She wriggled round to find herself looking at her ex-favorite gray eyes. “Oh God, it’s you,” she grunted through his fingers.
“What are you doing?” Morton C. sounded mildly amused, in sharp contrast to the hand over her mouth.
“Gerroff,” she demanded with as much dignity as she could muster under the circumstances.
Morton released his grip and rested one finger against her throat. “Keep your voice down. What are you doing here?”
“Sightseeing.”
“In your underwear?”
“I am also sunbathing.”
“How did you get up here?”
“I jumped.”
“You jumped?”
“Yes, and I nearly fell in. The ledge is covered in slime and so are my clothes.”
“Where are they?”
She pointed. He scrambled down the slope. She could hear small sounds and rustling. She started to turn over.
“I said, don’t move.” He reappeared over the edge of the hill. “Is this yours?” he asked, holding up a carrot.
She glowered at him.
“Don’t be sulky now. Come down here onto the ledge, slowly. Sit down on that rock.” As she did, she realized she was shaking. Morton C. crossed his arms, pulled his shirt over his head and handed it to her.
“Put this on,” he said.
“Not with your stink on it.”
“Put it on.” He stood back, watching her put on the shirt. “You’re not a journalist at all, are you? What are you doing here?”
“I told you. I came for a walk up Pumpkin Hill. I wanted to see the resort.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Why shouldn’t I check out the lovely hotel? What if I want to stay there?”
“Well, you ask at the lovely tourist office in the lovely village, and if they have a lovely room, they’ll take you round in a lovely boat.”
“Well, maybe I just will.”
“Well, get you.”
“Anyway, what are you doing here?”
“Are you always this difficult?”
“You’re working for Feramo, aren’t you?”
“What you need to do is get yourself back to the village without being spotted, and if you have any sense at all, you’ll say nothing about coming up here.”
“What a shitty thing to do, hanging around all the divers, pretending to be one of the lads, then grassing on them to that horrible, sinister acolyte like a telltale tit.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you got any of that stuff on your skin?”
“My hands, but I wiped it off.”
He took hold of her hands, held them two feet from his face and sniffed. “Okay,” he said. “Off you go. I’ll see you after the dive.”
No, you won’t, you two-faced bastard, she thought furiously, sitting in the mangroves and watching through her spyglass as Morton casually smoked a cigarette with the guard at the top of the hill. I’m going to have one last dive, then I’m going back to the British Embassy, tell them what I’ve found out and go home.
When Olivia turned up for her eleven o’clock dive, a group was huddled around the crackly television in Rod’s shack, watching the news.
“They’re small, they’re green, they’re widely available, but they’re about to poison the world: castor beans!
“Experts believe these commonly grown beans may be the source of Tuesday’s poison attack on the cruise ship Coyoba, an attack which has so far claimed the lives of two hundred and sixty-three passengers. The attack, believed to be the work of the al-Qaeda network, has been traced to the poison ricin, placed in the salt pots in the ship’s dining room.”
Up popped a scientist in a white coat. “Ricin, of course, was the substance used in the so-called ‘umbrella attack’ on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. The Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was killed by a pellet filled with ricin and fired from an umbrella. The problem with ricin—which is highly toxic to humans—is that the source material, the castor bean, is widely grown in many regions of the world, and the poison can be produced in so many forms—powder, as in this latest attack, but also crystal, liquid and even gel.”
“That’s what O’Reilly says they’re growing over the hill,” said Rod. “He thinks that’s what poisoned his goats.”
Fuuuuck, thought Olivia, sniffing her skin. “Just going for a swim!” she said brightly. “Very hot!”
She hurried to the edge of the jetty, stripped off her shorts and dived in. As she plunged deep into the lagoon, rubbing at her skin, her imagination was in overdrive: Ricin, face cream, maybe Feramo was planning to poison Devorée’s Crème de Phylgie with poison gel? Then Michael Monteroso would get it to catch on with his celebrity clients, and Feramo would slowly poison half of Hollywood before anyone suspected.
As Olivia swam back, Rod was waiting at the end of the jetty with the gear. “Fancy taking on a tunnel?” he asked, with a flash of his white teeth.
“Er . . .” Olivia was dead against diving tunnels and wrecks. As far as she could see, as long as you kept breathing and didn’t panic underwater, you were fine. If you went where you could get stuck, it wasn’t so simple.
“I’d rather do the wall again.”
“Well, I’m going to the tunnels. And Drew’s not around. So if you want to dive today, you’ll have to do tunnels.”
Olivia did not like being bossed around in this manner.
“Fine,” she said cheerily. “I’ll just go for another swim instead.”
“Okay, okay. We won’t go in any caves or tunnels. I might show you the odd crevice, though.”
Olivia tried to ignore the unattractive image this conjured up in her mind’s eye.