Page 50 of Deep Blue Lies
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds. This was a super quiet baby, you never heard it cry. Plus it was the calmest day ever. You’ve been there, you’ve seen what it’s like? Some days in Skalios Bay the water is an actual mirror, not a breath of wind. So we thought, we’ll strap the kid in its car seat, park it in the cockpit with some shade. It wouldn’t get in the way.”
I don’t reply, just wait.
“That’s what we did. We motored out of the marina, out in the bay, I put the sails up, because…I wanted to sail. Back then I hated motor yachts, called them floating caravans…” He takes a moment to shake his head at the literal ship he’s sitting in. “But we didn’t move, there wasn’t any wind.” He stops again, his eyes have a faraway look to them.
“So there we are, a half mile out, not moving, Karen gives the baby a bottle and it falls asleep. And we’ve got this cocaine…So we head downstairs, do a couple of lines each. One thing leads to another. We’re drinking a little too. We’ve got a stereo playing, so we don’t hear too well. And then…”
Simon’s tongue is poking just slightly out of the corner of his mouth. His blue eyes turn to me again, I sense they’re pleading with me not to judge him. But I don’t know what for.
“What happened next?”
“I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but sometimes in the summer, you get those calm days, and then the wind comes in sudden. Strong?”
I shake my head, but he just waves this away.
“It happens, believe me. And that’s what it was, that day. Look,picture it. I’m high as a kite, drunk too. I’m stark bollock-naked, and this yacht’s got her full sails up and we go from zero knots to forty, like that.” He clicks his fingers.
“She’s pressed flat – one-eighty-degree capsize, until the steering pulls her into the wind and she comes up a little. It’s almost impossible to even get out of the cabin to get her back under control. All the while I’m thinking, we’re taking on water, we might even sink. The sails catch the water and we could lose the mast. But…” He stops again.
“What?”
He gives a sudden smile. “I’m not just a pretty face, I know my way around a boat. I did back then. I work like a madman. I release the sheets, I yell at Karen to pull in the genoa before it flogs itself to death. I dump half the main, get it tied up and – we’re still naked – you know? But we get it under control. And now the wind’s stabilised, still blowing force six, maybe seven, but suddenly we’resailing.We’re flying along, glorious sunshine, and I’m thinking what a lucky escape, and what an adventure. We go below, put some clothes on. And that’s when Karen remembers.”
“The baby?”
Simon nods. “Yeah. The baby.”
“Where was it?”
He doesn’t answer. “Well I don’t exactly know, but it wasn’t on the boat.”
I feel my eyes widen. “What do you mean?”
“I was living onSunbeamat that time. She wasn’t in service because it wasn’t safe for the guests to use her.” He waves a hand. “A few things, but one of them was the guard rails around the deck. As in, there weren’t any.”
Again, I just wait.
“When we went below, we weren’t completely stupid. We left the baby in the bottom of the cockpit, strapped into a car seat. There’s no way it could have gone anywhere. But we couldn’t have anticipated a full capsize…” He shrugs. “I suppose it must have floated out.”
I’m quiet a second.
“You lost the baby?”
Simon stares at me, his eyes haunted. “Yeah. We did.”
“Oh my God.” This is horrific. But I blink in confusion. Because I don’t understand what this means.
“But the baby wasfound, the next day, when they found Mandy’s and Jason’s bodies. He killed her, then himself, but left the baby alive.”
“I haven’t finished yet.” Simon’s voice is quiet. But he takes a moment. “When the wind comes in, the sea gets rough quick. And we’re moving six, seven knots. By the time we knew it was gone, we were already a half-mile from where it would’ve entered the water. There was no chance of finding it.
“We tried anyway. We tacked back and forth in that fucking bay over and over, hoping against hope. But it was obvious. I don’t know, I thought maybe the car seat would have just sunk, and drowned the kid in seconds. A small mercy maybe, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Ava, you have to understand the situation, what it meant for us. We’d killed a baby. Worse, everybody there knew I was into the coke, I bragged about it. And the Greek laws on drugs, without the sort of protection that wealth gives you? Oh my God.”
He takes a swig from his 7Up.
“So our lives, as we knew them. They wereover.We were gonna have to go ashore and say what’d happened, and we were going to prison. For sure. For a long time. On top of that, we’d still got a whole load of coke inside us…So we made this plan. We were gonna run away. OnSunbeam.” A bleak smile comes across his face now.
“I don’t know if we’d have done it. I don’t think it would even have worked. A coastguard cutter would have caught up with us long before we got out of Greek waters. Even then, it wouldn’t have made any difference…” He sees that I’m not following, and winds back a beat. He draws in a deep breath.
