Page 122 of The Island of Lost Girls

47 | Mercedes

‘But why does it have to be you, kerida?’

‘Because there’s no one else,’ she says. ‘You know it’s true, Mama.’

It feels like the dinner before an execution. A dinner of lifetime favourites, arranged together on their one big platter: little goat’s cheeses from the mountains, fine prosciutto, bottled artichoke hearts charred on the grill in their oil, garlic olives, a head of grilled romaine. A little bowl of anchovies. A bowl of tomatoes from the garden, sliced and dressed with the zest and juice of an orange from their tree. They eat as their ancestors have eaten for a thousand years.

But nobody has much appetite.

‘The New Capri,’ says Larissa. ‘Do you think this was what he had in mind?’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ says Felix. ‘History’s full of aristocrats gone bad. Imagine having a whole country to do what you want with.’

Larissa toys with a scrap of bread. Rolls it between her fingers until it goes back to dough. She’s grey with worry, deep lines etched in her forehead. ‘That man. Everything went bad when he came here.’

Mercedes isn’t sure who she’s talking about: the duke, or Matthew Meade.

‘Everything went bad when the old duke died,’ she continues. ‘When he came here. He didn’t grow up here, you see. He has no attachment to the land. And now he’s brought those people here, and everything is spoiled.’

It wasn’t that good when the old duke was alive, thinks Mercedes. You’re letting nostalgia make you forget. There was no Europol here then, either. You’d just vanish if you were troublesome, and everyone would pretend you had never existed.

‘Maybe he doesn’t know?’ says Larissa. ‘Tell me he doesn’t know?’

Four girls on, three girls off. I have no cosy palliatives to offer you, Mama.

‘I don’t know,’ she lies. So many lies, so many years. ‘But what we need now is for him to no longer turn his face away.’

‘But why you?’

‘Because I’m the only one who can,’ she replies. ‘I can’t let them carry on. All those girls. Think about all those girls.’

Her lost sister hangs between them. A victim of La Kastellana and the duke and, in their way, the Meades, as much as anyone.

‘And Mama,’ she adds, ‘if I succeed, I’ll be free. There won’t be any contracts in prison. They’ll be gone, and I’ll be free.’

‘I should come with you,’ says Felix. ‘I hate thinking about you doing this alone.’

She shakes her head. ‘It’ll never work. Paulo won’t let you anywhere near that room. I’m the only person he won’t suspect. If I make it look like an accident, like a domestic crisis, he’ll let me in.’

‘And once you’re in there? What then? He’s not going to just let you go through their belongings, is he?’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘he’s easily distracted. And he’s lovely, but I don’t think it’s ever occurred to him that someone like me could be a problem. I’ll tell him there’s pâtisserie in the kitchen and the clean-up’s going to take hours, and I’ll have all the time in the world. And I know where everything is. There are a thousand DVDs in those drawers. He had the videos transferred across when they upgraded the tech and turned it all to flatscreen. It’s all there. I just need a few minutes to work out what’s what and slip a few into my apron.’

‘He keeps it all on DVD?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘Of course he does. Imagine getting your cloud hacked and all that being there. Same reason they all keep their secret stuff in the vaults at the bank.’

‘Ah,’ says Felix.

‘Only people with nothing worth keeping keep stuff on the internet. She told me that once.’

Mercedes tears a fig open with her fingers, wraps a scrap of prosciutto around it and pops it in her mouth. This could be her last meal with her family. When she leaves here tomorrow, she might never come back.

‘The biggest irony of all,’ she says, ‘is that it’s the one room in the house where they don’t have cameras.’