Page 82 of Deep Blue Lies

EIGHTY-ONE

“Did you say you had a drink?” Gregory asks me a moment later.

“No. I didn’t,” I reply. I’m not sure he hears, but Sophia jumps down from the worktop, fills a glass with water and bangs it down on the table in front of him.

“What did the file say?” she asks.

Gregory stares at the water, as if it’s somehow fascinating to watch the liquid settle. Finally he starts speaking again.

“This really is not an easy thing to say. Especially to Ava here.” His eyes glance up at mine, just for a second.

“I still need to hear it,” I reply.

He gives a single nod.

“The file was a…confession. I suppose you would call it that?”

“Go on.” Sophia and I wait.

“It was June when the Aegean Dream Resort closed. June 26, the day that the murders were discovered. The season was just getting going. A few weeks later and perhaps it wouldn’t have happened – because we didn’t get days off in midsummer.

” He blinks, not seeing us. Then seems to reconsider what he’s just said.

“Although of course something would have happened.” I feel him glancing up at me again, then resetting his mind.

Why is this so hard? What the hell am I about to hear ?

“Your mother – the woman you believe is your mother – Karen Whitaker. She was Imogen’s roommate, I suppose you already know this?” I nod. There’s not a moment when it occurs to me to correct him about Mum. He takes a breath.

“She was close with a man named Simon. He looked after the resort’s fleet of small yachts. He was…uncouth, not a man I liked.”

“OK.”

“He used drugs. I knew that then, but Imogen confirmed this to me in her confession.” His tongue flicks out, wetting his lips in a way that makes me think he’s not so unfamiliar with them himself. “Cocaine, I believe.”

“OK, but so what?” Sophia says.

“It was Simon’s day off. Karen’s too. Simon had access to the yachts – he was allowed to use them on his day off, which was unwise in my view – but they made some plan to go sailing.

What they really wanted to do was go afloat to take drugs.

And probably to…” He stops, and I get the sense he wants to use the word fornicate . But he doesn’t.

“Fuck, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”

I know this, I know about the baby, but I let him tell me again.

“There was a problem. Jason and Mandy – the manager and deputy manager of the resort – they’d had a child.

Very recently. It was maybe four weeks old, I don’t remember exactly.

But Mandy was a strange girl. Some of us thought she was rather simple even.

When she had the baby she became deeply untrusting, except for the second-seasoners, the people she’d known the longest. She asked Karen to look after the baby that day, while Mandy went to Athens for some paperwork. We all had to do it from time to time.”

“And?” Sophia says. I hear in her voice that she’s letting him give his side of the story too.

“And Karen went straight to Imogen asking her to look after the infant, so that she – Karen – could go out with Simon and have sex and take cocaine.” His eyebrows, flecked with white, furrow into his brow.

“But Imogen couldn’t. She was feeling unwell.

” He pauses, his tongue slipping out again, this time licking away a piece of spittle from his lips.

“Karen was unwilling to do the right thing and cancel her sex party, and she took the child onto the yacht. She says she strapped it into a car seat, and the car seat into the cockpit, but that last part is a lie.”

I wait, and Sophia does the same.

“There was a change in the weather. What had been a mirror-calm day was interrupted by a sudden squall. But it was nothing that any decent sailor wouldn’t have seen coming, but Simon was anything but, he was down below filling his nostrils and fornicating , and the yacht was put on its side.

The baby was swept away.” He stares at me now, his eyes wide. “The baby was lost, into the sea.”

I stare back at him. But I know all this. I hear myself responding.

“Simon told me. I went to see him. He told me this. But she found the baby. On the shore. She found the baby. It wasn’t harmed.”

His eyes widen even more as he learns I’ve seen Simon. I see how much it shocks him.

“Simon told me everything,” I say. But then Duncan shakes his head.

“No.”

“I wish that were the truth, but no. Simon doesn’t know what really happened. That was only the beginning of it.”