always been privy to. After all, she’d been one of the women who had allowed it to happen. She’d been stupid enough to believe his hollow pledge, his guarantees of money and security and a better future—in exchange for what? The most precious thing in the world. How could she even have considered it? But she’d been a different woman then, a wretched woman with no way out. As they all were.
Only she’d been more than he bargained for. She’d stood up to Mr V. She’d refused to give him what he wanted and he’d been forced to offer her a compromise, a position as his lowly housekeeper, guardian to his son, pushing her to the shadows and pretending she didn’t exist.
He should have known she wouldn’t stay there for ever.
Margaret exited the van der Meyde mansion and stood at the top of the stone steps that led down to the beach. She raised a hand against the glare of the sun and squinted down the pale sandy stretch. Mr V’s yacht was moored a hundred yards away, dark spots milling round it like ants, everybody desperate to get involved in the big man’s day. Adoring minions, nothing more, blinded by his riches and his power, with no idea what he was truly capable of.
It was ambitious. It was outrageous. It was wrong. But it was revenge, and revenge was usually all of those things.
As far as Margaret was concerned, there was only one person to protect.
‘Ralph!’ She called for the boy, knew he’d been playing on the beach all morning.
There was no reply, so she walked a little way down the steps and repeated his name. In moments she caught sight of the child’s small frame weaving haphazardly down the beach. As always, he brought a smile to her face and happiness to her heart. The years hadn’t all been in vain. He waved at her and she waved back.
‘What have you been up to?’ she asked as he ran, panting, up the steps, bursting with enthusiasm. He was carrying a red bucket and held it out for her to see. Inside was a hard, moving scrape of crabs’ legs, their burned-orange shells lifting and dragging over each other.
‘Shall we eat them?’ she asked.
Ralph nodded happily. ‘Where’s JB?’ he said excitedly. ‘I want to show JB!’
‘He’s not here, darling.’
He held out the crabs, his fingers small and sticky where they gripped the rim of the plastic lest anyone try to steal his loot. ‘Do you think Daddy will be pleased?’
Margaret swallowed. Ralph idolised Mr V, more so because he believed him to be his only living parent. It was what he had always been told.
If only.
‘Very,’ she said. ‘Come inside, my love, we’ve got to get you ready. Look at your fingers!’ He had grubby sandmarks under his nails.
‘Can I go to the party?’ he begged as he trailed her inside. ‘JB said the whole world’s coming! That means I have to come!’
Briskly she shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. You heard what Mr V said.’
‘He said I’m not old enough.’
‘And he’s right.’
Ralph was disappointed. ‘Please?’ he tried again, hoping Miss Jensen might be a softer touch. Usually she let him have his way.
‘I’ve said no and that’s the end of it.’ Outside the boy’s bedroom, she turned and crouched down to his level.
‘Besides, we’ll have fun here, won’t we?’ She smiled. ‘Just you and me. Safe on the island. Because, my darling, who knows what could happen at sea?’
Book Two
2009-10
15 Lori
The taxi Lori took from Murcia San Javier airport was driven by a slight, middle-aged Spaniard with a hook nose and thick eyebrows. A rosary swung from his rear-view mirror and the upholstery smelled sweet, like lemons, or vanilla. Dusk had fallen. The gloomy shapes of mountains reared up on both sides as the car wound its way between, tyres throwing up dust.
They drove through a sharp bend, then another, and she realised they were climbing. Each twist required the car to slow completely, almost to a stop, and she knew the ascent must be steep. She wound the window down and breathed the unfamiliar air. Crickets gave off their whistling nighttime rhythm; the sea was close because she could smell its salt.
Lori had travelled an ocean. She had gone halfway across the world. And yet all she had thought about, incessantly and without reprieve, for the past forty-eight hours, was the man who had saved her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face and his hands; the leather band around his wrist; the twist, almost cruel, of his top lip. That day felt like a dream, impossible—something out of a novel about which she’d half laugh, half swoon. The way he’d arrived from nowhere, strange as though he’d come from another world, far far away, and how he had kissed her, the urgency in his eyes as he’d tried to resist … Details became her addiction: a specific suddenly surfacing, shedding new light.
Who was he? Why had he come?
And then the soft comfort of her recollection would be punctured by shame. Guilt at having denied Rico the lie that would set him free; the way she had run from her commitment to him, into the arms of another man. She felt as if she had leapt from an aeroplane into wide blue sky, off the top of a mountain, over the rim of the earth, abandoning every principle that had guided her through seventeen years. Never had she endured a sensation so strong it eclipsed every other, stifling her conscience, making her selfish, reminding her that those same principles by which she’d lived so strictly had never made her happy or fulfilled, and in that way drawing her, tempting her, towards a new horizon.
For what? A stranger she knew nothing of?
Lori ran the bud of her thumb over the ring Rico had given her the day they had planned to escape. It felt like centuries ago, another life, another her.
They passed a red and white church buried in the hillside, momentarily bathed in the gold of the headlamps before retreating to its shroud of darkness. By the side of the road was a box, lit by a lone, uncertainly flickering candle: a shrine for a child, tipped from a crumbling precipice. The motion of the car, winding and turning, rising ever higher, began to lull Lori to sleep.
When she woke, the moon was high and bright in the sky. The car was rumbling along a bumpy track and Lori realised her head must have been resting against the window, for it was this motion that roused her. They were in the middle of nowhere. On either side what looked like orchards, clusters of trees whose fingers brushed questioningly as they passed. At the foot of the drive was the dark shape of her grandmother’s house, bordered by the shadowy outline of an olive grove, and a single lamp glowing in the porch.
She thanked the driver in Spanish and heaved her bag from the trunk. She watched as his red taillights disappeared, listening to the silence of a depth and quality entirely new to her.
There was no sound coming from inside and when Lori knocked it seemed to disturb the sleeping hills. She began to wonder if anyone was in when, eventually, a light came on. The slow patter of footsteps approached, accompanied by a wet snuffling.
When the door opened, something quick and small rushed out and
