‘Good afternoon, Miss Donovan,’ said a loud masculine voice, and Peggy turned to see a tall, upright, middle-aged man with friendly eyes. He was dressed casually – fawn trousers, an open-necked shirt and pullover. ‘I’ve just been tidying myself up a bit. I’ve been working on that greenhouse all morning.’
‘Yes,’ said Felicity Luckhurst. ‘I’ve told him he’s got to finish it before he goes back to work.’
‘When will that be?’ asked Peggy.
‘I’m not sure yet. In a month, I hope, but I’ve got to get the medic to sign me off. Lot of nonsense.’
‘Now, now,’ said his wife. ‘Miss Donovan doesn’t want to hear you grousing. Go and sit down and I’ll bring you some tea.’
They sat down in the wicker chairs in the conservatory and talked about the garden and the design of the house until Mrs Luckhurst brought the tea tray and left them to it.
‘So,’ Luckhurst said, ‘tell me what I can do to help the Home Office.’ He raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘I’ve come to follow up your conversation with DI Fontana. You gave him some information about where you were held in Somalia.’ Peggy was trying not to lead him in any particular direction.
Luckhurst nodded. ‘I take it you know broadly what happened to us?’
‘I think so – your ship was seized, and you and your crew were held captive until a ransom was paid. DI Fontana said you had something to tell us about the camp.’
‘Well, not so much about the camp itself, but rather what one of the people guarding us said to me.’ Luckhurst told Peggy about the young boy, Taban, who had brought them their supper each evening. On the last occasion that he’d seen him, he explained, Taban seemed really nervous. ‘Quite different from his usual self. I’d managed to establish quite a rapport with him – thought it might come in useful somehow. We talked in a kind of pidgin English. That evening he said – well, he didn’t exactly say this but it’s what I think he meant – that an Englishman had come to the camp. Not English like me, but like Taban; I think he was trying to say he was dark-skinned. He wasn’t a hostage, according to Taban; this “Englishman” had come to the camp with a bunch of Arabs.’
‘Arabs?’ asked Peggy. ‘Not Somalis?’
‘No, that’s why it stuck in my mind – that and the fact that he was a dark Englishman, whatever that means.’
Peggy had a very clear sense of what it meant. ‘Did he say what these Arabs were doing there?’
Luckhurst shook his head. ‘No, and I never saw them myself. You see, we never got a look at the whole camp. They brought us there in the dark, and we were kept in a pen. We were let out each day for exercise, in a kind of dusty open courtyard, but all I could see were dunes on one side, and a wall on the other.’
‘You said “dunes” – were you right by the sea?’
‘I assume so. Though to tell you the truth, I don’t know exactly where we were.’
Peggy reached down for the case holding her laptop. ‘Why don’t we try and find out?’
Five minutes later Peggy sat at the dining-room table, with an attentive Captain Luckhurst by her side. Thanks to Mrs Luckhurst’s attachment to online shopping, the household had fast Broadband access, and on the screen of Peggy’s laptop a picture of the United Kingdom suddenly appeared, viewed from hundreds of miles above.
‘Google Earth,’ said Luckhurst knowingly. ‘My son was showing it to me the other day.’
‘Something like that,’ said Peggy cryptically. In fact, they were looking at Ministry of Defence satellite photographs – unlike Google Earth, these pictures were constantly updated, so that instead of patches of cloud obscuring a given location on the day the Google satellite was at work, these were all razor-sharp.
‘You said your ship was boarded almost dead east of Mogadishu.’
‘That’s right. We were about thirty miles offshore.’
‘Did you have a sense of where you went next?’
‘Not really. It was south of Mogadishu – though I couldn’t see the city. Frankly I was too busy following the pirates’ orders to check the final co-ordinates.’
Meaning he’d had a gun to his head, thought Peggy, admiring Luckhurst’s understatement.
He pressed a finger to his lips, thinking hard. At last he said, ‘In the old days we’d have had a log – it would probably still be there in the pilot house. But nowadays it’s all electronic. That means HQ have a constant fix on the ship’s whereabouts.’ He looked at Peggy. ‘Let me go and make a call.’
When he returned he held a piece of paper. ‘Hope this means something to you.’
And when Peggy looked at the sequence of numbers it did. Opening a small box in one corner of the screen, she entered the precise latitude and longitude co-ordinates he had given her. Seconds later, the screen cleared and they were staring at a topographical view of ocean, with a superimposed X in the middle of the laptop’s display.
‘What’s that?’ asked Luckhurst.
‘The place where you were last anchored.’ She clicked a sequence of keys and suddenly the focus pulled back, exposing the nearby coastline. ‘Now, you were anchored only a mile or so offshore. Do you think you went straight in?’
