Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Jean, another back.

  ‘I was only a child,’ Romain said. ‘A child. If you’d just let me explain—’

  ‘What’s your excuse for Mikki then? Was that an accident too?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘That’s not what Mama says.’

  ‘You can’t believe everything she says, Jean.’

  ‘Oh, but I can believe everything you tell me? The convicted child murderer? The certified psychopath?’

  ‘I don’t know if—’

  Jean turned and ran, disappearing through the open door at the end of the hall and into the living room. But he went right instead of left, away from the phone. Then Romain remembered: mobile phones. Papa said lots of people had them now. Did that include teenagers?

  A wailing siren startled him.

  The house alarm. Jean had tripped it.

  Which was actually quite clever of him, Romain had to admit.

  He covered the rest of the hall in just a few strides, reaching the living room just as the patio door smacked loudly against its frame, having been pulled back with force.

  Jean had gone outside.

  Romain followed him into the garden, picking up his pace now. The alarm company would be calling the house any second, and, if nobody picked up and said the right words, the police would arrive shortly afterwards.

  He should leave. Right now.

  But . . .

  Convicted child murderer. Certified psychopath.

  He had to talk to Jean first. He had to make him listen.

  There was no sign of him at the back of the house, but there was only one place he could go—

  Romain rounded the corner and saw the boy halfway over the side gate, legs swinging, struggling for purchase.

  ‘Jean!’ He ran to the gate and took hold of Jean’s legs. ‘Come down from there. I just want to talk, for God’s sake. You don’t have to run from me. I’m not going to hurt you.’

  But Jean wasn’t listening. He was wriggling and kicking and struggling to pull himself up and over the gate. Clearly, he’d used all his energy getting up on it, his thin arms and bony shoulders suggesting that he didn’t have much to draw on in the way of strength.

  ‘Jean, please. Stop.’

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ he spat over his shoulder.

  ‘Will you stop? Let me get something you can stand on.’ Romain looked around the garden. ‘Is there a ladder here?’

  Jean, louder, over the gate: ‘Help! Somebody help me!’

  ‘I’ll go around the front,’ Romain said. ‘I’ll push the bin against the gate, and help you o—’

  The legs went up and over.

  Jean had pulled himself over the gate, but he mustn’t have had enough energy left to control his descent on the other side.

  He kept going, falling head first, letting out a yelp as he knocked the rubbish bin over and hit the ground.

  There was the sound of plastic rolling on cement and then nothing except for the wailing of the house alarm.

  ‘Jean?’ Romain called. ‘Jean? Are you okay?’

  No answer.

  ‘Jean?’

  For a moment, Romain let himself believe that Jean had somehow managed to silently land on the other side, get up, dust himself off and run away.

  But he knew that wasn’t the case.

  The darkness must be getting stronger. This time, it had only had to propel him as far as the house. He’d done the rest himself. Even when he was trying to be good, bad things still seemed to happen.

  This wasn’t his fault. But it was all his fault too.

  Romain pulled himself up to the gate, peered over the top of it. Jean was in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the other side, a circle of red, shiny blood oozing out from underneath him. He was completely still and the eye that Romain could see was open, unmoving. The rubbish bin was lying on its side a few feet away.

  Another brother, gone.

  Now Romain really had no one.

  He heard them then, in the distance: sirens, getting louder.

  Coming this way.

  Adam

  ‘Start from the beginning,’ Peter said. He was leaning against the desk, arms folded across his chest, looking towards my cabin door. I had it open five or six inches, just like it’d been when I’d woken up a few minutes before. I’d knocked on the wall to wake him up then, even though it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. ‘Did you lock it when you came in last night?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  I was sitting on the edge of my unmade bed, still in the same clothes I’d boarded the ship in. Holding Sarah’s scarf in shaking hands. Navy with white butterflies. A summer scarf, Sarah would tell you. (I’d made a joke about it. A bad one about winter flip-flops. All I’d got was an eye-roll.) The same scarf she’d been wearing when she’d walked through the terminal doors. It was frayed and washed-out-looking, but I was nearly positive that’s how it’d looked when I’d last seen it.

  There were no discernible stains.

  ‘Someone came in here,’ I said. ‘Someone with a key. And they put this on the bed beside me. While I was asleep. And I think we both know who.’

  Peter looked dazed.

  ‘Ethan knows, Peter. He knows we’re here. Someone’s told him. I knew it – when you asked that bartender last night, I knew it was a bad idea. And this . . .’ I looked down at the scarf. ‘This is a message.’

  ‘Would he have a key, though?’ Peter asked. ‘I mean, he’s in the food department. Do they have keys?’

  ‘If they don’t, I’m sure he could’ve got one.’

  ‘Was anything taken? Did you check?’

  ‘Everything’s here.’

  It had been easy to determine: all I’d brought with me was my bag, and all that was in it were some crumpled clothes.

  Peter crossed the room to sit on the sofa. He ran a hand through his hair. I’d never seen him like this before. Nervous. On edge. Distressed.

  ‘A message,’ he repeated. ‘Saying what?’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He killed her.’ I surprised myself by how matter of factly I said this. ‘How else would he have the scarf? It’s the one she was wearing when she left. How would he even know that if he wasn’t the one to meet her on the plane, or at the other end?’

  I pulled the material through my fingers. Would it still smell of her? She wore the same perfume all the time. Miracle or Miracles or something. Came in a pink bottle.

  I started to lift the scarf to my nose, but stopped. That would be too much. That would break me.

  ‘It’s a threat,’ I said. ‘He’s telling me he knows I’m here. He killed Sarah, he knows I’m here and, if I stay, he’ll kill me too.’

  Peter’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t think he’d . . . ?’

  ‘We’re not safe here. We should go.’

  ‘Go?’ He started shaking his head. ‘We can’t go.’

  Then I remembered something: this wasn’t my cabin.

  ‘Last night, at Fizz,’ I said. ‘Did you have to sign a receipt?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For the food and drink. Was it charged to the room? Do you remember?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. Oh, there may have been a slip I had to sign because I had a glass of white wine after you left.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘That’s not in the all-inclusive so it was added to the Swipeout account, and I had to sign for it.’

  ‘Which name did you put?’

  ‘My own of course.’

  I turned on the TV with the remote and pointed to the Welcome, PETER! message.

  ‘You must have mixed up the Swipeout cards,’ I said as he frowned at the screen. ‘Doesn’t your TV say Welcome, Adam?’

  ‘I haven’t checked.’

  ‘Something’s wrong here.’<
br />
  ‘Adam, everything’s wrong here.’

  ‘No, I mean something is wrong with this. This cabin is in your name. I doubt Ethan knows what I look like and, if he sneaked in here with this scarf, he probably wouldn’t hang around to check.’

  ‘What are you saying?

  ‘How come this isn’t in your cabin? That’s the one under my name.’

  ‘The reservation is in both our names. You’re the lead passenger.’

  ‘But your name is on this cabin.’

  ‘You’re presuming he’s working off a list. The reservation system or the manifest or whatever. But he could’ve seen you. Watched you come in here. Followed you.’ A pause. ‘Followed us.’

  I didn’t think that was plausible. I’d travelled back down to this deck in an otherwise empty elevator the night before, and didn’t remember seeing anyone else in the hall when I’d let myself into my cabin. And what were the chances that, barely an hour after the ship set sail, Ethan happened to be in the bar where Peter and I happened to go first, far away enough for us not to see him but close enough to overhear us mention his name?

  But I didn’t push the point, mostly because Peter seemed to be genuinely unnerved by this development.

  Scared, even.

  And who could blame him?

  This should be the point where we call in reinforcements, I thought. Where we, realising that we need both help and protection, contact an authority whose job it is to provide both those things.

  But who could we call? There was no one.

  I looked back down at the scarf. Just do it. I lifted my hands and buried my face in the material, breathed in deep.

  ‘This changes things,’ Peter was saying, almost to himself. ‘Perhaps we should go. Perhaps we should.’

  It did smell of Sarah, of her perfume. The scent was both a comfort and an assault, an exquisite pain. And it was so strong! Strong enough to still have the underlying twinge of its alcohol base, the faint burn still detectable under the floral notes.

  Too strong to have been sprayed on over a week ago.

  The only explanation was that he had her things too, that he’d taken whatever luggage she had in her cabin, found the perfume among it and sprayed the scarf just before he’d broken in and placed it on the bed beside me while I slept.

  Who was this man?

  What was he?

  ‘Adam,’ Peter said from the sofa. ‘I have to tell you something. Something I should’ve told you long before now.’

  I lifted my head to look at him.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  Peter didn’t answer me right away. He looked like he was deciding something.

  ‘Peter, what is it?’

  He stood up, moved towards the door of the cabin.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I think it’ll be easier for both of us if I just show you.’

  It took only a few minutes to cross the bay to Villefranche, a sliver of a village tucked into the side of one of the many rocky promontories along the Cote d’Azur. Its attraction was really the view it afforded: a small, secret bay of perfectly still sea, dotted with pleasure boats and yachts, pristine sails standing tall. In the distance, atop another rocky outcrop, the pink walls of the Villa Rothschild peaked out through a gap in the trees. Out of sight beyond it, Peter explained, further east along the coast, were Bono’s house in Eze, the glitzy kingdom of Monte Carlo and Ventimiglia, the first place on the other side of the Italian border where the trains stopped.

  I didn’t respond to anything he said. I wasn’t interested in his local knowledge. I wanted to know what it was he hadn’t told me, what it was he was still refusing to reveal.

  The bus to Nice was packed with sweaty cruise passengers. I stood by the middle doors clinging to a hand support, breathing deep and slow in an attempt to ward off motion sickness – an utterly futile endeavour when facing the wrong way in a bus as it snaked its way along the looping, twisting roads that climbed and descended the cliffs between Villefranche and Nice, sometimes at such a height and on such a narrow strip of tarmac that there was nothing between you and the shimmering water hundreds of feet below except for thin air.

  We alighted in a large square paved in two-tone stone like a chequerboard, criss-crossed with tram tracks and overlooked on three sides by beautiful rust-coloured buildings boasting row after row of yellow window shutters.

  We hadn’t been on the ship for a full day and yet, already, the breadth of the view, the vastness of this open space, the intense glare of the sun and the freshness of the air felt like a revelation. I’d already had enough of endless corridors, fluorescent light and the faint, salty smell of seawater lingering everywhere.

  I had a sudden urge to run, to leave this place and not come back. I didn’t want to go back on the ship. I could go home, find a way to survive.

  I had my passport in my pocket because we’d had to get another set of Swipeout cards en route to the tender platform; we were each carrying a ‘wrong’ key that matched to the other’s identity, and if we took different tenders back we’d be in trouble without a set of ‘right’ ones. Sarah’s scarf was in my backpack; everything else back in my cabin were either clothes or toiletries I’d be happy to leave behind.

  I could go straight home from here, if I wanted to.

  But first, I had to know what it was that Peter hadn’t told me about.

  ‘It’s a five-minute walk,’ he said, moving to cross the square. ‘To, ah, my place.’

  I stared at him. ‘You live here? In Nice?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I’ve been staying here. For the last four or five months. It was the place where Estelle was last seen, so . . .’

  I’d heard Nice was famous for its promenade, but it was nowhere to be seen. We’d entered the city via the port area; I lost all sense of direction since. We hurried in silence along a wide, busy street lined with cafes, real estate agencies and what surely must be an unnecessary number of pharmacies. I counted six in eight blocks. Above the ground-floor shops and restaurants, the buildings were all clean, pale in colour and attractive, with tended-to window boxes and shiny brass plates affixed to their doors. I studied them to see if I recognised any words – I didn’t – until I realised that it was dangerous not to look down. The footpaths were littered with piles and smears of dog shit.

  We passed under an unsightly railway bridge, all drooping power cables, torn posters and graffiti, and then took a left onto a quieter residential street that sloped gently uphill.

  ‘Here we are,’ Peter said cheerfully, stopping outside a set of glass doors fitted with a huge gold handle the size and shape of a dinner-plate. Thin gold lettering was printed on the glass: Beau Soleil Palais. Through them I could see marble steps, ornamental gold mirrors hung on cream walls and rows of numbered letterboxes. I watched as Peter unlocked the doors by touching a small plastic key fob to them.

  His apartment was on the third floor. We took a lift the size of a telephone box up.

  As soon as I stepped inside Peter’s place, I realised that apartment wasn’t really the word for the space he was staying in. The outside of the Beau Soleil Palais had been impressive, regal even, and the common areas gleaming, but what lay behind Peter’s door seemed to have been transplanted in from another building that’d been left to rot.

  It was one large, dark room, with what I presumed to be a small bathroom tucked away in one corner; from where I stood I could see something black growing between the cracked, off-white floor tiles its slightly open door revealed. Back in the main room was a Formica table, pockmarked, pushed against the far right-hand corner, in front of a set of grimy French doors half-covered with a bed sheet. Atop a folding table sat a microwave, a hot plate and a hodgepodge collection of crockery and pans. Tucked between its legs: a compact fridge, scratched and bearing the remains of a collage of faded children’s stickers. Above the
hob a brown stain was spreading out like rings in a tree trunk across the ceiling. To my left an opaque curtain hid whatever space remained beyond.

  The air smelled of stale things.

  ‘It’s a friend’s,’ Peter said. ‘He’s renovating it to sell on, but the work won’t start until September. He’s letting me stay here until then.’

  ‘That’s only a couple of weeks away,’ I said. ‘Are you going back to London then?’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Peter pointed to the curtain. ‘The, ah, living room, I suppose you’d call it, is through there. Why don’t you go on in? I’ll grab us something to drink and we can, ah, talk then. The thing I need to show you, it’s . . . It’s all in there.’

  I looked at the curtain and felt a ripple of unease. What could Peter possibly need to show me that he was keeping in his home? Not his home, even, but some rotting flat he was temporarily squatting in? In the town where his wife and my girlfriend were last seen?

  ‘Go on,’ Peter said. ‘It’s okay. It’s all in there.’

  I felt for a gap in the curtain, pushed through.

  At first, I only saw a battered brown armchair and a stack of old, warped IKEA shelves. Then a set of French doors leading to a little balcony, their white paint peeling back and the glass panes flecked with spots of dirt and grime. A house plant, its leaves yellow and bitten, dead for at least a week.

  But then, once I was fully inside the room, I saw the boxes.

  Piles and piles of boxes. The cardboard archive type. All labelled in the same handwriting in marker pen. Stacked on the floor and every other available flat, secure space in the room.

  WEST MED ASSAULTS & THEFTS 2009–2012.

  CREW EVAL/SECURITY DEPT/ATLANTIC ’06.

  JOHNSON SUIT: DISCOVERY (COPIES).

  I counted quickly. There were at least thirty such boxes.

  In a far corner on a second armchair lay pieces of Blue Wave-branded merchandise: a windbreaker, a baseball cap, a tote bag. Some of them were sporting the same logo that I’d seen on Sarah’s note, others had the older blue outline of a sailboat. They were thrown on a stack of newspapers that had been tied together with string and a collection of glossy brochures that looked about ready to fall over and slip to the floor.