Thunderbolt Wilbur Smith (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

came hot on the heels of this admission. If the businessman and crook Nicholas Courtney wasn’t my father, who was? Something about the way Mum wasn’t volunteering the information made me scared to ask, but I steeled myself to do so regardless.

‘Who is?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Who’s who, Jack?’

She obviously didn’t want me to ask, but all this pretending she didn’t know what I was on about only made me want to know more badly. ‘My real father,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’

Now it was her turn to put an arm around me. I allowed her to pull me close. Her hair smelled of apples. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said.

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘I know,’ she said, ‘but in a way it is.’

The way she was holding me and her soothing tone reminded me of when I was much younger. She’d held me like that in the days and weeks after Mark died. Then, it felt like she was protecting me from myself. What was she trying to protect me from now? After what we’d just been through, I’d surely proved myself capable of withstanding more or less anything. I shrugged her off gently and said, ‘Come on, Mum, I want to know.’

She stood back, stared at me steadily. Did she not want to tell me because she couldn’t? As in, did she not know herself? I nearly backtracked. The words ‘It doesn’t matter’ were on the tip of my tongue. But even that – my own mother not knowing who my father was – I could have handled. It would have been an answer of sorts.

She reached out and stroked the side of my cheek with one finger. I couldn’t help it; I leaned away. Instantly I felt guilty. I’m glad I didn’t cave in though, because she broke the silence eventually, with a promise.

‘You have my word: I’ll tell you when it’s time,’ she said. ‘Just as I was always planning to do.’

Though I wanted to ask her what ‘when it’s time’ depended upon, I couldn’t. It would have felt cruel somehow if I’d pushed further in that moment. Mum moved back to her little hotel desk and tidied it pointlessly. The conversation was over.

She had never lied to me before. I had no reason to doubt she was telling me the truth now: she had a plan and would follow through. And in any case, I knew for a fact that I would never take ‘no’ for a final answer to this question. It was too important. One way or another, no matter how long it took, I’d work out the answer.

I watched Mum busying herself and saw more clearly how the strain of these last weeks had taken their toll. Beneath the bright Zanzibar sun her skin, which normally tanned so easily, was still pale and papery. And she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. But she’d also lost confidence somehow. She moved with a brittleness I’d not noticed in her before.

‘You guys will need to fuel up at the buffet bar,’ she said, ‘before throwing yourselves back into your underwater hunting.’

‘Sure,’ I said, and I followed her out into the dappled courtyard, thinking that of all of us she was the one who most needed feeding up.

4.

That afternoon, on Pete’s advice, we searched off a different beach. He ran us down to it in the boat. We went gently. He’d already made a temporary repair to the fibreglass damaged by the sheared-off cleat. Noticing the split was neatly covered with gaffer tape, I looked away guiltily. Though this stretch of sand was smaller, one of the most exclusive resorts on the island sat above the beach, meaning wealthy guests. We dropped anchor not far offshore to gear up. A breeze pulled up ridges in the sea. They weren’t big waves, but enough to rock the boat beneath my feet.

‘Low tide in an hour, so you’re best off searching close in,’ said Pete.

I steadied myself on the rail near the stern, nodded to Amelia and Xander, then tipped back off it into the sea. The view through my mask was an instant explosion of bubbles.

When they cleared and I surfaced, Pete threw the detectors down to me. Amelia was sorting herself out on the other side of the boat. Xander had also dropped in. I bit down on the regulator, took the first metallic breath of oxygen, and rolled forward to swim beneath the boat and join them.

As I swam well beneath the hull – there was no way I was going to risk scraping it – I met not only Amelia and Xander, but also a large leatherback turtle, a metre across at least, flapping unhurriedly between us. It was swimming at an angle towards the shore. Without so much as a glance at each other we all fell in behind it. The leatherback didn’t swim so much as pulse, beckoning us on.

I’m not superstitious, but that turtle struck me as a sign. We kept a respectful distance, swimming side by side behind the leatherback, with the seabed rising to meet us. When the water was no more than ten or twelve feet deep, and we were not far from the beach at all, the turtle veered away, and again, without communicating to each other, we all stopped. Quite clearly this was the spot to start our search.

This wasn’t the shallowest place we’d scoured. The previous afternoon I’d run the detector so close to shore I could have stood up, but the aqualung was still a huge help: with just a snorkel I’d have been duck diving and resurfacing every thirty seconds.

Now, even though the serrated surface of the sea was almost within reach, I could hang a couple of feet off the seabed and search systematically. The blip-blip-blip of the detector was a familiar and soothing soundtrack. I worked my way methodically along the beachfront. Any moment now, I said to myself.

Any. Moment. Now.

For a good twenty minutes, all I heard