Michael Robotham - Shatter

‘What’s gross?’ asks Emma.

‘Never mind,’ we chorus.

Julianne and I used to have regular ‘us dates’- nights set aside with a babysitter booked. The first time I arranged one I made a point of bringing flowers and knocking on the front door. Julianne thought it was so sweet she wanted to take me straight up to the bedroom and skip dinner.

The phone rings again. I’m surprised at how quickly I pick it up. Everyone is staring at me.

‘Hello?’

Again there is no answer.

‘Is that you, Darcy?’

A male voice answers. ‘Is Julianne there?’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘Dirk.’

Disappointment morphs into irritation. ‘Did you call earlier?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Did you call about ten minutes ago?’

He doesn’t answer the question. ‘Is Julianne there or not?’

She pulls the phone from my hand and takes it upstairs to the study. I watch her through the stair rails as she closes the door.

The nanny arrives. She is everything I imagined: freckled, photogenic and blighted by a singsong Australian accent that makes her sound like she’s asking a question all the time. Her name is Imogen and she is rather large across the beam. I know that’s an incredibly sexist description but I’m not just talking about 24oz Porterhouse big, I’m talking huge.

According to Julianne, Imogen was definitely the most qualified candidate for the job. She has loads of experience, interviewed well and will do extra babysitting if required. None of these factors are the main reason Julianne hired her. Imogen isn’t competition. She’s not the least bit threatening unless she accidentally sat on somebody.

I carry her two suitcases upstairs. She says the room is awesome. The house is also awesome, so is the TV and my aging Escort. Collectively, everything is ‘absolutely awesome.’

Julianne is still on the phone. There must be some sort of problem at work. Either that or she and Dirk are having phone sex.

I’ve never met Dirk. I can’t even remember his surname- yet I dislike him with an irrational zeal. I hate the sound of his voice. I hate that he buys my wife gifts; that he travels with her, that he calls her at home on a day off. Mostly, I hate the way she laughs so easily for him.

When Julianne was pregnant with Charlie and going through the tired, tearful, ‘I feel fat’ stage, I tried to find ways of cheering her up. I booked us a holiday in Jamaica. She vomited the entire flight. A minibus picked us up from the airport and drove us to the resort, which was lovely and tropical, teeming with bougainvillea and hibiscus. We changed and headed for the beach. A naked black man walked past us. Butt-naked. Dangling. Next came a nude woman, textile free, wearing a blossom in her hair. Julianne looked at me strangely, her pregnancy bursting from her sarong.

Finally, a smiling young Jamaican man in staff whites pointed to my trunks.

‘Clothes off, mon.’

‘Pardon?’

‘This is a nekkid beach.’

‘Uhhhhh?’

Suddenly the slogan from the brochure came back to me: ‘Be Wicked for a Week’. And the penny dropped. I had booked my heavily pregnant wife on a week-long package holiday at a nudist resort where ‘sex on the beach’ wasn’t just the name of a cocktail.

Julianne should have killed me. Instead she laughed. She laughed so hard I thought her waters might break and our first child would be delivered by a Jamaican called ‘Tripod’ wearing nothing but sun-block. She hasn’t laughed like that for a long while.

After dropping Charlie at school, I detour to Bath Library. It’s on the first floor of the Podium Centre in Northgate Street, up an escalator and through twin glass doors. The librarians are boxed behind a counter on the right.

‘During the summer there was a ferry disaster in Greece,’ I say to one of them. She’s been changing an ink cartridge in a printer and two of her fingertips are stained black.

‘I remember,’ she says. ‘I was on holiday in Turkey. There were storms. Our campsite was flooded.’

She starts telling me the story, which features wet sleeping bags, near pneumonia, and spending two nights in a laundry block. Not surprisingly, she remembers the date. It was the last week in July.

I ask to see the newspaper files, choosing the Guardian and a local paper, the Western Daily Press. She’ll bring them out to me, she says.

I take a desk in a quiet corner and wait for the bound volumes to be delivered. She has to push them on a trolley. I help her lift the first one onto the desk.

‘What are you after?’ she asks, smiling absently.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Well, good luck.’

I turn the pages delicately, scanning the headlines. It doesn’t take long to find what I’m looking for.

FOURTEEN DEAD IN GREEK FERRY DISASTER

A rescue operation is under way in the Aegean Sea for survivors from a Greek ferry that sank in gale force winds off the island of Patmos.

The Greek Coast Guard says fourteen people have been confirmed dead and eight people are missing after the Argo Hellas sank eleven miles north-east of Patmos Harbour. More than forty passengers- most of them foreign holidaymakers- were plucked from the water by local fishing boats and pleasure craft. Survivors were taken to a health centre on Patmos, many suffering from cuts, bruises and the effects of hypothermia. Eight seriously injured passengers have been airlifted to hospitals in Athens.

An English hotelier helping in the rescue, Nick Barton, said those on board the ferry included UK citizens, Germans, Italians, Australians and local Greeks.

The eighteen-year-old ferry sank just after 2130 (1830 GMT) only fifteen minutes after leaving the port of Patmos. According to survivors it was swamped by the huge seas and sank so quickly that many had no time to don lifejackets before they jumped from the side.

The heavy seas and high winds have hampered the search for more survivors. Throughout the night Greek aircraft dropped flares in the sea and a helicopter from the Royal Navy’s HMS Invincible assisted with the search.

Turning the pages, I follow the story as it unfolds. The ferry sank on 24 July during a storm that caused widespread destruction across the Aegean. A container ship ran aground on the island of Skiros and further south a Maltese tanker broke in two and sank in the Sea of Crete.

Survivors of the ferry tragedy told their stories to reporters. In the final moments before the Argo Hellas sank, passengers were hanging from the railings and jumping overboard. Some were trapped inside as the ferry went down.

Forty-one people survived the tragedy and seventeen were confirmed dead. After two days a change in the weather allowed Greek naval divers to recover three more bodies from the wreck but six people were still missing including an American, an elderly French woman, two Greeks and a British mother and daughter. This must have been Helen and Chloe, but their names aren’t mentioned for several more days.

A follow up story in the Western Daily Press reported that Bryan Chambers was flying to Greece to look for his daughter and granddaughter. Describing him as a Wiltshire businessman, it said he was ‘praying for a miracle’ and preparing to mount his own search, if the official one failed to find Helen and Chloe.

A further story on Tuesday July 31 said that Mr Chambers had hired a light plane and was combing the beaches and rocky coves of the islands and Turkish coast. The story included a photograph of mother and daughter, who were travelling under Helen’s married name. The holiday snap shows them sitting on a rock wall with fishing boats in the background. Helen is wearing a sarong and Jackie O sunglasses while Chloe is dressed in white shorts, sandals and a pink top with shoestring straps.