic chair, with my head on the bed near her shoulder.

It is mid-afternoon when she finally wakes. I feel the mattress shift and open my eyes to see her looking at me.

“I need the bathroom,” she whispers.

I take her by the elbow and help her to the en suite.

“Where am I?”

“In a hospital.”

“What country?”

“England.”

There is a nod of acceptance but no hint of a journey completed or sense of achievement.

Samira washes her face, ears, hands and feet, talking softly to herself. I take her arm again, leading her back to bed.

Motioning to the window, she wants to look outside. The North Sea is just visible over the rooftops and between buildings. It is the color of brushed steel.

“As a child I used to wonder what the sea looked like,” she says. “I had only ever seen pictures in books and on TV.” She gazes at the horizon.

“What do you think now?”

“I think it looks higher than the land. Why doesn’t the water rush in and sweep us away?”

“Sometimes it does.”

I notice a towel in her hand. She wants to use it as a prayer mat but doesn’t know which direction to face toward Mecca. She turns slowly round and round like a cat trying to settle.

There are tears in her eyes and her lips tremble, struggling to form the words.

“They will be hungry soon. Who will feed them?”

Love and pain are not the same. Love is put to the test—pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love, “That was not true pain or it would not have disappeared so quickly.”—WILLIAM BOYD,

“The Blue Afternoon”

In the nights since the twins were born I have drowned countless times, twitching and kicking at the bedclothes. I see tiny bodies floating in fields of kelp or washed up on beaches. My lungs give out before I can reach them, leaving me choking and numb with an obscure anguish. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a swollen heart?

Samira is also awake. She walks through the house at 3:00 a.m. moving as though her feet have an agreement with the ground that she will always tread lightly in return for never encountering another path that is too steep.

It has been five days since the twins went missing. Pearl has soaked through the cracks of the world and vanished. We know how he got off the ferry. A CCTV camera on Deck 3 picked up a man in a hard hat and reflective jacket who couldn’t be identified as one of the crew. The footage didn’t show his face clearly but he was seen carrying a pet traveling cage. The square gray plastic box was supposed to contain two Siamese cats but they were found wandering in a stairwell.

Another camera in the Customs area picked up the clearest images of the unidentified man. In the foreground trucks are being scanned with heat-seeking equipment designed to find illegals. But in the background, at the edge of the frame, a pumpkin-shaped caravan attached to an early-model Range Rover can be seen. Mr. and Mrs. Jones of Cardiff are seen repacking their duty-frees and souvenirs after being searched. As the car and caravan pull away, a square gray pet cage is visible on the tarmac next to where they were parked.

The Welsh couple were pulled over a little after midday Sunday on the M4 just east of Reading. The caravan was empty but Pearl’s fingerprints were lifted from the table and the aluminum door. The couple had stopped for petrol at a motorway service center on the M25. A cashier remembered Pearl buying bottles and baby formula. Shortly afterward, at 10:42 a.m., a car was reported stolen from an adjacent parking area. It still hasn’t been found.

Forbes is running the investigation, liaising with Spijker in Amsterdam, combining resources, pitting their wills against the problem. They are cross-checking names from the IVF clinic with the U.K. immigration records.

There has been a news blackout about the missing twins. DI Forbes made the decision. Stolen children make dramatic headlines and he wants to avoid creating panic. A year ago a newborn was snatched from a hospital in Harrogate and there were 1,200 alleged sightings in the first two days. Mothers were accosted in the street and treated like kidnappers. Homes were raided needlessly. Innocent families suffered.