by Tim Weaver
I zoomed out and looked at the picture again, at the woman frozen in the top corner, and then at the timecode squeezed into the bottom right. It was two-tiered: the date and time were on the top line, and beneath that was a second line.
This one was more difficult to understand.
5106596|4|79/93
I could guess at the last part: 79 to 99 were the rooms the camera covered. In theory, 4 could have been the floor, or maybe a particular section of the hotel, but I had no idea what 5106596 represented. It could have been some sort of identifier, perhaps the serial number of the camera itself.
Leaning closer, I switched my attention from the timecode to the decor, then to the carpet – a swirling pattern of ropes and knots, with some sort of coat of arms – and finally to the woman, and as I did I felt a tiny, imperceptible shift, a sense that I’d connected something together but hadn’t grasped what it was yet. I gazed at the screen, fingers hovering over the trackpad of the laptop, eyes going back and forth between the different elements of the shot.
What have I seen?
I looked out at the coffee shop I was in – checking for faces that looked familiar or seemed to be paying me too much attention – and then I felt myself being drawn back to the laptop, to the picture, the construction of it, to the sense I’d had, all the way through, that there was something slightly off about it.
On-screen, the shot of Beth was still up, zoomed in by twenty per cent, her face slightly fuzzy. I returned it to its default size, then magnified the carpet. I realized the coat of arms I’d spotted had some sort of figure inside it. He was bearded and bare-chested and holding a galleon in the palm of his hand. I zoomed in on the nearest door to the camera, studying the flower-like shape that was engraved above its lock. Except it wasn’t a flower, I knew that now.
It was a trident.
The figure in the coat of arms was Poseidon. I couldn’t view the corridor as clearly as I would have liked because of the low lighting, but something else made sense now too: the rope pattern in the carpet wasn’t just a random sequence of shapes, it was nautical knots – bowlines and figure of eights.
As I looked at Beth again, I realized everything was marginally off. That was what I’d been seeing but not been able to place. The shot wasn’t straight. It was tilted, maybe only by two or three per cent, but it was tilted all the same. At first, I thought it might be because the camera itself had been bolted to the wall at something less than a perfect right angle, or that its bracket might be loose, or that it had been knocked off centre somehow.
But it wasn’t any of those things.
A web search later, I discovered that the seven-digit number in the timecode, 5106596, was an International Maritime Organization reference – and that was when I knew for sure that it wasn’t the camera that was at an angle, it was the corridor itself.
This wasn’t a hotel.
It was a ship.
37
I couldn’t rip my eyes away from the picture now.
Marek had said that Beth and Richard had been spotted together in the week leading up to Richard being found – so if she’d been on the ship, he had too. But why? What were they even doing on-board? Where had the ship been going?
I tried to think laterally.
The first thing I had to do was figure out what the name of the ship was. It didn’t take me long. Using the IMO number, I discovered it was a cruise liner, registered in Southampton, called the Olympia Britannia. That explained why the corridor looked so much like a hotel and why its walls were adorned with iconic British landmarks like the London Eye.
Could Richard have worked on the ship?
It didn’t feel like an absurd leap to make, and when I picked up my notebook and flicked back through the things I’d found out about him over the past week, I was reminded of something: the traces of calcium hypochlorite that were found on his hands.
The tests the forensic technicians had carried out were inconclusive, but what they could confirm was that the chemical was found in polishes and waxes, in solvents, oils and hydraulic fluids. Those were all things he could have come into contact with while working on a ship. Or it could have been something else entirely: calcium hypochlorite was also used to disinfect swimming pools. If that was the reason, if the chemical ended up on Richard’s hands because he’d come into frequent contact with chlorinated water, that didn’t discount the idea of him being aboard a ship – in fact, it played into it. A cruise liner would have had a swimming pool.
It turned out the Olympia Britannia had two of them.
The ship was operated by a travel company called Deep Atlantic, and on its website, I found photographs and videos mirroring the decor that I’d seen on the surveillance shot. The bleached colours, the fuzz, the softness of detail that I’d seen through the lens of the CCTV camera were all gone, replaced by pin-sharp, low-angled shots of interior corridors. I saw the trident logo, clearly embedded above the lock mechanisms on the doors; the royal blue of the carpets, the Poseidon crest, the ropes and knots; and then there were the pictures of British scenes – not just London but Stonehenge, Canterbury, Edinburgh, the Highlands.
Something about it didn’t quite add up, though: if he was an employee, if people had worked with him and knew him, why hadn’t anyone come forward after he was found? Even if, as was likely, they hadn’t read about him in local British newspapers, was it really possible that not a single person noticed that he suddenly wasn’t on-board any more?
And that was the thing I couldn’t reconcile about this whole case: no one seemed to know Richard or have even come into contact with him. No one had come forward in the months after he was found to tell the authorities who he was and what had happened. What about people that went to school with him, or had lived in his street or in his town? What about others he must have worked and socialized with at some point?
I returned to the laptop.
It was still on the Deep Atlantic website, on the page that listed all of the information on the Olympia – its size, facilities, prices, routes. If Richard and Beth weren’t aboard the ship as employees, and they weren’t there as holidaymakers – which seemed equally unlikely – then I could only think of one other scenario.
They were stowaways.
But even that didn’t make much sense. If they had sneaked on-board the ship, it was presumably while it was docked in Southampton. So why was Richard found only six miles from the port? The CCTV still of Beth was taken five days before he was discovered, but Marek seemed to suggest she was seen with Richard on the boat beforehand – so did that mean that the Olympia had just sat in Southampton docks for over a week? I studied the schedules and routes that the cruise liner operated and it seemed improbable. It was on the move the whole time, tracing the same course on repeat: Madeira, down the west coast of Africa towards Cape Town, across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires, north along the Brazilian shoreline, into the Caribbean, and on to the US. The final journey was from New York back to Southampton, and the cruise came in two different versions: a shorter, fifty-day trip, which eschewed stops in West Africa and Brazil, or an eighty-day version which included them. From what I could see, the ship wasn’t ever docked in Southampton for longer than three days at a time.
Yet there was something to it – not necessarily to the idea of him being a stowaway, but of him making an escape. I pushed the laptop aside and went back to my notebook, flipping through the pages, trying to snag on something that I hadn’t thought of. Eventually I stopped on a page with a familiar question at the top.
Why doesn’t anyone remember Richard?
It was the same question I’d just been asking myself. Except, this time, something had changed. Something felt different. I looked harder at my notes, reading back what I’d written, trying to decide what it was – and then I realized that it wasn’t something I’d read in my notes but something I’d read on the Internet. Something on the Olympia website.
The boat’s schedule.
I felt a ru
sh of blood, an almost dizzying sense of finally seeing the answer – and the sounds and movement of the coffee shop faded to nothing.
I’ve been looking in the wrong place.
My gaze fixed on the cruise’s schedule again, on the nine days it took the Olympia to cross the South Atlantic from Cape Town all the way to Buenos Aires. I saw everything so plainly now it was like mist clearing from a window: Richard had stowed away on the Olympia – but he hadn’t boarded the ship in Southampton.
He’d been travelling to Southampton.
Now I understood why I’d never been able to find the TV show that he was describing – because it wasn’t ever broadcast in the UK. I understood why Penny had told Howson it always rained where she came from, why Richard had said the beach he remembered looked so British, overcast and dreary, and yet he hadn’t been able to find a trace of it. Penny had said she was from a town called Sophia, but Howson had never been able to find a place with that name anywhere on a UK map. Neither had I. I’d just assumed that Penny had lied to him. But Penny hadn’t lied. Sophia existed – it just wasn’t up north.
I looked at the Olympia’s schedule again, at the place where it made a single, two-day stop-off halfway across the South Atlantic.
The Empress Islands.
That was where all of them were from. Richard Kite. Penny. Beth. That was where the offshore bank accounts were that Marek had funnelled money into. That was why he’d asked me if I was at Heathrow, trying to find a flight.
Because that was where the secrets were buried.
A British territory, seven thousand miles away.
Sisters
News spread fast around Sophia. It was only about seven square miles, so people tended to find things out quickly. They heard about the two girls being taken up to the Brink. They heard about why they’d had to be punished, why they’d been left up there most of the night.
When the kids at school saw Penny walking around town in the weeks after, and attempted to coax details out of her, she just shrugged them off. Because of that, because she refused to talk about it, her friends gradually began drifting away, one by one, unable to maintain a middle ground where they were defending Penny to other kids while not being entirely sure of what they were talking about. After that, the distance created a kind of prism through which the other kids – including her friends – would view Penny: they were fascinated by her, seeing her refusal to talk about it as some kind of terrible trauma; but they were also scared by the idea that it was true.
It wasn’t bombs up there.
It was something else.
Penny could see it for the circus it was, so retreated even further, not talking to people at all. She’d often be spotted alone in the town, or further out, on the concrete benches outside the lido. The benches had views of the sea and she’d sit there, even through the merciless South Atlantic winter, and watch as the ships drifted in and out. Once a week, on the day the planes arrived, she’d walk further along the coast to the airport – a small terminal building and a single runway – and see all the people boarding planes back to Buenos Aires and Cape Town.
It wasn’t the existence she’d dreamed of or wished for, but Penny could see the bigger picture: she just needed to keep her head down, to accept her new reality, and once she got her GCSE results she could plan her escape. The government on the island didn’t have the facilities to teach A levels, much less degrees, so they funded kids who wanted to go on to further education; even better, all the colleges and universities they had partnerships with were in the UK. Penny had always felt reticent about leaving her mum here, of putting such a huge distance between them in order to continue studying, but she could barely look at Jack now. She could hardly even stomach being under the same roof as him, and at the end of every day she became more certain that it was what she wanted. She was leaving Sophia and wasn’t ever coming back, and though she would miss her mum, though she would never get answers about her father, about where he had gone and what had happened to him, escape was the only real option. She’d get to the UK, set herself up somewhere and wait for Beth to join her.
Except, slowly, she started to realize that was never going to happen.
Beth didn’t handle the aftermath as well. She liked the attention to start with, fed on the popularity she gained from her night at the Brink, but then the popularity turned to jealousy and fear, and the kids at school became more brutish and began taunting her, bullying her. Some days, the sisters were the most popular kids in class, almost revered, their status elevated by secrecy and gossip. Other days, they were treated as contaminants, disease-carriers to be avoided.
Because of that, Beth began to rebel. She played up in class and at home, went out all the time, got paralytically drunk at thirteen and was found the next day in an alleyway behind the supermarket. Jack and Fiona grounded her, and grounded her again, and again, but after a while it stopped making any difference. Penny tried to talk to her, to use some of the closeness they’d thrived on growing up, the love they’d had for one another, but Beth was riled and resentful – at her father, at the way she was being treated at school, at Penny for making them go beyond the Brink in the first place, at the things that had happened to them up there, at anyone on the island who even looked at her the wrong way.
She was scared too, Penny could see that, scared that she might be taken up into the hills again and tied to the fence like last time, but she’d buried it all behind her anger. She took to applying too much make-up, layering on the black eyeliner, the mascara, until it was like her eyes were set in dark holes. Penny saw through that too: Beth’s eyes were always what gave her away. If she concealed them, if she made them harder to read, no one would see how frightened she was.
Penny tried to talk to Beth over and over again, but Beth would either glaze over or walk away. A couple of years after the events of that night at the Brink, Penny tried one final time. Beth had been grounded again for staying out past her 8 p.m. curfew, and Penny’s mum and Jack were at an assembly meeting in the town hall and had left Penny in charge. She came downstairs to find the back door open, rain hammering hard against the porch roof, and Beth smoking under a panel of ridged plastic where Jack kept his tools.
Penny went outside, to the steps of the porch. The two sisters turned to each other, said nothing and looked out into the night. From their garden, they could see the lights of the harbour at Blake Point.
‘What are you doing, Beth?’ Penny asked.
Beth eyed Penny. Then she shrugged and took another long drag on her cigarette. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘I’m not talking about the cigarette.’
Beth glanced at Penny again. Her mascara had run slightly, moving in a vague diagonal away from her left eye. It looked like a long line of stitches. Penny wondered if Beth had been crying or whether it was the rain that had done it, and after a while she started to think it might actually be tears. It was almost two years to the day that they’d been driven up to the Brink and left there. Beth would pretend she’d forgotten, that it made no difference to her, but she was like Penny.
She would never forget.
‘Beth, listen to me –’
‘I don’t want a lecture.’
‘I’m not going to lecture you.’
‘I don’t want any advice either.’
‘You’ve got to keep your head down, Bethany.’
Beth paused for a second. Penny rarely, if ever, used her sister’s full name – and when she did, it was because she was desperate for Beth to listen to her.
But Beth just shook her head.
‘Beth –’
‘I said I didn’t want any advice.’
‘I’m leaving in three months,’ Penny said. ‘Once I get my results, I’m leaving. If you keep your head down for the next two years, if you get your results too, you can leave as well. I’ll be set up in the UK by then, and you can come over and we –’
‘What’s the point?’
P
enny frowned. ‘The point?’
‘In listening to you. I mean, last time I listened to you, I got tied to a fucking fence.’ She glanced at Penny, taking another drag on her cigarette. ‘The worst thing I ever did in my whole life was listen to your advice, you know that?’
Penny tried not to show how much that hurt, but she didn’t do a very good job of it. Beth, watching her, seemed emboldened by the fact that she’d inflicted a wound. She straightened, took a step towards Penny, gesturing with the two fingers she was holding the cigarette between, and said, ‘You know something else?’
‘Beth, please. Don’t be like this.’
‘You stand there and ask me what I’m doing, like I’ve got some responsibility to you, as if what you think even matters to me. But we’re not even related, Penny.’
‘Beth –’
‘We’re not even related. You got no right telling me anything. You dragged me up there’ – she pointed in the other direction from the harbour, across the roof to where the hills were – ‘when I was twelve years old, and look what you did to me. This life. This shit that’s filling my head the whole time. I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating through the fucking sheets, because of what we saw up there. And you know what? I try to think rationally, I try to tell myself we didn’t see what we saw, but we both know it was real. And who can I talk to about it, huh? Dad? You?’
She smirked, shook her head again.
‘Do me a favour. How can I talk to either of you? He’s the one that drove us up there and dumped us. His own kid. And you … you were the one that put us in the back of that Land Rover in the first place. If I hadn’t followed you up there all those times, if we’d just done what we were supposed to and stayed away, I’d be getting off the island in a couple of years. I’d be sleeping like a baby every night and passing my exams and I’d be getting my grant and jetting off to the UK to some sixth-form college, to university; I’d be getting a job and I’d never have to come back to this shithole again. But I’m not doing that, am I, Pen? I’m getting pissed up every night because I’m trying to forget what we saw up there. I’m trying to forget the sound of it breathing. I can hear it every time I close my eyes. And some days that makes me a rock star, and everyone’s my best pal, and all the boys want to get in my knickers. And other days I get treated like a fucking leper. Brink girl, Brink girl, Brink girl, all the time. They whisper it behind my back as I walk home from school. I can’t concentrate on anything. I’m looking over my shoulder the whole time. And you know why I’m like this, Pen? Because you made me like this. It’s your fault.’
