Laila and her husband arrive for a desperately needed week’s holiday in Greece. As Laila sits by the pool, she finds herself drawn to the other family staying in their resort. Em has no idea who Laila is, or that she has been watching her and her teenage sons and husband so intently. Five days later their worlds will be blown apart by a horrifying event. The new thriller from Heidi Perks that will have you on the edge of your seat from page one.
Day Six – Thursday
I have been watching the other guests. Not obsessively, as my husband, James, accused me of last night – just peoplewatching around the pool since we arrived on Saturday. Six days into our holiday and I have seen the way the couples and families interact. You can’t help it in a resort like White Sands, you’re around the same people every day.
It’s an intimate hotel, or ‘luxury boutique’ as it refers to itself on its website. Though there are at least fifty or sixty rooms that are filled with predominantly British guests, the faces quickly become familiar. White Sands is a resort built on the northernmost point of the small island of Ixos and a long way from any villages. You can’t just walk out and amble past Greek tavernas and restaurants with waiters keen to usher you inside, like I’m used to doing.
I thought I would miss that. The fact that we would have to hire a car or go by taxi if we wanted to escape the hotel seemed like it might make the place feel claustrophobic, but then I had never stepped foot inside anywhere like White Sands before. I didn’t realise somewhere could so effortlessly sweep you up into its plush velvet sofas and perfectly aligned wicker sunbeds and make you feel that if you never left again you would be happy.
Besides, as James pointed out, there wasn’t really anywhere else to go on the island. Ixos is relatively unknown to tourists and undeveloped, save for our resort, and its only village is a half-hour drive along winding roads.
So instead I have given myself over to everything White Sands has to offer, heart and soul. My early reluctance about the holiday soon dissolved as I acquiesced that maybe James was right. That this was exactly what we needed. In spite of the cost.
Every morning I’ve woken up to go out walking before James or any of the other guests are up and about. There is something magical about stepping into the warm Greek morning air and wandering past the sunbeds, plumped with cream mattresses and rolled towels ready for guests. To see the sun rise and the water in the pool catch its first beams, dancing in ripples, before any guests have emerged to disturb the calm. To hear only the sounds of birds and the occasional words spoken by staff in a language I don’t understand.
I left our room this morning in much the same way, slipping on my complimentary flip-flops, opening the door and shutting it quietly behind me, breathing in like I had never taken a breath before. Today the bedroom had felt stifling, James splayed on his back, his mouth hanging open; clearly he wasn’t going to wake any time soon. It was the first morning of our holiday that I had wanted to get out to get away from him.
I was surprised I wasn’t feeling worse, given the amount we had both drunk the night before. Yesterday was the White Sands gala night, a high point of the week, and it had been talked about since we’d first arrived. Table service, instead of the usual buffet, and all laid out on the hotel’s private beach with live music and dancing on the sand. It was a real party atmosphere and was supposed to be such a different evening to the one it turned into. Now everything had unravelled. James and I weren’t speaking.
We had never before gone to bed on a fight. Not even after James told me he’d booked this holiday and our conversation ventured into unsafe ground, and he ended up breaking my heart with an admission I can still barely think about. Even then we’d found a way through. But not last night.
My mind was still on the events of the previous evening as I walked along the path that wove past the other rooms, each one individual and set apart from its neighbours. This isn’t a hotel with two-storey buildings; its luxury is evident in the space we have all been given, each room detached and with its own private garden.
“I couldn’t even say with certainty the exact moment I realised something was gravely wrong.”
I cut across the grass and veered away from the steps that led down to the private beach. All I could think of were James’s unkind words, my unanswered questions, and the mystery over what had happened to him yesterday when he went on the fishing trip alone. He had come back seemingly spoiling for a fight.
It was so unlike my husband, who I have known for ten years. James has always been laid-back and easy-going, eager to please me. I was surprised he wanted to go fishing in the first place; he’s never shown any interest in it before, but at the same time James is more active than I am. He has never been one to laze on sunbeds by the pool like I can for hours at a time. His Kindle is thrown into his suitcase at the last minute but rarely opened, unlike my carefully chosen pile of paperbacks, selected for a week in the sun.
I suppose it was because I was busy filtering through last night’s memories that at first I wasn’t aware of the commotion around the pool at 6 a.m., or the voices shouting at each other in Greek. I was too intent on piecing together fragments of last night and trying to fill in the many blanks to question why one of the waiters, Jonas, was racing across the path ahead of me, not stopping to wave and cheerily greet me like he usually does.
I couldn’t even say with certainty the exact moment I realised something was gravely wrong. Whether it was when I saw the crowd of staff gathered around the pool, or the seconds immediately after when I noticed the body, clothes billowing out, arms and legs in a star shape and face down in the water as they tried to pull it out.
Three hours later I am beside the same pool, only with my back to it now, and seated at a table near the bar where a detective pushes a glass of water in front of me. I hadn’t lingered here earlier, after it became clear that something was so terribly wrong. I didn’t go over to see who it was, although from where I stood I had a very good idea. Instead I turned and threw up into the bushes and then ran back to the room, my hands and legs shaking as I sat on the edge of the bed, not knowing whether to wake James or not.
I did, of course, because a dead body in the hotel swimming pool is not something you keep from your husband, even when you are both still simmering in the aftermath of a fight.
I knew that the detectives would likely want to question every one of the guests at White Sands, but this particular conversation hasn’t come about because of such a routine. This one was sprung upon me, and I have only myself to blame for leaving our room again when James specifically told me not to.
‘Was it an accident?’ I ask the detective as I hold the glass between my hands and lift it to my lips to take a sip of water. This is what James presumes. He told me so enough times earlier, though it was possibly an attempt to calm me down.
Out of the corner of my eye I see my husband pacing back and forth like a caged animal. He came out looking for me after I left our room again and found me only five minutes ago, but by then I was already sitting with the detective, who in turn ushered him away.
James doesn’t want to be at White Sands any longer, not after a death. He has suggested we look for another hotel over in Crete, but that is a two-hour boat ride away.
The detective bites his bottom lip as he mulls over what to say to me and in the end simply answers, ‘We do not know what has happened.’ His words are clipped but his English is very good. He has introduced himself as Police Lieutenant Kallis, and told me that he is in charge of the investigation.
“I say to the detective, ‘I saw what had happened this morning.’”
‘Surely it must be?’ I plead; the thought that it could be anything else is too terrifying to contemplate.
Kallis doesn’t respond and I feel the need to clear up the fact that I stumbled across the discovery of the body earlier. To tell him the truth, because James had pretended we didn’t already know at 7 a.m., when a room-service waiter delivered a breakfast I didn’t even want.
‘You cannot go to the pool today,’ the waiter had said as he’d set down the tray of pastries and berries that James had ordered.
‘Oh?’ James said. ‘Why is that?’
The young boy shook his head gravely. ‘There has been a – a drowning?’ He said it as if it were a question, though I think he was just checking he had the right word.
Now I want to be open and so I say to the detective, ‘I saw what had happened this morning.’
He raises his eyebrows.
‘Every morning I wake early and I go for a walk, and so I already saw the . . . the pool,’ I finish.
‘What time?’ he asks.
‘Six a.m.,’ I tell him. I had woken an hour earlier, but it was six when I eventually left the room. ‘But there were other people there,’ I add quickly. ‘I don’t mean I was the first to come across the body.’ The staff were already heaving it out of the water.
I squeeze my eyes shut before opening them sharply as if that will somehow rid me of the image that I have not been able to get out of my head.
Kallis makes a note in his pad and asks, ‘Mrs Burrow, you have seen the deceased before?’ He shows me a picture and I nod. ‘When was the last time?’
‘Yesterday,’ I say. ‘Some time yesterday – I’m not exactly sure when.’
‘You were at the gala night? Down on the beach?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I was.’
‘Did you see them then?’
‘Maybe. I . . .’ I think back, the night continuing to flash in distorted pictures. ‘Yes, I did.’ Of course I did. At the beginning of the evening I saw most of the guests I’d come to recognise, seated at their various tables looking happy, laughing. Later in the night I saw the way some of them gaped over at James and me. I had tried to keep my voice down, but I don’t know how much anyone else heard. ‘Only from a distance,’ I add.
‘What time did you leave dinner last night?’
‘I think it was about ten p.m., maybe ten thirty – I’m not sure.’ Most people had still been sitting at their tables, listening to the music, some of them dancing.
‘Mrs Burrow,’ he says now, ‘is there anything else you want to tell me?’
I wonder if he knows there is. That there are words on the tip of my tongue. By the way he is regarding me so suspiciously it feels like he knows I have something to tell him. My mind ticks back and forth like a metronome, not knowing if I should. Or if I can, more like.
If I’d confided in James, my husband would tell me to say nothing, keep out of it. After all, I don’t know anything with certainty. I can almost hear his words ringing in my ears. But I didn’t confide in him. I didn’t tell James anything about what happened yesterday, because I didn’t get the chance before our argument started.
Slowly, I shake my head. If I say anything I will have to admit how I know. I will have to tell Kallis what I have observed over the last five days when all the while I should maybe have been paying more attention to my marriage. Right now, perhaps the best thing would be not to say anything and focus on me and James. Somehow we have to put ourselves back together, and speaking up might be the worst thing I could do. But then what if there is a killer among us? What if my silence means they will get away with what they have done?
Extracted from The Other Guest by Heidi Perks, out now.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY
Extract: The Cloisters by Katy Hays