The Maldives, the day Anna dies
There is something about David that she can’t place as she walks down the stairs towards the glistening tarmac. Then she sees it, the likeness to his father as he steps forward in his pressed trousers and short-sleeved shirt, slipping so easily into Clive’s shoes.
‘You made it,’ he says, kissing her in a way that feels unnatural in front of Jorgos and Hans, after everything that has just happened. ‘Did you manage to sleep?’
‘Yes,’ Maria says, forcing a smile. She has no phone to check the time but she knows the flight is around thirteen hours so she imagines it must be mid-morning. The sleep on the plane had been deep, considering everything that she had been through, and she wonders if her body had let her pass out in an act of self-preservation.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t travel with you. It was deemed safer this way. Just in case.’
In case his father’s men had discovered she was a mole, and had to kill her? Except, with Clive so ill and David due to take over the helm, these are no longer Clive’s men. They are David’s.
Maria looks down. ‘I understand.’
David takes her hand, speaking brightly though his palms are damp in a way that suggests he is nervous. ‘Come and have a look around. This place is all ours, for as long as we need it. We’re safe together here.’
* * *
‘So this is our villa,’ David says, guiding her towards the main residence, with false jollity.
‘Who do the other two belong to?’ she asks as he opens the door into an airy kitchen with veneered pine cupboards, leading through to a dining room at one end and a large double bedroom at the other.
‘Jorgos and Hans are in one of them. The third is for the staff who run the place, and security.’
Maria’s mind moves to the cameras she noted pointing in, and out, at various points, as they landed.
‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asks and David leads her towards the plainly furnished master bedroom, pointing at the en suite beyond an open door.
‘I might have a shower if that’s OK, freshen up after the flight.’
‘As you wish,’ David says and she smiles, stepping inside and locking the door.
She unzips her bag and takes out her washbag, scanning around for cameras before reminding herself this is David’s domain. They won’t be watching her in here. They aren’t watching her at all. The thing with the phone and the search was a necessary final test – a test she had anticipated and prepared for, transferring everything she needed from her original phone to the second hidden device, which she had always planned to transfer back to her handbag after it had been checked. She hadn’t anticipated the second part, though, and the memory of the strip-search chips at her, even if she understands why they had to do it. She had anticipated them thinking that her phone might have been bugged by someone else. Somehow she hadn’t anticipated that they would suspect she herself was a conscious security risk. Except after Anna, she would be naive to assume they would trust her.
Maria’s mind moves to Harry. It is too risky to try to contact him straight away. Instead, she undresses and steps inside the shower, turning on the water and then stepping out again. Bracing herself, she bends over and moves her fingers inside herself, fiddling around for the phone. It had been much easier putting it in than it is attempting to take it out, and Maria feels panic set in, imagining this foreign object moving further inside her. If she can’t get it out, she will die. There will be no choice but to tell David that she needs to go to hospital. Perhaps she can feign appendicitis or an extreme urinary infection. But there is no way that will work. She has to do this on her own. Pressing her eyes tight against the pain, refusing to cry out with David just on the other side of the door, she reminds herself that women give birth to babies many times the size of the object that she needs to prise from her body.
She squeezes her pelvic floor, catching a corner of the plastic with her forefinger and thumb, tugging until she manages to get a grip around the handset and giving it a final pull. She stays there for a moment, bent over, before moving to the see-through washbag containing soap and a flannel, and mini shampoos and conditioner, which she had chosen believing they would be flying from Heathrow together, with only hand luggage.
She quickly wraps the phone inside the flannel, and tucks it into the washbag before ducking into the shower, collapsing with relief against the white tiles.
‘Better?’ David asks, when she emerges back into the bedroom fifteen minutes later, having lathered herself with soothing lavender-scented body lotion, and wrapping her wet hair in a towel.
She smiles at him. ‘Much.’
‘Good,’ he says, stepping towards her and pulling off the towel wrapped around her body.
Later that evening, Maria is lying on the sofa in the living area of the villa, resting her eyes, when Jorgos enters the room unannounced. Gasping, she sits up.
‘You frightened me.’
Jorgos barely seems to register her presence. ‘David?’ he calls out and David enters from the bedroom, apparently unbothered to see Jorgos here without invitation.
‘It’s done.’ Jorgos doesn’t say another word but Maria knows instantly from David’s reaction, the way he leans against the doorframe for support, exactly what he is referring to.
When Maria thinks of David now, she sees him as two separate people: on one side there is her childhood friend, the boy she loved like a brother. It is as though the image is a jigsaw which has been smashed apart and put back together, with all the pieces in the wrong places so that here he is, the other David – a man she barely recognises, a man capable of killing his wife.