The Names of the Dead

by Wignall, Kevin

  Wes glanced at the envelope. “There was something in the safe? Her passport?”

  “No, and perhaps that’s why they didn’t ask—the passport was with her when she died. I tried to contact the people, but the number they left . . .” She shook her head, baffled.

  Wes could imagine someone from the Madrid station being sent down here to collect Rachel’s belongings, resenting it, feeling it was a mundane task beneath their pay grade, giving the hotel manager a false number rather than risk having her call every ten minutes with something else she’d remembered.

  “Perhaps under the circumstances, it’s more appropriate for you to have them anyway, as a keepsake.”

  She picked up the envelope and handed it to him. It felt fat and heavy. He opened it and looked inside without taking out any of the contents. He could see paperwork, receipts, tickets.

  Resting it on his lap, he said, “Thank you. Do you know when she planned to check out?”

  “The day after the attack, I believe. The concierge told me she’d arranged a car to take her to Málaga, but she wasn’t staying there, only visiting the Picasso Museum. She planned to take the train from Málaga to Seville.”

  “So the car was taking her to the Picasso Museum?”

  “No, to the railway station.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No, but maybe she wanted to buy her ticket first, check the times. I don’t know.”

  Those were things she would have done online, and something about this diversion sounded wrong. It sounded to Wes like she’d been covering her tracks, and that made him wonder if it had actually been a working trip. That would explain her not wanting the child with her, but according to her brother she’d left the Agency six months earlier, so maybe she’d been freelancing, or Adam was wrong.

  Whatever the case, she hadn’t wanted the driver to know where she was really going in Málaga. So there was little point in Wes going there either, because without that information, he wouldn’t know what to look for or where to start.

  Besides, Wes’s job was to work out where she’d been, not where she’d been going. He had to concentrate on moving backward through her final days until he found Ethan.

  He looked across at the fountain, once again imagining her standing there. “I bet she loved this hotel.”

  “I didn’t meet her myself. She was here such a short time before it happened, but the staff who met her said she appeared very happy here. I think you can take comfort in that.”

  Rachel had felt like a stranger to him these last few years. Even when Dupont had broken the news of her death, it had seemed like news of a life far removed from his own. Yet now, little by little, he could feel her coming back to him, and he already knew with certainty that she wouldn’t have been happy—she’d had a son, something she’d wanted so much, and for whatever reason, she’d been without him here. She might well have been taking pleasure from the beauty of this place, but no, happiness would never have come into it.

  Fourteen

  They walked back, but parted en route, with Mia taking a pilgrim’s detour to the cathedral and Wes heading back to the hotel. He made his way into the courtyard when he got there, sitting at a table in the cloister. There were a few other people sitting at tables here and there in the shade, but the atmosphere was hushed.

  A waiter in a white tunic came gliding along the cloister and Wes ordered a cold drink before carefully emptying out the contents of the envelope onto the table. He thought of placing something on top of the various pieces of paper to hold them down, but there was no need—there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze, the stillness almost oppressive.

  Once it was all before him, he picked up a stack of receipts and looked idly through them. There were credit card receipts from restaurants and cafés, train tickets, two hotel receipts, both from Seville.

  He opened the two hotel receipts next to each other on the table. She’d stayed in one for three days, then another for two days. Why would she move? In both cases, the second sheet with the detailed breakdown had been removed and discarded, the marks from the staples the only sign that they’d ever been there, so there was nothing to show whether she’d been in both hotels alone.

  He folded them, then looked at the train tickets and felt a sudden giddy rush in his blood. A ticket from Madrid to Seville, for one adult and one child under the age of four. Ethan had been in Seville with her, which meant she hadn’t left him with Grace in Madrid. And she had meant to go back to Seville via Málaga, which meant he could still be there now, a couple of hours away from where Wes was sitting. She’d left him with friends, that’s what everyone kept saying, and maybe those friends were in Seville.

  He looked back through the sheets of paper and found a prebooked printed ticket from Málaga to Seville. Then he found a cash receipt for Renfe, the train company, for just under two hundred euros, but couldn’t find the corresponding ticket to go with it.

  Mia walked into the courtyard and Wes waved to her and she came over, exuding the same air of peace he’d noticed after her visit to the cathedral in Segovia.

  But when she sat down she said, “It was for tourists, not for prayer. I couldn’t even light a real candle.”

  “That’s too bad. Maybe Seville will be better.”

  Her eyes brightened. “You need to go to Seville?”

  “I think so, in the morning, if that’s okay.”

  “But I thought, in the morning, you wanted to visit the place where your ex-wife died.”

  “I don’t really need to see it. I’m not sure I even want to.”

  “But I think you should. It’s important.” He was taken aback by her certainty, but before he could say anything, she added, “We could go now—it’s still light, and too early for dinner. Then we could leave for Seville after breakfast. It’s a good plan, I think.”

  “Okay.”

  He started to put everything back into the envelope, and it seemed only now that she noticed it all.

  “There are lots of postcards.”

  “Yeah, she liked to buy them, write on them. She never sent them.” He picked one up and handed it to her, but she refused to take it.

  “It’s not for me.”

  “It’s not for anyone. She’d just write down random things.” He turned the card over and looked at the back. “This one’s from Seville. She says there’s the most beautiful scent all over the city, and she should find out what it is.”

  “Oh.” Mia seemed to weigh up what she thought of this idiosyncrasy of Rachel’s, then said brightly, “So, shall we go, to the place where she died?”

  “Sure.”

  He took the envelope back to his room and then they set off, following the tourist route the concierge had suggested. They climbed a steep narrow street hemmed in by small Arabic stores and restaurants, the owners of the former trying to attract Mia with their scarves or various decorative objects, the owners of the latter asking Wes if he liked good Moroccan food.

  There were swarms of day-trippers, but also plenty of people lounging or drifting about who looked more permanent in some disheveled way—immigrants, washed-up hippies, an African man who walked down the street toward them shaving himself absentmindedly with a disposable razor.

  Wes and Mia climbed higher, beyond the tightly packed stores, but Wes could feel his ankle twinging with the strain of the ascent so they turned off, moving sideways around the hill of the Albayzín where they found quieter streets. There were still pockets of tourists even here, trudging wearily through the late-afternoon heat. A decent number of them were staring at the maps on their phones, trying to work out where they’d gone astray.

  Wes and Mia also got lost and he pulled the map from his pocket, looking at the route the concierge had marked. They weren’t far off, and after a couple more turns through tight white-washed streets, they stepped into the Plaza San Martín and the site of the attack.

  The café where it had happened was closed, a couple of workmen just tidying up for th
e day, but the signs of rebuilding suggested either the explosion had been massive or that the owners had simply taken the opportunity to remodel. Another café was open on the opposite side of the almost empty square—a handful of tables, only one of them occupied.

  “Shall we stay for a drink?”

  Mia looked at him as if he’d made a lame joke. “But it’s closed.”

  “No, not here—I mean the café across the square.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  They strolled across and took seats. There were a couple of empty tables between them and the only other customer, an old man who sat leaning on his walking stick.

  A waiter came out a moment later, and before he’d even had a chance to greet them, Mia said, “A white wine, please.”

  “Of course.” He looked bemused. “Sir?”

  “Hola. Er, I guess I’ll have a glass of red, thanks.” The waiter nodded, but before he could disappear, Wes said, “I guess you’ve been quieter since the attack?”

  “You guess wrong.” Wes noticed he had a slight American accent, suggesting he’d spent time there. “This square’s normally pretty quiet. But now, we get a lot of people coming just to see it. Curious, you know. People like you.”

  “His ex-wife was killed there. With a bomb.”

  Mia pointed for good measure, and yet Wes already knew her well enough to know she wasn’t trying to make the waiter feel bad or put him in his place; she was just stating a fact.

  But there was no question the waiter felt bad anyway.

  “Man, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “I’m sorry anyway. I’ll get your drinks.”

  They sat in silence. Mia was staring intently at the partly restored café across the square from them. He couldn’t detect any sign of emotion or even curiosity in those unfathomable eyes, but she stared all the same. In the end, Wes turned and looked himself, and sure enough, a few people strolled into the square and stood there, pointing at the attack site before moving on.

  The waiter came out carrying a tray and put down the two glasses of wine and some olives in a bowl. He spoke a few words in Spanish to the old man as he walked back inside but received no response that was audible.

  Wes wanted to know where his son was—that was the only reason he was here. It was true, a part of him was also curious about what it was that Rachel might have been doing on this leg of her trip, what it was that had made her decide it might be better to leave Ethan with someone else.

  Until now, though, the attack itself hadn’t interested him—it was just the random way in which Rachel had happened to die too soon, a piece of bad luck no different to an air crash or cancer or any number of other causes. Despite all the conspiracy theories, in Wes’s experience terrorism was rarely that interesting.

  Even sitting here in this square, it was of only incidental interest, and yet . . . For the first time, his thoughts engaged with the event itself, engaged in a way that reminded him of the way he used to think, before three years of prison dulled his mind.

  Thinking aloud, he said, “This is a strange place for a suicide bomber to attack. Why here?”

  He was aware of Mia turning to look at him, and he turned too and met her gaze.

  “Terrorists attack where you least expect—that’s what my father told me.”

  Wes felt a warmth for the late General Pavić, imagining him trying to impart all these pieces of advice to his daughter, ways of surviving in a hostile world.

  “Your father was right, but there’s still some logic.” Even as he spoke, the ways in which there was an absence of logic in this attack began to pile up on top of each other. “Ignore the fact that this city has a sizable Muslim population. Let’s say one of them becomes radicalized and decides to detonate a bomb and kill as many tourists as possible. Where are the busiest places in Granada?”

  “The cathedral was busy, and I remember when I went to the Alhambra with my father, there were so many people.”

  “Exactly. Or the Mirador place the concierge mentioned with the view over the Alhambra. Any one of those places would have been perfect. Why a sleepy square with hardly any people in it?”

  She took out her phone and looked at it for a minute in silence. Wes sipped at his wine—it was too warm, and he wished now he’d gone for white like Mia.

  “The attacker was called Hassan Berrada. He was a Muslim, from Seville.”

  “So why didn’t he blow up some tourist site in Seville? Why come all this way?”

  She read on intently, then said, “They think he planned to detonate the bomb at the Alhambra, but it went off early.”

  “Does it say anything else about him?”

  “They think he was radicalized online, but they also say he had mental health problems.”

  That made Wes suspicious. On the one hand, there was a better than average chance that someone carrying out a terrorist attack had mental health problems. But he also knew it was the kind of sweeping statement used all the time by the authorities, usually as a way of defending their failure to preempt an attack, knowing full well it was almost impossible to disprove.

  But he knew he was falling into the same trap that the conspiracy theorists fell into in the aftermath of terrorist attacks—that of looking for meaning where there was none. Maybe there were things about this that seemed odd, but nothing odd enough to distract Wes from the more important matters he had to focus on.

  The reasons a young man had chosen to blow himself up in a quiet Spanish square, even if they could be fully deduced and explained, would serve no purpose to the bereaved, and certainly not to the victims. Hassan Berrada had nothing to tell Wes other than what he already knew, that Rachel was dead and that there would be no more chapters written between them.

  Fifteen

  They set off early the next morning, a low mist clinging to the hills around Granada, clearing only as they descended onto the plain. Mia hadn’t been to Seville before and was excited about seeing it, apparently oblivious to how strange the circumstances were.

  She’d booked a hotel before breakfast, and that was the other side of this woman. It had struck Wes a few times that she often referred to pieces of advice her father had given her, and he could imagine the old man trying to protect and guide her, knowing that she was ill-equipped for the world. Yet she was unfazed by practicalities like hotel bookings or driving—he hadn’t seen her use the satnav once.

  And when they got to Seville and drove into the old town, she navigated the tight and twisting streets with ease, even as others edged nervously between the confining walls of buildings. It was as if she’d calculated how big the SUV was, worked out that it fit in the gap available, and was completely confident as a result.

  The hotel was right next to the cathedral, so once they’d checked in, Wes said, “I guess you’ll want to go light a candle?”

  “Not yet. It’s not a good time.”

  The concierge nodded agreement as though he were part of the conversation. “It’s very busy at this time of day. Early or late is best.”

  Wes turned to look at him and said, “I need to get to a hotel, the Alfonso XIII.”

  “Sure, I can show you on the map.”

  Without meaning to, Wes threw a glance at Mia, then faced the concierge again. “No need. Just point me in the general direction.”

  “Okay. If you go around the cathedral on the right-hand side, then keep going straight ahead, you can’t really miss it. You’ll see signs.”

  Mia stared at the concierge, fixing him with those dark eyes, and Wes found himself holding his breath, wondering what she might be about to say, but then she smiled and said, “I like this hotel.”

  “Thank you.”

  A short while later they set off into the deadening heat of early afternoon, keeping to the shade and out of the crowds wherever they could. Mia hardly looked at the cathedral as they passed, but she stared with alarm and confusion at th
e line of people waiting to gain entry.

  Wes thought of Ethan and how close to him he might be right now. There were plenty of people walking about the place with small children and he found that oddly unnerving. He’d still not even seen a picture so he could have easily walked past his own son without knowing it. And then he thought of Ethan pining for his mother, too young to understand that she wasn’t coming back, and Wes didn’t want to think about that.

  He welcomed the distraction when Mia said, “It’s orange blossom.”

  “Excuse me?” He looked at her, just to be sure she’d been talking to him.

  She pointed at the tree nearest them. “In the postcard, your ex-wife wanted to find out about the scent. It’s orange blossom.”

  Wes noticed it now, a sweet delicate fragrance hanging in the air, and he imagined Rachel wandering around these streets. Had she ever found out what the scent was? And where had she been and what had she seen while she was here? He was increasingly certain this hadn’t been entirely a vacation for Rachel, but even so, she had experienced these streets, savored this orange blossom scent, just as he was doing now.

  “Why did your ex-wife leave you?”

  “Like I told you, I was sent to prison.”

  “But you were a soldier. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “True. It’s kind of complicated.” He looked across at her to see if that was enough, but he could see she was waiting for more and there was no reason not to tell her—even if he still owed any loyalty to the Agency, most of his fall was in the public domain anyway. “Look, there was a person we were targeting, someone who was causing problems. We got the details of the flightpath for his helicopter and we brought it down. But it was the wrong helicopter, and the aid workers killed were from an agency which had accused the CIA of carrying out crimes in the region. The three civilians were a couple of journalists and a UN observer looking into those claims. So it looked bad on us. We admitted friendly fire, promised to punish those responsible, and I fell on my sword.”

  “That’s just an expression.”