‘She’s not there,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to leave a message?’
I think for a moment. I’ll be in London four hours from now.
‘Tell her to call you.’
Charlie leaves a message. Afterwards, I take the mobile from her hand and give her mine.
‘We’re swapping, just for today. Darcy won’t answer my calls, but she’ll answer yours.’
Charlie frowns crossly. She has the cutest twin creases above the bridge of her nose.
‘If you read my text messages, I’ll never talk to you again!’
50
Ruiz leans against a park bench, eating a sandwich and drinking coffee. He’s watching a delivery truck trying to reverse down a narrow driveway. Someone is directing the driver, signalling left or right. A hand slaps the roller door.
‘You know one of the hard things about being retired?’ says Ruiz.
‘What’s that?’
‘You never get a day off. No holidays or long weekends.’
‘My heart bleeds.’
The park bench overlooks the Thames. Pale afternoon sunlight barely raises a gleam on the heavy brown water. Rowing crews and tourist launches leave white wakes that slide across the surface and wash up against the glistening mud exposed by an ebbing tide.
The old Barn Elms Water Works is across the river. South London could be another country. That’s the thing about London. It’s not so much a metropolis as a collection of villages. Chelsea is different from Clapham, Clapham is different from Hammersmith is different from Barnes is different from a dozen other places. The dividing line may only be as wide as a river yet the ambience changes completely once you cross from one place to the next.
Julianne is back from Rome. I wanted to meet her at Heathrow, but she said the company had sent a car and she had to go to the office. We’ve arranged to meet later at the hotel and go to the party together.
‘You want another coffee?’ asks Ruiz.
‘No thanks.’
Ruiz’s house is across the road. He treats the Thames like a water feature in his front garden or his own private stretch of river. This particular park bench is his outdoor furniture and he spends several hours a day here, fishing and reading the morning papers. Rumour has it that he’s never actually caught a fish and this has nothing to do with the water quality of the river or the fish population. He doesn’t use bait. I haven’t asked if it’s true. Some questions are best left unspoken.
We take our empty mugs back to the house and the kitchen. The door to the utilities room is open. Clothes spew from a dryer, light, pretty, women’s things; a tartan skirt, a mauve bra and ankle socks. Something about the scene is familiar yet oddly unsettling. I don’t picture Ruiz having women in his life even though he’s been married three times.
‘Is there something you want to share with me?’ I ask.
He looks at the basket. ‘I don’t think they’d fit.’
‘You have someone staying.’
‘My daughter.’
‘When did she get home?’
‘A while back.’ He shuts the door, trying to close off the conversation.
Ruiz’s daughter Claire has been dancing in New York. Her troubled relationship with her father has been akin to global warming- a melting of the icecaps, a rise in the oceans and a refloating of the boat- none of it achieved without sceptical voices questioning the outcome.
We move to the lounge. Papers and folders relating to the sinking of the Argo Hellas are spread across a coffee table. Ruiz takes a seat and pulls out his battered notebook.
‘I talked to the chief investigator as well as the coroner and the local police commander.’ Loose pages threaten to spill out from the broken spine as he turns them. ‘It was a thorough investigation. These are statements from witnesses and a transcript of the inquiry. They arrived by courier yesterday and I read them last night. Found nothing out of the ordinary.
‘Three people gave evidence that Helen and Chloe Tyler were on the ferry. One of them was a navy diver who was part of the recovery team.’
Ruiz hands me his statement and waits while I read it. The diver describes recovering four bodies that day. The visibility was less than ten yards and a treacherous current made the job more difficult.
On the fifth dive of the day, he found the body of a young girl snagged on the metal rungs of a ladder near a lifeboat winch, starboard side, nearest the stern. The diver cut the straps from the girl’s lifejacket, but the current ripped her body from his hands. He didn’t have enough air left in his tanks to swim after her.
‘He identified Chloe from a photograph,’ says Ruiz. ‘The girl had a cast on her arm. It matches what her grandfather said happened.’
Despite the statement, I sense that Ruiz isn’t completely convinced.
‘I did some checking on this diver. He’s a ten-year veteran, one of the most experienced divers they have.’
‘And?’
‘The navy suspended him for six months last year when he failed to check gear properly and almost drowned a trainee. Word is- well, it’s more a whisper- that he’s a drunk.’
Ruiz hands me a second statement. It belongs to a Canadian gap-year student who said he spoke to Helen and Chloe just after the ferry sailed. They were sitting in a passenger lounge, starboard side. Chloe was seasick and the backpacker offered her a pill.
‘I talked to his folks in Vancouver. They flew to Greece after the sinking and tried to talk him into coming home, but he wanted to continue. The kid is still travelling.’
‘Shouldn’t he have started uni by now?’
‘His gap year is turning into two.’
The last statement is from a German woman, Yelena Schafer, who runs a local hotel on Patmos. She drove mother and daughter to the ferry and says she waved them off.
Ruiz tells me he put in a call to the hotel but it was closed for the winter.
‘I managed to get hold of the caretaker, but this guy was all over the place like a wet dog on lino. Said he remembered Helen and Chloe. They stayed at the hotel for three weeks in June.’
‘Where is Yelena Schafer now?’
‘On holiday. The hotel won’t reopen until the spring.’
‘She might have family in Germany.’
‘I’ll call the caretaker again. He wasn’t overly helpful.’
Ruiz has left the curtains open. Through the window I see joggers ghost past on the Thames’ path and hear seagulls fighting over scraps in the ooze.
Ruiz hands me a report from the Maritime Rescue Service which lists the names of the dead, the missing and survivors. There was no official passenger manifest. The ferry was a regular island service full of tourists and locals, many of whom hopped on and off, paying for their tickets on board. Helen and Chloe most likely paid cash to avoid the paper trail left by a credit card.
Bryan Chambers said he last wired his daughter money on June 16, transferred from an account on the Isle of Man to a bank on Patmos.
What other evidence do we have that Helen and Chloe were on board the Argo Hellas? Luggage was found washed ashore on a beach, three miles east of the town. A large suitcase. A local fishing boat picked up a smaller bag belonging to Chloe.
Ruiz produces a hardcover book decorated with a collage of photographs cut from the pages of magazines and stuck onto the cover. The cardboard is swollen from water damage and the nameplate is illegible.
‘This was among the personal effects. It’s Chloe’s journal.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘I told a few white lies. I’m supposed to deliver it to the family.’
I open the book and run my fingers over the pages, which are buckled and undulating from the dried salt. The journal is more of a scrapbook than a daily diary. It contains postcards, photographs, ticket stubs and drawings, as well as the occasional diary entry and observation. Chloe pressed flowers between the pages. Poppies. I can see where the stamens and petals have stained the paper.
The brittle pages detai
l their travels- mainly in the islands. Occasionally, people are mentioned: a Turkish girl Chloe befriended and a boy who showed her how to catch fish.
There is no mention of the escape from Germany, but Chloe writes of the doctor in Italy who put her arm in a cast. He was the first to sign the plaster and drew a picture of Winnie the Pooh.
Using the postcards and place references, I can make out the route Helen took. She must have sold the car or left it somewhere, before they took a bus through mountains to Yugoslavia and across the border into Greece.
Days are unaccounted for. Weeks disappear. Mother and daughter kept moving, getting further from Germany, entering Turkey and following the coast. They finally stopped running at a campground in Fethiye on the edge of the Aegean. Chloe’s arm wasn’t healing properly. She visited the hospital again. There were more x-rays. Consultants. She wrote a postcard to her father; drew a picture of him. It was obviously never posted.
The impression I get of Chloe is of a bright, carefree child who missed her schoolfriends in Germany and her pet cat Tinkerbell, who everyone called ‘Tinkle’ because that was the sound the bell on her collar made when she tried to catch birds in the garden.
The last page of the journal is dated 22 July, two days before the Argo Hellas sank. Chloe was excited about her birthday. She would have turned seven in just over a fortnight.
Moving backwards through the final pages, I sense that Helen and Chloe had finally started to relax. They spent longer in Patmos than any place they’d visited in the previous two months.
I close Chloe’s journal and run my fingers over the collage.
Sometimes when you look too hard at a scene it leads to a kind of blindness because the image becomes burned onto our subconscious mind and will remain unchanged even when something new happens that should draw our attention. Similarly, the desire to simplify or to see a situation as a whole can cause us to ignore details that don’t fit rather than try to explain them.
‘Did they include a photograph of Helen Chambers in the stuff they sent?’ I ask Ruiz.
‘We already have one.’
Suddenly, he senses where I’m going.
‘What? You think it’s a different woman?’
‘No, but I want to be sure.’
He draws back, watching me. ‘You’re as bad as Gideon- you don’t think they’re dead.’
‘I want to know why he thinks they’re alive.’
‘Because he’s either deluded or in denial.’
‘Or he knows something.’
Ruiz stands up, stiff-kneed and grimacing. ‘If Helen and Chloe are alive, where are they?’
‘Hiding.’
‘How did they fake their deaths?’
‘Their bodies were never found. Their luggage could have been thrown into the sea.’
‘What about the statements?’
‘Bryan Chambers has the money to be very persuasive.’
‘It’s a stretch,’ says Ruiz. ‘I talked to the coroner’s office. Helen and Chloe are officially dead.’
‘Can we ask them to fax through a photograph of Helen Chambers? I just want to be sure we’re talking about the same woman.’
Veronica Cray is due to catch a train back to Bristol at six. I want to talk to her before she leaves. A minicab takes us along Fulham Palace Road, through Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. The cab’s suspension has almost collapsed completely on the right side. Maybe there’s a pedestrian lodged under the front axle.
Alongside me, Ruiz is silent. Buses shunt along the inside lane pausing to pick up queues at the bus stops. Other faces peer out from the windows or doze with their heads against the glass.
I keep going over the details of the ferry disaster. Helen and Chloe’s bodies were never recovered, but that doesn’t mean they survived. Gideon has no conclusive proof either way. That’s what he could be searching for- proof of death or proof of life. It’s not the whole answer. His crimes are too sadistic. He’s enjoying this too much to stop.
Veronica Cray is waiting for us at a cafe near platform one. Her overcoat is unbuttoned and drapes to the ground. She and Ruiz acknowledge each other without words. The only two things they have in common are their respective careers and a shared ability to let silence speak volumes.
Seats are rearranged. Watches checked. Veronica Cray has fifteen minutes.
‘The MOD wants to take over the investigation,’ she announces.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Tyler went AWOL. They claim he’s still one of theirs. They want to make the arrest.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told them to fuck off. Two women are dead and this is my investigation. And I’m not going to back off on the say-so of some pencil dick in khakis who gets a hard-on every time a tank rolls by.’
The vitriol in her voice is in sharp contrast to the care she takes in sugaring her tea and stirring it slowly. Holding the teacup between her thumb and forefinger, she drinks half the brew, ignoring the heat. Her pale fat throat seems to have a fist inside it, moving up and down.
Setting down the cup, she begins relating what she’s managed to find out about Gideon Tyler. Through a contact in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, she learned that Tyler spent four years in Belfast working for the TCG (Tasking and Co-ordination Group) in Armagh- a military intelligence body that specialised in surveillance and interrogation.
‘No wonder he’s so hard to find,’ says Ruiz. ‘These guys know how to follow someone and not be noticed. They’re experts in second and third party awareness.’
‘And how would you know a detail like that?’ asks DI Cray.
‘I worked in Belfast for a while,’ says Ruiz without offering any further explanation.
The DI doesn’t like being kept in the dark but carries on. ‘The Department of Immigration pulled up Tyler’s file. In the past six years he’s made multiple trips to Pakistan, Poland, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The length of time varies: none shorter than a week, never longer than a month.’
‘Why Egypt and Somalia?’ asks Ruiz. ‘The British army doesn’t operate there.’
‘He could have been training locals,’ says the DI.
‘It doesn’t explain the secrecy.’
‘Counter intelligence.’
‘Makes more sense.’
‘Maureen Bracken said Christine and Sylvia used to joke about Gideon being a spook.’
I consider the list of countries he visited: Afghanistan, Iraq, Poland, Pakistan, Egypt and Somalia. He is a trained interrogator, an expert in eliciting information from suspects- POWs, detainees, terrorists…
The memory of Sylvia Furness, hooded and hanging from a branch, fills my head. And a second image: Maureen Bracken, kneeling, blindfolded, with her hands outstretched. Sensory deprivation, disorientation and humiliation are the tools of interrogators and torturers.
If Gideon believes Helen and Chloe are alive, it stands to reason he’s also convinced people are hiding them. Bryan and Claudia Chambers, Christine Wheeler, Sylvia Furness and Maureen Bracken.
DI Cray gazes at me steadily. Ruiz sits motionless, with his eyes raised as if he’s listening for an approaching train or an echo from the past.
‘Let’s say you’re right and Tyler believes they’re alive,’ says Veronica Cray. ‘Why is he trying to flush them out? What’s the point? Helen isn’t going back to him and he’ll never breathe the same air as his daughter.’
‘He doesn’t want them back. He wants to punish his wife for having left him and he wants to see his daughter. Tyler is being driven by fear and hatred. Fear at what he’s capable of and fear of never seeing his daughter again. But his hate is even stronger. It has a structure all of its own.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘His is a hatred that demands we step aside; it negates the rights of others, it cleanses, it poisons, it dictates his beliefs. Hate is what sustains him.’
‘Who will he target next?’
‘No way of telling. Helen�
��s family are protected but she must have plenty of other friends.’
DI Cray leans hard on her knees, looking for a scrap of comfort in the polished caps of her shoes. A platform announcement ripples the air. She has to leave.
Buttoning her overcoat, she stands, says goodbye and hustles across the concourse towards her waiting train with an ogreish intensity. Ruiz watches her go and scratches his nose.
‘Do you think inside Cray there’s a thin woman, trying to get out?’
‘Two of them.’
‘You want a drink?’
I look at my watch. ‘Another time. Julianne’s party starts at eight. I want to buy her a present.’
‘Like what?’
‘Jewellery is always nice.’
‘Only if you’re having an affair.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Expensive gifts express guilt.’
‘No they don’t.’
‘The more expensive the jewellery, the deeper the guilt.’
‘You are a very sad suspicious man.’
‘I’ve been married three times. I know these things.’
Ruiz is watching me sidelong. I can feel my left hand twitching.
‘Julianne’s been away a lot. Travelling. I miss her. I thought I might buy her something special.’
My excuses sound too strident. I should just be quiet. I’m not going to tell Ruiz about Julianne’s boss, or the room service receipt, or the lingerie or the phone calls. And I’m not going to mention Darcy’s kiss or Julianne’s question about whether I still love her. I won’t say anything- and he won’t ask.
That’s one of the great paradoxes of friendship between men. It’s like an unspoken code: you don’t start tunnelling unless you hit rock bottom.
51
The central hall of the Natural History Museum has been transformed into a prehistoric forest. Monkeys, reptiles and birds seem to scale the terracotta walls and soaring arches. A skeletal Diplodocus is lit up in green.
I am showered, neatly shaved and medicated, dressed in my finest evening attire, which hasn’t had an airing for almost two years. Julianne told me to hire a tux from Moss Bros but why waste a perfectly good old one?
Shatter jo-3 Page 31
