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and a whiff of fishy odour – for Anastasia to realize that Ado was holding a handful of oysters. Anastasia’s black brows arched in surprise. She knew that oysters were a delicacy down in Granville Harbour but she had never seen any this far upriver. ‘Where did you find these?’ she asked in her rough Matadi – the local dialect.
    â€˜Down by the river,’ Ado answered. ‘Come and see.’
    Anastasia nodded and the pair of them left together.
Anything to get out of one of Father Antoine’s sermons
, thought the Russian woman cynically. It was already dark outside, and the weather seemed threatening. The compound, with its dormitory buildings, palm-thatched lean-tos that doubled as outside classrooms and refectories, was lit by a combination of flickering electric lights and candles – both now attracting the first evening moths but not – blessedly – mosquitoes. The lack of mosquitoes was the deciding factor in their choice of location. The river flowed too swiftly here for them to breed; and even after floods such as they had just experienced, the gradient of the land between the chapel and the river was too steep to allow any dangerous pools of standing water.
    Beyond the illuminated area, down towards the river, there was only a deepening, velvety darkness. Anastasia and Ado crossed to Brother Jacob’s generator hut, therefore, and Anastasia reached in to grab the big black steel Maglite torch that the engineer kept for emergencies. It was nearly fifty centimetres long and weighed a kilo and a half. Jacob kept the massive torch in a presentation box with an equally outsized Victorinox knife. She took that for good measure – if they found many more oysters, then she would want to start opening them. In her days as a billionaire oligarch’s beloved princess, she had indulged quite a penchant for oysters, caviar and pink champagne.
    Side by side, the two young women ran down the steep riverbank to the edge of the water. Anastasia did not switch on the torch at first, for she really did not want to be summoned back to the Evensong service, and her prickly conscience told her it would only take a word from Sister Charity to call her to heel. With a sense of guilty excitement, the truants ran down the bank in breathless silence until the busy chuckling slithering of the river warned them they were in danger of getting their toes wet. Then Anastasia pushed the Maglite’s switch forward and shaded the eye-watering dazzle with her hand. The red mud of the riverbank slid into the darker rush of water with hardly any differentiation. There were no deep banks or riverine cliffs here. And yet there was flotsam piled along the smooth mud as far back as the roots of the trees above them and the roots of the mangroves that spread away downstream. Like the ubiquitous water hyacinth, the freshwater mangroves were the result of an experiment in the seventies that had got out of hand in the last forty years. The river flooded regularly enough to support them and in places the huge bushes grew to more than fifty feet in height. But there was a strange, unsettling foreignness about them.
    The girls kept clear of the mangroves as they searched the bank, side by side, like children. The bright beam of the Maglite soon illuminated a big pile of ebony shells and Anastasia caught them up without a second thought. As she did so, Ado gave a startled gasp – the closest she would ever come to a scream. Anastasia looked down. There, beneath the pile of shell and weed, a skull was grinning up at them. Without a second thought, Anastasia struck out at it as though it had been a spider or a scorpion. The torch hit it like a bat striking a ball and it rolled back into the slick swirl of the river.
    â€˜Hold this,’ ordered Anastasia after a moment, when her breathing returned to normal. Ado took the offered torch and Anastasia pulled the biggest blade out of the Victorinox. With an