by Denise Mina
Gatwick was bland and enormous. We traipsed down blank corridors, up dreary escalators, through white doors. I was wildly alert to every man in dark clothes, every shady corner, every fresh jolt of the luggage conveyor belts.
Through arrivals, we found ourselves in a row of cafes and shops. Fin led us into an open-sided Starbucks. He went up to order, taking his place at the end of a glacial queue, leaving me to listen to his podcast.
It was shit.
The sound quality was awful, the air con whirred in the background, you could hear people buying cans from the drinks machine and the toilet doors slapping shut. It lasted for eight minutes. His voice was soft and conversational. He said he was going through some ‘tough stuff’ and had gone off on an adventure with Anna McDonald, his ‘friend’, which made me sound like a girlfriend he didn’t want to admit to. He told the story briefly and then he said we were investigating the Dana sinking, following on from the Death and the Dana podcast, that we didn’t believe Leon had killed himself or his kids. He brought up the thing about the photo–who took it? We thought there was a fourth person on board that night and that we were planning to find out who, to solve one of ‘life’s li’le mysteries’.
He rounded it off with, ‘So, until next time, mystery fans.’
He came back with two coffees and a muffin. I pulled the earbuds out and dropped them on the table. He sat down, opened the muffin and tore it in half, eating a mouthful. He nodded at his phone.
‘What do you think?’
‘“Life’s li’le mysteries”? It’s a triple fucking murder.’
By now the tweet had thirty thousand likes, the count was escalating ridiculously fast.
He took another bite of his muffin. ‘Trina Keany said she’ll meet us this morning–’
‘Shut. The. Fuck. Up.’
He ate the whole muffin himself. I didn’t want any. It was vegan and tasted of despair anyway. I sipped my coffee. My head hurt. I didn’t know whether to slap him or just get up and walk away.
Beyond the open Starbucks, flocks of passengers floated past. Families came out of baggage reclaim with enormous wheeled bags, cranky and tired from long-haul flights. Business people scurried by with briefcases.
I went back to my girls for comfort. My girls, on holiday. Waking up, tumbling from beds I had never seen. Whispering to each other about what was going on with their dad, worried about me. Sneaking up and putting on the television before breakfast, as if it was a Saturday. My girls–
‘I find you an incredibly angry person, Anna.’
‘Shut your anorexic fucking nuts, Findlay.’
‘Oh. I stand corrected.’
I slapped his phone. ‘What are you doing, advertising yourself on there?’
‘I’m making a little amusing thing for people. A distraction from the misery of existence.’
‘About my dead friend?’ That wasn’t my real objection, but I was pissed off and very much wanted to win the argument.
It stunned him quiet for moment before he parried, ‘You started it. You made me listen to a story about his death.’
He had me there.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not being malicious. I’m just trying to bring a little joy to the world. People on Twitter are claiming that I’m dying–what does that say to other people with anorexia? I’m not dying. I’m living and being interested in the world. It matters because people are looking at me. I’m coping with a very difficult situation. Soon the word’ll be out that my wife’s left me, that she’s having a baby with some rich old lawyer. It’s humiliating but I’m coping with that. I want them to have something else to say about me, even if it’s that I ran over your old boss and, by the way, I still don’t know what that was about–’
‘What?’
‘Why I had to run over two men to get you–’
‘No. Back more.’
‘My wife’s left me?’ I saw him slowly realise that I didn’t know. ‘Having a baby…’ His voice trailed off.
My hand was still on his phone. He reached forward and put his bony hand over mine. ‘They didn’t tell you. Oh, Anna.’
A baby. No. They didn’t tell me.
We sat there for quite a long time.
Fin finished his coffee. Mine went cold. I went cold.
After ten minutes or so he stood me up and walked and then we took a lift down. He bought tickets and we got on a train. The train set off.
The carriage wasn’t busy but someone recognised Fin–I saw her do a double take and look away. She tried to take a photo of him on her phone, smirking as she held it up for the shot, pretending to read something. It was so obvious and she was smug and mean about it, it made me feel even worse.
When she got off I whispered, ‘Couldn’t the baby be yours?’
Fin didn’t answer for a long time. His breathing was irregular. I felt he was only just holding it together and didn’t want to press it. We passed through two stations before he spoke. ‘You don’t understand.’
I did a bit, but I could see it wasn’t volitional. Did starvation do something to his sperm count or make him impotent? There was no way of asking that wasn’t insulting.
A baby.
They would stay together. They would form a new family. Estelle was great, Hamish was lucky, the girls would be delighted with a baby, but Fin and I, we were finished. We were extras in our own lives, marginal asides to the people we loved the most. I felt as if I was sliding off the side of the world. I started crying. Fin took my hand and held it until I stopped.
Then we held hands as we sat on the rickety train, rolling into a grey November London. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t sexual. We held hands like Hansel and Gretel on their first night in the forest. We were both sad and I think we were both grateful that someone else was there, someone kind.
31
I WASN’T PLANNING TO meet Trina Keany. I just didn’t want to be alone. Somehow though, her resistance to us made me feel a burning loyalty to Fin and our ridiculous project. Or maybe I was just playing a part and got very into it.
I was ambivalent when we turned up, is the point. By the end of it I’d have walked through a wall for our right to broadcast his next ramble. That was why I went into the travel agent’s afterwards and bought two flights to La Rochelle.
We were walking up a busy side street off Oxford Circus when we saw Trina sitting outside a cafe. She was alone at a little metal table, reading something on her phone. It was narrow and noisy and the pavement was littered with bins and trestle blackboards. It wasn’t a street anyone would choose to sit out in but there was no ashtray on the table and she wasn’t smoking.
Trina was young and slim, chocolate-coloured skinned with a lot of freckles. Her hair was black, worn in dry twist-outs, frizzy at the ends. A blue lanyard hung around her neck under her grey suit jacket. Even from quite far away, she seemed agitated.
She looked up, spotted us walking towards her and her eyes brightened for a second at the sight of Fin. She obviously recognised him, but then her face snapped shut, her lips tightened and she got her defences up. I didn’t think the meeting was going to go very well. It was fair enough. Fin had put out a podcast contradicting her, and he did it without contacting her about it first. It occurred to me that, for all his formality and old-world charm, Fin could be mercenary.
We all introduced ourselves, shook hands and pulled up chairs. Her lanyard was for the BBC building round the corner.
Fin apologised for negative reactions she had received to his podcast response. She shook her head and chewed her cheek.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, though it clearly did. ‘People are downloading us to find out what it is you’re contradicting. You’ve bumped us up the charts.’
The familiar timbre of her voice, her intonation, it took me back to the kitchen before everyone got up, to the bathroom with Hamish banging on the door, to the desperate drive up the lochside. I couldn’t stop looking at her lips, wishing she would speak again.
&
nbsp; Fin said, ‘So you work at the BBC?’
She nodded. ‘Admin. Not making anything.’
‘But you want to be a broadcaster?’
She frowned. ‘Look, dispensing with formalities: you can tell the bitch that I won’t take it down.’
‘What?’
‘I am surprised it’s you, honestly, because I’ve always liked your music.’
Just then the waiter came out and interrupted us. We ordered tea. Trina waited sullenly, glaring at the table and at me. She was very blunt and angry. I won’t lie: I liked her a lot. The waiter went back inside and she said, ‘Is she paying you? Or are you celebri-friends? Is that how it works?’
‘Who are you talking about?’ said Fin. ‘Gretchen Teigler?’
‘Not that one.’
Trina said. ‘She got you to make it, didn’t she?’
The growl of a bin lorry engine in the next street reverberated on the windows of the buildings around us.
‘Sorry,’ said Fin, shouting over the traffic. ‘Who are we talking about?’
Trina clicked her tongue and sneered, ‘OK, then.’
The tea arrived on a tray and we all sat and watched the waiter put it down, spill the milk on the brushed-metal table, clean the table, take the money, feel in his pocket for change. During all of this Trina Keany was agitated, juddered her leg under the table, her eyes darting as she mentally rehearsed the next bit of the argument.
The waiter left and Fin tried again. ‘Trina, sorry, what do you think is going on?’
‘Ha!’
‘Why did you agree to meet us?’
She thought about it for a moment. ‘Why did you want to meet me?’
I explained that we wanted to ask her about some things in the case, that we had unanswered questions, but she was making faces all the way through, expressions that related in no way to what I was saying, and I just sort of petered out and gave up.
Fin took over again. ‘For example: what happened to the necklace?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘You know perfectly fucking well.’
‘NO, WE DON’T KNOW.’ This was me shouting in exasperation, but the street was so noisy I don’t think I sounded particularly angry, just very clear.
‘Gretchen Teigler was sent the necklace IN THE POST.’
We were both shouting now and it wasn’t for the purposes of clear diction.
We were all lost in the conversation but Fin was lost. ‘Gretchen Teigler? It is her now?’
Trina turned to him. ‘AS IF YOU DON’T FUCKING KNOW.’
He held his hands up. ‘OK. Everyone needs to calm down.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘you think Teigler sent us?’
Trina sat back. ‘Are you going to say she didn’t?’
‘Trina, look.’ I held my fringe up, showing her my eyebrow. At first she was confused but then she looked at me closely, examining my scar.
We locked eyes.
She looked away and mouthed a curse. She turned back slowly to me and said quietly, ‘I’d like to talk to you about that.’
I muttered, ‘I don’t talk about that.’
‘Everyone thought you were dead. Where have you been all this time?’
‘Hiding.’
‘The other girl–was she with you?’
I shook my head. ‘We never met.’
She hissed at me: ‘It’s Teigler again.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing you say on the podcast. I couldn’t believe you had the guts to call her out.’
‘I didn’t know I was calling her out. I’ve never heard of her before.’
I might never get to speak to her again so I just blurted it out: ‘Trina, no one tells the truth about her. No one stands up to her. I can’t tell you what it meant to me yesterday.’
She was suspicious of that. ‘So what?’
‘So, thank you. Also, you have a lovely voice. Nice tone.’
She nodded at the pavement. ‘Well. That’s nice but I didn’t know not to say those things. But thanks.’
Fin wasn’t following this conversation and he was straining to hear us over the noisy traffic. He suggested we go for a walk. Trina said OK, she had forty minutes left of her lunch. We walked east to a quieter street and kept going.
Fin said to Trina: ‘We got interested in the story because my friend, Anna, was listening to your podcast and knew someone you mentioned in it.’
‘Your friend “Anna” knew someone?’ She smiled from one to the other. I shook my head softly and she realised that Fin wasn’t being facetious, that he didn’t know.
‘Anna was friends with Leon.’
I nodded. ‘I knew Leon nine years ago, way before he married Gretchen. He was going out with a Dutch woman. I worked in a hotel that they stayed in. I don’t think he did it. I’m sure he didn’t kill himself.’
‘Nine years ago you didn’t think he would kill himself? That’s wishful. It’s an impulse not a fixed character trait.’
I suddenly knew she was right. It was a passing impulse. It was a circumstance. I’d never thought of it like that. I was so relieved at that possibility: I hadn’t inherited my fate. I didn’t need to pass it on to my girls. None of it was inevitable.
Trina whispered, ‘You think I was wrong?’
‘I think Leon had come close but didn’t do it. He’s been in worse situations and didn’t do it. I think there was someone else on board the Dana that night.’
‘No, I mean, was I wrong to arrive at a conclusion? Usually true-crime podcasts finish up by saying “we may never know”. It’s such a cop-out. That’s what I thought. That’s why I was definitive and said it was him. Now I’m more convinced than ever that she covered it up.’
‘Weren’t you frightened of a backlash?’
She sighed. ‘Honestly, I had no idea about Gretchen Teigler. I mean, I knew she was rich, she came from a strange background, but who could know she’d be like that? I didn’t even blame her in the podcast, I just said that her power could have distorted what the police did. It’s not that controversial. I’m fucking terrified of her now though.’
‘I’m sick of being terrified of her.’
We were in a broad street with a lot of speed bumps, trees, a softer soundscape. Ahead of us Fin stopped and turned to an open gate, waving us to him. We followed him into the forecourt of the British Museum.
Up the stairs and through the door, we stopped at the desk and the security guard checked our bags. We walked through a metal detector, emerging into the strange, grey twilight in the glass-covered courtyard. We wandered westward and sat on a bench, Fin and I on either side, Trina Keany in the middle.
We were looking at the back of the Rosetta Stone set upright in a glass case. The tourists were gathered on the other side of the glass, looking towards us but not seeing us.
‘It’s Teigler,’ she told Fin. ‘She contacted me about the podcast.’
‘Gretchen Teigler threatened you?’
‘Not directly. She sent someone. They ordered me to take the podcast down. “Upsetting to the family,” she said. “Unethical disregard for her feelings.” All that stuff. She chose that cafe where we just met because it’s so noisy.’
‘So that you couldn’t tape her?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you chose it so we couldn’t secretly tape you?’
She gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I didn’t know who you were or who you were working for. She was very threatening. She offered me money to take it down. I refused and she threatened to get me kicked off the network. Then they went to see the owner and he told them to fuck off and then they tried to buy the network off him for forty grand. He’s from a rich family, thank God, didn’t need the cash. I’d have caved. Anyway, the podcast is the number-three download today because you said it was a bucket of crap. The more prominent it is the safer I’ll feel.’
‘I didn’t say it was a bucket of crap.’
‘You kind of did.’
‘We loved i
t. We just disagreed with your conclusion. Forty grand doesn’t seem like much.’
‘Really? I think it’s a lot. Podcasts don’t make money.’
‘But you’re sponsored.’
‘Barely covers studio time. We don’t get paid. Patreon is a big waste of time unless you’ve got profile.’
‘You’re making them for free?’
‘Yeah. I don’t mind, I love doing it. You don’t have to convince a committee of bored execs while your enthusiasm wains. You can just make it and put it out and people can listen or not. It will change but that’s what it’s like right now.’
‘I love that,’ nodded Fin, smiling warmly, ‘like the start of rock and roll.’
‘Someone’ll find a way to make them pay and it’ll be professionalised, but we’re not yet and we’re very vulnerable. We don’t really have editors or corporate structures to check what we’re saying or warn us. Teigler is a nasty nutjob but if no one is allowed to say it publicly, how the hell am I supposed to know? You try not to slander or insult but you can’t get it wrong by accident with scary rich bastards and just apologise. It doesn’t work like that.’
Suddenly, she stopped and stiffened at the sight of a woman walking in a gallery nearby. For a moment Trina watched her and then relaxed. ‘Not her.’
‘Is that like the person who came to see you?’
‘Yes. Slim, blonde, neat, you couldn’t really describe her, just bland, icy manner. Gave me the right creeps.’
‘What did you say about Violetta’s necklace?’
‘I only heard that after I’d finished the podcast. I was going to add it in later but you could spend forever revising these things. Gretchen Teigler was sent the necklace a week after the Dana went down. It came in the regular post, in a padded envelope, and she threw the envelope away before she knew it was significant.’
‘That’s a lie.’
‘Yeah but that’s the story she told the police. Gretchen was in Paris when the Dana sank, in case you’re wondering.’
‘Did you hear anything about Leon’s financial situation?’ Fin asked.
‘Yeah, Leon was bankrupt. He bought the Dana cheap to resell back in England. Had a buyer. He was just sailing it from Corfu. But he was totally broke.’