I consequently didn’t see Trox Island or its familiar ruins when I was leaving it, but if three of my captors thought I didn’t know who they were, they were wrong.
By the time we touched down, at a guess thirty-five to forty minutes later, I’d added cramp to my woes, a minor inconvenience compared to not having been flung overboard into the deep Caribbean. The aircraft taxied a good way after it landed, and then waited, with the engines ticking over, until the rear door was lowered and some of the passengers left through it. Then the door closed again and the aircraft taxied lengthily again, and again it stopped with the engines still running. Again I heard the rear door being lowered, and with sweat and rapid heartbeat I thought that if death were on its way to me it would be here at the end of a long taxi ride to nowhere.
Prods and pushes propelled me stumbling down the steps onto stony ground. This exit wasn’t followed immediately by a bullet through the brain, but by a blind walk through a squeaking gate in a rattling fence. Rough hands gave me an overbalancing final thrust forward, and while I tottered to stand upright I heard the squeaky gate slam shut behind me and with immense thankfulness understood I’d been unmistakably shoved free into the living present.
I swallowed, shuddered, felt sick. The aircraft taxied away into limbo. I thought with banality that it’s remarkable how stupid one feels standing half naked and blindfold with one’s wrists tied, in the middle of God knows where.
After a while, in which I tried unsuccessfully to free my hands, a voice at my shoulder asked in puzzlement, ‘What you doing out here, mon?’ and I answered with husky, out of use vocal chords, but endless gratitude, ‘If you untie me, I’ll tell you.’
He was big, black and laughing at my predicament, and he held the white cotton triangular bandage that had been wrapped round my head.
‘You got bandages where you don’t need them, mon,’ he said happily. ‘Who trussed you up like a chicken, eh? Your woman, eh?’ He tore and untied with strong fingers the bandages round my wrists. ‘Where are your shoes, mon?’ he asked. ‘Your feet have been bleeding.’ He saw the whole thing as a joke.
I smiled stiffly in return and asked where I was. It was evening, on the edge of night. Lights everywhere in the distance.
‘On Crewe Road, of course. Where’ve you been?’
I said neutrally, ‘On Trox Island.’
A frown replaced the laugh. ‘The hurricane wiped out that place, they say.’
I was standing on a grass verge of a road beside a wire mesh fence that skirted a medium-sized commercial airport. When I asked my laughing helper if it were Jamaica or Grand Cayman, he told me with more good humour than ever that it was Owen Roberts, mon, Cayman. Of course, Hurricane Odin had passed south of here, praise the Lord. He himself, now, he was from Jamaica, mon, but Crewe Road was in George Town, Grand Cayman.
He was naturally and endlessly curious about the state he’d found me in, but accepted that if I’d been set upon and robbed of my clothes and money and everything else I was mainly in need of transport, and cheerfully offered me a ride in his brother-in-law’s jeep which he was driving along Crewe Road when he saw me standing there helpless... and where did I want to go?
To Michael Ford’s house, I said, if he knew it, and he shrugged and drove me there with much less warmth if not with outright disapproval, and he merely nodded when at the Fords’ front gate I thanked him profoundly for his kindness. He thrust the bandages into my hands, said, ‘Not good people,’ and drove off as if he were sorry he had stopped for me at all.
Michael and Amy Ford greeted me with extreme astonishment.
‘We thought you were dead...!’
‘Kris said—’
Kris said.
Michael and Amy warmly gestured me to come in and led the way to the same sitting-room as before.
‘Kris is alive?’ I asked. ‘Is it true?’
Michael said heartily, ‘Of course he’s alive.’ He looked me up and down in the sitting-room lights. ‘My dear man, what a state you’re in.’
With a grimace I asked if my clothes and passport were still in their house and was relieved when Amy said she hadn’t yet sent them to England.
‘And my grandmother...’ I said, ‘can I pay you for a call to her?’
‘My dear man, be our guest.’ He pushed a telephone my way. ‘She’ll be asleep, though. It’s midnight in London.’
I pressed the buttons. ‘She’ll want to know I’m alive.’
The voice that answered was predictably that of a nurse. Less predictably, it was the voice of Jett van Els, who exclaimed ‘We were told you were dead—’
My grandmother, awakened, remarked toughly that she’d known all along that I was still alive and then rather spoiled the effect by sobbing.
‘I said...’ She swallowed and paused. ‘I told them you could outswim any hurricane. I said it, even if it isn’t true.’
‘Who is them?’ I asked.
‘The BBC. They wanted to put a tribute to you on the weather forecast and I told them to wait.’
I smiled, wished her a peaceful sleep, promised to phone the next day and, as I put down the receiver, asked Michael and Amy if they knew where Kris was.
‘There’s no search-and-rescue facility on Cayman,’ Amy said. ‘Robin phoned and said he felt responsible for letting Kris and you set off on such a risky flight and he organised a helicopter from Florida when you didn’t return and sent it out looking for both of you, after the worst of the storm had passed; and it did find Kris in the life raft, which was pretty amazing considering...’
‘But...’ Michael continued as Amy paused, ‘Kris told me the airplane had sunk in terrible waves and he saw you being swept away and all you had was a life jacket and he said not even a very good swimmer like you could have lived through waves more than thirty feet high.’
‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘When was he found?’
‘Don’t you want to get dressed?’ Amy interrupted sympathetically. ‘And your poor feet...!’
I was being careful to stand on her tiles so as not to dirty her rugs. ‘My feet are OK. When did the helicopter find Kris?’
Michael, frowning, answered vaguely, ‘Not yesterday... the day before, I think.’ He looked for confirmation to Amy, who nodded indecisively.
‘And, er...’ I asked without pressure, ‘where is he now?’
Amy answered, but after thought. ‘He went home to England. He said he was due back at work. Now, do put better clothes on. All your things are still in the room you used here.’
I gave in to her housekeeperly urging and in deep luxury showered, got rid of the stubbly beginnings of beard, and dressed in clean soap-smelling shirt, cotton trousers and, flip-flop sandals. Amy greeted the result with hands held high and multiple compliments, and Michael said he had lit the barbecue fire and was baking potatoes to go with the steak.
It wasn’t until after the food that they asked where I’d been and how I’d survived, and they showed shock and interest in suitable intensities at my account.
I explained that Kris in the last minute of control before the aircraft crashed into the sea had said that he was going to try to reach Trox Island, and that by some miracle the currents had actually swept me back there, where we had landed earlier on some errand for Robin.
‘What errand?’ Michael asked intently.
I said I didn’t know. I said I didn’t think Kris was clear about it either. I looked blankly puzzled. I told them that most extraordinarily I’d been brought back to Cayman in some sort of semi-military aircraft with a crew wearing radiation suits and carrying assault weapons. The crew hadn’t spoken to me or done anything I understood. It was all very odd, but anyway they’d blindfolded me, tied my wrists with bandages from — I supposed — the first-aid box every aircraft had to carry, and when they’d landed here on Cayman, they’d let me go. A Jamaican man who was passing had kindly untied me and driven me to their door.