Page 102 of The Island of Lost Girls

‘Is that a computer?’

‘Yah,’ says Tatiana.

Mercedes goes over to look at it. ‘I’ve heard about these,’ she says. It doesn’t look the way she’d expected it to. A series of boxes made of creamy plastic, a clunky keyboard that looks like a kid’s toy and a TV that even to her eye is way out of date.

‘They’re the wave of the future,’ says Tatiana. ‘They’re working on making one you can carry in a suitcase, you know. Daddy’s thinking about buying one.’

‘What is this place?’ She looks around again. With all its technology, it’s like being on a spaceship.

‘It’s a safe room.’

‘Safe room?’

Tatiana rolls her eyes. ‘In case of home invasion.’

‘Of what?’

Another eye-roll. ‘Oh, Mercedes. You’re such an innocent. It’s where you lock down if you get invaded.’

‘But who by?’

‘Robbers,’ says Tatiana, and she seems almost blasé about the words. ‘Terrorists. Political activists.’

‘I … on La Kastellana?’

‘Oh, Mercedes. Everywhere.’

Tatiana slides the door shut. ‘Three-inch-thick steel walls,’ she boasts. ‘And the door’s the same. And, if we press this button, security forces will be here literally days before anyone could cut through and get us.’

‘Security forces? Does the duke know?’

Tatiana laughs. ‘Duh. He has one of his own!’

A safe room. In a medieval fortification. It must be the safest place in the world. In the old days, the whole population would run for the castle at the first sign of a Moorish sail on the horizon. She wonders vaguely when it was that the dukes first started to shut them out.

She wanders the room, running her fingers over the smooth wood. ‘But how do you know who’s outside?’ she asks. ‘How do you know when it’s safe?’

‘Ahh,’ says Tatiana, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

She bends over the computer keyboard and starts rattling the keys, and the screens spring to life. Eight different views of Casa Amarilla. The party roaring on, the frenetic bustle in the kitchens and the staff quarters, the empty courtyard with its glistening fountain. Tatiana hits a key and the images change: her father, jiggling the change in his trouser pocket and talking to the duke; her mother, clinging to the wall, alone and awkward; her sister sitting on a banquette in the dark with a group of younger people, laughing as though she belongs there. And Sinjora Bocelli, the notary’s wife, in a bathroom, slipping a silver dish complete with bar of soap into her capacious handbag.

On the dining-room table stands an architect’s model of card and balsa nearly three metres long. The dining chairs – thrones in gold and Perspex – have been pushed back to line the walls, and people mill about, surveying it.

It takes Sergio several moments to recognise Kastellana Town. But there it is: the harbour front dwarfed by the spread of buildings either side. He recognises their soaring cliffs, built roughly from papier mâché. The new marina, its water a startling artificial blue, is filled with rows and rows of identical boats the size of his restaurant.

He comes in closer to study the detail. Here is the church, its dome and tower higher than the buildings on the square around it, as a church should be. But, on the market square, the ramshackle seventeenth-century houses on the sides closest to the sea have been replaced by apartment blocks six storeys high. The square itself is filled with tiny plastic tables and tiny paper parasols and people the size of ants. And the people who sell the spare produce from their land, piled up on old blankets on the pavement, are gone.

Along the new road they came up this evening, the land has been fenced off, subdivided and filled with houses like this one. To the west, the Via del Duqa is cut off at the end by the huge single-storey structure, the restaurant he’s been watching take shape all summer. Beyond that, the Via de las Sirenas has been extended all the way along the cliffs, almost to the old Roman cemetery where Larissa’s mother’s house stands, and lined with more apartment blocks and a huge hotel that looks as if it should be in Paris.

‘Oao!’ he says, out loud.

‘What do you think?’

He looks up to see who’s speaking, and a frisson chills his skin. He is being addressed by the duke.

Sergio bows. It’s one thing serving him in his restaurant. Something quite else to have him engage you in conversation.

‘Phase Two,’ replies the duke.