Between the villages, banana plantations ran right up to the edge of the road. Huge bunches of green fruit pointed up to the sky, brown raffia-like leaves crackled in the Jeep’s draught.
“You look for Red Colobus monkey?” Popo asked without taking his eye off the road.
“I told you last night,” Craig reminded him. “Zanzibar leopard. I’m looking for the leopard.”
“No leopard here,” Popo shook his head.
“I heard the witch doctors keep them.”
“No leopard.”
“There are witch doctors, then?”
Popo didn’t say anything as they passed through another tiny village, crowds of little children too small to be in school running up to the Jeep and waving at Craig, old men sat under a shelter made out of dried palm leaves. The children shouted after them: “Jambo, jambo!” Craig waved back.
“In Jozani Forest…” Popo said slowly, “Red Colobus monkey. Only here on Zanzibar.”
“I know,” said Craig, wiping his forearm across his slippery brow. “And the leopards? The witch doctors? I have to find them.”
“No leopard here.”
He wasn’t going to get much more out of Popo, that was clear. When the kid swung the Jeep off the road, he reacted swiftly by grabbing his arm, but they had only pulled into the carpark for the forest. He let go of the kid’s arm.
“Sorry. Took me by surprise.”
Popo blinked slowly.
“No leopard here,” he repeated.
The noise of the boat’s engine, a constant ragged chugging, made conversation impossible. There was no point trying to make yourself heard, but that didn’t stop Lief from occasionally mouthing easily understood remarks about the choppiness of the water, the heat of the sun.
The others—Karin, Anna, Kristin and Alison—grinned and nodded, although Alison’s grin was a little forced. Her trip to Prison Island was already going to exact a price, even though it was only supposed to be a half-hour hop: Alison could barely walk through a puddle without getting seasick. As the 25-foot wooden craft took another dive off the top of the next crest, she lurched forward and felt her stomach do the same, only, it seemed, without stopping. She retched, assumed the crash position, fully expecting to be ditched in the drink. It didn’t happen. The boat lumbered up the next heavy swell, perched an instant at its arête, and plummeted into the trough. Alison groaned.
The two Danes were chattering excitedly in their own tongue, clearly having a ball. When she looked up, Alison saw Anna and Kristin smiling down at her. “Are you okay?” one of them asked and Alison just managed to shake her head. “It’s not far to the island,” Anna said, looking forward, but the boat pitched to port, throwing her off her feet. She tumbled into Alison’s lap, Alison dry-retching once again.
“Oh God,” she moaned. “I can’t stand it.”
“It’s not far now,” Lief tried to reassure her, although he was puzzled as to why they had shifted around so much that the bow was now pointing out to sea.
“Where are we going?” Anna asked, of no one in particular, once she had picked herself up off the duckboards.
Now Kristin demanded “What’s going on?” as the bow swung around several degrees further to port. Their course could no longer be even loosely interpreted as being bound for Prison Island. “Where are you taking us?” she shouted at the boat’s skipper, a lad no more than 18 sat in the stern, his hand on the outboard throttle.
They were now heading into the wind, and spray broke over the bow every seventh or eighth wave. Alison had started to cry, tears slipping noiselessly over green cheeks. Her mouth was set in a firm, down-curved bow, her brow creased in determined abstraction.
Lief rose to his feet unsteadily and asked the skipper “What’s going on?” The 18-year-old just stared at the horizon. “We want to go to Prison Island. We paid you the money. Where are you taking us?” Still the guy wouldn’t look at him. Lief leaned forward to grab his arm but found himself jerked back from behind. The other African, who had been squatting in the bow, motioned to Lief that he should sit down. The fingers of his left hand were wrapped around the stubby handle of a fisherman’s knife.
“Sit,” he ordered. “Sit.” He looked at the girls. “Sit.” He pointed at the wooden bench seats and everyone complied. Now Anna had started to weep as well and was not so quiet about it as Alison.
“Hands,” the boy barked, his jaws snapping around the rusty gutting blade and grabbing at Lief’s wrists. With a length of twine he quickly tied Lief’s hands behind his back before any of the girls had the presence of mind to knock him off his feet while he had his hands occupied and was temporarily unarmed. They would live to regret this missed opportunity.
Anna and Kristin were almost paralysed with fear. Alison was within an ace of throwing herself overboard, believing that to be actually in the water could not be worse than being in a boat on it. Still the boat struck out against the direction of the incoming waves and soon they were all soaked from the spray over the bow. The boat climbed and plunged, climbed and plunged. Alison leant over the side and was quietly sick; she hoped it would make her feel better. It was funny how not even mortal fear could distract her from her seasickness.
Neither, it transpired, could the act of vomiting. If anything, she felt worse, and when the boat slipped around several degrees to port and took the waves side-on, she liked it even less. Each time the narrow craft leaned to either side she thought she was going in—again she considered doing it deliberately. Anna and Kristin were both crying, staring alternately at each other and at Lief, who was ashen-faced. Alison justified her intention to jump ship by interpreting the others’ introvertedness as being an atavistic retreat into their original social groupings in the face of extreme fear. They would no more try to save her life than they would that of one of the two kidnappers, she reasoned. How long had they known her? Twelve hours. What kind of bond grew in such a short time? Not a lasting one.
She remembered what her mother had once told her, when they’d taken the ferry to Calais. “Look at the horizon,” she’d said. “Watch the land. Don’t look at the water.” Thinking of her mother only brought fresh tears and looking left at the palm-fringed shoreline of the island some half a mile away made her feel no better. There was no way she would ever be able to swim such a distance, not even if her life depended on it. And seasickness had to be better than either drowning or being eaten by hammerhead sharks—she’d done her homework and mother nature’s bizarrest-looking fish was known to nest in several of the bays around Zanzibar.
She leaned forward again in order to sneak a look at the African boy who had gone back to the bow now that Lief was tied up and neither she nor any of the three other girls appeared to be capable of making a move against him and his mate. He appeared to be searching for something on land at the same time as casting quick little glances back at his captives. If she wasn’t mistaken, Alison thought he was nervous. She wondered if they could turn that to their advantage. Maybe he was new to this game, whatever it entailed.
“Listen,” she addressed the others, “we’ve got to do something.”
The three girls looked up, whereas Lief retreated further inside himself. He looked as if they might have lost him. Were it not for him, they could have all jumped overboard on a given signal and helped each other to shore. But with his hands tied behind his back, Lief would be unable to swim and the logistics of trying to drag him, lifesaving-style, over half a mile even between them seemed insurmountable.
Karin and Anna were still crying; Kristin had stopped and was calmer. “What can we do?” she wondered.