She's Mine Page 3

  I refuse to believe that Katie is dead. I cannot. Otherwise I’ll just keep walking into the sea until the waters close above my head. It’s possible that the lilo beached up on the rocks long enough for her to clamber ashore. It’s possible she wasn’t on the lilo at all but wandered off along the shore in search of shells. It’s possible that she’s sheltering somewhere lost and scared. I can’t sit here tearing out handfuls of hair. I’ll find her, if it kills me.

  A few minutes later, I knock on Christina’s door. There’s no answer so I let myself in. The room is in shadows, the curtains drawn. There’s just enough light to make out Christina’s bundled shape twisted up in the sheets. Despite the three sleeping tablets, she must have been tossing and turning all night. Her face is pressed into the pillows and her stunning blonde hair (‘beach-blonde, not bleach-blonde like the other school mums’ she had remarked proudly when I paid her a compliment yesterday morning) spills out in a wave over the white cotton sheets. But Damien’s side of the bed is empty, the sheet untouched and smooth. I shake Christina’s shoulder. Still under the influence of the sleeping tablets, she moans, curls over and buries her head further into the pillows.

  A message from ‘unknown caller’ sent at 3.42 earlier this morning flashes on the screen of Christina’s mobile on the bedside table. I tap in the security code, which I know to be Katie’s date of birth:

  Sorry ambushed at golf club by Seb and Georgio. Heavy night at the Coco Shack – crashing at Seb’s. Hope you had fun at beach with girls. Can’t wait to carry on where we left off xxx D. Lost my phone at the golf club so sending this from Seb’s.

  Who is this Seb, I wonder? I’m sure I’ve never heard Damien mention him before…

  I scan through messages Christina sent yesterday afternoon and evening to Damien – the first at 5.50 p.m. before she discovered Katie had disappeared:

  I’ve been waiting for you in the play area for the last half hour!! Where are you??

  And later on a series of urgent, panic-stricken texts and voicemails – seventeen in all – as she tried to locate him.

  ‘Selfish bastard,’ I say under my breath. Then scrolling back further, I come across an earlier message from Damien sent from his own phone yesterday afternoon.

  Meeting girls at play area at half five

  I screw up my lip. Bullshit. He never arranged to meet us at the play area, that’s a barefaced lie. The plan was to come and find us at the beach.

  I don’t trust that fuckhead…

  I stare at the screen for a few seconds, frowning, then replace the phone and leave without rousing Christina. Better to let her rest a little longer. To wake her would be cruel.

  *

  Not daring to stop for a coffee, I stride through the breakfast room and onto the palm-fringed terrace facing the beach. A few hotel guests, the early risers, are already tucking into the lavish breakfast buffet. Jake, the American grad student I drank with at the bar on our first evening, is sitting on the terrace. He glances up from a plate piled high with mango and papaya as I walk by, and looks away quickly. Screw you Jake! So much for our evening of ‘flanter’.

  Yesterday, I was turning heads in admiration, today they’re turning away in disgust. Overnight, I’ve become a social pariah, the careless, lazy nanny who fell asleep on the beach and let a little girl drown – or something worse! It’s so unfair. I want to turn round and shout at all those smug people, sitting there, looking the other way and judging me, ‘It’s not my fault. I was drugged.’

  But there’s no point making a scene. Right now the only thing that matters is to do everything in my power to help Katie – even if only the tiniest glimmer of hope remains. I hold my chin up and slide down my sunglasses. Come what may, I intend to clear my name. It’s only too obvious that the police think I’m the one to blame. Passing out isn’t a crime. God knows what my crime is but they’re going to pin it on me. Today I’m going to insist they give me a drug test and I’m going to make sure it goes down in my statement that I was targeted too – someone spiked my drink.

  Brushing past the lush frangipani and bougainvillea bushes spreading beyond the terrace, I breathe in deeply, calmed by the sweet fragrance of the blooms. I walk through the hotel grounds unconsciously softening my gait to the lilting beat of steel drums being played in the shade under the palm trees across the scrubby lawn. Further off, I hear the throbbing whine of the search helicopter hovering just offshore and the jolting rasp of an outboard motor being started up on the lifeboat. Thank God. They’re still searching for Katie. They haven’t given up hope of finding her alive.

  A boat is anchored out in the bay beyond the rocks where the punctured lilo was recovered. I walk down to the water’s edge and look out towards the reef. Now my heart sinks as I make out the silhouettes of police divers donning masks and strapping on oxygen tanks as they prepare to enter the water. It seems the search-and-rescue operation has now become a search-and-recovery operation to find Katie’s body. But I’m not giving up.

  I set off on the hiking trail that winds over the rocky headland towards the next bay and see a police officer hanging on to a tracker dog, straining on the leash and wagging its tail in excitement. The officer is combing the waterline, allowing the dog to tug him in zigzags as the pair advance from one rocky cove or stretch of sand to the next.

  The stony trail is set back about fifty metres from the beach. I scan the ground methodically from side to side as I walk, looking for anything unusual or out of place. I notice the occasional cigarette butt or discarded ice-lolly stick tossed between rocks beside the trail but otherwise the flora seems undisturbed. I’m planning to hike to the marina about six miles away, and then backtrack to the hotel staying close to the waterline. The sun is still low in the sky and a light breeze is coming off the glassy-smooth sea. It’s going to be another scorching day but for now it’s pleasantly cool, and my mind is focused and sharp, like the bright images of the landscape outlined in the early morning light.

  The rhythm of my footsteps concentrates my thoughts as I replay in my mind the events of the previous day. Now that my head is clear, I recall in photographic detail the morning that the four of us spent together at the pool before Katie disappeared.

  Damien and Christina spent much of the time reclining on poolside sun loungers, listening to music through headphones, reading and sensuously rubbing sun cream into each other’s backs. Christina didn’t go near the water but I had to admit, she looked a million dollars in her Calvin Klein leopard-print bikini. Damien did a couple of lengths of the pool showing off his stylish front crawl and his Orlebar Brown Hawaiian print swim trunks that he wears a little too tight and which I know cost him just short of three hundred US dollars. He spent the rest of the morning lazing around and flirting with Christina. Meanwhile I was in the water, entertaining Katie, giving her rides round the pool on the lilo, watching her on the waterslide, and helping her interact with two little girls on vacation from Texas who wanted to make friends.

  Just before lunch, Damien took it on himself to go over to the pool bar and fetch us all drinks – a strawberry soda for Katie, a tropical mango pale ale for himself, a Diet Coke for me, and for Christina, the local poison, a Painkiller cocktail, that potent mix of pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut cream, nutmeg and Caribbean rum which slips down easily and tastes so fresh and delicious. While Damien went off to the bar, Christina and I looked through the Spa ‘menu’ as we were planning to go over there for manicures later in the day. On his return, Damien told us that the bartender had boasted he mixed the best Painkillers on the island. I refused when he handed me the cocktail – ‘I asked for a Diet Coke,’ I protested. But he kept on pushing it in my face. He made out I was a being a killjoy, boring and square. Then he had a go at me for wasting his money. Even Christina had joined in to humour him, goading me gently.

  ‘Go on, live a little,’ she had said.

  As I hike out along the trail, I’m struck by the contrast between my current lucidity and the bizar
re, overwhelming feelings of intoxication I experienced yesterday. Must have been that cocktail. But it seemed quite ordinary at the time, didn’t taste particularly alcoholic, shouldn’t have made me drunk. And yet it set my head reeling, made me feel absolutely wretched. I remember feeling dizzy, nauseous and wasted… stoned – there’s no other word for it. I’m convinced something in the drink made me fall asleep on the beach and then left me with such a dreadful headache and sickness last night. It must have been tampered with. I’m sure of it.

  Could one of the barmen have spiked my drink? Unlikely. Damien ordered and paid for the drinks at the pool bar. Damien carried them over and handed me the glass. Is this his idea of a joke? Some joke! I left my cocktail on the table while I went over to cajole Katie out of the kids’ pool and get her ready for the beach. Could Christina have dropped something in when I left the table? The sedatives she’s always taking herself, perhaps? We were both drinking Painkillers. She could conceivably have dropped her pills into one of the cocktails and mixed up the glasses by mistake – or on purpose. My bet is that it was Damien who spiked my drink to try and make me look stupid and irresponsible in front of Christina. I think he’s been trying to get me sacked ever since I caught him going through her desk. Maybe he thought it would be funny to discredit me with Christina by getting me high when I was on duty with Katie, and it all went horribly, tragically wrong.

  The trail loops around the rocky headland, at times bringing me perilously close to the edge of steep limestone cliffs plunging down to turquoise sea. I can’t bear the thought of Katie, if by some miracle she is still alive, perhaps wandering around out here on her own, lonely and confused – just one slip away from certain death.

  Although I’m preoccupied, the rugged beauty of the coastline is not lost on me as I focus my attention on the surroundings for any sign of Katie. I trudge on for three or four miles. Nothing unusual catches my eye. Weirdly the feeling of panic and helplessness calls up flashbacks from the time our dog ran off when I was a little girl. Every fifty or so metres I stop and look around calling out Katie’s name again and again, and then straining my ears for any response. I must look like a mad woman but I’m past caring. And there’s no one to see me here. The track is deserted.

  Eventually the trail winds through an outcrop of boulders emerging onto an elevated expanse of grassland from where I can see the panorama of the bay and the marina in the far distance beyond the hills.

  The sun is now climbing in the sky, the cicadas are screeching, and the heat is building steadily. I’m beginning to tire. I pause at a viewpoint over the wide sandy bay to take a long swig from my water bottle and pull up my T-shirt to wipe my damp brow. I look out over the vast curve of sea, sand and green islands, known as Sugar Bay. The stunning vista would have enthralled me at any other time. At intervals along the beach, I make out red flags fluttering in the breeze. They must have been set up overnight by the coastguards to indicate that swimming is prohibited for the day. I shudder.

  ‘Katie… Katie!’ My voice echoes mournfully round the bay.

  Come on out, where are you hiding? Where are you?

  I scan the water, then the beach for any sign of a child, any sign of a body, any sign at all.

  The flags call to mind the news I caught on local TV early this morning when leaving the hotel. Investigators are still waiting for the verdict of marine experts on whether rips on the lilo were caused by a shark attack. The newsreel referred to a recent attack by a rogue Caribbean reef shark on a tourist participating in an eco-dive in shallow waters off the reef. Local dive companies were blamed for provoking aggressive behaviour in the sharks by attracting them with lumps of meat.

  I keep walking.

  Scenes from the movie Jaws crowd into my head, overlaid with my last image of Katie splashing about on the yellow lilo…

  But I’m letting my imagination get carried away. After all, the beach was crowded. Surely someone would have seen the lilo drifting out to sea? Why didn’t someone raise the alarm…? Now that I think about it calmly, I find it hard to believe that not one of those fat, rubbernecking tourists sitting on that beach would have noticed a little girl being swept out to sea on a bright yellow lilo. There’s something that doesn’t quite stack up.

  Beyond the viewpoint, the hiking trail runs close to the rough tarmac road leading from the main road to the hotel. There’s very little traffic today as local beaches are closed and day-trippers have diverted to the beaches in the north of the island. An occasional van servicing the hotel thunders past as I hike the trail towards the marina. A police patrol car glides by slowly, then a second police car, about ten minutes later. Part of the search operation, I guess. Otherwise the road is empty and uncannily quiet. The sound of my trainers scrunching on loose stones and dry grasses fills the air along with the incessant drilling of cicadas.

  I carry on hiking for another forty minutes or so when my reverie is broken by a clatter in the distance, the rattle of wheels bumping over rutted tarmac. The engine noise gets steadily louder as a vehicle approaches along the winding road. The noise is unnerving, yet somehow familiar. It sounds like a Jeep. Could it be Damien driving back to the hotel at last? Does he know about Katie? What on earth am I going to say to him? I shrink at the thought of having to break the news. Saying the unbearable words ‘Katie’s lost, she disappeared on the beach, we think she drowned,’ will make it all the more real, more hopeless.

  I stop uncertainly in my tracks. My mind is groping at something, that disturbing feeling of waking from a half-forgotten dream and struggling to remember some dark and threatening scene. My sense of foreboding grows. And it’s not the black dog of guilt (yes, for all my bravado, I can’t help but blame myself) that’s been howling at me since yesterday.

  Like a hunted animal, I sense danger. I quicken my pace, break into a jog. Now I’m sprinting down the track. The gorse rips against my arms but there’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to.

  As it rounds the bend, I immediately recognise the brassy orange jeep Damien rented at the airport.

  An idea takes shape, a sudden creeping fear.

  Oh my God… it’s him, of course… it’s Damien.

  He’s taken Katie. It seems so obvious now. It all fits. The image of the stick-figure hangman drawn in red lipstick, flashes before my eyes – both a death threat and a clue. The red letters ‘D’ ‘I’ and ‘E’, separated by dashes: spaces for missing letters? Like the children’s game? Fill in the blanks and you get ‘Damien.’

  I’ve been such an idiot!

  I should have told the police about his obsessive interest in Katie, and the trips to the park, and the time I caught him going through Christina’s private papers in her desk, and the killer cocktail, and his lie about meeting us in the play area, and his mysterious absence from the hotel since yesterday afternoon. And the yellow lilo… yellow, like in Jaws… his sick idea of a joke?

  ‘Oh shit!’ I say out loud, as he spins to a squealing halt alongside me on the road.

  He leans out of the window, leering, his head cocked to one side.

  ‘Scarlett! Fancy meeting you here!’

  He’s unshaven, with wild eyes, and I smell alcohol on his breath. His white shirt is creased and stained. He looks as if he has slept in his clothes. As he lunges out, I take a step back from the Jeep and look quickly up and down the empty trail.

  I’m on my own.

  ‘Hop in, gorgeous. I’ll give you a ride.’

  Now I am truly scared.

  4

  Photograph One

  18 October 1997: Oriel College, Oxford

  Forgive me, you’re not in this photograph but it seems like a good place to start – the end of your first week as an undergraduate in Oxford. I’m sure you’d remember the occasion. I kept the invite. The Oriel College Boat Club Freshers’97 Welcome Bop. You missed a great party, a party with a difference.

  This was taken just after we arrived. We’re standing a little awkwardly in St Mary’s Quad posing
for a group photograph in front of a black-and-white timber-framed building called, fittingly enough, ‘The Dolls’ House.’

  What a stunning collection of extremely pretty, female undergraduates (and me, the imposter, but just as beautiful as the rest), all dolled up to the nines, a hand-picked selection from the intake of female freshers, outnumbering the male undergraduates in the photograph by about three to one.

  The male undergraduates are also pleasing on the eye (all bar one, their puny cox) – eight tall, strapping second-year undergraduates with arrogant eyes and confident smiles, all wearing matching ivory boating blazers with navy blue piping and cuff rings bearing the three-ostrich-feather emblem on the left breast of the Oriel College Men’s First Eight.

  Look, there’s James, holding out a champagne glass to that curvaceous brunette in the emerald-green cocktail dress. And over here, in the right-hand corner, it’s me in your daringly low-cut, scarlet silk evening gown, clinking glasses with the president of the Boat Club. Do you remember him? Hamish Clarke, James’ best friend.

  We’re all looking so very charming, restrained and civilised here. But believe me, by the end of the evening it was carnage.

  We were so free in those days – before the tyranny of the Internet and the endless scrutiny of social media. I don’t want to boast, but let’s just say, the Monica Lewinski treatment was all the rage at the time.

  We were so enthusiastic and so eager to please.

  We gave those eight, presumptuous young gods (and their diminutive cox), more than their fair share – beyond their wildest imaginings!

  *

  It was coming to the end of Freshers’ Week and Lara was enjoying her freedom and beginning to feel less strange in her new college surroundings. She was more than a little put out by the sudden arrival of Gabrielle, who was training in London as a fashion photographer and had driven up unannounced to Oxford, to ambush her for the weekend.