Chapter Fifty-one

I PUSHED OUT early on a Monday morning and, while the boat was really too big for one person, the skills I had learned from Bill came flooding back and I discovered that, as long as I wasn’t too ambitious I could handle her well enough.

She must have cut a strange sight, though, with her freshly painted hull, faded sails and a patched spinnaker, but it wasn’t worth worrying about: it was so late in the year and winter was coming on so strong that the only other craft I saw were always well off on the horizon.

As I grew in confidence and my seamanship returned, I found that Nomad still had a stunning turn of speed, and after three weeks I was beating fast towards the boot of Italy with the idea of heading up the Adriatic Sea towards Split in Croatia.

I pulled into a tiny outpost on the western shore of Greece – no more than a general store and a decrepit jetty – to top up my fuel and buy supplies. The elderly owner fuelled the boat’s diesel, put the fruit and milk I had purchased into cartons and threw in a pile of International Herald Tribunes that had gone unsold over the previous months.

‘You might as well have them; I’m just going to burn ’em. ’

Two days later, sipping coffee in the late-afternoon sun, making my way along a deserted coast, I was down to the last few papers when I encountered an item at the back of one of them, almost lost next to the finance pages. It was nothing much, the sort of thing you might read all the time, simply a report that Greek police had found no suspicious circumstances concerning the death of a young American woman who fell from her luxury cruiser off the coast of the party island of Mykonos.

‘The woman, the former wife of wealthy auto heir, Dodge—’

I sat forward and scanned the paragraphs fast until I found the name: Cameron was dead. According to the police, she fell from the back of her cruiser while intoxicated – the story said that the local medical examiner had found a cocktail of recreational drugs and alcohol in her system.

In the middle of the text was a photo of Cameron and Ingrid arm in arm, posing with Ingrid’s stray mutt outside an impressive baroque building. With an increasing sense of dread, I flew through the story to find out what it meant.

A few paragraphs down, I got the answer. It said Cameron had only just remarried, tying the knot with Ingrid Kohl, a woman she had recently met in the town of Bodrum, Turkey.

‘The two women were among the first to take advantage of new German legislation allowing same-sex marriages, ’ the report said.

‘They had flown to Berlin and were wed at the City Hall four hours after the law came into effect, a ceremony witnessed by two strangers whom they had recruited off the street and their dog, Giancarlo.

‘The couple then began their honeymoon by returning to their boat moored near—’

I got to my feet and walked to the starboard rail, trying to breathe. The sun was melting into the sea, but I barely saw it. Ingrid had been right: I didn’t understand the half of it. But I was certain that I did now.

All my experience – all my intuition – told me that the moment they had left Berlin as a married couple, Cameron’s life was effectively over. Though I couldn’t prove it, I was convinced that the masterful plan Ingrid had developed in the maelstrom of 9/11 had one secret codicil which Cameron had known nothing about – Ingrid was going to make sure that she was the one who inherited Dodge’s fortune. But didn’t Ingrid love Cameron? I asked myself, always the investigator. But I already knew the answer – she had been betrayed and abandoned by her long-time lover. She didn’t love Cameron, she hated Cameron.

Of course, working to my belief, she would have had no difficulty in concealing her true feelings: she was an actress, and she would have played the part right up to the end. Once they were married, she knew that she didn’t even have to get Cameron to write a will – as the legal spouse, she would inherit everything, even if Cameron died without making one.

The rest must have been easy – a long night of partying, a walk to the stern, a last kiss in the moonlight, a slender hand that tipped Cameron over the rail as the big cruiser powered on.

In the dying light I hung my head, angry with myself that I hadn’t foreseen it, even though – God knows – I had been warned. I left the railing and went back to look at the date on the newspaper.

It was months old, too much time had passed – the boat would have been sold and the rest of the money transferred through a maze of untraceable offshore companies until it finally ended up in a bank like Richeloud’s.

Somebody as smart as Ingrid Kohl – or whatever her name was – would have had a new identity and a new life waiting, and I knew that she would have disappeared already into the anonymity of the world, protected by her boundless intelligence and ingenuity.

She was the best I had ever encountered and yet … and yet … I had a strong feeling that somewhere … on some strange shore … in a street of some foreign city … in Tallinn or Riga … in Dubrovnik or Krakow … I would see a face in the crowd …