Escape from Shadow Island Page 2

  “What happened?” she asked, her English marked with a strong Spanish accent.

  He looked at her innocently. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t give me that, Max. I know you too well. Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

  “How could you tell? I was inside a sack—you couldn’t see me.”

  “You took too long, and I could sense it as well,” Consuela said. “I don’t know how, but I could. All this time we’ve worked together, you get a feeling for things like that. I just know when things aren’t going right.”

  Max hunched forward over the heater. He ran a hand through his thick blond hair, then rubbed his face. His skin was still cold, but he could feel some sensation returning, feel the nerves recovering from their icy immersion.

  “I couldn’t get the key up,” he told her. “It took me four attempts.”

  Consuela went still, the kettle frozen in midair over the mug of chocolate powder and milk. She stared at Max in horror. “Four? My God, it’s worse than I thought. Max, that trick is too dangerous. I don’t think you should do it again.”

  Max looked away across the dressing room, but he didn’t reply.

  “Max, don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” he said eventually.

  “You could have died.”

  “I had it under control.”

  This wasn’t just bravado. With the confidence, perhaps also the folly, of youth, he’d already begun to forget just how serious the situation had been. He’d blanked out the fear he’d felt—and in the sack, with the water creeping up his body, he had been genuinely frightened—and looked back on his failure to recover the key as a minor blip, an unimportant little setback that had posed no significant threat to his well-being.

  Consuela handed him the mug of hot chocolate and he took a grateful sip, feeling the liquid thawing the ice he could still feel inside him. She stood over him, looking down with concerned eyes. “Max, we need to talk about this.”

  “Not now—I’m too tired.”

  “I don’t want you to do that trick again. The risks are too great.”

  “There are always risks. I can handle them.”

  “Can you?”

  “Of course. It won’t happen again. It was a fluke. Next time, I’ll get the key up first attempt.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I will, okay? I’ll do some more practice on it.”

  “You’re so stubborn,” Consuela said. “Just like your father.” She saw a cloud pass over Max’s face and she touched him gently on the shoulder. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “My father would have been proud of me,” answered Max, a hint of defiance in his voice.

  “I know he would,” Consuela said.

  She pulled out another chair and sat down opposite him. “I worry about you, that’s all. Someone has to look after you, Max. And that someone is me. Occasionally, you have to know when to stop, when to stand back and say, ‘No, this isn’t worth the risk.’”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Max said.

  “You’re young, you’re still inexperienced. Maybe this is one trick you need to come back to when you’re older.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not a problem,” Max insisted. “Now, I think I’ll have a shower.”

  Consuela sighed and stood up. “I know you hate taking advice,” she said, “and I hope I never see it, but if you’re not careful, the day will come when you find yourself in a situation you can’t escape from.”

  Max thought about what Consuela had said as he took his shower, the jet of steaming hot water massaging his body, reviving him. He knew she was right about him being stubborn and not listening to advice, but taking risks was in his nature. More than that, it was in his blood. His father, Alexander Cassidy, had been a famous escapologist too. Under his stage name of Alexander the Great, he’d toured the world for two decades, performing his show to thousands of enraptured spectators.

  Max, his only child, had been encouraged from an early age to follow in his father’s footsteps. Some dads taught their sons how to kick a soccer ball or land a fish with a rod. Alexander Cassidy had taught his son how to pick locks and get out of handcuffs. He had taught him the physical skills that his job entailed, too—strength, suppleness, agility, breath control. When Max was only a few months old, his father had taken him to a swimming pool and literally thrown him in at the deep end. Max had no memory of it now, but his mother had recounted many times how she’d screamed in terror at the sight of her precious baby being tossed into the water. But babies have a natural buoyancy, as Alexander Cassidy knew. Max had sunk beneath the surface for a few seconds, then bobbed back up again immediately and floated on his back, gurgling happily at his watching parents.

  Water was his element. He loved it, and Alexander had worked on that love, teaching his son to swim before he could walk, then training him to swim underwater to build up his lung capacity. Max could now swim two lengths of an Olympic-size pool without once surfacing for air. That was a hundred meters underwater. On dry land, in a resting position, Max could hold his breath for nearly three minutes.

  His skill with locks was equally impressive. There wasn’t a lock in existence that he couldn’t break, given the right tools. He’d been doing it for years, with his father’s encouragement. At four, Max could pick a simple padlock. At five, he could pick the lock on an average front door. By the age of six, he could get out of a pair of handcuffs in less than a minute, and by seven, he’d gotten that time down to under ten seconds.

  When he was eight, showing the rebellious streak that was a fundamental part of his character, Max had picked the lock of the head teacher’s office at his school one lunchtime, using a bobby pin he’d borrowed from one of the girls. He had then stolen the keys to the classrooms and gone around the school locking all the doors. With the keys missing, and no locksmith available, the whole school had been given the afternoon off. Suspicion had naturally fallen on Max, whose mastery of locks was already widely known. He’d eventually come clean and confessed, and his parents had been called in. Max had been threatened with expulsion if he ever did anything like that again. His mother had been livid, and his father appeared so too. But Alex Cassidy was secretly pleased that his son was showing such excellent prowess with a bobby pin.

  Max was fascinated by escapology. He liked nothing better than being with his dad, watching and learning how things were done. At first, he simply copied the tricks that his father performed in his shows. Then, as he matured, he began to invent tricks of his own, modifying some of his father’s ideas and making them unique to him.

  He had started performing in private when he was ten, small shows for family and friends on weekends. His first public show—a low-key event in the basement of a pub—took place a year later. By the time he was twelve, he was doing a show a week at different venues around London and had soon acquired such a reputation as a rising star that the London Cabaret Club, the most prestigious venue in the city, hired him for a short season, billing him as “The Great Maximilian.” The run had been such a hit that the club had invited him back for a second season a year later, for which Max had devised a whole series of new tricks to tantalize his audience. Some were relatively straightforward and safe; others, like the sack in the cold-water tank, much more dangerous.

  Max was supremely sure of his own abilities. He had a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance, a self-confidence that had not been undermined by the evening’s events. So one trick hadn’t gone exactly as he’d planned. That wasn’t a fault with the trick, it was a fault in its execution. He’d work at it—hard work was something Max had never avoided. He’d practice regurgitating objects, he’d build up his resistance to freezing water so that the next time he performed the trick—and he had every intention of doing it again—nothing would go wrong.

  He turned off the shower and stepped out of the stall. He had the dressing room to himself—Consuela
would be onstage supervising the packing away of the equipment Max used for his twice-weekly shows. He dried himself quickly with a towel and got dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a black sweatshirt. He was slipping on his sneakers when the door opened and a man came into the room.

  Max glanced up. The man was tall and thin, with a dark complexion and a head of thick black hair. It was difficult to gauge his age, but Max put him somewhere in his fifties. He looked around the room, his eyes darting nervously into the corners, across to the shower stall and toilet.

  “You are alone?” he asked. He opened the dressing-room door again and briefly peered out into the corridor. Then he closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

  Max suddenly felt alarmed. He often had visitors after a show, but they were always vetted by the security guard at the stage door and accompanied to the dressing room by one of the stagehands. Max was something of a teenage celebrity. He had to be protected from over-enthusiastic fans and the assorted nutcases who were always hanging around outside the theater.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What are you doing? Who are you?”

  “My name is Luis Lopez-Vega,” the man told him.

  He seemed on edge. His eyes were never still, and his hands fiddled compulsively with the buttons on his jacket. Max noticed the man’s fingers. They were long and bony, and the index and middle fingers of his left hand were missing.

  “What do you want?” asked Max. “Why did you lock the door?” He backed off a little, getting ready to defend himself if necessary.

  The man seemed to sense Max’s unease. He held up a reassuring hand.

  “Please, you have nothing to fear. I come here as a friend, I promise. All I want is to talk to you.”

  “Talk to me about what?”

  “About your father.”

  “My father?”

  Lopez-Vega licked his lips. He was breathing heavily. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead, wiping away a sheen of sweat. “It is hot in here,” he said. “May I sit down?”

  Max hesitated. He’d never seen Lopez-Vega before, but he didn’t seem like a threat. He looked frail and ill. And he wanted to talk about Max’s dad. Max was keen to find out what he had to say. He gestured to a chair. Lopez-Vega walked toward it slowly, with a pronounced limp. When Max looked at his gaunt, lined face, he saw a shadow of pain and suffering in his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Max asked. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water, maybe?”

  “Yes, thank you. Water would be nice,” said Lopez-Vega, lowering himself awkwardly onto the chair.

  Max turned off the electric heater. He filled a glass with water and handed it to Lopez-Vega, who took a sip. “Thank you. I feel a little unwell this evening.”

  “Shall I call you a doctor?”

  “A doctor?” A ghost of a smile flitted across the man’s face. “No, I have no need of a doctor.”

  He drank some more water, then put the glass down on the dressing table next to him. “I am sorry to trouble you,” he said apologetically. “I know you must be tired. I enjoyed your show, by the way. You are a very talented young man.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are as good as your father. I can offer you no higher compliment than that. He was the best.”

  Max stared at him intently. “You saw my father perform?”

  “Two years ago. In Santo Domingo. That is where I come from.”

  “Santo Domingo? Then…”

  “Yes, I saw his last show,” Lopez-Vega said.

  Alexander Cassidy had disappeared two years earlier, in the Central American country of Santo Domingo, where he’d gone to perform. His body had never been found, but there was circumstantial evidence to indicate that he’d been murdered. Max’s mother, Helen, who’d accompanied his father on the trip, had been tried and convicted of Alexander’s murder by a Santo Domingan court and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She’d served eighteen months in a jail there but had recently been transferred to a prison in England to complete the remainder of her sentence.

  “Did you know him? Did you know my father?” Max said eagerly. “Did you speak to him?”

  “It was a fine show,” Lopez-Vega said. “What happened afterward was terrible. The case against your mother was ridiculous. In a civilized country, a less corrupt country than Santo Domingo, it would have been thrown out of court on the first day. But Santo Domingo, alas, is not a civilized country. It is a country where people, where judges, can be bought like coconuts in the marketplace.”

  “The judge was bribed?” Max asked.

  “The police also. How else do you explain her conviction? She did not kill your father.”

  “I know,” Max said. “I’ve always known it.”

  “Your father is—” Lopez-Vega broke off as a harsh, racking cough made his whole body shake. He took another sip of water.

  Max looked at him anxiously. “Are you sure I can’t get you a doctor?”

  The man shook his head. He took a few deep breaths, the air wheezing through his lungs. “You must forgive me,” he said. “I would have come sooner, only I have been…” He paused to take another long breath. “Let’s just say I’ve been away for a time.”

  Max leaned toward Lopez-Vega. All the tiredness he’d felt earlier had suddenly fallen away. He was alert, full of hope. “You say my mother didn’t kill my father. Do you know something that will clear her name, prove her innocence?”

  Before Lopez-Vega could reply, there was a sharp knock on the dressing-room door and someone tried the handle. Lopez-Vega gave a violent start and turned to stare at it. There was fear in his eyes. “No one must know I am here,” he whispered urgently to Max.

  “Max?” came a voice from outside.

  “It’s all right,” Max said quietly. “It’s only Consuela.”

  “Max, are you okay?” Consuela asked through the door.

  “I’m fine,” Max called back.

  “Can I come in?”

  “One moment.”

  Lopez-Vega was on his feet, one hand gripping the back of his chair to steady himself. “Do not tell anyone about this,” he murmured. “Not a word, you understand?”

  “Max, what’s going on?” Consuela was getting impatient outside.

  “Just coming,” he replied.

  Lopez-Vega put his hand on Max’s arm. “Your father is not dead, Max,” he said softly.

  Max gaped at him. For a moment, he stopped breathing. He felt as if he’d been hit by a truck. “What do you mean? What’re you talking about?” he whispered.

  “We cannot talk here. Come to my hotel tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. The Rutland Hotel, near King’s Cross station. Room twelve.”

  “But you can’t go. How do you know Dad’s not dead? How? You have to tell me.”

  The door handle rattled. “Max, let me in,” Consuela called.

  “Tell me!” Max said urgently, ignoring Consuela. “Where is he? What happened to him?”

  “It is complicated, Max. I will explain tomorrow.”

  “But I need to know—”

  “Tomorrow. We need more time. And I have something to give you.”

  Lopez-Vega unlocked the door and stepped out past Consuela.

  “Why was the door locked?” she asked, coming into the dressing room. “Who was that?”

  Max didn’t reply. He felt breathless and his pulse was racing. His mind was in turmoil, reeling from what Lopez-Vega had said. His father wasn’t dead? Was the man telling the truth? Was Alex Cassidy really still alive, or was this some horrible, malicious trick? For two long years Max had lived with the possibility that his father was gone forever. But now this stranger had shown up and turned everything on its head. It couldn’t be true, could it? Max wanted desperately to believe what this man had told him, but he was wary. Who was this Luis Lopez-Vega? How did he know what had really happened to Max’s father? Max needed some answers. And he needed them now.

  He stepped out of the room and ran along the co
rridor to the stage door.

  “There was a man here just now,” he said to the security guard. “Tall, black hair.”

  “He just left,” the guard replied. “I think he took a taxi.”

  Max whipped open the stage door and ran out. There was a group of fans clustered on the pavement.

  “Max! Max!” they called.

  Max ignored them. He looked up the darkened street. The taillights of a taxi were just disappearing around the corner.

  3

  TWO YEARS AGO MAX’S WHOLE LIFE HAD imploded—collapsed in on itself. He could remember every tiny detail of that time: the shock of losing both his parents, his father apparently dead and his mother shut away in prison.

  His father had been invited to do a couple of shows in Santo Domingo and, because Max was going to be away for a week on a school trip to France, his mother had decided to accompany her husband. Normally, Helen stayed at home to look after Max, and only Consuela went with Alexander on his frequent trips abroad.

  Max remembered the bus pulling in outside the school on Friday evening, the children worn out after the long trip from France but excited to be home. They’d scrambled to their feet, peering out of the windows, searching for the faces of their parents in the crowd by the school gates. Max had been one of the last to get off, his face tanned from the French sun, a carrier bag clutched in his hand containing a box of chocolates and some cheese he’d bought as a present for his mum and dad. He’d stood on the pavement, his classmates thronging around him, the luggage being unloaded from the hold of the bus, wondering where his mother was. He’d felt disappointed, maybe a little angry. All the other parents were there on time.

  It was only when he saw the head teacher, Mrs. Williamson, approaching him with a uniformed female police officer beside her that Max realized something had happened—something serious, though he never imagined then that it would be quite as traumatic as it turned out to be.

  They didn’t give him the full story all at once. The policewoman took him home, told him there’d been an “incident” in Santo Domingo and his mother was going to have to stay there for a few days to sort it out. She had asked him if he had any relatives nearby who he could stay with, but Max didn’t have any extended family. His mother and father were both only children. There were no uncles or aunts or cousins, and his grandparents were all dead. The Cassidy family consisted of just three people—Max, his mum, and his dad.