‘I talked to his folks in Vancouver. They flew to Greece after the sinking and tried to talk him into coming home, but he wanted to continue. The kid is still travelling.’
‘Shouldn’t he have started uni by now?’
‘His gap year is turning into two.’
The last statement is from a German woman, Yelena Schafer, who runs a local hotel on Patmos. She drove mother and daughter to the ferry and says she waved them off.
Ruiz tells me he put in a call to the hotel but it was closed for the winter.
‘I managed to get hold of the caretaker, but this guy was all over the place like a wet dog on lino. Said he remembered Helen and Chloe. They stayed at the hotel for three weeks in June.’
‘Where is Yelena Schafer now?’
‘On holiday. The hotel won’t reopen until the spring.’
‘She might have family in Germany.’
‘I’ll call the caretaker again. He wasn’t overly helpful.’
Ruiz has left the curtains open. Through the window I see joggers ghost past on the Thames’ path and hear seagulls fighting over scraps in the ooze.
Ruiz hands me a report from the Maritime Rescue Service which lists the names of the dead, the missing and survivors. There was no official passenger manifest. The ferry was a regular island service full of tourists and locals, many of whom hopped on and off, paying for their tickets on board. Helen and Chloe most likely paid cash to avoid the paper trail left by a credit card.
Bryan Chambers said he last wired his daughter money on June 16, transferred from an account on the Isle of Man to a bank on Patmos.
What other evidence do we have that Helen and Chloe were on board the Argo Hellas? Luggage was found washed ashore on a beach, three miles east of the town. A large suitcase. A local fishing boat picked up a smaller bag belonging to Chloe.
Ruiz produces a hardcover book decorated with a collage of photographs cut from the pages of magazines and stuck onto the cover. The cardboard is swollen from water damage and the nameplate is illegible.
‘This was among the personal effects. It’s Chloe’s journal.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘I told a few white lies. I’m supposed to deliver it to the family.’
I open the book and run my fingers over the pages, which are buckled and undulating from the dried salt. The journal is more of a scrapbook than a daily diary. It contains postcards, photographs, ticket stubs and drawings, as well as the occasional diary entry and observation. Chloe pressed flowers between the pages. Poppies. I can see where the stamens and petals have stained the paper.
The brittle pages detail their travels- mainly in the islands. Occasionally, people are mentioned: a Turkish girl Chloe befriended and a boy who showed her how to catch fish.
There is no mention of the escape from Germany, but Chloe writes of the doctor in Italy who put her arm in a cast. He was the first to sign the plaster and drew a picture of Winnie the Pooh.
Using the postcards and place references, I can make out the route Helen took. She must have sold the car or left it somewhere, before they took a bus through mountains to Yugoslavia and across the border into Greece.
Days are unaccounted for. Weeks disappear. Mother and daughter kept moving, getting further from Germany, entering Turkey and following the coast. They finally stopped running at a campground in Fethiye on the edge of the Aegean. Chloe’s arm wasn’t healing properly. She visited the hospital again. There were more x-rays. Consultants. She wrote a postcard to her father; drew a picture of him. It was obviously never posted.
The impression I get of Chloe is of a bright, carefree child who missed her schoolfriends in Germany and her pet cat Tinkerbell, who everyone called ‘Tinkle’ because that was the sound the bell on her collar made when she tried to catch birds in the garden.
The last page of the journal is dated 22 July, two days before the Argo Hellas sank. Chloe was excited about her birthday. She would have turned seven in just over a fortnight.
Moving backwards through the final pages, I sense that Helen and Chloe had finally started to relax. They spent longer in Patmos than any place they’d visited in the previous two months.
I close Chloe’s journal and run my fingers over the collage.
Sometimes when you look too hard at a scene it leads to a kind of blindness because the image becomes burned onto our subconscious mind and will remain unchanged even when something new happens that should draw our attention. Similarly, the desire to simplify or to see a situation as a whole can cause us to ignore details that don’t fit rather than try to explain them.
‘Did they include a photograph of Helen Chambers in the stuff they sent?’ I ask Ruiz.
‘We already have one.’
Suddenly, he senses where I’m going.
‘What? You think it’s a different woman?’
‘No, but I want to be sure.’
He draws back, watching me. ‘You’re as bad as Gideon- you don’t think they’re dead.’
‘I want to know why he thinks they’re alive.’
‘Because he’s either deluded or in denial.’
‘Or he knows something.’
Ruiz stands up, stiff-kneed and grimacing. ‘If Helen and Chloe are alive, where are they?’
‘Hiding.’
‘How did they fake their deaths?’
‘Their bodies were never found. Their luggage could have been thrown into the sea.’
‘What about the statements?’
‘Bryan Chambers has the money to be very persuasive.’
‘It’s a stretch,’ says Ruiz. ‘I talked to the coroner’s office. Helen and Chloe are officially dead.’
‘Can we ask them to fax through a photograph of Helen Chambers? I just want to be sure we’re talking about the same woman.’
Veronica Cray is due to catch a train back to Bristol at six. I want to talk to her before she leaves. A minicab takes us along Fulham Palace Road, through Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush. The cab’s suspension has almost collapsed completely on the right side. Maybe there’s a pedestrian lodged under the front axle.
Alongside me, Ruiz is silent. Buses shunt along the inside lane pausing to pick up queues at the bus stops. Other faces peer out from the windows or doze with their heads against the glass.
I keep going over the details of the ferry disaster. Helen and Chloe’s bodies were never recovered, but that doesn’t mean they survived. Gideon has no conclusive proof either way. That’s what he could be searching for- proof of death or proof of life. It’s not the whole answer. His crimes are too sadistic. He’s enjoying this too much to stop.
Veronica Cray is waiting for us at a cafe near platform one. Her overcoat is unbuttoned and drapes to the ground. She and Ruiz acknowledge each other without words. The only two things they have in common are their respective careers and a shared ability to let silence speak volumes.
Seats are rearranged. Watches checked. Veronica Cray has fifteen minutes.
‘The MOD wants to take over the investigation,’ she announces.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Tyler went AWOL. They claim he’s still one of theirs. They want to make the arrest.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told them to fuck off. Two women are dead and this is my investigation. And I’m not going to back off on the say-so of some pencil dick in khakis who gets a hard-on every time a tank rolls by.’
The vitriol in her voice is in sharp contrast to the care she takes in sugaring her tea and stirring it slowly. Holding the teacup between her thumb and forefinger, she drinks half the brew, ignoring the heat. Her pale fat throat seems to have a fist inside it, moving up and down.
Setting down the cup, she begins relating what she’s managed to find out about Gideon Tyler. Through a contact in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, she learned that Tyler spent four years in Belfast working for the TCG (Tasking and Co-ordination Group) in Armagh- a military intelligence body that specialised in surveillance and interrogation.