‘That’s understandable, sweet Charlotte. Let’s just focus on getting through tonight. Luckily I brought you something to take the edge off the next couple of hours.’ Bianka slowly and theatrically places her hand inside her floaty midnight blue top and fishes for something in her bra. She pulls out a little pink pouch – cocaine. I shake my head. Then I remember how it made me feel a couple of nights ago: in control and capable and calm during some of the strangest, most nerve-racking moments of my life. And I want to feel like that again.
I take the pouch from Bianka’s hand and pour the white powder onto the gold-veined marble surface of my bedside table. I cut four lines with the narrow spine of a little notebook on mindfulness I keep by the bedside. Then I bend down and draw a line into each nostril before handing the fifty-euro bill to Bianka.
‘That’s better,’ she says, gazing at me admiringly from where she has settled atop my bedspread. The coke makes its way through the pathways of my brain and it’s as if it clears out all the old debris and brain fog and leaves a delicious, brilliant clarity in its wake.
‘I’ll see you in half an hour,’ I say, glancing pointedly at the door. Bianka gets up and leaves, but not before kissing me hard on the cheek, leaving a patch of wetness that I wipe away with my sleeve as soon as she’s out the door. I go to the bathroom and run a face cloth under the hot water tap and rub hard where her lips touched my skin. I also scrub my hands again even harder with the cloth, making the little cuts bleed afresh.
I look at the woman in the mirror. I imagine watching her, like in a movie, or rather – like Bianka did in real life – releasing her hair from its topknot and stabbing someone to death with the long, thick silver pin that had held it. I go back into the bedroom and retrieve the hairpin from my handbag. It’s still encrusted with Maxime’s blood and I hold it for a long while under the hot tap, watching the rusty stains fade, the silver gleaming again. I work soap into a lather and massage the pin with it until I feel satisfied not a single trace of blood remains, my hand shying away from the terrifying sharpness of its tip. I hold the pin in my fist the way I must have done in the moments before I plunged it into Max’s neck. I imagine it would have met firm resistance as soon as it was embedded in the skin; I must have had to use real, furious force to actually sever the jugular vein and kill a man with it.
I brush my hair with a couple of brusque strokes and then I twist it round and round into a coil and secure it with the pin. It meets resistance and I push harder until I’m sure it’s deeply buried in my densely wound, thick hair. I feel a wave of panic course through me like a hot flush but realize that, actually, it’s fury. I imagine stalking through the house, screaming at the top of my lungs, smashing everything into splinters, violently shoving anyone who gets in my way until every last bit of this crazy energy is gone.
Are you that angry, deep down? I ask her, the murderer, in the mirror.
Yes, say her eyes.
Twenty-Six
Bianka
It’s not going to be easy to get away and call it an early night; both Anette and Linda seem livelier than usual this evening, as if it’s taken them all these days to fully wake up to the joys of Ibiza’s nightlife. And tonight of all nights, thinks Bianka. She’s itching to get back to the finca, so the grisly deed will be done.
Anette insisted on going on to Els Horizonts for cocktails after dinner in Santa Eularia, at a cute beachfront brasserie whose name Bianka has already forgotten. Bianka decided it was probably a good idea to head on to a crowded bar – it would be much easier to get rid of Maxime’s phone there than in a restaurant. At dinner she kept seeking out Charlotte’s gaze across the table but the moment their eyes met, Charlotte would avert her eyes as though a shared glance held the power to burn her. She barely took part in the conversation, nodding here, laughing half-heartedly there, and Bianka could tell how high she was by the glassy, distant look in her eyes. When they arrived at Els Horizonts, Bianka pressed the pink pouch into Charlotte’s hand and she disappeared into the bathrooms for a long while.
Bianka watches Anette and Linda in an animated discussion about the merits of outdoor kitchens in their mountain cabins – Linda seems to be of the opinion that there’s little point as it’s so cold, but Anette reassures her that it really is the smartest thing she has ever done – her daughters simply adore barbecues on reindeer hides under the stars. Bianka has to stop herself from rolling her eyes and imagines Anette’s teenage daughters, probably as annoying as their mother, with shiny auburn hair and those weird, pale snake-like eyes. She focuses on Charlotte instead.
‘What do you think, Charlotte?’ asks Linda about something neither Bianka nor Charlotte caught.
‘About what?’ says Charlotte, a mellow, confused little smile on her lips. Bianka wonders whether Anette and Linda might suspect she’s taken something, but she assumes not; though these girls are heavy on the wine, they seem resolutely disinterested in drugs.
‘Are you feeling okay, Charlotte?’ asks Linda.
Charlotte looks great in a black organza silk dress. It’s high-necked and short, with a big bow tied at the side of her neck. She’s clearly good at makeup; the bloody ridge where she struck her face beneath her right eye has been carefully concealed, a line of highlighter dabbed alongside the top of it, reflecting the light.
‘Yeah. I just took a bit of a knock earlier. I don’t feel quite myself.’ Charlotte reaches across the table and takes a piece of the fluffy rosemary-and-salt encrusted focaccia Linda ordered ‘for nibbles’. She breaks off a chunk, dunks it into the truffle olive oil and pops it in her mouth, closing her eyes as she chews.
‘What in the actual hell are you doing?’ asks Anette. ‘Earth to Keto Queen?’
Charlotte keeps chewing, her eyes half-open and red-rimmed, as though she were actually asleep, and only now does Bianka realize how high she really is. Time to get this show on the road, she thinks, before Charlotte says or does something stupid.
‘Just having a nice piece of bread,’ says Charlotte, giggling, but her voice sounds hollow and strange.
Bianka pulls her phone from her handbag and pretends to check a message but carefully takes a picture of Charlotte, her eyes half-closed and strangely shiny, carbohydrate pinched between thumb and index fingers, as though she’s never held a piece of bread before, her teeth sinking again into the soft tissue of the focaccia. Then Bianka stands up.
‘Service is pretty slow here, I’m going to the bar to get some water for the table,’ she says. ‘Does anyone else want anything?’ Nobody does; Bianka has chosen this moment when everyone already has drinks.
She slips her phone back into the inside pocket of her handbag, a vintage Azzedine Alaïa bag she treasures, and it sits snug against Maxime’s Samsung. She’s already changed the access code.
She crosses the room and inserts herself into the dense throng of people clustering around the long mahogany bar. In the ceiling, huge fans whir, their wingspans as wide as rotor blades. Buddhas peruse the crowd from several vantage points throughout the large space. The bar is packed with the usual crowd of hip international types and Bianka picks out a medley of languages on the buzzy air: French, Catalan, German, and English, among others. Bianka glances over to the table where her friends sit, and, satisfied she can’t easily be seen from there, fishes Maxime’s phone from her handbag and swiftly unlocks it. She opens the Instagram app and selects Story, then takes a picture of the crowd, hashtagging it #ElsHorizonts and #IbizaNights before posting it. She scans the crowd for a suitable candidate for the next step but decides to step outside for a quick breath of fresh air and a chance to order her thoughts first. Els Horizonts has huge wraparound terraces as well as its enormous indoor bar area, and is right on the Port de Sant Miquel harbour front, where superyachts moor up out in the bay, sending their fancy guests in for dinner and drinks in nippy little speedboats. One such boat is just pulling up to the jetty in front of Bianka, the sound of laughter from its passengers rising above the engine’s rumble as the boat moors. Its bow reads ‘Soraya, Porto Cervo’, and it’s carrying six people dressed to the nines, three men and three women. A beautiful blonde carrying a pair of skyscraper heels in her hands hops onto the pier, cheered on by her friends who follow behind her. Bianka suddenly recognizes one of the men as one of Maxime’s burly friends from the party at Sa Capricciosa. She can’t recall his name. He doesn’t even glance at her as the party passes her on the way in to Els Horizonts; his eyes are glued to the blonde’s posterior, graphically outlined in a gold Hervé Léger dress, but Bianka spots the interlinked ‘o’ tattoo on his neck and shudders. Then she has an idea.
She waits for a couple of minutes, then goes back inside. She sees the Soraya yacht party in a private area adjacent to the bar. By a stroke of luck, one of the women, a leggy, pouty brunette with cartoonish feathered eyelashes, makes her way over to the bar and begins to talk to a woman already standing there, who could pass for her identical twin.
Bianka orders a large bottle of Acqua Panna and while she waits for it to arrive she discreetly fishes Maxime’s phone from her handbag and slips it into the wide Christian Dior handbag flung over the shoulder of the brunette. The girl shifts a little and flicks her curly bouncy hair over her shoulder so Bianka pushes against her, then apologizes, in case the girl felt the shift in weight as the phone landed in her bag. When Bianka returns to the table with the water and a thundering, erratic heart, she’s pleased to see Linda attempting to conceal a yawn.
When Bianka sits back down, Charlotte shoots her a quizzical look. Bianka nods very slightly, trying to convey that everything went to plan. She can’t wait to tell Charlotte what an incredible stroke of luck she’s just had seeing Maxime’s friend if it plays out as she hopes. The phone will leave Ibiza on the Soraya, and in the company of someone who actually knew the dead guy. And even better, someone who has known mafia connections.
Charlotte looks like she is about to burst into tears, though she is nodding enthusiastically in all the right places as Anette tells a story about a vile colleague. After she’s finished, to a collective murmur of agreement about the horrible colleague, Linda jumps in and changes the conversation.
‘Hey, did you guys hear about the body they found off the coast of Formentera? Well, head rather than body. It was severed.’ Linda’s face is twisted into a horrified grimace, but Bianka also detects a hint of excitement.
‘What? No?’ says Charlotte, her face appearing even whiter than before.
‘Yeah, I read about it online this afternoon. Isn’t that just the most awful thing you’ve ever heard? Imagine you were out there swimming and suddenly a head is bobbing around next to you,’ says Linda.
‘Oh, eww,’ says Anette.
‘Stop,’ says Charlotte, visibly shuddering. ‘I just can’t even…’
‘Well, they say the Mediterranean is full of bodies,’ says Anette, her face cracking into a gleeful smile as though this were a juicy piece of gossip and not a human tragedy.
‘Yes,’ continues Linda. ‘Full. Like, apparently you’re never more than a hundred feet from a body at any given time, statistically speaking.’
‘What? No, that can’t be true,’ says Charlotte.
‘The article said.’
Charlotte looks like she might throw up all over the table. Bianka also feels nauseous and chilled imagining a beautiful azure blue sea full of dead people in various stages of decomposition drifting around within its depths.
‘Where is the rest of the body?’ asks Anette.
