Swimming with Sharks

by Anna Legat

  There is a yes, followed by an elaboration that is swallowed by the relentless whine of the vacuum cleaner, the nozzle of which is circling Gillian’s chair. The cleaner avoids eye contact. ‘Hang on, I’ll be with you in a minute.’ Gillian puts the phone down and shouts a farewell to Mrs Clunes who, as is her custom, does not respond.

  Something smells around Jon’s desk. It is hard to say if it is Jon’s person or the contents of his drawers. The odour must have been there for a while – Jon doesn’t appear to be conscious of it. ‘Here,’ he says without any preliminaries, ‘this laptop hasn’t been used since December 25th. The last logon was at 10 p.m. that day. But she didn’t drop off the face of the Earth just then. Have a look here!’ He waves Gillian to come closer, which she does despite her strong reservation about the smell. He starts in his typical tabloid headline style: ‘Hotmail inbox. It didn’t take much to hack into – laptop memorised her password. Nothing to hide. Limited contacts, very limited. Historical evidence of liaison with two men. Very historical: dead and buried.’

  ‘How dead?’

  ‘Two and a half years ago – last contact with both men – Peter Bird and Paul Collins. Emails – restrained. No meat on the bone. Polite. Boring. She met them through a dating site, but that’s gone too. No life to speak of.’

  ‘Just like you then?’

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ Jon snaps back, sharp as the morning frost. If only he smelled better. Gillian steps back to the business at hand: ‘Is that all you’ve got? Anything current?’

  ‘Since December, emails accessed from a different machine, IP address … let me see …’

  ‘What sort of emails?’

  ‘Impersonal. Lots of junk, but she opens every one of them …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A month ago she makes an online booking, a holiday – Maldives.’

  ‘Booking agent?’

  ‘Primechoice Destinations. Never heard of it. People traffickers for all I know … So she’s lured under false pretences to … just kidding!’ Jon chuckles. His small but perfectly formed teeth and wispy facial hair render him in the likeness of a Chinese mandarin, or a sort of hairy Buddha. He switches to a different window. ‘Nicola Eagles’ Facebook page. For the past five years since she joined in January 2010, she never misses a day, logs in every bloody day like a Swiss clock, ‘likes’ every friend’s every post, but doesn’t post anything herself … In the first couple of days in February she starts posting manically, tons of snapshots, then – bang! – she goes silent. Her last activity on Facebook was five days ago. She’s either dead or lost the use of her arms. People don’t stop like that. Not unless there’s a good reason. It’s a habit. It’s stronger than heroin.’ If anyone, Jon should know something about computer addictions.

  Smell or no smell, Gillian draws a chair next to Jon and starts skimming through Nicola’s Facebook entries. Arrived on Itsouru. It is hot – hot as hell! Photos follow: typical exotic location snapshots and that’s it. That last entry is made on Tuesday, 3rd February. And then nothing. Silence.

  Gillian scans Nicola’s Facebook friends: only a dozen of them or so. Amongst them she recognises four of the names from Nicola’s address book, all of whom have claimed not to have heard from or even really remember who Nicola Eagles was. Robert is also on the list: his photo that of a man in his mid-thirties, his colouring that of a sun-dried tomato, the background an orange Australian sunset. So he did know his sister was taking a holiday in his very backyard … it is all there, on her Facebook profile.

  Jon clicks on Nicola’s avatar. It is a head-and-shoulders picture of a smiling woman with a heavy brown fringe half-covering her trusting, round eyes. She is smiling; her jaw is square and widened by the smile. So this is who Gillian is looking for.

  ‘Print me a few of her photos, Jon, thanks.’

  Hassan, the Day Manager at Itsouru Island Retreat, speaks some English, and what he speaks has all to do with his guests’ creature comforts and the restaurant menus. Nevertheless he is able to convey his deepest concern about Miss Eagles: she had not checked out by noon the day before yesterday as she should have; her belongings are still in her chalet, but she is not; it is as if she has stepped out of her room and vanished into thin air. The police have been called in from Malè – their arrival is expected later today. A discreet search has been carried out – the idea is not to unduly alarm other guests. The search has rendered no results. Miss Eagles is not on the island – this can be said with a degree of certainty.

  ‘People don’t just disappear,’ Gillian says. ‘She couldn’t have walked away …’

  ‘It is an island, madam, so no,’ Hassan sounds as if he is about to add unless she can walk on water, but thinks better of making flippant comments.

  ‘Drowning?’

  ‘We never had a single drowning, madam. We are an atoll island. We have shallow waters – we are safe indeed!’

  ‘Miss Eagles’ belongings – are they still in the room?’

  ‘They are, but we are fully booked. Chalet 42 overlooks the lagoon – it has views … Our next guests arrive tonight. I will put Miss Eagles’ items in storage –’

  ‘No! Don’t touch anything! Leave it as it is. It may be a crime scene. It probably is a crime scene.’

  ‘We cannot hold the room back! We are fully booked!’ Hassan’s voice rises by half an octave. ‘The police are here soon –’

  ‘I will be there tomorrow. Leave it all as it is until tomorrow.’ Gillian knows she has no jurisdiction over the man, but she puts on her most authoritative tone. It works. He agrees to wait. He is used to doing his best to please.

  It will take some convincing to get Scarface to sign off the trip. The cost will make a big dent in his budget. He will argue against it. He will say the Malè police are perfectly capable of dealing with such cases, but Gillian will hit the PR button: we look after our own, no matter what it takes, no matter how far we have to go, especially when some of us are vying for the position of Detective Superintendent and need to have the public’s confidence on their side.

  Gillian only realises how tired and hungry she is when she gets home. The house feels cold and empty. Colder and emptier than usual. There is an inexplicable sense of emptiness that niggles at the back of her head. Something is not right; something is missing … She cannot put her finger on it. She forgot something important – that much she knows, but having forgotten it, she can’t do anything about it until she remembers what it is. It is bound to relate to the missing woman’s case. Gillian is going over it in her head. She must have overlooked some small but vital detail. Perhaps something – some clue – she had missed in the woman’s house. Perhaps something the old couple told her, or the brother, or Hassan the resort manager … Somewhere there amongst snippets of conversation, books strewn on the floor of Field Cottage, and Nicola’s cryptic Facebook entries, lies a detail Gillian has missed. It is there. It’s staring her in the face yet she can’t see it. Gillian hates having these senior moments: memory lapses, missed appointments and words that escape her. Deon used to call them her blonde episodes. He was so annoyingly superior! Why does he suddenly spring to mind? He is in the distant past, but he was the last man to witness her bumbling incompetence on a day-to-day basis.

  The fridge is almost empty: there are eggs, but they require some form of cooking. Rashers of bacon look mummified – they are at least five days out of date. Perhaps they aren’t suitable for human consumption but the label says nothing about any expiry date for cats. Fritz yowls in the cage. She had to bring him home with her. By the time she remembered his existence it was too late to take him to an animal shelter. It was almost 8 p.m.

  Gingerly, Gillian opens the cage. Her experience with cats is limited. Do they bite strangers? ‘Go on then, Fritz, make yourself at home!’ He shoots out and makes Gillian jump back. ‘Damn animal!’ His glare is unforgiving, his miaow a resentful yodel. He pads across the floor panels and towards the front door. Another yodel. Do cats yodel? T
his one does. It is a desperate sound. ‘Hungry?’ Gillian cuts a strip of bacon and throws it on the floor. Fritz inspects it and turns his nose up on it. He sits and sulks. ‘Suit yourself.’ Gillian decides to fry the bacon with a couple of eggs.

  To block off the silence, she puts on the radio. The news is on. She tunes in instinctively and listens for revelations of humanitarian disasters. She has been doing it over the last nine days with religious regularity. It hits her: Tara!

  This is what has been missing in her day – her daughter! The sense of emptiness, of something not quite complete … She has missed Tara’s call! They agreed Tara would call every day between six and seven in the evening. It was the condition of Gillian letting her daughter go. It was Gillian’s condition, and she has missed it! With a shaking hand she reaches for the phone. The receiver tumbles to the floor, sending Fritz out of the room. Gillian curses the cat. It’s his fault – if it wasn’t for him, Gillian would have been home to hear from her child. But she got drawn into the cat and his missing owner’s case. Yet another case that has eclipsed her home life. When will she learn to keep her work at arm’s length? What will it take? Dread flushes through her stomach, like that day when, deep in thought, she had left Tara on the bus, in her pushchair, turned back after a few steps and seen the bus door close, and chased the bus on foot until it turned a corner and disappeared out of view. Or that night when she was too late and too tired to pick Tara up from her mum and dad or even call them to say she wasn’t coming, the very night when Tara drank a whole bottle of her grandmother’s anti-histamine and had to have her stomach pumped, and that gut-wrenching morning when Gillian turned up at her parents’ house to find it empty but for a note on the kitchen table: We’re at the hospital. It’s Tara.

  Thankfully there is a message on the answer phone: Hi, Mum! As promised. Will call tomorrow. Love you too! Frantically, Gillian dials Tara’s number. It does not ring. Not even once. No signal? She has turned it off? Engaged? She tries again. Leaves a disjointed message. An apology which is cut short halfway through a sentence by Tara’s mobile.

  She is a crap mother.

  Fritz has regrouped and is back before her, yodelling even more desperately than before, being a pain in the arse. ‘Fuck off,’ she tells him, but he won’t take orders from her. The smoke alarm goes off! Bacon and eggs! Gillian heads for the kitchen. Insidious smoke hangs on the walls like cobwebs. Gillian grabs the frying pan – drops it on the floor, convoluted bacon rashers bounce out. The cat is nowhere to be seen, but when Gillian opens the window, she thinks she can see the spooked creature bundle onto the windowsill. Or maybe it’s just the thick, swirling smoke?

  ‘Fuck!’ She waves a tea towel under the smoke detector under the stairs. At last it stops – cold air soothes it into silence. The cat is gone.

  Day Ten

  At Colombo airport Gillian tries again. She has been trying to call Tara for the past twenty-four hours. She is now so close to her that she contemplates the possibility of putting the missing person inquiry on hold and jetting over to Phuket. Only there are no guarantees that Tara is there. She has been very vague about her lodgings. In fact, she is what Gillian calls in her professional jargon of no fixed abode, moving between youth hostels and B&Bs of dubious repute. It is a daunting prospect for an eighteen-year-old gullible girl in a country where people get hanged for carrying too many boxes of aspirin. Gillian is paralysed with worry. And Tara’s telephone does not ring – it goes straight to the answer phone and in the same cheery voice Tara tells her to leave a message. Gillian hangs on to the off-chance that Tara called when she was in transit flying over the Indian Ocean with her phone switched off, but the empty voicemail contradicts that.

  The moment Gillian gets off the plane, she checks: no messages. She leaves one of her own: Tara? Mum here. Please call me on my mobile. I’m on a case – out of the country; won’t be at home. Call me as soon as you get this message. Did I say you must call my mobile? I have now. Call me. Love you! Nothing. Two hours later nothing. What time is it now in Thailand? It is 6 a.m. in Colombo.

  Another plane: to Malè. It is small and it rattles. As instructed by the captain, Gillian switches off her mobile and she resents the guy next to her who, in defiance of the rules, continues working on his laptop. ‘All electronic devices,’ she tells him in a half-whisper. ‘That includes laptops.’ The man smiles at her, nods politely and carries on with his work. Doesn’t speak English. Gillian tips her head back and closes her eyes. She just wants to get there.

  In her head she is inventorising facts. She has a name for it because she does it all the time. It reflects her thought process accurately as something halfway between inventorying and prioritising – inventorising. Gillian's mind works in mysterious ways, and so does her vernacular. Whenever a new case opens, Gillian mounts her spinning wheel of inventorised facts. She goes over the facts of the case over and over again, constantly reviewing the old and regularly adding the new to the spin. Like a hamster. She only stops when the case is solved. She doesn’t write it down; all she does is relentless mental revision. And now she has very little to go on: a forty-two-year-old woman, a spinster, fairly well off, in regular employment suddenly breaks the habit of a lifetime and goes on a holiday. Travelling alone, she chooses a traditional honeymoon destination in the Maldives. Her decision appears sudden and unexpected – no one is aware of it apart from the neighbours who are asked to look after her pet cat. They are told the day before she departs. Her brother doesn’t know. Her acquaintances do not know … Correction: the woman makes it known on Facebook but it looks like nobody reads it. This will be verified – Jon is checking the viewing statistics on her Facebook page. Other questions to be asked: one, was she meeting someone in the Maldives? Jon is running background checks on Paul Collins and Peter Bird, the only two potential romantic interests in her life who they can verify. Both over two years out of date, however … but that was just emails; they could have evolved to meetings in person, telephoning each other (Jon to check her line and mobile calls history). Question two, who would have interest in getting rid of her? The brother seems like the obvious candidate. He is her only relative, most likely to inherit her considerable wealth. According to Jon’s intelligence she is worth close to a million pounds. Unless there is a will (to be checked), the brother would get it all. If, contrary to what he says, he knew she was coming this way, then this was his perfect opportunity. The flight from Adelaide would have taken him just over seven hours – it is doable. Robert Eagles travels around the world for work. Jon is verifying with the Australian authorities if Eagles has travelled anywhere near the Indian subcontinent in the last ten days.

  The defiant man with a laptop tugs at Gillian’s sleeve and points her to a flight attendant hovering over their heads with what looks like a steaming jug. ‘Coffee or tea?’ the flight attendant asks with a withering smile. Gillian chooses coffee, which tastes bitter but will do for now to keep her awake. Maybe Scarface is right – maybe all there is to it is a midlife crisis, a woman wanting to get away from it all, losing herself a bit in the world, looking for adventure, all in one: taking time off and wishing to be left alone. If only she had told someone! That would have spared Gillian the seventeen hours sleepless air-ferrying across two continents and missing out on her DI training (though that could be considered an unforeseen bonus!).

  ‘Business or pleasure?’ the man next to her asks in perfect English. She had been sure he hadn’t understood her admonishment due to a language barrier. Clearly, he’d chosen not to heed it!

  ‘Didn’t you hear it?’ she asks, astounded.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘About switching off all electronic devices!’

  He smiles with a nonchalant wave of a hand. ‘Oh, that! That really means nothing. I always use my laptop in flight. It’s harmless, believe me. And it’s business for me. Lots of homework to catch up on!’ He salutes her with his coffee. ‘So, is it a holiday? Where are you heading?’

  ‘Wel
l, in that case, I’ve got an important telephone call to make!’ Gillian rises to reach for her mobile buried in her back trouser pocket. She turns it on. It takes a moment to light up. Hopefully Tara has called back.

  Nothing. No messages.

  ‘You won’t get any reception here,’ the man tells her.

  The flight attendant passes by with her steaming jug, offering more tea or coffee. She directs a warning scowl at Gillian. ‘Please switch off your phone, madam. All electronic devices must be switched off.’

  As soon as Gillian gets off the plane she puts the phone back on. While queuing through Border Control, she checks her messages. Nothing. She checks if she has reception. Reception, yes; messages, no. She dials Tara’s number again, and again gets the same no-rings silent treatment. The answerphone kicks in and invites her to leave a message after the beep. ‘Bloody, bloody hell!’ she mutters. The beep comes between the first and second bloodies. Gillian rings off. She hands her passport to the officer in a booth.

  ‘Welcome to the Maldives. Enjoy your holiday!’

  She only has hand luggage: toiletries, a couple of fresh shirts, sensible pyjamas. This is going to be a short stay. Everything costs and the budget gets smaller by the minute, Scarface informed her sourly after she managed to twist his arm into signing the trip off. The positive outcome is that she doesn’t have to queue for the conveyer belt. She pushes by the Nothing to Declare gate. If only she could clear her head! She won’t have peace until she gets hold of Tara. Her brain cannot multitask: she can’t turn it off to solve the missing person inquiry while it is frayed with constant worry. She decides to call Deon. It is not something she does lightly. His number in South Africa is stored on her mobile, but so far she hasn’t used it. It rings. At least it rings; she prays for him to pick it up. In the Arrivals Hall a wiry man dressed in white is holding a cardboard sign with her name on it: DS Marsh. It must be her taxi driver. She beckons him while balancing her mobile between her cheek and her shoulder. He looks surprised, and – oddly – ignores her, looking over her shoulder for the real DS Marsh. The telephone keeps ringing. ‘Come on, answer the damned phone!’