Page 50 of Deep Blue Lies

FORTY-NINE

We walk back upstairs in silence, returning to where we spoke before. But instead of sitting at the sofas, we move inside, to an area that seems less about luxury and more about where the ship is driven from. There’s a table here, and Simon invites me to sit down.

“Did Karen’s diary say anything about the day before the murder?” Simon asks, his eyes on his hands, clasped together in front of him.

I think back. “Something. It said she was planning on a day out, on the yacht you were living on and fixing up.”

“ Sunbeam .” He pauses and smiles deeply. “She was a twenty-seven-footer.” He glances around ruefully at the absurd luxury that now surrounds him. “She say anything about the baby? Mandy’s baby?”

I’m anxious as he brings this up, and I’m not sure why. At least, I’m not sure I want to admit to myself why. But I nod my head. “She said Mandy had to come here, to Athens, for some sort of paperwork, and she wanted Karen to look after it.”

“Yeah. That’s right.” He nods, looking out the window at the ship’s enormous bow, but he’s not looking at anything, more buying himself time .

“She was a strange girl, Mandy.” He turns back to look at me.

“It was obvious what Jason saw in her, but…” – he makes a face – “I’m not saying there was actually anything wrong with her, just she wasn’t bright.

It’s like…” He sticks out his jaw, then rasps the stubble with his hand.

“There weren’t many people there who even cared she’d had a baby, except maybe the nannies, who were cooing all over it.

But she decided the only people she was gonna trust was Karen or Imogen. No one else could even look at it.”

He stops and looks away, then he gets up suddenly, walks to a fridge built into one wall, and pulls open the door.

He takes out a can of 7Up, then holds it out to me.

“You want one?” I don’t get a chance to answer before he grabs a second, closes the fridge and comes and sits back down, sliding one can over to me.

He pulls the tab on the other, looks at it a moment, like he’s not sure where it came from. Then he takes a sip.

“What I’m about to tell you, I’ve never told another soul.” He doesn’t look at me. He drinks again, then sets the can down on the table, leaving his hands together, like he’s praying. He goes on.

“It was our day off, Karen and me. We’d only just got together, a few weeks before that.

But we’d clicked. We were both into the same stuff.

” He shakes his head. “It’s hard to explain what it was like working there, at the ADR. It’s every day.

You’d get up at six-thirty, start work at seven, and you don’t stop until the evening.

Then you’re still on duty, socialising with clients, maybe take them out to a bar, come back at two, three in the morning, and it’s expected, day after day.

And mid-summer, there’s no time off. And with Mandy having the kid, she wasn’t working, and Jason was busy, distracted.

It was even more intense.” Now he does look at me.

“Look, I’m not proud of this, Ava. It’s not who I am now, but I’ll be blunt: I scored some cocaine.

We were going to take Sunbeam out, get high and…

take advantage of a chance to unwind. A rare moment of privacy. You know what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“Alright. But on the day, there was a problem. Mandy had dumped the baby with Karen, saying she had to get the early bus, something like that.” He looks down at the can on the table, then back at me.

“I told her, put it with the nannies – that’s literally why they’re there, but she refused.

She knew what Mandy was like and didn’t want her to freak out.

I think Karen thought she could get Imogen to take care of the kid, but she was sick or something.

So instead, Karen comes up with this idea.

We’ll just take the kid onto the yacht.” He fixes me with his blue eyes.

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. This was a super quiet baby, you never heard it cry.

Plus it was the calmest day ever. You’ve been there, you’ve seen what it’s like?

Some days in Skalios Bay the water is an actual mirror, not a breath of wind.

So we thought, we’ll strap the kid in its car seat, park it in the cockpit with some shade. It wouldn’t get in the way.”

I don’t reply, just wait.

“That’s what we did. We motored out of the marina, out in the bay, I put the sails up, because…

I wanted to sail. Back then I hated motor yachts, called them floating caravans…

” He takes a moment to shake his head at the literal ship he’s sitting in.

“But we didn’t move, there wasn’t any wind.

” He stops again, his eyes have a faraway look to them.

“So there we are, a half mile out, not moving, Karen gives the baby a bottle and it falls asleep. And we’ve got this cocaine…So we head downstairs, do a couple of lines each. One thing leads to another. We’re drinking a little too. We’ve got a stereo playing, so we don’t hear too well. And then…”

Simon’s tongue is poking just slightly out of the corner of his mouth. His blue eyes turn to me again, I sense they’re pleading with me not to judge him. But I don’t know what for.

“What happened next?”

“I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but sometimes in the summer, you get those calm days, and then the wind comes in sudden. Strong?”

I shake my head, but he just waves this away.

“It happens, believe me. And that’s what it was, that day. Look, picture it. I’m high as a kite, drunk too. I’m stark bollock-naked, and this yacht’s got her full sails up and we go from zero knots to forty, like that.” He clicks his fingers.

“She’s pressed flat – one-eighty-degree capsize, until the steering pulls her into the wind and she comes up a little.

It’s almost impossible to even get out of the cabin to get her back under control.

All the while I’m thinking, we’re taking on water, we might even sink.

The sails catch the water and we could lose the mast. But… ” He stops again.

“What?”

He gives a sudden smile. “I’m not just a pretty face, I know my way around a boat.

I did back then. I work like a madman. I release the sheets, I yell at Karen to pull in the genoa before it flogs itself to death.

I dump half the main, get it tied up and – we’re still naked – you know?

But we get it under control. And now the wind’s stabilised, still blowing force six, maybe seven, but suddenly we’re sailing.

We’re flying along, glorious sunshine, and I’m thinking what a lucky escape, and what an adventure.

We go below, put some clothes on. And that’s when Karen remembers. ”

“The baby?”

Simon nods. “Yeah. The baby.”

“Where was it?”

He doesn’t answer. “Well I don’t exactly know, but it wasn’t on the boat.”

I feel my eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

“I was living on Sunbeam at that time. She wasn’t in service because it wasn’t safe for the guests to use her.” He waves a hand. “A few things, but one of them was the guard rails around the deck. As in, there weren’t any.”

Again, I just wait.

“When we went below, we weren’t completely stupid. We left the baby in the bottom of the cockpit, strapped into a car seat. There’s no way it could have gone anywhere. But we couldn’t have anticipated a full capsize…” He shrugs. “I suppose it must have floated ou t.”

I’m quiet a second.

“You lost the baby?”

Simon stares at me, his eyes haunted. “Yeah. We did.”

“Oh my God.” This is horrific. But I blink in confusion. Because I don’t understand what this means.

“But the baby was found , the next day, when they found Mandy’s and Jason’s bodies. He killed her, then himself, but left the baby alive.”

“I haven’t finished yet.” Simon’s voice is quiet. But he takes a moment. “When the wind comes in, the sea gets rough quick. And we’re moving six, seven knots. By the time we knew it was gone, we were already a half-mile from where it would’ve entered the water. There was no chance of finding it.

“We tried anyway. We tacked back and forth in that fucking bay over and over, hoping against hope. But it was obvious. I don’t know, I thought maybe the car seat would have just sunk, and drowned the kid in seconds.

A small mercy maybe, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Ava, you have to understand the situation, what it meant for us.

We’d killed a baby. Worse, everybody there knew I was into the coke, I bragged about it.

And the Greek laws on drugs, without the sort of protection that wealth gives you? Oh my God.”

He takes a swig from his 7Up.

“So our lives, as we knew them. They were over. We were gonna have to go ashore and say what’d happened, and we were going to prison.

For sure. For a long time. On top of that, we’d still got a whole load of coke inside us…

So we made this plan. We were gonna run away.

On Sunbeam .” A bleak smile comes across his face now.

“I don’t know if we’d have done it. I don’t think it would even have worked. A coastguard cutter would have caught up with us long before we got out of Greek waters. Even then, it wouldn’t have made any difference…” He sees that I’m not following, and winds back a beat. He draws in a deep breath.

“We took Sunbeam back to the marina. Karen got off, she was going back to the staff house at the resort. The idea was she’d grab clothes, her passport, any money she could find, meanwhile I’d fill up with fuel, fresh water.

We were desperate. We did the rest of the coke, just to try and keep our heads level.

” He shakes his head again. Then takes a deep, calming breath.

“So I finish victualling the boat, and then I’m sitting there waiting for Karen, shitting my pants because she’s taking so long, and I think the police are gonna come before she does.

But eventually I see her, walking down the dock.

And she looks…I don’t know. Like something’s been wiped clean.

Rewritten. There’s no bags, no panic – just this crazy look of calm on her face. ”

“Why? What happened?”

“Well that’s the thing. The next thing she did was give me this crazy, crazy fucking story.”