Page 87 of Someone in the Water
‘He tried to kill his family,’ I whisper, the words out before my sluggish brain can process the consequences of riling Raphael. ‘The man you’ve been friends with for twenty years. Who owns half this place.’
Raphael kicks my knee. A jolt of pain runs up my thigh. ‘God, I’m going to enjoy killing you,’ he murmurs. ‘Even if it is twenty-one years too late. And do you know who else I’m doing it for?’
‘Salvo,’ I murmur, seeing his face again. Those eyes.
‘No, not him. For some reason Salvo always wanted to protect you.’ He puts his finger on the trigger. ‘I’m doing it for Izzy, because she died trying.’
And he shoots.
Lola
1st August
Lola arches her back. Her heart is pounding, her body quivering with an overload of adrenaline. The noise is still there. A busy rustling with intermittent loud thuds. The longer she listens, the less she thinks it’s a person. It’s too frenetic. But it’s nothing small like a rat either. Why is she so scared? Blind people deal with this all the time. Hearing noises, seeing nothing. They don’t freeze with fear.
Slowly, she uncurls her legs until she’s standing. She pauses for a moment to ground herself, then starts shuffling towards the noise, her limbs shaking with fear. She doesn’t think the creature is in the room with her, otherwise surely she’d have felt it by now, so it must be the other side of a door, or maybe a window. Which means, if she’s brave enough to get close, there might be a chance for her to escape.
It’s hard to believe her heart can beat any faster, but it manages to as she edges closer. She holds out her arms, teetering forward like a zombie, both scared and hopeful of what she might find. The noise gets louder. Her heart pounds.
Finally, she touches something cold and coarse. Brickwork. It’s a wall. The relief makes her knees weak, and she leans her hands against it for a moment, her palms cooling. When she first walked in, it seemed like every wall was stacked high with wine bottles, but she wasn’t paying much attention then. She was too excited about toasting her birthday with Patrick.
Patrick. Where is he? Why didn’t he come back for her? There could be an innocent explanation – maybe he fell in the darkness and hurt himself. Or maybe he hasn’t been gone very long at all, and it’s just fear stretching time. But then Lola thinks about the voicemail from Nicole, Salvo’s mafia crimes, those threatening notes. And the strong chance that Patrick locked her in this terrifying cellar on purpose.
That thought spurs her into moving again. Using the wall as her reference point, she works her fingers towards the noise. Slides left and right, but only finds more brickwork. She stills, concentrates. The noise is coming from higher up, she realises. She reaches towards it. With her arms straight, and on her tiptoes, she feels a bump. She creeps her fingers further along. Thin slices of wood. It’s a shutter, she realises. Which means there’s a window behind it. A high window. Too high to climb through. But something to give her light.
Suddenly excited, she scrabbles around, stretching further until she finds the locking mechanism. A metal latch. With a small jump, she manages to lift it and both shutters sway forward. She curls her fingers around the edges and swings them wide open.
Then she screams.
Moonlight floods in. Lighting up the biggest bird she’s ever seen.
A huge owl. Brown and tan mottled feathers. Piercing orange eyes. It lifts its wings, revealing a pure white underside, and the sight is so magical that Lola’s scream freezes in her throat, her mouth gaping open in wonder and horror and shock. The owl holds its position for a moment, staring straight into Lola’s eyes, then it lifts off, flying into the night.
Frankie
1st August
BOOM.
The sound of the gun ricochets off the mountains. I collapse on the ground and wait for my heart rate to slow, for the pain to flare. But neither of those things happen. No pain, no blood loss, no injury.
Raphael missed his shot.
The huge bird from earlier swoops overhead and I look up, suddenly mesmerised by its size and aura. But then I hear a click. A reloaded gun. Of course the danger isn’t over. I flick my head, looking for an escape, but it’s a reflex action. I might be faster than Raphael, but the range of his pistol would outpace me in this vast sloping vineyard. I stare up, like cornered prey.
‘Stupid fucking bird!’ Raphael shouts, swinging the gun towards the sky in frustration, the owl just visible in the distance, then back to me. ‘But I won’t miss this time.’
I wait for a few seconds, but nothing happens. So I slowly, carefully, rise to my feet. Dom is somewhere in the vineyard, and he will have heard the shot. If I can keep Raphael talking, maybe there’s a chance I can survive this. ‘What do you mean by Izzy died trying?’ I ask, forcing myself to make eye contact, to hold his attention. ‘Trying what?’
His sudden crack of laughter makes me jump. ‘You still haven’t worked it out, have you? It was always only Izzy in the water with you that night. But she was there to kill you, not swim with you. She worked for me, remember? And that meant getting her hands dirty if I asked her too, not that she showed any reluctance when it came to killing you. She said you’d become too needy.’
His stare sharpens. ‘But you killed her instead. I don’t know what went wrong out there in the sea – she took Salvo’s mini-oxygen kit out of his boat, just like I told her to, so she should have had the upper hand. But she wasn’t wearing it when I found her, and it never showed up. I do know you got her drunk on tequila though, and judging by the mark I saw on her forehead when I found her, you also kicked her in the head. You knocked her unconscious, Frankie. You caused her to drown.’
My breathing stutters. I’m there in the water again. Fear giving me a strength I didn’t know my muscles were capable of. Kicking out, slamming my foot into something solid. Was that Izzy’s head? After all these years swerving between guilt for her death, and the trauma of escaping a predator … was it actually both?
‘If you kill me, you’ll go to prison for a long time,’ I say, my voice quivering. ‘Your life will be over too.’
‘I doubt it,’ Raphael says. ‘You’re roaming my family’s private land. I’ll say that a wild boar had been spotted trampling the vines and I came here to deal with that. I always keep my gun in the boot of my car, so no one will question it. And if a Brit is stupid enough to trespass on agricultural land in the middle of the night, those are the risks.’
