Conviction

by Denise Mina

  The kids watched Amila leave, saw the captain shouting, but then their father came down the gangplank. They hugged and then all three set off for a walk while the captain fumed and made arrangements for dinner.

  They walked up through the town and stopped at a café-bar for beer and Fantas. The café owner remembered that Leon smoked and talked a lot, that they all laughed together but seemed tense.

  Back on the Dana the captain still had to find a way of serving them a celebration meal. Les Copains, a Michelin-starred restaurant in the town, agreed to provide bouillabaisse soup, bread, charcuterie, cheeses and salad. Bouillabaisse is a fish stew. Like a lot of peasant foods, it began as a simple dish but now the recipe is rigidly adhered to. The basic fish stew should be garnished with freshly cooked mussels, crab and garlic-rubbed bread, all added just before serving. This became important later to establish the sequence of the events. The restaurant wanted to leave a sous chef on board to serve the bouillabaisse properly but the captain said no. Leon Parker wanted the yacht to himself tonight. No sous chef would be permitted to stay. Leon wanted to be alone with his children.

  Les Copains was so ashamed about their mis-service of the bouillabaisse that it took a week before they admitted that they left before the soup was served.

  When the dinner was delivered from Les Copains, it was set up in the galley, the bouillabaisse in a thermal pot, ready to be served. The garnish was left on a separate plate. The cheese had been plated up, as had the charcuterie. The crew set the table in the formal dining room downstairs. Leon hadn’t had a chance to use it yet and was keen to show it off. A magnum of champagne was put on ice, on deck, as per Leon’s instructions and the crew awaited the family’s return.

  When they saw the Parkers walking down the dock towards the ship, the captain got the crew to line up and welcome them. Leon was last on board. He gave the captain a few hundred euros and ordered him to take the crew to a bar for a big football match, France vs Germany in a European Cup semi-final match. He told them not to come back before eleven.

  The captain did what he was told. He led his men to a bar nearby and they watched the whole match. France won, knocking Germany out and gaining a place in the final. The French crew had a very good night. They went for pizza before getting to the dock at ten past eleven.

  But the Dana was gone. None of the Parker family members were ever seen alive again.

  There were no communications from on board but this is what was seen by diners at a nearby rooftop restaurant: sunset was around nine thirty. They saw one figure on deck, possibly Violetta, but it was dark. The Dana’s engine started and the ship motored out into open waters.

  As the top mast passed by the rooftop restaurant, just eighty yards away, onlookers gave her a round of applause. But the diners with sailing experience saw that something was wrong.

  The navigation lights were off on the boat.

  These lights should be on at all times when a ship is in motion: a light on the main mast, one at the front and back, and coloured lights on the side–red on port, green on starboard, so that other boats know which direction the ship is going in.

  Two diners were so troubled that they called the coastguard to warn them something was awry with the Dana. Someone had cast off without the lights on. It suggested an incompetent sailor with no training or awareness of the regulations. The coastguard tried to contact the yacht but the maritime radio was off.

  The Dana motored straight out into the Atlantic, cutting across a major shipping lane. That’s a dangerous thing to do without a radio because modern container ships are huge and sail blind. They rely on radio contact to warn smaller vessels to get out of the way.

  Miraculously, the Dana crossed the shipping lane without incident but the coastguard was now reporting it as a safety hazard.

  This drew the attention of other ships.

  A nearby container ship stationed a crewman to watch the Dana until the coastguard got there. Much later, after Amila was sentenced for the murders, the crewman was interviewed for a documentary. He described what he saw.

  There was a change of sound texture, better quality with the flat ambience of a studio. The man spoke perfect English with a thick Dutch accent.

  ‘Yes, we radioed many times but no reply came back. I was asked to stand on the bridge and watch until the coastguard got there. It was a clear night, I had binoculars. I could see the outline, we were approaching, but no one on board. So, OK. That was a strange… um… situation. The lights were off, even the masthead, but the engine was still running. I could see fumes coming out and it was moving in a straight line. Maybe a power failure? I don’t know. But as I watched, that yacht just dropped straight down into the sea.

  ‘I watched it go straight down. It didn’t list. It happened very quickly, sea folds over the deck, little puff of smoke as the engine went under, sea covered the top mast and then the water was calm again. It just went down and it was gone.

  ‘It was weird. We all laughed. We didn’t know there was a family on there. We thought someone had scuttled it for insurance, done it badly, that they would get found out. You have no idea how expensive these ships are, even sitting in dock. We thought that was what happened. Because, well, what else could have happened?’

  What else indeed?

  Amila Fabricase was charged and convicted of sinking the ship. The police found evidence that she had handled explosives and claimed that she set them in the engine room of the Dana before she got off. What the investigation never seemed to ask was this: who sailed the ship out to sea? It had to be someone on board.

  Suppose Leon Parker had a bit to drink and decided to go sailing after dinner. Suppose he forgot to turn on the lights and the radio–even then, the rooftop diners would have seen him confidently casting off. But they didn’t. One witness on the dock did see a lone figure but said they were staying low, being furtive, as if they were hiding. It was done surreptitiously.

  Amila was traced, searched, interrogated and investigated.

  The wealthy family was hardly looked at.

  The police paid scant attention to Leon, who had invited the kids there and dismissed the crew after paying them in cash. Leon, who could both cast off and sail the ship. Leon, who ordered the captain to set out the dinner in the dining room, below deck, on a warm July night, when the most obvious place to eat would be on deck. No one asked if Leon Parker killed his family. The police focused exclusively on Amila.

  Leon had recently married into a very powerful family. They are famously media-shy and connected. Is it possible that they asked the police not to look at Leon? Is it possible that it was strongly implied that the police’s focus should be elsewhere?

  I paused it. I knew it was my Leon. My friend Leon.

  My heart was thumping in my throat. I picked up my phone and opened the podcast home page.

  3

  THE BACKGROUND IMAGE WAS of the Dana hanging in a harness in dry dock. A fisheye lens distorted the image so the red-and-white bow loomed towards the viewer like a big friendly dog nuzzling up to the camera. The sky behind was crisp and blue, a Côte d’Azur winter sky, and the varnished wooden deck glinted in the sun.

  Down the side of the image were files, each marked by the episode they related to. ‘Ep1’. ‘Ep2’. They were designed to look like stacks of documents that had been dropped on a desk and seen from above. But it wasn’t a desk, it was a photo of a yacht.

  I tapped ‘Ep1’ and a series of photos separated and slid across the screen.

  There he was: Leon Parker.

  Leon grinning, gap-toothed, older.

  His arms were resting on the shoulders of two sleek kids, a gangly blond boy in an oversized T-shirt and a beautiful girl in a green-and-gold chevroned dress. She was smirking and wore a lumpy diamond necklace. She was touching it with her middle finger as if she was flipping the bird at the camera. They were all toasting the camera with champagne flutes.

  Leon Parker was dead. God, that made me sad. I hadn’t
seen him for years but some people are just a loss to the world. Leon Parker was one of those people.

  He hadn’t aged much in a decade. He was tall, six feet, square, broad around the middle but still handsome for a man in his late fifties. His hair was a little more silvered, still longish and curly, salt-tousled from being at sea. White chest hair curled up at the wide neck of his open shirt, stark against weathered brown skin. He was grinning, missing a tooth behind his incisor. He looked happy.

  My eye was drawn away from the blue-sky background, the kids and the diamond necklace, to the skinny cigarette burning between Leon’s fingers. Leon rolled his own. I’d seen him do it with one hand.

  In the picture he had his arms around the kids but held the cigarette away, keeping his cigarette to the side as if he didn’t want the smoke to get near them. I could almost smell his cheap tobacco, warm as gravy, hear him chuckle at the end of a story he must have told a hundred times.

  I didn’t want to listen on but I needed to know what had happened to him. I pressed play.

  Leon Parker was a character. No one could deny that. Whatever faults he had he certainly knew how to have a good time. Born to a working-class family in London’s East End, he was a City trader, then a businessman. He took a lot of risks, made and lost fortunes.

  After he died this little interview with him on London Tonight was unearthed. It was made in the street, on Black Wednesday in 1992 when the London markets collapsed.

  The sound of buses rumbling on a busy London street. A plummy-voiced interviewer shouted over the noise:

  ‘Excuse me, sir, have you lost money today?’

  ‘Everyfink.’ Leon’s voice was hoarse and raw. ‘I’ve lost the bleeding lot.’

  ‘A very bad day for you then?’ The interviewer sounded sombre.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Leon’s voice was suddenly lighter. ‘Win some, lose some, don’tcha?’

  Then he cackled his fruity laugh, a gorgeous blend of despair and love-of-the-game. The interviewer haw-hawed along with him. I found myself smiling too.

  Oh God, Leon’s laugh. So dark and wild you could drown a bag of kittens in it.

  It took me all the way back to a summer in the Scottish Highlands, way up the east coast, past Inverness, beyond the Black Isle, up to Dornach, where the hills are old and round and high, where the trains hardly go any more, where the weather is surprisingly mild and the land is pitted with abandoned farmsteads melting back into the land.

  Back to Skibo Castle.

  4

  SKIBO CASTLE IS AN exclusive members-only holiday resort near Dingwall.

  The castle was dilapidated when it was bought in 1897 by Andrew Carnegie. He was Scottish, emigrated to America when he was ten and made his money there. He was the wealthiest man in the world at the time. Carnegie rebuilt Skibo as an Edwardian mansion to use as a summer home. Set on twenty-eight thousand acres of land it has every luxury: fly-fishing and deer-hunting, sailing and kayaking, horse riding, excellent kitchens and beautiful rooms. It has a spa, selling cures that don’t work for things you don’t have. Madonna had her wedding reception there.

  Approached from the drive it looks quite big, but that is deceptive. It is built on a steep hill. It’s enormous, with the functional rooms tucked away below ground. This leaves the main rooms unencumbered by utility, free to pretend to be a house with twenty bedrooms and no broom cupboard.

  That part of the Highlands is polluted with castles. The owner of Harrods has one. Bob Dylan has one. The Queen Mother lived up there. The Dukes of Sutherland own Dunrobin Castle, which is open to the public.

  It has a rather nice tea room and a museum that makes no mention of the clearances, when tenant farmers were chased off the land to make way for profitable sheep. They do have a Carrara marble bust of Garibaldi. The Duke only met him for a few days but Garibaldi was very famous at the time. It’s the nineteenth century’s equivalent of a signed Hendrix poster.

  It’s an odd out-of-the-way place for odd out-of-the-way people, often incomers pretending to be Scottish. The whole area is awash with fictions. I loved it there.

  Leon Parker was visiting Skibo with his Dutch girlfriend. The club membership was hers but she didn’t shoot or sail or swim or even horse ride. She wore heels that scarred the oak parquet and spent her time in the spa, sipping tea cures and finding fault with the service. She was small and dark and very beautiful.

  Leon and I met one evening in the dark by a bin shed: I was on my smoke break, he was out for a walk. He asked me for a cigarette because he’d left his tobacco in his room. I couldn’t tell him to piss off. I was already in trouble with the manager.

  We stood and smoked in the quiet evening. I was wary of being alone with him. I made sure I could see into the kitchen window, kept an eye so that someone was always within calling distance. It wasn’t because Leon was threatening, I just didn’t really trust anyone back then.

  We talked about the smoking ban and how much it had enhanced our smoking. He told me he once got so desperate on a long flight that he ate tobacco and felt sick for hours. We laughed at that.

  He seemed kind of desperate for a laugh.

  I can’t remember how we got around to this but he told me a lovely story about a beggar he saw outside his hotel in Paris. The filthy man sat down on the pavement, took a clean tablecloth out of his pocket and laid it out in front of him. Then, from other pockets, he took out a knife, a fork, a spoon and napkin, set his place and propped up a sign that read ‘Merci’. Then he tucked the napkin into his collar and waited. As Leon watched, the man was served a meal by a nearby restaurant. The next day the man arrived again, laid his place and was again served a meal, from a different restaurant this time. Leon was there for four days and the man never went without lunch.

  ‘Paris!’ he said at the end, as if that meant anything.

  But I liked the story so I said, ‘Yeah, Paris!’ back.

  Then we fell quiet and smoked and watched the sun go down. It was something to see. Sunsets that summer were shocking-pink skies battling navy-blue night. A lake below us glinted silver. The pool enclosure was a giant Edwardian dome and the panes of glass winked the pink passing of the sun behind the hills in the west.

  The first night was a good laugh.

  But on the second night Leon turned up at the bins again. I was worried that he had the wrong idea. We chatted stiffly about the day and he rolled cigarettes for me, payback for the night before. Blackcurrant-and-vanilla-flavoured tobacco.

  Staff were not allowed to tell the guests to fuck off or hit them on the head with trays, as I had recently discovered to my cost. I had a bit of a temper back then.

  I wanted that job. It was a good job, well paid, comfortable accommodation, safe and out of the way. I had a close friend there, Adam Ross. Club members came from all over the world and most were pretty nice. If they weren’t, the manager, Albert, spoke to them and he could radiate shame in a five-mile radius. Service is a power game, Albert said, and formality is our only weapon. Always maintain a professional distance. But here was I, smoking cigarettes with a guest by the bins. It wasn’t right.

  Leon sensed my unease and addressed it straight on. Did I mind him coming out to smoke with me?

  It felt like a trick question. If I said I didn’t mind would he try to grab me? Best meet it with another question, so I said, ‘Why are you coming out to the bins to smoke? I’d use the smoking lounge if we were allowed.’

  ‘Well,’ he smiled shyly, ‘this lady I’m here with, my girlfriend, I really like her and all that, but she doesn’t have much chat, d’you know what I mean?’

  I thought she was a surly cow but I said, ‘Yeah, I know people like that…’

  ‘If I tell her a story, like that one about the Paris beggar, she looks confused and she’s like: Why did he lay out a serving place? Where did he get cutlery if he was a beggar? She doesn’t like stories.’

  I said maybe she didn’t come from a storytelling family.

  ‘Yeah. Do
esn’t get it.’ He looked worried and drew hard on his cigarette. ‘She says, “You’re always telling stories, Le-on. Always a little story to go with everything.”’ He was being disparaging, doing her accent, but he looked away, he wasn’t trying to get me to join in, and then he muttered, ‘Doesn’t get it…’ He seemed a bit sad.

  I said that one of the stories in the Arabian Nights is specifically about the urge to tell a story. It’s primal, the need to tell. It’s not about the listener but the storyteller. In some cultures, not telling your story is regarded as a sign of mental illness.

  ‘Arabian Nights,’ he smiled. ‘Like Ali Baba? Like in panto?’

  I was appalled. I went off on a rant about the Arabian Nights, the collective nature of it, how it created a whole world through accretive storytelling: layers of lives lived simultaneously, intersecting. And how it bounced from genre to genre, the stories were funny and brutal and romantic and tragic like life, I said, that’s like real life. It was produced before stories could only be one thing, before the form was set. I said how stupid and narrow it was of Western culture to make everything about just one person. I sounded pompous. I sounded like my mum, she was a literature professor at SOAS. I was saying all this to impress him because he was very handsome and I think I wanted him to know that I wasn’t just a chambermaid.

  Leon nodded and listened and smiled and he said that was interesting. He knew a woman whose whole thing was not telling her story because her family history was so dark. Super-secretive, super-rich. Keeps out of the papers. When I think back, it was a clumsy conversational segue but I knew who he was talking about even before he said ‘Nazis’ because I was so hyper-vigilant back then.

  ‘Her name is Gretchen Teigler,’ he said. ‘Is she a member here?’

  ‘No.’

  It was the first thing I checked when I got there. I wouldn’t have been at Skibo if she was a member. She was the reason I was on the run. Gretchen Teigler had tried to have me killed.