Conviction

by Denise Mina

  He blinked. ‘I won’t leave.’

  ‘I’M COMING OUT.’

  ‘… There’s no need to shout.’

  ‘… OK.’

  The letter box screamed shut. I swung my body away from the cellar door and staggered upstairs on stiff legs.

  13

  PANTS, PASSPORT, CASH.

  I changed out of my blood-stiff pyjamas into a shirt and trousers, grabbed an expensive leather coat I had been saving for the right weather and took the keys to Hamish’s car.

  Hamish thinks I can’t drive, that I am too afraid to learn, it’s one of my many random fears. Of course I can drive, I just couldn’t use my licence because it’s under the name of someone who is presumed dead, possibly murdered, but that’s another story.

  I kept my eyes down, walked back downstairs in the dark and scooped up the resettlement money scattered around the hall, shoving it into my pockets. I had a sudden, strong urge to swing around and go down to the cellar and I hurried away from it, almost running by the time I got to the front door. I threw it open, startling not just Fin but also Pretcha.

  It was an odd scene. They were standing together on the top step. Fin Cohen was tall, blond and far, far too thin. His nose was long, his skin creamy. His beard was neat and pointed but his blond hair was thick and messy. He was dressed in a tailored green tweed suit jacket, jeans with turn-ups over brown brogues and a tight grey shirt on his very slim frame. The top button was done up but he wore no tie. He looked like a dapper, starving Viking. His look was stiff and formal, his shirt could have been cut out of cardboard. He was always groomed to the nth degree, which annoyed me.

  Pretcha was clutching her phone to her chest as her forgotten dog Fat Stanley lumbered up the stairs behind her. She was simpering up at Fin. I had never seen her do that. She was smiling and doing a strange little dip with her knee, as if she was trying to make herself smaller.

  ‘Oh, hi, darling.’ She tried to smile wider but the top half of her face was frozen. She may have been trying to express empathy. Or sarcasm. Who the fuck knows.

  Fin and Pretcha looked past me into the hall.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, her eyes widening at the scene. ‘My gosh!’

  ‘Good God,’ whispered Fin.

  I looked back. Breakfast plates were smashed on the floor. A bloody hand print was smeared on the wall. The contents of Hamish’s yellow suitcase lay scattered, the toiletries stamped on. Flecks of light from the street were twinkled randomly everywhere in the dark. Sugar.

  I shut the door behind me and locked it. I took a deep-down breath.

  Pretcha was the first to snap back to the script.

  ‘Ooh, Anna! I didn’t know you knew the Fin Cohen.’

  I didn’t want Pretcha thrilling at the sight of Cohen or weaselling details about this morning out of me to pass around to the neighbours in little hors d’oeuvres of spite-laden gossip.

  I sound as if I’m being unfair to Pretcha, who never really did anything worse than wear a gilet and dislike me for being scary, but wait for it. I’m not wrong on this. She very nearly killed me.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ I said and showed him the car keys. ‘I’ll drive you home. Come on.’

  Fin Cohen followed me down the steps.

  It was rush hour. Beyond a row of bushes the Great Western Road was in full gridlocked swing. Headlights flashed, indicators blinked and engines growled. It was noisy and distracting. That’s why I didn’t notice Pretcha’s flash going off as she took the picture.

  14

  IT WAS A NICE car. I have to give Hamish that. His intellectual life might have ended at Cambridge but he does have an eye for a nice car. The engine was quiet and smooth, the seats deep and comfortable.

  Fin was shivering in the bucket of the passenger seat. Not in his extremities, not a tremble, but from so deep down in his middle it looked like tiny convulsions. He was embarrassed about it and didn’t want me to ask so I didn’t. I just turned the heating up and pulled out of the parking space.

  Great Western Terrace has a sharp drive down to the Great Western Road. It was jammed with cars and buses and it was a long time since I had driven. I kangarooed violently down the steep slip road, straight into the stream of rush-hour traffic almost hitting a car side-on. The driver was angry and gestured at me eloquently. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, though he was only five feet away from me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Fin, his voice faint.

  ‘Well, I’m going to Fort William. Where do you want me to drop you? Are you going home?’

  Fin didn’t answer me but there was a lot going on in the road, I hadn’t driven for a really long time, so I didn’t notice. The lights changed and the driver I’d almost rammed gave me an ardent finger as he moved away. I gave an apologetic wave. A few cars further down a man let me edge clumsily into the stream of traffic ahead of him. I could tell from his expression in the rear-view mirror that he was shocked at my driving. He left quite a big space behind me.

  ‘Fin. Where do you want dropped off?’

  ‘No,’ he muttered, ‘I’m just, around…’

  I stalled and had to restart the car. A lot of drivers were watching me now and it’s an understatement to say that they were unimpressed. I didn’t care. Up ahead a bus edged into a yellow box and a chorus of car horns sounded around the junction.

  I was elated at escaping from the hall; I had got away from the cellar. God alone knew where reminders of Gretchen Teigler would have taken me if I hadn’t. I was grateful to Fin for that but I wondered why he had come to the door. Did he come to tell me something? We didn’t know each other. He may have been my best friend’s husband but he’d always been cold towards me.

  ‘Why did you come to the house? Did Hamish send you to check on me?’

  ‘Send me? Hamish?’ His voice was very faint. ‘He’s… they’ve run off together. D’you know that?’

  ‘I–yeah. I know. To Porto. They took my kids.’

  For some reason I had assumed Fin was in on it, that he was OK with, or even the cause of it. I thought he would have been having affairs with other women and, you know, maybe, you couldn’t blame Estelle. I didn’t think it would be the same for him as it was for as me. But that’s part of being down. Empathy loss. I can’t imagine anything might be worse for anyone else, not really.

  He sounded indignant. ‘I’m not friends with Hamish.’

  The bus moved and we got across the junction to the next set of lights. It felt like another tiny triumph.

  ‘Why did you come to the house?’

  ‘I dunno. I was a bit, you know…’ Fin’s voice was soft, his breath stuttering. ‘… I thought of. You and just. I wondered…’

  I glanced at the passenger seat. Tears were dripping from his beard as he stared straight ahead at the road. He looked glazed and grey and his jacket was buttoned up over his concave belly.

  ‘Fin?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Fin?’

  Nothing.

  I couldn’t stop the car and put him out, not in two lanes of heavy, bad-tempered traffic. He didn’t seem capable of finding his way to the pavement. I wanted rid of him now though, now we were away from Pretcha and I had spoiled her fun. I wanted him out of the car and I never, ever wanted to see him again.

  Because I didn’t like Fin at all.

  It wasn’t personal, though I did think his band were whimsical and a bit crap. I didn’t like him because he had snubbed me the few times we had met and, I suppose, because Estelle bad-mouthed him a lot. Also, he scared me. I hate famous men.

  I don’t remember him becoming well known. I didn’t know Estelle at the time. It seemed to happen very quickly, while I was having babies and being a happy bit of furniture. His band were young, just in their late teens. They had only played small gigs in the living rooms of fans who won competitions. Without releasing more than a couple of demos they were suddenly everywhere. I can’t remember how that happened. It was Fin Cohen people were int
erested in, really. He was tall, groomed and very good-looking. He was vegan, anti-capitalist, all the buzzwords. Hailed as the leader of a new subculture, he was interviewed on every topic from summer colours to climate change. He was everywhere, worldwide fame, huge in South America and Asia. It took less than two years for capitalism to eat him.

  Cohen lost a lot of weight. The press followed him around, taking pictures, charting his decline. He became terrifyingly thin and wore very tight clothes. His face hollowed out. Suddenly he was forced into rehab for opiate addiction. So far so on trend.

  The band were self-managed, which Estelle said was like trying to run a train company from a smartphone. A massive unexpected tax bill came in. All of their stage equipment was stolen in Germany and they had taken out the wrong insurance.

  Then came the famous interview. The drummer got wasted and gave an interview to a nasty vlogger. I haven’t watched it but apparently the vlogger prises everyone’s secrets out of the very drunk twenty-year-old. Their bass player was sexually predating on their young fans. This was true, he later went to jail for it. The guitarist painted miniature dragon statues as a hobby and lived with his mum. Their frontman, Cohen, wasn’t an addict, that was a lie. Fin was anorexic. Addiction was cool but an eating disorder wasn’t, apparently.

  The band imploded, gone as quickly as they arrived, a footnote in music history. But celebrity sticks in a small town and Glasgow is small.

  Estelle was Portuguese. She married him at the height of his fame, big diamond ring, rush-wedding in Vegas. This was before the weight loss began. She was there for the car crash and she stayed, but it was hard. They were broke. His eating ruled their lives. He was in and out of hospital. I still saw blurry pictures of him on the cover of the schadenfreude magazines, speculating about his weight and mental health.

  I looked at him sitting in the passenger seat, his thighs hardly touching, so thin that the safety belt might as well have been done up over an empty chair. He looked as if he was dying.

  ‘Fin? Have you eaten today?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Drunk water?’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Do you want me to drop you somewhere?’

  He didn’t answer.

  Mothering is a comfort. Even through a smog of suicidal self-pity I found the voice I used for the girls:

  ‘OK, Fin. You want to come and meet my pal Adam? Have a wee road trip up and down to Fort William?’ I think he nodded. It was hard to tell. ‘Yeah. We’ll go on a drive and see some sights. Shall we?’ He didn’t answer. I should have listened. ‘Come on, then.’

  I was driving, my life was in pieces, I had someone to look after, my leg hurt, it was all good, except that one small part of my mind was still unoccupied. I remembered Hamish and the old dark feelings began to rise again.

  I couldn’t stand to be alone with those thoughts.

  When we stopped at the lights I got out my phone and I pressed play.

  15

  Episode 3: The Haunting

  In this episode I am going to give a brief biography of the Dana to explain where the ghost story came from.

  Seafarers are superstitious. They are always looking to divine the future by looking at signs and patterns in the past. It’s understandable; the sea is dangerous and unpredictable. Superstitions give people a sense of control. From her very beginnings the Dana had a reputation for bad luck.

  In researching this podcast, we began to wonder if this was true. None of us knows the history of any other private yachts and maybe these are common events in the lives of extraordinary people. So we looked into it and, compared to other yachts of the same age and size, the Dana had belonged to an unusually high number of people who met terrible ends. Was she cursed? Or was she simply a luxury yacht that was often the subject of a disputed title and therefore bought by people likely to take other risks?

  The Dana was commissioned in 1929 by Harold J. Webb of New York City.

  Webb had learned to sail as a boy, off the coast of Mayo in Ireland. He arrived in New York a penniless fourteen-year-old, threw in with Owney Moody, made a fortune from prohibition and set about gathering the totems of wealth. He bought a mansion, got a good Catholic wife from an old Boston family, bought cars and horses and he suits and he commissioned a yacht.

  The Dana was considered a masterpiece of her time. She had two generators, central heating and electric refrigeration. But Webb didn’t live to take possession of her. He lost his fortune over the course of three days of tumbling stocks in the Wall Street Crash. On day four he rented the presidential suite at the Biltmore Hotel. There, he sat down at the desk, three arched windows at his back, wrote a short note and then shot himself in the temple.

  But his hand slipped.

  He was using an antique .32 Derringer, a small pistol with a kidney-shaped handle. He lived on for another eight months with no jaw, mute and bedridden, in excruciating pain, nursed by his estranged wife.

  There is a taped interview with Dana Webb, done in the 1950s, but the quality is very poor. I’ll play a little bit in a moment but she says she kept her husband alive by hand-feeding him with a glass pipette. She kept him going for as long as possible. She made it her ‘mission’. They were both Catholic and suicide is a mortal sin. It was the least she could do for another human being, even if he wasn’t a terribly nice human being. Here is some of the tape. Forgive the quality.

  The sound was crackled and muffled and scratchy and Dana Webb’s ageing voice high and breathless. Her Boston accent sounded like a Kennedy parody.

  ‘No!’ she said, answering a mumbled, off-mic question. ‘No! Mr Webb was NOT a nice man. He was an all-round louse–God forgive me for speaking ill of the dead. May God. Rest. His. SOUL.’ She sounded as if the benevolent prayer was being punched out of her.

  Eventually, a bank took possession of the yacht in lieu of loan payments. Then the bank went bust. The Dana’s title was contestable, everyone knew that, so the beautiful ship languished in a shipyard, waiting for someone to take a chance on her.

  The Dana had a series of owners, seven over a six-year period, all of whom tried and failed to use her for profit. Then she was bought by a Parisian family who used her for a happy few years of family holidays and pleasure sailing. In 1939 she sailed to Bermuda to overwinter. No one ever came back for her. The French family had evaporated during the liberation of Paris. By 1947 the Dana was impounded for mooring fees. Then the Danish government owned her, using long sea journeys as a form of drug rehab, but the ship was too expensive to maintain.

  Eventually, the Polish millionaire and playboy Andris Larkos bought her and so began the darkest episode in the yacht’s history.

  Larkos spent a fortune renovating her and then hosted lavish parties on board, hung priceless artworks in the dining room, served cocaine from a punchbowl. But that was when he was alone with his friends. The ship was stripped back when his five children and wife boarded for their annual holiday.

  The events that would make her famous happened on 7 July 1976, coincidentally, the same day and month in which she sank with the Parkers on board forty years later. The Dana was docked in Crete during a stultifying heatwave. The cabins were unbearably hot and airless so cots had been set up on deck. Larkos’s five sons were asleep next to their nannies. The deck was a lake of white sheets.

  At quarter past three that night one of the nannies was awoken by a deep, sonorous vibration through the hull. It was rhythmic. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Something was banging against the side of the boat. She pulled back her sheet and padded over to the side. One of the Larkos boys was face down in the water. His head was being washed against the side of the boat by the lapping waves. Thunk. Thunk.

  The boy was seven. It was a terrible accident. His mother, Angelika Larkos, had never had good mental health but she broke down completely afterwards. She tried to cut her own throat and was admitted to a sanatorium. Diagnosed with a schizotypal disorder, she stayed there for the r
est of her life.

  Andris Larkos put the Dana up for sale but unsurprisingly no one wanted it. While he waited for a buyer his other sons began to die. The press called it ‘The Larkos Curse’. Hauntings, curses and alien myths were fashionable in the 1970s. Human beings are programmed to find patterns, to make sense of random events, and, back then, curses were a favoured explanation. The modern equivalent might be conspiracy theories.

  Looked at objectively there was no mysterious supernatural force causing the deaths of the Larkos boys because this was far from risk-free parenting. Andris did his best but he took the boys to places where no child should be. They visited refugee camps, they were in the Sudan during a cholera outbreak. They were taken on a crazy three-week free-camping safari in Tanzania.

  One boy died when he fell from an open-sided helicopter in Miami and broke his back. Another died from an overdose of barbiturates prescribed to the housekeeper. A third boy simply got lost on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. No trace of him was ever found.

  With only one son surviving, Andris sold the Dana dirt cheap to a Mr and Mrs Clarke. This was when the public myth of the Dana really began.

  The Clarkes were publicity hounds. Soon they were all over the papers claiming that the Dana was haunted. The ghost sightings were always the same: in the middle of the night a small boy would be seen standing on the edge of the prow, his hair and clothes dripping wet.

  I was really only listening for more mentions of Gretchen Teigler and was slow to realise that the boy with the angry black eyes in the diver’s film was somehow related to this part of the story.

  One man who saw the ghost was a crewman from Malta. He told the story to a journalist from RTE.

  It cut to a radio interview. The man’s accent was a cross between Blitz-era London and southern Italy, his voice was soft.

  ‘The middle of the night. We were, maybe, two hundred feet from dock. I was on deck alone and I see a boy standing on the prow, a small boy. He is silhouetted by moonlight reflected from the sea.