Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
The search continues for some time, but there is little belief that we will succeed. Not really. Sasha had been caring for her sick husband before she disappeared. She would have told him if she was planning to head off to watch a film, have a run on a treadmill or read a book somewhere.
“She’s a strong swimmer,” Tom keeps saying now that we accept that she won’t be found on board.
“If she’s fallen from the ship, it doesn’t mean she’s dead.
” We all want to believe this, but I doubt that anyone does.
“I’ve remembered the time that she left now.
It had just gone ten by my clock – two or three minutes past, maybe.
Surely the captain can use that to work out where we were and take us back there. Surely there’s still hope.”
No one disagrees with him and, with a towel draped over my shoulders, I turn to Ade, hoping he’ll know what to do.
We’ve gathered in his suite; it feels safer in here somehow. The master suite is surely the perfect place to make a master plan, is my naive thinking, though I question what we can do in a ship in a storm in the middle of the rebellious ocean.
Perhaps the vintage red rotary phone beside Ade’s bed has put me in mind of cunning plans and daring solutions. It looks like something from an early James Bond film and, to my amazement, he walks across to it and dials a single number to connect to the bridge.
“Hi, Andy, the missing woman’s husband thinks she was last seen just after ten o’clock. Might that help us locate the point where we need to be looking?”
There’s silence in the room as he listens to the captain. If this was a cartoon, we’d hear a squeaky response travel over to us, but we can only guess what is said from Ade’s pensive expression.
“Thank you. I do appreciate it. And thank you for coming back on duty. I hope you won’t have to be up too late.
” The oddly formal moment over, he puts the phone down and talks to us instead.
“He says that he’s put out a distress call, though there’s nothing to say how quickly any sort of rescue services will arrive.
We’re away from major shipping lanes here, and there are no nearby vessels. We’re as far from land as we can get.”
He could have probably found a softer way to break this bad news.
“But we are going back for her, right?” In normal circumstances, Tom would have jumped to his feet and rushed forward to compel Ade to do something. But he only has the strength to perch on the bed and shout his troubled thoughts across the room. “We are going to look for her?”
“The captain is turning the boat around now.”
This feels like the official announcement that Sasha is in the water somewhere.
The room falls silent, and I’m sure I’m not the only one to see her out in the blackness – to feel her fear as the storm does all it can to drown her.
Ryan watches Tom as silent sobs rack his body, and it’s clear that he’s wondering how our friend fell overboard in the first place.
It’s Jake who finally breaks through the uneasy quiet. “We have to be realistic,” he begins, before coming to a complete stop and looking uncertain about what he wants to say.
Ade is sitting at his desk, turning from one side to another in his spinning chair. “I think we’ve been realistic from the beginning.”
Is there a note of irritation in this? Perhaps he’s worried what will happen when the internet discovers that his drummer OD’d and a woman fell from his yacht. Natalie Wood’s death followed her husband around for decades after she drowned off his boat.
“Let me finish.” Jake doesn’t look up as he says this. He’s staring at the floor as though he needs all of his brainpower to work out this equation. “I’m saying that it’s extremely unlikely for two people to die so close together for apparently unrelated reasons.”
Clara puts her hand to her mouth to cover a gasp, and I realise just how much she has in common with the children from an Enid Blyton novel. She even looks a bit like one, with her neat little hair slide and 1940s bob.
“How could you think that?” Tom’s words run together into one long slurred sound. “We have no idea what happened to Sasha yet. How can you be so morbid?”
“Well you said that someone knocked on your door, not that I’m accusing anyone.
” Keeping his cool, Jake’s eyes never leave Tom.
“I just think it’s worth pointing out that we don’t know whether Mick’s overdose was self-inflicted.
There could have been someone with him when he died.
And there’s something no one’s mentioned… ”
I know him well enough to realise that he doesn’t want to say any of this.
His features are crumpled together, his tone reluctant, but he clearly believes that there’s no other choice.
“Does no one else think it’s odd that Clara toppled off the upper deck into the sea?
There was a corridor right behind the spot where she’d been standing.
Someone could have sneaked up and pushed her over. Perhaps they did the same with Sasha.”
“I don’t see how I…” Clara is trembling. She opens her mouth to speak, then shakes her head. It must be hard to contemplate the possibility that someone tried to kill you.
This is all too much for Tom. He looks down at his hands as if checking he still has all his fingers.
Is hallucination a symptom of alcohol withdrawal?
When he looks at us, does he see monsters with three heads?
The horrified look on his face makes me question whether his reality and ours are the same.
When he notices that Jake’s eyes are still on him, he struggles for a response. “If you think for one second you’re going to push what happened onto me…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but then he doesn’t need to. In his condition, it’s unlikely he could carry out any threat.
Ryan is looking at me in the same way as when we rescued Clara yesterday afternoon. “Jake’s got a point.” Like a bad actor in a school play, he steps forward to speak. “We should at least question whether all these things are connected.”
Tom cranes his neck to look at him. “‘Connected’? You’re not Inspector Morse, mate!” He tries to sit up but his head rolls about his shoulders for a moment. “Who even invited you?”
“Forget I said anything.”
“No, come on. Tell me.” Tom won’t let it go.
He puts his hands behind him on the bed and pushes himself up to standing.
For a moment, he reminds me of my grandfather when he had a bad back.
“What are you doing here? I barely remember you existing when we lived in New Cross. So why do you think you have any right to comment on my wife or my friends?”
His face is sweating. He’s a shaking, nervous mess, and I’m glad he isn’t any closer to Ryan or he might try to punch him.
“I said I’m sorry.”
“Who did invite you here, Ryan?” a voice from the corner asks, and I turn to see Ade directing his furious gaze at our unlikely companion.
“What do you—” Ryan puts his hand to his chest and clears his throat. “I mean, you sent me a plane ticket. You wrote me a letter.”
“No, I didn’t.”
The temperature in the room suddenly drops thirty degrees. It’s as if a dumper truck has flooded the place with ice. Ryan looks around in search of support, but he has no allies here. Sasha was the only one of us who really knew him, and she’s gone.
“I sent six invitations.” Ade holds his fingers up to drive the message home. “Six tickets. Clara, Sasha, Tom, Jake, Bridget and Dawn were supposed to come. Dawn told me she couldn’t make it, but when my man went to collect Clara and Jake from the airport, there you were.”
Ryan has no obvious response to this – no real explanation – so he starts to ramble. “I’m not saying that I didn’t think it was weird. After all, you and I never knew each other very well. But I know about the trouble you’ve had over the last few years, and I wondered—”
“Oh, do you?” Ade launches himself from his chair, which goes rolling into the desk behind him. “Then how do you know that, when my people have done everything in their power to keep my business out of the press?”
Ryan looks petrified, but he keeps talking. “Because I work in the music industry, and there were rumours. There are always rumours. I thought you wanted to make it up to me.”
Ade’s immense muscular frame is suddenly more noticeable through his T-shirt, and he shouts at Ryan from two feet away. “Make up for what?”
I can’t stand to see people being bullied. The sight of an unstable Tom and an enraged Ade ganging up on the slightly chubby fanboy is too much to bear.
“We all need to calm down,” I tell them, because I see where this is heading.
Without Sasha, there’s too big an imbalance – too much unnecessary testosterone slopping about – and this lot might end up ripping someone’s head off.
“You’re not thinking straight. Why would Ryan want to hurt Mick? Or Sasha, for that matter?”
The force of my words seem to have the desired effect on Ade, and Tom is already making such an effort to stay on his feet that he doesn’t have the energy to continue his attack. Unhappily, there’s someone else here to do it for him.
“You’re right, Bridget.” Jake sounds unexpectedly mature. “But he still hasn’t explained what he’s doing here if he wasn’t invited.”
“Yes, I have.” Ryan shakes his hands out nervously and walks to the other side of the room to put some space between himself and the panel of judges. “The letter came in the post. There was a ticket. I sent an email to the address provided to confirm I was coming.”
“There was no email from you,” Ade snaps, but anyone could open an account in his name, so that doesn’t prove anything.
“Did you notice the postmark?” I ask, because that was the first thing that occurred to me when Ade’s letter came.
“The postmark?” Ryan’s voice has gone higher, and even if I’m trying to help him, he still sounds defensive. “Why would I? Is that even a thing these days?”
“What about airmail stickers?” I try again. “Did it look like it had been sent from the Middle East? Mine was.”
“Mine too,” Jake says.
“No… No, I don’t think so. It looked like any letter I get for work.”
“So, it was sent from within the UK.” I sound like Nancy Drew.
When this gets us nowhere, Jake grabs hold of the discussion once more. “Okay, so you received the ticket in the post. It’s hugely unlikely but theoretically possible that someone heard about what was happening and decided to mess with Ade. Now tell us what he did to you that warranted an apology.”
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” the one person who had stayed out of the argument suddenly cries out.
Clara is sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her legs and a look of something approaching terror on her face.
“Do you hear me? I can’t deal with this.
We don’t even know that Sasha is dead, and you’re already turning against each other. I can’t stand it.”
Her words leave a hollow ring behind. The macho idiots who had been trying to out-posture one another look sorry for all of five seconds, and it’s up to me to make it better.
I cross the room to sit down beside her, and I know that whatever anxiety and anguish she went through all those years ago is playing out in her head again as the boys ignore her suffering and continue to push Ryan for answers.
“You still haven’t told us the whole story.” Even as Jake says this, he glances across at Ade, and I wonder what he’s thinking. “Why should we trust you when you haven’t told us what Ade did?”