‘No!’ Her exclamation came before thought. This was like a new violation. How on earth had he managed to follow them, she wondered, immediately picturing his lurch to the taxis waiting outside the hospital, the bountiful tip to the youthful driver, Ralph’s persuasive powers getting him through right to the end – evidence, even as he was dying, of his weaselling ability to wriggle out of a problem.
‘Mum, he’s chasing you. It’s creepy.’
‘Quick, let’s go,’ Daphne hissed. She grabbed their cases and led Libby away from the spectre that was trying to haunt them. She wouldn’t speak to him, she decided. She’d had enough. Let him have his own dramas.
The boat advanced slowly out of the harbour, past the disused warehouses painted with giant murals, and the cluttered, hillside neighbourhood of Kastella. As it took up speed in the open waters, a chill wind blustered around them and waves slapped against the hull, sending showers of seaspray on to the deck. After about ten minutes, Libby said, ‘It’s freezing. Let’s go inside.’ They edged along the narrow passage of deck to the side of the boat, looking for a way in, and Daphne kept an eye out for Ralph, not wanting to encounter him. She spotted him standing upright, if hunched, at the stern, gripping the rail and looking back at the frothed, white trail in the sea.
As they settled themselves inside near the cosy clattering of the cafeteria, she became more worried. He’ll die out there in the cold, she thought. Shit. He’s impossible. It was unnerving to be the person responsible for Ralph’s welfare.
‘Libs, I think I need to tell someone official that he’s on board,’ she said. ‘I can’t just leave him out there like that. They need to make sure he doesn’t get off the boat, that he goes straight back to Athens.’
‘Yeah, well don’t go and talk to him, OK? He’s probably trying to make you feel sorry for him.’
Later, Daphne raked over these moments until her brain ached. She tried to identify a clue that might have enabled her to act differently. It took almost fifteen minutes until she returned with a crewmember the captain had grudgingly appointed to accompany her. Ralph was no longer standing where he had been. Mild irritation became unease after they made a tour of the entire deck on that level and did not find him. The crewman went into the men’s toilets but they were empty.
‘Are you sure this friend was on board?’ the sailor asked suspiciously. ‘Maybe he got off before we left the port?’ They made a rapid sweep of the other decks, inside and out, to no avail. Unease became heart-thumping dread. Evidently annoyed by the inconvenience, the captain turned the boat around and went back in case he could spot Ralph in the sea. Nothing. The ferry circled again and headed on towards Aegina.
As they approached the harbour, she could see the ancient temple on the promontory, its one remaining column poking up and sheered off at an angle. Police were waiting at the port and, when they walked over to speak to her, there was the strange sense that she was now the one in trouble. The officers agreed she and Libby could put their luggage in the back of the car and drove them the short distance to the island’s main police station – a colourful old villa with lemon trees outside it and a surrounding wall painted custard-yellow and blue.
‘A coastguard boat has already been sent out,’ confirmed kyrios Kranidis, the chief of police. He spoke slowly with a lack of urgency, as though people disappeared every day, which maybe they did. There was no sign she was a suspect, but it was shocking to be officially thrust into the centre of what was probably Ralph’s last performance.
Libby was given a bottle of lemonade and a straw and made to wait in the reception area, while kyrios Kranidis set up the paperwork to open the case. It all took ages. He also rang Nina, and Daphne overheard his side of the conversation as he gave the bald, brutal facts, extrapolating from the notes he had just taken.
Nina caught the Flying Dolphin hydrofoil and arrived only a couple of hours later. She made it clear she did not wish to see Daphne and the police tactfully arranged that they should not encounter one another. Daphne was requested to stay on the island till the next day, but she and Libby were permitted to go to the family house. Old kyria Lemonia’s daughter, Eleni, came to check up on them. She had taken over as caretaker now that her mother was too frail to work; though, as she explained, she didn’t actually do much – there wasn’t the money to pay her. The shuttered-up building looked fine to Daphne, and the sun-filled courtyard was occupied by a family of cats. Libby set about finding food and water for them and coaxing them with Greek ‘Pss, pss’ sounds.
‘Tragic,’ said Eleni, plump, gimlet-eyed and failing to hide the enjoyable excitement so easily felt at someone else’s calamity. ‘So terrible, to fall overboard. And you say he was very ill anyway?’
‘It may have been a heart attack. We don’t know anything yet,’ said Daphne. Dread and panic were subsiding into bewilderment and anger. Fuck, shit, bugger, wanker… As they used to say. And bloody, bastard, bollocks, pools of poxy piss, as Ralph would have added.
They returned to Athens the next day on the Agios Nektarios – she couldn’t face staying on Aegina in the circumstances. Sam stepped into the breach, meeting them off the boat, taking Libby to stay with him and Xenia in Kalithea and promising to arrange the entire business of her birthday celebrations. He struck her as being more solid, as though he’d finally stopped being a boy. He hugged Daphne and said, ‘What a fricking mess. I’m really sorry.’
In the end, Libby’s party was held at To Spiti – ‘The House’ – one of the places where Sam volunteered with young refugees.
‘It’s what she wanted,’ he said to Daphne on the phone, when she questioned it as an unlikely choice. ‘It’ll be fun.’ And it was. There was food cooked by the kitchen staff, a gigantic cake, and although Daphne couldn’t face dancing, there was much merrymaking, despite the foundation of suffering and uncertainty that showed on many of the guests’ faces.
It did not take long for the Greek and foreign media to identify several ingredients for a juicy story: a mysterious, unsolved death, a famous composer, and the recent accusations of child sex abuse. Somehow, Daphne’s name was revealed as the plaintiff as well as being the last person to see Ralph alive. The Greek press unearthed an old picture of her at a party wearing a skimpy summer dress, taken soon after her marriage to Constantine.
A few days later, fishermen found Ralph’s body near the small island of Angistri, close to Aegina. He was caught in their nets.
It was horrible back in London. She did not attend Ralph’s funeral. In all the chaos, nobody thought to fill her in about Jane’s revelations or the Swedish boys or whatever they were. For about a month, Jane made what sounded like excuses not to meet, but eventually she asked to see her, arriving one wet, weekday evening in early December.
‘How are you doing?’ Jane hardly smiled, as though she did not care. Daphne wondered why she had come. What had happened to their resurrected friendship that seemed so sincere?
‘Oh, you know, pretty low really. It wasn’t the ending to the saga that I’d have chosen.’
In the kitchen, Jane took a sip of wine from the glass Daphne handed her and laid down her gauntlet. ‘Well that was certainly a major fuck-up, concocting a deathbed elopement with Ralph.’ Daphne’s initial reaction was puzzlement at the sarcastic tone. It was so unlike her – the supportive friend who had helped her through so much over this strange, discomforting year. ‘I didn’t take him to the boat, you know. He followed me. Crap knows how.’