Page 31 of The Island of Lost Girls

She’s brought the full gamut, she thinks, and smiles and smiles. All the choices. They must really want to butter that prince up. And they may look young, those girls, but they’re all old inside.

Only Paulo doesn’t smile. He’s not paid to smile.

Tatiana turns at last to the rest of her staff. Peers at them all doubtfully, as though she doesn’t know them. She really doesn’t, of course. Staff come and staff go. Only Mercedes is a permanent fixture.

One of the gardeners comes back and picks up a little pink backpack. Slings it over his shoulder. The pale little girl squeaks and starts to run towards him, hands outstretched.

‘Hanne!’ Tatiana barks. The girl halts in her tracks.

And then the honeyed voice is back. ‘No need to worry. That’s what he’s here for. You’re not in Magaluf now.’

The other girls smirk behind her back.

‘They’ll put your bags in your bedrooms,’ explains Mercedes.

The girl stares, big-eyed. Mercedes wonders where she’s been recruited from. She always wonders. They can’t just find them on the streets, can they?

‘And Mercy will unpack for you. Won’t you, Mercy?’ says Tatiana.

‘Of course,’ Mercedes says smoothly. ‘Now, would you like a drink? Food? You must be thirsty.’

‘I think we’d all like a swim,’ says Tatiana. ‘Would that be good, girls?’

‘I’ll come out to the pool,’ says Ursula.

We’re a well-oiled machine, thinks Mercedes. Nobody has any idea the muck sweat we were in yesterday.

She goes upstairs to the sound of splashing and girlish laughter from the garden. Tatiana’s luggage is piled up outside her door and she carries it in, puts the big case on the stand, the vanity case in the bathroom, the jewellery box straight into the safe. Tatiana’s private portrait stares at her from above the bed, the one that lives in the upstairs store-room. Buck-naked, back arched, a finger pressed to her lower lip, gazing at you wherever you go. She has never been able to bear to look at it for long. I knew her when she was a child, she thinks. And then: But was she ever a child? Really? And she decides to do the girls’ rooms first, while everyone is busy.

They are quartered at the back of the house. Two to a bedroom, a view of the top storey of the Casa Azul over the road blocking out the view of the mountains.

Those little girls, she thinks. We all know what they’re here for. And none of us will say a word, because what happens to them isn’t happening to our sisters and our daughters. The dukes have always kept us safe, and life is better here than it’s ever been. Who’s going to stir the pot, when there’s so much to gain? They didn’t exist for us before today, these girls. They won’t when they’re gone, either.

A bag sits on each bed – convent-like single beds like her own, in rooms of whitewashed plaster. If these girls think they’re here as equals, they will be disabused of that notion when they see where they’re sleeping. Not that they’ll be spending that much time here. Only when they’re dismissed.

They’re sweet, kiddish bags. Someone’s told them to come with hand baggage only, and they’ve all stuffed them so full she’s surprised a seam hasn’t split. She unpacks them, gingerly. In one room, the pink backpack, and a hard-shell wheelie bag in silver chrome that the owner must have been immensely proud of when she bought it. In the other, a soft-sided carry-on in a print of tropical flowers, and a black leather thing that proves, when she opens it, to contain a maze of pockets, and half a dozen compression bags which have crumpled the rolled clothes within so badly that Stefanie will be working overtime.

She tries to guess which belongs to whom. She guesses that the black one belongs to the first girl who got out of the car, the one with the legs. She had the look of someone to whom none of this was new. So the hard-shell wheelie is probably the Asian girl’s and the flowers belong to the curly girl. She gets the contents out, lays them on the beds, contemplates them. Short, tight, high, low. Not clothes for girls who plan to hide away. Four little jewellery rolls, identical, as though they’ve been given them, filled with tinny little necklaces, pendants on chains, charm bracelets, earrings. The odd precious stone so small it probably started life as a sweeping on the floor of the Tiffany atelier.

She hangs the dresses, folds underwear – tiny, scanty things of lace and satin that are more an idea than a piece of clothing – and separates them by suitcase into the small drawers at the tops of the chests. She unrolls the jewellery and lays it out on surfaces, where they can see it all and know that nothing is missing. She takes the washbags to the marble bathrooms and lays every bottle, every unguent, every battered toothbrush, out on glass shelving, like knick-knacks in a souvenir shop.

And she finds their passports, one by one, tucked into outside pockets, and slips them into the large pocket that is the one redeeming feature of her uniform. And, when she has them all, she goes and sits on a toilet, where even the Meades’ cameras don’t reach, and photographs them for Laurence.