Conviction

by Denise Mina

  We went off to find Mark Parker’s Airbnb.

  We had booked it while we were waiting to board at Heathrow. The listing said it was ‘situé au coeur de la cité’. It looked grim in the photos. It boasted ‘bed type: real bed’ but looked like a single futon. A decorative fan was pinned on the wall at a strange angle, possibly as a cover-up for a damp patch. No pets. No smoking. No parties.

  We found the street very quickly. It was broad, with stone benches shaded by shedding pine trees. The house was down a side alley.

  It needed a coat of paint. Stratified black dust had settled on the white lime-washed walls. The front door was plastic, cheap and moulded to look like wood.

  I knocked and we listened. A mop handle clattered to a stone floor. After a moment the door was opened by a young, very tall, bald man and I introduced myself as his tenant for the evening.

  ‘No luggage?’

  ‘No.’

  He opened the door to the wall. ‘Come in.’

  He led us up a dark corridor, past a mop propped in a corner as if it was in time out. We came to a small door and he opened it, turned to us and shrugged.

  ‘Vous avez payée, mais…’ He gestured to my expensive leather coat and shrugged again.

  The room smelled bad and looked awful. The window was dirty and a corner crack was mended with yellowing Sellotape. The stone floor was still wet from the mop. It stank of tangy synthetic lemon.

  I smiled at him, which surprised him. ‘I’ll pay you for three more nights, in cash, right now, and then my friend and I will leave and you’ll never see us again.’

  He looked at us, from one to the other. ‘For what?’

  ‘We want to ask about Mark Parker.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to know about his luggage.’

  As I say, he was tall, about six five, and had to stoop in the low corridor. He looked over our heads regretfully. ‘This island is so small,’ he said. ‘There are much people here who don’t want to talk of these things. It’s difficult…’

  He wanted more money.

  I said, ‘OK, never mind. You keep the payment for tonight and sorry to have bothered you.’ I turned to leave.

  ‘Non!’

  I turned back.

  ‘Come in here.’ He waved us towards a bigger door that led into a kitchen.

  The house was small and narrow. To accommodate the addition of a kitchen, the back of the house had been knocked through and a boxy glass conservatory built on. This room smelled weird too, the same kind of lemony weird. I began to think the smell was coming from the man.

  He sat us down on a mottled pink-and-grey sofa and I counted out the cash. When he was sure it was the right amount he nodded and began:

  Mark Parker booked that room only one week before he is arrived. He was lucky to achieve this room. Many have said it is not a good room but it is good enough for one night and is well priced. Very cheap. Why not? People of no money cannot stay here now it is a rich place. Cheap places are necessary, are they not?

  They are, indeed. Did he remember Mark arriving at the door?

  Certainly, he did. He remembered very much detail because afterwards it came to his realisation that this person had died.

  It happened like this: Mark was a little bit late because the bus from the airport had been delayed. Later in this day it was heard that a crash is happened on the road bridge. Anyway, anyway, not relevant to this.

  So it was that Mark was a little bit late, but not important. The door is knocked, he open the door and it is Mark Parker there, outside. Mark shows his booking on the phone and they say, oh, little bit late, never mind, sorry for this, OK. Come in.

  What was he wearing?

  T-shirt of The Omen. Yes, said the man, he must be a big fan of horror! The next day he is wearing a T-shirt of Drag Me to Hell: very good movie, old-school horror, Sam Raimi is, of course, genius. So, anyway, Mark is come in.

  Did he have a bag with him?

  Yes! A bag enormous! I show him this room and say wow! Such a big bag! Very small room. But is very thin bag.

  Was it a surfboard, or a boogie board?

  Thinner. He pinched his finger and thumb together to show that it was paper thin. But, he said, at the end of this bag (here he made a cupping/weighing gesture) is lumps, like T-shirts and clothes. I have to pass him this bag into the room! Very narrow door.

  What did you think was inside the bag?

  Hm. A plastic-stiff feeling.

  A laminated poster?

  A what? What is that thing?

  ‘Laminated poster’ is surprisingly hard to mime. I had to use a letter from the breakfast bar and said, ‘Paper with plastic on it.’

  ‘Ah, feuilleté?’

  I didn’t know if that was right: stiff. Not bending. Plastic?

  Certainly. What was it, in there?

  Have you seen the film of the wreck?

  Certainly, he nodded. I see it, although not so much a fan of horror. Mark is fan, very much, very big. Me, I prefer sci-fi.

  Fin said Sam Raimi was married to the daughter of Lorne Greene, who, of course, played Commander Adama in the original Battlestar Galactica. The man was delighted by that morsel.

  So, but why are you asking this? Was it movie stuff inside?

  I said Mark was into movies, he loved horror and I expect he would have already seen The Haunting of the Dana.

  ‘Oh.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘This film is a shit.’

  ‘Yeah, so I saw the dive film and know lots of people think the face of the boy in the cabin was pasted into the film afterwards. But I saw bits of varnish moving in front of it, from the side, so that doesn’t work. I wondered if the image could have been a poster of the kid in the movie.’

  ‘No,’ said the man, ‘not possible. That ship was in the sea for one month and a poster would–’ He made a crumble gesture, as if he was rubbing money at me.

  ‘Not a laminated poster,’ I said. ‘If it was good laminate. Could that be what you felt in the bag? With the T-shirts and shorts? A laminated poster?’

  He thought about that. He looked at the ceiling. He rubbed his finger and thumb together, remembering the sensation of the bag. ‘Ah! But that, it is absolutely possible!’ He looked away and imagined it. ‘Yes! Feuilleté. That, it is possible!’

  ‘Another thing,’ said Fin. ‘Soon after the Dana sank you gave an interview saying you saw someone on the deck of the Dana that night–’

  ‘No!’ He held his hand up to stop the line of questioning. ‘No!’

  Neither of us quite knew what he meant. Was he saying he hadn’t seen that or we shouldn’t ask about it?

  He stood up. ‘You must go.’

  I thanked him and we got up. We promised not to tell anyone that he had spoken to us. Fin bowed and thanked him for his courtesy. The man was moved by this for some reason and kissed Fin several times.

  On the way back down the narrow corridor he apologised for his English. Better in German.

  ‘You don’t want to talk about what you saw that night?’

  ‘Some things–there is not enough money to talk about. Frightening woman come by–threats. Drag Me To Hell, eh?’ He opened the door to let us out. ‘I am sorry.’

  He slammed it shut behind us.

  35

  WE SAT DOWN ON a stone bench in the bright square. Fin called up the dive film on his phone, replaying the part where the boy’s face appears. Detritus floated past the outer frame of the picture, across the boy’s dark eyes. When the water flowed in from the corridor the current in front of him quickened. The diver’s head torch reflected on the gloss surface, causing the flash of light from the boy’s mouth. It was a laminated poster. We were pretty sure.

  Fin asked me how I had spotted it and I told him I knew as much as there was to know about lamination. Price point, thickness, longevity, lamination textures, which paper sizes they could accommodate. If it was a laminated picture it would need to be A3 size, possibly A2. Most machines could only lam
inate up to A4. He must have used an office services shop for one that big.

  Fin was impressed with my reasoning. ‘Wow. You know a lot about lamination.’

  ‘Yes, the parents’ council took that purchasing decision on the basis of a very thorough report.’

  ‘Mark must have had it made in Southampton. Maybe we could trace the shop where he had the lamination done.’

  Fin tweeted out a question: we thought the ‘boy’ in the wreck dive video was a laminated poster of the actor in the original Dana film. Anyone in Southampton know if Mark Parker used a lamination machine in an office services shop there? I think we both felt quite hopeful and competent at that point. I’ve always enjoyed the promise of a hanging question.

  The ghost story didn’t mean that much to either of us but it meant everything to a lot of other people. The interested-in-ghosts community was enormous. Suddenly, Fin was being followed by fifty people at a time, a hundred people, a thousand. They were commenting, retweeting, talking about ghosts and the still from the video, sending pictures and GIFs of the boy. It was overwhelming and changing so quickly, it was like trying to read a poster on the side of a speeding train. Fin struggled to make sense of it for a bit and then gave up in exasperation. He actually turned his phone off. He was running out of battery anyway.

  Fin nodded back to the Airbnb. ‘Was he threatened not to say he saw Violetta casting off?’

  ‘Well, he’d just deny it if it wasn’t true. Who’d warn him not to talk about something he didn’t see?’

  We looked around at the quiet square. It was beautiful. The stone was pale, the light bright, the air was warm. An old man passed by on a child’s bicycle, his knees wide to the side, clutching a paper bag of groceries to his chest.

  ‘Fin, I really think we need to get out of here.’

  ‘What a shame. It’s so pretty.’

  The museum across from us was shut, we couldn’t hear any traffic, though cars were parked here and there in the street. A woman walked at the far end of the square, crossing our eyeline and heading down to the dock. She seemed the epitome of Saint-Martin: tall and slim, cool glasses, wearing a grey cashmere poncho with mustard trim. Her dyed blonde hair was pulled up in a perfect ponytail at the crown. I gave the girls ponytails like that and after fifteen minutes they had stray hairs dangling over their ears, escapee curls at the nape. God, I yearned for the sight of them. I took my phone out and looked at some photos and films to keep me steady.

  ‘Missing them?’ asked Fin.

  ‘It’s agony.’ But I watched a film of the girls in the garden and it lifted my mood. I knew they were safe. I watched a film of them failing to ride bicycles. Children in stories can always ride bikes. Mine find it impossible. In the film they were wobbling along on stabilisers in front of the house, Jess whining, ‘I can’t!’ and my exasperated voice shouting from the behind the camera, telling her to just shut up and bloody pedal. Sometimes being a mother isn’t quite what you think it’s going to be.

  ‘Come on.’ Fin stood up and brushed pine needles off his backside. ‘Let’s go back down, see if we can find where the Dana docked and then get a taxi to the airport.’

  We walked down to the harbour, passing the bar again, and found ourselves among a glut of shops selling potpourri and stinking glycerine soap. We backtracked and got lost in a winding lane. This one was full of boutiques.

  Fin stopped suddenly. He was looking down a narrow alley that led to a pretty courtyard of converted stables. Standing on a plinth in the middle was a large bronze sculpture of a fat cartoonish baby ecstatically raising his chubby arms to the sky. We went towards it and found ourselves surrounded by designer clothes shops on a bijou scale. Decals around the edge of the window advertised who they stocked: Gucci, Chanel, Burberry, Missoni.

  ‘Missoni,’ whispered Fin.

  The shop surround was pale blue. It looked expensive. The window display was a single dress on a velvet hanger and a rustic wooden stool with ‘not for sale’ handwritten on a card.

  We opened the door and stepped into a small room with a lone rail of four dresses and a woollen hat on a plinth. At the far end was a wooden table, possibly the comrade to the stool in the window. Behind it sat a woman with grey hair in a tousled bob. She wore a bright yellow dress and had cat-eye glasses made of clear plastic hanging on a matching plastic chain. She made me want to go straight out and buy a yellow dress, dye my hair grey and develop an astigmatism.

  She put her glasses on and looked us up and down, nodded faintly at Fin’s shoes, took her time over me. She priced my wide-leg Margaret Howell trousers, Agnès B. shirt and the coat.

  ‘Bonjour.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Fin but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

  ‘This leather coat–taupe, it’s by Marni, yes?’

  I nodded. She gave me an approving nod.

  ‘You stock Missoni?’ asked Fin.

  ‘No.’ She took off her elegant glasses and stood up. ‘Not any more. Too expensive for here. Now we stock M for Missoni, the cheaper label.’

  ‘Too expensive for here?’ I asked.

  She smiled. ‘Here, it’s very low-key. It’s not Monaco. Only French come here, no Russians.’

  I thought that was quite racist but asked, ‘When did you stop stocking Missoni?’

  ‘Oof! Twelve years ago.’ She waved at the name of the shop painted in faint grey behind her, Ela, de 2004. ‘A few years after we opened.’

  ‘So, you weren’t selling Missoni two years ago, only M for Missoni?’

  ‘Yes, only the cheaper brand.’

  ‘Are you the sole stockist of M for Missoni in Saint-Martin?’

  She looked suspicious. She pointed at me with one arm of her glasses and turned to Fin. She drew a circle around him with her specs. ‘Hm, Violetta Parkour.’ She wasn’t looking at me any more, she was looking at Fin. ‘You are Fin Cohen.’

  He bowed. ‘I am.’

  She made a circle by her ear. ‘I listen to this thing you’re doing. People here, not happy with you being here, bring it all up again, I think it’s good. Off-season, it’s very quiet here. Bring people in, maybe. But some here are very hostile.’

  Fin asked, ‘Did she buy her dress here?’

  She nodded her head from side to side, meaning yes.

  ‘But the reports were that she spent a thousand euros. M for Missoni dresses aren’t that much. How much are you charging?’

  She smirked, flashing deep dimples at us. She really was a gorgeous-looking woman. It’s dismaying to meet someone in their sixties who is better looking than you will ever be. I was thinking about this when she raised her hand, holding up her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘She bought two?’ I asked.

  Tiny nod. ‘The same dress. Twice.’ She seemed quite pleased about the sale.

  ‘Why would she buy two?’

  She shrugged. ‘She loved the dress? Good price? Nettoyer à sec? Sometimes rich people who travel will buy two because they can’t have a piece cleaned quickly. I don’t know. I was very happy.’

  I could see that. ‘Two the same?’

  ‘Same design but one size 36 and one 42.’

  ‘Didn’t you have the 38 or 40?’

  ‘Of course. But she wanted those sizes.’

  ‘Did she try them on?’

  ‘Just the 36. Fit perfectly.’

  ‘Did she pay cash?’

  ‘Non. She charged it to the hotel. I called and they said fine.’

  She was barely looking at me now, she was blatantly flirting with Fin. I might as well have been invisible. My pride was a little bit bruised by that, not that there was anything between Fin and me, but she didn’t know that and I was standing right there. They made eyes at one another. Fin thanked her and bowed. She curtsied back. The atmosphere between them was so charged you could have stood a fucking spoon up in it.

  Outside we walked back to the lane of soap shops and headed back to the harbour.

  ‘Two dresses,’ I said. ‘Two different
sizes.’

  ‘Why is that important?’

  I explained: look at the picture on deck. She’s nowhere near a 42. One of the dresses she bought was much too large for her.

  ‘I still don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Fin, there were two women on board wearing the same distinctive dress. There was someone else there, they took the photo. That’s why no one noticed the extra person moving around on the boat, because they were wearing the same dress.’

  ‘The crew didn’t mention that.’

  ‘Neither did Mark when he texted his mum. Maybe they snuck on later or maybe it was someone they knew? Like Violetta’s mother? Anyway, Monsieur Airbnb didn’t see Violetta, did he? He saw someone wearing the dress. It could have been her or the other person.’

  We stopped at the mouth of the lane in front of the busy dock. Fin grabbed my arm and pointed out to sea.

  A large yacht was docked outside the harbour. It dwarfed the little buildings. It was beautiful, white with two high masts and brown-frosted glass that made it slightly old-fashioned.

  He pointed at the ship and traced the skyline with his finger to a flat roof that overlooked the deck. A forlorn string of light bulbs hung from a corner pole, flapping gently in the wind.

  It was the rooftop restaurant.

  The scene opened up now: Violetta and Mark walking down here, right in front of us, in the heat of a July afternoon, crossing and heading for the outside wall of the harbour as the Dana docked. I could hear the clatter of Amila’s feet on the metal gangway echo around the harbour front, feel the confusion among the drunk crew as they arrived back in the dark to find the ship gone. I was deep into these imaginings but Fin was deeper still. I glanced at him. His eyes were hooded, his cheeks lightly flushed, his mouth hung open. Then, beyond him I saw a man, head down, barrelling down the street to the dock.

  He was three hundred yards away. He was big, a full head above the milling crowd, wearing a battered leather jacket, baggy jeans, clothes that were too cheap and washed out for here. He had a brawny red face and tight fists swinging at his side as he walked away from the open door of a taxi. He was scanning the street, looking for someone. I knew instinctively that he was coming for me.