Page 61 of Deep Blue Lies

SIXTY

Neither of us says anything about it, but I feel that whatever might have been about to happen now isn’t.

I take the bag, open the door and carry it inside, emptying it carefully onto the kitchen table.

It’s clear enough what it is, my laptop had butterfly stickers on the lid because everyone at university had a MacBook Air.

I can still see them, but the lid itself has been ripped off, the screen smashed into black shards of plastic-backed glass.

“What the hell is going on?” Sophia asks, but I can’t answer. I have no idea. “Is it yours?”

I nod. I didn’t tell her, so I do now. “It was stolen from me, a week ago.”

“ What? How?”

I tell her about the break-in, how I’d been stupid and left it in view on the kitchen table, and how the apartments here all seem to have the same key, so maybe that’s how they got in.

This time we do check, going back outside and trying the key that fits my front door into the two other apartments on my floor. It doesn’t work in either.

We give up and go back into my apartment. I notice the bottle of Metaxa I was going to offer her. I pick it up with a half-hearted shrug, and she laughs lightly.

“Not sure I’m in the mood now.”

“Me neither.” Our eyes fall back to the broken laptop on the table.

“I can understand stealing it, but why smash it up?” Sophia asks.

I try to make my brain focus on the question, but I’m tired now, tired and a little drunk still.

“It wasn’t a very good laptop. Maybe whoever took it realised that – that it wasn’t worth selling, and they were angry?”

It doesn’t sound convincing to me, and it seems Sophia agrees.

“Do you believe that?”

I shrug. “I don’t know what else to believe.”

“Did you have a password?” she asks a moment later. “You’d have to…and your fingerprint for unlocking it?”

“Yeah.”

“So they wouldn’t have got into it, whoever stole it. Macs are secure,” she continues. “So maybe that’s what made them angry? They were looking for something, and they couldn’t find it? So maybe it’s a message?”

That unsettles me even more.

“What kind of message?”

“I don’t know, stop digging? What you’re doing, looking into your past, it’s opening up questions about the ADR? And if Mum’s right, and it wasn’t Jason Wright who killed Mandy Paul, but both of them were murdered, then maybe whoever did it doesn’t want those questions asked?”

“Well who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.”

I think of everyone I’ve met from that time. There’s one face that sticks in my mind, one presence.

“What about Kostas?”

“ What? ”

“There’s something about him, I keep seeing him watching me, it freaks me out… ”

“Don’t be stupid.”

I pause. Something about the way she says the word “stupid” opens an immediate and gaping void between us.

“Why’s it stupid? He was there at the time, he lied when I first spoke to him and?—”

“Because he’s my boss .” She glares at me now. It’s crazy, I really thought something might happen between the two of us tonight. But this isn’t what I had in mind.

“Just because you work for the guy doesn’t mean you know what he was doing twenty years ago.”

She gives me an angry look, but I think she isn’t going to argue with the logic.

“What about Gregory Duncan? He’s a weirdo,” she says instead. My mind goes right back to the meeting I had with him, in his house. He seemed scared of something, could it have been me that worried him, and what I might find out?

“There’s loads of people it could have been,” I reply. “If it was anyone. The simplest answer is that Jason Wright did it. My dad.”

“Yeah,” she shrugs. The gap closes, a sort of truce between us.

We’re both quiet a moment, and I think of something else, something I meant to ask her before.

“The other day I was walking past the old Aegean Dream Resort, and I thought I saw something there – someone there. Maybe watching me?” As I say it I remember how freaked out I was by the sound of breathing inside the ruined room. I should have told her before. But I didn’t really know her then.

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” I hesitate. “I don’t even know for certain if it was someone. I mean it could have been an animal. But I wondered, is it a place teenagers make out? That kind of thing?”

She thinks before answering.

“I don’t know. I never made out there.” She flashes a mirthless smile.

“But when I was younger we used to hang out there sometimes. Me and some friends. We used to play a game of hide and seek, a sort-of daring version because we all knew why it was closed. So maybe it was that?” She doesn’t look convinced.

Sophia doesn’t stay much longer. I say she can stay if she likes and offer her the bed, saying I’ll sleep on the little sofa, but she gives me a strange look and says it’s only a ten-minute walk to her house.

Then I suggest walking her home, just to make sure she’s safe, but she points out the obvious – that if I walk her home, she’ll then have to walk me home, and we’ll be stuck in an ever-repeating loop, where each of us walks the other one home.

I see her point. I still don’t like it though, but when she does leave I realise it’s not just her that I’m worried about.

Left alone in my apartment with my ruined laptop I worry again about who took it, who smashed it up, and why they left it hanging on my door for me to find.

The one person who couldn’t have done that was Jason Wright.

But then my thoughts are interrupted by a text: Still alive…

Then two emoticons: a house and a smiley face. So, finally, I take myself off to bed.

I have to work the next two days. Sophia too, so I can’t even see her in the mornings.

And Bar Sunset is busy enough that I don’t get much time to think, which is probably good.

Then on the third day, while I’m doing my laundry, I get a message from Sophia.

Papadakis has dropped the results of my DNA test at her house.

I can come round whenever I want to get them.

I can’t leave right away, I have a washing machine filled with clothes, but suddenly the weight of everything seems to hit me.

These last few days I’ve been operating with a lightness of thinking I already know who my real mother is, but suddenly I’m about to discover for real.

And my father too – a man who might or might not have murdered my mother, ripping away the life I should have had, and replacing it with what I know instead.

How do I feel about all that? It’s a lot. It’s really hard to know what to feel.

I both want the stupid washing machine to finish already, and for it to never stop.

I want to end the agony, and extend this limbo forever.

I seriously consider not going to Sophia’s house at all.

Because once I do know this, I can’t unknow it.

And once I know, the next stage has to be speaking to Mum – Karen.

And I’ve no idea how I’m going to do that, how she’ll react.

But I do know it’s going to change everything about me.

When the machine does finally stop, I dump everything into the dryer. It has a glass door so I stare into it, letting the rhythmic swirl of my clothes lull me into a near hypnotic state. My life going around and around and around.

“Hey,” Sophia says quietly, when I knock on her door a half-hour later.

“Hey.” I nod. She’s wearing her TEAM T-shirt. “Are you supposed to be working?”

“I told Kostas I had something to do.” Her eyes bore into my face. “I wanted to be here for you.” Her lips curl into a smile that doesn’t quite work. I nod.

She leads me into the garden with its flowers and the lemon tree. But my eye goes straight to the table, empty except for a slim envelope with my name on it.

“Do you know what it says? Have you looked?”

Sophia shakes her head. “No. Papadakis dropped it off early this morning. If he looked he didn’t say.”

I don’t pick it up. I don’t even want to touch it.

“I already know what it’s going to tell me.” I try to smile at Sophia, but I can feel how crooked it comes out. She nods at me.

“Yeah. It’ll be good to have it confirmed though. Like, to know for sure.”

I know she’s right, but it also feels like she’s wrong.

My stomach hurts. Once I had really bad food poisoning, and it’s like that – when you’ve been throwing up so much and there’s nothing left to get out, but so just breathing hurts.

I force my hand towards the envelope, but it’s like I’m pushing against some invisible force. I pull it back.

“Can we find them?” I ask suddenly.

“What?”

“Like, a picture? Of Mandy and Jason. Can you get your computer? Try and find a picture of them online?”

Sophia pauses a moment, then silently nods and disappears.

She’s back a moment later, and she sits down at the table.

I take the seat next to her and watch her work.

It takes only a few seconds, and she’s on the website of some Greek newspaper.

It’s probably best that I can’t read what the headline says.

But underneath it are two photographs. One is a pretty woman, in her late twenties I’d guess.

She has blonde hair, mid-length and cut into a bob.

Her eyes are blue and wide, and there’s an – innocence, I suppose you’d call it – about her.

Perhaps it accords with the way my mother – Karen, I mean – and Simon described her, as not too bright.

I drop my eyes to the table a moment, contemplating what I may have inherited there.

Then when I’m ready I look at Jason. Dad.

He’s probably a little older than she is.

He looks…quite English, I suppose. He doesn’t have the dark hair and skin of the Greek people.

But there’s nothing in his appearance to suggest he could be a killer.

I wonder what happened, what it was that drove him to do what he did?

Or was it not him at all? It’s impossible to say from a photograph.

“Are you OK?” Sophia asks.

I take a long time to answer. But then I nod, chewing a little on the corner of my lower lip. “Yeah. I’m good. I think I’m going to open it now.”

I pick up the envelope. It’s light, just as if this has no consequence.

No more meaning than a circular letter or a piece of junk mail.

Inside is a folded sheet of paper, and I slip it out.

I hesitate though, once more, before unfolding it.

If the result of this test is positive, my life will never be the same again.

I unfold the envelope and start to read. For a few moments it’s unclear – I don’t understand the technical language I’m reading. But then there’s a bit underlined and written in bold. And that’s as clear as can be.

Test Result: No Maternal Match Found.

My stomach turns cold. No maternal match?

What does that mean? That Mandy Paul isn’t my mother?

Then who the hell is?