Swiping her key card against the hostel entrance, Kate pushed open the door and was greeted by sounds of revelry from above. Toby’s mobile bar must be proving popular. She’d imagined going straight to find her brother but rapidly concluded that being around happy, drunken guests would be too jarring. Instead, she headed to her room, where she peeled off her sodden clothing and cocooned her wet hair in a towel.
The bathroom bore witness to her earlier preparation, the lid left off the perfume she had sprayed liberally over her body, the hairdryer still plugged in and a smear of cocoa butter on the edge of the basin. Methodically, Kate tidied and cleaned, the irony of restoring order when so much else had been thrown into disarray was not lost on her. It did help, though, to put things back in their allotted places; it helped her calm down.
Wind and rain howled beyond the window, and Kate shivered despite the mugginess of the small room. Finding a long cardigan in the wardrobe, she pulled it on over the leggings and shirt she’d changed into, starting as there was a bang on the door.
Kate took off her glasses and hurriedly wiped the tears off her cheeks.
‘Nims, you in there?’
It was Toby.
‘Is Al with you?’ he asked, when the door was opened, looking around her into the room.
Kate wrapped her arms around herself. ‘No, he’s with Angela.’
Toby shook his head impatiently. ‘Not anymore he’s not. She just rang the office number; said she can’t reach you.’
Kate glanced around for her bag, which she’d dropped on the floor outside the bathroom and pulled out her phone.
‘Shit,’ she said, tapping uselessly at the blank screen. ‘It must have got wet in the rain. What did Angela say? Where the hell is Alex?’
‘I don’t know. But she’s on her way here now,’ Toby explained. ‘I told her we’d wait for her in reception.’
On the way downstairs, Kate filled him in, explaining as best she could in the space of a few minutes how she’d inadvertently managed to solve a missing-person case.
‘So, Alex is actually Josh?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘And he’s been missing for over a decade?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you had no idea—’
‘None.’
‘Bloody hell, Nims.’
‘I know.’ She grimaced. ‘It’s a lot to take in. Where’s Filippo?’
‘Manning the bar.’ Toby stole a glance towards the ceiling. ‘Or trying to.’
As they reached the ground floor, Kate saw Angela standing on the other side of the entrance window and hurried to let her in.
‘Is he here?’ were her first words.
Kate shook her head. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, as a motionless Angela stood there in an appalled silence, her saturated clothes dripping water onto the tiled floor. ‘I only left you two an hour ago – what happened?’
‘That’s just it,’ moaned Angela, as Toby ducked into the back office. ‘We were getting on fine. Josh seemed to get over his initial shock and we were talking, really talking, like we used to on his good days. He told me all about you.’ She turned to Kate, her lower lip quivering as Toby wrapped a towel around her shoulders. ‘He loves you, you know?’
Kate heard her brother exhale with shock.
‘We agreed to come back here, so we could find you and talk some more,’ Angela went on. ‘Josh said he needed to pick up a few things from his boat first and I was keen to go along with him, but he said no, and that I would get soaked. He seemed so sedate, so completely at ease with everything, and I trusted him when he said he’d catch up with me. I let him go,’ she cried, engulfed by a fresh wave of panic. ‘Why did I do that? What was I thinking?’
She was bashing the flat of her hand against her forehead as she spoke, and Kate moved forwards to intervene.
‘Please don’t blame yourself,’ she said. ‘Maybe Al – Josh bumped into someone he knows and got held up?’
‘In a force-nine gale?’ reasoned Toby, prompting them to glance out through the darkened windows.
‘I thought he was happy to see me,’ Angela said, her voice strangled by wretched sobs. ‘But what if he’s gone? What if it was all too much for him to cope with? What if seeing me again after such a long time has pushed him over the edge?’
‘No,’ said Kate, more sharply than she had intended. ‘Don’t say that – don’t even think that. Alex will be all right. He maybe just needs a few hours alone to process what’s happened. I can think of a few places he might have gone. We can go now, all of us. OK? We can find him together.’
This seemed to bolster Angela and she sniffed hard, wiping away her tears with one corner of the towel.
Kate turned to Toby.
‘Can you take Angela down to Lovro’s pizza place? He’s one of Alex’s closest friends on the island and I know he trusts him. There’s a good chance that’s where he’d go if he needed a bolthole.’
‘Good plan.’ Toby darted behind the reception desk and re-emerged with a bright yellow raincoat and two umbrellas.
‘Where are you going to go?’ he asked Kate, who’d already reached the door.
‘To the beach,’ she said. ‘To find his boat.’
Chapter 55
There was no sign of Alex or his boat in the bay at Pokonji Dol, neither did Kate find any trace of it along the coastal path or in the town harbour.
The ongoing storm had blotted out the stars and driven dense clouds over the moon. It was almost impossible to see much beyond the shoreline. The further she searched, the more desperate Kate became, eventually wading into the shallows and screaming his name into the night. But it did no good. The wind that was buckling the sailboats snatched her cries away and buffeted them against the rocks, the swirling water shouting back a warning of its own that she must retreat. Nobody would be foolish enough to venture out in this.
Would they?
Without her phone, Kate had no idea how Toby and Angela were getting on, so she had no choice but to plough back up the hill to Sul Tetto, where Filippo gave her more bad news.
‘No luck yet, bambina. Toby is taking Angela from bar to bar.’
‘Alex won’t be in a bar,’ she said insistently. ‘He’ll be outside somewhere – I know him.’
‘Stay here,’ soothed Filippo. ‘Let me go out and try.’
But Kate would not let him.
Again, she trawled along the water’s edge, calling out his name. The umbrella Toby had given her blew inside out, its flimsy metal arms mangled beyond repair, so she hurled it into a bin, calling it all the worst curse words she knew, all the things she longed to shout at the world for doing this to her; for giving her someone to love only to spirit him away.
The storm scared her with its ferociousness. The restaurants in the town square were eerily quiet, the floodlit Fortico thrown for once into shadow. Kate wished she’d thought to put in her hated contact lenses before leaving the hostel, because it was hopeless trying to see through her glasses. She’d never known Alex to moor any further around the coast, but she set off along the wide pathway regardless, scouring the dark sea for any sign of a blue, white and red boat and yelling his name until it became a whimper.
There were no lights on the water, no movement save for the waves, no people hunched on benches or crouched hidden below the path. Kate searched every outcrop, every cove, every empty beach bar and every darkened pathway.
Alex was not hiding. He was gone.
It was well past midnight when Kate finally trudged back to the hostel, soaked through and shuddering with cold and misery. She found Angela on the sofa in the lounge area, a cup of something hot in her hands and haunted expression on her face that only became more so as she watched Kate walk in alone. Toby handed over her phone, which he’d managed to revive, but there were no waiting messages from Alex.
‘I guess you’ve all tried to call him?’ she said, and Angela sighed miserably.
‘No point. He left his phon
e with me – probably thought it would throw me off the scent,’ she said pointedly, only to crumple inwards with regret. ‘Shit, I didn’t mean that. Or maybe I did. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do next, who to call, where to start looking. I feel so helpless.’
Kate said the one thing she’d been repeating to herself all night. ‘Alex can take care of himself. He has done for a long time.’
‘I know,’ Angela agreed, not looking up. ‘But what if he chooses not to this time?’
‘Come on now,’ said Toby, who’d just brought Kate a mug of tea. ‘There’s no point thinking like that. Al would never—’
‘You don’t know that,’ interrupted Angela. ‘When people are cornered like this, they do all sorts of awful things. It’s my fault. I never should have let him out of my sight.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Toby, but he had visibly paled.
‘Depression isn’t temporary,’ Angela went on sadly. ‘You can’t simply hunker down with a Lemsip and emerge well again a few days later.’
Toby started to reply, but she cut across him.
‘You have no idea how many times I’ve had to explain that to people,’ she said tersely. ‘How many times Josh was told to “cheer up”, like he was choosing to feel bad, like he was pretending to be afraid to leave his bedroom.’
Toby had turned very red.
She didn’t look as if she was going to stop ranting now she had started, so Kate put her mug on the floor and cleared her throat.
‘We’re not arguing with you,’ she said gently. ‘We’re not those people.’
Angela opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have gone off on one. You’ve been so kind and I’m behaving terribly as always.’
‘Forget about it,’ said Toby evenly. ‘Does anyone want something stronger to drink?’
Both women shook their heads.
‘Well, I hope you don’t mind if I do? I have a feeling we’re in for a long night.’
They’d agreed it was pointless to continue their search until after the storm had passed but sitting and waiting for it to end was almost worse than stumbling around in the downpour. Kate couldn’t stay still and paced the lounge endlessly, clutching cups of tea and coffee that she never drank. Angela, meanwhile, curled herself up into a tight ball, scrolling through her phone and saying nothing. Toby pretended to read a novel, while Filippo, who had joined them after locking up for the night, flicked through a copy of Vogue that had been left behind by one of the guests.
The inside of Kate’s mouth felt as if it was growing moss, so at around six, she headed upstairs to clean her teeth and re-emerged to find Siva sitting on the landing.
‘You miss him, don’t you?’ she murmured, bending to stroke the cat. ‘Me too.’
The rain finally splattered to a stop just after seven a.m. and a watered-down sun emerged from behind milky white clouds. Kate was expecting to find devastation in the streets, but there was little out of place save for a few fallen palm leaves and strewn items of rubbish. Bins had been toppled and washing whipped from lines, but such was the heat that the pavements seemed to steam underfoot, the air thick and metallic in flavour. Angela and Filippo set off to walk the same coastal path route that Kate had followed during the night, while she and Toby clambered into the jeep and drove to western tip of the island, their plan being to walk back along the shoreline from the opposite direction.
It did not take long for them to find something.
‘Oh no,’ Kate cried, running across the rocks so fast that she tripped, crumpling to the ground and cutting her knee and elbow in the process.
‘Be careful,’ yelled Toby from above, but Kate barely felt a thing.
There was an object in the water ahead of her; something she recognised but did not want to believe she was seeing. It had been she who had nailed the deckchair to the roof of Alex’s boat and she who chose its bright, swirly, cactus-print pattern. Kate could not deny that it was the same chair floating in pieces before her no matter how much she wanted to.
Toby came to a halt behind her. ‘That could be anyone’s deckchair,’ he said, but his voice sounded shaky. ‘There must be loads like that in Hvar.’
‘There aren’t,’ she said dully. ‘I made this for him myself. It’s the only one.’
A silence followed while Toby took this in. Kate crouched and pulled the splintered frame of the chair towards her, hauling it out from among sticks of driftwood, beer bottles, plastic carrier bags and an old blanket gently, as if it would somehow emerge with Alex attached.
‘Leave it.’ Toby put a hand on her arm. ‘We need to go, Nims – we need to call the coastguard, put an alert out.’
‘It’s all my fault,’ she whispered, holding tight to what remained of Alex’s boat. ‘I should never have taken Angela to meet him – I should have checked with him first.’
‘Kate, we have to go.’
‘I did this, Toby, don’t you see? He ran because of me and now he’s dead.’
‘Don’t say that. You don’t know that.’
‘This is his boat,’ she cried, starting to shake. ‘This chair, that blanket, all this stuff. He wanted to fix the engine yesterday and I didn’t let him. I distracted him. It’s been playing up for ages, since we went to Palmižana that day with Robyn, remember? What if he tried to go out in the storm and got into trouble? What if he smashed into the rocks?’
‘That’s why we have to go.’ Toby tugged at her arm again. ‘We need to start searching the sea.’
Kate couldn’t move, could no longer speak, could hardly breathe. She was numb.
Toby led her away, his arm around her shoulders as he told her over and over again that everything would be all right, that they would find him, that she would see Alex again.
If only she could believe him.
Chapter 56
The rest of the day seemed to pass Kate by in a blur.
She was aware of calls being made and received, of Angela’s anguished tears upon learning of the smashed deckchair, of Toby’s tireless attempts to comfort, and of Siva’s claws digging into her bare thighs as she sat, motionless with dread, in the apartment opposite the hostel.
Alex had run away, that much was obvious. But how far had the storm allowed him to go?
Kate had been all for renting a boat and going out to look for him herself, but Toby, via the Maritime Search and Rescue team, had told her gently but firmly that she was better off waiting by the phone.
‘But have you told them?’ she’d pleaded. ‘About the secret cove on Jerolim and the beach at Stiniva?’
‘They know,’ he had assured her. ‘They are going to look everywhere.’
Sundown arrived and there was still no news. Nobody could find a trace of Alex or his boat, but there was no sign of any additional wreckage either – a fact that Filippo repeated so often that it became a mantra.
‘No news is good news,’ Toby kept saying, until Kate could take it no longer.
‘Where are you going?’ said Angela, who was hollow-eyed and twitchy. Kate wanted to comfort her but felt it would be dishonest to make assurances she couldn’t keep. She was unable to shake the feeling that this entire mess was her fault, and the guilt was in danger of consuming her, one greedy piece after another.
‘For a walk,’ she said. ‘I need some air.’ Then, as Angela looked at her in desperation. ‘It’s OK. I won’t be long. I’ll take my phone with me.’
‘We will look after you, darling,’ said Filippo. ‘Why don’t you try to eat something?’
Angela shook her head and Kate understood why. Food was an impossibility. Even sipping water was a struggle. Her stomach was bound so tightly in knots that it felt bruised.
Where was he?
Kate left the apartment and headed east, her trainers making little sound as she walked.
A whole day since she had seen him; twenty-four hours since he had run.
It felt like longer.
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She hadn’t set out with a destination in mind, but the water was calling to her, beckoning her down as it always did to the white-stone beach not far from the hostel. So many times she’d walked this route on her way to meet Alex, a smile of anticipation playing around her lips whenever she saw him there, waiting by the shore, eager to see her, to touch her, to wrap her up and kiss her. So strong was the memory that a part of Kate allowed herself to believe she might find him there. But there was nobody. Only the stones and the water; the moon and the stars; the emptiness and the disappointment. Kate had never felt more helpless in her life.
Stooping, she picked up a pebble, turning it over in her hands as she thought about all the things she’d been through to get here; her spiritless start, when she was broken down and riddled with anxiety, when she’d cowered inside a chrysalis woven from dejection only to emerge like a butterfly as her creativity flourished. The heart she’d thought shattered had mended, now larger and fuller than ever, the confidence she’d sought for so long gained pace alongside her ambition. Kate had made wishes that were granted, possibilities once stolen were returned, but as she gazed out now, across a sea that swayed in time to its own beat, all she could think was that she would trade all of it. Every bit.
For him.
She sat for a while, staring but not seeing, the stones below her cooled by a night that felt darker than most. Noticing something small glinting in the shallows, she knelt forwards to retrieve it, giving in to a hopeless smile as she saw what it was. A silver coin, a lucky charm, a reminder of the man she’d found. And lost.
Tossing the coin up into the air, Kate caught it in the flat of her palm, closing her eyes before she could see which way it had landed.
Heads he comes back; tails he doesn’t.
She hardly dared look.
There was a whisper of sound behind her and Siva appeared, her soft grey body warm as she snaked between Kate’s knees, purring with pleasure.
The Getaway: A holiday romance for 2021 - perfect summer escapism! Page 32
