Page 133 of The Island of Lost Girls

Tatiana throws him a look of pure malevolence.

‘Must’ve been a hell of an offer,’ says Sara. ‘She’s left all her stuff.’

‘Probably didn’t want to wake you up,’ says Tatiana.

‘I don’t think anything would have woken me up last night,’ says Wei-Cheng. ‘I don’t think I even finished my nightcap.’

‘She’s left literally everything,’ says Hanne. ‘Her clothes. Underwear. Even her earrings.’

‘Ooh!’ says Wei-Cheng, perking up. ‘The diamond ones?’

‘Yes!’

‘You might as well go and divide it all up,’ says Tatiana. ‘She won’t be back.’

‘What, even the jewellery?’

Tatiana sighs. ‘If she wants a sugar daddy,’ she says, ‘he can bloody well buy her kit himself. Besides, I gave her those earrings. I guess I can take them away again.’

‘Ooh!’ says Wei-Cheng again, and suddenly there’s a flurry of getting up and running, droplets sparkling in the air as their feet flip from the pool. The teenage capacity for recovery. Hanne, nearest to the shallow end, is out first, and has a good three-metre lead on the others, despite her limp and her gammy hand. She lopes into the house, cackling in triumph.

And that’s how it goes, thinks Mercedes. Show people the shiny things and they’ll forget the questions they should have asked. Just like my father. One glimpse of Mediterraneo, and he might as well have never had an older daughter. I hope that girl’s okay. That she’s still alive. That something didn’t happen already, in the night.

Her smile is beginning to hurt. There’s nothing she can do right now. She just has to keep her game face on, and hope.

The adults watch the girls’ retreating backs with amused smiles on their faces.

‘And that,’ says Matthew Meade, ‘is why I will never be poor. People will do anything for money.’

Bruce Fanshawe’s eyes narrow, like a basking lizard’s. ‘It’s the things they don’t know they’re going to do for money that really interest me these days,’ he says.

They all laugh.

The actor finds his querulous voice. ‘Are you really going to let her speak to your guests like that?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘Your maid.’

‘Oh, shush,’ says Tatiana. The honeymoon is definitely over. ‘She’s devoted to us. I’ve known her since she was twelve years old.’

Mercedes retreats to prepare for the clean.

Tatiana’s voice follows her through the house. ‘Mercy will do anything I say. Did I ever tell you about the time I pissed on her?’

She follows her employer down the corridor. Stands politely with her back turned while she keys in the code, picks up her bucket and her bleach when she hears the door slide back. When she turns, she is hit by a gust of old smells. They’ve left the room closed with the air-con off all night and it’s matured. Abandoned alcohol, cigar smoke. Something salty. Something faintly faecal. It smells of death, she thinks, and pulls on her rubber gloves. Even the air feels dead.

Tatiana doesn’t comment. Not on the smell, not on the mess. She can’t imagine ever reaching such a state of entitlement that she wouldn’t apologise for leaving someone else to deal with a room like this.

But of course, they literally pay us, yuh?

‘Let me know when you’re done,’ she says, ‘and I’ll lock up.’

‘I may be a while,’ Mercedes says. Under the ceiling spotlights, she sees sticky patches on pretty much every surface. Stains. On the carpet, on the seats of the chairs. She long since passed the point where anything she has to clean in this house brings on nausea. She has heard that there are specialist firms on the mainland that clean up after murders, or when some lonely individual dies and nobody notices until their viscosities start leaking through the ceiling into the floor below. I’d be good at that, she thinks, stepping over the threshold. Only, on La Kastellana, we don’t leave people to die alone.

‘Whatever,’ says Tatiana, and goes back to her party.

On the table, among the bottles and the ashtrays, lies a little pile of cable ties, closed and then cut open. She knows what they will have been binding. I hate them, she thinks, as she crosses the tacky carpet to fill her bucket at the kitchenette sink. They’re disgusting. Wicked, and disgusting. They deserve everything that will happen to them. Everything.

This job will take at least two hours. When she’s finished, she’ll put the plug into the sink, turn the tap on and close the door.