Page 46 of Deep Blue Lies

FORTY-FIVE

“What do you know?” Sophia asks, a few moments later.

“What?”

I realise I must have been sitting here a while, just resting in the silence. It’s a lovely peaceful place, scented by the flowers and the lemon tree, shady but still warm.

“About where you were born and everything? What do you know for certain? You said you were from the island?”

“Yeah.” I nod, pulling myself up straighter.

“I was born on the island. At least, that’s what my passport says…

” I stop, it’s here with me, I put it in my bag this morning, after what happened last night in my apartment.

I rummage for a second and pull it out, then hold it out to her. Sophia turns to the back.

“OK. So a British passport, but place of birth: Alythos, Greece.”

I give a shrug.

“Well, that looks pretty official. And it has your date of birth. May 20, 2001.” She smiles suddenly, a flash of white teeth. “You’re exactly one month older than me. That’s cool.”

The smile lingers, then fades away. “How about a birth certificate? You have one of those? You must have had one to get a passport? ”

“Yeah.” I frown. “I think so. At home. I’m sure I’ve seen one.”

“English or Greek?”

“Greek.”

“And you don’t have it here?”

I shake my head. “No. Mum’s always looked after that sort of thing.”

“Yeah. Mothers are good for that.”

We’re both quiet.

“Maybe you can find out from the records here? If you were born here, it would have been recorded…although…” She makes a face.

“What?”

“It’s just…Greek bureaucracy, it can be difficult.” She gives a lopsided look. “That’s kind of an understatement. It’s a nightmare.”

“Do you know anything about it?” I ask, suddenly hopeful, but she shakes her head again.

“No. Mamá might. I mean, she went through it all, when she adopted me, I suppose. But that was a long time ago. I’m not sure how much she’ll remember. And since then it’s probably all changed.”

For the first time it hits me that, however hard this is for me to deal with, I’m not the only one who’s gone through tough times. There’s a portrait on the wall inside the house, Maria and a younger Sophia, with a man who must be her father.

“Is that your dad?” I point to it now.

“Yeah.”

“He looks nice.”

She looks wistful a moment. Sad, she nods. “Yeah. He was.”

“I could ask my mother, about the adoption stuff,” she goes on quickly. “I don’t know if she’ll be able to help, but I’m sure she’ll want to. She’s pretty good like that.”

I look around before answering. I’m not sure how I came to be here, sitting at this table, looking out over the pretty garden, the lemon tree, the ancient stone wall covered in roses. The view up to the mountainside beyond. I find myself nodding.

“Would you? Yeah, that would be cool.”

Again we both fall quiet, but only for a moment.

“Do you want some olives?”

Before I can answer Sophia jumps up again. When she comes back, it’s not just with a jar of giant olives, under her arm she also has a laptop. She puts it on the table and unscrews the jar. She spoons out a dozen or so olives onto the plate, and pushes it towards me.

“I was thinking you could try and find the people in the diary. Track them down. Maybe they could tell you something?”

I’m confused by this. “How would I find them?”

She pops an olive in her mouth, it’s so big it makes her cheek puff out, like a hamster. She tries to answer like that, but the words come out all wrong. So she bites the meat off the olive then pops the stone out and tries again.

“At the front of the diary?”

I don’t know what she means, but she shows me. Right on the front page are some contact details. There’s only two there: Imogen Grant , with a phone number, which I think has an American code in front of it. The second one is an email address: [email protected]

“Are there any other ‘Simons’ in the diary?” she asks. “If not this has to be the guy your mum was with, just before the murders.” She doesn’t seem to be listening, so I don’t even answer, but I move my chair to better see her screen.

“What are you doing?”

She still doesn’t answer, but her fingers are working fast on the keyboard, typing into a black window that’s appeared on her screen. I’m distracted by the background photo on her desktop. It’s her riding some sort of flying surfboard thing.

“I’m pinging it to see if the email’s still live. There.” She sits back, waits a second, and a new line of text appears:

451 Temporary Local Proble m

“What does that mean?”

“It means Popmail still exists,” – Sophia turns to me, looking thoughtful – “but this Simon guy probably doesn’t use this email anymore. Or he might have died.” She brightens. “Let’s find out.”

She turns back to the computer, clicking open another browser window, and her fingers blur as she types a search for Simon + Walker + Denzil OR Walker-Denzil . “Funny name,” she explains, as the search runs.

She’s much quicker than me scanning the results.

She’s already clicked the fourth one down before I’ve finished reading the summary of the first. A new page opens, which seems to be some sort of crew-finding service for yachts.

There’s a photograph of a man in his late thirties, with brown hair and tanned skin.

He’s standing behind the wheel of a large sailing yacht, braced against the boat’s heel.

“Here we go,” Sophia says. “Superyacht Crew International. Simon Walker-Denzil. He’s a captain, with a ‘Master 3000 GT licence’ – whatever that is, and full STCW training.

Good for him. But this is four years ago.

” Already she’s clicking back off the page, and hitting another link.

This time a newspaper article opens. There’s another picture, of an enormous boat this time, more of a ship really.

The article seems to be about corruption, as much of it as can be read before Sophia has covered the text with another search box.

This zooms straight to where Simon’s name appears in the article. A snippet of text:

Celestial’s captain is thought to be a British man, Simon Walker-Denzil. The rumours are he was hired because he keeps his mouth shut. However the yacht has been flagged for “security reasons” in multiple ports.

“This is better, it’s from last year,” Sophia says, though I can’t see where she’s seen this. “Let me see, Celestial ...” On a new tab she runs a search for “ Yacht Celestial ”, then another for “ Yacht Celestial + location ” .

“I could try with AIS, but I doubt most of these superyachts would bother turning it on.”

I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t. “What’s AIS? And also, how do you know all this stuff?”

“I told you, my dad was a programmer. But he used to work on fishing boats too, so I know a bit about boats. Hence the AIS.”

“I… what…?”

“It’s the identification system that ships use. You can track them on sites like MarineTraffic. So it’s like air traffic control, but for ships.” She glances at me, a little embarrassed. “It’s maybe a bit geeky, but…I’m a bit of a geek.”

Another window appears on the screen. It’s a map of this part of the Aegean, with little flashing orange and blue triangles, that I suppose must be ships? Sophia runs another search, typing “ Celestial ” and ticking the option for private yacht. But nothing comes up.

“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “We’ll find it.”

She runs the search again in Google, but clicks on “ News ” this time, and now she picks the first story on the list. It’s dated from two days ago.

Superyacht Celestial spotted in Athens Marina

“Here we go. I’ve got a friend in Athens. There’re always loads of these boats there, the owners hardly ever use them, so they just sit there. I bet it’s still there.”

I’m a bit bewildered by how fast she did all that.

“But I still can’t contact him. I mean, you can’t just walk onto someone’s superyacht?”

For the first time, Sophia looks beaten. She bites her lip, and her fingers stay still. Then, just as she’s about to answer, the black text window she first used appears again on the screen.

220 mail.popmail.com ESMTP Service Ready

250 2.1.0 Sender OK

250 2.1.5 Recipient OK

“Oh,” Sophia says. “That is still his address. So maybe you could just email him?”