Only an hour or so to go. Then, perhaps she would find out.
And so it was that Nellie came alongside the jetty at Granville Harbour a little before midnight. A full fat moon had risen behind her like a silver sun, so Anastasia had no trouble jumping on to the deserted jetty and mooring Nellie safely. Then she leaped back aboard and went below to discuss things with the other two, suddenly a little hesitant, almost scared by the situation she now found herself in. There was no official welcome to the inland section of the port — no customs or registration formalities. If there was a harbour master, he was asleep in bed. There was probably a security team watching the gin-palaces in the private marina, but a battered old riverboat with three youngsters aboard was far beneath their notice. No one of authority seemed interested in them at all.
‘I’ll have to go into the city itself,’ said Anastasia. ‘Find someone who can get the alert out to the authorities. You two will have to stay here. Esan, you can’t even dream of showing your face, just in case. Ado, you’d be best to stay with him. Neither of you have any papers or anything. You could get into a world of trouble out there.’
‘You’ve got no papers either,’ countered Ado. ‘What’s to stop you getting into trouble?’
Nothing, thought Anastasia. Nothing at all. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, with much more confidence than she felt. ‘I’ll just try and find a police patrol or something. Once I get in contact with anyone from the police, security or the army I should be able to get some kind of alert out. All you two have to do is wait for me to come back. But try and keep an eye out. If anyone you don’t know comes this way, then slip the mooring and head off. Do not under any circumstances start using the guns again.’
As Anastasia walked warily along the jetty in the moonlight, she looked about her in shock and confusion. She remembered this place well — her last visit had been six months or so ago. What had happened in the meantime? It looked as though a hurricane had hit it. The buildings appeared to be little better than the ruins of Citematadi. Certainly all the street lighting was out. Had the moon and stars not been so bright tonight she would hardly have been able to find her way. But things improved at the inland end of the compound. There were occasional street lights here and, although she wasn’t familiar with the city, it wasn’t too hard to work out what was what. The long, quiet road leading along the rear of the wrecked office compound led eventually to a fenced-off area filled with yellow security lighting. She went straight towards this, reasoning that there must be some kind of a guard there — someone she could start with.
But before she managed to get to the security gate, however, she was distracted by something else. It was a bar called OTI. As she passed the door, there was a tremendous cheer and a cacophony of laughing and applause. Intrigued, she looked in. She saw a long bar down one side of a low-ceilinged, square room with a stage at the far end and a range of boxes opposite the bar. A woman wearing no clothes whatsoever was just leaving the stage. Between the door and the stage there was a floor packed with tables and chairs, all of which seemed to be filled with drunken men. Some of them were in naval whites. She stepped in, thinking that a naval officer — even a drunk one — might be a better place to start than a security guard.
She had only gone a few feet before she stopped, simply frozen with surprise. She knew the men sitting at the nearest table. It was Nellie’s old crew. And the man opposite her, his face clear and unmistakable even in the smoke-filled gloom, was the captain. ‘Captain Christophe? Is that you?’ she asked in simple, overwhelming relief. ‘Captain Christophe?’ she called. ‘It’s me, Anastasia Asov. I thought you were dead!’
‘Dead?’ he demanded, surging unsteadily to his feet. ‘Who says I’m dead?’
‘No one,’ she answered shortly. ‘But when we found Nellie…’
‘Nellie.’ He subsided sadly. ‘Ah Nellie. My poor Nellie! Where is she now?’
‘She’s at the end of the jetty,’ Anastasia answered matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve just moored her there. Listen. Captain Christophe, you have to help me…’ She stopped. The old man was staring at her simply horrified.
‘You have her? You moored her? Then where are the men I sold her to? They were bad men, those ones! The sort who chop off hands like the Rwandan Interahamwe. They’ll come after Nellie, mark my words. After you too, if you stole her. Maybe… Maybe they’ll come after me!’ He surged to his feet again, staring down at the horrified woman. ‘After me!’ he repeated, and he punched her full in the face. ‘What have you done?’ he roared. ‘What have you done?’
One of the navy men took him by the shoulder. ‘What are you doing, old man?’ he asked. ‘You can’t go round punching women like that…’
He would have said more, but the terrified Captain Christophe rounded on him with a wild haymaker that floored him at once. Then, before Anastasia could grasp what was really going on, she was in the middle of a full-blown punch-up.
After all she had been through, this seemed like the final straw. She crawled under a table, closed her eyes and curled into the smallest, tightest ball she could. Which is where she was when the police arrived. The drunken brawl was quelled in an instant and the main protagonists dragged off to a paddy wagon waiting outside. And Anastasia might have stayed hidden under her table, had the young officer who tried to protect her not asked, ‘Hey! Where’s the woman who started all this? The one the old guy punched in the face?’
Five minutes later, she was with the others in the back of the wagon. She fought the overwhelming desire to shout, scream, swear at the aggrieved naval lieutenant. To punch the comatose Captain Christophe in the face as he deserved. To try and get someone to listen to a story she knew was going to sound frankly unbelievable. She sat in silence and cudgelled her brains therefore, until the wagon stopped, the doors opened and she was swept on to the next level of helplessness.
Half an hour later, her next opportunity to sit and think things through arrived — she was alone in a cell in the nearest police station to OTI, which, as it happened was police headquarters. She was charged with affray. She was charged with having no ID or papers. The others were slung in a communal holding area. She was photographed and led to a single cell deep in the cellars of the building. It was chilly, badly lit, very basic. There was a pallet bed to sit on or lie on, a stainless steel washstand and beside it a stainless steel toilet with no seat. She would have used the toilet but she couldn’t get over the feeling that she was being watched. So she sat, stunned by the enormity of the misfortune that had overtaken her, praying that the men who chopped off hands had not yet noticed that Nellie was moored at the end of the jetty, when the door opened.
She was so stressed that she actually screamed. Screamed again, even as her reeling mind registered that she knew the man in army officer’s uniform, with his clipped moustache and Denzel Washington good looks.