Even though life on board is, for a guest, assiduously magical, with constant Broadway-style high-budget shows, bingo, origami and acupuncture classes, films under the stars, and shore excursions to snorkel with tropical fish and ride horses through Mexican rain forests, from time to time I detect tiny flashes of cabin fever. I watch a children’s entertainer try out a move in which he throws a stuffed pelican to his assistant. It accidentally hits her in the face. “You’re supposed to catch the pelican!” he snaps.
“My boss,” she mutters, looking embarrassed.
On a shore excursion, a Mexican crew member asks some passengers to stand in a straight line, two by two, while we wait for the bus. Every passenger feels the need to say something facetiously passive-aggressive in response.
“Oh, a straight line!” one says.
“Can it not be a little crooked?” says another.
And so on, practically all the way down the line. The crew member looks upset and embarrassed.
I’ve decided the only place Rebecca could have fallen from is the deck 4 jogging track. The railings everywhere else are just too high. She was a keep-fit fanatic. My theory is that after the 5:45 a.m. phone call, she went for a jog and slipped. So I’m surprised to spot four CCTV cameras on deck 4—two on the port side, two on the starboard—evidently capturing every inch of the deck. They’re hard to see at first, as they’re shaped like long tubes and look like some kind of nautical equipment.
A man in yellow overalls is varnishing a railing. I glance inside the atrium. There’s a big Cinderella party going on. Someone is singing a song about how we have to have “faith, trust, and pixie dust.” There’s a crew party going on somewhere too—I hear screeching and laughter from behind a steel door. It sounds very different from the guest parties, like a pressure cooker letting off steam.
I sidle up to the man doing the varnishing. “That girl who went missing back in March,” I say. “She must have fallen from this deck?”
He looks surprised: “No, she went from deck 5.”
“But there’s no outside space on deck 5,” I say.
“Go to deck 10, walk to the front of the ship, and look down,” he says. “You’ll see the crew swimming pool. That’s where she went from. The starboard side.”
“How do you know this?” I ask him.
“I was on the ship that day. Everyone knows.”
“How?” I ask.
“They found her slipper,” he says.
I walk up to deck 10 and look down. And I see it. The crew swimming pool looks nice—bigger than some of the guest pools. But it’s the swimming-pool equivalent of an inside cabin. There is no view of the ocean because behind the railings is a high steel wall. It reaches well above head height. There is no way someone could accidentally fall from there. You would have to make the effort to climb up. It would be difficult. It would take time.
Back on deck 4, the man is still varnishing.
“I saw it,” I say.
“God bless her,” he says.
“It must be a very intense life, working on the Disney Wonder,” I say. “You’ve got those tiny, claustrophobic cabins. The passengers are very demanding. You work every day for six months. You have to be a Disney-type person the whole time, even when you’re varnishing railings. . . .”
He looks at me as if I’m nuts. “We don’t spend any time in our cabins,” he says. “We just sleep and shower there. We spend our free time in the mess hall or by the crew pool.”
A group of his fellow deck workers joins us. “Disney aren’t slave masters,” one says. “We get to go onshore. We get breaks. Everything you’ve got up here, we’ve got down there.” He points to the bowels of the ship. “We’ve got a library, a gym, a games room, a swimming pool. I don’t have a flat-screen TV or a gym at home. I have them here. The only thing I miss is my family.”
“But all that having to be on show for the guests all the time . . .” I say.
“All the big smiles and happiness,” someone replies, “it’s all real. You couldn’t act that.”
“Disney wouldn’t hire you if you weren’t that sort of person,” someone else says.
“But what about Rebecca Coriam?” I say. “Did you know her?”
A few of them nod. “She was a lovely girl,” one says. “Not emotional. Just like everyone here. Nice and friendly and happy.”
“Then why . . . ?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “But there’s nothing dark or sinister going on. This is Disney.”
Over the next few days I ask more people, and every time I get the exact same response: She jumped from the front of deck 5, at the crew pool.
“Disney knows exactly what happened,” one crew member tells me. “That phone call she had? It was taped. Everything here is taped. There’s CCTV everywhere. Disney have the tape.”
“What’s in the tape?” I ask her.
“I don’t know, but I know someone who knew her well. Would you like me to introduce you?”
And so, after everyone has gone to bed, I have a brief conversation with one of Rebecca’s closer friends from the ship.
“Do you know what was in the tape?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Not exactly. I know she was having a fight with her partner.” He pauses. “What’s it ever about? It’s about love, relationships. There’s no mystery. She was just a lovely girl with underlying sadness.”
The next morning, as we sail back into the Port of Los Angeles, a crew member beckons me over. He says he’s heard I’ve been asking questions about Rebecca Coriam and he wants me to know that suicide is not the only possibility. Maybe, he says, after the phone call she took a walk to clear her head and the wind lifted her away.
“But the steel wall is so high down there,” I say.
“I was on the ship that day,” he says. “It was a rocky day. One time a friend of mine was called early in the morning. The deck by the crew pool was really windy and slippery, and someone was walking there, and my friend was called to get them inside. Disney took it really seriously. The guy got sent home.”
“So she could have fallen?” I ask.
“She could have fallen,” he says.
We pull into the port. This is where Mike and Ann came on March 25 after receiving a call from Disney executive Jim Orie to say Rebecca was missing. They were here in time to see the passengers disembark.
“We were hoping we could have spoken to some of them, but we never got the opportunity,” Mike told me back in Chester. Ann added: “They kept us in a car with the windows all blacked out.”
“Did you get the feeling they were deliberately keeping you away from the passengers?”
Mike: “Well . . .”
Ann: “Probably.”
“But Disney were being polite and helpful and sympathetic?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” said Mike.
After the passengers had disembarked, Mike and Ann were taken on board. They were put in a room that quickly filled with Disney executives and the girl Rebecca had spoken to on the phone at 5:45 a.m.
“Did you ask her what they’d talked about?” I asked. “Why Rebecca had been upset?”
They shook their heads. “We would have liked to have asked more, but by the time we’d flown over we were jet-lagged,” Ann said. “We hadn’t slept since the Tuesday. We flew out on the Friday. We hadn’t eaten. . . .”
“With hindsight, it might have been better if we’d gone out a little later,” Mike said.
“When you were more able to ask questions?”
He nodded. “But your daughter’s missing, so you don’t think like that, do you? Also, we wanted to be quick to meet some of the passengers.”