Conviction

by Denise Mina

  ‘We have some questions. Were you in Saint-Martin with Violetta and Leon when the Dana went down?’

  ‘No. I was here. The police had to call my friend to come and tell me. I don’t like phones.’

  Fin said, ‘Can I record this?’

  She didn’t even look at Fin but spoke to me and shrugged a careless shoulder. ‘Sure.’

  Fin took out his phone and fitted the mic.

  ‘Julia, people are saying that Leon killed himself and the kids. I don’t believe that.’

  She waved a care-worn hand. ‘Why, darling? You don’t know what anyone will do.’

  I was a little dismayed by that. I had been hoping for an ally. ‘Well, we’re working on a different idea about what could have happened. When Violetta’s luggage came back from the hotel, did it have a size 42 dress in it?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not her luggage.’

  ‘Not her luggage?’

  ‘They send it here to me. I don’t know. It’s not Violetta’s. It’s… the hotel send me the wrong bag. The clothes are the wrong size, all wrong, too big. Expensive shampoo, wrong underwear, wrong everything. I would have contacted the owner of the bag but there were no markings on anything. The luggage, so weird, all the labels cut out of the clothes and so on. Weird.’ While she said this, my eyes kept flicking to the mic on Fin’s phone and she said, ‘Actually, I don’t think I want this recorded.’

  He shot me a filthy look. She wouldn’t have remembered we were recording if I hadn’t drawn her attention to it. He turned it off and put it down. But she was wary of Fin now. ‘You,’ she said to him, ‘you didn’t know Leon. You, I don’t know. These people are rich and mean and they hate…’ She trailed off.

  Fin said, ‘I could wait outside if you prefer?’

  ‘Hm.’ She nodded.

  ‘I could go to the shop.’ Back in duty-free we’d remembered to buy power packs to charge our phones but forgotten to get tobacco and I knew he was anxious to get more. ‘Is there anything you need?’

  She smiled sardonically as her hand rolled a circle around the room. ‘As you can see, I have everything a person can need.’

  ‘Cigarettes, maybe?’ suggested Fin.

  Julia shut her eyes and scratched the base of her neck. ‘Actually, that would be nice. Pall Mall Menthol. Malik’s store around the corner gets them for me.’

  She waved a vague direction with her finger.

  Fin took some cash from me and opened the door. For a moment the room was filled with light and damp air, sounds and smells of the world beyond. He left, shutting the door behind him.

  I was looking at the framed photos on the coffee table. Julia when she was gorgeous, Violetta as a child, as a teen, as a tiny girl in a ballet tutu and headdress, holding an arabesque pose. Most were of them were of Violetta.

  ‘I very much like your pants.’ Julia was looking at my wide-leg trousers, ‘Like Katharine Hepburn.’

  ‘They’re Margaret Howell.’

  She recognised the brand, smiled as if she hadn’t heard the name for a while. ‘Wool?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s itchy?’

  ‘No. They’re silk-lined. Was there an M for Missoni dress in the luggage they sent back?’

  ‘That I would have noticed.’

  I knew she would have.

  She said, ‘All those clothes were big. Size I-don’t-know. Too big though for Vee.’ She waved her hand at the cheap room. ‘This is temporary. No money so we moved here for a moment, some years ago. It’s my friend’s. Old boyfriend from Belgrade. He is eighty-seven.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘He’s so fucking demented now, I don’t know if he even remembers I am here. I still love that man. He was a fucking god.’ She smiled lasciviously, playing her fingers over her bony décolletage.

  ‘Where did Violetta get her money?’

  ‘Vee didn’t have any money.’

  ‘But she spent a thousand euros on two dresses.’

  ‘Ha! No. Violetta didn’t have a thousand euros, that’s for sure. Leon, my beautiful Leon, he was broke. We were broke a really long time, Vee and I. Leon came back and helped for a while, then even his money stopped coming. For a year before Vee died it had stopped. Nothing. We had to move here from a beautiful apartment. But it was going to be OK, he said. His new woman, Gretchen, she said she would support us.’

  ‘And did she?’

  She laughed and it turned into a rattling cough. ‘Do I look supported?’

  ‘She changed her mind when Leon died?’

  ‘Before even. Dauphine Loire, her PA, put a private investigator on to his affairs after they married and found out he was broke. She found out all that and told her. Fucking fat bitch. Violetta was very angry with her. But… Gretchen didn’t investigate before she married him so–you know–love? Maybe? They had prenups but she could have found out he was broke if she cared. Only Loire cared enough to find out. Ask why. Is Loire inheriting? Gretchen could have found out. She supported us for a while, a little money, just enough to irritate.’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘Humph. Formal letter. Not even from her. From the bitch PA. Change of circumstances. Who does that to their friends? She has plenty. When I had plenty I shared with everyone.’

  ‘If you were so broke, why didn’t Violetta want the diamond necklace?’

  ‘Haw!’ She raised her hands. ‘That necklace? What is Leon doing, spending like that? He’s broke. He is making it worse, buying a fucking necklace at public auction? Never pay retail! Twenty per cent to the auction house–fuck! Violetta was too good to say it but I did: You. Are. Broke. Stop spending, Leon! He was making it worse. He was very driven, you know? But we’re his girls! We don’t give a fuck. Sometimes you have, sometimes you don’t have. We’re still his girls.’

  I knew then that Julia had sent those texts to Leon on Violetta’s behalf. It was her style, her tone.

  ‘But Violetta booked the best suite at the hotel in Saint-Martin. She arrived there on a private plane.’

  ‘Really? I thought she flew commercial. Well, maybe a friend paid for her. She was always tricking people into paying for her.’

  ‘How did she do that?’

  Julia smiled softly. ‘She was so beautiful, graceful, people want her around, you know? She’d just, be friendly, I don’t know, flatter a little bit, send them the bill or suggest something, I don’t know.’ Julia was smiling and squirming in her seat, turning her elegant hands in circles by her ears. She was describing her daughter grifting money out of people as if it was a dance recital. If my girls did that they’d be grounded until they were thirty. But then she stopped. She slumped. Her hands fell to her sides and she clutched the sofa. ‘We made allowances for Violetta. You have to understand, she had a difficult time with me, with Leon, you know. She got in trouble sometimes but I was so crazy.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Huh! Ah! You know…’ it pained her to say it, ‘taking things from friends. She gave them back! But when Leon left me he also left her. I mean, I was really crazy. She…’ Julia cringed and caught herself. ‘She had a difficult time. I was… you know. You have to make allowances. So, maybe she got a friend to pay for her? She could make people do things, manipulative girl. Maybe Leon paid?’ She shrugged. ‘Non lo so.’

  ‘Her half-brother, Mark, flew easyJet and stayed in a cheap Airbnb. Would Leon pay for Violetta and not Mark?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t. Not his style.’

  At that, Fin walked back in. He had bought her a carton of two hundred Pall Mall Menthol.

  Julia stood up to meet him; she called him darling and thanked him sweetly with a hand squeeze. Then she sat back down on the couch, her cigaretted hand outstretched, the other hand resting on the pack of two hundred as if it were a toy dog. I have never seen anyone more regal.

  She reminded me of Leon. They must have been a great couple. Beautiful, fun, charismatic, those special creatures it’s hard to envy because, despite their flaws and lies and shallowness, the
y enhance the world by existing.

  Julia saw the awe on my face. She recognised it. She pouted and graced me with a small, wry smile, then dropped her eyes and turned away as if to say, yes, here I am. I am a peerless pearl who has fallen from her setting. I have rolled into the dust under a couch and been forgotten. But, if you can see past the dust and the gloom, you will see that I am still a pearl.

  39

  WE WALKED PAST MALIK’S store, through grimy streets until we reached a wide canal bordered by mean-windowed warehouses. We were both slightly stunned by our surroundings but I knew we shouldn’t let our guard down. Citizens of Venice didn’t have the bourgeois uniformity of Saint-Martin. Off the main drag everyone looked like potential assassins.

  Fin could see how jumpy I was. ‘You need to calm down.’

  ‘But they’ll know we’re here. There’s only one flight to Venice from La Rochelle every second day off season. If they get here and ask at the water-taxi stand they’ll find us in minutes.’

  ‘Well, honestly, Anna, I think you’re overreacting.’

  ‘I’ll just take my medication.’

  We weren’t getting on at this point.

  We followed a lane until we came out at the concourse in front of the train station leading down to the absurdly blue Grand Canal. The station building was long, low, vaguely fascistic, with a bronze emblem on its roof like an airline pilot’s cap badge. The wide forecourt was full of milling tourists and busy commuters heading home. It was impossible to keep track of all the faces or potential threats.

  Persuading Fin he should eat a proper meal, I got him into a water taxi and convinced him it would be better for us to sit inside the cabin. I looked up a list of vegan restaurants on my phone and pointed the driver to one address.

  The driver started the engine and drew out into the canal.

  Venice is foggy in November. The city was subdued but every so often we would stumble across a famous site–the Rialto Bridge, museums, certain palazzos on the canal–and throngs would suddenly appear as if people were welling up from the ground. These people were all dressed for a different place or for another season, in plastic ponchos or summer clothes, they didn’t seem to be in Venice. The taxi driver explained that enormous cruise ships docked nearby and dumped huge numbers of tourists between the hours of nine and five. He said Venetians hated the cruise ships because the passengers ate on board, spent no money in the city and made the best sites impassable. We could see them on the water’s edge, following tour guides with raised umbrellas, recording everything on phones but looking at nothing, seeing nothing.

  ‘What did Julia say when I was gone?’ asked Fin.

  I told him and I said, ‘She said Leon was broke. She was relying on Gretchen to support her and Violetta but Gretchen had cut her off. She called Dauphine Loire a “fat bitch”. Maybe she was the size 42 dress.’

  ‘Forty-two isn’t fat.’

  ‘Fin, Julia is a cocaine-addicted supermodel. She probably thinks you’re a bit fat.’

  I looked behind for motorboats following us but the waterway was so busy and the taxis all looked the exactly the same.

  ‘I suppose if Loire was in Saint-Martin she could have paid for Violetta. She wouldn’t have excited a lot of attention in the family, could have been there as Gretchen’s proxy and taken the picture. But how would she get off the boat?’

  I took out my phone and opened Facebook, sent a message to Adam Ross: ‘How would someone get off a yacht in the middle of the Bay of Biscay?’

  And it made me think of the question we had tweeted: ‘Any answers to the Mark Parker stationery shop question?’

  Fin looked at his own phone. ‘There’s so much feedback it’s impossible to filter through all the replies. Most of it’s about ghosts and me eating chips. Mostly ghosts.’ He offered me his phone. ‘D’you want to try and see if you can find an answer in amongst it all?’

  I didn’t know what else I would find on there. I flinched away. ‘No. You do it.’

  He scrolled through a bit and found one from a Mail Boxes Etc. It had a small scan of a newspaper article attached. The Southampton Daily Echo had covered this at the time of the sinking. The article reported that Mark Parker had been in there before he went to France to meet his dad. He’d had a poster from the horror film laminated. Later, when the wreck dive went viral, the story was repeated in the paper and the article suggested it might be the poster that people were seeing in the dive film. The information was already out there, hidden in the noise.

  Fin was visibly excited by this discovery. He wanted to do an episode about it right away. I said it was a good idea.

  Fin said, ‘And, Anna, I’ve been seeing this image a lot.’ He showed me the photo of the cat nailed to my old front door.

  I pushed the phone away.

  ‘Vicious.’

  I shrugged. ‘People…’

  Fin nodded kindly and said, ‘Yup. Sorry about that. Sorry for saying you were paranoid. I can see how you got there.’ He didn’t say I wasn’t paranoid though.

  He dropped the phone into his top pocket and turned away, reached out to me and touched my back. He was patronising me, not sympathising. I knew the difference. We ignored each other for a while and looked out of the taxi at the view of the canal. It was eerily quiet. Colourful gondolas were tied up, slapping against each other. Largely empty vaporetti motored slowly past.

  It slowly dawned on me that we were being followed by another water taxi. We were on a quiet part of the canal now but when our driver slowed, so did that one, it was always there, I knew because the driver was wearing a distinctive green scarf. He was standing at the wheel but kept turning back, taking instructions from someone in the cabin. I couldn’t point it out to Fin: we’d just had an argument about my paranoia.

  A few hundred yards on our taxi pulled up into a side canal, went down it for fifty yards and stopped by some steps, pointing us up a lane to the restaurant.

  I paid and turned back at the top of the steps and saw the water taxi that was following us pull past the opening very slowly. The curtains were drawn in the cabin. Fin saw it.

  I couldn’t help myself: ‘I think that water taxi was following us. I watched it, it was a bit sinister.’

  ‘It’s Venice in November,’ smiled Fin weakly. ‘Isn’t everything a bit sinister?’

  We walked up the stairs to a heavy wooden door and stepped into a warm room. The walls were lime-washed, the floor rough stone, there were very few tables. It was quiet, past lunchtime, and all the other diners looked like fellow tourists.

  The waiter sat us down near the door and gave us linen menus.

  We ordered, and as the waiter was walking away I felt a damp breeze on my ankles. The door had opened behind us. I looked up.

  It was the ponytailed woman in the grey cashmere poncho that we had seen in Saint-Martin. She was standing in the doorway, looking straight at me, the light glinting off her glasses, turning the lenses opaque. I don’t know why but I nodded. She nodded back and walked up to our table.

  Fin recognised her too. He was as surprised as I was.

  ‘Mr Cohen, Ms Bukaran, may I join you?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer. The waiter brought over a chair and took her poncho. She wanted to keep it with her but he offered to hang it up. She said no, she would hang it on the chair behind her. While this went on I picked up my phone and I took a photo of her. It was quite dark and I was sitting down, she was standing up. It wasn’t a good picture and she was quite nondescript.

  She sat down, spoke to the waiter in immaculate Italian telling him that no, she would not be eating, just bring a glass of still water with lemon, quickly please. Then she introduced herself to us. She was Dauphine Loire, assistant to Gretchen Teigler. How do you do. It wasn’t a question. She flashed a smile of neat, characterless teeth.

  Fin looked worried.

  ‘Are you following us?’ I asked.

  ‘I was in Saint-Martin when you were also there, I think.�
� She showed us her teeth again.

  ‘What do you want,’ I said, ‘apart from water?’

  Her mouth opened and a laugh-type sound came out. Her mouth snapped shut and the noise stopped. ‘I am here on behalf of Ms Gretchen Teigler,’ she said, ‘to speak to you about your audio broadcasts.’

  I understood why Trina was afraid of this woman. There was something very cold about her. She was here to perform a task and didn’t care what we thought about it. She was so disengaged that she seemed slightly robotic.

  ‘We want you to stop this broadcasting. We are prepared to pay you to do so.’ She flashed her teeth again.

  This is how the Teiglers had always operated. First bribes, then threats.

  I said, ‘I believe we have a friend in common: Patricia Hummingsworth.’

  She turned her head to look at me. There was no memory of DS Patricia Hummingsworth in her eyes. Nor of the man she had sent to kill me in my mother’s kitchen. In fact there was nothing in her eyes, so much nothing that it felt like a warning. I didn’t take it.

  ‘DS Hummingsworth gave you advanced warning that the other girl corroborated my evidence. You bribed her.’

  ‘That was disproved in court,’ she said, blinking once and wiping the allegation away.

  ‘Nothing is “disproved” in court. Courts find things proven or not proven but not “disproved”. There are some advantages to living with a pedantic lawyer.

  Dauphine was astonishingly unashamed about what she had done to me. It was almost hypnotic. Some people have no internal ethics, they do what they can get away with, but most will be at least conflicted if they’re caught out in a lie. I put my hand on hers and smiled, ‘Wow! You look so young for your age!’

  She pulled her hand away and I saw a spark of something on her face. She half-blinked and regained her composure. I prodded her again, ‘Have you had surgery?’

  She blinked again, ‘It’s amazing what they can do.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ I said, too loud, quite rude, pretending to look for scars in her hair line. ‘Wow!’ Then I pulled out some euros and dropped them on the table. ‘You’re creepy, d’you know that? Something’s missing in you.’