Distress Signals

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  It was a screenshot of an Instagram post – Rose noted he hadn’t posted anything to the app for nearly a year, so pickings were slim there on the content front. But what she had found was a close-up of a coffee table on which a cup and a notebook had been artfully arranged, tinged with a sepia filter. The caption said To Do List Time! ‘To Do List’ was written in block capitals across the top of the notepad, above a line which read ‘#1: Think of things to put on To Do List’, also handwritten but in cursive underneath. Rose had typed Recognise it? Passport envelope? alongside the picture, but I didn’t. But so what? He could’ve changed it on the envelope, written it with his other hand. Got someone else to do it. We didn’t even know for sure that the writing on the notepad was his. He could’ve snapped someone else’s notepad, or that could’ve been someone else’s picture that he’d merely reposted. Both the handwriting and the set-up looked feminine to me.

  I went back to the picture of him on the campsite.

  And had an idea.

  I saved the campsite photo to the computer’s desktop. Then I navigated to the profile page Cusack had found, the one from which she’d discovered that Ethan worked on the ship, and saved the picture from there too.

  Then I went to Google and searched for ‘Estelle Brazier’ + ‘Becky’.

  A list of news articles appeared, all dated from August or September of last year. I’d seen them all before, when I’d first stumbled upon Peter’s story on the Cruise Confessions website and had gone to Google to search for more information.

  I had to open three of them before I found mention of Becky’s last name: Richardson.

  Google found tens of Becky Richardsons and adding ‘London’ to the mix didn’t help narrow it down much. I went back to the art­icles, opening them again until I found a picture of Becky and Estelle together. It looked like it had been taken on Becky’s wedding day. Estelle was in a pink bridesmaid’s dress.

  I saved that picture to the desktop too. Then I went back to Google again and dragged it into the search box.

  I’d only ever seen Google’s search-by-image function used on TV to track down creeps with emotional problems who were pretending to be someone else – or multiple someone elses – online, but it worked a treat. The top match was Becky’s Facebook page, where the image had originally been posted. Her feed was filled with photos of her young children: a girl of about four or five and a boy who was just a toddler.

  I decided against sending her a message through Facebook. Since we weren’t friends, it would go to her ‘Other’ inbox, which most users rarely checked. I needed to find out whether or not Becky recognised Ethan now, not in a few weeks’ time. I scrolled down her profile page, looking for clues as to where I might find an email address for her.

  On the bottom left-hand side of the page was a list of the public Facebook pages Becky had ‘liked’. A high-street clothing store, John Mayer, an artisan chocolate shop, a famous diet book, Ideal Homes magazine—

  And Parkview High School, Kilburn.

  Why would Becky ‘like’ a high school’s page if she didn’t have children old enough to go there? Could it be because that’s where she worked?

  Back to Google. Becky Richardson Parkview High School Kilburn London. Search.

  The top result was the ‘Staff’ page of Parkview High’s website, on which Becky was listed as the school’s librarian. Below a picture of it was an email address, which I copied.

  Thank you, Internet.

  I hit Compose and pasted Becky’s email address into the ‘To’ box. Then I typed a message explaining who I was, about how Sarah had disappeared just like Estelle had, how I’d got a passport and a note too and how Peter and I had boarded the Celebrate to try to find the man we believed was responsible for this: Ethan. Could she please take a look at his picture and let me know if she’d ever seen him before, if she could remember seeing him on the ship last August? I explained my phone probably wouldn’t work at sea but that I’d check my emails as often as I could. Then I attached the picture and pressed Send.

  I drummed my fingers on the desk. What else should I do while I was here? I ran through everything Peter and I had been talking about . . .

  And stopped at Sanne.

  Peter thought that there was, in all probability, a note to go with her passport, but we didn’t know for sure. Maybe I could find something online about it. I Googled her name and the word Celebrate.

  Most of the results were in Dutch. I’d put enough things through automatic translation programmes to know that using it to make sense of anything was a fool’s errand.

  I thought there might be an easier way. A reverse way. I looked up the Dutch for passport and cruise ship – paspoort and cruise-schip – and put that into the search box along with Sanne’s full name.

  There were plenty of search results, but none of them contained all three things. There were several stories about Sanne and a cruise ship, but none that included both of those things and mentioned a passport too.

  In fact, none of the Sanne stories that came back said anything at all about a passport. So how had Peter found out that her family had been sent it?

  ‘Watcha doin’?’ Megan whispered into my right ear.

  I bolted upright, knocking the coffee cup over with my arm. It spilled onto the desk, a thin, caramel-coloured lake expanding fast in the direction of the keyboard.

  I heard Megan cry, ‘Oh, God!’ while I scrambled for something to mop it up with. I looked over the partition to my left and saw a newspaper had been abandoned on the next desk. I grabbed it and threw it on top of the coffee, stopping the flow, patting it so it would soak up all the liquid.

  I turned to face Megan.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ she said. She looked like she was trying not to laugh. ‘I was sitting over there, I saw you come in. I thought it’d be funny to creep up on you. I guess I didn’t think about the coffee.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine. It just might take me a minute to get my heart rate back to normal.’

  Her eyes flicked to the screen.

  ‘I was just finishing up,’ I said, hastily moving the mouse to close the browser window. ‘Are you heading back to the ship?’

  ‘Not for a little while. I thought I’d get some lunch. Want to join me? I do owe you a coffee . . .’

  Just the idea of trying to make small talk while my brain whirred with thoughts of cruise ship crimes and passports and Ethan’s face left me exhausted, but at the same time Peter had made it clear that we needed her help, and I agreed with him.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘Great. There’s a good place on Massena that does subs to go. We can take them to the beach.’ She leaned in close to me, lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Then you can tell me who you and Peter really are, and what you’re really doing on that ship.’

  We walked along the promenade until we came to a public stretch of Nice’s pebble beach, free of unsteady picnic tables, uniformed waiters or bright-blue parasols. Unfortunately it was covered in people and their beach-time accoutrements instead, and we struggled to find a gap in between the folding deckchairs and oily bodies. We ended up eating our lunch perched on a rise just feet from the crashing surf, the waves retreating as the tide went out, turning and churning pebbles as it did.

  ‘Okay,’ Megan said when we were both sitting cross-legged, having found a somewhat comfortable distribution of weight on the rocks. ‘Go.’

  I tried to sound as casual as possible. ‘Go with what?’

  ‘Come on, Adam, I’m not stupid,’ Megan said good-naturedly. ‘Two grown men who aren’t dating each other going on their first cruise alone together? Who supposedly met in university even though you’re from different countries and he’s, what, ten to fifteen years older than you? My theory was you were having an affair with each other until I saw what you were
looking up in that Internet cafe.’

  ‘You were spying on me?’

  ‘I just happened to see your screen.’ Megan took a bite of her sandwich, chewed. With her hand in front of her mouth, she said, ‘Come on, then. What’s the big secret?’

  ‘There isn’t one.’

  ‘Then why were you looking up cruise ship crimes?’

  I took a bite of my sandwich, one big enough to prevent talking so I could think of what to say.

  I decided a lie based on the truth was my best bet.

  ‘Peter and I came on this cruise to relax,’ I said, ‘and we are old friends who met at university. The reason I was looking up cruise ship crimes is because, when I woke up this morning, the door of my cabin was standing wide open and I know I closed it before I went to bed last night.’

  ‘Huh.’ Megan made a face. ‘Careless cabin attendant?’

  ‘Maybe. But I had a Do Not Disturb sign on my door.’

  ‘You think someone broke in?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s why I was Googling it, to see if there was anything on those cruise forums or wherever about something similar happening to someone else.’

  I watched her face. She seemed to buy it.

  ‘Was anything taken?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  The scarf was lying on the pebbles beside me, carefully stowed inside my bag.

  But something was delivered.

  ‘That’s kind of weird,’ Megan said.

  ‘Have you ever heard of anything like that? Break-ins on cruise ships? Or, you know . . .’ I looked out at the sea. ‘Other stuff. Other crimes.’

  ‘Things happen, yeah. But nothing that doesn’t happen on land.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Thefts. Assaults. People have accidents. They disappear. It doesn’t happen very often though.’

  ‘That’s reassuring. How often is not very?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s something like two hundred people since the mid-nineties. I read that somewhere, I think.’

  Peter had said almost exactly the same thing.

  ‘You don’t sound very concerned,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m not.’ Megan rubbed her hands together over the pebbles, cleaning crumbs from her fingers. ‘Did you ever hear the phrase “guns don’t kill people, people do”?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And it’s bullshit. A gun may need a person to point it at another person and pull the trigger, but it’s infinitely easier to shoot someone in an instant than to, say, spend a minute strangling them to death. Also, accidents. It’s incredibly difficult to accidentally strangle someone, but people shoot other people by accident all the time. Therefore, guns do kill people, because more people die just because they’re around.’

  Megan was staring at me. ‘You done there, Mr Gun Control?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, somewhat sheepishly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I was just going to make the point that theft, violence, murder and all that jazz – they’re all crimes committed by people. Wherever you have people, you’ll have those crimes. And cruise ships are full of what, Adam? People. Thousands of them. What’s the difference between them and hotels? Have you ever worked in a hotel?’

  I shook my head, no.

  ‘Well, I have. Lots of them. Trust me when I say that all sorts of crap goes down in hotels. It’s a great place to commit suicide, for starters. You have a room you can lock yourself into, a nice, big bathtub to do the business in, and you know for sure that you’ll eventually be found, and it’ll be by a stranger. No loved one of yours has to live out their years with a vision of your cold blue body tattooed on their brain. Opportunistic rapists love it too. Do you know why most hotels train their housekeepers not to leave guestroom doors propped open while they work inside? Because any guy passing the door could let himself in, rape them and then leave again, and there’d be no proof he was ever in the room because he didn’t have to swipe his card or put his fingers on the door handle to get in there. Then you have stressed-out families who shouldn’t even be together, let alone cramped into a hotel room . . . The last place I worked? We had a woman call Security in the middle of the night – from a cell phone – to say she was thinking of hurting her children. Security had to call in everyone on its payroll to check every guestroom, one by one.’

  ‘Did they find anything?’

  ‘Thankfully, no. But just a couple of weeks later we had a ­murder-suicide. An engineer went into one of the suites because the one below had a water stain spreading across its ceiling, and found a guest had slit his wrists in the bath. The rooms director was dealing with the coroner when he looked at the reservation and realised that two people had checked into the room. The guy’s girlfriend was in a suitcase in the closet.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘That’s people.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s worse on a cruise ship?’

  ‘Why would it be?’

  ‘Because it’s easier to get away with things, isn’t it? I mean, there’s the whole maritime law thing.’

  ‘The what?’

  I explained it briefly, leaving out the bit about how Megan could enjoy the protection – or at least attention after the fact – of the FBI.

  She’d never heard any of it before.

  ‘I suppose that makes sense though,’ she said. ‘What I don’t see is how that makes it easier to get away with things.’

  I repeated all the reasons that Peter had given me. From insufficient police resources to the sea being a perfect dead-body dumping ground.

  By the time I’d finished, Megan was eyeing me suspiciously.

  ‘You seem to have thought a lot about this,’ she said.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You know’ – she started folding up the wrapper her sandwich had come in – ‘what you’re saying, it’s a little bit racist, don’t you think? Like, why do you assume that a police officer from a country other than your own isn’t as well trained or as good at his or her job as your own guys are?’

  ‘It’s not so much that as that there’d only be one or two of them. But maybe they wouldn’t be as good. Maybe they wouldn’t speak the language, for example.’

  ‘English, you mean.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  Megan rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Do you know who Amanda Knox is?’

  ‘The girl who went on trial in Italy for the murder of that British student?’

  ‘The American girl, yes. If you were in the States during the trial, you just couldn’t get away from it. It was everywhere. And running through all the coverage, every station, every interviewer, every talking head: the idea that Italy didn’t know how to do justice, not like our fantastic country, the leading edge of democracy, the wonderful United States, which, the way people were talking, you’d think had invented the concept.’

  ‘You’re saying I’m overreacting.’

  ‘To your cabin door being open when you woke up this morning? Possibly, yeah.’

  I’d actually forgotten that that had been the start of this conversation.

  ‘I’d just like to know who it was,’ I said. ‘Or if it was anyone at all. I could’ve just forgotten to close the door myself, or failed to close it properly.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Megan said. ‘I know someone who’s in security on the Celebrate. I used to work with him on Royal Caribbean. If I can find him, I’ll get him to check your lock activity. I think he’s on shift right now.’

  ‘You’d do that?’

  ‘What can I say? I’m a nice gal. Also, I think you’re a little crazy and I like to encourage that.’

  She winked at me.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘It’s going to cost you a drink though. A proper one. Purchased for me tonight in t
he Horse and Jockey.’

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘A bar on the Oceanic Deck.’

  If she could get me a copy of my cabin door’s lock activity, I reasoned, I’d do pretty much anything.

  ‘Isn’t the Horse and Jockey a very strange name for a bar on a boat?’ I asked.

  Megan threw her head back and laughed. ‘Here’s a tip, Adam: don’t let anyone hear you call it a boat.’

  We started walking back to the bus station shortly after that and, between waiting while three buses to Villefranche came and went, already full, and then waiting again to get on a tender, Megan and I didn’t re-board the ship until after six.

  I knocked on Peter’s cabin door to let him know I was back, but there was no answer. I slipped a note beneath it saying I’d meet him in the Horse and Jockey at seven-thirty, half an hour before I’d told Megan I’d see her there. Then I went into my cabin to shower and change.

  I knocked on Peter’s door again before I left for the bar, but there was still no answer. I could see the tip of my folded note just under his cabin door.

  He mustn’t have come back yet. But where was he? The ship was due to sail in a matter of minutes.

  And I needed him to get to the bar before Megan did, so I could fill him in on her offer to get the Swipeout activity and tell him about the Becky brainwave I’d had.

  But when Peter finally did arrive, he did so with Megan. He’d only just got my note a few minutes before, and met her in the lift on the way there.

  It was less than an hour later when Peter first complained of feeling unwell.

  We were sitting at the bar, the three of us in a row, me in the middle. A line of pint glasses of beer filled to various levels sat in front of us. Peter was telling Megan a story about some unruly children who’d been on his tender ride back from Villefranche.

  I was only half-listening because what I was really thinking about was the size of Megan’s bladder. How long would it be before she needed the loo? That would be my only opportunity to talk to Peter alone, to fill him in. Women may get away with announcing that they were off to the bathroom together for some conspiratorial whispering and a shared urination experience, but I doubted Peter and I would. I didn’t want to arouse any suspicions in Megan again.