by Tina Seskis
‘Jemma, love,’ Dad says. ‘Are you hungry?’
I nod, although I’m not, and I almost miss Chati, who always seemed able to tempt me. Jamie was a good cook, too. Sadly, Dad’s culinary efforts don’t quite hit the mark, although of course I’d never tell him that.
Dad sits down on the chair opposite me. ‘Jemma, love, I’m worried about you.’
There’s nothing I can say to make him feel better. He takes my hand. ‘I’m sorry your mum’s not here for you.’
I don’t know how to respond. What can either of us do about that? Perhaps there’s no point in being mad any more and, besides, Dad has more than made up for being a historically crap parent in the last few weeks. He kisses my forehead and stands up and leaves the room. Fifteen minutes later he comes back with a bowl of soup and some cheese on toast, and although the food might not be to the gourmet standard of my honeymoon resort, it’s enough that my dad is trying, and that he loves me, despite everything.
77
Sasha comes round again the next day, and I’m concerned about her. I can tell by the look in her eyes, her despair that I’ve got myself into this mess, that she’s blaming herself. Sasha is one of those people who loves the romance of consequence, of the ‘If I hadn’t done X, then Y would never have happened’ theory of the present. In Sasha’s world, her fake email to my disastrous online-date, Dan, which kick-started this whole sorry sequence of events, renders Jamie’s supposed death and my arrest for his murder entirely her fault. I tell her not to be silly, but she’s insisting on cancelling her beach wedding in Barbados and moving it to Caterham, and hopes I’ll still be bridesmaid. The fact that I might be in jail by then anyway occurs to her too late, she’s already said it, and she starts crying again. I hold her hand as she sobs, and tell her over and over that it’s not her fault. Whatever I do I mustn’t let this ruin her life too.
Over the weeks following my arrest, I continue to find it hard to know how to feel, even when the worst happens, and I’m officially charged with my husband’s murder. It’s as if I’ve gone beyond grief and disbelief to numbness. The days slip by, and my mind grows more and more somnolent, and my body fills outwards … and when my baby kicks for the first time it should be a joyful moment, but it is laced with sadness. What start am I giving this child? What hope does he have? Where is his father? Who will bring him up, if his mother goes to jail? What on earth have I done?
Kay and Dad do their best, and my baby keeps on growing, and the weeks roll by – and then at last the status quo is broken. A date has been set, and the only good piece of news is that it’s in December. Small mercies. At least my trial, for the murder of my husband, is three months after I’m due to give birth to his baby.
78
In a sunny corner of a large, bucolic garden near Cheltenham, Dan is digging a hole. It’s for a rectangular fish pond, and he really has to put his back into it, and although he enjoys manual labour, he no longer likes digging trenches. It makes him think of his brother, who, as far as anyone still knows, may or may not be dead, but, assuming he is, has never had a funeral. The ghastly scenario is a cancer that has crept into the corner of his heart and eaten away at the happy life he has tried so hard to build for himself.
And yet it was never meant to have been like this. His brother’s wedding was supposed to have been the full stop to his past. It was meant to have been the time he properly said goodbye to his love for a girl who long ago had betrayed him. It was meant to have been a time for forgiveness.
Dan stops and wipes his brow. The sun has a strength to it that should be uplifting, but isn’t. Instead, Dan feels deeply saddened as he remembers past events all over again. He’d been phlegmatic about seeing her at the wedding rehearsal. No, not even phlegmatic – completely fine. They’d run into each other at a couple of family events over the previous few years. He was happy with Lydia. It was all in the past.
It had been a foul-weathered evening, and the church had been gloomy. He pictures Jemma now, running in from the rain, completely drenched, and it reminds him of the first time he ever saw her. She’d always had a raw kind of energy that made people look at her. A neurotic glow, he’d called it. He remembers watching her race over to Jamie and throw her arms around him, in an ostentatious apology for being late for the rehearsal. Jamie laughing and saying it was fine, as long as she didn’t repeat it on the day itself. Her smiling entrancingly at the vicar, getting away with it. The jealousy that had struck him, deep in his bones. The sudden desire to rip his little brother’s throat out. It was just as bad as the time he’d seen them kissing in his parents’ house. What had been stronger in both of those moments, six years apart? Dan’s possessiveness of Jemma? Or his resentment of his brother? He still isn’t sure. He can barely admit to himself the extent of his desire for revenge. He’s tried so hard to suppress his feelings over the intervening years, but it seems he has failed.
As Dan carries on digging, the hole he’s in getting bigger and bigger, he recalls Jemma’s gaze moving away from Jamie and falling briefly on him, and the fact she was finally over him had been obvious, and it had angered him further. He’d hated her and Jamie in that moment, almost wished them both dead.
Dan groans as he flings another shovel-load of dirt over his shoulder. The earth is black and rich, so full of potential. The sun is too hot on his back. He wonders vaguely whether Jemma will be found guilty of his brother’s murder. The case against her is almost entirely circumstantial – a trial by media, in his opinion – but it has been relentless and brutal and utterly destructive for all of them. Was she capable of killing someone, though? Dan honestly doesn’t know. And would it ultimately prove to be his fault, for ruining their happiness, just as they had once ruined his? What kind of Armageddon had one little phone call unleashed?
Dan puts down his shovel, as if in surrender, and lies prone in the trench, which is just long enough to fit him now. He lies still and closes his eyes and imagines soil being flung on top of him, and the midday sun on his face is glorious, and the smell of the earth is rich, and mellow, and full of worms and maggots, like death.
79
A few months later
The police call Jamie’s parents second, straight after they’ve let Jemma know. His mother takes the call, and when she puts down the phone her breath is jumpy and her eyes are flinty. She calls for her still-unwell husband as she lies gasping and swooning on the multi-pillowed sofa, and when Peter shuffles in, she insists that he fans her face, as she’s sure she’s about to pass out. Eventually, she sits up and her lips are thin and red, and her eyes are flashing with a hard-to-define emotion. What is it? What is she feeling? It’s as if the path has been opened up again, the faint hope that her Jamie, her precious baby, might still be alive, after all this time. And yet, if it turns out that that is indeed true, that Jamie has absconded somehow, a different path might therefore be blocked. The one that sees Jemma go to jail. Even Veronica is appalled at her conflicting emotions, the depths of her hatred.
‘That was the police,’ she says, at last.
‘Oh?’ says Peter. He starts coughing, a little at first, and then harder, until he’s hacking – taking away the attention from her as usual, she thinks crossly.
‘Apparently the story is about to break, so they wanted us to know first …’ Veronica takes a long, self-important pause. It’s the most extraordinary feeling, that this is her moment, and she despises herself for it. ‘… Another tourist has gone missing in the Maldives.’
‘Oh.’
‘Another honeymooner. Another man.’
‘Oh.’
‘On the same island.’ Veronica starts weeping.
‘Ohhh,’ says Peter, but she can tell that this last one has a note of understanding in it, rather than being a filler to hopefully appease rather than antagonize her.
‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ she sobs. ‘I knew it must have been that Pascal. I never trusted him, the slimy French snake.’
This is no tim
e for xenophobia, Peter thinks, but he daren’t say so. ‘Now, come on, dear, is that what the police have said? Otherwise it’s rather jumping to conclusions.’
‘Well, no, they haven’t said anything yet. But perhaps Pascal’s running some kind of racket, helping people disappear and start new lives. How could Jamie do that to us?’
‘We don’t know that, Ronnie. We don’t know anything. It might turn out to be just a terrible coincidence. We need to wait for the police to investigate it.’
‘Oh, my nerves just can’t stand it!’ Veronica says. ‘Fetch me a sherry, will you, Peter?’
Peter nods, ever obedient, but in her heightened state her husband’s compliance just annoys Veronica. Why is he always so passive, she thinks. Why can’t he be passionate for a change, show some emotion? Why hadn’t he ever loved her the way Dan and Jamie had fawned over that dreadful girl? And now her darling boy is still missing, and yet Jemma is surely off the hook. It’s too much.
Veronica lets out a low, guttural wail that turns into a growled, ‘Hurry up, Peter.’ She needs a drink. She watches her husband take a few shaky steps towards the door, and then he wheezes again, and an expression crosses his face that she hasn’t seen before … And now, instead of going out of the room, he turns around, walks over to his wing-backed chair and sits down decisively – and has the temerity to tell her that if she wants a drink, she can bloody well get it herself.
80
The buffet is as enticing and food-laden as ever, the cream puffs fresh, the fruit displayed in a bounteously flamboyant fashion, the sushi cut like jewels, the aromas sweet and intoxicating, but Nathalie can’t stomach anything. She hadn’t hesitated for one single second to report her husband missing – in fact, she’d run into the main restaurant and screamed the place down, so pretty much everyone had heard the moment she’d realized he was gone. But that had been twenty-four hours ago now, and since then the island has been crawling with police, seemingly dozens of them, and she’s been either completely hysterical or else on the verge of it. Surely it was too much of a coincidence to expect a good outcome for Cory, not after the last disappearance here. She’d even suggested to him, once she’d realized, that they pick another island, but Cory’s heart had been set on this one. He’d just laughed and told her that she was being paranoid, and besides, it was the wife who’d done it anyway. So unless she’d been planning on drowning him, her husband had quipped, he was sure that he would survive their honeymoon.
Nathalie feels light-headed again. She wonders where he could be, what could have happened. He’d said he was going for a quick walk to look for baby sharks basking in the shallows while she was blow-drying her hair before dinner, joking that she always took so long. But then he’d never come back, and when she’d run down and looked at the beach, curling emptily away in both directions, she’d known instantly. The feeling had been like a rock, wrapped in barbed wire, landing in the bottom of her stomach. Thank goodness her parents had got straight on a flight from Sydney and are here with her already. The situation is just too horrific to handle alone.
‘Traditional curry, ma’am?’ says the smiley, soft-eyed chef. She shakes her head, but her mother insists that she eat something, and even Nathalie isn’t completely averse – she hasn’t eaten a thing since she realized Cory was gone, and the food is delicious. Mrs Jarvis nods in thanks and says that she’ll have some too. Mother and daughter head back to their white-clothed table, which is in the far corner, shaded by palm trees, the view exquisite. Their waiter, Bobbi, appears discreetly and pulls out the chairs for them, rearranges their linen napkins across their laps. Once they are settled her mother does her best to cajole her, but it seems Nathalie has no appetite after all. She can’t bear the eyes on her, the thrum of the search boats, the grotesque atmosphere of suppressed excitement. She can’t bear the feeling of doom, gathering in the pit of her belly. She longs for Cory, who she has been with since high school, who is her best friend in the world. And so as Nathalie picks at her plate, she can’t help but break down again – and to hide her endless tears, she turns and stares out to the blinking blue sea, and she searches hopelessly for her brand-new husband, out there in the soft, slack waves.
81
Pascal Anais sits sullenly across from two Maldivian policemen. They are the same officers who’d managed the initial investigation into the baffling disappearance of Jamie Armstrong, although the interview isn’t taking place in the sanatorium this time. Instead they’re all crammed into the small office behind Reception, cooped up with whirring printers and photocopiers that make the air-conditioned air feel hot and full of static. Pascal is furious with himself. He knew he should have quit his job and left the island after the police had departed nine months ago. It seems he’d been right about it being too risky to remain.
The police officers are as smartly uniformed as ever, but they have a noticeably brighter air than they’d had by the end of the original investigation, when they’d been upstaged by those British police who, in Pascal’s opinion, seemed just as keen to get a tan as solve any potential crimes. Pascal feels ganged up on today, and he’s still in his wetsuit, and he doesn’t know how many more times he’ll have to say that he really doesn’t know where Jamie is, or this new man, whatever he’s called. Why do they have to keep picking on him? Do they really think he runs an international smuggling ring from a small thatch-roofed building on the south side of an island that you could fit into the middle of the Seine? It’s a ridiculous suggestion.
Pascal wishes he’d never got involved with Jamie now, then perhaps none of this would ever have happened. Mon dieu. All he’d done was sort out a deal on a honeymoon, as a favour to his sister, but no matter how many times Pascal tells that to the police, they refuse to believe him. And now this other guy has gone missing too, and Pascal doesn’t even know who he is, yet the police insist on insinuating that he’s involved somehow. It’s as if there’s a magic sinkhole, somewhere on this atrocious island, which husbands fall into. Pascal folds his arms and scowls as the police try again.
‘So, where were you on the evening that Mr Faustino disappeared?’
Pascal huffs. ‘I told you. In my room. I was tired.’
‘Did you speak to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone see you go into your room?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t looking.’ Pascal feels trapped, enraged, and he longs to just get up, walk out of this whirring, clattering room. Don’t these clowns know how exhausting it is, taking bored, rich tourists out to see the same fish, the same reefs, day after day? Constantly having to balance flirting with the wives with not pissing off the husbands. Often, after he’s showered and eaten, he just stays in his room and watches a movie, gets away from everyone.
Pascal sighs. Whatever happens, as soon as he can, he’s going to go back to Thailand, where people are normal. Staying on this tiny island has stultified him, turned him ever so slightly crazy, and it isn’t worth it, no matter how good the pay might be. He’s had enough. The police have nothing on him. They can’t force him to stay and sit through this ludicrous charade.
‘Can I go now?’ Pascal says. The policemen look surprised. They turn and glance at each other, shrug their shoulders.
‘Do you have anything more to add?’ the sinister-looking officer asks.
‘Non,’ Pascal says. ‘Rien.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. I have nothing to say.’
The two policemen look at each other again. Pascal holds his breath.
‘OK,’ the smaller one says. ‘You are free to go. For now.’ He clicks off the tape recorder.
‘D’accord, poulets.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, thank you,’ says Pascal, and he stands up and stomps barefoot out of the office.
82
Nine months earlier
Jamie lurched out of the sea and ran along the dark, cool beach, stumbling and retching. Oh my God. What had ju
st happened? What the fuck had he and Jemma been thinking? Physically fighting in the sea, in the dark, off their faces – they could so easily have drowned.
Jamie hared his way across the sand and around the tip of the island, away from the bungalows, until finally he began to slow his pace as his breath caught up with him. Just before the beach bar, he slunk away into the patch of jungle that crossed the north-east side of the island, where the sand became pebbly and it was scratchy underfoot. He stopped completely now, and bent over for a moment, panting. Thank fuck he’d come to his senses and let her go, but bloody hell, it had been way too close for comfort. But what on earth had been the matter with her? Despite all the times she’d gone for him before, like a wild cat, he’d never thought she would actually try to kill him.
And yet maybe it wasn’t all that surprising, Jamie thought now. Ever since their wedding day, Jemma had been acting like she fucking hated him, would barely come near him, certainly wouldn’t sleep with him, and on their honeymoon too. He’d known all along that she was lying about her period, but short of forcing her, what else could he have done, apart from try to make the best of a bad situation.
Jamie sank down onto the sandy ground, his head between his legs, trying to work it out. None of it made any sense. Had she meant it when she’d said in the restaurant that she wished that she’d married his brother? Had there been something going on between Jemma and Dan behind his back – perhaps even on the night before the wedding? He and Jemma had stuck to tradition and been apart that night – and it would explain Jemma’s apparent gigantic change of heart. Surely not? If it were true, Jamie would kill Dan. Literally pulverize him.
