by Tim Weaver
‘So Penny didn’t trust your dad?’
‘I think she stopped trusting him the night he left us up there at the fence; and I think, the older she got, the more she wanted to know what had happened to her own dad.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know for sure. Maybe it doesn’t even matter now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she started looking into Dad’s accounts and, sometime down the line, when she’d already been in the UK for a while, she finally found a connection to Roland Dell.’
A connection that got her killed.
Across the corridor from me, Beth moved position against the wall, the glow from one of the night lights cutting across her, painting one side of her face a pale grey. As I watched her, I turned and looked at Marek. He’d hardly moved.
‘The morning after he found that IM conversation on his dad’s laptop, Rich came to see me,’ she said quietly. ‘He told me everything. He told me about Penny.’ Beth stopped, sniffed. She had a hand across her mouth, as if she were trying to hold her head up, and it softened the sound of her words. ‘He said he’d been to the library,’ she went on, ‘using the Internet there to look for stories about Penny. Anything he could find about her disappearance.’
Now I understood why Richard was being shown photos of Penny in his sessions with Naomi Russum. In the days after he and Beth fled the islands, Bill Presley, Jack Kilburn and Anthony Jessop – with Dell pulling the strings from London – must have found out about Richard being at the library that morning. It wouldn’t have taken much to discover what he was looking at: his searches for Penny would have been in the Internet history. That was when they realized they had a problem. They must have thought Richard had found out the truth: that Penny was silenced for something she found out about Caleb Beck; that she’d caught a glimpse of why her dad had disappeared, entombed deep in the islands’ past. The irony was, at that stage, Richard hadn’t known as much as they thought, but – with Beth in tow, with her tenacity – he would soon find out.
But there was something more disturbing: Jack Kilburn’s involvement in Penny’s murder. He’d pretty much brought her up. Fiona had died in 2011, but there was nothing to suggest that – before and after her mum passed on; and that night at the Brink aside – Kilburn hadn’t been anything less than a loving stepfather to Penny, even if she’d grown wary of him. Yet he’d sanctioned her death – or, at least, accepted it as inevitable and necessary – and watched from afar as Marek killed a woman every bit as much of a daughter to him as Beth. How could any parent do that?
‘Rich didn’t find any stories with Penny’s name in it,’ Beth said, bringing me back into the moment, ‘but he told me about this woman who was murdered in London, and left on a railway line.’
The same story I’d found.
I watched Beth as her eyes filled up.
‘They cut out her tattoo so no one would know it was her – didn’t they?’
There was no way to make it any easier for her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Beth.’
She swallowed and looked away, into the dark of the corridor. I heard her sniffing, saw her wiping her eyes, and then her face came back to me and it had changed: it was streaked with tears, but it was fierce.
‘We talked about going to the police in St George,’ she said, her words sharper, ‘because Rich’s dad ran the station at Sophia, so we couldn’t go there. But Bill Presley knew the guys in St George too. And seven thousand miles from anyone else who could make a difference, who might be able to help us, it didn’t seem we had any choice.’
‘You stowed away on the Olympia.’
She wiped her eyes and it left a trail at the side of her face. ‘It wasn’t like we could just walk off the islands. We’re surrounded by miles of sea. Plus, the people at Blake Point, at the harbour there, and the people in the airport down the road, they either knew us or they’d recognize us. So I came up with the idea of using the ship.’
‘How did you get on-board?’
‘I managed to work out the Olympia’s schedule from the documents they had at the yard. They kept a lot of paperwork because we organized day trips for the passengers who came ashore. It basically worked on five separate rotations: one eighty-day trip, one fifty-day, one eighty, one fifty, one eighty. That added up to three hundred and forty days, and they spent the other twenty-five in dry dock for maintenance. It meant the boat came to the Empress Islands five times a year, and – when I looked at the timetable – I could see that the next opportunity for us was only a week away. So Rich spent the time gathering up all our supplies, and our clothes, and I spent the time getting the rest of it.’
‘The rest of it?’
‘Our uniforms and IDs.’
‘You pretended you worked on the boat?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t need to. A couple of the guys at the yard had been cleared by the security team on the Olympia because they’d been providing day trips for passengers for years. The ship always arrived early in the morning at Blake Point and anchored for the night, so they gave the guys these ID cards that let them come on to the boat first thing and hard-sell the trips to passengers directly. The IDs didn’t have photographs on them, but when you ran them through the scanner at the ship’s security check-in, it showed the name of the person they belonged to. So on the second day the boat was anchored, in the afternoon, when the men from the yard had taken groups out to see the whales, we took a tender across to the Olympia. I pretended one of the guys had left a ledger on-board the day before and he’d asked me to come and get it, and because we passed through the crew entrance, because we turned up in T-shirts with the yard’s logo on, name badges, clipboards full of paperwork, because we kept them talking, they never paid attention to the bags we were carrying, and never looked at their screens. They never saw that the name on my ID was male.’ She stopped, took a breath. ‘It was weird. We’d spent the week before so nervous about it, about what would happen if we got caught. We went over and over what we were going to say, thinking up scenarios, throwing questions at one another. I barely slept at all. But, in the end, we just breezed right through.’
‘Where did you hide out?’
‘Some nights, we just stayed in the restaurant and nightclub area because there were always people around and no one would look at us twice. The next day, we’d catch up on our sleep during daylight hours – at the pools, or on the sofas in the coffee lounge. Other nights, when it was warmer, we slept outside on sun loungers. After a while, I managed to swipe a housekeeping uniform and, when no one was around, I’d put it on and go to the laundry. I’d use the rotas to see what rooms were being used at what time. A few nights, we managed to find unoccupied rooms to sleep in.’
It was why she’d been wearing the uniform when she was captured on CCTV: eventually, the laundry would become a place for her to store things – food and supplies – but back then it was the place where the rota was, where they could find out which rooms were free.
‘It went on like that for weeks,’ she continued. ‘We sailed up through South America, the Caribbean, and we never had any problems. We knew we were going to get off at Southampton, so we just had to sit tight.’ She stopped. The stir of a memory; a flicker of unease. ‘But then we docked at New York.’
‘What happened there?’
‘We started thinking that we’d made it. I mean, we were six days from the UK. We pretty much had made it. But as we were leaving port, I left Rich upstairs on the sun deck and went to get us a coffee, and I found this guy in there, asking the staff questions. I stood there in the queue, waiting for our drinks, when he started moving along the queue towards me. He was showing a whole bunch of photographs – and they were all of me and Rich.’
A whole bunch, not just one. Dell must have drafted Marek in after Presley, Kilburn and Jessop had failed to find Beth and Richard anywhere on the islands; and then, shortly after boarding the Olympia, Marek – with Larry Grobb’s help – would have been through the CCTV feeds on the ship an
d found evidence of Beth and Richard everywhere.
‘The man asking questions was him,’ Beth said.
She was looking at Marek.
‘What happened after that?’
‘I backed out, slowly as I could, trying not to come to anyone’s attention, and I ran up to the top deck and grabbed Rich. We were so scared. We’d spent the entire three weeks it had taken to come up from the islands being lulled into this false sense of security. We’d got cosy. We didn’t have any back-up plans because we’d started to think we weren’t going to need one.’ She stopped, shaking her head, her eyes moving from Marek back to me. ‘I didn’t know the ship then like I know it now. Now, I’ve got all my things divided up: pieces of my life in different places; stuff I’ll need in case an emergency hits; safe places for things I care about.’ She paused, a tremor in her throat. Things she cared about. I knew she meant the picture I’d found in the laundry of Penny and her as kids. ‘Back then, though, we had no idea how to stay hidden.’
‘So where did you go?’
‘For the next six days, we just kept moving. We went to the cinema and sat there in the dark at the back, watching the same films over and over again. I mean, I must have seen North by Northwest about seventy times. We hid out in the toilets, in the laundry, in the corners of restaurants and bars, and when the nightclubs opened, we went in there. We took turns to keep lookout. We changed as often as we could, so we didn’t get seen in the same outfits all the time, and we used the swimming pool as our bath. We’d wake before the sun was up and go to the pool, trying to keep clean, trying to act normal, because I figured anything abnormal would mean people noticed us. If we stank, if we were unclean or acting weirdly, they’d remember us.’
When he was found, Richard had traces of calcium hypochlorite on his hands – chlorine powder – and I’d already made the connection between that and the swimming pools on the ship. But now I was seeing the full extent of the story: the two of them, him and Beth, washing themselves in the pool every day.
‘That carried on pretty much all the way into Southampton harbour,’ she said. ‘We saw the British coastline for the first time at four in the morning, and the boat was due to dock at half five. That time of the day, there weren’t a lot of people around, but even so we played it safe. We thought it would be better if we headed back to the cinema and hid out in there. If he was still on the lookout for us, he’d probably assume that we were going to head upstairs.’
But she knew Marek better now. So did I.
He wouldn’t have assumed that at all.
‘He was waiting for us,’ she said. ‘The cinema had become a good hiding place. You could be anonymous in there.’ Her words fell away: six days of anonymity were rendered worthless the moment he found them. ‘He had access to the cameras on the ship, and we were conscious of that from the moment he started showing our pictures around – we kept a low profile, stayed out of view, kept on the move. But that cinema, it became a minor routine without us even thinking about it. We felt safe in there, so it was one of the few places we’d gone to more than once or twice.’ A pained expression gripped her face. ‘The moment we saw him, we ran – we both just ran – but then, somehow, we got separated. I don’t know when it happened but suddenly Rich wasn’t there any more.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I went back to try and find him.’
She blinked a couple of times, her eyes on a space between us where I’d left the remnants of the food she’d given me: empty wrappers, a half-finished packet of crisps, crumbs spilling out.
‘I couldn’t find him on the deck we’d been on, so I moved up,’ she said. ‘I kept moving up, floor by floor, going to the places we’d hidden out in, the places that I would have returned to if I’d been him. Finally, I got to the lido deck. It was quiet. It was still very early. I worked my way from one end to the other, looking around the pools, the changing rooms, the toilets, and then I found them. They were both below me.’
‘Below you?’
‘They’d got on to this narrow balcony in the corner of deck eight.’ She stopped and her smile was so bereft it seemed to draw the light from the corridor. ‘Rich had obviously got down there and hidden, but the thing with Rich was that he wasn’t devious enough for stuff like that. Everything we’d done in the lead-up to that moment, all the hiding we’d done over the course of three weeks, I’d driven all of it. His brain, it just wasn’t wired that way: deceit, secrets – those things didn’t come naturally to him. He thought that the balcony was the best place to hide – but what it ended up doing was boxing him in. He was trapped.’
Very softly, almost sighing the words into existence, she said, ‘He grabbed Rich. They struggled and then Rich slipped over. It had been raining, so there were these patches of water everywhere, and when Rich lost his footing, when he went down, he hit the railings with the side of his face. He hit it so hard I heard it, even above the sounds of the ship. He hit the railings and then, a second later, he hit the floor and then I could see blood on his cheek.’
It was how Richard had got his injuries.
‘Did the impact knock Richard unconscious?’
‘No. He tried to stand, but kind of staggered sideways, and’ – she glanced at Marek – ‘he stepped back from Rich, as if he knew it was all over.’ Beth’s words fell away, her hand open at her side like she was trying to stop her boyfriend from going over the edge. ‘I don’t think he expected Rich to go overboard. But it all happened so fast. Rich brushed against the railings and lost his balance, and when he reached out for the railings again, his hand went over the side. And then, before I knew it, the rest of him had followed. I can see it so clearly. He was there, and then he wasn’t. It was like I blinked and he stopped existing. I didn’t hear a sound when he hit the water. He didn’t scream. There was nothing. He was just gone.’
The sounds of the corridor seemed to die around us.
‘I didn’t find out that he was alive until much later. He was always a really good swimmer, so it must have been instinct kicking in when he hit the water. Like, this will to survive, this automatic mechanism or whatever. That must have been what got him to shore before he finally blacked out. I sneaked on to the computers on the lower deck a few weeks after that, and I was amazed when I read about him online. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘A few weeks later? So you never tried to leave at Southampton?’
‘No.’ Her open hand slowly closed into a fist. ‘I knew I couldn’t leave the boat at Southampton. I knew Marek would be waiting for me. If he’d used the cameras to find us, that meant he had the security team in his pocket – and that meant he’d put people at the exits. I knew I was trapped.’
‘So you stayed on-board the whole time?’
‘Yes. That was how I discovered places like that.’ She looked up at the open air vent. ‘After a while, a few weeks, a month, I think they believed that I’d somehow got off the ship at a port and they stopped looking for me on-board. But, by then, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I was scared.’
‘You didn’t think about going to see Richard?’
‘He had no memory – what would have been the point? He was the “Lost Man” by then.’ She smiled for a moment, but it was a distortion of one, meagre and heartbroken. ‘You know what the really strange thing was? I had no idea that he’d lost his memory until I read about it on the Internet. But there was this moment, before he went over the railings, when he kind of turned in my direction, almost looked up at me, and his eyes …’ She stopped. ‘I know there’s no way I could see the memory loss, that it could never be visible on his body. But I swear to you, after he hit his head, his eyes changed. It was like they belonged to someone else. My Rich was gone.’
I stared at her for a moment, trying to understand everything I’d heard, to put it into some sort of order, and – after a while – both of us seemed to become aware of something. We looked at each other, and then out along the corridor to the office.
Marek was gone.
54
We’d taken our eye off him for what seemed like no time at all.
But it had been enough.
Beth yanked the gun from her belt, held it up in front of her and started to move. I followed. The closer we edged to the glass, the more I felt the tension kick in. There was no sign of him between the desks in the office. We could see under a few, through those to others, and he wasn’t beneath any of them.
So where the hell was he?
It would have taken him time and effort to pick the locks on the door, if he even had any picks in the first place; and if he’d somehow come out of the office, we’d have seen him. The movement would have registered in our peripheral vision.
Beth made a beeline for the key she’d thrown away. It took her a couple of seconds and then she located it, bringing it back to the door.
I told her to stop.
The key was already in the lock, her fingers over the handle. She turned to look at me, a mixture of frustration and confusion on her face, and then I gestured to a tall, thin metal cabinet in the office, right at the back of the room. Next to it was the teddy bear, the MANAGER sign strung around its neck.
In there, I mouthed, pointing to the cabinet.
Its doors were slightly ajar.
Beth nodded, grabbed the handle and opened up the office. An air-conditioning unit just above the metal cabinet was pumping air downwards, making its doors move faintly in the breeze. It was hard to see all the way inside, but it didn’t look like there were shelves in there, and if there weren’t shelves, it was roomy enough for someone to hide in.
Yet I stopped at the door to the office.
Something didn’t feel right.
Beth glanced at me once, then moved ahead, her arms in a V at the front of her body, the gun absolutely still. I saw how confident she was with the weapon, and imagined – as the daughter of a farmer – she’d grown up around them. I was the son of a farmer and I’d done the same, although my experience with real firearms, rather than air rifles and pellet guns, had come in the time since, in moments like this, on cases like this, with men like Marek.
