A Twist of Fate Page 3

  And of course she was an investment of Solya’s. The Professor would be unwise to forget that.

  ‘Child,’ he said. ‘Am I correct in thinking that this is the fifth time in the last two months that you have caused a disturbance in the canteen? If you are not careful, you won’t be getting any meals at all. Is that what you want? To starve? Is that what you’re going to force me to do?’

  Romy stared at the Professor. He had abnormally long arms and legs and, sitting there now, his sharp elbows on his desk as he rested his pointed chin on his thin fingers, Romy thought he looked like nothing so much as a spider waiting to pounce.

  Romy made her eyes well up with tears. ‘Please, sir, it wasn’t my fault, I swear it.’

  ‘I’m not a cruel man,’ Professor Lemcke said, creaking out of his chair. His knees cracked loudly. His eyes met Romy’s and his tone changed. ‘Haven’t I treated you as my own? Haven’t I looked after you since you were a baby here?’

  Romy tried to hide from her eyes the hatred she felt for this man. He was clever, she knew, even more clever than Fox. She knew how much he liked to inflict pain on the other children, particularly the boys. But something had always made him hold back with her. Perhaps he really did have a soft spot for her after all.

  ‘Please don’t punish me,’ Romy said, with a plaintive sob, edging towards his desk.

  The stainless-steel letter opener was by his blotter, just where she’d known it would be. She’d been planning this all week, since last week’s visit, when she’d stolen the book – a novel about fishing – that she was still working her way through with Klaus, the elderly laundry supervisor. Romy was determined to learn how to read. How to read and escape. To escape and then, somehow, win through to a better life than this.

  ‘Everyone else thinks my heart is hard, but it’s not, Gerte,’ the Professor was saying. The use of her real name shocked Romy. He never referred to any of the children by their Christian names. She hadn’t even realized he knew hers. ‘It’s not. I do an impossible job here. You must understand. Now please don’t cry,’ he continued, coming around the desk.

  He put his arms around her and pressed her face tight against his long legs, the way he’d done once before. She could hear him breathing deeply.

  ‘There, there,’ he told her, not letting go.

  This was her moment. This was going exactly to plan.

  As he ran his hand through her hair and trailed his fingers down her spine, sending a shuddering tremble through his whole body, Romy reached behind him and grabbed the letter opener, sliding it up her sleeve.

  Footsteps sounded on the other side of the office door. With an agonized sigh, the Professor released her and quickly stepped back.

  She looked up at him, her eyes round with obedience. ‘I’ll do an extra shift at the laundry. I’ll do it right now. I’ll be good.’

  He was about to answer when there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come,’ Lemcke called.

  One of the older boys, Drum, barged into the room.

  ‘Bit young, isn’t she, Prof?’ Drum said, looking between Romy and the Professor, a thin smile playing on his fleshy lips. ‘You should feed these ones up, Professor,’ he sneered. ‘The faster they grow, the better for us all, eh?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Professor Lemcke walked back around his desk, his composure ruffled.

  ‘You know what,’ Drum said. ‘Come on, I’ve already got the basement ready.’

  The Professor nodded, opening his desk drawer with a tiny gold key that he took from his inside jacket pocket. Both he and Drum had clearly both forgotten that Romy was even there.

  She edged nearer the desk, trying to see what was inside the drawer, already mentally clocking where the Professor kept the key. Somewhere in this office, or in the filing room next door, would be her birth certificate and perhaps documentation relating to who her parents were. She was determined that one day she would make that information hers.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Drum snapped, looking over his shoulder at her. He hissed at Romy, making her recoil. ‘Get out of here, pipsqueak. Shoo. Before I give you nightmares to last you for the rest of your life. Or I’ll tell Solya about you.’

  He was grinning when he said it, his eyes widening, but it didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like a promise. Solya was the orphanage’s bogey-man. Romy had no idea who he was, or if he even existed, but rumours about this shadowy figure crackled around the dormitories at night. It was said that Solya was so mean that he’d make even Lemcke wet his pants.

  Romy ran. She knew when her luck was up.

  Three hours later, hungry but triumphant, Romy had finished her extra punishment shift in the boiler room of the laundry.

  At precisely three-thirteen the two men who supervised the afternoon shift took their break, which gave Romy a clear seven minutes on her own before the next shift began.

  As everyone filed out past the hissing boilers and clanking pipes, she joined the back of the queue. But as the others marched on into the main laundry area, Romy peeled off and hid in the giant drum of the end dryer and counted to a hundred.

  Then, looking both ways, she sneaked out of its doorway and slipped into the service shaft next to the dryer, quickly climbing up the hot metal rungs of its ladder and heaving with all her might against the ventilation hatch at the top, before crawling out onto the cracked asphalt roof.

  Smiling, she lay back, relishing this delicious moment of solitude. She spread her limbs out and closed her eyes, feeling the sun on her skin and listening to the birdsong drifting to her from the nearby woods. A blue sky stretched out above her.

  If only she could get out of here. No, not if, she told herself, when.

  She rolled onto her stomach and crawled on her elbows to the edge of the roof to survey the perimeter of the orphanage, a high fence fortified with rolls of barbed wire.

  She knew it was electrified, supposedly to keep thieves out, but in reality to keep her and the other children in. It was also patrolled by dogs. The worst two, both Alsatians, belonged to Ulrich. It was rumoured he fed them live rats.

  But there must be a way out, Romy thought. There must be a way that she could be free. In the distance she heard a church bell clang from the nearby town of Schwedt.

  From inside the breast pocket of her boiler suit, she took out the old postcard that she’d found in a colonel’s uniform three years ago. The image on it was almost obliterated, it had been folded so many times. It showed a balustrade on a terrace, the fine wall of a beautiful building stretching up one side. But beyond the fancy balustrade was a view of the vast, twinkling ocean, with a yacht in the background. The faded words said ‘Hotel Amal . . .’ something. The letters were worn away. But as she looked at it, Romy felt a surety creep into her. Someday, no matter what, she was going to go there and stand in the picture and feast her eyes on that view.

  The ocean. What would it feel like to dip her toes in it? Maybe even walk in right up to her waist? What would the other people on the beach be like? Would they talk to her? Would they want to be her friends?

  Her reverie was interrupted by the harsh bell that signified the start of the next shift. She rolled across the roof and looked down into the yard below, where the children were already starting to gather for roll call. She shimmied down the drainpipe behind the old pine tree and blended in with the others.

  As the children lined up, she slipped the cigarettes along to Fox.

  He leaned forward and looked back along the line to Romy and she saw respect flash in his eyes. The two of them had planned the petty robbery of that fool Ulrich just a few minutes before lunch. She was gratified now as her hair-clip was passed back along the line in exchange.

  But more importantly, thanks to Fox’s growing influence amongst the elder boys and the guards, tonight the dormitory arrangements would change as a result of this transaction. She’d get the big bed all to herself. She’d let little Magda sneak in beside her, as she always did. And Tara, to
o. But when the littlies were asleep, she’d be able to move the box that she kept hidden under the floorboard in the corner of the room to a safer hiding place beneath her new bed.

  Then she’d add the stainless-steel letter opener to her other treasures, and she’d sleep happily, safe in the knowledge that she had a weapon. A good one.

  One that she was sure would prove useful one day.

  CHAPTER THREE

  December 1982

  From the back sun-deck Thea stared over the side of Alyssa, her father’s sleek blue racing yacht, as it sliced through the Caribbean water. She sighed sadly to herself as the compilation tape Michael had made her for her new Sony Walkman finished, the last bars of ‘Ebony and Ivory’ fading out to a static hiss. She pressed the button to stop it, before it reversed back to the Aside where Michael had recorded Chicago’s ‘Hard to Say I’m Sorry’ for her, but had deliberately cut it off before the end with the start of Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. Michael’s mixing definitely needed some improvement, but Thea was so touched that he’d made the tape of all their favourite music, with a couple of ‘soppy ones’, as he put it, thrown in for her. But here in the sunshine the music just made her feel more homesick.

  Now, as she took the headphones off, she listened to the wind and the waves slapping against the hull, gazing up at the white sails billowing against the cloudless blue sky. Then she looked to where her father stood at the ship’s wheel, taking instructions from Rupert, the captain, who seemed only too happy to indulge his boss in sailing lessons. Their laughter carried towards her on the breeze.

  In his yellow shorts, his white shirt flapping, Griffin Maddox looked deeply tanned and healthy, and it seemed to Thea that, despite how hard he still worked in the swanky new Maddox Inc. headquarters in Manhattan, he’d become the happiest she’d known him in these last eighteen months. In fact Thea often wondered whether he missed her mother at all.

  He certainly seemed determined to live life to the full. His latest purchase was Crofters, an old banana plantation on Mustique, which he’d assured Thea she was going to love too. This was where they were heading right now.

  But even though she knew she should be excited, Thea couldn’t help thinking that this recent distraction was a mistake. Daddy spent so little time at Little Elms, as it was. Wouldn’t this new home just keep him away even more? And even if he did bring her out with him every holiday, it was still so far away from everyone Thea knew and loved. The whole thing jarred, in fact. It rocked her sense of well-being, just as surely as the waves had rocked this boat last night in Petit St Vincent.

  It just felt too weird being here, when the snow was falling back in New England. It was the first time she and her father had ever spent Christmas away from Little Elms, and Thea wondered whether all the staff and Michael would be sharing Christmas dinner at the long table in the kitchen, or whether they’d have bothered to go to the trouble of chopping down an alpine spruce from the estate and heaving it into the hall for decorating, knowing that Thea and her father would be away until well into the new year.

  She hoped that Mrs Pryor would find all the presents she’d left for them in the pantry, the labels of which she’d decorated by hand. She’d sent off for an English riding hat for Michael. She wished she could see his face when he opened it.

  Why, oh why, couldn’t they just have Christmas back home instead? This holiday would never have happened if her mother were still alive. Thea tried to imagine Alyssa Maddox here aboard her namesake. But the second she did, she pictured the way she’d last seen her, three long years ago, lying there on that bed in the private hospital, slipping in and out of consciousness, pressing that little plastic button on the tube going into her arm.

  And as soon as Thea thought of that, she remembered the horrible funeral. The people and the platitudes. That cold stone grave. Would there be anything left of her mama now? Anything left there but bones?

  ‘Not far now. Just around that headland,’ her father shouted out over his shoulder to her.

  He looked so excited that, straight away, Thea hated herself for being so selfish and so maudlin. Not many people ever got to go on a trip like this in their lifetime. She was the luckiest kid in the world – wasn’t that what Daddy always told her? Well, she told herself, isn’t it about time you start behaving like it, and start making him feel lucky too?

  She looked over the top of her sunglasses to where he was pointing. There, less than half a mile away, was the palm-fringed coast of Mustique. The bluest of waters lapped up against its pure-white sands. Densely forested green hills stretched up into a clear blue sky. It reminded Thea of the pictures in her mother’s treasured first edition of Robinson Crusoe in the Little Elms library, and she scrambled up from the cushions now to join her father.

  Thea felt her excitement mounting as she helped the crew furl in the sails, sweating and laughing as they let her turn the handle on the winch. As they rounded the headland she saw a wooden landing jetty jutting out from the beach. Behind it, she could make out a red-tiled roof with a high turret nestled in the trees.

  ‘Welcome to Crofters, my darling,’ Griffin Maddox said, as he lowered the passerail to the jetty and held out his hand gallantly for Thea to step past. He’d done up his white shirt now and waved a straw trilby in salute, before putting it on his head.

  She giggled at his playful mood, hoping it was a good omen for the days ahead. The water was breathtakingly clear, shoals of blue and silver fish darting beneath the jetty’s worn wooden planks. On first impressions, this place really was as much of a Caribbean paradise as he’d promised.

  As she sat together with her father in the small golf buggy and he set off along a path leading into the trees, she strained to look between the dense foliage on each side of the track. But she could sense him looking at her for a reaction.

  And OK, she had to admit it, she could see immediately why her father had fallen for this place. It was like something out of The Jungle Book. All around were trees and giant green plants and bushes, bursting with orange and yellow flowers, and the dense, damp air was filled with the sound of buzzing insects and trilling birds.

  Who was she kidding? She was going to have a great time here. She grinned at her father and, seeing the sparkle of pleasure in his eyes when she did, found herself finally letting go.

  She really had him all to herself for two weeks. Here. In this tropical hideaway. With time stretching ahead of them and no work commitments that he had to rush off to, she knew this was finally her chance to show him what she was really like. Not just the smartly dressed, demure little girl he liked to talk to politely over supper on the rare times they were alone. But the real Thea Maddox. The girl who liked the Rolling Stones and poetry. The girl who liked to stay up late and go swimming and climb trees. The girl who’d watched E.T. three times already at the cinema, and Cats on Broadway and knew all the words to ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran.

  In fact there were so many things she wanted to talk to him about that she now didn’t know where to start. How about by telling him how cool it had been to go to New York with Mrs Douglas and Michael on her eleventh birthday? And how they’d given the old governess the slip in the Guggenheim and taken pictures on her camera of all the crazy exhibits behind the guards’ backs. Or how about how Michael’s mom had taught her how to make pancakes? There was already so much of her life that her father knew nothing about.

  But just as her mind was jamming with all the anecdotes she wanted to share, the house came into view and Thea gasped, momentarily forgetting everything.

  ‘You like it?’ Griffin Maddox laughed.

  ‘Daddy, it’s incredible,’ she said, staring wide-eyed at the elegant teak and stone structure, with its series of sloping terracotta-tiled roofs and its window-studded turret poking up above the trees. She couldn’t wait to go and explore up there.

  ‘I’ve got a special surprise for you inside,’ Griffin Maddox said, his eyes dancing.

  His excitement was contagious. What had he
got her? An early Christmas present? Oh God, please let it be a puppy, she thought. But then, just as quickly, she started to worry about how they’d get it home. Maybe he meant there was just something really cool, like some kind of amazing forest pool. Oh yes, she hoped, please let it be that. Then she could show him how well she’d learnt to dive.

  She squeezed his hand and skipped beside him up the steps to the large wooden front door.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked, grinning down at her.

  He opened the carved teak door. Together they stepped into the hall, a giant circular fan beating the humid air above their heads. A grand piano filled the space below the swooping staircase. Enormous terracotta pots stood filled with fluffy cream pampas grass against a wall filled with a massive painting of a fat naked woman. Her strange breasts made Thea want to giggle, but she just managed to stop herself in time, in case Daddy had bought it and liked it himself.

  He winked at Thea and then led her through an open-plan living area, with low sofas and shaggy rugs, and on into the back of the house. Pulling back a tinted glass sliding door, he stepped with her out onto a wide wooden veranda.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Anyone home?’

  Is there supposed to be anyone home? Thea thought, following him past a bamboo bar area with bohemian swing-seats and a view of the twinkling sea. Wasn’t this their home? He must mean the staff, she realized. A cook, or a housekeeper. She hoped they wouldn’t be actually living here, that it would just be her father and her.

  But then she saw someone.

  A woman, with extremely long legs, was stretched out on a wicker sun-lounger, next to a sparkling circular swimming pool. Her face was hidden almost entirely from view by a giant black straw hat.

  ‘Hey, honey,’ Thea’s father said.

  Honey?

  ‘Oh my God! You’re here!’ The woman’s voice, a southern drawl, with long, dramatic vowels, was as mesmerizing as the way she looked.

  Thea watched, slack-jawed, as the woman swung her legs off the sun-bed and stood up. She was topless, her large, perfectly tanned breasts tipped with soft pink nipples. A long pearl and diamond necklace stretched down to her black bikini bottom, and gold and silver bangles jangled on her wrists as she flung her hat dramatically aside, revealing a tumble of rich auburn hair. She strode over to Thea’s father’s and kissed him fully on the lips.