Michael Robotham - Shatter

I think for a moment. I’ll be in London four hours from now.

‘Tell her to call you.’

Charlie leaves a message. Afterwards, I take the mobile from her hand and give her mine.

‘We’re swapping, just for today. Darcy won’t answer my calls, but she’ll answer yours.’

Charlie frowns crossly. She has the cutest twin creases above the bridge of her nose.

‘If you read my text messages, I’ll never talk to you again!’

Ruiz leans against a park bench, eating a sandwich and drinking coffee. He’s watching a delivery truck trying to reverse down a narrow driveway. Someone is directing the driver, signalling left or right. A hand slaps the roller door.

‘You know one of the hard things about being retired?’ says Ruiz.

‘What’s that?’

‘You never get a day off. No holidays or long weekends.’

‘My heart bleeds.’

The park bench overlooks the Thames. Pale afternoon sunlight barely raises a gleam on the heavy brown water. Rowing crews and tourist launches leave white wakes that slide across the surface and wash up against the glistening mud exposed by an ebbing tide.

The old Barn Elms Water Works is across the river. South London could be another country. That’s the thing about London. It’s not so much a metropolis as a collection of villages. Chelsea is different from Clapham, Clapham is different from Hammersmith is different from Barnes is different from a dozen other places. The dividing line may only be as wide as a river yet the ambience changes completely once you cross from one place to the next.

Julianne is back from Rome. I wanted to meet her at Heathrow, but she said the company had sent a car and she had to go to the office. We’ve arranged to meet later at the hotel and go to the party together.

‘You want another coffee?’ asks Ruiz.

‘No thanks.’

Ruiz’s house is across the road. He treats the Thames like a water feature in his front garden or his own private stretch of river. This particular park bench is his outdoor furniture and he spends several hours a day here, fishing and reading the morning papers. Rumour has it that he’s never actually caught a fish and this has nothing to do with the water quality of the river or the fish population. He doesn’t use bait. I haven’t asked if it’s true. Some questions are best left unspoken.

We take our empty mugs back to the house and the kitchen. The door to the utilities room is open. Clothes spew from a dryer, light, pretty, women’s things; a tartan skirt, a mauve bra and ankle socks. Something about the scene is familiar yet oddly unsettling. I don’t picture Ruiz having women in his life even though he’s been married three times.

‘Is there something you want to share with me?’ I ask.

He looks at the basket. ‘I don’t think they’d fit.’

‘You have someone staying.’

‘My daughter.’

‘When did she get home?’

‘A while back.’ He shuts the door, trying to close off the conversation.

Ruiz’s daughter Claire has been dancing in New York. Her troubled relationship with her father has been akin to global warming- a melting of the icecaps, a rise in the oceans and a refloating of the boat- none of it achieved without sceptical voices questioning the outcome.

We move to the lounge. Papers and folders relating to the sinking of the Argo Hellas are spread across a coffee table. Ruiz takes a seat and pulls out his battered notebook.

‘I talked to the chief investigator as well as the coroner and the local police commander.’ Loose pages threaten to spill out from the broken spine as he turns them. ‘It was a thorough investigation. These are statements from witnesses and a transcript of the inquiry. They arrived by courier yesterday and I read them last night. Found nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Three people gave evidence that Helen and Chloe Tyler were on the ferry. One of them was a navy diver who was part of the recovery team.’

Ruiz hands me his statement and waits while I read it. The diver describes recovering four bodies that day. The visibility was less than ten yards and a treacherous current made the job more difficult.

On the fifth dive of the day, he found the body of a young girl snagged on the metal rungs of a ladder near a lifeboat winch, starboard side, nearest the stern. The diver cut the straps from the girl’s lifejacket, but the current ripped her body from his hands. He didn’t have enough air left in his tanks to swim after her.

‘He identified Chloe from a photograph,’ says Ruiz. ‘The girl had a cast on her arm. It matches what her grandfather said happened.’

Despite the statement, I sense that Ruiz isn’t completely convinced.

‘I did some checking on this diver. He’s a ten-year veteran, one of the most experienced divers they have.’

‘And?’

‘The navy suspended him for six months last year when he failed to check gear properly and almost drowned a trainee. Word is- well, it’s more a whisper- that he’s a drunk.’

Ruiz hands me a second statement. It belongs to a Canadian gap-year student who said he spoke to Helen and Chloe just after the ferry sailed. They were sitting in a passenger lounge, starboard side. Chloe was seasick and the backpacker offered her a pill.

‘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.