The list had started in January with just five pieces of paper, all torn from Stelzik’s notebook by hand. The edges were imperfect and the sizes all slightly different, but it didn’t matter. She’d knelt in the corridor, laid the pieces of paper out in a row on the floor in front of her, and written a name on each one. Johnny. Gareth. Noella. Hain. Lima.
Under each one, on a fresh piece of paper, she wrote a possible motive. For Hain and Lima, it was difficult. She still had no idea why they wanted her dead, didn’t even know who they were and how or when she might have crossed paths with them, so instead she concentrated on what she did know: what they looked like, and what she could remember them saying the night they’d come back to the island. Beneath that, she posed the same question below their names: Are they working alone – or with other people?
She turned her attention to the other people.
Writing Working with Hain and Lima? under each of the three names, she set about coming up with possible motives for Johnny, Gareth and Noella. Using a ball of string she’d found in the general store, she began slicing off lengths of twine with a cooking knife, then mooring the suspects to one another, the string indicating a confirmed connection. That became easier as she added more names to the wall: there was a confirmed connection between Gareth and Karl Stelzik because of the email; there was one between Johnny and Kirsty Cohen, whom she added as well, based not only on the fact that Johnny had known Kirsty but that Kirsty had called asking to speak to Rebekah about Johnny the day before they’d left for the island.
Over the course of the days and weeks that followed, she added more and more names to the walls: doctors she’d worked with, other mothers she knew, friends from college, a few people she’d fallen out badly with down the years. She’d even written Daniel at the top of a piece of paper, and the names of other men she’d slept with before Gareth, trying to remember if there was anything that might be worth thinking about further. There wasn’t. One of the last names on the list was her father’s, although he’d already been dead for over two years, so it was hard to imagine how he could be connected to any of this. Maybe someone he’d arrested. Maybe someone out for revenge.
Even though some of it felt like a stretch, under each name she listed things she’d done with that person, major events or memorable occasions that might be linked to what had happened to her on the island. She tried especially to think of times when both she and Johnny had done something as a pair with that person. That looped back in Gareth and Noella, perhaps Kirsty as well, but Rebekah struggled to think of many other mutual acquaintances. But, still, it was reasonable to assume that the catalyst for Lima wanting them dead was something that Rebekah and her brother had done together.
After weeks of collation and study, she kept coming back to the same five names. The first three were the people she was closest to: Gareth, because of the email to Stelzik, and the affair he’d had with a woman Rebekah had never wanted to ask about; Noella, because she’d described Gareth as good-looking, confident and charming, and because of that weird last phone call in the forest, when she’d stayed silent on the line before appearing to hang up just after Rebekah had told her they were on Crow Island. And then there was Johnny. In her heart, she still believed her brother had had nothing to do with what had gone on, but there were small questions she couldn’t answer or deny: the way he had simply vanished after Rebekah had fallen into the gully, or getting the last day of the season wrong, or the way he’d said to Rebekah, as they stood waiting to be shot, that everything was his fault.
The fourth name on the wall was a separate reason she couldn’t dismiss her brother yet: Kirsty Cohen. Because, under both her name and Johnny’s, pieces of string coming from each and joining at the top of a fresh piece of paper, there was another name: Louise. The woman Johnny had been dating, the woman he and Rebekah had, briefly, talked about on the ferry over. Rebekah remembered how reluctant Johnny had been to discuss Louise, although she knew it wasn’t unusual for him to be guarded about his love life. In fact, it had happened many times before. He didn’t make a big deal of dating until it looked like it might actually be going somewhere.
He and Louise hadn’t gone anywhere.
Rebekah had never met Louise, didn’t know anything about her, even her surname – but, still, for some reason she’d decided she didn’t want to see Johnny any more, and it was Kirsty who’d originally set them up, so there remained question marks.
More often, though, her gaze would be drawn to the same part of the wall, to a fifth name she’d added much later than the others. She’d been awake one night, unable to get warm, a rainstorm buffeting the hostel windows, when she’d begun to think about the Why? again. And that was when she realized she’d missed someone.
Her mother.
Rebekah knew nothing about her, barely even remembered what she looked like, but that only added to her sense of disquiet. Was it more likely that all of this stemmed from the actions of someone like Johnny, whom Rebekah had trusted and known her entire life, or from the type of person who would just abandon three young children? ‘With Sympathy’ cards don’t count, Rebekah thought, remembering the envelopes that had turned up in the mail after Mike and her father had died.
She couldn’t imagine where her mother’s life, and whatever she’d done with it, intersected with hers and Johnny’s, let alone why someone would want them dead because of it. But of all the people she’d put up on the walls of the hostel, all the names she’d added – all the theories she’d constructed and tried to shackle together into a cohesive argument – she knew the least about her mother.
To Rebekah, Fiona Camberwell was a total stranger.