II

Once the ground started to give way beneath Rebecca, everything became reflexive, something she couldn’t stop, only manage. She sat up straight and buckled her seatbelt. Her rear-end cannoned a tree and the impact turned the Jeep face-on to the slope. She stamped hard on the brake and clutch, thrust her gear-stick into reverse, but something snapped and then the Jeep was bounding down the steep gradient, wheels barely in contact with the earth, punching a way through the thin vegetation, branches and tendrils slapping the windscreen. A baobab loomed. She wrenched the steering wheel around but it had no effect. She braced her feet against the floor and threw up her forearms to protect her head. The front left hit hard. She heard the crunch of metal and the tinkle of a headlight. The Jeep flew up on to two wheels and then fell back. The brush opened up in front of her; the hillside simply dropped away. The Jeep plunged down an embankment and smashed nose-first into the compacted earth of the track which had wended back on itself. The bonnet buckled like a concertina against her knees. The windscreen and side windows shattered. Pebbles of glass spat everywhere. She slammed against her seat-belt, her head flew forward and she felt her left shoulder dislocate. The Jeep tumbled over itself before settling on its passenger door. It rocked for a few moments and then was still.

Rebecca’s head slowly cleared. She checked her arms, legs, head and torso, was relieved to find scratches and bruises but no serious damage except for her shoulder. She looked out. Smoke and water vapour rose in clouds from her crumpled bonnet. The slope was so steep that the Jeep was only held in place by a tangled net of spiny brush, creaking and groaning beneath the strain. She could smell diesel and oil. She needed to get out quick. She tried to unfasten her seat-belt, but the buckle had jammed. She shimmied out sideways instead, keeping her shoulder as still as possible, retrieved the holdall and her bag, dropped them through the empty windscreen and followed them out. She had to jump down to the ground. The jolt was so exquisite on her left shoulder that she cried out, both from the pain itself and from knowledge of what lay ahead. Her shoulder had dislocated twice before, once after an awkward parachute landing, once deep in the Australian outback, trying to grab the reins of a snake-spooked horse that had bucked her. Catching that damned mare and riding her six miles back to camp had taken Rebecca three hours. For the last two of those, her shoulder muscles had been in spasm. It had been the most gruelling ordeal of her life, the kind that ages you, that makes you understand why patients in chronic pain seek to die. They’d had to cut open her shoulder to fix it. God only knew what would happen in Madagascar.

She took her mobile from her bag, but it had no signal. She breathed deeply to quell her rising panic. On safari in Kenya last year, a knuckle-head South African had tried to impress her with all his scars, so she’d retorted with her shoulder. He’d laughed at that. Dislocations didn’t count. Christ only knew how many times he’d dislocated his shoulder; he just slammed it against the nearest tree. If some loudmouth guide could do it, thought Rebecca grimly, then she could, too. She held her left arm with its ball as near its socket as she could figure, then threw herself hard against the front bumper of the Jeep. She screamed in agony and failure. She stood, wiped away her tears, gritted her teeth and hurled herself even harder. The pain was so fierce and prolonged that she screamed and carried on screaming, her screams turning into cries of frustration. It wasn’t going to work. Your body would tell you these things if you listened. She squatted down. As a zoologist, she understood the rudiments of primate anatomy. The shoulder wasn’t a typical ball-and-socket joint, because it needed to facilitate such a wide range of movement. The ball therefore sat upon the socket rather like an egg upon its cup, held in place by muscles, tendons and ligaments. That made it all the more prone to dislocation, but it also made it easier to fix. Reduction was a matter of angles, torque and traction. That South African had been a braggart, but not a liar.

The carry-straps of Mustafa’s canvas holdall had detachable metal buckles at either end. She took them off with her teeth and her good right hand, clipped them together into a single, long rope. The muscles in her left shoulder were beginning to twitch and fibrillate. In ten minutes, it would be too late. She tried not to let panic hurry her into mistakes. She tied slipknots in either end, tightened one loop around her left wrist, the second around her left foot. Then she stood up tall, lifting her leg so that the strap was taut, but no more. Satisfied, she now pressed down and outwards with her foot, pulling her wrist, arm and shoulder forwards. She could feel the ball getting closer and closer to its socket, but it still needed a sideways jolt to snap it back into place. She closed her eyes and let herself fall sideways to the ground, landing flush upon her shoulder. For a terrible moment pain screeched at her like angry geese, but then everything slotted sweetly back and it was glorious, like a tooth abscess bursting, like orgasm, like mainlined heroin, no pleasure came close to the flooding relief from insupportable pain, it was so sweet, so—

The euphoria faded fast. Her shoulder began to throb. She remembered that Adam’s and Emilia’s lives depended upon her. She was monstrously late, but she still had the cash and she wasn’t about to give up yet. The Jeep was dead. She needed to hike back to the road, flag down a vehicle. She held the money-bag as a buffer in front of her to barge through the brush. She was making good progress when she saw a flash of movement ahead. It vanished, reappeared. Andriama’s offhand remark about bad men knowing of the ransom echoed in her mind. She caught and held her breath, crouched and froze. She put down the holdall, picked up a large sharp flint instead, and steeled herself to strike.