‘You protested against one of their hotels. In Cala Llonga.’
Marta looked at me. Alberto looked at me. It was a collective realisation.
‘You know about the goats, don’t you?’ I asked them both. ‘The goats that were shot on Es Vedrà for the hotel?’
Alberto nodded, his face dappled in shade. ‘Yes. I felt it the moment I saw you. After the lobsters.’
This troubled Marta more than the glass. ‘Why didn’t they just move them?’
‘Because the person who gave the orders didn’t care,’ I said. It was a hypothesis. I couldn’t know for sure, but it seemed increasingly the case. ‘In fact, I think they quite relished the idea.’
‘Where is this going?’ Alberto wondered.
‘Well, the thing is, the people who shot them were on a boat. The boat had a tiny logo on it, but I could see it in my head.’
Marta shook her head. ‘The local government are stupid. But they are not that stupid. Not after all the trouble with Cala Llonga. Eighth Wonder is the very worst company ever to set foot here. They would never have given the permission to…’
Her voice faltered. She was holding the dustpan full of broken glass. Shade from the branches of the fig tree decorated her face.
‘There was a man who visited Christina,’ I said. ‘There were lots of people but one was a rich hotelier. The taxi driver told me on the first night I was here. He said his name began with an A. Originally I thought the A might be for Alberto but he said he was well dressed.’
‘Very nice,’ grumbled Alberto, looking down at his tatty shorts.
‘He had just been to the most expensive restaurant. I have tried to access Christina’s memories of him but can’t. There is a block.’
Marta’s thoughts were a bubbling cauldron. ‘The world’s most expensive restaurant. That place by the Hard Rock. Where you wear virtual-reality goggles. It’s a gimmick. For rich tourists and flash DJs…for people with more money than sense.’
I thought of Karl. How he would have tutted at the idea. I remembered how he turned his nose up at a pizza chain after they had put big holes in the middle of some of their pizzas and branded them diet options. (‘How stupid do they think people are?’) Complaining about restaurants had been one of his hobbies. A recreational grouchiness.
‘Submarine,’ said Alberto. ‘That’s the name of the restaurant.’
‘No,’ corrected Marta. ‘There is no restaurant in Ibiza called Submarine. It’s called Sublimotion.’
‘Well, it should be called Submarine. What kind of a name is Sublimotion?’
Marta’s whole mind eye-rolled. ‘Papá, por favor. Focus.’
Alberto sighed. ‘Look, we need to be careful we don’t jump to conclusions. A lot of people were interested in her because she told the future. Almost every day she changed lives. From her stall at Las Dalias. Or, sometimes, from her house. I always thought it was a bad idea, but it was a way she could help people…’
I shook my head. ‘Whoever wanted to kill poor Christina was very sure of the future. That was why they wanted to kill her. She was going to stop them doing what they wanted to do. And what did she want to stop? The destruction of nature on Ibiza.’
‘Yes,’ said Marta. ‘And the worst developer is Eighth Wonder. Run by Art Butler.’
‘A is Art,’ muttered Alberto.
Marta nodded. ‘Eco retreats, offering those who can afford it meditation and cryotherapy and biohacking and charcoal smoothies. They are these hypocritical green hotels complete with responsibly sourced restaurants that somehow always exist in former nature reserves. They preach sustainability then illegally dump raw sewage in the Mediterranean.’
Marta was kneeling, but upright, meaning business. In her flow. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘He has a couple in the States. Last year he opened one in Bali…But Ibiza is where he started. He now has seven here. This was always his testing ground. You see, Ibiza has been an aspirational place. What works here becomes cloned elsewhere, taking the heart out of it. It’s always been that way. Discos, beach clubs, agroturismo, wellness retreats, whatever…Take paradise, package it, and make people very rich.’
Alberto nodded, wondering why he hadn’t made the connection. Wondering what force had been stopping him realising the most obvious thing – that the person Christina had protested against had been the person who endangered her. And he hadn’t made the connection, he surmised, because Art Butler hadn’t let him. ‘The bigshot Brit,’ he mumbled to himself. Then something else. ‘We should stop this…we should stop…’
Marta didn’t hear him. ‘On Ibiza he has messed up the sea with sewage, he has helped make plants and birds extinct, he has damaged the ecosystem, he has screwed over workers. He cares nothing about nature, but pretends to.’
‘But does this really mean he planned to do away with Christina? It is a leap.’
‘He has a lot of influence,’ Marta said, ominously. ‘And a lot of money. He has overcome obstacles that no one else would be able to overcome. Protected areas suddenly stop being so protected, and he always promises to preserve species and habitats, but as soon as the planning goes through everything is destroyed. As far as we know he is a human, but if he was human, then Christina would have been able to know he was going to kill her and she didn’t. She said there was a block on seeing the person. They had no face.’
I thought of my vision of a faceless person and the Guardia Civil officer with money in his hand. I sensed Marta’s mood darken further.
‘There was a politician here,’ she said, ‘Ricardo Martínez, who died mysteriously after blocking the application of an Eighth Wonder resort beside the wetlands at Ses Feixes.’
‘That is terrible,’ I said. ‘But correlation is not—’
That was the last time I would use reality-centred logic in this conversation. Because that was the precise moment reality as I knew it disintegrated entirely and any further logic would have to encompass the preternatural. Because that was when Marta’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
It was a text message. It simply said, in English: To live, stop.
There was an eerie quiet. A collective holding of breath. The air around us seemed to tighten. Marta’s hand was trembling.
‘Holy shit,’ she exhaled.
‘It’s him,’ Alberto said, in a panic, twitching his head around as if Art Butler was hiding behind a fig tree.
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. But there is something else going on with him. Something other.’
‘He means the protest. He wants me to stop the protest.’
