Page 92 of Deep Blue Lies
NINETY-ONE
One Week Later
I’m still on the island. I moved back into my apartment, but I haven’t slept there alone, since Sophia’s been with me the whole time.
I think after what we’ve both endured she needs me as much as I need her.
I won’t stay here long though, Sophia knows of much better places, kept for the locals and not usually available to the foreign workers who fill up Alythos each summer.
I tell Hans I’m not going to work in the bar anymore.
At least not for a while. Not until I work out what I’m going to do next.
At first Mum refused to speak to the police. I’m still calling her that. Whatever else has happened here, she’s still the person who looked after me, who brought me up from just before I was three years old. I know more about that now, and I’ll get to it, as soon as I can. But first Mum.
For two whole days, the police tried to ask her questions, and she would either refuse to answer, or she would tell them one lie after another – that it wasn’t true that she and Imogen killed Mandy and Jason, or that they did do it, but it was all Imogen, and Karen only helped with the cover-up.
But the police had the recording I made, and once Gregory Duncan knew that, he was more than happy to back it up with what he saw on Imogen’s confession video.
Plus they went to speak with Simon Walker-Denzil, and he confirmed the story about the missing baby.
And slowly the police understood, and that’s when I think Mum saw there was just no way to maintain the lies anymore.
She got a lawyer too, who told her she’d face less time in prison if she finally admitted what had happened.
And so finally she began to tell the truth.
The version she gave them was pretty much what Imogen said, and it’s the version that makes the most sense to me.
Mum admitted to attacking Imogen on the beach too.
She followed her there and crushed her skull in with a rock, because she couldn’t let her speak to me.
And then, when she learned that Imogen hadn’t died, and had woken up in hospital, she went there too and injected air into the IV port when Imogen was sleeping.
They found CCTV footage of Mum entering the hospital, wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap.
They also sent Imogen’s body back from the UK to Greece for a post mortem, and the pathologist found air bubbles in her heart, which is consistent with an air embolism.
The detective who’s leading the case has good English.
He told me it was a cold, clean way to kill somebody.
As for her sentencing – I don’t know yet what will happen.
They’ve only charged her with two murders – Jason Wright and Imogen Grant.
Apparently because of the way Mandy Paul reacted when she saw Karen trying to give her back the wrong baby, it only counts as manslaughter, and there’s a statute of limitations in Greek law which means they can’t prosecute a manslaughter case that’s more than twenty years old.
Tragically that also means they can’t do anything about the baby – Callie – who was washed overboard from Mum and Simon’s yacht.
Poor Callie Paul. I think that’s the saddest thing of all, she doesn’t get any justice.
We do know what happened to her though, at least where she ended up.
One of the detectives working the case – there’s lots now – she remembered reading, a long time ago, about a baby who was found dead, strapped to a car seat, by fishermen off the coast of Turkey.
The case was never solved, but it stuck with her because of how awful it was.
And it was never linked to Alythos, because it was a long way away and there are hundreds of islands out here.
The Turkish police kept samples of the baby’s DNA, and they’re now being matched to the DNA from baby Callie’s birth memory book.
We don’t have the results yet, but it’s pretty clear that they’re the same child. She drifted nearly two hundred miles.
I don’t have to do any more DNA tests though, to find out who I am. My adoption case has now been unsealed, which gives one half of the story, and Mum has agreed to talk about it too, which gives the other. I’m grateful to her for that.
I am Imogen Grant’s child. Fathered by Kostas Aetos and born on Alythos, but not in the little medical clinic in Kastria where Mandy Paul had her baby.
I was the result of a cryptic pregnancy, and appeared almost out of the blue, in the room on the end of the staff dorm of the old Aegean Dream Resort.
I was delivered by Karen Whitaker, out of her head on cocaine and fear.
And then I was swapped, presented to Mandy as her child, Callie. And when Mandy saw at once that I was a different baby, Karen killed Mandy, and later Jason. But I was left alive.
When the bodies were found I was put into temporary foster care, with Eleni Kouris, the woman who lives in the white house on the road out to the monastery.
Who knows if she really did remember me, probably not, but she was right about it.
And the reason the DNA test didn’t confirm it was because I arrived there with the birth book that Mandy Paul made for her child, Callie. Who wasn’t me.
As for the adoption, that’s more complicated.
Mum said that, a couple of years after the murders, Imogen was really struggling with what they’d done.
Plus she’d learned that the baby they’d swapped – her baby, me – had been placed into an orphanage and wasn’t doing well.
Imogen became obsessed with the idea that she could adopt me back, and that this would somehow assuage the terrible guilt she felt. But she couldn’t do it on her own.
Mum says that Imogen begged Karen for months to help her with this, and Karen kept refusing – telling her the idea was ridiculous. But eventually Imogen threatened to go to the police and tell them what really happened if Karen didn’t do something. Mum was trapped, she had no choice.
But she also knew the authorities would never give a child to someone like Imogen – someone who was clearly a mess.
But they might to a person who by then was in a relationship, and running a successful business.
Someone like Mum. And Karen says she felt guilt too, for all that had happened.
So the whole idea of doing something good, taking me in and giving me a better life, it appealed to her as well.
As for the how, she’d just come into some money.
Her parents – I’ve always thought of them as my grandparents, though I never got to meet them – had just passed away, leaving her a significant inheritance, and she was able to use this to hire a lawyer who understood the Greek adoption system.
Apparently it’s not unusual for foreigners to adopt from Greece, with a big-enough sweetener.
Bribes were paid, the rules were bent, and I was transferred out of the orphanage and given to Karen.
It was just about enough to keep Imogen happy, as long as Karen let her see me every now and then.
Which was a convenient moment for Karen to slip Imogen a few packets of sedatives to keep her calm.
Karen did try to get me British paperwork, a passport and birth certificate, deleting all records linking me to my birth in Greece, but that proved impossible, even for her dodgy lawyer.
So I kept my Greek birth certificate, and the Alythos listing on my passport.
Meanwhile my records here in Greece were sealed, the false secret that I was Mandy and Jason’s baby put under official lock and key.
Karen said she’d hoped one day Imogen would go back to America and forget all that had happened, but she never did. Instead she kept turning up at our house, trying to get to speak to me. And she’d watch me. She just watched me, as I grew .
I don’t know how I feel about all this. Not yet. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ll ever know.
It’s funny though, how the world keeps turning, even when for me it’s been tipped upside down.
The tourists keep turning up – Sophia has to go to work to teach them diving.
Maria has to open the supermarket, and after a week or so, I don’t even hear from the detectives working the case anymore.
The big questions are answered, it’s just up to me now to work out what comes next.
And here the sun keeps rising. Like today, it’s one of those beautiful Alythos days, where there isn’t a breath of wind over the bay.
The sun is already high, and the sky a deep, deep blue.
I don’t know how I feel. Maybe in the years to come I’ll find a way to forgive Mum, maybe I won’t.
There’s time for that though. For now, I want to find a way to keep living.