I’d never felt so alone.
I was on auto-pilot. Walk forward.
I felt no emotion. I was numb. My parents’ faces, Moorsey’s, Rose’s, Maureen’s, Jack’s . . . When they tried to force their way up into my consciousness – what will they think? – I pushed them back down.
Keep walking. Just keep walking.
Eventually we reached a door marked ‘AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT’. It had a keypad. The guard punched in a number, momentarily tightened his grip on my arm. The door unlocked with a loud click and he nodded for me to step through it.
They’d say I was driven to it by grief. Or maybe anger. Sarah had cheated on me, after all. In fact, almost everyone else seemed to believe that she was out there somewhere, having escaped me, having chosen to leave. They’d say I couldn’t take it. They’d say I’d snapped.
We were on the bridge now. A wall of windows offered a near-panoramic view of the Cote d’Azur, jagged and mountainous, blue water sparkling, baked-white apartment buildings clustered in packs. The hills were rose-coloured again. It must be mid-afternoon at least.
How long had I been unconscious?
The coastline was getting closer, growing bigger in the windows. We were returning to Villefranche. They were bringing me back to land. Policemen would come aboard and arrest me. The FBI would be waiting on shore. My wrists would be in handcuffs. My face would be on the news.
Officers in navy trousers and white shirts stood in front of consoles, turning knobs and pressing buttons. Most of them turned to look at me now. Some nodded in greeting at my chaperone.
‘Mr Dunne?’
A man had stepped in front of me. He was in plain clothes, a suit. Tall, broad-shouldered, older with a shock of white-blonde hair. A laminated lanyard hung from around his neck. It read Director of Security on it. His name was obscured by his tie.
‘Yes,’ I said weakly.
‘This way please.’
He motioned towards a glassed-in office directly behind him. All that was in there was a table with a chair on either side. There was something on the table, but I couldn’t make out what it was from here. Some kind of recording equipment? This was to be my interrogation room then.
The director nodded to the guard beside me, who released his grip on my arm. I stepped forward, towards the office. Stepped inside its open door.
And saw that the device on the table wasn’t a voice recorder at all. It was a phone.
A phone that was off the hook.
What the . . . ?
‘Take a seat,’ the director said. His tone was friendly. I did what I was told. He reached across me to pick up the receiver, put it to his ear and said into it, ‘I have him here for you now . . . Yes, you’re most welcome . . . Okay. Just a second.’ He held the receiver out to me.
I had no idea what was going on, but I took it.
‘I’ll just be outside,’ the director said. ‘Take your time.’
I watched him leave. Then, slowly, I put the phone to my ear.
‘Hello?’ I said into the silence.
There was a rush of breath, of relief. Then a woman’s voice, quiet and unsure:
‘Is this Adam?’
‘Yes.’
‘Adam Dunne?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘Are you alone? I . . .’ A pause. ‘I mean, is Peter Brazier with you? In the room with you? Right now?’
‘No, I haven’t . . . Actually, I don’t know where he is. Who is this?’
‘You sent me an email. My name is Becky. Becky Richardson?’
‘Estelle’s friend.’
‘Yes. I tried calling the number you gave me but your phone seems to be turned off, and I wasn’t sure when you’d get my email . . .’
My phone. I thought back to the cabin. Had it been there? I didn’t remember seeing it. I felt in my pockets with my free hand. I didn’t have it with me. That was gone too.
‘I knew you were on the Celebrate,’ Becky said, ‘so I thought a ship-to-shore call was best. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure they did those any more, but—’
‘Becky,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You can’t tell him I called, okay? Peter. If you can’t promise me that you won’t tell him I called, I’ll hang up right now.’
‘I...’ My mind was a muddle. ‘Fine. Yeah, grand. I won’t tell him.’
‘He’s not going to find her,’ Becky said.
‘How do you know? Do you know something he doesn’t?’
‘I know something you don’t. I know Peter. My advice to you is to get off that ship as soon as possible, to leave all this be. Leave Peter be.’
‘My girlfriend, Sarah, she—’
‘I know. And I’m sorry. But Peter isn’t going to help you find her. How could he, possibly?’
‘Becky,’ I said, rubbing my temples. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but something is. Someone drugged us last night and broke into my cabin—’
‘“Us”? You mean you and Peter?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How is Peter now?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him yet today. He’s not in his cabin. But look, Becky, I don’t know what you think you know, but I’m the one here with him, the one who’s seeing all of this—’
‘Adam, I had her passport.’
‘Her . . . What?’
‘I said I had her passport. Estelle’s. I had it in my bag. She gave it to me for safe-keeping after we boarded the ship. I’m the one who gave it to Peter.’
‘So she gave you the note?’
‘Adam, no. Look . . .’ A pause. ‘Adam, I’m sorry, but there was no note. He must have just made that bit up, along with the stuff about it being posted to him. To take advantage of you, is my guess. There’s articles about you online, about the money you were paid for that film. Did you, by any chance, pay for the both of you to get on that ship?’
I thought of the boxes in his living room in the Beau Soleil Palais, the labels on them.
WEST MED ASSAULTS & THEFTS 2009–2012.
CREW EVAL/SECURITY DEPT/ATLANTIC ’06.
JOHNSON SUIT: DISCOVERY (COPIES).
The writing on them, it was the same as the writing on the note Peter had shown me that was supposedly from Estelle. I hadn’t realised at the time, because I’d been distracted by the boxes themselves, by what was in them. But I could see it now, as clear as day.
And Sanne Vrijs . . .
My guess was there was no passport there at all. That’s why I hadn’t been able to find any mention of it in the news stories about Sanne’s disappearance online.
‘Peter can’t accept that Estelle isn’t coming back,’ Becky said. ‘He won’t stop this. He can’t. He’s lying to you. He’s a desperate man taking desperate measures and the only thing to do is to leave him to it. Like I said, you need to get off that ship as soon as possible. Get away from him now, before he pulls you down with him.’
I thought about how, outside Fizz that first night, Peter had caught up with me.
She’s perfect, Adam. Megan is perfect.
I’d thought he meant that she could help us find Ethan – and he did. But now I realised that we had very different ideas about how she could.
‘It’s too late,’ I said to Becky. ‘He already has.’
As soon as I hung up the phone, the door opened behind me and someone stepped into the room.
‘Adam,’ a voice said. A voice I’d heard before. ‘Stay calm, okay?’ Deep, with a distinctly American accent. ‘I just want to talk to you.’
I turned to find Ethan Eckhart standing in front of me.
I bolted up in an instant, made for the door.
‘Wait,’ he said, grabbing my arm. ‘Calm down. I just want to talk to you, okay?’
‘Get the
fuck away from me.’
I tried for the door again. This time he stood in front of me, blocking my way. Over his shoulder I could see some of the officers outside, looking in through the glass. One of them was frowning, his hand moving to the walkie-talkie on his belt, taking a step forward.
Ethan turned and waved at the man, smiled.
‘People are looking,’ he said when he turned back to me. ‘Sit down.’ His body was still in front of me, his left hand still gripping my right. He looked just like he did in his headshot, except his hair was a bit lighter now and cut tighter. He wasn’t in uniform; he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. ‘Adam, sit down.’
What could he do to me, here in this glass room with a bridge full of officers just feet away?
What more could he do to me?
Defeated, I sat back down.
‘That’s it.’ Ethan exhaled loudly. He leaned back against the wall, his arms folded, his body still between me and the door. ‘I heard your name on the tannoy, so I came here to wait for you. I was going to knock on your cabin door but I thought this might be better for you. More comfortable.’
‘Knock on my door again, you mean.’
‘What?’
‘How did you know I was here, on board?’
‘I searched the manifest for your name on embarkation day. This one and the one before. I thought you might arrive on Monday, but apparently you didn’t know that Sarah had been on here by then. I knew once you found out where she’d been there was a danger you’d come here to look for me and after you called me . . . Well, I figured it was only a matter of time. How did you find out?’
‘How about fuck you?’
Ethan sighed. ‘I deserve that, I know. But, Adam, you have to believe me. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I never thought . . . I don’t know what got into her, to be honest.’
A rage boiled up inside me, spilled over and out of my mouth.
‘You fucking shit. You don’t know what got into her? What could she have possibly done to deserve what you did?’
‘What I . . . What I did?’ Ethan blinked, looked at me blankly. ‘I don’t know what she’s told you, but she broke up with me. She said I’d just been a silly mistake. She picked you. Her words, exactly. “I pick Adam.” Then she just left without even telling me she was going. Or where she was. Or telling you, it turned out. When you called me and said the Gardaí were involved . . .’ Ethan shook his head. ‘Man, like I said. I don’t know what got into her. Did she call you?’
I tried to clear a path through my thoughts. Half an hour ago I was sure I was about to be frog-marched off the Celebrate, charged with Megan’s murder. Five minutes ago Becky Richardson told me that Peter hadn’t received Estelle’s passport in the post at all, and that he’d just told me he had so he could take advantage of me, that he’d written Estelle’s note himself so he could extort from me the cash he needed to continue his quest to find out what had happened to his wife by getting on this ship.
Now Sarah’s killer and I were having a perfectly polite, human conversation, during which he told me that she’d left him – alive? – and picked me.
‘Go back to the beginning,’ I said. ‘Start at the start.’
‘Well, it’s a long story.’
‘I have time.’
‘Do you want a coffee?’ Ethan asked, inexplicably.
I glared at him.
‘No?’ He held up his hands. ‘Okay, man. Sorry. I was just trying to be polite.’
Then he walked around to the other side of the table – the one furthest from the door – and took the seat opposite me. If I wanted to now, I could easily bolt out the door.
What the hell was going on?
When was I going to be able to stop asking that question?
‘I want to say something to you first,’ Ethan said. ‘I know this is probably hard for you to hear and I get that, but I’m in love with her. I don’t know what happened, that day in the office when we first met, but I just felt something. Some kind of connection. I’d never felt it before. My marriage had just ended, and she was feeling like you and her weren’t going any—’
‘Wait,’ I said, holding up a hand. ‘You’re in love with her?’
‘Yeah. I thought she might have been in love with me too, until we came here.’
‘You’re in love with her.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Present tense?’
‘Huh?’
‘She’s alive, you’re saying? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Alive? What the . . .’ Ethan sat back in his chair, shook his head at me. ‘Man, I think you should start at the beginning, because I don’t have the first clue what the heck you’re on about.’ His eyes widened. ‘Wait, do you . . . Is she okay? Did something . . . Did something happen to her?’
A minute ago I would’ve said, Yeah, you, you piece of shit. But now I wasn’t so sure.
I looked at Ethan as if I’d never seen him before, as if I’d no preconceived ideas about him or any advance information on who he was. He looked ordinary, average, normal. Until we’d met in this room I’d been telling myself that that was on purpose, deliberate, that he was an everyman so he could blend into the background, unnoticed, at every scene.
But now I wondered if he was just ordinary after all, if that was all he was.
Sarah? Sarah, is that you? Talk to me, please. Just talk to me.
‘She came on here with you,’ I said. ‘Boarded the Celebrate, the Monday before last.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You spent a night in Barcelona first, in a hotel.’
‘If we flew out from Cork on the Monday morning, we wouldn’t have made it to the port on time.’
‘You boarded the ship together. Did you share a cabin?’
‘We were supposed to. I was on an educational – a comped staff trip; every director gets one so that you can experience the product like a customer – and Sarah was my guest.’
That’s why Blue Wave hadn’t been able to find her reservation. Because she didn’t have one, she was on his. Ethan’s had presumably been made in-house, at corporate level, outside the normal reservation system.
And it would look doubly bad to have a crew member’s cruise companion disappear off the ship, especially if he didn’t bother to report her missing. Some tall tale about a computer glitch easily covered the company’s ass on that.
‘What happened?’
‘I think Sarah . . .’ A cough, a nervous throat-clearing. ‘Sarah was very unsure about the whole thing. Her and me, I mean. Well, I suppose you and her too. She thought that maybe we . . . When you’re having an affair, there’s the element of danger. The excitement of sneaking around, the novelty of the secret. You know what I mean?’
‘No, I don’t actually.’
‘Yeah, well . . . She was, ah, being weird all day. Wouldn’t talk to me about it. I thought she might actually turn around and tell me she wasn’t even getting on the ship, that she was going home instead. But she did, and then I had to go meet my new line manager so she went to dinner alone, and then afterwards . . . Well, afterwards we had a fight. Out on deck. On Pacific. By the Grotto Pool?’
‘I don’t give a flying fuck where it happened, Ethan. Tell me what did.’
‘She broke up with me, okay? She said that it felt wrong and that it had all been a mistake, and that she loved you and that . . . She said she couldn’t believe that she’d hurt you so much already. She was going to get off the ship in the morning, fly straight home from Nice and tell you everything. Ask you if you two could start all over again.’
‘How did you react?’ I asked while trying not to react to what he’d just said.
She was coming back to me. She was coming home.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Ethan said. ‘I let her go. I said okay, fi
ne. Whatever you want. That’s what I told her. We agreed that I’d go find a chair in a corner of a lounge somewhere or a bed in crew quarters, and let her have the cabin for the night. She said she’d go pack her stuff and off she went. But then I started thinking about us, about how I didn’t want to let her go. I told you, I love her. And then I was like, is this a test? You know what women are like. They never actually say what—’
‘So what then?’ I said, cutting him off. ‘You went back to the cabin?’
‘Yeah, but she wasn’t there. Her stuff wasn’t either. Well, most of her stuff. She’d taken her suitcase, but she’d left some clothes behind in the wardrobe and some make-up stuff by the bathroom sink. And there was the note.’
‘The . . . The what?’
‘The note,’ Ethan repeated.
‘What note?’
‘She’d written me a note. It was stuck to the mirror over the desk.’
‘How do you mean, stuck?’
‘It was one of those Post-It things.’
‘One of those . . .’ I tried to gulp down some air, to inflate my lungs. They felt like they were collapsing. ‘What did it say? What did the note say?’
‘That she was sorry,’ Ethan said.
‘Tell me the exact words.’
‘“I’m sorry,” signed the letter “S”.’
‘In block capitals?’
‘Yeah. Wait, how do you—’
‘What happened to the note? Did you take it?’
‘No, I left to go look for her. Went all over the ship, man. I swear. I searched everywhere. Came back to the cabin a couple of hours later and the note was gone. That was it. I didn’t see Sarah again. I tried calling her and texting her, but I never got through. Her phone was switched off. So . . .’ Ethan hesitated. ‘Well, I didn’t think anything was wrong, you know? I thought she was just mad at me, and that turndown service had taken the note, or it had fallen under the bed and I just couldn’t see it or something.’
‘You didn’t report her missing.’
‘Missing? Why would I? She’d just decided not to spend that night in our cabin, and then she got off the ship the next day. I know she did, I checked her Swipeout activity.’
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