Lost at Sea (34 page)

Back on deck 4, the man is still varnishing.

“I saw it,” I say.

“God bless her,” he says.

“It must be a very intense life, working on the
Disney Wonder
,” I say. “You’ve got those tiny, claustrophobic cabins. The passengers are very demanding. You work every day for six months. You have to be a Disney-type person the whole time, even when you’re varnishing railings. . . .”

He looks at me as if I’m nuts. “We don’t spend any time in our cabins,” he says. “We just sleep and shower there. We spend our free time in the mess hall or by the crew pool.”

A group of his fellow deck workers joins us. “Disney aren’t slave masters,” one says. “We get to go onshore. We get breaks. Everything you’ve got up here, we’ve got down there.” He points to the bowels of the ship. “We’ve got a library, a gym, a games room, a swimming pool. I don’t have a flat-screen TV or a gym at home. I have them here. The only thing I miss is my family.”

“But all that having to be on show for the guests all the time . . .” I say.

“All the big smiles and happiness,” someone replies, “it’s all real. You couldn’t act that.”

“Disney wouldn’t hire you if you weren’t that sort of person,” someone else says.

“But what about Rebecca Coriam?” I say. “Did you know her?”

A few of them nod. “She was a lovely girl,” one says. “Not emotional. Just like everyone here. Nice and friendly and happy.”

“Then why . . . ?” I say.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “But there’s nothing dark or sinister going on. This is Disney.”

Over the next few days I ask more people, and every time I get the exact same response: She jumped from the front of deck 5, at the crew pool.

“Disney knows exactly what happened,” one crew member tells me. “That phone call she had? It was taped. Everything here is taped. There’s CCTV everywhere. Disney have the tape.”

“What’s in the tape?” I ask her.

“I don’t know, but I know someone who knew her well. Would you like me to introduce you?”

And so, after everyone has gone to bed, I have a brief conversation with one of Rebecca’s closer friends from the ship.

“Do you know what was in the tape?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “Not exactly. I know she was having a fight with her partner.” He pauses. “What’s it ever about? It’s about love, relationships. There’s no mystery. She was just a lovely girl with underlying sadness.”

The next morning, as we sail back into the Port of Los Angeles, a crew member beckons me over. He says he’s heard I’ve been asking questions about Rebecca Coriam and he wants me to know that suicide is not the only possibility. Maybe, he says, after the phone call she took a walk to clear her head and the wind lifted her away.

“But the steel wall is so high down there,” I say.

“I was on the ship that day,” he says. “It was a rocky day. One time a friend of mine was called early in the morning. The deck by the crew pool was really windy and slippery, and someone was walking there, and my friend was called to get them inside. Disney took it really seriously. The guy got sent home.”

“So she could have fallen?” I ask.

“She could have fallen,” he says.

We pull into the port. This is where Mike and Ann came on March 25 after receiving a call from Disney executive Jim Orie to say Rebecca was missing. They were here in time to see the passengers disembark.

“We were hoping we could have spoken to some of them, but we never got the opportunity,” Mike told me back in Chester. Ann added: “They kept us in a car with the windows all blacked out.”

“Did you get the feeling they were deliberately keeping you away from the passengers?”

Mike: “Well . . .”

Ann: “Probably.”

“But Disney were being polite and helpful and sympathetic?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” said Mike.

After the passengers had disembarked, Mike and Ann were taken on board. They were put in a room that quickly filled with Disney executives and the girl Rebecca had spoken to on the phone at 5:45 a.m.

“Did you ask her what they’d talked about?” I asked. “Why Rebecca had been upset?”

They shook their heads. “We would have liked to have asked more, but by the time we’d flown over we were jet-lagged,” Ann said. “We hadn’t slept since the Tuesday. We flew out on the Friday. We hadn’t eaten. . . .”

“With hindsight, it might have been better if we’d gone out a little later,” Mike said.

“When you were more able to ask questions?”

He nodded. “But your daughter’s missing, so you don’t think like that, do you? Also, we wanted to be quick to meet some of the passengers.”

Mike remembered thinking, as he sat in that room on the ship, that their uselessness at getting information wouldn’t be a problem because there would be plenty of other opportunities to ask questions. They had no idea they would never have another chance.

The next day, November 1, Rebecca is discussed in the House of Commons. Her MP, Stephen Mosley, says Disney was “more interested in getting the ship back to sea than in the case of a missing crew member” and “it’s appalling” that only one policeman from the Bahamas—“an authority internationally recognized as almost toothless”—was called to investigate. He said “flag of convenience” countries such as the Bahamas, as they’re called in the shipping world, shouldn’t be left to conduct these kinds of investigations.

I call Disney. Their spokesperson tells me, “If you talked to crew members, you’ll know Rebecca’s disappearance has been difficult and heartbreaking for everyone.” And beyond that, they can say nothing much else except “The police in the Bahamas are also telling us the investigation is still ongoing. They have not shared a timeline with us, either.”

“Is it true the telephone call Rebecca made shortly before vanishing was taped?” I ask.

“That pertains to specific details about the investigation and so it’s not appropriate for us to share that kind of information,” she replies.

“Is there anything you can tell me?” I ask.

“I can tell you we wish we knew what happened as much as anyone,” she says.

The officer in the Bahamas, Paul Rolle, doesn’t return my calls.

I call Mike and Ann. I tell them about my week on the ship. When I get to the part about the waiter saying, “It didn’t happen,” Mike sighs and says, “Oh. Yeah.”

I tell them about all the CCTV cameras and Mike says, “They could have had them fitted since.” (It’s a measure of him that he’ll not descend to conspiracy theories about Disney.) I tell them about the high steel wall on deck 5, about how that sadly points to suicide, although not definitely. I ask if I’m telling them things they didn’t know.

“No, we’ve been through all this,” Mike says.

“Was there any underlying sadness?” I ask.

“No, no, no,” Mike says. “There isn’t.”

“A crew member told me Disney have a tape of the telephone conversation,” I say.

There’s a silence. “Did they say . . .” Mike pauses. “Was there any idea . . . ?”

“No,” I say. “No idea.”

I say I regret never talking to one of her really good friends on board. And then, later that night, a woman telephones. I’ll call her Melissa. She says she’d never have talked to me had Mike and Ann not asked her to.

“When did you last see Rebecca?” I ask her.

“It was at eleven p.m. the night before she went missing. We’d both just finished work, and she was trying to pull my false eyelashes off.” She laughs. “She had her head on my knee and we were chatting and messing about.”

“Where was this?” I ask.

“In the secret corridor,” she says. “There’s a whole different world underneath the ship deck. We have parties down there, private showings of films. It’s absolutely brilliant. Bex said, ‘Are you going to the bar?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ but I didn’t for some reason. And that was the last time I saw her.” She pauses. “She was the most amazing little burst of energy. You were completely drawn to her. She loved life. Bouncing around all the time. She was one of my best friends, but it could get a bit much.” She laughs again. “You come in from a heavy night and she’d be zapping around everywhere. Playing tricks on you. She’s very mischievous.”

“Someone told me she’d had a fight with her partner,” I say.

“That ship absolutely seethes with rumors,” Melissa says. “Yes. She was in a relationship, and there were problems, and it was upsetting her. It was a very, very intense relationship. It was great and then it was awful. They were both fiery, passionate personalities.”

“Do you think that’s what the call was about?”

“I can’t think of any other reason why she’d have been upset and wandering around by herself at six a.m.,” Melissa says. “From what I’ve heard, she was on the phone to a mutual friend. Not the girl she’d been having the relationship with.”

And then Melissa starts telling me some odd little things. She says after Rebecca went missing, Disney had a little ceremony. They put flowers at the wall next to the crew pool, “where they think she might have jumped from. But they didn’t say. They put these flowers down but refused to answer any questions as to why. It was left unsaid. It really stirred things up. Why are they putting them there? Nothing was clear.”

“I thought they knew she went from there because they found her slipper,” I say.

“Those weren’t her flip-flops,” says Melissa. “Mike and Ann showed them to me. They were too big. They weren’t her style. They were pink and flowery and Hawaiian. I’d never seen her wear them. Why didn’t Disney come to me or her girlfriend and say, ‘Can you identify these as Bex’s?’ Instead they put them in her room for when her parents got on board. Who does that?” She pauses. “Disney swear they’ve told us everything they know, which is that they don’t know anything, but most of us think, ‘Bullshit. Someone must know something. Someone’s covering something up.’”

Melissa has her own theory. “Bex was a bit of a risk taker. She was always pouring soap over people. Classic Bex. I was welcoming a family on board one time and she came over and rugby-tackled me to the ground!”

Melissa thinks Rebecca went to the crew pool at 6:00 a.m. to be alone, with no intention of harming herself. “She loved deck 5. It’s where we always used to go. I bet she climbed onto the wall and sat on the ledge in a ‘I need to feel like I’m off the ship for a second’ way. She wouldn’t have thought, ‘It’s very high. I might fall.’ She’d have just sat on it and thought, ‘Oh crap. What have I done?’ And fell.” She pauses. “Security on that ship is ultra-tight. You can’t get on or off without your ID card. Down by the crew pool there’s HR offices, the crew gym, the crew office that deals with passports, money, documentation. And they’re saying there’s no CCTV cameras?”

“But why would they suppress that?” I ask.

“To try to protect the brand. If it was six a.m. and they were doing their job and watching the front, someone must have seen her go over. Or if they didn’t, they’re covering up why they didn’t.” She falls silent. Then she says, “Bex made hundreds of people happy. The passengers loved her. They all loved her. You’d think Disney would give something back. They owe it to her to find out what happened.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jon Ronson’s books include the
New York Times
best seller
The Psychopath Test
, as well as
Them: Adventures with Extremists
and
The Men Who Stare at Goats
—both international best sellers.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
was adapted as a major motion picture, released in 2009 and starring George Clooney. Ronson lives in London.

ALSO BY JON RONSON

Them: Adventures with Extremists

The Men Who Stare at Goats

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry