I pulled the sack out of her dead grip, making her bones rattle as the frail cloth came free. The first thing I found inside the sack was a blue Australian passport, in which was written the dead woman’s name, Maureen Delaney, and her age, twenty-three. The passport photograph showed a round, girlish face that smiled at the world with an astonished happiness.
There was a stub of pencil in the sack, but no sheet of paper or notebook, so I leafed through the passport until I found some faint penciled letters on a blank page that told me how wrong I was. This girl had not died trying to reach the mine, but escaping from it. She had crawled up here, and died, because such a fate was better than staying in the mine. Maureen Delaney had been murdered.
The blank page in the passport was headed Naiad, and under that boat’s name was a brief and pathetic message. “They killed John and Mark. There were four of them: two Germans, an American, and an English girl. They let others rape me. And rape me.” The words were ill-written and very eloquent, as eloquent as any voice that speaks from the grave. “It is November,” Maureen Delaney’s message continued, “they say they’ll kill me. The girls won’t help me.” I turned the passport’s stiff page to find some words addressed to her mother.
I closed my eyes as though I could stop the tears.
I tried to persuade myself that there might be another English girl in the Genesis community, or that this Australian girl’s dying testimony was mere imagination, but I had deceived myself for long enough, and there could be no more deception. Maureen Delaney’s companions had been murdered, and she had been driven to this cold, lonely death, which was as bad as murder, and my daughter had been a participant. For what? For a boat, I assumed, for possession of Naiad, because, like all terrorists, my daughter believed that the foulest means were sanctified by the nobility of the cause.
I turned back the passport’s pages until Maureen Delaney’s smiling, sun-tanned face again stared into mine. She looked, I thought, enthusiastic, like someone who had taken life with both hands as a gift. She must have been an adventurous girl, independent and tough, for she had sailed far seas, keeping the wind’s tune and knowing the sea’s measure, but then she had been raped and killed. With my daughter’s compliance. I imagined the Australian girl begging for help and Nicole’s cold face turning away, and that thought made me want to put the Lee-Enfield’s cold muzzle in my mouth and blow my brains out, but instead I put the murdered girl’s passport into my pocket. It would have to go to the Australian embassy.
I emptied the last contents of the sack and found the useless remains of a box of matches, and then evidence that Maureen Delaney had planned to take revenge on her tormentors. At the bottom of the sack were six sticks of dynamite, each one wrapped in a sheet of old, pinkish, greasy paper that bore the trademark “Nobel.” Maureen Delaney had never found her revenge; instead, after escaping from the buildings by the quay, where, presumably, she had stolen the sticks of explosive, she had fallen and died in this high place.
I said a prayer for her. It was inadequate, but my memorial for Maureen Delaney would be more substantial than prayer, to which end I put the six sticks of dynamite into my bag.
In the cottages, standing in the kitchen where Nicole’s photographs decorated the wall, I had persuaded myself that it would be best if I sailed away from the Isle of Torments. I had persuaded myself that I did not need to know what Nicole had become. I had hoped that Stormchild would still be free and that I could have sailed away in her and never looked back.
But I could no longer do that. I had found Nicole, and what I had found was evil. David would doubtless say I should give that evidence to the authorities and let the black-uniformed men of the Chilean Armada scour out this nest of killers, but one of the killers was my daughter. And a dead Australian girl had given me six sticks of dynamite. So I changed my mind again. I would not, after all, walk away in the solace of ignorance. Instead, as best as I could, I would be a good environmentalist. I would clean up the mess.
I crossed the marshland in the dusk. It still rained, and in places that rain had puddled into the tire tracks left by the two cross-country motorbikes.
I followed the tracks as far as the crest above the fjord. There the thickly ribbed tire marks slewed abruptly northward, almost as though von Rellsteb and his companion had reached this high vantage place and stared down to see that their hunt was over. I, too, gazed down the long, damp slope to see that Stormchild was gone. Lake Joanna lay empty, while the land on either bank of the fjord stretched away in broken and deserted folds toward the ocean.
I slid down the hill to the tree line, then charged recklessly through the undergrowth, not caring what noise I made. No one waited in ambush at the hill’s foot. I had half expected to find two discarded cross-country motorbikes, but there was only the empty gray-black water that was being stirred into restlessness by the wind and pelting rain.
I looked round the rain-soaked beach until I found the pale, platelike rock, under which David had agreed to leave me a message. If Stormchild had been captured then I knew there would be no such message, and thus I lifted the stone with a sense of doom which evaporated into instant relief when I saw the piece of white card that David had protectively wrapped in a clear plastic bag. The existence of the message meant that Stormchild was safe, because David, clearly scared of the deteriorating weather, had taken her back to sea.
“08.46 hours.” My brother’s message was written with ink in block capitals, and began with a typical punctiliousness. “The glass is still falling alarmingly, so I propose to take advantage of the ebbing tide and take Stormchild to sea. To save your radio’s batteries I shall listen for your transmissions on the hour, every hour, for precisely five minutes, on our agreed channel. If I have not heard from you within seventy two hours, I shall assume that you have neither read this note, nor ever will, and I shall go north for help. In the meantime I have left you a cache of supplies, which I have concealed in the woodland. You will find the cache eleven paces due east of this rock. God bless you, D.” The last two sentences had been written in pencil, just as had the postscript, which David had evidently scribbled after he had brought the message ashore. “09.03 hours, Tim! I have just made my first confirmed sighting of a green-backed firecrown hummingbird. The bird had a disappointingly dun plumage, so was probably a female, but it was still a thrill to see! You might care to look for yourself. Mine was feeding on the wild fuchsias, which are growing among the trees just above your cache.”
I saw no hummingbird. I did not even look for a hummingbird. I could not have cared if a whole troupe of hummingbirds had joined wing tips and hummed hallelujahs around my head. I just wanted to find David’s cache, which consisted of ten cans of baked beans, ten cans of corned beef, six Kendal Mint bars, a small cooking canteen, a box of Earl Grey teabags, a waterproof container of matches, a can-opener, a groundsheet, and a sleeping bag, all crammed into a rucksack. It was a sensible cache, though I wished he had included one of the cheap, spare quartz watches that I had stored aboard Stormchild for the day when all my expensive chronometers gave up their ghosts. David was very sensible in restricting the times when he would keep a radio watch for me, but I no longer had a watch and did not know when the hour was on the hour.