December 22nd, 2023

Dear Annabelle,

I’m writing, somewhat belatedly, to thank you for your wedding present. As you can see, I did manage to do some writing in the time that you gifted me, and indeed Richard did some too. So your offering had the desired effect. I’m very grateful. I do hope you read the enclosed documents before you read this letter, because then I think you will understand exactly what happened and why I was not to blame for any of it.

As I type this, the sea outside is hushing and pulling at the sand, and the pohutukawa tree is still in blossom, its gash-pink flowers full of thirsty bees, and its branches home to the brutal mosquitoes that nip at my legs if I sit on the balcony too late in the evening. There’s so much to look at here; I can barely write a sentence before someone walks past with an interesting tattoo or well-worn rucksack, or a tui lands in the branches in front of me and starts performing. Have you ever heard a tui? They are not subtle birds. The tui’s throat appears to have one small white pompom, like a clown’s collar, until it starts to sing; then the little collar opens and it’s more like two fat blobs of whipped cream on a shiny Black Forest gateau. The song is a joyful mess of notes that are too high or too sharp or have too much warble. One moment it sounds like a broken clock, then a cat in heat, then a songbird, then a honking ship. The tui somehow barks out what I feel, all my absurd confusion and muted rage—but also my joy at being released from your awful, awful family.

The tui sings, and then it flies away, just like I did.

So I am not dead; at least, I don’t think so. You have recently declared Richard to be dead, and you even had a funeral for him. Was the body they found really his? You buried it anyway. But I am alive, Annabelle. Perhaps only just, after everything that happened, but I am alive. Although, of course, you’ve known that for a long time now.

We won’t pretend you don’t know where I am. That’s not my reason for writing. I wanted a chance to communicate with you, woman to woman, in the hope that we can come to some peaceful agreement. I don’t even need my whole inheritance at this point. All I want is my share of the joint bank account and the freedom to tell my story without you hounding me forever.

The lawyer I spoke to (just a friend, nothing official) recommended that I not write this letter, but here it is. I want to get the facts down, so you understand my perspective on what happened, and why I, as you put it, “ran away.” I should point out that the main reason for my running away was because I was about to be killed. And I’m sorry, but I can’t explain why I didn’t send help for Richard, except to say that I knew it was too late, and I was scared.

I mean, I heard the actual buzz, Annabelle. It was the most sickening, terrible sound you could possibly imagine. I heard them do it to him—or I was as certain as I could have been at the time—and I couldn’t let them do it to me too, however much you would have preferred that they did.

I’d just finished writing my letter to Richard when Hamza appeared outside the window of our honeymoon suite, the thin white curtain fluttering and making him slighter and more spectral than he already was. He was clutching his arm, which was bleeding. I tried to wake Richard with no success, and then I went after Hamza to try to get him to come inside, but he’d already disappeared into the storm. I’d been soaked through in about ten seconds as I pelted down the stone steps, hissing his name, saying I could only help him if he came to me. Rain was pouring down my face like hysterical tears.

At first it seemed I had no hope of finding him in the dark. I’d run out holding Richard’s phone and I’d managed to switch on the torch, but it barely showed anything except raindrops. But then, through the whooshing and the rush of the downpour, I heard an engine start, and I then saw Hamza running down the driveway and getting into Christos’s car, which was parked near a dripping pomegranate tree. I ran over and banged on the car window. Christos rolled it open.

“Go away,” he yelled into the rain and the wind.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why is Hamza bleeding?”

“Go away,” said Christos again. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble, with your fucking snooping, and your recording?”

“He wanted me to do it!” I said.

It was true. Hamza had seen what I was doing with the phone and had given me a tiny nod and then covered it with the napkin he’d been holding like a fainted creature.

“Right, and look what happened to him as a result,” said Christos.

Sounds of shouting and slamming suddenly came from the house.

“Get in!” hissed Christos, so I did.

He drove too fast on the narrow roads, with the rain and the wind slapping the car like it was a little child. Hamza was shivering in the front seat, blood dripping from the wound on his arm. Christos was shouting at him, calling him fucking stupid, and a fucking waste of space, and soon Hamza started crying. Eventually, Christos pulled off the road and got a first-aid kit out of the glove box. He threw a bandage at Hamza and then drove on, just as manically as before.

“What’s going on?” I asked Christos.

He didn’t say anything; he just accelerated.

I was surprised when we arrived at the airport. If only I’d brought my bags, I thought then, I could have saved myself the very long walk I’d been planning. I had my passport in my belt-bag from where I’d been getting ready to leave after finishing my letter to Richard, and I was still holding Richard’s phone with all his credit cards on it. I probably should have tried to make a run for it then. But I didn’t.

“Happy now?” Christos yelled at Hamza. “Now you can go suck another American dick and maybe get what you really want this time.”

Hamza tried to open the passenger door, but it was locked.

“Let me out,” he said. “For God’s sake, Christos.”

Christos grimaced. “Sure, after I get the password for that file you both recorded.”

“I don’t know it,” said Hamza. “Only she knows.”

“Well, unless she tells me what it is, you’re not going anywhere.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening right now,” I said, suddenly afraid. I thought I’d ended up on this bizarre road trip by accident, not on purpose.

“Give me the password,” Christos said to me, “and he can go.”

“Please,” said Hamza, turning to look at me. “They will kill me.”

“Who’ll kill you? What are you talking about?”

“Shut up,” said Christos to Hamza. “One more word and you’re not going anywhere. What’s the name of the app?” he asked me.

I told him, and he immediately started thumbing letters on his phone screen.

“But I can’t just give you my password,” I said. “All my important files are on there.”

“Fine,” said Christos, turning and staring at me. “Then we’re all going back to the Villa Rosa, and I’m going to tell Isabella that you’re both planning to go to the police about her. Then we’ll see what happens.”

“So I’m meant to be scared of Isabella?” I said incredulously. “Um, OK.”

Christos then punched the steering wheel and let out a sort of scream. He reversed the car at speed and did a terrifying three-point turn.

“If you don’t give me the password, I’m a dead man,” he said, wrenching the gearstick back into first. “And if I have to die, I don’t see why I shouldn’t take you both with me.”

He started accelerating toward a tree a few hundred yards away.

I have to say, as a move designed to make someone do what a person wants, I have never seen it equalled.

The tree seemed to be racing toward us, like it was being pushed from the beyond.

“OK!” I shouted, over the horrific sound of the engine. “Fucking hell—stop!”

The car stopped with a loud screech and skidded, just missing the tree.

Everything smelled of burning rubber and carbon monoxide.

So I gave Christos my username and my password.

“But please,” I said after I told him. “Please leave my other files alone, OK? I have so much work on there.”

Christos didn’t reply. He typed the password into his phone.

“Why can’t I log in?” he said. “It’s a fake password. I knew it!”

“The 4G is not good here,” said Hamza. “Please, if you don’t let me go now—”

“You’ll do what?” said Christos.

But neither of them said anything else. Christos turned the car around in silence.

“Are you sure they’ll take you?” said Christos when he’d parked outside the terminal. He suddenly seemed pathetic and deflated. “You look fucking awful.”

“I know the story of the sleepwalkers more than anyone. And not because of what you think.”

“Right.” Christos looked sad. “Just make sure you leave me out of it.”

“You know I will. I said already.”

“How will you pay?”

“It’s a private plane. There is no ticket.”

“Are you sure?”

For someone who’d seemingly just been trying to kill Hamza, Christos was now speaking surprisingly tenderly to him.

“Wait, when exactly is the plane leaving?” I asked Hamza.

He was still trembling. “Soon, they said. Before the storm gets worse.”

“Go,” said Christos, while holding on to Hamza’s arm, so he couldn’t actually move.

Hamza leaned over and gave Christos a kiss, on the lips.

“Goodbye,” he said.

Hamza got out of the car and ran into the tiny terminal building.

“I’ll probably never see him again,” said Christos unhappily.

He started the car. Then he turned off the engine once more.

“God,” he said. “My fucking brain. I still need to delete that file before he downloads it himself. You did give me the right password?”

“I did, yes. Actually,” I said, “I need to nip in to the loo if that’s OK.”

He laughed humorlessly. “Right, so you gave me the wrong password, and now you’re running away? I don’t fucking think so.”

“I don’t have my passport, or any luggage,” I pointed out.

I was lying about the passport of course.

Christos hunched his shoulders. “Well, can you check he’s OK? If he needs cash…” Christos pulled a battered yellow nylon wallet out of his jeans and handed me a wad of euros. “Please. I’m sorry I’m acting so nuts.”

I took the money and went into the terminal. It was eerie and quiet, and appeared to be closed for business. There were no staff; no machines switched on. Debbie and Marcus were sitting there in their coats, playing cards. Debbie was balancing an old-looking tea tray on her lap, and Marcus was putting a four of diamonds onto it.

I walked over to them.

“Room for one more?” I said, jauntier than I felt.

“You wanna get out of here too, doll, huh?” said Debbie unenthusiastically.

That was when I realized that I needed something of a killer line.

“Yeah, well, ever since that bitch tried to screw my husband,” I said, with a complicated smile. “And then the waiter tried to kill me.”

Marcus looked startled, then guffawed.

“You got yourself a seat on the plane,” he said. “I wanna hear all about this.”

“When does it go?” I said.

“Not till tomorrow, sweetie,” said Debbie. “We shoulda stayed longer at Heartbreak Hotel. Thought it’d be good to go tonight. But, you know, weather.”

“None of the other planes’ll even try,” said Marcus. “Good job we brought our own guy.”

“OK, right,” I said. “I just need to go back and get my bags.”

“Why don’t you have your bags?” said Marcus suspiciously. “You were just passing or something?”

“Yeah, kind of. And, um, him?” I said, pointing at Hamza. He was perched on a chair on the other side of the small terminal, hunched over his phone. “He can come too?”

“Oh sweetheart, we’ve already told him no,” said Debbie. She dropped her voice. “We think he might be illegal? He said something about asylum, for goodness’ sake.”

“I think he’s Turkish, though,” I said.

This made no impression on them.

“You’re only going to Athens, right?” I tried. “He’s already in Greece.”

“That’s true, baby,” said Debbie to Marcus. “It is just an internal flight.”

“I can pay for him,” I said. “And me, of course. However much you want.”

I showed them Christos’s cash.

“No, sugar,” said Debbie. “You’re our guest.”

“Well, I really need him to come too,” I said.

“Well…” said Debbie, taking the cash. “OK.”

“Where’s your luggage, though?” asked Marcus.

“Just at the hotel,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

And then I left before they could say anything else.

Back at the car, Christos was more relaxed.

“OK, I’ve deleted the file,” he said, putting his phone down. “Thank you.”

“They’ll take him,” I said. “But I have to go too. They think he’s a refugee. You need to drive me to the hotel and then bring me back with my luggage.”

“Sure,” said Christos, starting the car. “Let’s go.”

At that point it was all surprisingly civilized. I didn’t believe he was actually dangerous.

“Did you listen to the recording?” Christos asked me as he drove back down toward the road to the Villa Rosa.

“Nope,” I said. “Isabella never gave me back my phone.”

“Oh.”

“What would I have heard?”

He sighed loudly. “You would have heard a lot about a turd on a stick.”

“Sorry?”

“Couple of rich travelers disembark on an island and all the locals go crazy trying to sell them whatever they’ve got, even if it’s only a turd on a stick.”

“Right,” I said.

We pulled up outside the Villa Rosa. The rain was getting worse again, but somewhere beyond the torrents, dawn was beginning to break.

“I’ll be five minutes,” I said.

I hurried up the wet stone steps as fast as I could, hoping Richard was still asleep.

At the top of the stairs, I went through the fire door, which had been hooked open. I walked quickly down the corridor toward the entrance to the honeymoon suite. I just wanted to grab my stuff and get out of there while I had the chance, before I changed my mind.

Isabella was coming out of the room—MY room—wearing a silk dressing gown, and holding an envelope. She seemed to say something to me, but her eyes were in the wrong place. Too late I realized she was speaking to the figure behind me.

“They know, Christos. They know everything.”

I always thought that if something really bad happened to me, I’d have time to get away, like in films. I thought there’d be due warning, and then it would be like a game, or a performance. I didn’t really understand the concept of being cornered, or there being no way out.

But there was no warning, and no way out. Isabella opened the storeroom door, and Christos bundled me into it. Then they locked it behind me.

And there I stayed for some hours, banging on the wall, trying to get Richard’s attention. We talked, as you will have seen in the transcript, and then Isabella brought us cups of coffee. She did it so smoothly and silently that the cup of coffee was sitting there inside the door before I realized what was going on and the lock clicked once more. I thumped on the wall to alert Richard, but it clearly had no effect. I willed him not to drink the coffee. But evidently he did drink it. Perhaps we should be grateful for that, because it would have meant he didn’t suffer.

I poured my coffee into a small gap in the skirting board. I left about a third of it, thinking that would seem authentic. Then I feigned unconsciousness. I’ve been trying to remember what we called the exercise back in drama school. I feel like it should have been “corpsing,” but in fact that means to spoil a piece of theatre by forgetting one’s lines or laughing uncontrollably. Perhaps we just called it “playing dead,” which is what I did. I let them—I guessed it was Kostas and Christos—carry me by my arms and legs into the secluded back garden of the Villa Rosa, where they laid me down by the whirring generator. By some miracle no one noticed I still had my passport strapped to me. I’d let Richard’s phone fall on the floor of the storeroom as a distraction—it must have worked. After they put me on the ground I opened my eyes a tiny crack. Ahead of me was a pomegranate tree, the one on the approach to the main house, where Christos had parked his car the night before. The large red fruits bobbed heavily in front of a churning khaki sky. I chose my moment with focused precision, then jumped up and ran as fast as I possibly could, while Isabella executed my husband. My rapist husband.

As I’ve said, I heard it. It was so awful, Annabelle.

And before you say that I’m not upset, I am upset. I am at least as troubled by the idea of electrocution as Sylvia Plath was. But how much worse a lethal injection would be, don’t you think? I often wonder if drowning would be the better death. Perhaps even more if you were so drugged you knew hardly anything about it. Drowning after taking sleeping pills would probably be fine, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m almost certain Richard knew nothing about what happened to him, and I hope that will be of some comfort to you. And although I know you think I should have gone back to save him, all I can say is that I warned him again and again and he chose to ignore me.

It was Kostas who ran after me. A bad pursuant, thank God. I’m not a great runner like Richard was, but I did pick up some tips from him. Keep your pelvis tilted slightly back; breathe in a waltz pattern; use your natural “gears.” Of course I did none of those things. I ran like a ragged, hunted woman; like a bad dog with its muzzle full of stolen mutton. I sprinted enough to put a small distance between Kostas and me, and then I held my threshold pace while he wheezed and spluttered behind me. “Running away” sounded like the coward’s way out when you accused me of it on the phone, but it was not easy. There were times when I just couldn’t make my body move any farther, and my lungs felt like they’d been on the barbecue, and Kostas caught up almost enough to touch me. I couldn’t believe I outran him, but I did.

I was in quite a state when I arrived at Kathos airport. There were still no staff—the place had the atmosphere of a dystopian mini-series. I heaved myself through the doors, breathless and shaking, and it was Hamza who ran over and helped me to a chair, his small hands barely touching my arms but somehow fluttering me along. I had finally managed to lose Kostas, or maybe he’d given up on me. Had he gone back to get the others? I still felt like a dead woman. My only priority at that moment was to get out of there and keep on running.

“Where’s your luggage?” said Debbie when she saw me. Then, “Oh honey, what’s wrong?”

“Please help me,” I started saying, but when I saw the frightened look that crossed her face, I instinctively tried to lighten the atmosphere. “I don’t suppose you have a mascara I can borrow?” I said it like a joke, because I didn’t want her to think I was going to be any kind of burden. I just needed them to take me on their plane.

She and Marcus were still sheltering in the corner of the waiting area where they’d been playing cards late into the night before.

“What a godforsaken place,” said Marcus now, thankfully no longer bothered by my lack of luggage. He was sipping a vending machine coffee and peering outside into the stormy morning.

I was still trying to get my breath back. One of my calves was cramping badly and I tried to stretch it out without drawing any more attention to myself.

“I feel like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada,” said Debbie.

Outside the window was a small propeller plane with some metal steps next to it. Rain was pouring off its wings in ragged waterfalls. Little windscreen wipers flapped back and forth over the front window a few times and then stopped. A light went off inside. A figure in a large raincoat appeared and began wheeling the steps away from the plane.

“What on earth?” said Debbie. “Honey, why are they doing that?”

“I’ll deal with this,” said Marcus.

He walked over to the window and banged on it.

“Hey!” he called. “Hey!”

The figure gesticulated. Waved his arms at the sky. Whatever he was trying to mime was objectively incomprehensible. But it seemed to be something along the lines of, “You’d be mad to try to fly in this weather.”

Marcus was wearing a cream trench coat over his yellow linen suit. He now took a bulging wallet from it.

“Let’s figure this out,” he said.

While he did that I went into the toilets and tried to clean myself up, but after my best efforts I still looked like something from one of my own deleted scenes, like a picnicker after the vampires have hurtled through the forest.

When I came out, Hamza was waiting for me. He was pale and trembling.

“You OK?” I asked him.

“I am afraid,” he said simply. “Do you think we will crash?”

I thought of all the terrible flights I’d had in my life. Taking off from Venice in a lightning storm. Returning from Cape Town with food poisoning. Hitting the worst turbulence of my life somewhere over the Australian Outback, with one of the cabin crew cheerfully saying that if we did come down here, no one would ever find us.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The flight wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared, but we all threw up—even Marcus. Hamza clearly felt it the worst. The peak of the turbulence seemed to come when we were past the storm clouds and flying into the clear blue sky over Athens. Landing was like bumping a heavy case down an escalator. When we finally hit the ground there was a feeling in the cabin of joie de vivre, of being unexpectedly reborn. The sun had come out at last.

Still, my legs felt shaky as we disembarked.

“We’re going clothes shopping,” declared Debbie, taking my arm as we walked toward check-in for international flights. “We’ll catch you boys up!”

“Don’t you just want to get to the lounge, honey?” Marcus said, sounding annoyed.

“We just need ten minutes, baby. Wait here with the luggage.”

Marcus looked displeased to be left with Hamza. He sat stiffly in a plastic chair outside a pastry shop drinking an espresso, while Hamza talked urgently to him. Hamza looked a wreck, although no one offered to take him clothes shopping. He was still wearing his odd little shorts and his thin turquoise scarf, but the ensemble looked ragged and dirty in the harsh light of the airport, and blood was beginning to seep through the bandage on his arm. I didn’t know what he was talking to Marcus about then, but I suppose I do now.

God bless Debbie Goldstein. I didn’t know what her motivation was at that moment, but she hoicked me into one of the designer stores and quickly picked me out a new outfit—a simple day-dress and cashmere cardigan—and she winked when she gave me the paper bag tied with the ribbon.

“I’ll wait here,” she said. “Go change.” She pointed at the toilets.

She gave me her makeup bag too, all neatly packed for her flight.

“I know what it’s like, sweetie,” she said. “I’ve been there.”

I went into the loos in a daze, blinking stupidly at all the bright lights.

When I came out, Marcus was talking to Debbie while Hamza sat there on the plastic chair with his tiny fists balled, looking as if he might be about to cry.

“Is there a Turkish Netflix, honey? I don’t remember where they have all their outposts.”

“Sure, baby. In Istanbul probably.”

Marcus turned to Hamza.

“See, kid, the first step in a career like this is you go and intern somewhere. Learn how to pitch your ideas. Make coffee. Network.”

“He could come back to us maybe in the spring, baby?”

“Yeah, we could have our PA squeeze you in for a ten-minute call.”

“I’m sure we could do a half hour, honey.”

“Eight to ten slides, like I said. No more. Save them as a PDF. All in English.”

I must have looked a lot fresher in my normcore clothes, like a girl about to go to her first gymkhana or bat mitzvah, pure and almost virginal. Hamza flashed me a look, but I wasn’t sure what it meant.

Marcus stood up and briefly appraised me before looking back at Hamza.

“And make it interesting. Funny, even!”

Debbie drained her espresso cup and then stood up as well.

“Oh, maybe like The Death of Stalin!”

“I didn’t like that movie,” said Marcus. “I didn’t like that movie at all.”

Hamza began to shake.

“But—” he began.

Marcus grasped Hamza’s tiny shoulder, quite forcefully.

“And focus on the sleepwalkers, not all that other stuff.”

“But you said—”

“OK, kid, you’ve had your five minutes,” said Marcus. “We’re going to find our lounge now. You gotta know when to stop, you know what I mean?”

Hamza stood up, let out a desperate sob, turned, and ran away.

Perhaps I should have gone after him, but I didn’t. Frankly, at that moment I felt like I was going to pass out, from the shock of everything that had happened, and from lack of food and water. Hamza’s skinny body weaved in and out of the chairs and tables belonging to the pastry café and then he turned just before a line of trolleys and he was gone.

Marcus looked at me. “Now, your story, sweetheart? That we do wanna option.”

“Yeah,” said Debbie. “Come with us up to the lounge, doll. We’ll talk about it.”

They started pushing their heavily laden trolley toward the check-in desks.

I began following them but then realized I didn’t have a valid ticket. Richard and I were not supposed to be flying back to Heathrow for a few days yet.

“I might have to hang around here for a while,” I said. “Change my ticket and stuff.”

I felt dazed. So incredibly dazed. Everything was so loud around me.

“We’ll be in the Emirates lounge, doll,” said Debbie.

I had no cash and no purse. However, I did have an emergency credit card tucked in the back of my passport wallet. I checked it and by some amazing good fortune it hadn’t expired. I went and used it to buy a large Mulberry handbag, so I didn’t look so suspicious boarding a plane with no luggage.

I chose the farthest place Emirates flew, and paid for the 4,500-euro one-way ticket with the credit card, and then I checked in and walked through the terminal with my new bag, feeling like someone else’s shadow, not even my own.

All I wanted was to keep on running. You do understand that, Annabelle? I couldn’t fly back to London and face you and Peter. I’d just escaped from my husband’s murder scene, for God’s sake. I didn’t know when I’d be able to stop.

I sat in the Emirates lounge shivering while Marcus stuffed his face with cold meats and told me what a great story he thought I could write, all about my toxic relationship and my doomed honeymoon, and the mystery of the sleepwalkers. But I didn’t want to write at that point; I wanted to keep on moving.

At Auckland, I emerged into the spring sunshine, still feeling I hadn’t gone far enough. A loud and happy family seemed to be following signs to the domestic terminal, so I followed them, thinking how simple life would be if I could join their little flock. But they peeled off into a car hire place, and I was alone again, following the line on the ground. I went into the terminal and bought a ticket to Kerikeri, because I liked the name, and the flight was leaving soon.

At Kerikeri airport I got a bus into the town. Its main street was lined with garish takeaways, and the public toilets were full of mosquitoes. I asked a man in a car park where he’d recommend taking a honeymoon nearby. He said to go to Paihia, or better yet, to take the ferry from Paihia to Russell, in the Bay of Islands near where Captain Cook harbored on his first voyage on the Endeavour. Richard loved Captain Cook—did you ever know that? He once spent over a thousand pounds on a leather-bound set of Cook’s journals that sat in one of our cabinets in the Clerkenwell flat, looking ancient and out of place amidst the rest of the minimalist décor. Perhaps you already know that. Perhaps you’ve already been and cleared them out. Have you sold the flat too? I can’t believe you sold my house, Annabelle, less than a year after I went missing—but I have promised myself I won’t get angry in this letter, and so I will breathe instead, and look at the sea, and try to calm myself.

It was when I returned to London last April that I first thought about coming to see you, to tell you I was still alive and to plead with you to not do anything drastic with anything that belonged to me that was still in the family trusts, but I couldn’t face it, so I sat in a café and rang you instead. You were surprised to hear my voice. I possibly should have warned you first that I was going to be calling.

“Where is my son?” was the first thing you said. “Where is my fucking son?”

The body you’d later decide was Richard’s had not yet been found.

I tried to tell you something of what had happened, but it came out all wrong.

“Then why did you run away?” you demanded.

I attempted to explain, but I knew it didn’t make any sense.

“Murderer!” you screamed at me. “You’re deranged, you’re fucking—”

So I put the phone down.

I hadn’t been able to tell you just how bizarre it had been arriving in Russell the previous September. I’m still not quite sure how to describe it, except to say that for a few moments I was certain that I was landing back on Kathos. It seemed either that Russell was Kathos’s exact strange mirror, or that I’d accidentally traveled back to where I started—or simply never left, as in one of those nightmares where you can’t move, no matter how hard you try. The sensation had made me feel faint, and I think I passed out for a few seconds because a German man had to help me to disembark from the Paihia ferry.

As I walked up the jetty, I wondered if I had actually died back in Greece along with Richard. I mean, it is so heavenly here: the light is warm and there is good food and wine and cheap oysters and so many pleasant tourists. But the restaurants may as well be tavernas, and the bees could yet be lazy hornets. Perhaps you won’t believe me or even care, but the little town here really is reminiscent of the one I left so far behind. The white villas are made from wood, rather than stone, though, and everything is milder. Monarch butterflies flap lazily like orange sarongs lifted from washing lines by the gentle breeze. Elderly people loll in hammocks with thick paperbacks. Kingfishers bow slowly from power lines. Overfed ducks waddle around eating scraps the tourists feed them, and then float on the pondlike sea in the evenings like they’re posing above my childhood fireplace.

As I write this a small boat has arrived at the jetty and some young men have got off. They’ve walked up to the highest platform and they’re jumping into the sea, one by one. I thought for a moment that the last one reminded me of Richard, because he seemed to be lagging behind, moody and anxious, not wanting to do these pathetically bro-ish stunts. But then he put on a pair of large sunglasses, lit a cigarette, handed it to his friend, vaulted onto the highest wooden post at the end of the platform and backflipped into the sea. And Richard was gone again.

Dear Richard. I love him so much more now he’s dead. I see him here often, although it’s always only his ghost, of course. Some days I see him more than once, and it’s comforting to think his spirit is still so strong. Yesterday there was a pale British man looking awkward in a new Panama hat; the day before, it was a good runner pounding up Telegraph Hill. Even now I can see a hesitant swimmer in slightly too-short bathers, and again I am transported back to Kathos.

I remember a queer day on our honeymoon, perhaps the penultimate time I swam on Kathos, before I knew that’s what it was going to be. I went out beyond the unnerving stroke of the sea plants, a little too far from shore for my liking. There was a strange foam in that part of the water, and then I noticed hundreds of small fish, maybe sprats or anchovies. I was going to call out to Richard to come and see them, but then I realized they were dead. The whole sea in front of me was sprinkled with tiny dead fish, flip-flopping in the froth, like some terribly themed Frappuccino. I can still see their thousands of eyes, flat and glossy, as their corpses bobbled on the water.

After Richard and Paul raped me, I signed up for an optional module in “Self as Performance.” I got a distinction for my work that term. I constructed a new persona for myself—Hannah Kayak, a mute mime artist inspired by Harpo Marx—but I went further than the other students and got my persona a bank account. It’s not that hard. Perhaps that’s why your lawyer had trouble finding me at first—I haven’t spent any traceable money since I left Kathos last September, not that I officially have any money now anyway. I’m not exactly sure why I did it, but at the height of the success of The Chambermaid I put £10,000 in Hannah’s account and never told anyone. I suppose even back then I felt I might need to escape one day. It was Hannah’s card I’d used to buy my plane ticket in Athens, and again at Auckland. I’d had to travel under my own name, of course, and I guess that was how you eventually found me.

Back in the days of Hannah Kayak, Peter liked to fuck me as soon as you left for London on a Sunday evening. He’d do it desperately sometimes, like a slavering hound, bending me over your white porcelain sink, or pushing me down onto my hands and knees in front of the cream enamel Aga.

“Why do you make me do this?” he panted one cold Sunday evening.

“Because I’m a disgusting whore,” I said back obediently.

“You fucking bitch,” he breathed raggedly into my ear.

Afterwards he was usually more gentle, but later, in the lead-up to the wedding, he became colder and rougher. He’d barely speak to me once he’d cleaned his jizz off my lower back with a Kleenex. But I think he loved me, in his own way, and I know he feared losing me. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Luciana, and your poorly chosen honeymoon gift, things would likely have carried on as usual, with Peter being serviced by his daughter-in-law. There are much worse forms of incest, I expect.

I always thought you knew and never said anything. It can’t have been such a bad deal. I soaked up Peter’s rage and his spunk (it only went on my back if my app said I was fertile) and handed him back showered and in a pressed shirt ready for your dinner parties and family events. I was like a dog-grooming service. Not that you ever had a real dog. You didn’t really need one.

But how much else did you know? I wondered if you were aware when you booked the Villa Rosa that terrible things had happened there, but I don’t believe you were. I think you simply saw the reviews and didn’t look into it any further. For a while I wondered if one of your well-connected friends had told you of the horrors of the island, and that was what inspired your choice, but it makes no sense. You wouldn’t want to harm your precious son, would you? But then how precious was he really? When I finally read the letter he wrote me, I couldn’t help wondering where you’d been when he’d needed you. But you know I don’t like blame-the-mother narratives, so we won’t dwell there.

It dwindled fast, Hannah’s money. New Zealand isn’t a cheap country. Still, I lived in the motel easily enough for almost a month. You’d be horrified by what I ate. Grimy, gritty strawberries from plastic punnets, thin processed ham, packet pastrami with a rainbow sheen, the most basic South Island brie and nothing organic. For the first week I lived on pure white Greek yogurt, because my stomach was recovering from all the vomiting. It had started on the propeller plane, but continued through my next flight, and then the one after that, until my bile turned pale green and then became a kind of foresty color, before drying up completely.

I don’t eat carbs anymore. I’ve become a carnivore (well, almost—I also eat berries and yogurt) and I highly recommend it. Debbie explained it all to me at Athens airport, while I was trembling in the lounge. Humans should function as machines for turning earth into beauty, not sugar into fat, she’d said, stroking my arm softly with her manicured fingers. Cows and other beasts eat the inedible things of the world, things that sprout out of the mulch of the dead, and then we eat the animals and then we produce art and culture. Then we die and it all begins again. The miserable starvation diet you had me on for the wedding, all that oatmeal and dry Ryvita, that just creates disease and waste, according to Debbie. And it doesn’t even stick, as you well know.

It certainly helped me go undetected, having little bird shoulders like Debbie’s, and a skinny waist like on fitness magazines. In Russell I started wearing a khaki baseball cap all the time, and I got a few small tattoos. I bought cheap bracelets for my wrists and let the sun bleach my hair and grew out my fringe. You probably didn’t notice me walking by your house last spring? Don’t worry, I’m harmless. I was hardly going to knock on your door after our terrible phone call. But I did wonder for a while if you were harboring Richard, if by some miracle he was still alive. Anyway, I’m back on the other side of the world again now, where I belong, in the ghost version of Europe, all upside down like Erewhon.

One day, probably in the second or third week after I first arrived here, I was running up the hill from the sailing club, on my way to Long Beach. Beating Kostas had made me think maybe I should carry on running, and I’d picked up a second-hand sports watch of the type Richard always favored. I was looking out for the kingfisher I sometimes saw on the power lines, but instead I glimpsed a bright parrot lunging out of the bushes by the road. It was every color all at once: a red beak, a blue-and-yellow head and a green back, as if someone had given a primary school child too many crayons. I was moved by its ridiculously extravagant palette, its brash beauty. When I got back to the motel I used the Wi-Fi to look it up and I found it was a rainbow lorikeet—an “unwanted organism” in this country. You were supposed to call a number to report it, but of course I didn’t. I realized how scared I was of being reported myself.

Another day I was on my way to Four Square to buy more yogurt and a plastic carton of blueberries when a police car cruised the main road. I ducked into a side street and in a slight panic ended up in the Russell museum—$12 entry, seriously. Inside, there was a shark’s jaw, and a replica of Cook’s boat, some military buttons and the tooth of a sea elephant. There were also samplers and tapestries done by the nineteenth-century women who lived the kind of life I think you always aspired to. One of the samplers had the phrase “A little pot is soon hot” stitched again and again. Just beyond that was a sad-looking taxidermized kiwi with an egg far too big for its body.

Until I finally read Richard’s story, I thought he was so unworldly, that he didn’t see the grime of life because he didn’t know it was there. I recall a previous holiday in India, which I think you may even have booked as a birthday gift. We’d had a pleasant-enough time following all the other tourists from the city to the lake to the mountains to the tea plantation, before ending up back at sea level at a beach resort frequented by politicians from the UK and a celebrity chef I wouldn’t have recognized if I hadn’t overheard two other women talking about him in the pool.

Richard was such a good tourist, so compliant and cheerful. Like other good tourists, he wanted “authentic” experiences. The Indian beach hotel was contrived and fake, with its thatched huts and outdoor dining areas fringed with palm trees, and the brightly lit shop selling factor-50 sun cream and T-shirts with the name of the resort on them. One morning Richard suggested going for a walk down the beach, even though the hotel and guidebook advised against leaving the official complex. As we walked, we noticed men squatting on the sand near some fishing lines, and we assumed that they were fishermen working. I felt uncomfortable watching them, and suggested to Richard that we turn back. I’ve never liked to think of other people’s labor as a sideshow. But Richard wanted to carry on, and so we did. One man seemed to have caught something between his legs, some sort of seafood, and he was grappling with it, so Richard stopped to watch, full of enthusiasm. I realized before Richard did that the seafood was actually the man’s penis, and that he and all the other men were squatting on the seashore because they were taking their morning shit.

Now I’m a good tourist too, now that I basically live on holiday.

But do you think I was happy when I arrived in Russell, so far from home and everything I’d ever known? It is a perfect, tranquil place, but I couldn’t enjoy it then. Those first few nights I dreamed I was still in Kathos, locked in the store cupboard, or lying there by the generator, and then I’d wake too early in the shimmering waterfront town that looked so familiar, and wonder if I was quite mad. Eventually, I tried to write it all down; not for a film adaptation, but for myself—at least at first. My contacts in the film and TV world in the UK had long since dried up, and I wasn’t there to take any meetings anyway. I wasn’t even in the right time zone for a call. So when I realized my money was running out I did the only thing I could think of. I called Debbie on the number on the card she’d given me at Athens airport.

It took a few rings for her to pick up.

“It’s Evelyn Masters,” I said. “Evie. We met on Kathos, in that storm?”

“Um…?”

“Last September,” I said. “In Greece.”

“Sorry, doll, not totally sure I can place you.”

“You flew me out of Kathos on your private plane? I was running away from my husband? You were there because of the sleepwalkers, and—”

“Oh, hi, sweetie! How are you?”

“I’m good, how are you?”

“Honestly? About to go out for a mani-pedi, so…”

“Right, well, I’ll be quick. Um, what you said about optioning my story.”

“Yeah, what story was that?”

“About breaking up with my husband, and, you know, that weird hotel owner Isabella, and how controlling she was, and—” My pitch wasn’t coming out the way I’d hoped. I remembered how mad I must have seemed that morning at the Athens airport, when Debbie had taken me to buy new clothes. But it had been Marcus’s idea to option my story. He was the one who’d brought it up.

“I just wondered if I could send some material?”

“Oh, doll, I’m sorry but you’re too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Greek story? The Sleepwalkers? Well, we already have that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re buying some documents? There’s like a package that tells the whole story. We’re flying back out there next month to collect it.”

My mind hurried to catch up.

“Who has the documents? Isabella?”

“Well, no, but—”

“The French man? From the curio shop?”

“Yeah, exactly. But that lady from the hotel? She has a pitch for the screenplay.”

“Do the documents…?” I wasn’t sure how to ask it. “Is there a letter of mine in there?”

“Uh—”

“Because that belongs to me,” I said. “I wrote that. And I lost a notebook as well.”

“There are quite a few documents, doll. A letter from a wife, a letter from her husband, some—”

“Wait, a letter from a husband? Richard’s letter to me?”

I wasn’t sure I’d believed Richard when he’d said he’d been writing to me. I didn’t think he’d actually done it, and that there was a letter for me that had been left behind.

“Please,” I said. “I have to see that letter.”

“I don’t have it, sweetie. Not until next month.”

“But—”

“You know,” she said, “it does sound like maybe this is more your story.”

“Yes!” I said. “I agree.”

“I mean, I said that to Marcus originally.”

“Well, then—”

“Yeah, Marcus believes movies nowadays are much more about synecdoche and metonymy, you know, like the adjacent stories? How you can open up one story using a totally different one? To be honest, I don’t really get it myself.”

“OK.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“So, I mean, if you wanna maybe go and locate the material we’d be just as happy to buy it from you. And you could probably pitch for the screenplay too. I’d need to check with Marcus, of course, and the lawyer.”

An hour later I got an email from her saying that yes, they’d be glad to buy the documents from me, if they happened to be in my possession. And they’d be willing to hear my pitch for how I’d adapt it for their movie.

So I decided to go back.

I’d already begun waitressing at the classy hotel overlooking the waterfront. It was the one place I’d never frequented as a punter, in my early days here in Russell, when I still had money. I’d always preferred the lowly charm of the Swordfish Club, which I’d even joined, with its walls covered in pictures of Zane Grey and all the enormous fish he caught. On the few evenings I wasn’t working I’d sit on the Swordfish Club balcony and watch huge sunsets bleed out over the harbor and the jetty, and check airfares and do calculations. It wasn’t at all clear I’d be able to get to Greece before Marcus and Debbie did.

On the nicer evenings there’d be kids chucking each other in the water from a scruffy diving island. One time there was a girl, thin and lithe, in amongst several boys. The game seemed to be a version of King of the Castle. The tallest boy with the longest shorts was standing there, his chest aloft and proud, and whenever one of the other children got on the island he’d throw them in. After a while, one group of children were called out of the sea to eat chips with their parents on the beach, and only two boys and the girl remained. The boys picked the girl up by her arms and legs, her slight body like a skipping rope, and they swung her to and fro and then threw her in the bright blue water. They’d tossed her so high, she went in deep. It was a few moments before she came up, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.

The classy hotel was patronized mostly by European men with their long-suffering wives. They came from France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria. They reminded me of you, the wives, with their sensible haircuts and modest diamond jewelry. Their skin, like yours, was pale from years of sun-block and good cosmetics. They would drink one glass of wine out of the bottle their husband ordered, and never, ever eat dessert.

The men’s tongues tasted like espresso and Gitanes. Their dicks were salty and wrinkled, but usually firmed up with a bit of encouragement.

The conversation would start when I brought the bill, carefully timed for when the wife had gone to freshen up in the toilets.

“And you keep all the tips?” he would say, or something like that, pressing a couple of fifties into my hand, or simply tossing them onto the saucer with the bill, if he was the kind of man who liked people to see him disgracing himself. I’d touch the money and then he’d ask where I lived, and was it nearby.

The wives would take a sleeping pill and not notice their husbands slipping out. Or maybe they just didn’t care. By then it was late summer in the southern hemisphere and I’d left the motel and rented a cheaper room above the pizza place, all patchwork throws and complicated plants. I’d pour Cointreau into a shot glass and say it was a British delicacy, or sometimes I’d serve Japanese gin with just a squeeze of lime and one tiny ice cube. The drink usually remained untouched, though, not because the men thought it was poisoned, but because they wanted to fuck me as soon as possible. Or Hannah. I always let Hannah do the actual fucking.

Is it wrong that I earned my airfare back this way? You’d already managed to get Richard’s assets frozen, including our joint account, and so I really had no option. I had to get back to Greece, and even economy tickets cost a lot then, in those early years after the worst of the pandemic, with everyone flying everywhere all of a sudden, and it always being summer somewhere, more or less.

It had actually begun with the private investigator you sent after me. He did a great job, by the way, picking up my trail at Athens and following it to Kerikeri, so long after I’d left. It only took him a few more weeks of all-expenses-paid travel in Northland to finally locate me. I can’t believe I didn’t suss him out immediately, but I’d become a little soft by then. He’d sat on the veranda of the hotel in a white polo shirt on Christmas Eve, nursing a single glass of Man O’ War Syrah from Waiheke Island and staring out to sea. Sleigh-bell music and carols were playing on the sound system that night, reindeer and snow at the height of the summer. He’s the only customer I regret fucking, and not only because he didn’t leave a large tip. He was hard and brutal, although I still thought I deserved that then, after being so ruined by your son. Your detective—I never knew his real name—fucked me like it was a punishment, holding my shoulders and ramming me so hard it was like something you might see done to an animal at a country fair. He said if he could film himself deep-throating me with his hand around my neck he’d consider not telling you he’d found me, and that was when I realized you’d hired him. When I visibly considered his offer he laughed and said he was joking, that of course he was going to report back. But in his own way he was warning me, giving me notice to move on if I didn’t want to be found.

I told him I had nothing to hide, and I didn’t. I still don’t.

I went so far away because I was traumatized, Annabelle; nothing more. Why can’t you believe that? There would have been more convenient places for me to have hidden out, I promise you. Places it would have been so much easier to come back from.

Not that it isn’t glorious here. Lemons grow on trees and although their outsides are knobbly and wretched, their soft flesh is the color of early sunrise. There are so many stars in the night sky. I’ve seen the Pleiades for the first time. They call them the “Matariki” here, and celebrate when they first appear in June or July, deep in their winter. Māori navigators once used them to travel in the Pacific and the Tasman, and the Greeks used them as a signal that it was time to begin sailing. Even though there are now only six visible stars, most cultures over history have mythologized them as seven sisters, or a mother and six daughters. Often, they are seven maidens being pursued by a man, and so there is always the fallen one, the one who disappeared, or was caught. Once she glowed bright in the heavens, but she’s not there now. Maybe she’s gone so far into the darkness we just don’t see her; or perhaps she went into supernova and died a long time ago.

I don’t imagine you ever thought twice about flying, not even long haul. I’ve always been a nervous flier—well, until I’m actually in the sky, at which point I love the freedom of it, and the sense of people moving around the planet, doing interesting things. I’m usually the only one with the window shade open, agog at the wondrousness of it all, mouth open for the vast pink sunsets and the insane twilight that covers the whole of Europe, with towns and cities twinkling below stars that have never seemed so close. This time the sky seemed bigger and the stars seemed brighter, and it was not just because it had been so hard to save up my fare, but because I was traveling so far to retrieve a part of myself that was so lost.

I spent my layover in Athens in the same airport hotel I’d gone to with Richard after the wedding, trying to remember the person I had been then. I even drank a glass of the same bad rosé. But it was as if I couldn’t yet get that part of my mind to open back up. That place within me just felt numb.

The ferry crossing to Kathos was rougher than I’d thought it would be. I’ve never minded a choppy sea, but all around me people were vomiting. One elderly French lady was demurely throwing up into her handbag—she’d tucked a sick bag inside so it looked almost elegant. I waited in my cabin for the worst of the heaving and falling to subside, and then I went to the shop and bought an American fashion magazine, thinking it was something I could hide behind if I had to. The shop was in chaos: the mini shampoos and sun creams had fallen off the shelves, and other people seemed to care about this a lot more than I did. One man was taking photographs with a professional-looking camera while the woman who’d been vomiting into her handbag shouted at him in French and dabbed at her lips with a white handkerchief.

Memory is such a strange thing. When I’d looked at a map of Kathos when I was making my bookings, I’d initially been convinced Richard and I had honeymooned on the west coast of the island, although we can’t have done, because I wouldn’t have been able to see Turkey from there. In my mind we’d driven from the west coast to the east, on that strange humid night with Bob Dylan playing in the taxi, when we’d gone to the wrong restaurant, but it must have been the other way around. This time, I’d booked an anonymous-looking hotel in a bay on the southeast of the island. I was there for my letters, of course, but for something else too, something I’d never known I needed: the ability to stay perpetually in transit, to never go home, for the honeymoon to never end, even after the marriage itself has irrevocably broken down and the poor husband has been killed.

It was warm when I disembarked from the ferry, my legs unsteady from the crossing, and the anticipation of trauma. I felt more OK than I expected as I got in the cab to be taken to my hotel. But my chest tightened as the cab snaked through the dusty back streets, past the mopeds and whitewashed villas and—it came quicker than I remembered—the dapper little man’s curio shop. My heart flipped. It was still there! But of course there was no reason why it wouldn’t be. I wondered if my letters were tied in a bundle on his shelves or if Isabella now had them. I tried not to look too suspicious as I peered over my shoulder at the shop as we passed, the driver beeping for a couple of kids to get out of the road. The beep made a figure in the shop look around, startled. He moved out of the shadows and into the early evening sunlight. It was a skinny young man in a crop top. Hamza? Had he come back?

My hotel room had everything I needed. A bed, a sofa, and a small tiled balcony with a wooden table and two slightly rickety chairs. I sat on my balcony with a large glass of cold white wine and looked out across the bay toward the south of the island, oddly grateful I couldn’t see Turkey, that the view was new to me and therefore neutral. For a few moments I pretended I was a single, innocent woman on holiday, and I didn’t have anything to be afraid of. What would I do, if I were that woman? I supposed I’d read, and so I took the American magazine I’d bought on the ferry to dinner with me, and I flipped the glossy pages with their wrap dresses and cruise collections and diet advice disguised as “wellness” as I ate a grilled fish with a Greek salad. Afterwards, the tall young waiter brought me a complimentary bowl of Greek yogurt with lemon apparently preserved by his grandmother, and it really was as if I’d never been there before.

The next day was a Saturday. I got up early and went straight to the curio shop. I’d disguised myself as best I could, with bronzer-heavy makeup and my khaki cap. But the shop was closed, it seemed, for the whole weekend. A sign said it would reopen on Monday. I walked back to the hotel. As I did, I caught sight of myself in the window of a taverna and although I’d recently got used to finding myself unrecognizable—I saw that it was in fact me. Evelyn Masters. The woman who’d come here after marrying Richard. It didn’t matter if I lost weight or wore a cap: here I was.

I spent the rest of the weekend daubing lemon in my hair and trying different styles of makeup to see if I could erase myself. I lay restlessly on a sun-lounger and planned and re-planned how I’d get my letters. I swam for miles, my head full of logistics and lies, with all the colorful fish underneath me. There were no tendrilous sea-plants on this part of the island, nothing to lick at my legs or pull me under. For each meal I ate a fish and a salad and shook my head when the preserved lemon arrived. I only wanted fresh lemons for my hair. The hours went past slowly, and sometimes it felt as if I wasn’t even on Kathos and I imagined myself on a different island altogether, on a pleasant holiday or research trip. I tried to picture myself back in Russell but it really wasn’t that similar at all, I realized. Everything on Kathos was so square and stony, and the light reflected off the whitewashed walls in a bluer way.

On Sunday I went for a longer swim than usual, around one bay and then into another. Back in New Zealand I’d been getting a buzz out of swimming as a form of transport, a way of actually getting from A to B. I’d take my sports watch, set it to swim mode, and when I arrived at the next bay or island I’d use its wallet app to pay for a plate of oysters, or an espresso, or if it was evening, a Japanese gin over ice. On that Sunday in Kathos I felt a great surge of energy, so much it almost frightened me, and instead of stopping at the first bay, I swam on to the next one. My tendency to mirror things and turn them upside down had persisted, because although I thought I was swimming southwest, I was actually going northeast. I thought I knew the shape of the coast, and I believed the next bay was closer than it really was. I ended up in a kind of no-man’s-land, where I’d gone too far to turn back, but the nearest shore was still so far away. The last few hundred yards were difficult because choppy waves appeared in the water, and the current seemed to want to pull me back the way I’d come. I thought I was going to drown.

I ended up right by George’s Taverna, where Paul and I had watched the fish devour the bread roll just six months before. There was hardly any beach, to tell you the truth—maybe it was because of the high tide, or perhaps George’s spring storm had not yet brought it back after the winter. But otherwise the place was the same as before. I felt a little faint, but I couldn’t draw attention to myself by passing out, so I slowly and carefully swam on, out of sight of George’s Taverna.

When I’d swum the day before I hadn’t cared about arriving at the next bay in my bikini—I almost relished the lack of shame I felt with my new body. But on this part of the island I needed more of a disguise, so I bought a cheap orange sarong and a pair of dark glasses in the general store by the motorcycle man’s shop, and then found somewhere to sit before I lost consciousness. I’d also bought half a cantaloupe melon, a hunk of feta cheese and some water, and so I sat on the semi-beach and sucked the sweetness and moisture and fat into myself. What had I been thinking? I’d swum way too far and now here I was, in this terrible place where the sleepwalkers had drowned. I was like an animal that had unwittingly circled back to the hunt.

The wreath was still there, just about, storm-battered and withered. I sat next to it as I ate. Once I’d finished, I walked along the thin strip of beach toward George’s Taverna. I couldn’t help myself. And there was Christos, picking up a bowl from a table. In an instant, our eyes met. The effect was startling. I began shaking, and tried to cover it by walking faster. He looked away, but I was sure he knew it was me; he’d seen me as easily as I’d recognized my own reflection the day before. I walked on, feigning confidence, as if I had somewhere to go, but the path beyond George’s Taverna only led up the mountain. I walked uphill and then sat in a grove until the sun went down, leaking orangey colors all over the jagged rocks. I half-wondered if Christos might follow me, perhaps even try to kill me again, but there were no footsteps, and nobody came. I pulled myself together and walked back as if I had just been on some innocent errand, as if that was something a lone tourist was likely to do on a mountain path. By then the evening service had begun and I could see George running back and forth, head down. Christos was gone.

As I walked past the taverna I noticed a table of beautiful young people; not the same ones I’d been so obsessed with the year before, of course. There were two girls and two boys. The girls wore heavy makeup, with false eyelashes and electric-blue eyeliner flicks. One wore a low-cut white camisole and the other wore a loose black halter-neck over a bandeau bikini top. The boys were slim and tanned, both with dyed blond hair. The two men they were with looked very much like the ones who’d been here last year. One of them was tearing the shell off a large prawn while the other one was glowering into his tablet with the bluebottle cover. I carried on walking. When I reached the harbor an hour or so later, I saw that the new beautiful people had got into a small boat with the men, and it was sailing back along the route I’d swum, perhaps heading for the marina. As the boat went past, the girl with the camisole peeled it off and dived into the water, topless. It looked at first as if she were attempting an escape, but she simply did a decorative backstroke alongside the boat until her friends laughed and hauled her back in.

I glanced at the fish restaurant across the harbor. Was Christos in there, I wondered, still doing his evening shifts as if nothing here had really changed? But how could he not have been affected by what had happened? He was the one who’d dragged me out of the storeroom in the Villa Rosa, while I was playing dead. He was the one who’d lain me on the grass next to the generator. I was pretty sure it was he who had killed Richard. I just had no idea why. If you’ve read the enclosed documents carefully enough, you’ll know why Richard died. But I didn’t, because I didn’t yet have them.

The next day was Monday. I arrived at the curio shop at around eleven, before it shut for lunch. I had decided not to arrive like a hungry street cat when it opened at ten. As I approached I could hear the faint sound of a goldfinch singing from within the next-door taverna. The silver bell tinkled when I opened the door of the curio shop. Inside, it was cool, not because of air-con but because the shutters were half closed, and pale curtains fluttered in front of the open windows. You can make rooms cool if you know how, even in hot countries.

He was there, the dapper little man, at the desk at the back of the shop, just as he had been the first time I’d ever seen him. Once again, he was working on a birdcage. He seemed to be securing a yellow wooden perch to the roof of the wire house.

Behind him were the shelves on which he kept the bundles of documents. They were there just as before, looking both real and fake, tied in string and browned and faded in all the right places. I glanced at them and then looked away, back down to the desk, on which there was a soft pack of Gitanes and a bronze Zippo lighter.

“Kalimera,” I said, as if I were just a normal tourist.

The dapper little man glanced at me and then nodded and went back to his pliers and his wire, twisting it through a hole in the yellow piece of wood.

He was wearing a three-piece suit, despite the heat. His small paisley waistcoat was neatly done up, as if the buttons were glued to the fabric. His black hair appeared painted on or molded in plastic. I looked away and pretended to browse. Well, in fact, I really did browse. Acting has to be as close to life as possible to seem authentic. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski’s Director asks students to search inside a curtain for an important brooch. When a woman is unable to do it convincingly enough, he tells her she’ll be thrown out of class if she can’t find it. Only then does she act with truth.

Last time I’d been in the curio shop I couldn’t make myself swirl my hands through the drawer of starfish and seahorses as Beth had, but I did it now. I browsed the rails of peasant nightdresses and jodhpurs. I sincerely wondered how I’d look in loose, flowing white cotton, like a ghost that is secretly alive, or an invalid from a Victorian novel. In my mind I became the sort of woman who would wear clothes like that; the sort of woman who runs a hotel and is always looking for interesting interior design ideas and amusing things to pop on dressers. I could see it clearly in my head, my hotel. I could see its tiled entrance hall, and its large terracotta pots.

“Excuse me,” I said, floating over to the front desk, but deliberately standing in shadow. “What are those?”

I pointed at the shelves of documents behind the dapper little man.

They were just out of reach, like prescription medicines.

“Histoires,” he said, in French, and then shrugged.

I’d thought I was standing in shadow, but it must have been only a temporary cloud, as the sun suddenly shone in my eyes. I tried to move sideways out of the glare, but it was impossible. I stepped backwards, finally returning to the cool semi-darkness.

“For decoration?”

“Yes. Or you can read. They have genuine documents from the ages.”

I let my eyes open wide with a sort of shallow excitement.

“They’d look amazing in my hotel. On the chests of drawers in the rooms.”

His head jerked then, ever so slightly.

“Which subject you look for?”

“I’m sorry?”

“They have different subjects. Here.” He stood and climbed onto a small wooden stepladder. “This one is about Italians who occupied the island during the war.” He hooked his finger under the brown twine with which the documents were secured, turned and let the bundle of papers drop onto the counter in front of me. “There are love letters that were not sent; also a very sad journal of an Italian soldier just before the Germans came, and he was killed.”

“Wow,” I said.

“This one,” he continued, dropping a smaller bundle on the desk, “is a collection of notes left for a cleaner from a man in a villa near the airport. They have many details about the tasks he asks her to do. Here in this one is also shopping lists and receipts for pharmaceuticals, and tailoring. I have others, from all around the world.”

I had no idea the dapper little man could say so many words. Last year he’d been so sullen, and almost as mute as Hannah Kayak. I struggled to stay in character as he stared at me.

“How do you get the documents?” I asked innocently.

“People toss them away,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “They send them to be recycled and I find them. Or my boy does. Or they leave them in boxes or the attic when they move, or die.” He shrugged again.

Or you steal them, I wanted to say. You fucking take them.

Of course, I said nothing. Still, perhaps I am not that good an actress after all. Or perhaps he never believed in me. Perhaps at that moment the anger flashed in my eyes and he understood it all. Perhaps he’d understood from the moment I walked in the door. Perhaps he’d seen me as easily as Christos had.

He stared at me, and there was unkindness in his small eyes.

“Maybe they send them to the wrong person, who then loses them. Or perhaps they write in public, for anyone to take, in a hotel guest book.”

I stared back at him. “Or leave them on a pillow, in a locked room.”

He broke my gaze then. He picked up his Zippo lighter, turned it over in his hand, and put it down again.

“So you have come to search for your letters, after all this time?” he said, deadpan.

“They are mine,” I said.

“You should have been more careful with them.”

The way he said this chilled me. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, like I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

He shrugged once again. “You know, if a photographer takes your picture, it belongs to him. Just because it is you in the photo does not means it belongs to you.”

“Right. But these are not photographs, and what I wrote does belong to me. Are my letters here?”

I must have looked as if I was about to vault over his desk and start ransacking his shelves. He held up a hand as if to stop me.

“She have them. Isabella. She will burn them, perhaps, or maybe sell them to Hollywood. I don’t know. But you must ask her. I see her no more.”

“I suppose she’s still at the Villa Rosa, murdering other women’s husbands?”

“This is not true,” he said, grimacing. “You misunderstand.”

He shook his head and a long hissing sound emerged from between his teeth like a balloon deflating.

“Your husband.” The dapper little man sneered. “He took a boat and left.”

“No, that’s not true!”

“Really? There was no dead body.”

“I was there! I was locked in a cupboard and then—”

“Or maybe you put yourself in a cupboard while your husband packed and left you behind, and you had a breakdown and invented a ridiculous story. I know precisely what ridiculous story you invented, because I collected it and put it in order.”

So you see, Annabelle, you’re not the only one who has accused me of making things up. It’s always been the same kind of dirt that sticks to me: slightly crazy actress who doesn’t know what is real and what is fake, who imagines drama where there is no drama, who drives her husband away with her petty jealousy. The girl who kneels in puddles to give blow jobs to men she doesn’t even like, because she simply must be in a story, even if she has to be the femme fatale, or, worse, the victim.

But even that girl rarely goes so fucking mad as to believe in an entirely different version of the world. But it was obvious this story about the cupboard and the breakdown was what they’d told the police. That must have been why you’d engaged your private investigator to find me.

“I don’t understand you,” I said to the dapper little man. “Why are you protecting Isabella?”

“I owe her,” he said. “But not you.”

He took a bundle of documents off the bottom shelf. It wasn’t yet tied with string—it was as if this archive was still in progress.

“Here is a nice collection. A genuine blackmail letter, with some demands, and a few pictures. And then also a reply, negotiating. I am going to take the pictures out—they add nothing—and then…” He pulled out the photographs and laid them on the desk in front of him. I thought I glimpsed Isabella, naked and possibly even handcuffed, before he turned the photos over. Then he took out two of the sheets of paper—they were blue, lightweight, made for letter-writing—and crumpled them into a ball before smoothing them out again. Then he took one of the pieces of paper and ripped it in half. He took one of these fragments—it had maybe two handwritten sentences on it—and held it in his thumb and forefinger, while with the other hand he picked up the bronze Zippo lighter from the counter. Then he set fire to the fragment. He let it burn to the last millimeter before dropping the burning ember to the desk, where it disappeared, like a hallucination.

He looked me deep in the eyes, and sneered.

“It is as Chekhov says: always delete the ending.”

I bit my lip, said nothing, and left.

Actually, Chekhov says that you should delete the beginning as well as the end, but only for short stories, not for plays. I always think plays need a proper ending, so everyone knows where they stand. Don’t you agree?

After I left the curio shop, I walked back to my hotel and drank an iced coffee without tasting it and then had a long, cold shower.

I went over to the Villa Rosa late that afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to set. Perhaps you won’t care, but when I originally began writing my letter to Richard I imagined it ending up as a one-act play with the title The Honeymoon. I was writing it partly to spite you and certainly to spite him. It was how I’d coped with the trauma of the wedding. I was planning to recast the whole thing as a tragic love story, or a melancholy tale of misunderstanding and loss where a couple splits up, but no one dies. Of course, that was before I knew the true story; before it had the chance to unfold. At one point I’d planned to end my play with the husband—Richard’s character, whom I’d renamed Jay—coming back to the Villa Rosa many years later with his new wife. I visualized a moment of epiphany as he and the new wife go up the driveway and then into the cool tiled entrance hall, and Isabella, older but otherwise unchanged, treats the new wife exactly as she’d treated me. I’d even written in my notes something like, “And at that moment, he understood,” although I was trying to work out how to translate that into an action, or a piece of believable dialogue. How do you convey a person’s realization that they have been so wrong, and their whole life has pivoted as the result of a single mistake?

As I turned into the dusty road off the seafront now, a taxi overtook me. Then another one. Inside the first one had been a man and a woman of about my age. In the second one was an older couple. I had to blink a few times and steady myself because for a moment I imagined I was seeing myself and Richard, and the sleepwalkers, all arriving together, completely out of time. The road was not as dry as it had been the previous autumn, before the storm came. There was a damp freshness to everything, with flower buds on the trees and in the bushes. A few playful sparrows chased me down the path, twittering.

As I began walking up the driveway toward the Villa Rosa, the now empty taxis were leaving. I stepped aside and stood under the pomegranate tree to let them pass. Up ahead, a skinny young man was hacking at a large lemon bush with a machete. At first I assumed it was Kostas, and wondered how he’d lost so much weight. But as I approached, I saw the thin red silk scarf around his neck and realized it was Hamza. So he was back on the island. So much for claiming asylum in the UK or the US. But I guess I knew he was abandoning that plan when he’d made a run for it at Athens, that dreadful day we’d flown out of Kathos in the storm. And I had no idea why someone like Hamza would want to apply for asylum anyway. Not then.

I expect you don’t care about stories of servants, and you may even agree with Aristotle that these can never be fully tragic stories, because they don’t deal with great and powerful people. I’ve experienced the way you treat staff: never looking them quite in the eye and speaking to them in that crisp tone you reserve for giving instructions to people you believe are beneath you. If you ever reflected on it, you’d realize that you think of servants as a lower class of human. So I’m sure it won’t be of any interest to you to hear that Hamza had come back because he loved Christos. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hamza turned and looked at me, startled.

“Kalispera,” I said.

“You have come back,” he said.

“So have you,” I observed.

“Why are you here?”

“For my letters.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re mine. I think my husband wrote to me. Before—”

Hamza looked frightened, as if I might actually say it. So I didn’t.

“Yes,” Hamza said softly. “There is a long letter. It is a sad letter.”

“Wait, you’ve seen it?” I said. “Where is it?”

Hamza shrugged and turned back to the lemon tree.

“Come on,” I said. “I helped you.”

“I don’t remember,” said Hamza. It wasn’t clear if he meant that he didn’t remember me helping him, or if he didn’t remember what was in the letter.

“Does Isabella have my letters?” I asked. “And my notebook?”

“She won’t give them to you.”

“Why not?”

He bit his lip nervously. “She dreams of her movie deal. She is writing her screenplay. She has planned a big dinner for the producers when they come back next week.”

“Is her screenplay about how she murdered my husband?”

Hamza looked down, as if he was ashamed.

“Well?” I demanded.

“It is about how you murdered your husband,” he said. “Because of your past.”

This hit me like a sudden punch. I felt sharp pain, then numbness.

“You know I didn’t kill Richard,” I said. “How am I supposed to have done it?”

“With sleeping pills. And then drowning.”

“But that’s utterly ridiculous.”

Hamza didn’t reply. He turned and hacked another piece off the lemon tree.

“What if the producers actually want to do a deal with me?” I said.

“You are writing a screenplay too?”

“Maybe.”

Hamza shrugged again, but I could tell this changed things somehow.

“They are my documents. It’s my life,” I said. “And you know what really happened.”

“What really happened is no good.”

“I know you want to get out of here,” I said. “What if I helped you, again?”

He looked back at me then, and there was a thin sliver of hope in his eyes. Then he blinked and it was gone. He turned away and started hacking at the lemon bush once more.

I approached the main house.

Isabella was there in the tiled entrance hall, just as she’d been the previous September. She was wearing something that looked like a cast-off wedding dress with a wide brown belt buckled tight at her waist, and a pair of shining mahogany riding boots. She wore these items as if they’d been picked out for her by a drunk parent, or chosen by an older cousin from a dressing-up box. The cream gown hung limply off her slight shoulders, and the belt looked as if it had been pulled tight by another, more spiteful child. The boots had the air of being too stiff and too big. I strongly feel that you need to wear a dress like hers with a lot more enthusiasm.

As I approached, I saw that Isabella’s face was partly obscured by a pair of thick, black-rimmed spectacles. She was holding some papers that looked like screenplay pages.

“Hello,” I said. I’d like to think there was a lot of nuance in the way I said it. A twinge of regret, of course, plus the acknowledgment of time having passed, as well as our shared knowledge of her guilt. I also said it in a way that (I thought) implied I wasn’t about to attack her in a crazed frenzy. After all, she had murdered my husband, or helped someone else to do it. And now it seemed that she was actually writing a version of events in which I’d killed Richard.

“Yes?” she said, putting the papers down and taking off the spectacles. She looked at me. “Can I help you? You have a booking?”

Can you believe she was the only person on the island who seemingly did not recognize me?

“I actually stayed here last year,” I said.

“OK,” she said, slightly mockingly, not quite meeting my eye. It was as if I were beginning a joke, or, perhaps more accurately, that I was the joke.

“I left something behind.”

“Really?” she said. “I don’t remember you. When did you stay?”

“September,” I said. “There was a big storm.”

“A storm?” she said, in the same half-amused mocking tone. “I don’t remember. We have many storms in autumn months.” Her voice then lost the amused tone and became serious. “It is a bad time to come.”

In that moment, I realized that I hadn’t ever accepted that Richard was dead. There was no way I could have come here if I’d thought I was going to confront his murderer. I suddenly realized I believed that he was still alive. Had he really taken a boat, like the dapper little man had suggested?

“Where is he?” I said.

“Where is who?” said Isabella.

“Oh, come on,” I said, “stop messing around.”

“You have lost someone?” she said, still deadpan. “I’ve seen no one except for my new guests. Such beautiful guests these are.”

“My fucking husband,” I said. “The one you’re writing your fucking screenplay about. Where did he go?”

“You cannot keep track of your husband?” she said. “Oh dear.”

“I want my letters,” I said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

She shrugged. “I’m sorry. You say you left a letter?”

Her eyes then revealed something, just for a moment. They darted just very slightly over my right shoulder and then back to somewhere on my face. For the whole exchange so far, Isabella hadn’t completely caught my eye. She’d looked at my forehead or my nose but not into my eyes. Her gaze flicked once again to the right and then back. She looked anxious, suddenly. There was someone standing behind me. I turned. It was Hamza. He was holding the bundle of documents. The bundle was tied with string. Of course, I couldn’t see what any of the documents were, but I knew instinctively that my letters were there.

“What is this?” said Isabella, with real emotion in her voice for the first time. “Hamza, what are you doing?”

Without thinking, I grabbed the bundle from Hamza’s hands and went to make a run for it. Isabella saw what I was doing and lunged at me. She snatched at the documents but only managed to get hold of the string. The bundle loosened and some of the handwritten pages scattered on the floor. I didn’t have time to try to retrieve them. I yanked the string out of Isabella’s fingers, clutched the remaining documents to my chest and darted out of the hotel lobby. I started running, just as I had that night back in September. This time at the end of the driveway I turned right instead of left.

I kept running, holding the documents to my chest and not looking behind me, until I reached the main street that ran parallel to the sea. The motorcycle man was standing outside his shop. He gave me a big thumbs-up and then let his tongue fall out of his mouth and began miming “panting heavily” and I realized that’s what I was doing. I could hardly breathe. I slowed and gasped for air and looked behind me. No one was there. No one had followed me. I tried to give the motorcycle man some kind of acknowledgment, which I think turned into a painful grimace, and then I jogged on to where there were taxis down by the big hotel.

I suppose anyone else on that street that day would have noticed the breathless and frightened woman running with a bundle of documents loosely tied with string. Maybe somebody saw me, maybe they didn’t, but by the following afternoon the documents were gone. Obviously I took care to hide them in my hotel room, and locked the door. But none of this stopped whoever came and took the documents back.

Was it Isabella? She certainly created an interesting diversion when she turned up the following morning. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

I arrived back at my room, still clutching the documents. I drank a whole bottle of mineral water, washed my hands and face, and then I sat on my bed and read everything, as I hope you’ve just done. But maybe you didn’t even bother? Maybe you chose to leave the bundle unopened on the chiffonier, so to speak. Maybe you didn’t think it contained anything important.

My own letter was familiar enough, and I read it wishing it had simply become the one-act play I’d had in mind when I’d begun it. My notebook was sobering. Richard’s letter was less of a shock than you might think, especially as it stopped halfway through, just before his confession. You’ll have read the confession by now, I suppose, but those pages—along with some from the guest book—were the ones that had fallen out of the bundle, and so at that point I didn’t have them.

The next morning I woke to a furious pounding on the door of my room.

When I opened it I was surprised to find Isabella there, pink-faced and breathless.

“I hope you’ve brought the rest of my letter,” I said.

“Where is he?” she demanded. “What have you done to him, you stupid bitch?”

It was the first time I’d seen her lose her cool.

“Who?” I said, but I guess I knew already that she meant Hamza.

“What have you done to him?” she said again. “Are you hiding him? You must give me back the pages that you stole. All of them. Including the fallen ones he took.”

She held out her hands, as if I would simply put the bundle of documents in them.

“What I stole? You’re even more brazen than I thought.”

“Why are you here?” she hissed. “Why did you come back?”

“I came back for my husband,” I said simply, letting the double meaning float in the air between us.

“You could never keep a husband. You are too…” She looked me up and down. “You are too English,” she said eventually.

“I guess once Richard knew you were involved in human trafficking he needed to be killed,” I said. “And you thought I knew too, didn’t you?”

You got that from the transcript as well, presumably, Annabelle?

“I do not know what you are talking about,” Isabella said, biting her lip. She was back in her innocent child pose, as if she were about to blame everything on her cruel belt-tightening cousin. “You do not understand.” She blushed and looked as if she was about to stamp her little foot.

“I know that Christos is a murderer,” I said.

I should have been suspicious at the way Isabella reacted to that.

“I see,” she said, dropping her head. “You have discovered everything. Well, then, I suppose there is nothing more to say.”

She turned to leave, with the air of a performer about to exit the stage.

“I thought you were trying to find Hamza,” I said scornfully.

“It’s too late for him,” she said, looking back at me. “I have tried to protect him, but Christos will be very angry with what you have discovered. He may think you mean to take Hamza away, which he will not like.” She shook her head, and then she turned again and walked away, her buttocks bouncing in her pale jodhpurs like melons in a flimsy carrier bag. It was as if she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Is that an odd thing to notice in that moment? It was certainly impossible to ignore.

Once I was dressed, I hid the documents at the bottom of my rucksack, and covered them with the fashion magazine. I can’t believe I thought this was a good enough hiding place, but the hotel room had no safe, so I felt I had little choice. I went over to the harbor and got in a taxi and asked to be taken to George’s Taverna.

When I arrived, the place seemed empty. It was not yet ten o’clock. Christos was there, putting the umbrellas up at the outside tables.

“Where’s Hamza?” I asked him.

“You tell me,” said Christos wearily.

“He has something,” I said. “Something I need. And I think he’s in danger.”

At this, Christos laughed coldly. “Really?” he said. “OK.”

“I’ve read the transcript,” I said. “I’d be happy to swap it for the pages he has.”

On the word “transcript,” Christos froze.

“What?” he said. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The transcript,” I said, taking an instinctive step back.

“The one I deleted?”

“I—”

“You kept a copy? You lied?”

Christos took a step toward me and then seemed to stop himself, just as I held my hands up.

“No. Hamza—”

“He downloaded it. At the airport. Fuck.” Christos thumped the table. “That fucking treacherous snake.”

“Christos, I’ve read everything,” I said, as gently as I could.

“OK,” he said, sinking into a chair by the table. “OK.”

Are you at all worried for my safety here, Annabelle? Don’t be. There was a steady trickle of traffic on the dusty road, and a few people off for their morning strolls. I felt sure someone would try to save me if Christos attempted to kill me, so I sat down opposite him. Out of lunging distance, I calculated. But you can never be sure, can you? No one knows the day they’re going to die. Would you die for the truth? On that morning I thought I probably would if I had to, absurd as that may sound now.

And also, how do you feel about “manspreading”? I’ve never really minded it myself. It’s just a way to sit, after all, especially if you have long legs and need to arrange them. Poor Christos looked less like a confident bro trying to take up the maximum space possible and more like a condemned prisoner trying to burrow into himself. After a few moments he took his head out of his hands and looked at me.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I want all my documents,” I said. “And then I just want to leave. I’m not going to make trouble for anyone.”

This wasn’t a hundred percent true, but I felt like it was what Christos needed to hear.

“And I want to know Hamza’s OK.”

Christos scoffed. “What do you care about Hamza?”

“He tried to help me.”

“Yeah? What did he think you’d give him in return?” Christos sighed, and visibly stopped himself continuing. He shook his head. “I take that back.” He picked up the salt cellar from the table and weighed it in his hand as if it contained the truth. “I did love him, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“You have any idea what it means to be like Hamza, in Turkey?”

I shrugged. I’d read something once about people in the West thinking Muslim countries were much more homophobic than they actually are. But I’d never been to Turkey. I had no idea of what it would be like there for anyone. Was it even officially a Muslim country anyway? I didn’t think so. I vaguely imagined that it would probably be fine if you knew what to do, just like most other places.

“Being used by men, being—”

“OK, we’ve all been used by men,” I snapped. I dislike being lectured to about the patriarchy by its constituents, to be honest.

Christos looked at his feet, then back up at me. A pickup truck on the street behind him beeped at a moped that seemed to have stopped for no reason.

“Hamza wanted to be an artist,” said Christos. “His father went crazy when he went to Istanbul and got a place at art school. Hamza worked in a nightclub to pay his fees. There were student nights, gay nights. Turned out the manager was trafficking and employing illegals. At first Hamza thought it was cool to be working with Syrians and Iraqis. They were queer, like him, or girls who’d got in trouble back home. When he realized they weren’t being paid properly, he complained to the owner. The guy turned nasty and beat Hamza up. It’s not difficult.”

That hung in the air for half a minute.

“So then how did Hamza get involved in the trafficking himself?” I asked. “I mean, if he was so against it? That’s what he was doing, right? Bringing kids over from Turkey, for, like, I don’t know—”

“Photo shoots, marketing for a ‘new band.’ Yup.”

“All organized by Isabella.”

“There are worse people beyond her. Hamza’s not scared of her so much, but he is scared of them.”

“But how did he get involved with them?”

“He went back home for a big holiday, a few years back. Maybe Ramadan? It was pretty intense. Hamza came out to his dad, but it didn’t go well. They had a big fight. Hamza stuck around, hoping they’d find some peace, only then his dad got Covid, no doubt from his son arriving from the big city. It was in the early days, and there were no antivirals or vaccines.” Christos paused. “His dad died.”

“Fucking hell.”

“Right? So Hamza goes back to Istanbul, kinda broken, only now he has to make money to send his mom to pay for the house, and all the bills, and all his little sisters’ shit, as they have zero income now his dad’s dead. The dude who ran the nightclub gave Hamza a lot of extra shifts, but it wasn’t enough, so he asked how he could make more money. All he had to do at first was befriend students or under-age kids who came to the club. They had to be vulnerable somehow, needy. He’d invite them for band auditions, or to do ‘modeling.’ There was a lot of bullshit, obviously, but eventually they’d end up on a private yacht to the island—all very impressive. They’d stay at Isabella’s and get their pictures taken, and then on the last day their passports would disappear and they’d be sold on, to work in villas or on yachts or, if it was a pretty girl, to work as a personal maid in London or New York or Dubai.”

“A ‘personal maid’?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if they were prostitutes exactly. They probably ended up in a better country than the one they’d come from anyway.”

“I thought Turkey was quite a good place to live?”

“There are desperate kids everywhere. Kids get trafficked out of London and New York as well.”

“And the refugee camps here of course.”

“Yeah.” Christos looked down at the floor. “That’s on me. If he hadn’t met me, he wouldn’t have wanted to stay on the island. He—”

“Where’s Hamza now?”

Christos shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Probably packing, now he’s got your attention. He’ll think you’ll repay him by taking him back to the UK and sponsoring his visa. Or you’ll help him claim asylum.”

“Can Turkish people even get asylum in the UK? I mean, Turkey’s in NATO. It’s virtually the EU.”

“He wants to report Isabella and the traffickers, but then he can never come back.”

“Which would devastate you, right? Maybe even get you arrested.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“Come on. You obviously still love him. Please say you haven’t hurt him.”

Christos said nothing. The street behind him was suddenly still and silent.

I stood up and took a couple of steps away from Christos.

“Because you killed the sleepwalkers in a jealous rage, right?”

Christos shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, that’s exactly how you kill people when you’re in a jealous rage.”

“So you admit you gave them the sleeping pills.”

“Hardly.”

“Come on, you as good as say it on the transcript. I think the software wrote ‘slipping peels’ but I knew what it meant.”

“I don’t think that’s gonna stand up anywhere.”

“What did Isabella do? Did she show you the letter Hamza wrote to James Border, the super-religious guy? All about giving Hamza love? I’m guessing James meant spiritual love, but you misunderstood, didn’t you? You thought Hamza was going to meet him for sex.”

Christos sighed. “It didn’t matter if it was love or sex. The result would have been the same.”

“You would have lost him.”

“He thought if he could get to the US or the UK he’d finally be able to make enough money for his mother, but in a legitimate way, not by hurting people.”

“And you wanted to stop him?”

“That makes it sound wrong. I wanted to support him, but—”

“Isabella told you Hamza and James were hooking up? And she showed you the note Hamza wrote, to prove it.”

“Why does it matter?”

“You took away Hamza’s one chance of freedom!”

“Did I? He didn’t even want to go to the UK anyway. He was much more desperate to go to the US, the land of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. We were going to get married, but—”

“Where is he, Christos?”

“He’s exactly where he wants to be.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Have you even stopped for one second to examine your own assumptions? You assume that all gay people are psychos who commit murder every time they feel jealous?”

I sighed. “Don’t do that.” I paused. “You tried to kill my fucking husband.”

“No. I did not try to kill your fucking husband.”

I grimaced. “Right.”

“You wanna know why? Because I am nowhere near the biggest psycho on this island,” he said. “You got the wrong guy.”

“You tried to drive me into a fucking tree!”

“Yeah, but I didn’t do it, did I? I’ve got issues, but I’m not a goddamn murderer.”

“Who, then? Kostas?”

Christos laughed bitterly. “Poor stupid Kostas. She owns him too.”

“So you’re saying Isabella did everything?”

At that point, I felt we were going around in circles.

“Ask yourself who owns Isabella,” he said, standing up. “And then you’ll find Hamza. And the rest of your stupid documents.”

“What happened to my husband?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I wasn’t there. I told her not to do it. Just before we brought you out. She’d never gone that far before. You know, she’s never actually killed anyone herself. Not even her husband. Far as the police are concerned, she’s as innocent as a fucking baby.”

“Then what happened to Richard? And how did the sleepwalkers die?”

“The sleepwalkers drowned, just like the autopsy said.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “We both know they were murdered.”

“Isabella knows some pretty bad people,” said Christos, as if that explained it. He paused. “I knew you were faking, by the way. And I ignored your passport—did you not wonder about that? I told her to wait, to find some other way. I was trying to save you, and your ridiculous husband. I guess you didn’t realize that I was running after Kostas while he chased you.”

“I—”

“You didn’t think it was weird when he just stopped running after you?”

“I assumed I’d outrun him,” I said.

“I brought him down,” said Christos. “I fucking saved you.”

“But why? I mean, before that, when I heard a buzz, I thought it was you electrocuting Richard.”

“No. She was just testing it.”

“So then where is he?” I asked. “Where’s my husband?”

Christos shook his head. “I don’t know.”

As I walked down the street after leaving the taverna, I thought back to a particularly rainy day in Russell, just a couple of weeks before. It hadn’t yet turned into a full-blown cyclone and they were still calling it a “tropical low.” The sun had unexpectedly come out, late in the day, and I’d attempted to clean the wooden deck of my flat above the pizza restaurant. I’d seen a native pigeon that day, a kererū, its fat white legs like something you’d usually see covered in gravy, pecking away at a soaked cabbage palm for its unripe berries, its bright orange eyes flashing in the brief sunlight. I’d begun to clean the deck’s major eyesore: a rotten old bird table that had been hanging from the branches of another tree for several winters and summers, and which now housed several different spiders. I was trying to clean it without killing the spiders when a tiny moth landed on its small roof. One of the spiders saw it and it darted out, ready to pounce. My instinct told me to give the moth a little push to make it fly away, thus saving its life. I did it—anyone would have done the same—but as the spider scuttled back to its web, disappointed, I realized that saving the moth meant killing the spider, or at least starving it to death. And maybe I hadn’t even saved the moth, because you’re not really supposed to touch their wings, however gently.

I arrived at the curio shop before I’d even thought about what I was going to do or say. I’d believed I was calm, but when I got there I realized I was so pumped with adrenaline I was ready to bust my way in and rip the shop apart. Looking back now, I guess I was a little unhinged—not the way you thought, though. I wanted to find out what had happened to Richard, and I wanted my documents, and I wanted to help Hamza. His story had touched me deeply. Maybe the reasons for that are obvious; maybe not. I wanted so many things at once it was all a tangle. I felt stronger than I really am, fiercer.

But the door to the curio shop was locked and bolted, which was odd, because it was a weekday, and some time before lunch. I peered in through the window. At first, all I could see were the silent shadows of bookshelves and riding crops, and the ghostly outlines of all the long white dresses that you could sleep in if you were rich or get married in if you were poor.

Then I saw the wooden chair in the center of the back room.

Hamza was sitting on it, naked from the waist up. Where was his usual scarf? His shoulders were thrust forward at a slightly unnatural angle and I could see the sharp jut of his collarbones. I realized with a gasp that his hands were behind the chair: indeed, that’s where his scarf was, tied in a brutal-looking knot around his tiny wrists while the ends trailed on the floor like a spilled drink. Across the room was the dapper little man, sketching the scene with a stick of charcoal.

It all made sense once I’d put it together. The dapper little man was the reason for everything. It was he, after all, who had been negotiating with Marcus and Debbie to sell the story of the sleepwalkers. It was he who had stolen all the documents and put them together in the first place. He had been Speaker 4 on the transcript. He was the one I’d originally thought was getting a fetishistic kind of pleasure from controlling everything around him, the one Christos had described on the transcript as a “little vampire.”

I was just about to try and kick the door in when I saw Hamza smile, and then laugh. He said something to the dapper little man, who smiled back and nodded. I suddenly couldn’t understand the scene at all. Its meaning fluttered away from me like an uncaged bird. Then Hamza spotted me looking in the window. The dapper little man had his head bent over his sketch, and Hamza frowned at me and shook his head. His shoulders lifted into a nonchalant shrug. He seemed to be saying, I’m fine. Go away. I wasn’t sure, so I kept staring for a few moments, but all I saw was more easy laughter and banter between them. The scene seemed to be telling me to leave. So I did, feeling utterly confused.

When I got back to the hotel, as I said, the bundle of documents was gone.

But don’t worry, Annabelle, I took pictures of everything. I’d photographed each sheet of paper as I’d read it earlier that day, just as any sensible person would have done. So, yes, I no longer had the originals, but I had the material itself. I had what I’d come for, more or less. I was still missing a few pages, but I’d already read the guest book entry, and I suppose I thought I knew by then what Richard’s confession was. As I reflected on this, I felt the spark of something creative, the same as the feeling I’d had back in Athens after the wedding, when I was so traumatized I’d decided my life from then on would be fictional, like a play I was only acting in. The documents did make a good story, although not in the exact order the dapper little man had arranged them. I wondered about a different way of telling things. A new focus. Certainly an alternative to Isabella’s murder mystery with me as the killer. Then I called Debbie’s number.

She didn’t pick up, which was disappointing. Ideas were racing through my mind like spirited reindeer and I wanted to make them real by telling them to someone. Perhaps that’s also when I thought I should write to you, but of course I didn’t begin this letter until much later, when I was back in New Zealand.

It was a couple of hours after dinner when the package was slipped under my hotel room door.

It was an A4 brown envelope, unsealed, like a thirsty mouth.

Did it contain my missing pages? I opened the flap and pulled out what appeared to be a short series of charcoal sketches, on thick creamy paper. On the first page, I was puzzled to see the girl with the “Istanbul is Contemporary” bag. She had been drawn inside a framed panel like in a comic book, with tables from a café scattered along the edge of the sea behind her.

The next sketch zoomed out to show a woman—did she look unnervingly like me?—reading the comic book with this panel in it. The woman’s face was mine, I realized, and her hands somehow were too: the nails cut square, with the same chipped nail polish I was wearing right now. The woman had her fingers poised to turn the page, to see what happens next. There was another sheet under the first two, and so I had to turn the page just as cartoon-me did. Nice touch, I half-thought.

When I saw what was on the next sheet, I retched, and dropped everything. But then I forced myself to pick it up and look at it. Brace yourself, Annabelle. The focus of the scene had been expanded again so that the entire woman was now shown, reading her comic book. The face and hands remained realistic, but the body was both too skinny and too voluptuous. The woman’s breasts pushed against a tight white shirt and almost touched the desk she’d bent over to read the comic book, which she held in both hands, her elbows resting schoolgirlishly beside her breasts, which were not as a schoolgirl’s breasts should be. The woman’s tiny skirt had been roughly pulled up over her shapely arse, all the way to her waist. You could tell the skirt had been roughly pulled up because the man’s hands were still gripping it with some force as he penetrated her with his large penis. His expression was one of violence and pain, but on the woman’s face was a simple, innocent smile.

The man looked exactly like Peter.

When I retrieved the envelope from the floor where I’d dropped it, my hand trembling, I saw there was a plane ticket back to Athens for the next morning. I’d been planning to take the ferry again in a few days’ time, but suddenly I wanted to leave as soon as possible. I had to get away from that terrible place, with its cruelty and drama. Much as I hated doing it, I heeded the warning. I packed quickly and left the next day.

When I paid my bill at reception there was another envelope for me, of the same sort as the one that had been pushed under my door. This time it was sealed. I didn’t want to open it, of course.

When I did, it contained the remains of the guest-book pages, and the second part of Richard’s letter, both crudely photocopied.

I’d much rather have read the rest of Richard’s letter in private than on the tiny plane with the whirring propellers and happy tourists. I must have looked a mess, sobbing without a tissue.

Paul, I kept thinking. Paul.

Even now, his name still turns me inside out.

I hung around Athens for the two remaining days until my flight back to London. It was hot and dusty, with long traffic jams down roads lined with parked mopeds and orange trees. Street cats sunbathed on ancient ruins. I walked up to the Acropolis—or at least, until the point where you have to pay. There were street-hawkers, scammers and beggars. How many of them were doing it through choice, I wondered. There were men who would get chatting to tourists, asking where they were from and if they liked music. They’d then give a friendship bracelet as a “gift.” Presumably they would demand money once the offering was accepted. Gifts so often come with an edge or a threat, don’t you think, Annabelle?

I began noticing the people you probably never see, the quiet cleaners, and the invisible staff washing up in the backs of kitchens, and I wondered how they’d got there. I tried Debbie and Marcus a couple more times. I drank a lot. I sat in the hotel bar, hating myself and the world I’d been born into. I stared at the curious framed prints in the airport lounge, the ones that depicted happy balloon rides and picnics, all in the same two-dimensional sunlit world.

There was nothing left for me in the UK. I stayed for only three days before flying back to Auckland. I didn’t even have a window seat.

And now here I am, back on the balcony of the Swordfish Club, looking out at the pohutukawa tree and the jetty, as I was when I began this letter. The tables here are comfortable to write on, and I am inspired, somehow, by Zane Grey and all his novels and his many large fish. Right now I am trying to spend as much time as possible in public, and not simply because I am afraid of what might be slipped under my door when I am alone. I keep thinking I’ve seen him here, Annabelle. The dapper little man. I know that sounds crazy. But I was almost certain it was him—a white linen napkin tucked into his paisley waistcoat—in the classy hotel just yesterday when I was running past, and I balked, and ran faster. And then this morning I thought I saw him coming out of the public toilets near the museum. He was holding his brown briefcase with the bronze clasp.

So I must finish this quickly, and send it sooner than I’d like.

I don’t even know what I expect you to do with all this material. But I hope you understand it, and give me back what is rightfully mine. If Richard is out there somewhere, don’t you think he needs his bank account as well? But please, Annabelle, give me my money. The proceeds from the sale of my house would be a good start. Whether you like it or not, Richard married me, and I didn’t kill him and I am not dead, so what he left behind should be mine, however cleverly you have hidden it. I’m unlikely to earn any money from this story. Marcus and Debbie decided not to go ahead with any version of The Sleepwalkers in the end. They said it wasn’t clear enough whose story it was, and what actually happened. They felt it was too experimental and too dark. They said they still didn’t know who the sleepwalkers really were and who, if anyone, had killed them.

“This story,” said Marcus, when I finally got him to speak to me, “is missing something. You gotta make it clearer what actually happened. And I have to admit, sweetheart, I don’t like trafficking. Tragic love—that I do like. But trafficking? Does anyone really care? And even if they do—which I doubt—is it even your story to tell?”

“But Hamza,” I said. “He wanted to tell it, and you—”

“That kid didn’t know how to pick his moment,” said Marcus.

You know what I keep asking myself, Annabelle? Why did Richard drink the coffee? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he poured his away too. Now I’ve read the transcript I can see that he was telling me he knew about the trafficking. Did he escape? Is he out there somewhere? It’s worth keeping an open mind on that, don’t you think? But then again, maybe he was so ashamed he just wanted to die.

I don’t even blame Isabella anymore. Where had she come from, with her disguised Texan accent and her layers of costume and armor and other people’s kink? When I think of Isabella now she blurs in my mind with Chloe, the girl from Richard’s story, who disappeared into the back streets of Europe. Chloe returned in the end, but I wonder if there are people waiting for Isabella back in Texas, or wherever it is she came from. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s why.

Of course, I sent an anonymous email to Interpol as soon as I got back to New Zealand. Is that why the dapper little man is haunting me now? I imagine all kinds of ghastly weapons in his briefcase, plus his sketch pad and sticks of charcoal, to record the way he kills me. Whatever authorities ever arrived on Kathos, I imagine he will have got away with everything, and Isabella too. They are white, Western, silver-tongued. I hesitated before I reported their crimes at all, thinking it most likely that poor Hamza would take the blame like the whipping boy he always seemed to be. But then I remembered the sleek heron girl with her “Istanbul is Contemporary” bag, and how happy she’d appeared that day, and how much I’d longed to be her, because I didn’t understand who she really was.

There are tsunami hazard warnings everywhere here. They freaked me out when I first arrived, with their image of a stick figure frantically clawing his way up a steep cliff, a jagged wave rearing up behind him like the open mouth of a shark. There is absolutely no way he’s going to make it, but he scrambles for high ground anyway, wanting to stay alive, as we all do. I do hope you’ll read all of this, or even if you don’t read it, please keep it safe, for