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I turn my head to catch the attention of Luís, one of the young waiters hovering behind the bar, and wave my fingers at him. He smiles and nods his acknowledgement before trudging across the beach to reach me. The staff here are so attentive. I ask him if hewouldn’t mind moving my sun lounger so that I can take shelter under the parasol. ‘Of course, Senõra Harper,’ he chirps, and helps me to my feet before rearranging the position of my sunbed. Nothing is too much trouble for him and I tip him a handful of pesos.
I glance out towards the sea and squint when I catch motion before the horizon. It’s a pod of dolphins breaking through the water’s surface and spinning through the air in an arc-like formation. I smile and raise my glass to them. It’s taken me almost eighty-five years but I finally know how it feels to be free like them.
Further out is the motorboat that brought us to shore, and behind that,The Adventurer, the luxury cruise liner I’ve spent the last month of my life aboard. Most of my fellow guests are either enjoying excursions inland or have remained onboard, enjoying one of the many bars or entertainments on offer to us all. But I prefer to make the most of the beaches, as and when I can. I’ve wasted too much of my life cooped up indoors to spend my remaining days living that way.
It’s my first time in El Mirador but the second time I’ve visited Cancún in the year I’ve been travelling. It’s become one of my favourite places on earth and I now have a good number of journeys under my belt to compare it to. I’ve enjoyed cruises around Europe, the Bahamas and Australia. But I’ve decided Mexico is where my heart lies. The people, the aromas, the food, the sights and sounds ... all of it makes my heart sing in a way I have never heard it do before.
The money from the sales of both houses barely had time to make a dent in my bank account before I made a withdrawal to pay for my first cruise around Europe. It lasted six weeks and I enjoyed it so much that I booked a second while I was still onboard the first. But the trip I’m on now is a little different. I’m four weeks into a mammoth two-hundred-and-eighty-day worldwide journey. I’llbe taking in six continents, sixty-two countries and a hundred and fifteen ports. And my residency ticket means I get to keep the same cabin for this tour and the one after that. The only time I’ll be away from this ship is for a few short weeks when routine maintenance work takes place between excursions. And I’ve already planned and paid for what I’ll do then. I’ll be on a shorter trip around the British Isles and Europe. It’ll be like taking a holiday from a holiday.
I no longer have a permanent base back in England. At my time of life, this should terrify me. But it doesn’t, which confirms in my mind that I’ve made the right decision. I am a million miles away from what I thought was my comfort zone, and for the very first time, life is exhilarating. I don’t ever want to go back because I have everything I could ever need here. It’s all done for me – my meals, washing and dry cleaning, there are onboard cabarets and singers every night along with sports to play, a spa, a library and three cinemas. I’m one of almost nine hundred passengers and the vast majority are retired, like me. We call ourselves the Silver Sailors – a community of floating expats from every corner of the globe, all from different walks of life but with the same shared sense of adventure. We aren’t willing to give up the ghost just because that’s what society expects of us. We plan to live our lives, not spend what’s left of them reflecting on what has been and gone. Each day we meet for lunches and dinners, we take spa breaks together or exercise, or visit the mainland on excursions. I didn’t realise just how gregarious I was until I woke from my hibernation. My social life hasn’t been as extensive or exciting as this since my university days.
My cabin is spacious enough for me to relax and spend time alone when the mood takes me. My bedroom and bathroom are the size of the entire ground floor of my old house. I have access to doctors, a physiotherapist, masseuses and a dentist if I need them. I still use my walking stick to get me about, but my joints haven’t felt as flexible in years. And I love my new knees! The surgeons at the Sheba hospital in Israel have a reputation for being some of the bestin the world for good reason. And exercise, the sun and a lust for life are marvellous tools for recovery. Who wouldn’t want this life?
Sometimes I take a step back from myself and wonder if this is all real, or whether I’ve suffered a colossal stroke and I’m actually lying in a hospital bed and this is all in my imagination. Only when I pinch myself and watch my skin redden do I accept this is my reality and will be until the day I die, God willing. It really is the perfect existence. And I have Gwen, Connie and Paul to thank for it all.
I don’t like to dwell on the past anymore, but I briefly allow my mind to wander back to my Hampton-in-Arden home. I thought I’d see out my days under the same roof I’d spent most of my life under. I remember when Covid struck and my social life was obliterated by the first lockdown. By the second, I’d lost my confidence in going out and seeing other people. By lockdown number three, I was completely alone. I remained in my foxhole, not seeing anyone but the postman for weeks and weeks at a time. I’m not ashamed to admit there were occasions when I considered emptying all the pills prescribed for my various ailments and swallowing them in one go. Because the thought of living another decade like that left me empty. And then Connie turned up on my doorstep and changed everything. She gave me options and I will always be grateful to her for that, even if it wasn’t what she intended for me.
I had fallen for her story, hook, line and sinker. I had no reason to doubt she was being anything other than completely honest about her relationship with Gwen. Even when she slipped in the conversation about Gwen leaving her the estate in her will, I thought nothing of it. She had looked after my cousin, so why shouldn’t she be rewarded for it? And then, after what Paul tried to do to her ... well, I thought, that money might help her until she was able to recover, return to Italy and pick up her career again as a wedding planner.
And then Paul’s letter arrived.
A few hours after being charged with the murders of Gwen and those other unfortunate souls, he wrote to me. Across three detailed pages, he explained Connie wasn’t who she claimed to be; that she was a career criminal and con-woman who, like him, had edged her way into Gwen’s life with the sole purpose of taking her money upon her death. Only Paul wasn’t willing to wait around as long as Connie was.
While he stopped short of admitting to any actual crimes, he was eager to reveal all he knew about his adversary. In a package that arrived later the same week, each of his accusations was proven with factual, tangible evidence, supplied by an unnamed associate of his. There was a copy of her criminal record, birth certificate, passport and driver’s licence, and bank statements including her withdrawals from Gwen’s accounts for her own use. Unless they were elaborate forgeries, together they made damning evidence. He also warned it was likely she was targeting me next.
Words like ‘shocked’, ‘dismayed’ and ‘disappointed’ do not do justice to how let down this left me. I wrote back to him, asking why he was contacting me with this, especially after murdering my cousin. He informed me, honestly, I suppose, that his only motive was to ensure that, like him, Connie was stopped from inheriting anything of Gwen’s. He knew the evidence was weighted against him but until he was found guilty or confessed to his crimes, her estate still technically belonged to him.
But if I was to organise a lawyer of my own, he would sign everything over to me.
My answer was immediate.No, I wrote.I don’t want anything to do with your blood money. That level of deception might be second nature to people like Connie and Paul, but not to me. I’ve led an honest life and I’ve hurt no one, even when I’ve been provoked.
I informed him by return of post that even if I did want a change, I didn’t need him to do it. I had access to Gwen’s will and if I made it disappear, it would go to probate and everything would end up with me anyway, being Gwen’s sole surviving relative.
It’s six months until my trial, and you could be waiting up to a year after that until it’s in your name, he wrote back.Do you really have all that time on your side? Why wait when it can all be yours in a couple of months? I’d already drained Gwen’s bank account and changed ownership of the property into a business account in the Cayman Islands before my assets could be frozen. But you need to act quickly before it’s traced and the recovery process begins.
He made a compelling argument and set the cogs in my brain spinning. Neither Paul nor Connie deserved Gwen’s money, but after what my cousin had put me through, I did. I asked myself a question I should perhaps have asked many moons ago. Where has being a decent human being got me? Unmarried, childless, with very few surviving friends and waiting to die alone. I had long known and accepted that I was one of life’s also-rans ... someone who had allowed the world to pass them by because they were too afraid to make changes by themselves. I had never lived anything close to what young people today call ‘my best life’. I didn’t have the foresight, ambition or access to finances to do that. But now Paul was offering me a way to completely alter my future. And the decision was mine.
So I wrote back to Paul and told him yes, I’d accept his offer. Then I set the wheels in motion, using my savings to hire a lawyer to discreetly begin what was necessary.
In the meantime, I kept from Connie what Paul had told me of her. We texted regularly and continued to speak on the phone weekly while she was recovering in hospital and then after her release. I gave her every opportunity to tell me the truth about who she was and how she and Gwen had really met, but she kept up hercharade. I’d ask questions about her family and background, her ‘work’ in Italy, her previous careers, but nothing she revealed bore any resemblance to the documents Paul had sent. If she couldn’t be honest with me, she didn’t deserve my honesty in return.
Nine weeks before Paul changed his plea to guilty on the day of his trial, Gwen’s estate legally became mine. And the clock was ticking. My house and hers were uploaded to an online auction site in the same week, as I didn’t want estate agents showing potential buyers around Gwen’s and alerting Connie or her neighbours to what was happening. I also insisted on cash-only buyers to speed up the transactions. Gwen’s home was immediately snapped up by a builder while mine was sold to a landlord. Then, once the money from both transactions was deposited into my account, I sold all my belongings to a house clearance company. I bought my tickets for my first cruise, and booked a driver to take me to Portsmouth, where I stayed for a few days in a four-star hotel before my ship set sail.
A week before Connie was to visit my house, our liner was navigating the Mediterranean Sea and preparing to dock in Barcelona when she began calling me, multiple times. I diverted them all to voicemail so that she wouldn’t hear a foreign ringtone.She knows what I’ve done, I thought and I waited until we reached calmer waters and when the sound of the boat slicing through the waves died down. Her message sounded worried, not angry, and I realised she had yet to discover the truth. When I called her back she was completely oblivious to my location on the top deck of a ship, and that it was the wind blowing through my hair and not a hairdryer at the village salon. She was concerned when I hadn’t answered straight away, which gave me a brief stab of remorse. I wondered if perhaps she did care for my well-being after all, until she reminded me she was coming to pick up Gwen’s will the following week. That was what she cared about, not me. I bet I wouldn’t have seen herfor dust once it was back in her possession. What she did to Gwen was far worse than what I was doing to her.
Sometimes I try and imagine her face when she found my home was empty of all belongings. If it was anything like the many voicemails she left afterwards, she will have run through a full gamut of emotions. Her reaction reminded me of the five stages of grief. To begin with, she was confused as to where I was and wanted to know why I hadn’t told her I was moving. Then came the frustration as to why I hadn’t called her back. Next came anger over the missing page of the will, followed by denial that I could have done such a thing. Finally, she finished with near-hysterical threats.
As the months have progressed, her calls have continued, although less so now. In some, she is angry and swears a lot; in others, her speech is slurred as if drunk and her words are more of a running commentary on her life now. She complains about how someone has stolen her handbag from the hostel she’s been staying at. She sobs as she recalls how she has been arrested for shoplifting, and somehow I’m to blame. Sometimes she hurls more abuse at me and in other messages she begs me to help her financially. And in the last call I received, about six weeks ago, an operator explained the call was coming from a women’s prison. I hung up. One can only assume that things took a very sharp turn in the wrong direction for Connie.
I think of Paul on occasion and how his first letter altered everything for me. He will be approaching his second year behind bars now, if you include his time on remand. There will be another thirty years to go of his sentence before he’ll be able to apply for parole. But in all likelihood, he will be long dead by then, which is no more than he deserves. Regardless of his actions, I have sent him a few colourful postcards of my journeys along the way. If nothing else, they might brighten up his cell and he can see how the money has not gone to waste. I hate him for what he did to those otherwomen. However, I cannot be angry with him for what he did to Gwen. The cruelty with which he treated my cousin is beyond belief, but it was every bit deserved. A painful, lingering death like the one she suffered couldn’t have happened to a better woman.
She and I were bonded by blood and we should have been friends for life. Our mothers were first cousins and had a close relationship in childhood and as adults. However, Gwen and I didn’t replicate their friendship. Neither of us had brothers or sisters and only five months separated us. In personality, we were as far apart as the continents I sail to now. I was kind and thoughtful while Gwen was spoiled and jealous of me. But we were forced to spend time together either on annual family holidays to the Norfolk Broads and Scotland, or at each other’s houses during the long summer school breaks.
There was always an intense rivalry between us, and a day wouldn’t pass without us bickering over something trivial. If my parents gave me a gift, she would whine until hers bought her something similar, or better. If I caught the eye of a boy, Gwen flirted like crazy until his attention was drawn to her. I dreaded her extended visits as she belittled me in front of my friends to win laughs and favour. It was as if she feared that she did not exist if she wasn’t someone’s priority.
I excelled both academically and at sports, and because she didn’t, there were plenty of reasons for Gwen to resent me. The only things she possessed and that I lacked were good looks and confidence. I’d have to use make-up, spend time styling my hair and wear something modern to earn attention. All Gwen did was ruffle her curls, stick out her chest and wait for the opposite sex to swarm around her like bees to a honey pot.
But William was different. He was immune to her charms. We met at a party during our first year of university. I was studying chemistry and he was in the midst of a business and finance degree.Possessing such a serious speciality, I expected him to be as equally intense. Yet he was the opposite. He was such a quick-witted boy with a knack of doing pin-sharp impressions of lecturers and friends we had in common. We became besotted by one another, and fifteen months later, he got down on one knee and proposed on New Year’s Eve. Of course I said yes. I felt safe with him and I was sure I had met my soulmate, even though we had barely left our teens. Gwen had her own boyfriend at the time, but I could tell he was only there for her to pass the time with. The grass was always greener on the opposite side to Gwen.
