Who she was, p.23
Who She Was, page 23
‘But we better go in now,’ I said.
They roared when we walked into the restaurant.
This great big throaty cheer that touched me deeply, as though we both belonged here with these people, as though we were home at last. And as though they were happy for us – more than happy – delighted, proud, and wishing us well.
Champagne flutes were raised all around us, and a young waiter I did not recognise smilingly handed a glass to my wife and me, and the glass had just been taken out of the freezer – that classy Le Poisson Imaginaire touch – it was so cold that it burned my fingers.
Champagne and hugs and kisses and congratulations. Faces – Bet and Will and Anton and Michelle and Lisa and Charlie and Paolo and Sandy. Fishermen who were struggling to make a living with their wives and children, all wearing their best clothes.
We had the entire restaurant to ourselves today, the long tables covered in white linen and silver cutlery and glass vases of coastal wildflowers. There were ox-eye daisies, also known as moon daisy and dog daisy, like a daisy, only bigger. There was pink sea thrift to ensure we were never poor, red English stonecrop that grows among the black granite cliffs, fluffy blue flowers called sheeps bit scabious because sheep can never get enough of them, and small white flowers known as dead man’s bells.
‘It’s beautiful, Anton,’ Clementine was saying. ‘Thank you.’
‘Shall we begin?’ Anton said.
The first course was lobster cocktail. Day-caught lobster landed at dawn by Will Farthing and Paolo out on the Bonnie Bet while we were all still sleeping.
There were, I now realised, a pack of young waiters waiting to serve us. They wore black and had been bussed in from some neighbouring city – probably Bristol – because it was so hard to get staff in our corner of the world these days. They were young, these boys and girls waiting with their trays of champagne and lobster cocktails. Almost certainly university students who needed to bump up their grant. And they were bright-eyed, willing, decent kids who could not stop looking at Clementine. Serving at our wedding reception was obviously just a weekend job to earn a few quid.
They stood there looking at my bride and I knew they would never forget how she looked that day.
And then there was the unexpected crash as an explosive noise broke the spell, followed by apologies and expressions of regret and a few mocking cheers.
A girl, late teens at the most. Small, pretty, black hair and eyes I had not yet seen. She was staring at the floor, the mess of broken glass and spoilt lobster and smashed plates. Other waiters, her mates, rushed to help her, to clear up the mess, to maintain the mood.
And then suddenly she looked at me. Eyes that were brown, large and shining. And I realised that all the waiters had been staring at Clementine from the moment we entered the restaurant. But one of them had been looking at me.
‘Dad?’ she said, her eyes wide with shock and horror.
That was me.
Dad.
Her dad.
She was staring at a dead man.
47
Manila was the best place to die.
P. Burgos Street is named after Padre José Burgos, a Catholic priest accused of mutiny and executed by the Spanish colonialists. It is the red-light district, teeming with all life forms in the hours of darkness, and it runs like a neon-lit river through Manila’s financial district, Makati City.
If you know where to look, you can buy anything on P. Burgos Street.
And I knew where to look.
Walk from one end of Burgos – as the locals call it – to the other and someone will step from the shadows to sell you whatever you are in the market for – drugs, Viagra, a gun or a companion for the week, the night or fifteen minutes.
But I was looking for something that would last forever.
My death.
I needed a way out of the hole that I had dug for myself.
I craved the exit door on my life.
All my research had pointed to this country, this city, and this street. The search engines all directed me to a fourteen-hour flight on Philippine Airlines to Manila, and the services rendered on P. Burgos Street. All my research had screamed – they will sell what you are looking for in Manila.
You can fake your death in the Philippines.
London had had enough of me. London was sick and tired of me. London wanted me to pay my debts. And if I did not – and if I could not – then London was ready to break my heart, my legs, my neck.
It was not poverty that brought me low.
It was debts that had grown like a tumour.
Gambling debts – my problem was as banal as that.
Scarlet Bush was wrong – I was a journalist. That was never a lie. I wrote about sport. And I bet on it too, and I made money, and then when I started to lose, I played harder, for bigger stakes.
And one day I woke up to find the hole I was in was a grave.
Sometimes your problems are so insurmountable that only death can draw a line under them.
I had done my research, of course.
And I would have far preferred to make my dramatic exit on home soil. I had to wait for an excuse to go to Manila. In the end it came – an up-and-coming young boxer who was widely predicted to be the next Manny Pacquiao. I watched him spar, train. I even went running with him and his crew. We sat down to talk in a hotel where the air con made me shiver. I even filed a 2,000-word feature. I don’t think they ever printed it.
I could not fake my death at home. The pile of clothes on the beach – or the lonely lakeside – had just been done too many times. That disgraced MP in the olden days, John Stonehouse. That man in a canoe. And Clementine, with her neat pile of clothes left on a rock in the Lake District.
None of them pulled it off for long enough, did they?
And when you are faking your death, only forever is long enough.
They even try it in the Philippines, funnily enough. Skipping out on their failing life after some pantomime of drowning. And it doesn’t work there either.
Nobody buys that clothes-on-the-shore routine any more.
Stephen Monk didn’t buy it. His stepfather didn’t buy it.
Although of course – I can’t be sure! I can’t be sure that some lucky soul did not pull off the old clothes-on-the-shore routine. Because such is the nature of – technical term – pseudocide that the ones who never get caught are the ones who you never hear about. Because they pulled it off.
And then they remain happily dead forever.
I have, you will guess, inevitably made a study of the subject.
Men – like me – almost always do it to escape debt.
Women, like my Clementine, almost always do it to escape men.
The successful disappearing act takes elaborate preparation.
And perhaps one day the world will catch on that foreigners who die in the Philippines sometimes enjoy a strange afterlife – running a lobster restaurant at the far end of England, for example.
But the world has not caught on right now. Not quite yet, and not in my time.
Manila turned out just fine for me. No, that’s not true, of course – because when a man walks away from his debts he also walks away from everything and everyone he ever loved. You tell yourself – as the years after death drift by – that they, the loved ones left behind, are better off without you.
On the good days, you even believe it to be true.
My top tip for faking your death – you have to be sure before you begin. Think twice. And then think a thousand times more. You have to be positive that you have the will to see it through to the bitter end.
What helps is if there is no other way out. What helps is when dying seems like a bloody good idea.
The initial contact was the hard part. I wanted something a bit more dangerous for all concerned than a bar girl, a gram of blow or a Beretta 92 clone from Turkey. One of the tech guys at my newspaper showed me how to access the Dark Web – research, I lied, for a piece about elite sportsmen buying performance-enhancing drugs. What I wanted was waiting for me on the Dark Web.
And I met a man in a bar called Stardust, at the unlit end of P. Burgos Street.
Stardust was a bit different from the other bars on the street because it was clean, there was a cabaret, and carefully choreographed dancing girls in elaborate costumes.
It was far more upmarket than most of the bars on P. Burgos. It was a lot less hard sell – you could drink a beer, for example, without someone sitting on your lap. Perhaps that is why, when I walked in, the place was completely empty apart from me, the guy behind the bar, and around fifty girls wearing either string bikinis or elaborate evening dresses.
And then he walked in.
Middle-aged, balding, no nonsense. He wore a barong tagalog – the traditional Filipino shirt for men, like a white dress shirt, long sleeved and buttoned at the neck, but worn outside his trousers. American accent. Educated. He told me he was a civil servant. We left it at that.
And he told me how it would be.
We ordered two San Miguel Lights.
And we began at the end as he placed my death certificate on the bar.
48
Republic of the Philippines
OFFICE OF THE CIVIL REGISTRAR GENERAL
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
It was all there on one single yellow sheet of paper.
My name – my real name – my gender, my date of birth.
My date of death, my place of death, my cause of death.
Car accident. A hit-and-run driver on Roxas Boulevard.
My hand reached out to take it. The man in the barong shook his head.
‘This is for your family,’ he said. ‘For your authorities. Don’t touch it. It goes to the British embassy on Upper McKinley Road. And then back to your country.’ He sipped his San Miguel, stared with some disapproval at the dancing girls on stage, smiling at the empty bar. ‘It goes back with your remains.’
They want you to succeed. All of them.
The policeman who reported the dead tourist run down on Roxas.
The doctor who signed the certification of death, and the second doctor who reviewed and signed the document. The funeral director who signed the burial/cremation permit (I chose cremation, an unclaimed cadaver at the morgue providing the ashes – so much more final). The registrar who recorded my death. And the man in the barong shirt in Stardust, although he scared me more than anyone I had ever met. I was terrified of blackmail. I was afraid the one million pesos bill could become ten million.
Which I did not have. I was afraid – right at the end, as the girls at Stardust danced before an empty nightclub – that I was going to be betrayed, shaken down, carted off in handcuffs.
But they all want you to succeed.
Betray one death fraudster and the industry would never recover.
That’s why it is possible. That’s why it works. That is why it cost me everything I had left in the bank – one million Philippine pesos: £15,000, plus change.
The Philippines is a poor country. And that kind of money, it changes lives. And it changed mine.
The return to the UK presented problems.
I could not, for obvious reasons, use the return leg on my Philippine Airlines e-ticket. My passport stayed with my death certificate and the other paperwork. The official police report from the Manila Police District of the Philippine National Police. An authentication certificate from the Department of Foreign Affairs, as I was a foreigner.
But I had brought another passport with me in the name of Tom Cooper, acquired online – not even on the Dark Web! – before I left home.
But Tom Cooper is not my name. That’s why Scarlet Bush could find no trace of me among the old hands of the newspaper industry. They would recognise my real name, they would remember me as a pretty good sportswriter, and not a bad bloke. He got pissed in Manila and hit by a bus, silly sod.
But once Tom Cooper was on home soil it was all remarkably easy. I knew where I was headed – the county where I had been happy as a child.
Did I say Manila had cost me everything I had in the world? That’s not quite true, for there was a Cleto Reyes kitbag waiting inside a locker at Paddington railway station that contained cash – not a fortune, but enough to start a modest restaurant at the end of England that I was going to call the Lobster Pot.
I caught the sleeper train from Paddington to the end of the end.
There was no insurance policy to cash in – the quickest way to have the authorities on your tail. That’s how they get you – asking them for money. Your death matters a lot less to the world if there is nobody holding out their hand for compensation.
I had no dying parents I had to see. I had no friends who I could not live without. My wife had tired of me, fallen in love with the single dad next door – who can blame her? – for I was preoccupied with my gambling debts. My untimely death on a business trip would, I strongly suspected, be a relief to a wife who was looking for her own way out.
But, ah, my little girl.
My daughter.
That’s who I would miss.
And I would miss her forever.
But that was the price I had to pay.
The price I paid to the man in Stardust – that one million Philippine pesos – was not the real bill. I was leaving a woman who had loved me once – whatever she said now! – but what really cut me to the bone was leaving that beautiful, special child who I would not get to watch grow up, the girl who – I thought! – I would never see again.
So, yes – fear, regret, sadness, depression, all of that.
But mostly – the shame, like a birthmark you will never remove, like a wound that never heals, like a weight that can never be lifted.
That’s what it ultimately does, walking away from your life.
It shatters those you leave behind.
But it kills you.
I stared with wonder at the daughter I had not seen for ten years.
Half her lifetime! How quickly the years fly, and how heartbreakingly out of reach they are when they are gone. All that precious time, and it could never come again.
I could see her mother in her. But I could see myself too – something about her mouth, and her eyes – and that was hard to look at. Because she was appalled by me, and by the level of deception.
By the weakness of the parent who ran away. And far worse than that – who pretended to be dead. All those years. All those lies.
My cruelty was unspeakable.
‘I didn’t do this to hurt you and your mother,’ I told her now. ‘There were some very bad men after me. I did it to protect you.’
‘To protect yourself, more like!’
‘Yes, that too. But to make a happy life possible. For you and your mother.’
Behind us, the wedding reception was struggling to know what to do. We were being watched. But they all melted away, even my bride, and there was just me and my daughter. She stood with her back to the glass wall, and the great expanse of the ocean was behind her, and that faded to nothing too.
‘She remarried. Remember Joe? The man next door with the little boy? They’re both very happy as far as I can tell. I think of him as my father. I think of Joe as my dad. And he is a good man. And do you know the greatest thing he does? He shows up. He’s there. That’s what a real father does. That’s what a loving parent does. That’s what a real man does. They show up. Get it, do you?’
She watched the hurt register on my face.
‘I want to explain,’ I said. ‘I don’t ask for forgiveness or understanding, I don’t expect you to feel anything for me but contempt. But I want you to understand why I had no choice.’
‘No,’ she said, taking off her apron, throwing it in my face. ‘Just – no. Drop dead, will you?’
It did not sound like the worst idea in the world.
49
WILL FARTHING: You won’t see Tom Cooper round here no more. Done a bunk after that maid saw him at the wedding. His daughter, turns out. Not much of a party after that, was it? Lot of tears. Lot of trauma. I don’t think anyone even tasted my lobster. Our Clem – his wife – came to see me and my missus the next morning. She thought he might have bunked down with us until it all blew over. But we hadn’t seen hair nor hide of him. Tom walked out of that wedding reception and he was gone. I have to say that at the party he looked – how can I put it? He looked as if he was at the end of everything.
Shame. Bloody shame. Lovely couple they were. But he’s gone now and I reckon he’s gone for good. He looked like a man who had had enough of life. He looked like he couldn’t stand no more. Run out of road, as the saying goes.
And what do you lads want him for? Money, was it? Like – a lot of money? Yes, that is a lot of money! Well, good luck with that. Best not hold your breath. My bet is that Tom Cooper – or whatever his real name was – chucked himself down a tin mine. Those shafts are a long way down. If you want to top yourself in these parts – if you really want to see it through, if it’s not a call for help – then you go to one of the old tin mines, and you step off the edge and you drop yourself down one of them shafts. You want to find Tom Cooper? Try looking down the tin mines. My hunch is that you will find Tom’s body at the bottom of one of them.
How many old tin mines are there in Cornwall? Ooh, I believe there are around two thousand or so.
That sound about right, Paolo?
Anyway – me and this young man are going out on the second tide soon, so we can’t stand around here yakking all day long. Yes, nice to meet you, lads. And good luck with finding Tom down a tin mine. But one word of advice for you.
The red-haired maid up at the restaurant – the Lobster Pot.
Steer clear of her, all right?
His wife. Yes, Tom’s wife. My advice – don’t go anywhere near her, hear me? Don’t talk to her.
Don’t ask her for money.
And don’t even look at her.
Because if you ever do – if you ever do – then you will have the whole of St Jude’s to answer to. That’s what we are like around here.
