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Holly didn’t even bother taking her suitcase. What did it matter? It was old anyway, and it was hardly like she was going to need a silk sarong and sequined flip-flops any time soon. What she needed was a taxi.
With countless apologies, she weaved her way out of the baggage drop queue, past the same tourist police stand she had seen when they arrived and outside into the sun, where for the first time, she stopped and considered what her next move was going to be. Before she had left, Jamie had offered to come with her, but this was something Holly needed to do by herself. Now she needed to work out how.
While taking Fin’s credit card had felt sensible in the moment, she was hit by the realisation that she had no idea how much a taxi to Monaco was going to cost. Or even how far away it was. But she wasn’t backing out now.
Not giving herself time to second guess her actions, she raced towards the taxis. Without even heading to the front of the queue, she opened the nearest back door, jumped inside and opened a search engine on her phone, ready to work out where to go next.
‘Monaco,’ she said, without looking up.
‘Where in Monaco? What is the name of the hotel?’
He may have only spoken one sentence, but something about the man’s tone made Holly look up from her phone.
A mixture of shock and disbelief hit her. There, sat in the driver’s seat, was a round-faced man wearing aviator sunglasses. This was the same taxi driver who had insisted he didn’t speak a word of English when he had taken two hundred Euros of Evan’s money from her and raced back to his cab. And now he was sitting there, speaking to her with a flawless accent. Even with the fans blowing on full, his cheeks were unusually red, while a small soul patch made his large chin look even larger.
‘You speak English?’ Holly spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I should go to the police about you, right now.’
‘And say what? That you were foolish enough to let me walk off with your money?’
He spoke with a confident lilt, though Holly noticed the way his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. If she had to make a bet, she suspected she wasn’t the first tourist he’d ripped off.
‘I’d tell them the truth. That I didn’t even see the meter and when I asked you how much the trip was, you took the money from my hands and drove off before I could stop you. You’re lucky I don’t have any time to waste or I’d be dragging you to the tourist police now.’
He emitted a loud sigh. ‘Merci.Merci.’
‘Just drive, will you? And put the meter on now. I’m not letting you get away with it again.’
His eyes glinted as he switched on the engine.
His initial cocky talkativeness was replaced by complete silence and they were several minutes onto the highway before he finally spoke again.
‘You still didn’t tell me what hotel?’
Holly looked up from her phone.
She had been worried, given her limited knowledge of luxury locations like Monaco that she would have difficulty finding out where Evan was planning on departing from. In the films she watched, it looked like every posh hotel had a helipad on top. But a quick internet search told her this wasn’t the case. At least not here. Monaco, she discovered, was only 1 square mile and the second smallest country in the world, and as such, had only one heliport.
That was where she was going.
A constant stream of questions whirred through her head, although she kept coming back to the same one: was she doing the right thing? It was certainly the craziest thing she had done. Even when she’d made a spur-of-the-minute decision to buy the sweet shop, she’d had some knowledge of how to run the place. Not to mention she’d bought it in a country she had lived in all her life with family around her. But in this moment, she was alone in the back of a taxi with a man she knew was untrustworthy with only a distant B-grade GCSE in French to get her through.
‘Will you stop that, please?’ The taxi driver glared at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘Your foot. It keeps banging on the floor. You’re going to ruin my suspension if you keep going like that.’
Holly doubted it was true, but he was right. Her knee was bouncing about like crazy. Unfortunately, she couldn’t stop it. Even when she tried and held her knee down, the tapping resumed somewhere else, like her hands.
‘Do you need the toilet?’ The taxi driver spoke with a hint of fear. ‘These seats are only just cleaned. You’ll pay extra if you make a mess.’
‘I don’t need the toilet,’ Holly said indignantly. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t pay you extra for anything. I’m just nervous, that’s all.’
‘About the helicopter? You should be nervous. Scary things. Never liked them.’
Holly was starting to think she liked the taxi driver better when he was pretending he didn’t understand her. But at least talking to someone was helping to diminish her endless rollercoaster of thoughts.
‘No, not about the helicopter. I’m not going on a helicopter. I just need to speak to someone who is there.’
‘A pilot? Helicopter pilots are the worst. The way they look down on our taxis. My brother-in-law, he is a helicopter pilot. You should hear him at Christmas. Easter. Every time: helicopter this, helicopter that.’
While the taxi driver continued to rant about his brother-in-law, flicking between French and English, Holly questioned again and again whether she had lost her mind. What if Evan really had needed to go early? What if it hadn’t been an excuse not to see Holly? What if she got to the heliport, found he had already gone, and she was stuck there, entirely on her own, with only Fin’s credit card? She shook her head and tried to push the thoughts from her mind. She didn’t know how to explain it, but she could feel it in her gut. Evan was going to be there. They were meant to be together. Never in all her days had she felt it before, that certainty that she was meant to be with someone. The assurance that the fates would align to make sure it happened.
