Untold Story (13 page)

Thank you, Mrs. Jackson, thought Grabowski. One thing you forgot to tell me about Lydia, one detail that would have been useful.

Grabber went back to the bed-and-breakfast. He slung his camera and bag on the bed. Then he slung himself down.

He thought about going down to the “vestibule” and ringing that stupid brass bell. When Mrs. Jackson came running, asking what she could get for him, he would say, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a gram of coke, and a couple of teenage whores. Help me stimulate some writerly juice, if you are a true friend of Art.

He picked up his camera and scrolled through what he’d shot, still lying on his back. They were average. None of the painterly qualities he’d been hoping for. He came to the shots of Lydia. The first was out of focus, on the second the frame was off, in the third one she was blinking, and the fourth was beautiful.

He scrolled back and deleted the first three, with a sigh he was about to delete the fourth. Then he took another look. He zoomed in even closer. Her lips were slightly parted, she was about to speak or laugh. Those eyes were amazing—ultramarine. You couldn’t blame a man for trying.

That’s exactly what he hadn’t done. He’d only lurked.

Grabowski pushed in closer on the eyes. He stared at them. He sat up.

He got up and found the cable that connected the camera to the laptop, and loaded the photo onto the hard drive. He brought it up on the screen.

It was uncanny. He could have sworn it. It even had him a little spooked.

He brought up the picture he was planning to use for the cover shot. He arranged the two photographs side by side. It wasn’t her, but the eyes were exactly the same. Exactly.

He needed a drink.

What if it was her? What if he had a story right here? The biggest story of his life.

Hadn’t she been sighted in Abu Dhabi and Switzerland? What if all the cranks who said she had faked her own death weren’t cranks after all? It was possible. There was no body. People have been known to fake their own deaths. And those were only the ones who got caught. What about Lord Lucan? What happened to him? Eventually declared dead, but he only went missing, right after someone, probably the merry lord himself, murdered the kids’ nanny. Perhaps he was still living it up in Rio or wherever he fled. He’d be old by now, but still lucky. Lucky Lucan, that was his nickname.

His cell phone rang and he jumped as though someone had just shot at him.

“Tinny,” he said, “can I call you back? In the middle of something here.”

“Grabber, I got a hot one coming up, big bang, big bucks. I’m not telling you on the phone.”

“Good, that’s great. Don’t tell me. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

“I’m not telling you on the phone, Grabber. You’re not getting it outta me.”

“I’m in, I’m in,” said Grabowski. “I’m sold. I’m coming down.”

He hung up and stared at the pictures on his screen.

Very possibly he was going mad. What had he been doing for the last few weeks other than driving around pissant towns and staring at boardinghouse ceilings? Working. That was a joke. He hadn’t settled to anything. He’d brooded. He’d worked himself up. He’d calmed himself down with too many drinks. He’d hardly spoken to anyone.

Obviously it wasn’t her. She was dead. She didn’t fake it. She wasn’t assassinated by the secret service. She wasn’t kidnapped by aliens.

You could alter a lot with plastic surgery. Criminals on the run did it.

She wasn’t a criminal.

Drowned, eaten, whatever. All the true icons die young. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, whoever. The way it went.

He looked again at the screen. It was bizarre. The eyes, apart from a light smattering of wrinkles around them, were identical, down to the tiny, barely visible ring of green inset around the right pupil. He checked the left eye—pure, bright blue. And the right again. You had to look very closely to see. Grabowski saw it clearly, as he had a thousand times before.

Chapter Eleven

6 February 1998

Went for a long walk yesterday along the front. My left leg behaved, more or less, not as shaky as last week. I availed myself of a bench from time to time. Alan came down for lunch, which was good of him, pie and mash in the Crown and Anchor. I have to force myself really, interesting how food loses its appeal when one can no longer smell anything.

He gave me all the departmental gossip, although I don’t know all the players these days, turnover has been high in the past couple of years. Spats about office space, rumored romances, minor scandals involving the spending of discretionary grants. Inevitable questions about the book, inevitable nervous questions about state of health, inevitable uncomfortable shifting in his seat. Was suddenly seized by the temptation to say that Dr. Patel had revised her opinion and decided to operate, and that I’ve made a miraculous full recovery. The urge was very strong. Do I take that as a sign of the “personality change” of which I’ve been warned? Or is the fact that I resisted a sign that I have not changed at all?

Useless to ponder on imponderables, although that does not usually prevent me from doing so.

It was good to see Alan. I wonder if he could be prevailed upon for the eulogy. What is the form? Should one organize such things oneself ? A word with Patricia might suffice, although she does flinch rather when I attempt that type of forward planning.

7 February 1998

How many times did I go over “our little plan” while sipping Earl Grey, Darjeeling, or Lapsang souchong? I wanted every detail to be clear, every obstacle outlined, every tactic for overcoming them understood. I repeated myself ad nauseam, although in the end I knew I had passed the point of delivering any useful instruction and was merely becoming a bore. Let’s think it through, I would say, you establish a pattern early on in the holiday of taking a morning swim. At first you will be photographed doing so. You will comment privately that you find this to be a nuisance and that you intend to beat the paparazzi by swimming earlier. You bring forward your swim times and alert the crew to be on watch for you. You swim farther and farther from the yacht, to the point where they begin to be discomfited. What will you do if they attempt to put a stop to it?

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll seduce them.”

I always like to imagine that when she teases like that I take it well in my stride.

She laughed. “Do you really think I would? What a low opinion you must have.”

It had already been worked out, in any case. The plan was that she would continue with her early swims and, in the final days, take her swim before anyone else was awake but be sure to let them know, as soon as they got up, that she had already been out. Her beau would remonstrate but she knew where the power in that relationship lay. He wouldn’t dare to risk thwarting her. As extra insurance, on the penultimate day she hopped on a launch with a bodyguard and headed to the motorboat carrying reporters from the
Mirror,
the
Sun,
and the
Daily Mail
. For ten minutes or so she chatted about life on board the
Ramesses
and then dropped into the conversation that she intended to do some Jet Skiing just before lunch the next day. With that promise of an ideal photo opportunity (the story would get around to the other press boats) we could be sure that the reporters and photographers wouldn’t bother to leave their hotels and start buzzing around the
Ramesses
at the crack of dawn, only to get boring pictures of her doing a steady breaststroke.

All of this, as intended, surfaced in the media. At first her beau was at pains to suppress the information about her taking early and unsupervised swims. The crew and the bodyguards were instructed not to talk, but that broke down as soon as Scotland Yard arrived at the scene. Even prior to that, someone had leaked to the press. It was all to the good. It provided a smooth arc to the narrative.

8 February 1998

The context, in terms of her behavior, was far wider, and it reached back a considerable way in her history. But last summer it did seem that she really had lost control. “Lawrence,” she had said to me (we were at KP, it was immediately after she’d had the place swept for bugs for a second time), “I know how I’ve got to behave in these last months. I’ve got to be very calm and collected. No antics, no outbursts. Nothing that might lead people to suspect that I’ve had a breakdown and run away.”

I said I thought that to be a reasonable calculation and moved on to reviewing once again the mechanics of the finances. It was a subject that bored her despite its being vital to the whole enterprise. The amount was all that interested her and although I tried to explain why just under one million was the maximum I could spirit away without leaving traces, she merely sighed and said, “Do try again, if you can bear it. I won’t have a single stitch to my name. Will I even have a name?” I reassured her once again about the construction of an identity, how the passport and documentation would be sound. These things can be done, with a little insider information. False passports can, of course, be purchased (and are, by the hapless souls who are desperate to enter our country) but I had no intention of going down that route.

Her understanding, in any case, was that she should be on her best behavior in the run-up to her disappearance. I can’t say she managed that.

The pressures under which she was operating were almost unspeakable. A trusted confidant (a quack therapist-cum-mystic, how did she fall for these things?) turned out to be in the pay of the tabloids. Her own mother had given a paid interview in a gossip magazine. One could blame the booze, which had got the better of mother dearest, but if one’s daughter is a princess, no excuse is good enough. Communications severed. The “love of her life” (there have been a few) had made it clear earlier in the year that he would not marry her, and dashed all her hopes once again. Her ex-husband began, as she saw it, “flaunting” his long-term mistress in public, and there was no doubt that the palace PR machine had begun to market her, with flagrant disingenuity, as “the woman who waited.” Such cheek.

On top of all that there was her charity work and her campaign about land mines. Undoubtedly it fired her up (she felt her power then, and as a force for good) but the cognitive dissonance of spending one day talking to amputees in Sarajevo and the next being pursued by paparazzi while wearing a tiger-print bathing suit is hardly a recipe for emotional stability.

9 February 1998

She called me when she was away over those summer months, but no more than usual. I had impressed upon her that after her “death” her phone records would be checked and any strange pattern investigated. Having been through the “phone pest” scandal a little while ago, it was a lesson she easily took to heart. That particular front-page story had distressed her greatly. It was true that she’d been calling her lover’s home late at night from public phone boxes, hanging up when his wife answered. But it was loneliness, not malice, that drove her to it. And it cut her to the quick that he did nothing to defend her.

Even without her phone calls to me, thanks to the daily deluge of photographs and reporting in the media and on the Internet, I could follow her every move. That came in useful for the Pernambuco assignation—I couldn’t be sure in advance of the exact date of her arrival, but I could be sure to track her progress via the media.

In July she flitted between the Mediterranean and London and various charity commitments. At least she had her boys for most of that time. They were introduced to her beau’s family and the press reaction was excoriating—should the heir to the throne be mixing with such folk? (Fascinating how the nouveau riche are looked down upon not merely by the Establishment, but also by the readers of the tabloids.) Her behavior could at best be described as volatile. One minute she would be posing for the photographers, the next she would be trying to hide. She initiated impromptu press conferences and then denied they had taken place. She gave tip-offs to photographers and was apparently furious when they turned up. I read every bit of coverage I could find. A photojournalist who had covered her for seventeen years wrote that he had “never seen her act more bizarrely.” Apparently she had crawled along the balcony of the villa, a towel over her head, and then followed up by posing on the front stairs.

If I feared for her sanity, I could see too why a desperate remedy might be required.

10 February 1998

In early August, the antics that she had said she would avoid intensified. With the boys at Balmoral (always a low point for her) she could not be still—except in the embrace of her lover with a long lens trained on them. Then there was the Paris fiasco. Rumors of an engagement, ceaseless comings and goings within the two-day trip, an aborted dinner at the Ritz, a near-riot of paparazzi every time they moved. And move they did. No sooner, it seemed, than they reached a cocoon of luxurious privacy, they were in the car again. Why did she do it? I have not discussed it with her. I would have talked to her about it as it pertained to a forward strategy, but during our brief and infrequent phone conversations I always sensed another presence in the room with her. Afterward, the analysis bore no relevance and it would have been an impertinence on my part. A courtier to the last.