Page 83 of Someone in the Water
‘That was my first thought, but amazingly it’s not. Must be a misdial because no one else knows this number apart from you.’ Her phone buzzes in her hand twice – whoever called has left a voice message – then falls silent again.
Patrick looks at his watch. ‘Looks like we’ve got some celebrating to do.’
Lola’s eyes widen. ‘Wait, is it my birthday?’
Patrick grins. ‘Welcome to adulthood. Let me show you something cool.’ He reaches for her hand and leads her through a doorway at the back of the shop into narrow rooms separated by solid stone walls. Each room has a line of wall lights on one side, and a stack of wooden barrels on the other, shadows dancing everywhere. Lola shivers.
‘Are you cold?’ Patrick asks. ‘I know this place looks like something from the eighteenth century, but the temperature is centrally controlled. I forget what at, but it’s chilly.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ she says, rubbing her arms, while secretly wishing that Patrick would warm her up. Her thoughts must show on her face because he edges closer to her until their shoulders are touching.
‘Do you want to see the cave?’ he asks.
‘This isn’t the cave?’
‘It’s downstairs. Kind of a half-cellar, cut into the hillside.’ He floats his arm around the room. ‘All the wine in these casks is still fermenting but there are thousands of finished bottles downstairs. And definitely a spare one for us to raise a toast with.’
Together, they snake their way through more narrow rooms – all identical in their layout – until they reach a staircase. Patrick gestures for Lola to go first, but she pauses at the bottom, waiting for him to lead again. He guides her down a corridor until he reaches a heavy wooden door, then pushes it open. The place is like the cellar of a castle. Granite floor tiles, bare brick walls, all lined with bottles of rosé in rows up to the ceiling.
‘Impressive, hey?’ Patrick says, reaching for a bottle. ‘Shit, I should have brought glasses from the bar.’
‘Oh don’t worry,’ Lola says, smiling. ‘We can drink straight from the bottle.’
But Patrick shakes his head. ‘We can’t raise a toast that way. And we could do with some ice. I’ll only be a second, wait here.’ Patrick kisses her cheek and disappears out of the door. There’s no furniture in here, and all the walls are stacked with bottles, so Lola stands awkwardly in the middle of the room. The way each wall looks the same, and the mottled bulge of the protruding bottles, makes her feel a bit claustrophobic.
A feeling that gets a lot worse when the lights go out.
Lola
1st August
She mustn’t panic. She’s in darkness, not danger. A bulb has blown and tripped the switch. Or the centralised system Patrick was talking about has malfunctioned. He’ll sort it, then come back for her. She just needs to wait it out.
But damn, it’s dark. Actually, more than dark. Pure, perfect blackness, the type that makes you wonder if you really exist. Are those wine bottles still lining the walls? Or is she floating in space, or some other unknown dimension?
A noise brings her back to earth. Rustling. She flicks her head left and right, sees nothing. She imagines rats scurrying across the floor. Spiders crawling. Her breath judders inside her chest.
Shit. She needs to hold it together.
Patrick will be back soon, she reminds herself. The lights will come back on.
She feels unbalanced in the darkness, so she lowers down to sitting. She runs her hands down her legs. The soft material of her dress, the slight rise of the hemline, then the smooth flesh of freshly shaved skin. She pulls her knees into her chest, curls into a ball.
In her new position, she can feel the hard mound of her phone in her jacket pocket pressed against her thigh. God, she wishes she had a phone with a torch function instead of the stupid relic her mum got her. Then realisation hits. It might not have a torch, but it will light up if she turns it on, which is a hundred times better than the black hole she’s in now. And more importantly, she can call Patrick. She pulls the phone out of her pocket and feels around for the on button.
The screen lights up with a dim green glow. She looks around, but the light ebbs away quickly – she can’t make anything out beyond a metre or so – so she looks back at the screen. Then sighs at the now missing bars. Patrick called it a cave. And there are thick stone walls. No wonder there’s no signal. The screen does show that she has a voicemail – it must have downloaded when she was still upstairs. Maybe she should listen to that, something to distract her while she waits for Patrick to come back.
She presses the button to play the message, then pushes the phone against her ear. She tenses as she realises it’s from Nicole.
Thank you for your phone call, Lola. I’m sorry I missed you because I really want to talk to you. You know, I’ve been processing Isobel’s death for a long time now, but the names you mentioned in your email came as a shock. When Isobel died, I broke. My doctor gave me pills that kept me alive, but I didn’t know night from day. I couldn’t travel to the boulangerie, never mind go to Corsica, so the local police organised her repatriation. Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m mentioning all this. Well, it’s to excuse me. My stupidity. Because it’s so obvious now, what she was doing. Who she was with.
Lola swings around. She was sure she heard something, the door pushing open. But no, a false alarm. Just Nicole’s words messing with her head. What is so obvious? What was Izzy doing? Lola forces herself back to the message.
Isobel’s father was Corsican, you see. He was born there, in Porto Vecchio, then moved to Paris for university, which is where I met him. He missed the sea, the fishing, so we set up the restaurant in Nice. Luca’s parents – Teresa and Nicholas – moved to Nice too, but there was an aunt who stayed in Corsica, Marie. And she had a son called Salvo. Now I know that’s quite a common name in Corsica, but his son was called Raphael. And it’s harder to believe that was a coincidence.
The crackling, tinny voice swirls around in Lola’s head and it makes her feel nauseous. Izzy was related to the Paoli family? That’s why she was working for them? But why would they keep that a secret? Lola swallows hard, focuses on Nicole’s voice.
I didn’t want Isobel anywhere near Salvo with his mafia links, the drug trafficking that he was involved in. But she promised me that her job in Corsica had nothing to do with the Paoli family. She said she’d been offered a sailing instructor job by a hotelier she met in London, and I believed her. And as far as I knew, the Paolis had a restaurant, not a hotel. But now I realise that wasn’t true. That Isobel spent her final days with her father’s cousin, who also happened to be a ruthless criminal …
