by Denise Mina
10
THE DIVER TOOK HOLD of both sides of the door frame and pulled himself down into a narrow corridor filled with the dirty water. Papery fragments covered the lens. When it cleared I could see that it wasn’t paper, it was rotting varnish from the wooden walls and had settled in a thin silt on the floor. Every step the diver took sent a gritty grey squall curling slowly up to his knees.
He stood still. The darkness inside was profound.
Abruptly, the world jolted sideways. The diver’s hands shot out to the walls, steadying himself as the Dana listed left. She shifted on the seabed, dropping half a foot.
‘This is a danger sign. This means the internal pressure has been strong enough to play a factor in stabilising the wreck. He has altered that. He knows this. His heart rate is up. The whole cabin could collapse in on him. Why is he in there? This is crazy. He should leave.’
But he didn’t.
The beam of his head torch stroked the peeling walls. Ragged grey fragments of varnish floated slowly up from the floor, hovering in front of him, a chorus of tiny ghosts gathering to watch.
Feeling his way with both hands, he made his way deeper into the ship down the narrow corridor. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. He came to the biggest door at the very end, turned the handle, heaved. It was stuck.
‘He is too far in. He has fifty-five seconds. He should turn back. His calculations do not allow for physical exertions. His oxygen is running down.’
Again, the diver used a foot against the wall and pulled with all of his strength. It wouldn’t open. He tried again.
‘Forty-five seconds. He should be leaving right now. He thinks the diamond necklace is in there. He is making bad decisions.’
One last hard yank and the door opened violently, knocking the diver off his feet.
It took a moment for the camera lens to focus.
It was a wood-panelled dining room. The grey muck was an inch thick on the floor. Three people were at the table, slumped in their chairs.
‘They have been in there for a month.’
They had been there for four weeks, in the salt water and the dark, the colour sucked from the meat of them. The soft tissue on their eyes and noses and fingers had rotted away to sockets and bone.
Fresh track marks through the grey silt showed that the chairs had moved when the ship shifted but it looked as if the corpses had pushed their seats back to get up and greet the new arrival.
‘The ship has moved. Their thighs have been pinned under the table but now they have been moved. These bodies are untethered.’
Leon was in shadow, facing the door. I saw his silver hair hanging over what was left of his face. He was looking down at the table, head at an alarming, acute angle to his neck. He was in shadow because the diver’s torch was on the girl in a rotting striped dress in front of him. I could hardly look at her. The image, what had happened to her face, that was hard to see. There was another body there. The T-shirt boy, slumped face down over the table.
‘Thirty seconds.’
But the diver had frozen in the doorway. His torch beam and camera were locked on something in the shadows at the very back of the room.
It was a boy, seven or eight, same age as Jess, looking straight back at the diver. This face was not decayed. It was wholly intact and his skin was piercing white. He was crouching in the dark, hiding in the far corner, glaring out with angry, black eyes. Suddenly, a long strip of white light flashed from his mouth.
This all happened in a few startling seconds, while water rushed in from the corridor and filled the chest of Leon’s shirt. His head began to rise. Everything in the room began to lift.
‘It is the change in cabin pressure that makes this happen.’
The bodies rose from the table, standing up, coming apart, heads tumbling from necks, arms dislocating and rising at the same time.
The diver panicked. The camera lurched up to the ceiling, smearing trails of light. Desperate, he backed out, his gloved hands swiped through a swirl of murk as he got to the corridor, tumbling into black space.
The camera snapped focus on peeling walls, on rotting ceiling, on his own frantic hands flailing and slapping at the walls. The hands slowed, their actions becoming soft and vague. Then they stopped. A final gloved hand floated across the frame, bidding the world adieu.
The screen froze.
‘He has run out of oxygen. He has died.’
I dropped the phone in shock and it skittered across the hall floor, rat-like on its thick rubber cover. I stared at it. The light from the screen shone upward in the dim hall like the dead diver’s torch.
I had forgotten all about Hamish and Estelle for a moment. I wasn’t thinking about my girls. I wasn’t mapping the journey from the cellar, rope in hand, to the attic. For those seven minutes I was thinking about silt, about the diver, about a boy hiding under the sea, about matter out of place.
I pressed play on the second episode.
11
BY THE TIME ESTELLE’S husband came to the door I was half mad. The rest of the day was sore. I had ambitions at one point to get up and put the lights on but somehow it never happened.
I spent a long time sitting by the front door, not listening to the podcast. I sat between the ottoman and the cold marble pillar at first. Then I moved on to the ottoman. I was in shock, I think. I was there for a very long time, afraid to stand in case my feet took me to the cellar, tricking myself into living through the next moment by waiting for answers: who was the boy? How did he get there? Who steered the ship? Where was Amila running to? Mostly though, I was wondered what Amila was running away from. Any story about women bolting catches my attention. Had Amila been attacked by a member of the crew? If so, did Leon know about it? Was he killed because he knew?
Hours into the day, when my mind ran out of circles and it was starting to get dark outside, I pressed play on episode 2 and put the phone in the cup of my bra, speakers towards my face, forming a sound barrier between me and the door to the cellar.
Episode 2: 7 July
In this episode we will look more closely at what actually happened that night. We will profile the people who died on board the Dana: Leon, Violetta and Mark.
To celebrate Violetta’s coming of age Leon had bought her an extravagant gift, an antique diamond necklace. It cost almost three-quarters of a million euros and had a great provenance. Leon bought it at a charity auction in Malaga from Princess Elana of Sweden. But the necklace was ugly, an old-fashioned rope of daisy flowers made from diamonds clustered around bigger diamonds.
Violetta made it clear that she didn’t want the necklace.
She emailed her father, saying that money or help with an apartment would be more useful. But Leon had a grand-gesture style of parenting. It didn’t really encompass financial support or help finding a flat. It was more suited to buying the most expensive item in a public auction in front of an international audience.
Violetta texted her father. Please forgive the bad language here, but it’s important to give a flavour of their relationship:
V: I don’t want jewellery. You shouldn’t buy overpriced crap like that.
Again, later on the same day:
V: Because I have to insure it & store it & I can’t fucking wear it anywhere. It’ll COST me money.
Gaudy jewellery was not Violetta’s style. She liked plain designs. She was elegant and Leon couldn’t have picked a more inappropriate gift. He didn’t seem to know her very well.
According to the phone company, Leon was out of range for a while but when he docked in Balboa he replied to both texts.
L: Fine, V. If you don’t want it I’ll give it to someone else.
V: Fine.
L: It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever given you.
V: It’s the only thing.
Again, long pause.
L: Are you even fucking coming to St Martin?
V: Of course, you crazy old bastard.
Then a flurry of text
s from Leon:
L: You ungrateful little shit.
L: I’m trying to give you a fucking necklace worth €750k RETAIL.
L: FFS
Violetta replied:
V: Leon! NEVER PAY RETAIL.
L: Hahahaha! I love you.
L: Come and see me.
L: Sell the fucking thing, I don’t care.
And then, three hours later:
L: Hahahaha still laughing at that!
Those texts give you a flavour of their relationship. Violetta and Leon were informal with each other. She wasn’t intimidated by her father or afraid to complain about his inconsistent parenting. Leon had not been a good father to Violetta. As a very small child he left her in the care of an addict and walked away. When she was nine Violetta was hospitalised for malnutrition. In recent years Leon had been trying to compensate for that and, although she was still angry, they seemed to be getting on.
Mark was the younger child. His mother, Daniela, worked in local government in Southampton. Daniela and Leon didn’t marry. They met in a local pub and lived together in Leon’s house in Sandbanks for nearly a decade. Sandbanks is a small spit of land on the south coast and is home to the most expensive property in the whole of England. After he died Leon’s house was sold for twenty-one million pounds.
Of the two children, Mark seems to have fared best in his relationship with his father. He got to six before Leon and Daniela split up but saw his dad regularly. Leon attended school concerts and paid child support for Mark. No one said how Violetta felt about Mark but he was clearly the favoured child. He was just sixteen when he died.
Daniela, for me, is the best argument against Leon committing a family annihilation because an obsession with status is a major predictor of that style of murder. But Daniela plays fiddle in a folk band. She is a social worker. When Mark was a toddler, she worked part-time and studied for a Master’s. Their relationship was not about status. This was love ad hominem. They liked each other, were together for a long time and when they split up it wasn’t acrimonious.
Leon had recently married for the second time, to an heiress. He boasted that they spent longer signing the prenup on their wedding day than making vows which doesn’t seem like a man keen to make people to think he has money and power.
Leon picked Saint-Martin as the rendezvous point because it was reachable from both of his kids’ starting points.
Violetta arrived on a private jet from Venice, was met by a car service in La Rochelle, and checked into Saint-Martin’s only five-star hotel. She went shopping and spent over a thousand euros on a Missoni dress. She went back to the hotel, had coffee in her suite of rooms, put her new dress on and went to meet her younger brother.
Mark Parker flew EasyJet from Southampton. He arrived a day early because the cut-price airline only flew every second day. He stayed in an Airbnb. In the listings it looks like a camp bed in a shed. While Violetta was booked into the hotel for two nights, Mark was planning to sleep on board the Dana once his dad arrived, presumably to save money, and had his luggage with him: a boogie board bag. He had probably spent the day at the beach.
These kids came from different backgrounds and very different income levels. That puzzles me. Leon was rich. Why was Mark staying in a shed while Violetta had a private plane? Julia might have remarried or made a fortune. She’s hard to track. Also, expenditure doesn’t always speak to income: Daniela may just have been careful whereas Julia was flamboyant. Perhaps Mark was being taught to travel on a budget.
That’s just speculation. Let’s go back to what is provable, what we know about the movements on board that night.
The kids walked down to meet Leon. He got off the ship and they went for a walk and a drink. The trio got back to the boat at around 7 p.m. The crew left. The Parkers gathered on deck and had a drink. Leon presented Violetta with the necklace she didn’t want and made her put it on for a photo. Mark instagrammed it and texted it to his mum. It was to be the last time anyone ever heard from any of them.
Then the deck was empty. We can assume they had gone downstairs to the dining room because this is where they were found. Whether they were in there when the Dana motored from the harbour or elsewhere on the ship, we may never know.
It was Leon who insisted the family would be alone on the Dana. Is it possible that Leon asked Amila to leave the boat? She has not spoken about him. Did he plan to kill the kids, or was there a more benign reason for him ensuring they were alone?
The crew thought it was because of the necklace: Violetta was travelling alone, going home the next day, and the diamond necklace was a high-priced item for a young girl to carry home. The crew weren’t supposed to know about the necklace. Crew aren’t supposed to know a lot of things but they see it all.
The bodies were found in the dining room with the door shut. From forensic video analysis of the remains on the table, the mussels garnishing the soup were still all in complete shells, not yet shucked apart. This means they hadn’t been eaten, which means the Parkers were yet to begin their soup when the yacht went down. Were they already dead when the ship left the dock? Were they drugged?
Leon wanted to show off the dining room but it was a hot night. The natural thing would be to leave the door open for the breeze, especially if they were eating hot soup. But the door to the dining room was firmly shut. Why would they shut the door on an empty boat?
What if Leon poisoned the kids before they started eating: both kids die, Leon doesn’t. With his dead children in the dining room, Leon casts off in such a state of high emotion that he forgets the navigation lights and the radio, and then returns to the dining room, shutting the door and sealing himself in with the two kids he has murdered, knowing they will sink when the explosion goes off in the engine room.
This seems unlikely. In family annihilation the killer usually covers or hides the bodies. They are not ‘product killers’–that is people who murder so that they have a body to play with. They are not ‘process killers’, who kill because they enjoy the act of murder. They are ‘outcome killers’. They kill so that people are dead. They are repulsed by the sight of dead bodies. They cover them with sheets, cover their faces, turn away from the bodies.
This bothers me. The door being shut makes sense if the killer is outside the room and does not want to see the bodies which raises the possibility of a fourth person on board but there is scant evidence of that. The Dana was being watched by all the rooftop diners and someone would have spotted an extra person on deck. No one that night saw anyone other than the two kids and the dad.
These are all questions the police didn’t seem to ask. Leon was barely glanced at by the investigation. Was it his new rich wife, Gretchen Teigler, who ensured that was the case?
Do you like to cook at home but find it hard to make the time? At Fast’n’Fresh, our service provides–
I stopped it there. I rewound. I heard the name again. Gretchen Teigler.
I rewound. I replayed and I heard it again. Gretchen Fucking Teigler. I had vacillated about whether or not it was my Leon Parker, but I didn’t doubt this was my Gretchen.
Leon married Gretchen Teigler. I could not believe he’d done that. With no good reason I felt personally betrayed.
But now I knew what had happened to the Dana investigation. Gretchen Teigler had done it again. She chose a lie that suited her and used all of her power and money to make it the official version.
I hadn’t thought about Gretchen for years. When I stumbled across news stories that tangentially referred to her I always turned away. I’d done a deal with myself: I could let the past go because I had my girls, Hamish, my new life. Only now I didn’t have those things.
I looked up at the hall and hardly knew how I came to be here all these years later. I stood up, my knees stiff, pins and needles in my feet, and found myself turning, almost against my will, to face the cellar door.
That was when I heard someone outside the front door. For just a moment I thought I had conjur
ed Gretchen Teigler.
12
‘HELLO?’ IT WAS A male voice, muffled by the heavy door. ‘Is that you, Anna? I can hear a radio.’
By this stage I found it hard to even speak. I felt I was going blind. What’s the point? I kept thinking, over and over. What’s the point of this? It’s often the case, when I’m down, that everything dark that has happened comes back and swamps me. That thin voice outside was a pinprick of light. When I was small I believed stars were pinholes and their light was the brightness of heaven shining through. This is what his voice felt like. A glimpse of an unreachable dimension of light beyond my catastrophe and Leon’s death.
‘Anna? It’s Estelle’s husband, Fin. Could you open the door? It’s rather cold out here.’
Fin Cohen opened the letter box. He looked in at me. I turned my head and caught his eye. He must have been kneeling down.
‘Anna? You don’t look too good. D’you want to open the door?’
I couldn’t speak.
His fingertips withdrew. The dry metal spring shrieked as the letter box guillotined shut. The sharp echo rattled around the hall, up the stairs, humming off the stone floor, until I didn’t know if I was hearing or remembering the sound.
For a terrible moment I thought that Fin had gone. If he left me here I knew where my feet would take me.
But he didn’t leave. He opened the letter box again and looked at me. He wasn’t asking for anything. He wasn’t giving anything either. He was just there.
Gretchen Teigler, again. Married to Leon. How could it happen again? How often had she done this? Looking at those eyes peering in through the letter box, I saw a thousand other pairs of eyes, all the human detritus left in Gretchen’s wake. And behind them all the gatekeepers who helped her, the lawyers who drew up the non-disclosures, the journalists who didn’t ask questions, the cops who took hints.
I took the phone out of my bra and pressed pause. I looked back and Fin was still there, still looking at me.
‘PLEASE DON’T LEAVE.’