The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (learn to read books .TXT) 📕

Serey said simply, ‘There is none.’

He looked at the three faces in consternation and felt the stirrings of conscience, like the first warning shiver of a coming cold. ‘What about you?’

‘Your need is greater than ours,’ Serey replied.

A shadow fell across them, and the young doctor who had changed his dressing on the first day out, crouched down beside them, his face grey with fatigue. He laid down his precious bag, kept safe somehow during the storm, on the deck. ‘We must change your dressing,’ he said. The sound of a child crying bitterly for its mother carried on the breeze.

By mid-morning the sun blazed down on the stricken boat. Every scrap of shade was occupied, makeshift tents and awnings contrived from whatever materials were available. The trawler’s nose dipped low in the water. The angle of the deck made walking impossible without holding on, scrambling from one fixture to another. Numerous makeshift rafts were in the process of construction; there was no lifeboat. It seemed such a cruel stroke of fate that they should sink now. The sea was dead calm, a deep, inviting, marine blue. But the only invitation it offered was death.

Elliot fought the pain and the heat and the nausea, to try and complete their raft in time. With Hau’s help he had stripped all the wooden planking from the back of the wheelhouse, and showed Serey and Ny how to lash them together to create a dozen thicker planks, like logs, nine inches deep and eight feet long. With a machete he cut four thick, pliable stakes long enough to overlap the width of the raft deck. He laid them down seven feet apart, and the others manoeuvred the lashed planking to lie across them. It was a simple matter, then, to lay the other two stakes across the top, directly above the bottom two, and lash the notched ends together to hold the raft firmly in place.

They were visited frequently by other groups building rafts, to see how it should be done, and Elliot demonstrated how to make a paddle rudder and mount it on an A-frame at one end of their rafts. In return they provided food and cigarettes. Large areas of the deck had now been ripped up, and there were a dozen rafts at various stages of construction, the trawl nets providing more than enough rope for the purpose.

Elliot was in the process of lashing the last of their belongings to the deck of their raft when a shout came from the forward part of the boat, followed by a chorus of voices raised in excitement. Elliot looked across as Ny scrambled up the steep slope of the deck to grasp the rail. She gazed out across the sea for a moment, and when she turned back her face was shining. ‘Land!’ she called. ‘There is land!’ And she broke into a babble of Cambodian.

Elliot climbed painfully across the deck to see for himself. There, in the shimmering distance, a dark green line of tropical vegetation broke the horizon. He looked up, and for the first time noticed that there were birds circling overhead.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Half-filled cardboard boxes stood around the living room. Clothes lay draped over chairs. Piled in twos and threes, drawers containing the letters, jewellery, diaries and bric-a-brac that one collects over nearly forty years were stacked in the middle of the floor. Lisa sat cross-legged in front of the fire sifting through her mother’s things, deciding what should go to Oxfam and what should be consigned to the cardboard boxes.

The house was haunted by memories, and these were the last tangible reminders; mother-of-pearl hair clasps with strands of her hair still caught between the teeth; a pile of scratched Elvis Presley singles; a box of black and white photographs of her mother as a child during the war years. These were all that remained of an unremarkable and unhappy life. A sad and meaningless legacy, to be wrapped in newspaper and packed away in boxes, as her mother had packed away all memories of her husband in an attic trunk.

Lisa heard the sound of hammering from the front garden. She crossed to the window. A young man from the estate agent was knocking a FOR SALE sign on a pole into soft earth on the garden side of the wall. A light drizzle blurred the glass. She turned from the window and winced a little as the pain in her ribs reminded her of things she would rather forget. She was comforted by the thought that this memory, too, would fade with the pain.

She picked her way across the floor and sat at the table. Before her, spread out on the cloth, were all the cuttings of the court-martial, and her parents’ wedding photographs. She had read and reread every word, examined every detail of every picture. She looked again at the press photographs of her father, and traced the line of the scar on his cheek lightly with her fingers, smearing the newsprint.

However hard she tried, she found she could not recall with any clarity the features of the woman who had died for her in Bangkok in the damp basement of a dockland warehouse. Even the face of her mother had receded to the backwaters of her memory. There were, she supposed, always photographs to remind her, but these she could hide away in boxes in the attic. It was her father’s face that remained etched on her memory. It was his face she saw when she closed her eyes at night, though she had glimpsed him only once, sheltering beneath a tree at her mother’s funeral.

Bangkok was a million miles away. It belonged to another existence, to a person she had been only briefly. Soon London, too, would be just a memory, along with the house. It was possible to put everything away, or behind you. It was possible to be someone else, the sum total of all those