He took the hand from behind his back and held it out for me. My stomach dropped, like it was going over a humpback bridge. But when I saw what was in his hand I laughed with relief. It was a giant pouch of Haribo gummy bears.
‘She said sweets are her guilty pleasure,’ he said, a giant smile on his face. ‘Pineapple Goldbears are her favourite. There’s some in there. Just a thank-you.’
‘Right,’ I said. And I was about to tell him the truth about Christina, but he had already turned away.
‘Thank you,’ I said. And I felt guilty for judging him, as the metal gate clanked shut behind him. I heard a car door shut. Then electronic music sounding like a very loud heart palpitation.
La vida imposible
I went online.
I had brought my laptop. My ten-year-old laptop with a Harley-Davidson sticker on it. It had been Karl’s – the Harley-Davidson sticker to add a frisson of danger to his civil engineer life – so to upgrade it would have felt like betrayal. Not that he had ever actually owned a motorbike.
I typed ‘Christina van der Berg’ into Google.
I saw the piece on the Diario de Ibiza website which Pau the taxi driver had mentioned. When I translated it, the phrase ‘disappeared presumed drowned’ stood out. She had booked a midnight dive at Atlantis Scuba and had never returned. Alberto Ribas had been taken in for questioning and then let go.
I added the word ‘psychic’ and there was just one mention, in relation to a list of stalls at Las Dalias market, so I went back to just her name again.
A few things came up. Mainly related to her singing at a hotel called the Buenavista in Santa Eulalia, years ago. There was a photo of her at a nightclub called Ku in 1986, and a different one of her, starstruck, with Freddie Mercury – but clearly on the same night as the framed photo on the wall. This was, apparently, Freddie’s forty-first birthday party at Pikes Hotel and she was one of several local acts that performed there that night. In this one she was wearing a little bowler hat, like Sally Bowles in Cabaret. This was the same place, I discovered, where the pop group Wham! had filmed the video for ‘Club Tropicana’ a few years before. It all seemed a very glamorous world.
I felt proud of her, as I kept researching. A mention of her and a friend, way back in 1981 at a nightclub called Glory’s on an English Instagram page called ‘Ibiza Nostalgia’.
This was very much the Christina I remembered, but with slightly more make-up and bigger hair. Then there was a photo of her looking greyer in the Diario. She was standing with two others holding a banner that read, in English, NO OIL. The article’s text was in Spanish so I put it into Google Translate and it was about protests held in Ibiza Town in 2014 against a Scottish oil firm’s plan to drill for oil off the coast of Ibiza. A plan that, further research told me, never happened because the protests were so strong. Ten thousand people marching through Ibiza Town. The same number that had protested against a golf course at Cala d’Hort a few years before. There was another mention of her in relation to a protest against a hotel at Cala Llonga too.
I tried something else. I typed ‘Alberto Ribas’. I found a mention of him on a blog called the Roving Sceptic, in an article titled ‘Scientists Who Lost the Plot’:
Alberto Ribas. This once respected marine biologist was a former oceanography graduate of the University of Vigo, before teaching in the US at the University of California and then numerous Spanish and South American universities.
He was one of the first people to draw attention to the hazard of microplastics in the ocean and has authored several books, on a variety of subjects from algae to sea turtles to the ecology of coral reef systems. He was widely discredited after publishing a paper on the Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadows of Ibiza and Formentera. The paper concluded that the seagrass has managed to live as a single organism for over 100,000 years because of a ‘peculiar and ethereal presence within the water here, occasionally manifesting as an abnormal light with unnatural properties, which bears no relation to algae and does not appear to have an earthly origin’.
Ribas’s belief that some extra-terrestrial force inhabits the Mediterranean saw him kicked out of the International Society of Marine Biology back in 2016, and lost him his post at the University of the Balearic Islands, located in Palma, Majorca, when subsequent independent studies found no evidence to back his claims. Dr Ribas, however, doubled down and even self-published a book called La vida imposible – or Impossible Life in English – claiming that he had proof of many occurrences of life forms that scientists consider ‘impossible’ existing here on planet Earth, primarily in the Balearic Islands.
Okay, I thought. An insane person. One of those insane people the taxi driver had talked about. And maybe Christina had been mad too, and maybe that is why she left me – a virtual stranger – a house here.
The Alberto Ribas search also led me to the website of Atlantis Scuba.
I clicked on it and saw two flags – one Spanish, one British. I clicked on the British one and arrived at the English-language version of the site and a beautiful photograph of two divers swimming in crystalline waters.
‘Leave your troubles on the land and explore another world,’ read the text. ‘Another universe of natural beauty and wonder. A place of calm…’
I clicked through some more pictures. Some people on a boat in diving gear. Christina was among them.
She was next to an older man with a beard. I recognised him from the piratey author photograph. Alberto himself. He still looked made for the sea. He was also smiling, widely, like Christina. But there was a possible malevolence to his gaze. I don’t know why, but I had an uneasy sense just looking at him. There was some text about the importance of ocean conservation. I flicked through some more photos, with a feeling that made my mouth go dry.
A fluorescent sea creature; a diver heading into a cave; an octopus; a moray eel; another diver visiting the shipwreck of the Don Pedro, the text explaining that it was a boat that sank a few kilometres from the Port of Ibiza in 2007; an orange rockfish swimming through a coral reef.
And then an image of a vast plant. An underwater meadow of seagrass. In the clearest, cleanest water imaginable, with fractured sunlight breaking through the ocean and a school of small silver fish in the background. It was, quite possibly, the most beautiful photograph I had ever seen. A fleeting feeling came over me. Something different to the rising fear. Something alongside it. Wonder, I suppose. A magnetic, forceful kind.
I stared at the television a little, as the temple containing the Holy Grail collapsed around Sean Connery and Harrison Ford, then I turned back to the laptop. I clicked it open to the photo and that’s when I saw something new. Something small and missable. A tiny golden object amid the seagrass.
I zoomed in.
And this is the moment it became terrifying. Being all alone in that new house, on that new island, feeling miles away from everything I’d ever known, imagining olive jars filling themselves with water, and plants appearing out of nowhere. And now this. Something most peculiar was definitely happening. I couldn’t work out the odds, but they were seemingly many millions against. Yet there it was, sitting at the bottom of the sea. Something that I truly felt had belonged to me. The detail was sharp enough for me to see not only the colour of the necklace, but the image of St Christopher on the pendant itself.
I had not a single doubt in my mind that this was the exact same necklace I had given to Christina back in 1979, that Christmas, shining like lost hope.
Please Stay Away from Mr Ribas
The Guardia Civil officer, a man of indeterminate age, sat behind his desk in his immaculately ironed short-sleeved military-green shirt staring at Christina’s letter to me. He chewed gum as he read it. There was the soft glitter of sweat on his frowning scalp.
He exuded suppressed emotion. He was a clenched fist of a man.
‘I know that you are still conducting an investigation into Christina’s disappearance and I thought this might help. Even though there is not much there.’
He gave the smallest of nods. Growled a little to himself. Then spoke to me in a gruff Spanglish. ‘Es verdad. There is not so much there.’
‘But it tells us that she knew. She knew she was going to die…That has to be significant. I should also tell you that there was a necklace in the water. I saw it in a photograph online. I had given it to her. It was a St Christopher.’
The policeman looked up at me. A man of few words and gestures. He had a spherical, shaven head and no beard. There was no expression in his tired eyes. ‘Cuándo?’
‘Sorry?’
‘When?’
‘I don’t understand.’
I sensed his frustration. He muttered something to himself in Spanish. Then asked: ‘When did you give the necklace?’ He gave the question reluctantly, like coins to someone begging.
