by Denise Mina
I saw a chair in the hall and thought about picking it up and smashing it over his head but I’m a lady. And anyway, I wouldn’t give Estelle the satisfaction.
7
I LOCKED THE BATHROOM door behind me. I felt so hopeless, overwhelmed, I needed to make the noise in my head stop. I remembered the washing-line rope in the cellar. I cursed my father and thought of the rope again. I vowed not to try anything while the girls were still in the house. It was already too much for them. I told myself: get through the next hour, that’s all, and then you can think about it. But just for a moment, I needed to get out of here. I sat on the side of the bath and fumbled my earbuds in and pressed play.
Could Leon Parker have killed his family and himself? Why would he? French police never asked these questions. But the Dana murders have the extreme and often unique signature of a family annihilation.
There is a warmth and a comfort in hearing about people in worse situations than your own. Pity is a hollow virtue. I like it. It’s a form of self-aggrandisement really, bigging yourself up by defining someone as below you. True-crime podcasts are usually great for that but sometimes you have to look really hard to find anyone down there. I had not murdered my family and killed myself. I hung onto that.
Family annihilation is a peculiar crime. This is when a man, and it is almost always a man, murders his immediate family and then kills himself.
The term ‘annihilation’ is apt because what these events always have in common is the thoroughness of the murders. It is literally overkill: stabbing and then burning. Shooting then drowning. The annihilator is in a state of high emotion and overcommits the murders. Often they kill everyone and then burn the family home down around the dead.
To me, the Dana murders have that passionate, overwhelming signature of annihilation. They do not feel like the action of a disgruntled employee with no motive other than a tenuous link to radical politics, as the French police came to believe.
Family annihilations can be divided into four types.
The first is the disappointed family member. They are often hyper-competitive people whose identity is drawn solely from their achievements. They feel let down by their family’s performance: a wife gets fat, a kid drops out of university or fails in a competitive sport. And because the family members have not fulfilled the role assigned to them by the annihilator, they are murdered as a punishment.
This doesn’t seem like Leon. He was an adventurer. He celebrated chance-taking, not achievements. Neither of his kids was involved in sport and there were no recent failures or dropping out of anything. We can rule that one out.
The next motive is spite. This scenario is very often a parent who kills the children of an estranged partner, a controlling family member, usually reacting after a victim has made a bid for freedom. The killer communicates their fury through escalating threats to the escapee leading up to the deaths. They issue ultimatums and believe that, having not met the demands, the person they want to hurt is responsible for the deaths.
Again, none of this applies to Leon. He had two kids with two different women. He was not especially controlling, was on fairly good terms with both of them and had recently married someone else.
The third type of family annihilation is the paranoiac, where the killer is deluded and thinks that they are saving the family from a fate worse than death. The delusions are usually religious or psychotic in nature. Everyone agrees that Leon was in his right mind during this voyage. He was not deluded or religious, he had no especially strange ideas or sense of the world coming to an end. There are no reports of him ever having a psychotic episode.
Most likely to be relevant here is the annihilation where the person has suffered a perceived loss of social status, for example if they are bankrupt or expelled from their community for some social contravention. Here, the killer sees his family as part of his own social identity and when he loses status–I’m using gendered language advisedly here–with no means of restoring it, he kills them and then himself. He values nothing else about himself but his status and failure is experienced as a personal annihilation. The family are his chattels, they are nothing more significant than his limbs or his car. If he ceases to exist there is no point in them continuing to do so.
I was sitting on the edge of the bath, thinking that the last one did sound a bit like Leon. Being successful meant an awful lot to him, more than it would to most people. He liked Skibo and fast cars and rich, beautiful women, even if they were obnoxious.
Yet just six months before the sinking Leon had married into one of the richest families in the world.
Was he even capable of a family annihilation? Usually perpetrators will have a history of mental illness or suicide attempts, of controlling behaviour with previous partners or records of domestic violence. There was little in his past life that would support this. Leon had no history of suicide attempts.
Well, I wasn’t sure about that. I had the impression that he had at least contemplated it.
Leon wasn’t controlling but did have one allegation of domestic violence against him.
In his late thirties he married Julia, Violetta’s mother. Julia was an Italian supermodel, very famous in her time. Towards the end of their marriage she gave a bizarre and rambling interview to an Italian magazine. She showed the interviewer bruises on her back and arms and claimed that Leon had beaten her. They divorced shortly afterwards.
Leon never spoke about these allegations or his relationship with Julia. None of his subsequent partners made domestic violence claims against him.
Julia later recovered from an addiction and wrote a tell-all, cash-in autobiography, full of anatomical details about the famous men she had slept with. But she did not repeat the domestic violence allegations against Leon. She said Leon was the love of her life and her cocaine addiction drove him away.
Maybe he didn’t hit her, or maybe she hit him and he defended himself. If you’ve lived with a drug addict you can probably fill in the spaces in that story.
I liked the way Trina Keany told that. No drama. No personal share. Just a coded call to those who knew that chaos.
Poor Leon. I tried to remember how he had spoken about his daughter back at Skibo, but that was years ago and Hamish was banging on the bathroom door. I pressed pause and heard his muffled voice.
‘Anna. Please come out. I need to tell you something.’
I was straddling worlds: from a cocaine-addicted Italian supermodel’s autobiography to a cold bathroom in Glasgow.
Then I wasn’t.
I was just sitting on the side of the bath, wishing I was dead. Hamish was leaving me. He was taking my girls. My friend had betrayed me. There were no mysteries here, just banal miseries.
‘Anna? Please?’
8
I SHOVED MY PHONE and earbuds into my pocket and went back out, hanging on to thoughts of Leon’s glamorous life because what was outside the bathroom door was so tawdry and real.
Hamish was waiting for me. He turned away and I saw something–was it just a movement of his hand? He had such graceful fingers–some detail that sparked the deep furnace of love I had for him and suddenly I wasn’t angry. I loved him. I loved our little girls and our family. I knew it wasn’t working but I loved him. I loved our counsellor and our fights. I loved my girls and early mornings and quiet Sundays. I knew it was over but I wasn’t ready. I was drowning in loss.
I covered my face and sobbed. ‘Please, Hamish, don’t leave me. Please. I’m sorry for how I am. I love you.’
Hamish turned back and he was crying too. He put his arms around me and I sobbed into his chest and I kept saying over and over ‘be kind to me’–where did that come from? I don’t know but we both knew it was over. I was desolate.
I begged him not to take the girls. ‘I can’t stand to be away from them. A week is too long. I’ll die. Stay, please. I’ll leave the house. But stay. Stay-stay-stay.’
He mumbled, ‘Anna, listen, I have to say something–’ b
ut then Estelle shouted from downstairs that the taxi was outside and Hamish pulled away.
And then we were all downstairs and I was scattering the brick of ‘resettlement’ cash all over the hall. Hamish’s suitcase was all smashed up and I had cut my leg and blood was running down my shin. Estelle was furious because I scooped up some of the blood and flicked it on her new dress.
I was completely baffled by Estelle. Estelle was feisty and funny and intolerant. She once laughed so hard at someone farting in our yoga class that she fell over and broke her wrist. She was no fool. Had Hamish told her I was abusive? Was I abusive?
But she knew that he had done all of this before. I’d told her about it.
I was five months pregnant with Jess when Hamish invited me to his house for the first time. Come to the house at eight in the morning, he said. We’ll be grown up about it. We’ll tell Helen together. I knew then that he was a coward.
Estelle knew that I got to Hillhead Underground Station and, instead of getting off and walking up here and telling Hamish’s wife that she was being usurped by a younger model, I stayed on the train. I turned my phone off and went all the way around the circuit then I got off in town and jumped a train to Manchester. I stayed with a friend for a while. When I came back Helen was gone.
Helen wrote to me for a number of years. Unfriendly, let’s say. I made myself read them. They were nasty but I didn’t tell Hamish about them. He might have cut her allowance. She wasn’t working and the letters had the sour tangy odour of vodka about them.
Estelle knew all of this and she still came to the door as ordered. Following orders isn’t for everyone. It’s not for me.
I watched them drive off in the airport cab. I was on the top step outside the front door, weeping with fury and impotence when I saw our bitchy neighbour, Pretcha, coming back from walking her fat dog, Stanley.
I couldn’t deal with her; I was watching the cab leave with everything I loved in it.
I wanted to run after it barking like a dog, rescue the girls from their nice holiday, save Estelle from her new relationship, drag Hamish back to our mutual misery.
Pretcha sauntered up slowly, hypnotised by her phone as usual. She is fifty to sixtyish and has never liked me. She calls me ‘the au pair’ behind my back. She took in the drama through her tight, botoxed face. We all had to pretend she hadn’t had a metric fuckton of bad surgery. Be nice to them, Hamish always said, he basically runs German banking. He’s incredibly rich.
‘Hello, darling?’ she said.
Just when you think something can’t get any worse someone who dislikes you comes to watch.
I’m making this sound eventful. I’m making it ridiculous and action-packed. It wasn’t like that. It was just humiliating and sad.
Standing on the steps in spiteful rain, watched by an unkind neighbour, the cab pulled away with my life in it and I felt something snap in my chest. I wanted to sink to my knees and howl, rent my clothing, cover my hair in dust and curse God. But this is Glasgow and I’m Anna McDonald, so I just turned and went inside and hid.
That was a mistake.
I very nearly didn’t get out of there alive.
9
I WAS ON THE floor in the hall. Mood very low. Paralysed with shock. I think I was there for a long while, hours anyway, but it was hard to gauge time, it was sliding around like a puppy on a greasy floor.
I had settled on hanging myself, in the bedroom, but was worried about who would find me. I saw the girls coming home from Portugal, rushing upstairs and finding my body, one week old, bloated and rotting. I was disgusted by my weakness. I couldn’t save them from what my father had passed on to me but maybe I could save them from finding me.
The attic. The girls couldn’t get up there without a ladder. The smell would alert Hamish and he’d come up and find me. The washing-line rope was in the cellar, curled on a shelf, coiled and waiting for me.
In a minute. I couldn’t get up. I was there for an hour or two.
At one point I found my phone in my pocket. I had to do something. I couldn’t speak to anyone. I couldn’t have coped with listening to music, a stray minor key might have finished me off. I’m not on social media, for obvious reasons. All I do on the phone is listen to books and podcasts.
Podcasts.
I didn’t know if I could face listening to that podcast. True crime only works if it’s about people you don’t know, scenarios you’re not in, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I opened the phone and found myself on the Death and the Dana website. That was when I spotted the video file at the bottom of the home page.
It was seven minutes long, not much of a commitment. ‘Dive A241-7’. It was hanging alone and didn’t seem to relate to any of the episodes. I tapped play.
The screen blacked out. The narrator, Trina, delivered a trigger warning: basically, don’t watch this. Don’t watch if you’re too young or old or nervous or squeamish. Does anyone ever think those warning are addressed to them? I didn’t, and nothing could make me feel worse.
Angry green sea filled the frame. It was silent, filmed underwater.
A diver was alone in the depths, working his descent hand-over-hand down a drop line, filming from a GoCam on his chest. A beam of light swept back and forth from his head torch, criss-crossing the rope. Deep waves buffeted him. His muscled arms were tense, slick as sealskin in his wetsuit.
The camera struggled to focus in the murk, fixing on specks of flotsam just before they were blown out of frame.
An ugly industrial yellow font came up over the swirling green–Narrated by O. Tasksson–diving instructor–then faded away.
‘He feels his way down the drop line,’ said Tasksson. ‘His hands do not leave the rope.’ His voice was flat and colourless, his accent mildly Germanic. He sounded bored, describing the scene with the muted emotions of a man who has seen a lot of life.
‘Visibility is poor. The sea is violent. Many dangers. This is the life of a professional diver. Very hard. Not a leisure sport. You will have many bruises from a descent like this.’
A rope attached to the main line snaked away to a metal cylinder in the foggy green distance.
‘The decompression tank is attached so that he can find it when he comes back up. He will not come back up.’
I thought I had misheard. Tasksson’s voice was so dreary that it was quite hard to listen to. I watched as the diver descended further, passing a bushel of oxygen tanks attached to the rope.
‘A dangerous moment in a heavy sea,’ droned Tasksson. ‘Spare tanks might swing around and knock him out. We can look at his oxygen and pressure readings here. They are good. At this point he is well saturated with oxygen and is thinking clearly. He is in charge.’
Nothing but hands feeling down the rope for minutes, it became quite tedious to watch, but visibility gradually improved. Every so often Tasksson commented on the pressure or the diver’s oxygen readings. Down and down the diver went, buffeted around the drop line by deep-water waves.
‘Now we see the Dana for the first time.’
The GoCam pointed down. In the grainy distance, like a dream remembered, the massive yacht was sitting on the seabed, banked precariously against a sheer rock cliff, upright but tilted. The mainmast had snapped and lay across the deck. He moved closer.
There was a hole in the hull, small and round, the wood rotting outwards so that the splinters looked like soft, rotting teeth falling out of an open mouth. It was sickening.
‘There is a hole in the hull. Caused by something inside. Now we have the answer to the question of what has caused the sinking. Something has exploded in the engine room and caused this breach. The ship would sink very quickly from this. Discovering this is the purpose of this dive.’
The diver lowered himself, moving slowly, pointing the camera on his chest at the damaged hull to get good crisp film of it. Then he carried on moving down the line.
‘This is his first mistake. He has secured the site and identifi
ed the cause of the sinking. According to the dive plan he is supposed to return now to the decompression chamber.’
The diver moved on down, letting go of the rope once his fingers reached the buckled handrail on the deck. He moved along the ship towards the back.
‘He is making his way without a line. He is alone. He should not do this. He is in danger. His oxygen level is good, but now begins the countdown to his tank change. He has two minutes and fifty-five seconds of oxygen left.’
The diver pulled himself along the rail around the deck.
‘He is alone. I would not do this. This is a bad choice. A dangerous choice.’ Even in a monotone, Tasksson’s exasperation was clear.
The diver got round to the back of the ship and turned to face two small doors like a kitchen cupboard.
‘He should not go in.’
The diver tried to pull the doors open but they were jammed.
‘The wood has swollen. Also: differential pressure is holding these doors closed. Inside and outside are different, like the vacuum in a jar of pickles. This tells us that the cabin has been sealed since it was on the surface. No one has been in. No one has come out.’
The diver lifted a foot to the surround and pulled hard. The doors opened and all around him water was sucked into the cabin. A rotting white ribbon on the handrail flapped in, then out as stale water rushed out of the cabin carrying a cloud of papery grey flecks. The diver stood still until the water cleared, the grey washed away on an updraught.
‘Two minutes. This is another mistake. Performing acts of physical exertion while low on oxygen puts him in danger. It is this series of bad decisions that kills this man.’
Kills the diver? I straightened at that. I didn’t want to watch someone die. My finger hovered over the pause. Maybe it was a joke? But I knew it wasn’t. I lied to myself because I wanted to see what happened. I ignored the second warning.
I watched on.