by Denise Mina
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2019 by Denise Mina
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover art © Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company
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First North American ebook edition: June 2019
Originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK: May 2019
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ISBN 978-0-316-52848-1
E3-20190516-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Acknowledgements
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Denise Mina
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One [belief] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.
Steven Pinker
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Prologue
Just tell the truth. I’ve said that to my own kids. What a ridiculous thing to teach children. No one wants to hear it. There has to be a reason to tell the truth. I stopped some time ago and, let me tell you, it was great. Best decision I ever made. Lie and lie again, make up a name, a background, your likes and dislikes, just fabricate the whole thing. So much more rational. But I’m telling you the truth in this book. There’s a very good reason for that.
I ruined my life by telling the truth. I was very young. My mum had just died. Men gathered in my garden at night to shout abuse at my house because I wouldn’t lie. Everyone started discussing what was wrong with me, with people like me. Someone nailed a dead cat to my front door in protest. A man broke into my house and tried to kill me to shut me up.
So I shut up and I ran. I changed my name. I became secretive and careful and sealed off that part of my life; I never told it again. When anything even touching on that story came up–house fires, Gretchen Teigler, football–I went to the loo or changed the subject. I didn’t feel as if I was lying, I just wasn’t Sophie Bukaran any more. I was Anna McDonald and those things were nothing to do with me. I felt safe.
When you’re tired and young and frightened and the whole world hates you, shutting up is luxurious.
But now I’m telling that story again. Why am I writing a whole book about it for you to read? What changed? I wouldn’t be doing it if my life hadn’t imploded that morning. I’m no hero. I’m not a whistle-blower of tremendous personal courage, content to be hounded to my grave because I will not be silenced. I’m truth-telling for a very different reason. It’s less laudable but a bit more relatable, maybe. And it’s the truth.
1
THE DAY MY LIFE exploded started well.
It was early morning in November and I woke up without the use of an alarm clock. I was pleased about that. It was a concession to our couples counselling: I wouldn’t wake Hamish at six with my alarm clock and he wouldn’t play Candy Crush on his phone all evening while ignoring the children.
I was looking forward to my day. I had a new true-crime podcast series waiting on my phone and I’d heard good things about it. I planned to listen to the first episode, get a taste for the story before I woke the kids for school, and then binge on it while I trawled through a day of menial tasks. A good podcast can add a glorious multi-world texture to anything. I’ve resisted an Assyrian invasion while picking up dry-cleaning. I’ve seen justice served on a vicious murderer while buying underpants.
I lay in bed savouring the anticipation, watching light from the street ripple across the ceiling, listening as the heating kicked on and the grand old dame of a house groaned and cracked her bones. I got up, pulled on a jumper and slippers, and crept out of the bedroom.
I loved getting up before everyone else, when the house was still and I could read or listen to a podcast alone in a frozen world. I knew where everyone was. I knew they were safe. I could relax.
Hamish resented it. He said it was creepy. Why did I need this time alone, sneaking around the house? Why did I need to be alone so much?
Trust issues, the couples counsellor called it.
I tried to reassure Hamish, I’m not planning to kill you or anything. But that was not reassuring, apparently. In fact, Anna, it might sound rather hostile to Hamish, if you think about it from his point of view. Really? (I said it in a hostile way.) Does that sound hostile? Then we talked about that for a while. It was a stupid process. We were both hostile and sad. Our relationship was in its death throes.
I tiptoed across the landing, skirting the squeakiest floorboards and looked in on both of the girls. They were fast asleep in their wee beds, school uniforms laid out on chairs, socks in shoes, ties under collars. I wish I had lingered longer. I would never see them so innocent again.
I went back out to the landing. The oak banister curled softly from the top of the house to bottom, carved to fit the cup of a hand, grainy to the touch, following the wind of the stairs like a great long snake of yellow marzipan. It led down to a grand hallway with ma
rble pillars flanking the front door and a floor mosaic of Hamish’s ancestral coat of arms. The house was bought by Hamish’s great-grandfather in 1869. He bought it new from Greek Thompson.
Hamish was very proud of his background. He knew nothing at all about mine. I must emphasise that. I’m not just saying that to protect him, now that everything has come out. He was a senior member of the Bar, hoping to be appointed to the bench like his forebears. He wouldn’t have risked that just to be with me.
When we met I was Anna, the new office temp from Somewhere-Outside-of-Aberdeen. I chose Hamish quite carefully. I did love him, I must say that, and I still do, sometimes. But I deliberately picked an older man with money and status. A declamatory man, full of facts and opinions. He was the perfect hide.
Hamish was born in that house and had never lived anywhere else. His family had been on or near the Scottish judiciary for two hundred years. He didn’t much like foreign travel. He read only Scottish writers. That seemed so weird to me. I think I found it a little exotic.
It was cold in the hall that morning. I walked through into the white-gleaming, German-designed kitchen and made a pot of strong coffee. I picked up my phone. The true-crime podcast series was called Death and the Dana. The description read ‘A sunken yacht, a murdered family on board, a secret still unsolved…’
Oh yes: ponderous tone, secrets, murders, it had everything. And the case had happened while my girls were small, a time of little jumpers and waiting outside school, standing silently with the timeless phalanx of mothers, absent from the wider world. I didn’t know anything about this murder case.
I poured a big mug of coffee, sat down, put my phone on the kitchen table in front of me and pressed play. I expected an absorbing, high-stakes story.
I had no idea I was about to meet Leon Parker again.
2
Episode 1: Death and the Dana
Hi.
I’m Trina Keany, a producer here on the MisoNetwork. Welcome to this podcast series: Death and the Dana.
According to French police this strange and troubling case is closed. They solved it. Amila Fabricase was convicted of the murder of three members of the same family on their yacht. But Amila Fabricase could not have done it: the murders could only have been committed by someone on board and multiple witnesses, CCTV and passport checks place Amila on an airplane, flying to Lyon, at the time.
On the night in question a wealthy family–a father and his two children–were having dinner on board their docked private yacht, the Dana. The crew had been sent ashore at the father’s insistence and the family were alone.
While Amila was in the air the boat motored out of port in the dark. No sails were set. Radio and navigation lights were off. Still, the Dana navigated the tricky sandbanks of the Perthuis Breton strait, changed course by thirty-two degrees and headed out into the Atlantic. Several miles out to sea an explosion in the hull sank the ship. All three people on board died.
So what could have happened? Why were the authorities so determined to believe something that was provably not true? And why has there never been an appeal against the conviction?
Even before it sank, the Dana had a reputation for being haunted. Superstitious commentators immediately seized upon the sinking as proof that the boat was haunted. A month later, a bizarre underwater film of the wreck seemed to confirm tales of vengeful ghosts on board.
Trina Keany’s south London accent was soft, her timbre low, intonation melodic. I put my feet up on the chair next to me and sipped delicious coffee.
But let’s go back to the beginning and set the scene.
The Île de Ré is a chichi holiday resort off the west coast of France. It has a quirky history. It’s a long, flat island, basically a sandbank between La Rochelle and the Bay of Biscay. For most of its history the island was cut off from the mainland and very poor. The economy depended on salt harvesting and criminal transportations. It was from the island’s capital, Saint-Martin, that French prisoners left for the penal colonies of New Caledonia and Guiana. Dreyfus left for Devil’s Island from Saint-Martin. The author of Papillon, Henri Charrière, left on a prison ship in 1931.
Because it was poor and isolated the island remained undeveloped. It kept its ancient cobbled streets, pretty sun-bleached cottages with terracotta roofs, doors and shutters painted pastel green or blue. Tall pink hollyhocks burst from pavements in summer and it has become a UNESCO World Heritage site. But the population is very wealthy now and that’s because of the bridge.
In the late 1980s, at great expense, a long road bridge was built linking it with La Rochelle. French holidaymakers slowly began to discover the unspoiled island. It became a low-key holiday resort, understated, modest in scale. The climate is pleasant, as sunny as the south of France but cooler because of a breeze coming off the Atlantic. The island is flat. There are cycle lanes everywhere.
Over the next couple of decades more and more people wanted a simple life in the bucolic setting. Movie stars, musicians, ex-presidents and captains of industry moved there. Competition for houses became intense. Even modest houses became expensive, then unaffordable. Poor fishermen’s cottages stand empty, used occasionally by high-end holidaymakers who sail into the marina in the centre of town. Shops no longer sell horsemeat or hardware, they sell Gucci and Chanel. It has an air of wealth.
Locals have resisted. Holiday homes have been burned to the ground. Incomers have reported harassment and prejudicial treatment. A family from New Zealand claimed they were chased off the island. But mostly it is peaceful.
As the Dana docked in Saint-Martin that day there were a lot of hobby sailors who recognised and admired her. She was a beautiful ship.
The Dana was not the kind of private yacht we tend to think of now: there were no plasma screens or helipads, no four storeys of white couches and minibars. She was a sailing ship, a schooner. Schooners are louche. In times gone by, pirates and privateers loved schooners for their speed. They have high sails and a curved bow that sits low in the water like a slick-hipped cowboy’s gun belt.
So the Dana was beautiful and she was famous. Once dubbed ‘the most haunted yacht afloat’, a movie had been made about her in the 1970s in the tradition of The Amityville Horror. Like that film and other horror movies of that period, The Haunting of the Dana looks creaky to us now, but it was very successful at the time, as was the book that inspired it. The ship’s notoriety followed it, creating a flurry of interest wherever she docked.
That afternoon, she docked in Saint-Martin, was tied up, bow and stern, and a gangplank was lowered.
A mismatched young couple were seen approaching the ship. The girl was slim, tanned, blonde and looked very Italian. She wore a sleeveless, ankle-length Missoni dress and sandals. Her companion was a gangly teen boy dressed in baggy shorts, skater shoes and an oversized T-shirt. One eyewitness actually thought the boy was a lucky horror fan who had stumbled unexpectedly on the Dana, because his T-shirt had an image from the cult horror movie Drag Me to Hell. The witness remembered thinking that the boy must be very pleased to see the famous ship. He was surprised when a man with the same hair and face, obviously the boy’s father, waved to the boy from the yacht. He wondered if the father had bought the yacht for the boy’s entertainment or if the boy wore the T-shirt for his father’s. It stuck in his mind.
I was relaxed, had my feet up on the table and I was drinking coffee so strong that it was making me break into a gentle sweat. My mind began to stray to the day ahead but then Keany said:
In fact, the mismatched boy and girl were siblings and had come to meet their father, Leon Parker, the yacht’s new owner.
Startled, I sat up. I must have misheard. I was groggy, it was early. I thought it was sleepy mind tricks, that made me hear Leon’s name. I hadn’t thought about him for years and it surprised me that his name should come to me now.
He’d invited his two children to come to Saint-Martin to join him on board the Dana. They were celebrating the eldest, Violetta, tur
ning twenty-one. The kids barely knew each other. They came from homes in different countries and from very different mothers. Leon had recently remarried and was making an effort to forge a family unit out of the mess of his past, an effort that may have been at the behest of his new wife. It was a marked change from his previous behaviour.
He meant to serve them a meal on board his yacht and present his daughter with a fabulous antique diamond necklace to mark her coming of age.
Sitting upright in the chill of the morning kitchen, I was still in denial, convinced I had heard the name wrong, but my heart rate rose steadily. It was as if my blood knew it was him before my mind could take it in.
As the gangplank hit the dock, a young woman rushed off the ship. She had a bag of clothes with her; she held one hand over her right eye and was being shouted after by the captain.
This was Amila Fabricase, the ship’s chef.
Amila left fast enough to make a loud clang clang clang on the metal gangplank. The noise drew the eyes of multiple witnesses. She pushed through the crowds, ran across town and stopped to ask a waiter in a cafe where she could get a taxi to the airport. He later described her as holding a hand over her eye, face ashen, body trembling, tears rolling down the covered side of her face and dripping from her chin. The waiter made her sit down and called a cab. She seemed to be in a lot of pain, he thought she had hurt her eye and asked if she wanted him to take a look. She didn’t. He helped her into the cab for the airport and she thanked him.
Back on the Dana the captain was furious. The family had gathered for a celebration meal but the chef was gone. He called Amila’s employment agency demanding a replacement but it was the height of the season and no one was available. He left angry messages on Amila’s phone, insisting that she give back her wages: the crew had all been paid in cash at the start of the voyage. This is very unusual practice and made the captain look bad. Amila had taken all of her money with her. She never called back.