Resting on the laptop, Sanne’s hands started to shake.
‘I didn’t kill my brother Jean,’ Romain said. ‘He fell and hit his head while he was trying to get away from me. But the rest of it . . . The rest of it is true.’
He reached over Sanne’s arm and clicked one of the YouTube links.
——
Mama was sitting in an armchair, looking thin and frail, shredding a piece of tissue between her fingers. She looked so old to Romain, and he knew that now she was older still. She spoke so quietly the interviewer had to ask her to speak up. She didn’t cry at all.
The interview was for a popular documentary channel, so it was conducted in English.
‘Tell us,’ the interviewer said, ‘about Romain’s father.’ The woman asking the questions was as old as Mama, but had lots of make-up on and her hair wasn’t grey. ‘There’s been some speculation in the press . . .’
‘I was raped,’ Mama said flatly. ‘Walking home from work one night, just a few months after Charlie and I got married. I’d stayed in the city a bit later than I normally did to have a drink with a friend of mine – it was her birthday – and so, although I was doing a walk home from the station that I had done I don’t even know how many times already, that night I was walking the route a good deal later than I ever had. There were no people around, few cars on the roads – but it was such a short distance, five minutes at most. I thought it’d be fine. Actually, I didn’t think much about it at all. I had just turned onto this street where, I noticed, all the streetlamps were out, and I was thinking how odd that was when I heard footsteps running towards me and then—’
Mama paused here, took a breath in through her nose, steeled herself.
‘Take your time,’ the interviewer said gently.
‘A man grabbed me. He dragged me backwards, behind the garden wall of a house that was derelict. He beat me several times, in the stomach and on the sides of my head – to disable me, I suppose. I felt woozy after it, sleepy. Then he dragged me by my hair inside the house.’
‘How long were you in there?’
‘It was light outside when he left.’
‘Were you . . . conscious?’
‘Just.’
The interviewer shook her head. ‘I can’t even imagine.’
‘I wouldn’t ask anyone to.’
‘Did they ever catch him?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t report it.’
‘Why not?’
Mama looked down at her lap, mumbled something.
The interviewer asked her to repeat it.
‘Because I didn’t want my husband to know.’
‘Why not?’
‘It wasn’t the right decision, I know. But I was in shock. I was thinking, okay, this happened. I can’t change that. But my body withstood it. My mind withstood it. He didn’t win. I hadn’t let him. Telling Charlie back then . . . To me it seemed like it would be an infection, that I would let this, this thing invade my life, let it spread beyond that house that night. So I made up some story about how I’d fallen asleep at a friend’s house and then tripped and fell running back home, and Charlie was in a rush to get out for work and he didn’t question it, and by the time he got home that evening I had had a chance to put myself back together, to practise my story.’ Mama paused. ‘It was foolish of me, I realise now. I know. I should’ve gone to the police, let them collect evidence, get a description of him. But I was traumatised. That’s what was happening to me, on a clinical level: trauma. I wanted to push it down, to forget that it had ever happened. I didn’t realise that by doing so there’d be repercussions for me in the long run. I thought I could just forget all about it.’
‘So you kept it a secret?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then, when you found out you were pregnant . . . ?’
‘Then . . .’ Another breath in through the nose, out again. ‘Then it was too late for the truth. I couldn’t—’
——
Mama’s voice cut off mid-sentence. Sanne had closed the lid of the laptop, turning it off.
‘Are you okay?’ Romain asked.
He reached for her but she shot up from the sofa and went to stand on the other side of the room.
‘Sanne—’
‘Don’t speak, Luke. Romain. Just . . . Just don’t speak.’
He did as he was told.
They stayed like that, in silence, for a long time.
‘You killed a child,’ Sanne said eventually. It sounded like it could be a question.
‘When I was also a child, yes. I was even younger than . . . Than he was.’
‘Why?’
‘He’d been bullying me, and now he was saying things to my younger brother. Scaring him. Jean started to cry. And I got mad, Sanne. I got so mad. Don’t you ever feel like that?’
‘Not enough that I would kill someone, no.’
‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to.’
‘What about the other ones? Your brothers?’
‘I told you about Jean. He fell. Mikki . . .’ Romain sighed. ‘That was a very long time ago. He was crying, and my mother told me to make him stop. I’d seen her walk up and down the room with him, shaking him. I tried to do the same thing but I was only seven years old and I didn’t know that what I was supposed to do was gently shake him and he . . . He got a brain injury. From his brain moving inside his skull, hitting off the front and back. He died a few years ago, from an infection.’
‘Has there been anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Are you lying to me right now?’
‘No.’
‘How do I know what’s the truth? All this time . . . You didn’t even tell me your real name.’
They fell silent again.
‘Sanne,’ Romain said after a while, ‘the baby—’
‘You think it’ll be like you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you think you did what you did because of your father.’
‘Yes,’ Romain said. ‘Possibly.’
‘What was your mother like?’
‘She wasn’t . . .’ Romain sighed. ‘Not like a mother.’
‘But this is different,’ Sanne said. ‘This baby was made from love. Even if it wasn’t real, that was the intention.’
‘It was real. It still is, Sanne.’
‘That’s why you wouldn’t come with me to Breda that time, isn’t it? To visit my parents. You couldn’t travel.’
‘I couldn’t risk it.’
‘Do you even have a passport? ID? A birth cert?’
Romain had got into Greece in 2005 with a passport he’d stolen from a Danish guy in Seville. They looked vaguely alike but, still, it wasn’t something he was willing to put to the test in an airport. He’d been lucky enough to get through the sleepy guards at the ferry terminal on the way here.
‘I have a passport, yes, but I don’t want to use it unless I have to.’ He stood up, went to her. She turned her head away from him, but didn’t try to move. ‘Sanne, listen to me. I love you.’ He risked touching her. She let him. ‘All this, it was so long ago. I was just a child. Yes, I should’ve told you but what would you have done if I’d told you before now? You would’ve run away. You would’ve left me. And why? Because of one minute of one day nineteen years ago. Because of something stupid I did when I was too young to know that it was. Because of a darkness that I haven’t felt since, Sanne. A darkness that your love keeps away.’
Tears were streaming down Sanne’s face. Romain gently pressed his lips against her cheeks, trying to stop the flow of them.
‘What about the baby?’ she asked.
‘My father—’
‘It’s not the same. We’re not the same.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You didn’t rape me
.’ She turned to face him, met his eyes. ‘And I’m not like your mother. I will love this baby. Our baby.’
Romain pulled Sanne to him, whispered into her hair:
‘But it scares me.’
‘It scares me too.’ She put her arms around him, and he pulled her tighter again. ‘But we can do this. Together. I think we can. But only if there are no more lies. None. Not even little ones. Love isn’t just touching and feeling, L— Romain. It’s knowing. Knowing everything. And still having the feeling, even then.’
‘I will never lie to you again, Sanne.’ He meant it. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
He held her until he ached. He didn’t know how long they stood there.
For the first time in his life, Romain felt like a real person. There was nothing inside that wasn’t outside, no dark streak in his core. He had just been young, mixed up, and he’d made mistakes. But now he had someone who believed in him, who loved him, who wanted to have a family with him.
A proper family, like the one he wished he’d had.
We can do this, Sanne had said. I love you too.
But she didn’t. It was all an act.
——
Sanne disappeared from Crete three days later, while Romain was at Mikey’s on a ten-hour shift. She somehow found Romain’s stolen Danish passport taped to the underside of one of the bed’s wooden slats, and took it with her.
He thought she was at the restaurant but, no: she’d been executing the escape plan she’d presumably begun to hatch the moment she’d seen the search results for Romain Dupont. Everything that had happened since had been a lie, a way for Sanne to extricate herself from the situation without getting hurt.
Romain understood this now.
Had she gone to the police too? If she hadn’t already, she would do once she was away.
What about their baby? They’d had seventy-two hours to talk about the future, to discuss names and make plans and get excited.
Romain couldn’t even contemplate the idea of a baby without feeling a strange lump in his throat. Imagine: a child, maybe even a son, to whom he could give everything Mama had denied him, everything she’d kept from him because she’d started regretting her decision to have him the very moment he was born, maybe even before that.
A child who would feel about Romain the way Romain had once felt about Papa.
But now Sanne was gone, and that didn’t bode well for the life in her stomach.
That night Romain packed a bag, wiped the apartment of all trace of him and walked into the night, stopping only when he reached the beach. He slept on the sand and then, the next morning, talked his way onto a fishing vessel headed for Essaouira, convincing the captain to stow him away for five hundred euro which was nearly all the money he had in the world.
Romain hated Morocco. Essaouira was dirty and noisy with bird-shit as common there as drunk sunburned tourists had been back in Greece. The place was infested with seagulls and stank of rotting fish. But he kept his head down, kept his end goal in mind. Within a few weeks he had enough money to afford new, better papers, and to buy a plane ticket back to Europe.
A ticket back to Sanne.
He knew exactly where she was. He’d spent nearly all of his days off in Essaouira’s Internet cafes, searching for her.
She hadn’t called the police. He’d checked day in, day out for weeks, but had come across no new alerts, news stories or other mentions of him online, and absolutely nothing tying him to Greece. This gave him a very valuable piece of information: if Sanne hadn’t told the police about him, it was unlikely she’d told anyone else about him either.
Romain created a fake Facebook profile using the name of one of the waitresses from Mikey’s Place, Claire, who apparently didn’t already have one. He happened to have a photograph of Claire and Sanne, arms around each other’s shoulders during a night out a few months ago. He uploaded it as ‘Claire’s’ profile picture, thus establishing a connection to Sanne without Sanne knowing a thing about it or having to click anything to authenticate.
Then Romain started systematically sending friend requests from ‘Claire’ to every one of Sanne’s friends. Some of them accepted them, some didn’t.
He bided his time.
Four weeks after his arrival in Morocco, a girl named Kelly who was friends with Sanne and ‘Claire’ posted a status update about how excited she was to finally be getting on the Celebrate after a month of training.
Underneath the status it said:
With Sanne Vrijs
Kelly had ‘tagged’ Sanne in her status, an action that millions of people performed on the site every day. She had probably thought nothing of it. Maybe even Sanne thought nothing of it, not realising that Kelly was connected, through ‘Claire’, to Romain.
It was all Romain needed.
He deleted ‘Claire’ and determined that the Celebrate was a Blue Wave cruise ship readying itself for its maiden voyage, due to take place the following week. More Internet searching returned photos of Sanne in a Blue Wave T-shirt on something called Tumblr, and he even found a video she appeared in momentarily on someone else’s blog. In one of the pictures of her published online, Sanne was helpfully wearing a name-tag that, when Romain enlarged the image, clearly read Fizz Cocktail Lounge.
You could try to protect your own privacy, yes, but you couldn’t really count on those around you to do the same.
Once he knew where she was, the next part was easy. He booked himself onto the Celebrate and boarded the ship at Barcelona. He’d got a discounted ticket because it was its very first cruise. His new passport was worth every penny, passing every checkpoint with flying colours. On embarkation day he went to his cabin, slept for a few hours and then, as soon as Fizz opened that evening, made his way to Sanne.
She wasn’t pleased to see him.
‘I’m not here to make a scene,’ Romain said to her. ‘I just want to talk to you. You don’t have to be afraid. I won’t hurt you. I don’t do that any more, Sanne. I wasn’t lying about that.’
‘You need to leave,’ she’d said through clenched teeth, trying to keep her face neutral. There were a number of passengers sitting at the bar alongside them. A male colleague of hers stood at the other end of the counter, polishing glasses and watching them out of the corner of his eye.
‘Sanne, I just want to talk. That’s all. Five minutes.’
‘Go away or I’m going to call Security.’
‘What about the baby?’
‘Baby?’ She scoffed. ‘There is no baby, Romain. I did what you said.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What I had to.’
‘You mean you . . .’
Sanne looked him right in the eye. ‘What choice did I have?’
The bartender started walking towards them.
‘Everything okay here?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ Sanne said. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Are you sure?’ The bartender looked to Romain. ‘This guy isn’t bothering you, is he?’
‘No, he was just leaving.’
With both of them staring at him – and other passengers turning now to look – Romain turned and walked out of Fizz. He had no choice.
After that, he walked the ship for hours, circling every deck numerous times, thinking about what to do next. He had no loving feelings for Sanne any more. It was like someone had flipped a switch.
But the baby . . .
Was she telling the truth about that? It had only been a few weeks. Maybe she hadn’t done it yet. Maybe she was just lying to him, to get him to leave. Still, a job on a cruise ship seemed an odd choice for a young woman who was pregnant.
But he had to be sure before he’d let her get away again.
The lights went off in Fizz just after three in the morning. A few minutes later, Sanne emerged
alone to pull down and lock the metal shutter that covered its entranceway overnight.
Romain watched her from a dark corner a few feet away, a nook that housed a little ATM machine.
When she was done she pocketed the keys and started towards the stairs. Romain followed her. She took them both up to one of the open decks.
It was practically deserted up there, what with the hour and the weather. It was the middle of the night and it was cold outside, with spots of rain and a bracing wind. Sanne kept away from the brightly lit area by the railing, walking in the shadows cast by the lifeboats hanging overhead instead.
Romain followed her from a safe distance, looking for security cameras as he went. After a minute or so he realised that the cameras were all on the other side of the promenade, on lamp-posts close to the railings.
Sanne was intentionally avoiding them and the lights.
But why?
The penny dropped: because she was crew. Crew in uniform. She wasn’t supposed to be up here at all.
And it was the middle of the night.
And they were at sea.
And no one knew a convicted murderer named Romain Dupont was even on this ship in the first place.
That’s how it happened. There was no great plan, no real premeditation. He had intended just to talk to her. At least to try that first.
But then different ideas moved into the foreground of his mind like pieces sliding across a chessboard. Coming together. Forming a new, better idea.
One the darkness really liked.
Near the end of the deck, Sanne crossed to the railing and leaned against it, looking out. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
Romain didn’t think Sanne was the type to smoke while she was pregnant, but that in itself wasn’t proof of anything. After checking for cameras pointed at her or other passengers – there were neither – he made his move.
As quick as he could, he stepped up behind Sanne, threw one strong arm around her waist while wrapping another across her chest, clamped his hand roughly over her mouth and pulled her head back.
The cigarettes fell into the darkness beyond the railing.
Sanne didn’t get a chance to make a sound.
Distress Signals Page 29