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63 | Mercedes
It’s hot in the guts of the boat. Mercedes curls up on a cot-bed in the maid’s cabin and waits. A few doors down, someone hammers, metal on metal. A radio, playing disco and a deep male voice singing along. The engineer, making good before he disembarks at dawn. Matthew only takes Philip when he goes on the Stag.
He knows. He must know. That’s why he’s stayed, all these years, taking his triple wages and his generous holiday allowance. All these men. Lining their nests and sending their daughters to private school and turning a blind eye because in the end what does it matter if there’s one less breeder in the world, from a place where life is cheap?
She wakes before she realises that she has fallen asleep. Someone has started the engine, and her hot little sanctuary shudders as they manoeuvre from their mooring.
He’s here. We’re leaving. Felix, please have got my message.
She thinks for a moment about activating the beacon. And then she thinks: no. If Felix’s little working boat has radar, there’s no question that the Princess Tatiana has radar ten times better. A tracking beacon igniting in her very bowels would be bound to raise an alert.
I trust him. He’s not stupid. He’ll know where I am.
She waits in the dark until the shudder turns to a throb and the gentle roll of the cot beneath her tells her that they are speeding over open water, then she lets herself back out into Matthew Meade’s territory.
She hears his voice, and freezes. Has to fight the urge to creep back to her hiding place. But Matthew never comes down the second flight of stairs. Not ever. Never goes to staff quarters, here or anywhere else. He’s on the cabin deck, and he’s on the phone. Bellowing, because he’s drunk and there’s no one to hear him.
‘Yes, gone!’ he shouts. ‘Not a bloody sign of her. Fucking Philip didn’t notice a fucking thing!’
He’s been down to Tatiana’s cabin. Her stomach lurches as she remembers. He’s sick. He must be. Torturing a teenager to her death surrounded by his middle-aged daughter’s furbelows. An animal, watching himself in the mirror as he films his ‘friends’.
Some sick animals cannot be cured. Sometimes it’s better for the whole world if they are destroyed.
Oh, lord, how blind I was. The way she climbed all over him like a little monkey, the way she perched in his lap while he sniffed her hair. But you don’t know, do you? When you’re a child. You only know the things you know about. Strange behaviour among your peers is just bad personality. It never occurs to you that there’s more to it. And the Meades were so strange anyway, to my island eyes. Everything about them was different. I had never seen such a world before. How would you know, when you’re twelve years old, where one sort of different ends and another begins?
She’s too old for him now, that’s for sure. Is that it? That everything she does is done to keep his favour? That the only way to keep him is to enable him? Him, and his friends, and in time the friends’ children. The sons invited, the girls with their faces turned blithely away for the sake of a dowry and the promise of a house like the one they grew up in. Raised to marry Men Like Daddy and pass the corruption down through the generations.
The sirenas were the Gemmas of the old world. She sees it now. Cut from the herd as their beauty flowered. Pressganged playthings for the dukes, hurled to their deaths with our willing co-operation before they could speak out and make trouble. I see it all now. I see it, and we are all guilty. Every one of us. We carry those sins in our DNA.
At least we never had children.
‘I don’t know, do I?’ he is bellowing. ‘Someone. I told her! Over and over. You turn staff over. You don’t give them time to develop petty resentments. This is where that leads, Jesus. She’s had that housekeeper for bloody ever. Literally got her when she was a teenager. Yes. No, well, she’s gone now. That’s all I know. If fucking Tatiana’s let the Greeks in through the gate, then serve her bloody right … ’
The voice drifts away towards the back of the boat, mounting the saloon stairs. She catches a glimpse of a hairy ankle as he goes.
‘Ugh. Tripoli, of all bloody places. I know. Well, yes. But frankly they’re so chaotic there that the extradition treaty’s not worth the paper it’s written on. I’ll be on the plane before they’ve even got the papers. Yeah, I’m sorry, Geoff. Nothing I can do. The money’ll be back in your account next week. Christ, of course it won’t be traceable. You think I’m a bloody idiot. Yeah, the Al Mahary. I know, right? But I suppose at least I’ll be able to get a drink … ’
He stumbles on a step. Swears. He’s really, really drunk, she thinks. Good.
She slips quietly up the servants’ stairs.
A perfect nautical night. Lights burn on the rear deck, but from her place in the shadows she can see a million stars. The moon has gone and the sea is oily black, white foam breaking over the hull as it speeds its way to Libya.
In the distance, far behind, a single light. Something small, something patient. Lacking the power to keep up, but dogging their wake nonetheless.
Felix. Let it be Felix. There is no way off this boat but over the side, and this water will be very, very lonely.
She hears him again. He’s on the rear deck, still bellowing into the phone. Through the porthole she glimpses a whisky bottle, half-empty, sitting on the bar. Good. He may be old and he may be morbidly obese, but sober she would stand no chance with him, mano a mano. He’s a big man, in every way. Not merely the giant of her childhood memories, but in real life, too. A hundred and forty kilos of thug, all the weight on his side and no conscience to hamper him.
She glances up and down the gangway to ensure that she is alone. Treads quietly from servants’ doorway to gangplank gate. Its lock is simple: a metal pin that slides into a socket and a hinge that swings outwards. Greased against rusting, the pin slides out with the gentlest of pressure. She digs in her pocket, finds one of her father’s Mediterraneo branded matchbooks and wedges it between gate and guard rail. It may be open, but it needs to look closed. She pushes it in firmly and it holds. A casual glance would reveal nothing out of place about the guard rail at all.
Matthew appears at the head of the gangway, white towelling robe and slippers, his onboard uniform, black hair shining with oil beneath the swaying light.
No, no. Not yet. I’m not ready.
She freezes. The slap, slap, slap of slowly rolling waves against the hull, the whoosh of blood in her temples. Too late to duck. The movement would be more likely to catch his eye than no movement at all.
Matthew doesn’t glance up the gangway. He just gazes out over the sea. Puts his glass to his face and turns away. Starts talking again. He’s still on the phone. Words drift down to her from metres away. Slurred, booming. Giancarlo … of course he will, the cunt … fucking Tatiana.
