by Tim Weaver
I wondered if he knew that already.
I wondered if he was working with Marek.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘The wildlife is amazing.’
‘That’s what I hear.’
‘Whales, seals, penguins. I went on my day off a few years back to see the southern right whales, because you only find them in this part of the world. I love whales. I love animals. I watch all the documentaries. Attenborough, man, he’s the king. Anyway, I went back again in March with one of the girls who works down in the Athena. She’s from the islands, so she gave me a nice tour.’
He smiled again, but it was hard to tell whether nice tour meant an actual trip around the islands with the woman, or an hour in the back of a car on some remote headland. Either way, it didn’t really matter that much.
‘What’s Athena?’ I asked.
‘It’s the coffee lounge on deck eight.’
I finished my beer and headed down there.
40
The woman’s name was Annie. She was thin and in her twenties with short red-brown hair, clipped into place, and a line of freckles running from one eye to the other over the bridge of her nose. As I arrived at the Athena coffee lounge, a large room of about a hundred tables segregated by zigzagging glass-panelled walls, I spotted her on the far side of it, wiping down a table littered with pastry crumbs.
‘Annie?’
She looked up and broke into a smile. But then she must have realized I’d addressed her by name without looking at her name badge, and the smile faded just a little as she asked, ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘My name’s David Raker,’ I said, handing her a business card. She took it from me and, as she did, I noticed an Empress Islands flag on the badge, next to her full name, Annie Arnold-Yunk. The flag was blue with a Union Jack in the top left and a coat of arms to the right. The coat of arms featured Lady Justice holding a set of scales and, on a ribbon underneath, the Latin phrase hic situs est. This is the place.
‘I was just talking to Gael upstairs,’ I said, ‘and he mentioned that you’re originally from the Empress Islands.’ I gestured to the flag. ‘I’m interested in finding out some more about Sophia. Do you think we could have a chat?’
She seemed thrown. ‘I’m not actually from Sophia,’ she said and, as soon as she spoke, I could hear the same accent as Richard Kite’s, the same unique mix of dialects. The a of Sophia came out as a hard er.
I held up the book. ‘All I’ve got at the moment is what’s written inside here, so any local knowledge would be a big help.’
Relaxing a little, she said, ‘Oh, okay.’
She asked if I could wait until she was on break, and at 2 p.m. I met her at the front of the coffee lounge and then followed her outside. There was some shade and a few empty sun loungers further down the deck. Once we were seated, she removed a pack of nicotine gum from the breast pocket of her blouse, popped a piece in her mouth and pointed to the copy of No Ordinary Route perched on the lounger beside me.
‘Is that the one where he says Sophia’s a shithole?’
I smiled. ‘Have you read it, then?’
She shook her head and started turning the pack of gum in her hands. ‘I just remember there being a review in the Empress Express – what, like three years back?’
It would have been more like five, as the book was published in 2011.
‘I don’t imagine the book went down very well.’
She smirked. ‘Some people reckon that, if you get seen with a copy of that by the police in Sophia, they’ll confiscate it.’
‘What if you get seen with it somewhere else?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m from a place called Cardigan, way out east. I hated growing up there. It’s one of the smaller islands. St George, Sophia, Blake Point, they’re on Victoria and Cabot, to the west. On Cardigan, there was never anything to do, you had to get in a boat to go to school, to the shops, to anywhere half decent. I’m twenty-nine, and until I was sixteen I didn’t even know what satellite TV was. We had one channel. That was it. And it was all pre-recorded shows, and the programmes were always two weeks out of date, because that’s how long it took to ship the cassettes over from the UK.’ She chewed for a while. ‘But, as boring as my childhood was, and as tiny and uninteresting as Cardigan is, even we used to make jokes about Sophia.’
‘What did you used to say?’
‘Everyone called it “Sophucking Cold”.’
‘So, did it deserve the nickname?’
‘It’s just a strange place,’ she said, rolling the gum across her tongue. ‘It’s the yin to St George’s yang. Or maybe Mr Hyde to its Dr Jekyll. I mean, it sits on the wrong side of the mountain for a start, so it gets all the really shitty weather from the west. That’s where a lot of wind comes in from, and the town just sits there, right in the middle of it. Blake Point, where the harbour is, is – what? – eight miles south of it, but there’s hardly any houses there, just a few cottages, so most of the people in the fishing industry live in Sophia. That’s the other thing about it. It looks like a fishing town, but not in a good way. It’s not St Ives or Cape Cod or something. It’s deprived and run-down. It stinks, literally. You’ve got a few farmers there too, but not much else in the way of industry. All the more upmarket stuff, the banking, the government buildings, the one decent clothes shop we’ve got on the islands, the big library, the DVD rental place, they’re in St George. They get pretty crappy weather there too – everywhere in the islands does; I mean, we’re closer to the Antarctic than we are to South America or Africa – but, because St George is on the “right” side of the mountain, it’s just never as cold, miserable or depressing.’
‘Did you ever meet anyone from Sophia?’
‘In my entire life? Yeah, of course. I didn’t have any friends from there, though, if that’s what you mean. That always seemed the strangest thing about the islands to me. We never had that sense of community, of togetherness, even though there are only seven and a half thousand of us. We’ve never been like the Falklands. We’re bigger than they are, spread over a wider area, so I guess that doesn’t help. But they had the war too, which I think kind of brought them together in a bizarre sort of way, whereas we’re just a bunch of communities scattered across hundreds of miles.’
She checked her watch.
‘You okay for time, Annie?’
‘I’ve got about another ten minutes.’
I removed some pictures of Richard Kite and Penny Beck, and handed them across. She took them from me, examined them.
‘Do you recognize either of those people?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Who are they?’
‘I think they might have come from Sophia.’
‘No, I don’t recognize them.’ She handed the photographs back as I brought the image of Beth up on my phone. But before I got the chance to show her, she said, ‘It wasn’t just that, though.’
I looked up. ‘Wasn’t just what?’
‘Sophia.’ She eyed me. ‘It wasn’t just that it was a lot colder, or that it stank.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean’ – she pointed to the copy of No Ordinary Route – ‘I haven’t read it but, from what I heard, the things he says in there aren’t that wide of the mark.’
‘In what respect?’
‘He talks about Sophia having a secret, right?’
‘He said he initially made it as a joke.’
‘Initially. Exactly.’
I studied her. ‘Are you saying you agree with him?’
‘I’m saying you hear rumours.’
‘About what?’
She stopped chewing for a moment. Seagulls squawked in the sky above us, following the ship as it carved across the Atlantic. We were a day and a half out of Cape Town, heading south-west across the ocean, and the sun was still hot. But, even with the heat pressing at us, even under a perfect, cloudless sky, I noticed goosebumps on Annie’s skin.
&
nbsp; ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it sounds crazy even saying it aloud, but we just used to hear rumours about the things that went on there. Weird things. Like, body parts being found up on the Mount Strathyde hiking trails. Bones. That sort of thing.’
I watched her. ‘Did it ever get reported?’
‘I’m not sure. That’s the thing. The main police station is in St George, but there’s a smaller one in Sophia. Like, four or five police officers. They would have dealt with it.’ She looked out at the sea. ‘What I mean is, if there was something going on, and the town wanted to keep it a secret, I guess the Sophia police could do that, right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know enough about the place.’
‘Well, they could. They definitely could.’
‘So is that what you think happened?’
She shrugged again.
‘But you believed the rumours?’
‘There were just a lot of them, that’s all, and whenever someone from Sophia told you about what they’d heard it was always along the same lines. Weird things up on the hiking trails, especially around the bogs. People disappearing. Landmines – that was the other thing. They had to build this big fence up there to stop people wandering out to the marshland.’
I remembered something being written about that in the book, about the inconsistent stories given by the residents of Sophia for why the fence was put up. I tried to think whether any of this was related to Richard Kite, to Penny Beck, to Beth, to Marek, to anything I’d found out, but the only thing that even vaguely fitted was what Annie said about people disappearing.
Penny’s dad had disappeared.
I let it go for now, but one picture it did paint was of a community cut off, not just from the rest of the world, but even from its nearest neighbours. That could breed all sorts of things: paranoia, suspicion, rumour, fear.
‘Point is, a lot of people said it wasn’t just landmines.’
I’d been writing down what she’d been telling me, but now I stopped, pen poised above the notebook.
‘In fact, some people said there weren’t any landmines up there at all.’
‘So why build the fence?’
She stared at me.
‘Annie?’
I thought she wasn’t going to respond for a second time, but then – almost inaudibly – she said, ‘To keep it away from the town.’
I frowned. ‘It?’
She shrugged.
‘What do you mean, “it”?’
‘I mean …’ She trailed off, shaking her head, and didn’t speak again for a long time. ‘There were just rumours that there might be something out there.’
‘ “Something”?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What do you mean, “something”?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t make me say it.’ She paused, looking at me hard. But I was going to make her say it, because I didn’t think for a second that she actually believed it. ‘A monster,’ she added quietly.
‘Are you serious?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘That’s just what people from Sophia used to say.’
It was an impossible idea to swallow. Much easier to process was the idea that it was a story built on whispers, massaged and developed inside the bubble of a town that existed right at the edge of the earth.
‘I’m going to have to go,’ she said.
‘Okay, can I just quickly show you this?’
‘Sure.’
I turned my phone to her and brought the image of Beth up on the screen. ‘What about her?’ I said, making sure she could see it. ‘Does she seem familiar?’
‘Is that taken on-board the ship?’
‘Yeah, it is.’
I didn’t say anything else, not about Beth, or when the picture was taken. I didn’t want to colour anything that was coming. Annie leaned forward, pinch-zoomed in on the photograph, and then shuffled forward on the lounger, her teeth moving as she chewed.
‘Does she work on the Olympia?’ Annie asked.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
She began frowning.
‘Are you sure she doesn’t work here?’
‘Pretty sure. Why?’
‘Her clothes.’
I turned the phone around and looked at the image of Beth, at the clothes she had on. I must have looked at them a hundred times. She was all in black: top, trousers, shoes. But for the first time I noticed something else: one leg had a faint motif on it, grey and pale. I thought it had just been a random pattern, maybe a logo. But it wasn’t either of those. It was a series of very thin, interlocked ropes and knots.
A uniform.
‘That’s what housekeeping wear,’ Annie said.
41
As I exited the lift on the fourth deck, I felt again like I was trapped in some sort of loop: an echo, a movie on repeat. It wasn’t just the relentless, identical doors in both directions, it was the ceaseless hum of the boat’s engines as well, the only real reminder that this wasn’t a hotel, or a mall, or a city, but a moving vessel in the middle of a colossal ocean. Or maybe what was getting to me wasn’t either of those things but the embers of what Annie had described: body parts, a fence built to keep people out, and the town that couldn’t get its story straight.
I tried to shake off the feeling as I moved through the empty corridor, heading in the direction Beth had been going when she was captured on CCTV.
Each deck had its own launderette and – on an earlier walk-through of the ship – I’d noticed that each launderette had a STAFF ONLY door adjacent to it. I found the one on deck four ajar. Through the gap, I spotted shelves full of towels, bed sheets and blankets, a mounted storage cupboard with soap and shampoo in it, and a woman in her fifties stacking toilet rolls into a wheeled cart. I waited for her to come out.
‘Excuse me.’
The woman stopped as she emerged, the clipboard she’d been reading – attached by a thin cord of string – swinging back against the hard plastic of her cart. She smiled, blinked. Straight away, without her saying anything, I knew she didn’t speak much English. She was Senegalese and her name was Léna.
‘Bonjour, Léna.’
She smiled a little. ‘Bonjour.’
I got out my phone, went to the picture of Beth, zoomed in on her until the timecoding was no longer visible, and then tried to continue in the best French I could muster. ‘My name is David. I’m a sort of policeman.’ I held up the phone to her. ‘Have you ever seen this woman?’
She leaned in, squinting a little, and then fiddled in her pockets for a pair of glasses. Sliding them on to her nose, she came forward again, eyes magnified.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You don’t know her?’
‘No, I don’t.’ She took off her glasses and returned them to her pocket. ‘Michael might know. He’s in there.’ She pointed towards the staff door behind me.
‘Who’s Michael?’
‘He’s in charge.’
‘The boss?’
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling again. ‘The boss.’
‘Okay. Thank you, Léna.’
I watched her go and then knocked on the door a couple of times. When I got no response, I knocked again. Still nothing. I pushed the door further open.
The room was hot, the walls specked with moisture, and there were metal shelving units everywhere. When I took a few steps in, I could see past the initial ones and out into a space in the middle where there was a large table full of bed linen and towels, some folded and ironed, others scrunched into balls. Against the rear wall, partly disguised by the shelving units, was a skyline of industrial-sized washer-dryers rumbling at a low volume. I couldn’t see anyone.
‘Hello?’
The shelves created a mini network of different routes, and because each unit was stacked top to bottom, it was hard to see through them, or much further than the next turn in the towers of sheets and linen. ‘Hello?’ I said again, and then a third time when my
voice seemed to get lost in the growl of the machines.
‘Michael?’
Pretty certain that there was no one in here, I continued moving, past the centre table and out along another passageway created by the shelves, in the direction of the dryers. Their spin cycles went in minute-long phases, loud for sixty seconds, and then silent for a moment as the drum changed direction. It created a weird, eerie sound: a succession of thundering hums interspersed with frequent pauses, like hundreds of songs playing on a record player, all skipping at different times.
When I reached them – stacked two high all the way along the back wall; the noise louder than ever close up – I saw a door to my left marked MANAGER.
‘Michael?’
Inside, I could see more shelves, this time loaded with bottles of bleach, bathroom cleaner and detergent. There was a desk with a computer on it and a pile of ring binders stacked against the far wall. I pushed at the door and, even above the low rumble of the dryers, I could hear the hinges whine as it fanned back and bumped against the wall.
The office was empty.
I stepped into the room and looked it over, waking the computer from its slumber. It was password protected. I went through the drawers of the desk to see if I could find an employee list, any sort of record from the past nine months, but there was nothing like that and somehow I wasn’t convinced that Beth had actually worked in housekeeping, even if she’d had the uniform.
I took in the rest of the room.
If she hadn’t worked here officially, then she’d been using the uniform to blend in, or to gain access to somewhere. Somewhere like here. The CCTV camera had caught her on this deck, in uniform, heading in this direction – but what would she want with the laundry room?
I returned to the doorway and looked out at the shelving units, and then faced in to the office again.
