Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination Read online

  * * *

  She lay on her stomach in her bra and knickers, her slime-coated jeans, T-shirt and shoes hidden at a distance so she couldn’t smell them. She was out of sight of the guards, round the side of the hill, and peering through her spyglass at Pierre Feramo’s resort. A turquoise coral lagoon was ringed with a perfect white beach dotted with palms and wooden sun loungers with cream linen cushions. In the center, a square pool was set into a wooden deck. A large thatched structure behind was obviously the reception area and restaurant. A wooden jetty stretched over the lagoon, leading to a thatched bar. On either side two further walkways stretched over the water, three thatched huts leading off each. Each hut had a shaded wooden veranda with a wooden staircase leading directly into the sea. Six more guest huts were scattered among the palms on the edge of the beach. Mmmm, she thought, slipping without noticing into holiday hotel mode. Maybe I should visit, after all. I wonder if I could get one of the huts over the water. Or maybe it would be nicer to be back on the edge of the beach? But what about sandflies?

  The clientele dotted on the sun loungers and bar stools looked like Vogue models. A couple paddled kayaks across the lagoon. A man was snorkeling. Two girls were wading to the edge of the reef in scuba gear, aided by an instructor. To the right of the resort was a parking area, where there were trucks and diggers, a compressor and tanks. A rough roadway snaked round a headland. Beyond, a substantial concrete pier led out past the coral to the point where the water turned from turquoise to darkest blue. She put the spyglass down and took some more snaps. Then she put the spyglass back to her eye, but for some reason couldn’t see anything.

  “It’s the wrong way round.”

  She started to scream, but a hand was over her mouth, the other holding her arm behind her back.

  30

  She wriggled round to find herself looking at her ex-favorite gray eyes. “Oh God, it’s you,” she grunted through his fingers.

  “What are you doing?” Morton C. sounded mildly amused, in sharp contrast to the hand over her mouth.

  “Gerroff,” she demanded with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances.

  Morton released his grip and rested one finger against her throat. “Keep your voice down. What are you doing here?”

  “Sightseeing.”

  “In your underwear?”

  “I am also sunbathing.”

  “How did you get up here?”

  “I jumped.”

  “You jumped?”

  “Yes, and I nearly fell in. The ledge is covered in slime and so are my clothes.”

  “Where are they?”

  She pointed. He scrambled down the slope. She could hear small sounds and rustling. She started to turn over.

  “I said, don’t move.” He reappeared over the edge of the hill. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up a carrot.

  She glowered at him.

  “Don’t be sulky now. Come down here onto the ledge, slowly. Sit down on that rock.” As she did, she realized she was shaking. Morton C. crossed his arms, pulled his shirt over his head and handed it to her.

  “Put this on,” he said.

  “Not with your stink on it.”

  “Put it on.” He stood back, watching her put on the shirt. “You’re not a journalist at all, are you? What are you doing here?”

  “I told you. I came for a walk up Pumpkin Hill. I wanted to see the resort.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Why shouldn’t I check out the lovely hotel? What if I want to stay there?”

  “Well, you ask at the lovely tourist office in the lovely village, and if they have a lovely room, they’ll take you round in a lovely boat.”

  “Well, maybe I just will.”

  “Well, get you.”

  “Anyway, what are you doing here?”

  “Are you always this difficult?”

  “You’re working for Feramo, aren’t you?”

  “What you need to do is get yourself back to the village without being spotted, and if you have any sense at all, you’ll say nothing about coming up here.”

  “What a shitty thing to do, hanging around all the divers, pretending to be one of the lads, then grassing on them to that horrible, sinister acolyte like a telltale tit.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you got any of that stuff on your skin?”

  “My hands, but I wiped it off.”

  He took hold of her hands, held them two feet from his face and sniffed. “Okay,” he said. “Off you go. I’ll see you after the dive.”

  * * *

  No, you won’t, you two-faced bastard, she thought furiously, sitting in the mangroves and watching through her spyglass as Morton casually smoked a cigarette with the guard at the top of the hill. I’m going to have one last dive, then I’m going back to the British Embassy, tell them what I’ve found out and go home.

  * * *

  When Olivia turned up for her eleven o’clock dive, a group was huddled around the crackly television in Rod’s shack, watching the news.

  “They’re small, they’re green, they’re widely available, but they’re about to poison the world: castor beans!

  “Experts believe these commonly grown beans may be the source of Tuesday’s poison attack on the cruise ship Coyoba, an attack which has so far claimed the lives of two hundred and sixty-three passengers. The attack, believed to be the work of the al-Qaeda network, has been traced to the poison ricin, placed in the salt pots in the ship’s dining room.”

  Up popped a scientist in a white coat. “Ricin, of course, was the substance used in the so-called ‘umbrella attack’ on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. The Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was killed by a pellet filled with ricin and fired from an umbrella. The problem with ricin—which is highly toxic to humans—is that the source material, the castor bean, is widely grown in many regions of the world, and the poison can be produced in so many forms—powder, as in this latest attack, but also crystal, liquid and even gel.”

  “That’s what O’Reilly says they’re growing over the hill,” said Rod. “He thinks that’s what poisoned his goats.”

  Fuuuuck, thought Olivia, sniffing her skin. “Just going for a swim!” she said brightly. “Very hot!”

  She hurried to the edge of the jetty, stripped off her shorts and dived in. As she plunged deep into the lagoon, rubbing at her skin, her imagination was in overdrive: Ricin, face cream, maybe Feramo was planning to poison Devorée’s Crème de Phylgie with poison gel? Then Michael Monteroso would get it to catch on with his celebrity clients, and Feramo would slowly poison half of Hollywood before anyone suspected.

  * * *

  As Olivia swam back, Rod was waiting at the end of the jetty with the gear. “Fancy taking on a tunnel?” he asked, with a flash of his white teeth.

  “Er . . .” Olivia was dead against diving tunnels and wrecks. As far as she could see, as long as you kept breathing and didn’t panic underwater, you were fine. If you went where you could get stuck, it wasn’t so simple.

  “I’d rather do the wall again.”

  “Well, I’m going to the tunnels. And Drew’s not around. So if you want to dive today, you’ll have to do tunnels.”

  Olivia did not like being bossed around in this manner.

  “Fine,” she said cheerily. “I’ll just go for another swim instead.”

  “Okay, okay. We won’t go in any caves or tunnels. I might show you the odd crevice, though.”

  Olivia tried to ignore the unattractive image this conjured up in her mind’s eye.

  31

  Once underwater, Rod turned into a classic Smug Techie. He was the same breed as the man from the Spy Shop who had come to check out her room at the Standard, or the Smug Computer Expert who tinkers with your computer with a smirk and a vocabulary of unintelligible jargon, as if privy to a whole fabulous world which you cannot hope to understand, giving you a mere tasting menu of its delights suitable for a three-t
o-five-year-old, in order to bask in your childlike wonder and snigger about you with his techie friends later. Rod was somehow managing to convey a tech-esque smirk, in spite of the fact that he was eighty feet underwater and had a mask on his face and an oxygen pipe in his mouth.

  Olivia followed him through a crevice and then, when she realized that the crevice was actually a tunnel and that it was getting too narrow to turn, panicked so much that she dropped the regulator out of her mouth. For a few seconds she broke the golden rule and started floundering. What if Rod was one of Feramo’s men too and was going to kill her or lead her to Alfonso, who would perform female circumcision on her? What if she got trapped by an octopus? What if a giant squid wrapped its suckered tentacles around her and . . . Calm, calm, breathe, breathe. She collected herself, letting her air out slowly, and remembered what to do: lean to the right, run your hand down your thigh, and the regulator will be hanging just there—as indeed it was.

  The tunnel was narrowing alarmingly. She started having fantasies about reporting Rod to the diving authorities and having him struck off. Could diving instructors be struck off? She wasn’t breathing properly. A combination of fear and indignation was messing everything up. She had to force herself to do what she had been taught: breathe very very slowly and deeply, counter-intuitively, as if, instead of being almost trapped in an underwater tunnel, she was lying down at the end of a yoga class imagining a ball of orange light sliding down her body. Soon she was hearing her own heavy breathing, like a sound effect in a horror movie.

  After what seemed an unconscionable amount of time, she emerged into blue water. They were in an enormous cavern. There must have been a pretty large hole somewhere above because the water was clear and illuminated by shafts of sunlight. She looked up, trying to see the surface, but all she could see was diffuse light. Shoals of brightly colored fish darted this way and that. It was like being on some unbelievable acid trip. She swam to and fro, forgetting about time and reality, until she saw Rod in front of her tapping his hand on the air dial, communicating such patronizing sarcasm with each tap that she felt that the scuba world’s gain had been the mime world’s loss.

  They had fifteen minutes left. She couldn’t see the entrance back into the tunnel. Rod swam ahead of her, pointed to the gap and gestured to her to lead the way. It took longer than she remembered to get back. Something seemed wrong. She didn’t recognize the route. The fear resurfaced: Rod was a terrorist, Rod had been talking to Morton, Rod was trying to get rid of her because she knew too much. As she turned a corner, she saw what was ahead and screamed into her regulator, screaming and screaming so that it fell from her mouth again.

  32

  Olivia was face-to-face with a diver whose entire head was covered in black rubber apart from holes for the eyes and an opening which flapped and sucked around his regulator like a fish’s mouth. For a second, in the semidarkness of the tunnel, they stared at each other, mesmerized, like a cat and a goldfish. Then the diver took his regulator from his mouth and held it to hers, blowing out bubbles, holding her gaze until her breathing steadied, then took it back and took a breath himself. He kept his eyes trained steadily on hers as she breathed out into the water, then put his regulator back in her mouth to let her take in more air.

  The instinct to flail and gasp was overwhelming. They were eighty feet underwater, under rock. She could feel Rod behind her, clawing and shaking frantically at her leg, pushing her. Did he think she’d simply stopped to look at the view? She kicked her fins to signal him to stop as the diver gently lifted the regulator to her mouth again.

  Diving is a constant fight against panic. The phrase repeated itself in her head. She had stabilized, she was breathing from the regulator, but another wave of terror was starting to overwhelm her. She was sandwiched between Rod and the hooded man in the narrowest part of the tunnel. Even if she and Rod pushed their way back to the cavern, they might not make it in time. And if they did, they might not find air at the top; they might just die there.

  The hooded man held up his finger for her attention. She kept her eyes on his, breathing his air, as he reached out along her body. Then he withdrew his hand and held up her regulator. Still holding her gaze like an instructor doing a demonstration, he breathed from it, then held it out to her. She thought there was something familiar about his eyes, but she couldn’t make out the color. Who was he? At least he wasn’t trying to kill her, or if he was, he was prone to self-defeating behaviors. He reached forward again, found her gauge, looked at it, and showed it to her. At this depth she had seven minutes of air left. Rod was shaking her leg frantically. She tried to turn her head. When she turned forward again, the diver was moving away from her, backwards, at a steady speed, as if he was being pulled. She started to kick and moved ahead. She felt a massive stinging burn on her shoulder. Fire coral. She had an overwhelming urge to kick Rod in the face with her fin. If she had planned to go into a tunnel she’d have put on a wetsuit.

  The tunnel widened. The light ahead had a different quality. She could no longer see the diver in front of her. She moved faster and faster, bursting out into the open sea, looking up to see the light and bubbles of the surface misleadingly close. Resisting the urge to race her way up there, she turned to check for Rod, who was emerging from the tunnel, making his thumb and index finger into a circle.

  She wished there was a signal for, “No fucking thanks to you, you irresponsible bastard.”

  Rod raised a thumb signaling the ascent, then jerked his head in a sudden, panicky movement. She looked up to see the shadowy form of a shark.

  The shark was maybe twenty feet above them. Olivia knew that calm divers have nothing to fear from a shark. This one was moving fast and deliberately, as if towards prey. There was a flurry of movement and churning water, and then a red cloud started slowly to spread. She signaled to Rod to move away. His eyes were wide, terrified. She followed his gaze to see something falling down towards them, like a grotesque fish with a huge dark gaping mouth, trailing fronds which looked like seaweed. The object turned slowly to reveal a human face, the mouth open in a scream, bright red blood belching from the neck, long hair trailing behind. It was Drew’s head.

  33

  Rod swam past her, thrashing dangerously, brandishing his knife and heading towards the shark. She reached out and grabbed his leg, pulling him back towards her. She held up the gauge, signaled with her fist across her throat to say out of air and pointed upwards. He looked down towards the head, still falling into the abyss, and then turned to follow her. She swam smoothly away from the scene, checking her compass for the direction of the shore, checking that Rod was still following, feeling the change in the regulator which told her that the air was almost gone, fighting the panic again. There were dark shadows above them. More predators were moving towards the bloodbath. She started a controlled, out-of-air ascent, blowing her air out very, very slowly, saying “Ahhh” out loud. She felt the air in her buoyancy jacket expand and tighten against her chest and found the air-release hose, taking a lungful of air from it, discharging it slowly into the water, looking up, seeing the magical light and bubbles and blue of the surface beckoning, closer than it seemed, and forced herself to take her time: Breathe, don’t panic, slow your ascent to the speed of the slowest bubble.

  As they broke the surface, gasping for air and retching, they were still far from the shore—the dive shack was a good three hundred yards away.

  “What did you do to him?” yelled Rod.

  “What?” she said, pushing her mask up and dropping her weight belt. “What are you talking about?”

  She gave the signal for emergency towards the shore and blew her whistle. The usual bunch of guys were sitting around at the shack. “Help!” she shouted. “Sharks!”

  “What did you do to him?” said Rod, through a sob. “What did you do?”

  “What are you talking about?” she said furiously. “Are you mad? It wasn’t Drew in that tunnel. It was someone in a rubber mask. He gave
me his air and then just started zooming backwards.”

  “For fuck’s sake. That’s impossible. Hey!” Rod started shouting and gesticulating towards the shack. “Hey, get over here!”

  She looked backwards and saw a fin.

  “Rod, shut up and keep still.”

  Keeping her eyes on the fin, she blew the whistle and raised her hand again. Mercifully, a sense of urgency had finally communicated itself to the dive-shack guys. Someone had started up the boat’s engine, figures were jumping aboard and seconds later the boat was powering towards them. The fin disappeared under the water. She drew her legs up close, mushroom floating, thinking, Hurry, please hurry, waiting for a sudden muscular movement, the feel of her flesh being ripped apart. The boat seemed to take an interminable amount of time to reach them. What were they doing? Fucking stoneheads.

  “Leave the tanks—get in,” yelled Rod, suddenly the capable dive instructor again, as the boat drew up. Olivia ditched her tank and her fins, reached out to the arms stretching over the side of the boat and, scrambling with her feet, got herself over and lay in the bottom, gasping for breath.

  * * *

  Back on the jetty, Olivia sat on the bench, a towel around her shoulders, her arms round her knees. The whole horrible ritual of death and its aftermath was unfolding around her. Out at sea, a shark cage containing Rod and a buddy was descending from a boat in a plainly hopeless quest to retrieve the remains of Drew, Popayan’s only medical professional, an elderly Irish midwife, was standing helplessly on the jetty, holding her bag. At the sound of sirens, Olivia looked up to see a boat with flashing lights approaching: the medical boat from Roatán, the big island.