Page 144 of The Island of Lost Girls

60 | Mercedes

I hate you.

Rage is a white light. It eradicates colour, obliterates shade.

I hate you.

Her palms itch. She wishes she were holding a carving knife.

She leaves the Casa Amarilla for the last time and strides the silent cliff road. Blank black windows gaze balefully, lights extinguished, as though the world has ended. As though there were no one left but her. The residents are up at the castle, preening. Swanking through the Great Hall, kissing the air around each other’s ears.

Damn them. Damn them all to hell: the duke, his sycophants. If there were justice, it would burn to the ground with them all inside.

I hate you, barks her heart, in time with the rhythm of her steps. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

I hate you, Matthew Meade. Three decades I’ve carried my grief and my guilt in equal measure. Blaming my neighbours, blaming myself, blaming my mother and father. And now I would give anything to have that guilt back, if it meant I would never know what you did to her. What sort of world allows a man like you to live? What sort of God?

A big black car crawls towards her up the hill, and she steps off the road to let it pass just as the first firework, crimson and gold and blue, bursts into the air above the castle battlements. Her brain hangs for a moment. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And then she comes back to herself and strides on towards the lights of Kastellana Town.

The Re del Pesce is still open. Late diners, nursing coffee and limonxela as the staff set up for morning service. Larissa comes to greet her.

The world tilts.

I cannot tell my mother, she thinks. It will kill her.

‘It’s done,’ she says. ‘I’m going to the boat. To wait for him.’

Larissa searches her face. ‘Something’s happened,’ she says, and Mercedes feels her face twist with rage. She turns it away.

‘He’ll go,’ she says. ‘The minute he realises he’s been uncovered, he’ll be on that boat and out of here, and I can’t let that happen.’

Larissa speaks slowly. ‘Mercedes,’ she says, ‘be careful.’

For a moment – just a moment – she wonders if she has the strength. If this rage of hers is just driving her to her own doom. And then she remembers her sister’s face, on that screen, and she is filled with white heat.

He cannot leave tonight.

She hands her mother her phone. ‘Can you look after this?’

Larissa looks doubtful.

‘They can track where I am,’ she tells her. ‘By its signal. Call Felix.’

‘And tell him what?’

‘He’ll know. Tell him I’m on the boat. Tell him I’ve got my beacon with me,’ she says. ‘He’ll know.’

She has no plan. Just an intention. The plan will come.

She punches the code into the pad and walks through the tunnel in the harbour wall. Deep dark and damp inside, yellow sulphur lights at the far end. She’s always hated it in here. The sense of going from one world to another, the fear of what might be waiting.

Someone steps into the far end and she freezes. It’s someone huge, and weirdly bulky. They fill the opening, block the dim light from the marina, and they’re advancing at alarming speed. An ogre, striding towards her in a place with no escape. And then he gets closer and she see that it’s Paulo, huge Paulo, with the girl Gemma in his arms.

‘Get the gate,’ he calls.

She jogs the way she’s come.

Paulo strides past. Bursts the gate open with a kick.