Sister Connie sat back in her chair. “I was a very ordinary schoolgirl,” she said. “Just like everybody else. When I was fourteen, I wanted to be a dancer. I used to go to a modern dance class, and ballet too, and I was serious about dancing exams. I thought that it would be a wonderful thing to do. I imagined being picked for the Royal Academy of Dance, or somewhere like that, and appearing in London. I really thought that it would be that easy.
“But then something happened – something which changed the direction of my life – changed my life, actually. It’s odd, isn’t it, how one little incident, one conversation, one experience, one thing you see or hear, can change everything? That’s odd, don’t you think?”
Pat thought of her own life. Had there been something which had changed the whole course of her life? Yes. There had been.
There had been something on that gap year, something which had happened in Australia, which had done that. If she had not gone to that particular interview, if she had not seen the notice in the
“We were from Gourock,” said Sister Connie. “We lived in a flat which looked out over the Firth. We were on the top floor, right up at the top, and there were one hundred and twenty-two steps from the ground floor up to our landing. I counted them. One hundred and twenty-two.
“On the floor below, there was a woman who lived by herself.
She wasn’t particularly old – I suppose she was hardly much more than sixty, but at the time, when I was a teenager, that seemed old enough. She was a nice woman, and I liked her. I used to get messages for her from time to time, as she had difficulty with those stairs. Her breathing wasn’t very good, you see.
People like that should live on the ground floor, but ground-floor flats are more expensive and I don’t think she could manage it.
“She was frailer than I had imagined. She had given me a key to let myself in when I helped her, and one Saturday morning I used this key to let myself in when she did not answer my 108
knock on the door. I went inside and found her on her bed, half in, half out. Her feet were on the floor, but her body was under the sheets. I thought that she was dead at first, but then I saw that she was watching me. Her eyes were open.
“I rushed over to her bedside and looked down at her. I saw then that she was still alive, and I reached out to take hold of her hand. It felt very dry. Very cold and very dry. Then she pointed to a piece of paper on the side of the table and whispered to me. She asked me to phone the number on the paper and . . .”
Sister Connie’s narrative tailed off. She had noticed that Pat was no longer looking at her, but was staring in the direction of another table, one closer to the door.
“I don’t want to bore you,” said the nun. “Perhaps I should tell you the rest of the story some other time.”
For a moment, Pat said nothing. Then she turned back to face her companion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just seen somebody I’m trying to . . . Well, I suppose I’m trying to avoid him.”
Sister Connie looked in the direction in which Pat had been staring. “That young man over there?” she asked. “That handsome young man?”
Pat lowered her eyes. Wolf’s presence could have been a coincidence, but that seemed unlikely to her. “Yes,” she said.
Sister Connie frowned. “Is he bothering you?” she asked.
Pat hesitated. Was Wolf bothering her? Yes, he was. He must have followed her here and was presumably waiting until Sister Connie left so that he could talk to her. That was stalking, in her view, or something which was close enough to stalking.
Sister Connie leaned forward. “Troublesome men are easily defeated,” she said. “Just give me five minutes. That’s all I’ll need.”
Domenica had an early breakfast in the courtyard of her small hotel in Malacca. The couple who ran the hotel, the da Silvas, brought her a plate of freshly sliced tropical fruits – paw-paw, watermelon, star fruit – and this was followed by a fine white porridge, sweetened and flavoured with cinnamon, and after that by scrambled eggs in which chopped smoked fish had been mixed. She ate alone at her table; it seemed that she was the only guest in the hotel; she had seen nobody else since she had arrived, and the da Silvas had urged her to stay as long as possible.
“There is plenty of room,” they said, wistfully, she thought.
The courtyard suited her very well, as it had two frangipani trees in blossom and she could just pick up the delicate, rather sickly scent of their white flowers. She liked frangipani trees, and had planted several in her time in Kerala, all those years ago. But not everybody shared her enthusiasm; the Chinese often did not like them because they associated them with cemeteries, where they often grew. Tree associations interested Domenica.
In Scotland, it was well known that rowan trees protected one against witches, just as buddleia attracts butterflies. And then there were the ancestor trees in Africa – a tree which one should not cut down, out of respect for the ancestor who might inhabit it. In India, the same rule applied to banyan trees, and she had once travelled on a highway where a banyan tree had been left growing in the middle of the road. Surprising as it was, that, she thought, demonstrated a proper sense of priorities. In her view, the car should give way to spiritual values, although it rarely did. And, of course, there were places where the car was even accorded an almost spiritual status. Had somebody in the United States not insisted on being buried in his car? It was so absurd.
Her breakfast over, Domenica returned to her room and packed her bags. In an hour’s time, Edward Hong would be calling for her, as he had agreed to drive her to meet the contact who would lead her to the pirate village. He could not drive all the way, he explained, for reasons of security.
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“I’m afraid that they’re a little bit unwilling to let me go to the village itself,” he said. “And you will be obliged to walk the last couple of miles. But everybody knows where it is, of course.
I suppose they like to maintain at least some sense of clandes-tinity. Good for their self-image, I suspect.”
