Fuentes’ mouth twitches and he seems to clamp it shut. Bianka gets the impression that he almost allowed it to drop open in surprise before regaining his composure.
Thirty-Nine
Charlotte
I sit down with a glass of champagne in the VIP lounge at the airport, but unsurprisingly, I can’t relax at all. I send Bianka yet another message but only a single tick appears – she’s either blocked me or turned off her phone – the tables have well and truly turned. I don’t understand why she isn’t responding, I feel like I managed her quite well when I went to her house, she was certainly appeased at the mention of going away together to ‘reconnect.’ But now I have no way of knowing whether Fuentes has been in touch with her, too. What if he has, and she told him all kinds of lies? Or, even worse – the truth. I have seriously considered coming clean at this point, because how can I live with this hanging over me for the rest of my life? In the end I concluded that it won’t, because I truly believe what I said to Bianka the other day. We can still make this go away; we just have to be smart about it. And that depends on her keeping her fucking mouth shut. When the call came, I realized that I needed to get smarter, and that is precisely why I’m here. I asked myself, what would an innocent person do?
‘Hi, Mrs Vinge. Pardon this inconvenience but I’m calling as we’ve had some new and relevant information come in about Maxime Dubois-Joseph since we spoke this morning.’
‘Okay, no problem. I’m happy to be of any help I can, of course.’
‘I’d like to ask you whether it might be possible for you to come in in person.’
‘To Ibiza?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Can I ask what this is about?’
‘We’d like to ask a few more questions about the nature of your relationships with the Dubois-Joseph family.’
‘I see.’ I realized they must be aware of the feud with the neighbours. Or – could Bianka have said something to the police? ‘When?’
‘As soon as possible. Could you be here by tomorrow afternoon?’
*
I board the plane and sink back into my seat in row 1, thanking my lucky stars that the rest of the row appears to be empty as the flight attendant shuts the aircraft door with a hollow clang. Because I had to travel as quickly as possible and it was already afternoon when I decided to leave immediately, I have to change planes in Frankfurt and won’t get in until gone two o’clock in the morning. As the plane begins to taxi, I switch my phone over to flight mode and it’s actually a relief to make myself unavailable for several hours. It’s comforting to think that I’ll be unreachable and free to think about what exactly I will say to the police. As we take off, the plane rolling on the brisk wind, I close my eyes and think about how surreal it is, that it’s just a few weeks ago that I sat there clutching Linda’s hand in mine as we took to the sky, excited for the week ahead, not knowing that those were the last moments that my life as I knew it was intact.
Forty
Charlotte
For the first time I wake at Can Xara with no real appreciation for my surroundings; even the sight of the deep-blue sky and shimmering sea as I open the blinds fills me with dread. I deliberately avoid even a glance down toward the finca. My heart is thundering in my chest as I go downstairs and prepare a coffee, and my eyes flit around the room as though someone might leap forward, though nobody is here. I am all alone here for the first time. I stand a while at the window gazing out at the unblemished horizon. Will the sea ever look uncomplicatedly beautiful to me again, now I know what it holds beneath the surface?
My stress levels are so high ahead of the police interview this afternoon that I just don’t know what to do with myself for the next few hours. I try Bianka again and again, but she doesn’t pick up. I even message her husband asking him to ask her to get in touch with me. I consider going for a run but decide against it, settling instead on a heavy weights session in our home gym, but as soon as I enter the airy, large space at the back of the house, I remember where the kettlebells are, inside the abdomen of the man I killed, taped shut, and I feel violently nauseous. I pace back and forth in the living room, trying to calm my racing heart and mind. I didn’t work so hard for so long to get everything I wanted only to lose it.
I decide to do something I’ve put off for so long, my entire adult life – the one thing I can think of that will undoubtedly take my mind completely off the insane and stressful situation at hand.
I’m crying before I even reach the finca, not for Maxime or for myself now, but for my mother; I’m imagining her walking along this same path, shielding her eyes from the sun, smiling to herself at the incredible beauty of Can Xara, and I let myself remember how radiant she was, how alive. I hope that she was happy here, even when I wouldn’t come. She’d begged me to, telling me of the olive groves and the scent of the waxy leaves of the citrus trees, and of a wonderful little international school I could go to, of Can Xara itself – the place she called the home of her heart. But I couldn’t see beyond my safe little life in the house I’d grown up in. I must have thought there would be second chances.
Today, I will spend my time until the police interview sorting through my mother’s stuff, breathing in her scent still stored in them. I might look at some of the pictures I noticed in the box in her bedroom, and perhaps finally decide which items of her jewellery to keep and which to sell; I’ve never been able to face these tasks, until now. My father has never come here; in fact we have never once discussed Can Xara other than to talk about my newly constructed house, which he was interested in seeing pictures of.
I unlock the door to the finca and move quickly through the main living space without looking at any of the places where Maxime Dubois-Joseph’s dead body lay, hurrying instead to my mother’s bedroom at the back of the house. I open the shutters and let light flow into the room. I make myself look at the deep, narrow bed in which my mother was found dead. In just a few short years, I will surpass my mother’s age, and this is a strange and upsetting notion, that I’ll be older than she’ll ever be. If I’m still alive, then, that is. Just weeks ago, I would have naturally assumed I’d still be here years down the line but I’m no longer so sure. I’ve seen too much death now.
I sit down and try to breathe deeply and, for the first time today, I’m actually able to. I decide to go all the way and imagine Ximena’s final moments in this room. She must have had a few drinks and come in here hoping to sleep it off. She would have pulled the covers up to her chin and lay shivering as the toxins coursed through her system. The autopsy report was inconclusive as to cause of death, though most likely a heart attack caused by ‘excessive intoxication’. The toxicology report had found alcohol, painkillers, and a sedative in her blood. It was strange, because my mother was never a big drinker, but the doctors concluded she had an unusual and unfortunate reaction to the exact combination of those drugs with alcohol.
I feel overcome with a thick sadness and get up off the bed and get the box of photographs and letters from the cupboard. I’ve steeled myself for this: most of the pictures are of Ximena and me. Me as a laughing little girl, perched on the arm of my mother, gazing adoringly at her child. My mother and five-year-old me on the wintry beach in Bygdøy, throwing rocks at the frozen Oslo Fjord. My mother alone in a formal photograph as a young girl. I study her face for a long while and it occurs to me that I know almost nothing about her childhood and youth here on the island. Her parents had moved to a village near Valencia after Ximena’s marriage to my father, and I vaguely recall going to see them as a child, but there might still be family living on the island; I’ve never tried to find out. What I would give to be able to ask her now.
There are several photographs of a very young Ximena, probably in her mid to late teens, with a handsome young man. I briefly recall having seen him before, in the picture I picked up while looking for something to wear after Maxime had died.
There are dozens more; in one, they’re in a vintage car, Ximena looking chic in a duck-egg blue crepe suit, the man looking at her the way a hungry man might look at a bloody steak. In another photo, they are at a party, surrounded by other young people, and Ximena is sitting on the man’s lap, her thin arm flung casually around his neck. There’s a photo of them on the beach, probably taken in the seventies when Ximena was sixteen or so, judging by her beehive hair and thick black eyeliner flicked like wings at the corners of her eyes. Like in all the pictures, they are laughing, droplets of water studding their smooth, bronzed skin. I focus on the young man in the picture – there is something familiar about him. Then I see it – he looks a bit like Maxime Dubois-Joseph. It’s something about his nose, sharp at the end, and the thick eyebrows, set low above expressive, mischievous eyes.
I go through the rest of the photos in the box, and among the last few I find what I’m looking for. It’s another picture of my mother with the same man, only now they are several decades older. In fact, it’s one of the few pictures I’ve seen of Ximena taken in the years after she left Norway – her hair is streaked with silver and she’s grown even more beautiful as her face has softened with age. Though her skin is still supple and radiant, she has becoming laughter lines at the corners of her eyes. In this picture, they are outside the finca, on a wooden bench I threw away years ago, as it was ruined by rot and termites. And the man in the picture is unmistakable – it’s Louis Dubois-Joseph, Maxime’s father, and he’s looking at her in exactly the same way he did when they were very young – like he’d die for her.
I stand up and walk slowly and unsteadily outside; I feel the sudden need for fresh air. There is something disturbing about these pictures, which clearly show that my mother was affiliated with Dubois-Joseph from a very young age, and that whatever their relation was, it continued in some form until fairly close to her death, judging by the last picture. As far as I knew, she’d merely bought the land from them and set about restoring the finca. That was all I’d known until after Ximena’s death, when the Dubois-Josephs became increasingly insistent on buying the land back as it became obvious that I wouldn’t sell Can Xara, as they’d probably assumed I would.
Something occurs to me and I go back inside to the bedroom and rifle to the bottom of the box with pictures; I’d noticed letters, too, lots of them, but hadn’t stopped to look. There are several from me, both from childhood and later. And several from Louis, all professing his love for my mother. My Spanish is nowhere near fluent but I can understand the gist of them. Soon, my love, reads one. I can’t wait to be with you, says another. You and me forever, a third. I fold them carefully and place them in my pocket, then head back outside. I need to think. Suddenly a disturbing memory comes back to me. I’m standing on the path leading to the finca and Maxime is standing above me as the path climbs the final stretch up to the house. He’s laughing at me and I have the distinct recollection of intense fury coursing through my system. Then I remember his words.
You should be careful. You don’t want to end up like your mother, do you?
I sit down shakily on the ground where the bench in the photograph had once stood, leaning my head against the wall of the house, closing my eyes and trying to make some sense of the thoughts churning through my head. I try to remember something else from the exchange with Maxime, but there is nothing. Where was Bianka in those moments? I can’t recall. I breathe deeply, drawing in the scent of all the plants Ximena had loved so much: citrus, roses, frangipani, belladonna, thyme, rosemary, and the earth itself. I think, with a pang of sadness, of my mother’s final resting place. I can see it from where I’m sitting, on a natural promontory at the end of the garden, in the spot with the best sea views, entirely at one with the landscape, like she would have wanted. You would never find it unless you knew it was there; it’s impossible to spot from the path or the garden. I’ve made sure the gardener has kept it beautifully over the years, but I never go there myself – I can’t bear it. Now, I stand up and walk slowly toward the spot, stumbling a couple of times through a haze of tears. It feels as though I’m being steered by an invisible hand intent on making me come entirely undone.
Ximena’s headstone was brought up from Cala Azura and is a beautiful, large, uneven rock with metallic-specked patches, and white dusty traces from centuries of being drenched in saltwater still visible on its sides. It would seem the gardener hasn’t been for a while and I tear furiously at the brambles and weeds partly covering it, brushing it clean of earth with my white linen sleeve, until the two lines are revealed; her name and the dates of her birth and death inscribed in gold.
Ximena Antonia Bizes Marí
01.10.1957 – 22.04.2002
When I’ve entirely cleared her headstone, I rush back to the garden to the side of the finca, and pick a thick bunch of flowers, mostly roses, some lilies, and several beautiful leaves. As my hand tears loose one of these leafy greens, a memory appears in my mind, as clear as though it had happened yesterday.
I’m in a garden somewhere with my mother. It’s probably Spain because I can see the long shadows of palm trees falling across the grass, and we’re surrounded by an explosion of colours. I’m small, maybe five or six, and I can see my own tiny, dimpled hand reaching out to pick a kiwi from the tree. I can practically feel the firm, hairy fruit filling the palm of my hand, the brief resistance of its host plant as I yanked it loose. My mother crouches down and peruses the fruit, smiling and kissing my cheek loudly.
Never forget the beauty and abundance of this earth, my darling, she whispers in my ear. It will give you everything you’ll ever need.
We walk around in slow circles and Ximena points out a wide variety of trees and plants, saying and repeating their Latin names – this one for luck, this one for love, this one for a quick death… My mother suddenly becomes alive to me again and I regain memory of details that were lost to me; a little scar by her eyebrow, the charming bump on her nose, how long her eyelashes were, how she used to coil her hair up into a tightly wound bun, securing it with a dagger hairpin, like the one she gave me.
It’s this that rouses me back to the present moment, standing in the brilliant afternoon sun at my mother’s grave, finally cleared and bearing fresh flowers – the image of the hair dagger. I run inside and like I remember, I find one almost identical to the one that killed Maxime among her things in the bathroom drawer. I pick it up and a memory rushes through me, its images as vivid as if it were unfolding in real time; Bianka yanking the hairpin from my hair in the split second before I fell… No. Before I was shoved out of the way. And then, after, turning me over, her face edging close to mine, checking to see whether I really was unconscious. I must have opened my eyes a sliver because now I clearly remember a hand, her hand, pulling the dagger from Maxime’s neck as he crashed around the room, blood erupting from the gash in his neck. Then Bianka slid the pin into my hand and closed my fist around it. I clearly recall the warm press of her hand squeezing my own shut, the cool metal pin inside.
