‘They don’t know. Apparently, heads are often severed from the rest of the body by fish because they eat the eyes and the lips first.’
‘Stop,’ whispers Charlotte. Her thin fingers are gripping the water glass so hard her knuckles are white and Bianka fears it will shatter in her hand. She wants to reach across and uncurl her hand and take it in her own, squeezing it, reassuring Charlotte that everything will be okay eventually, it has to be.
‘Seriously, are you okay?’ asks Anette.
‘Yeah, I’m just tired.’ Charlotte takes a sip from her water glass but her hand trembles violently. Anette stares at her, her weird serpentine eyes narrowed, and Linda suppresses a yawn.
‘Sounds like we could all use an early night. Shall we get out of here?’ Bianka asks, forcing a yawn, too. She feels a surge of anticipation mingled with dread.
‘Yeah,’ says Linda. ‘With all these drugs in my system, it’s like I’m constantly sleepy. Not only do the hormones make me chubby and depressed, but apparently exhausted too.’ She yawns dramatically again as they stand up and begin to move through the crowd toward the door. Bianka scans the room for signs of the yacht party but their private area is now occupied by someone else and when they step outside she sees the little speedboat leaving the harbour, its lights blinking as it crosses the bay to one of the superyachts, taking Maxime Dubois-Joseph’s phone off Ibiza.
*
It’s past midnight by the time Bianka and Charlotte quietly walk down the path from the house to the beach through scraggy, steep fields that carry the scent of lavender and sage and thyme, cicadas loud in the air, their sound constant and insistent. At the far end of the beach stands the boathouse, barely a house at all, more a shack with a corrugated tin roof, built to house Ximena’s rowing boat during the winter storms. Bianka remembers how, only this afternoon, Maxime had stood here, in this very spot, in his jeans and his fancy belt, shielding his eyes against the sun and talking to Charlotte.
They walk in silence – there is nothing more to say. There needs to be absolutely nothing to connect Maxime to Bianka or Charlotte now that Bianka has managed to get rid of the phone. Hopefully the police will be thrown off scent by its signal as the Soraya and her passengers continue onwards to wherever they are heading next.
If the body is never found, and no link is ever established to either of them, Maxime Dubois-Joseph will become just another missing person like the smiling faces you might see on a poster in the underground in big cities. His memory will fade in the minds of the public, who may initially engage with the mystery of the vanished playboy heir, cooking up all kinds of theories about his whereabouts. Then he will gradually be forgotten, as missing people inevitably are. And Bianka and Charlotte will be safely back home in Wimbledon, moving on and forgetting, together.
Charlotte unlocks the boat shed with a loud metallic clang, and they stop in their tracks for several long moments, scanning the headlands and the beach for any signs of life, but there is none. Together they slide the door open enough to slip through the gap. It groans loudly and they pause again, listening out, as if someone might be out there in the night. But the beach is deserted. Suddenly, her mind returns to the severed head bobbing in the water near Formentera. She pushes the thought away, but it won’t quite fade and she imagines the little horseshoe bay full of floating heads, nudging against each other, dozens of unseeing eyes staring, Cala Azura’s clear, shallow water running red with blood.
No, she tells herself. She must have shaken her head because when she looks up at Charlotte, she’s staring at her, frowning. She glances around at her surroundings – the beach, the wide expanse of sea beyond the cape, the little boathouse – and re-centres herself. Come on, Bianka, get a grip. The moon is high in the sky and the sea is calm, whispering onto the rocks on either end of the bay. The first night, when Bianka came down here, she’d envisioned a much younger Charlotte on this same beach, arriving back at Can Xara after her mother had unexpectedly died. She wouldn’t have possibly imagined that some day, she’d return to this place, a killer.
Bianka opens the torch function on her phone when they have both stepped inside the boathouse and shut the door behind them. The boat fills most of the space in the shed and though it’s old, it looks well-maintained and seaworthy – Charlotte had explained that it would be, that Andreas sometimes likes to take it out to fish beyond the cape. Its hull sits atop a metallic launch track that leads through the shed, outside and all the way down to the water’s edge. Together, as quietly as possible, Bianka and Charlotte release the catch holding the boat in place and urge it down and out, a laborious task because the track is old and rusty, but eventually they manage to shove the boat into the calm, black water, and Charlotte secures it to an iron hook on the rocks with a rope.
For a moment they stand there, the pointed bough of the boat between them, staring at each other, before quietly heading back up to the finca for the next step toward ensuring Maxime Dubois-Joseph’s body will never resurface. Bianka considers herself a woman with a steely constitution but the thought of this next step brings the bitter taste of bile to her mouth.
Charlotte, she tells herself, watching Charlotte nimbly move up the path in front of her. You’re doing this for Charlotte. You’d do anything for Charlotte. Anything at all.
Twenty-Seven
Storm
For the next few days, Storm and Madeleine spend most of their time together, sometimes at the lake, sometimes at Storm’s house, up in the bedroom in the eaves, chewing the marijuana gummies, laughing at everything and nothing, cuddling and kissing but nothing more, not yet, at times sharing silly jokes, and other times, their deepest thoughts and dreams. He feels himself return to himself after the upset of the other day, and relishes his freedom, away from his father and Bianka, away from school, in the company of Madeleine.
They go for walks in the evenings, endless loops around the murky lake. Sometimes they walk only a little and kiss a lot. Other times they walk for hours, in the rain or when it’s stiflingly hot, like today.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘now that I’ve started looking back and asking questions about my mother, I want to know more. Everything. But I just can’t remember. It’s so weird. And frustrating.’
‘I think it’s trauma,’ says Madeleine. ‘I’ve read about it. We need to recover more of your memories. It’s all there, inside of you.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘I have an idea. We need to reintroduce you to the things you knew. When your mother was alive. They call it exposure therapy. At some point, something, some random little thing, will trigger a memory. And then that memory will dislodge other memories until you have access to a whole ton of them.’
*
The next day, a warm but rainy day, they take the number 19 tram across town to Saeter, where Storm used to live with his parents when Mia was still alive. It’s not far from where his grandparents live, set high above the city and its fjord on a rocky promontory. The house is blue and semi-detached, set in lush gardens, the trees heavy with deep-red apples, but Storm has no instant recollection of it. He stares at each of the upstairs windows in turn. One of them must have once been his bedroom, where he’d slept, not knowing that soon, his family as he’d known it would break apart.
‘Nothing?’ asks Madeleine, placing a light, warm hand on his arm. Storm shakes his head.
The nursery is just down the road in a low building by a roundabout; it was easy to find with a simple Google search. It’s only a couple of minutes’ walk from the blue house and Storm feels oddly unsettled at the complete blank of his memory. Storm and Madeleine cross the road, exchanging a little smile as they approach the dark-brown timber bungalow with an ornate wraparound terrace, set in large gardens – it looks more like a mountain cabin than a nursery. In spite of the light rain, children are playing in the garden, running around and shrieking, one little boy squirting water from a plastic bottle after the other kids.
He must have stood here, in this exact spot, every morning as Mia slid the metal bolt of the gate open, perhaps turning back to smile at him. It can’t be normal to have chunks of your early life just deleted, though Madeleine says she’s the same; she barely remembers a thing before she started school.
‘Can I help you?’ says a voice. A woman is standing on the building’s terrace and smiling quizzically across the soggy strip of trampled lawn on which the children chase each other.
‘Uh…’ says Storm, feeling as if a big mushy lump has suddenly slotted into place in his throat, closing it almost completely. He’s seen this woman before. ‘Uh.’
‘My name is Madeleine Vinge. And this is Storm Langeland – he used to go here. We wondered if anyone has worked here, like, a really long time?’
The woman’s eyes narrow as she takes Storm in and she appears to recognize him, smiling widely and touching her hand to her chest above her heart.
‘Oh, my goodness. Storm Langeland. Of course. How fantastic to see you. You’re all grown up. And as lovely as always.’ The woman rushes off the terrace and across the patchy, mud-streaked grass to the gate. She slides it open and then holds out her arms to him. When she sees him hesitate, she immediately drops the gesture and gives him a fist bump instead.
‘I’ve seen you on TV, of course, making all of us very proud indeed. But to have you drop in here at the Blueberry Patch… Oh, how very special. You must come inside. I’ll fix us a nice drink and we can have a chat in my office.’
The woman shows them down a long corridor decorated with children’s scratchy drawings and smelling of boiled meat and disinfectant, then into a cosy office with book-laden shelves and a pleasant view of the peaceful suburban neighbourhood outside.
‘Do you remember me, Storm?’
‘Uh. No. Well… I think I remember your face. And maybe your voice.’
‘My name is Lone. I was your key worker when you attended the Blueberry Patch. Oh, Storm, it really is wonderful to see you again.’
‘Yeah. It might seem a little, uh, strange to just stop into your old day-care like this. I just wanted to see it again. To see if I might remember something from when I was small. We moved across town to Slemdal and I don’t think I’ve been to Saeter at all since then. Since around the time when my mother died, so thirteen years.’
‘Yes. Oh, you poor boy. It was a tragedy, what happened to your mother. I knew her well.’
