Shatter (39 page)

on 19 May shows him wearing a basebal cap pul ed down over his eyes.

The evidence against him is compel ing, but circumstantial. He had Christine Wheeler’s mobile. Alice Furness has identified him as the man she spoke to in the pub four days before her mother disappeared. Darcy is stil missing but might also be able to recognise him from the train. Maureen Bracken only met Gideon once, seven years ago. She didn’t remember his voice but the man who spoke to her asked about Helen Chambers.

Police haven’t managed to link Gideon to any of the other mobiles used in the attacks, which had either been stolen or purchased using fake identification.

Charlie is talking to me: ‘Earth to Dad, Earth to Dad. Are you reading me?’

It’s her mother’s line. She is looking through a rack of clothes, trying to find something dark and goth-like.

‘Did you hear anything I said?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re hopeless sometimes.’ Again, she sounds like Julianne. ‘It was about Darcy.’

‘What about her?’

‘Why can’t she come and live with us?’

‘She has her own family. And we don’t have the room.’

‘We could make room.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘But her aunt hates her.’

‘Who told you that?’

The hesitation is enough evidence. Charlie makes it worse by turning and burrowing into an open cardboard box ful of dol ’s clothes. She won’t look at me.

‘Have you talked to Darcy?’

She chooses not to answer rather than tel a lie.

‘When did you talk to her?’

Charlie looks at me as though it’s my fault that she can’t keep a secret.

‘Please, sweetheart. I’ve been worried. I need to know where she is.’

‘In London.’

‘You’ve talked to her?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Why didn’t you tel me?’

‘She told me not to. She said that you’d come looking for her. She said you’d make her go to Spain with her aunt, the one who smokes and smel s like a donkey.’

I’m more relieved than angry. It’s been five days since Darcy went missing and she hasn’t returned any of my cal s or messages. Charlie comes clean. She and Darcy have been talking most days and sending text messages. Darcy is living in London and hanging out with an older girl who used to dance with the Royal Bal et.

‘I want you to cal her for me.’

Charlie hesitates. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes.’

‘What if she won’t be my friend any more?’

‘This is more important.’

Charlie takes her mobile from her jeans and punches the number.

‘She’s not there,’ she says. ‘Do you want me to leave a message?’

I think for a moment. I’l be in London four hours from now.

‘Tel her to cal 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
cal s, but she’l answer yours.’

Charlie frowns crossly. She has the cutest twin creases above the bridge of her nose.

‘If you read my text messages, I’l 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, signal ing left or right. A hand slaps the rol er 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 col ection of vil ages.

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 actual y 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 pul s out his battered notebook.

‘I talked to the chief investigator as wel as the coroner and the local police commander.’ Loose pages threaten to spil 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— wel , 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 pil .

‘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 stil travel ing.’

‘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 tel s me he put in a cal to the hotel but it was closed for the winter.

‘I managed to get hold of the caretaker, but this guy was al 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’l cal 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 seagul s 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 ful 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 smal er bag belonging to Chloe.

Ruiz produces a hardcover book decorated with a col age of photographs cut from the pages of magazines and stuck onto the cover. The cardboard is swol en from water damage and the nameplate is il egible.

‘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 wel 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 detail their travels— mainly in the islands. Occasional y, 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 fol owing the coast. They final y 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 Tinkerbel , who everyone cal ed ‘Tinkle’ because that was the sound the bel on her col ar 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 final y 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 col age.

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 wil 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 official y 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 col apsed 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.