Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ryan says this as though he’s revealed a great secret, and the screen is about to fade to black. But we’re still here – still standing on the deck in the rain – and I prompt him for more.
“What are you saying? That he should have done more to help?”
“I don’t know exactly, but there was a corridor just behind where he was standing, and I thought perhaps…
” He looks at the crashing ocean beyond me, searching for the right words.
“It’s hard to describe the expression on his face, but his eyes were fixed on the water, and he didn’t look up at me as I arrived.
I started yelling at him to throw down a life ring, and he finally snapped out of it. ”
“So you think that Ade pushed two of our friends off the ship and helped Mick to overdose? What possible reason would he have?”
These questions pull him back to reality. “I haven’t thought that far.” He touches the thinning hair on the top of his egg-shaped head. “But you must admit that it’s strange.”
“Yeah,” I say as I turn to go. “Strange.”
Despite my scepticism, Ryan’s questions stay with me.
We walk back across the deck as my brain whirs.
If there is a murderer among us, surely a more obvious explanation is that Tom saw his opportunity to get rid of the wife who clearly no longer loved him.
He could have pushed her overboard and waited to tell anyone that she was missing.
But then the even more likely solution is that she slipped on the wet deck in the storm.
Once we’ve gone through every deck on the ship and talked to the crew, we head up to Ade’s suite, and he hands out towels to help us dry off.
I haven’t felt cold until now, but the warmth of the towel, fresh from a heated cupboard, sends a shiver through me, as if my body now remembers what temperature it’s supposed to be.
Ade gets the captain to turn the boat around, and then the arguments inevitably begin. Suspicion veers between Ade and Ryan, who was never meant to be here in the first place. In the end, as keeps happening, the weight of suspicion tips back to Tom.
“… if you wanted to get rid of her,” I tell him, “this was the perfect moment to do it.”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, Tom explodes, and Bridget rushes off in tears. I don’t know what to do. I feel myself being torn apart, and I want to make sure that she’s okay, but Tom keeps shouting at me and I can’t think anymore.
“I would never hurt my wife.” Something about the way he pronounces these last two words makes me doubt this is true. He doesn’t use Sasha’s name and makes her sound like a prize possession rather than a person. “I’ve never touched her.”
He grabs me by the T-shirt and pushes me up against a shelf. He wants to hit me and I kind of wish he would. That familiar thirst for violence is back. I’m desperate for any excuse to punch his head in and, even though I haven’t had a drop of alcohol, the very memory of it makes me light-headed.
Ade is there to make sure this doesn’t happen. He forces himself between us, and I’m happy to step back.
“This is getting us nowhere.” He has a level of authority that the rest of us lack. And even though I was just questioning whether he could be the killer, I find his presence reassuring. “You need to calm down and stop behaving like idiots.”
Tom grits his teeth as I lean against the bookshelf behind me. I can still feel where he pushed me against it.
“Ade’s right; we’re supposed to be friends.” Clara is the last girl left with us. She stands beside the desk looking like she’d rather be hiding under it.
“Exactly,” Tom says, and he pauses to breathe in slowly through his nostrils. “We’re supposed to be friends, and that’s why this is all so hard to believe.”
He sits down on Ade’s unnecessarily large bed and goes back to feeling sorry for himself.
The fragile peace holds for a short while, and I feel that this is the moment when everything can change. We can calm down and try to concentrate on what lies ahead. We can come together, but I think we all know how unlikely that is.
“We are friends,” Tom whispers to himself and the rest of us relax just long enough to regret it.
“But I know there was a knock on the door. I know Sasha spoke to someone before she left the room. She thought I was sleeping, but I heard her talking in a low voice, and then the door closed behind her.”
“And what, Tom?” Ade asks when no one makes a sound. “What do you think that means?”
Ryan looks like he wants to raise his hand and say, Sorry, folks. This has got nothing to do with me. I think I walked into the wrong room. His whole time here has been a mistake in some way, but he’s too polite to make his presence known and goes to sit beside Clara in solidarity.
“It means…” Tom’s eyes catch the light of a weird tentacled lamp on the ceiling. “It means we’re not alone here, and we’ve been stupid to overlook the fact.”
Ade doesn’t need to respond. His face is the picture dictionary entry for confused.
“I’m saying that there are any number of crew on board this boat. It could have been one of them who came knocking for Sasha. She was more likely to go off with someone in authority than one of you when she was looking after her sick husband.”
“You’re just guessing now, Tom,” Clara tells him, in the same pleading tone as before.
“No, I’m seeing things clearly at last. How could we have been so stupid?” He claps his hands together then balls them into fists. “One of them must be behind this.”
“Why would you think that?” Even as he drops his voice, Ade still looks disgusted by the man in front of him.
Tom sneers as if he knows something we are too dumb to realise. “It’s jealousy. Ever since I was a kid, people have treated me differently because I come from money. They say it’s about equality and fairness, but the reality is that everyone wants what they haven’t got.”
He sounds like a Victorian industrialist, peering down on the little people, and I can’t hold my tongue any longer.
“So you think someone here is picking us off one by one because they hate the rich?”
“Think about it!” He gives me a second to do so. “First, they failed with Clara, then Mick died, and now Sasha has vanished. This isn’t just cold-blooded murder. It’s class war.”
Is it terrible that the only response I can produce is laughter?
Ade is currently more reasonable than me. “I really don’t think that any of the crew would hurt someone.”
“Because you interviewed each of them personally, did you?” Tom can’t direct as much fury sitting down, so he gets to his feet again. “I suppose you’ve got to know them all intimately during your time on board.”
Ade has no response to this and glances across at me.
“Come on, tell us.” Tom juts out his jaw and looks like a football hooligan spoiling for a fight. “How long have you owned this ship? And how many of the people who work on it do you actually know?”
“A yacht is a boat not a ship,” Ade snaps, as if that makes any difference right now. “I bought it at the end of last year, and I’m not a prince or a recluse. I talk to my staff.”
“Yeah, but you can’t know them all. You said yourself there’s normally thirty people working on here.”
Tom evidently feels that this is the answer.
None of us can prove that the crew weren’t involved in Sasha’s disappearance, and so he is the smart one.
The obvious conclusion is that he’s making so much fuss because he doesn’t want us to think about his involvement, but we’re beyond that now.
He moves off towards the door, and the others wait to see whether anyone has the energy to object.
“If there is a killer out there, why would you risk bumping into him?” I almost regret the masculine pronoun. Women can be killers too, I tell myself, but it probably isn’t the time for political correctness.
“Because I have to do something!”
He turns to slide the door open, and when I try to stop him, he spins back around and punches me in the shoulder.
It’s not the obvious way to hurt someone, but that doesn’t change the fact that my collarbone immediately feels like it’s broken.
I think that even he’s surprised by his strength, as he looks at his fist and mutters an unconvincing warning.
“You don’t want to do that, Jake.”
It’s all very macho, and all very fake, but no one is going to change his mind. We just watch as he disappears into the darkness, and I can’t help wondering whether we’ll ever see him again.