by Peter May
He shone a torch into darkness and saw footprints in dust which had accumulated like frost on marble tiles. Old footprints. He stopped for a moment to shine his torch on the plans he had been given. Downstairs, through the spa, then out by the rear entrance to the rooms and up the fire stairs that wrapped around the lift shaft. The bedroom he was looking for was on the second floor. No. 233. It would be unlocked, they had said. He would find a bed with clean linen, a working toilet, bottled water, candles, matches. A safe room. A place to lie low for thirty-six hours until the exchange.
‘Where are we?’ It was the first interest Ana had shown. He took her hand in his.
– No matter. We’re safe.
This time he held on to her hand and led her down into pitch blackness. By the beam of his torch he saw spa baths raised above floor level, the size of swimming pools laid side by side. They filled a vast echoing space that must once have resounded to the carefree voices of wealthy patrons. All gone. In another era these pools had frothed with clear blue Mediterranean waters. Now they were filled with dust and debris, Roman pillars stained by time and damp. Doors led off along one side. Changing cubicles, and massage rooms where hot stones wrapped in soft towels had once been laid on aching backs.
They circumnavigated a tiny labyrinth of stairways leading to and from the baths, disturbing dust as they walked. It hung in the air like mist in their wake. Until they found the exit door at the far end and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Room 233 was carpeted. Even though its south-facing windows were shuttered, it had trapped the warmth of the day and was stifling hot. Cleland led Ana to the bed and sat her down while he rolled up the shutter and slid open glass doors leading to the balcony. Fresh air flooded in and he took a deep breath.
‘Don’t hurt me.’ Her voice was tiny.
He looked at her and frowned. He had sat her on a bed. Did she really think he was going to rape her? He sat beside her and took her hand again. As a means of communication this was frustratingly slow.
– Not going to hurt you. Here for a while. Don’t call for help. No one to hear. I’ll be gone some of the time. Day after tomorrow I’ll take you to The Rock. You know it?
‘Gibraltar?’
– Yes.
‘I’ve never been.’
– A shithole. Strategic for the British. And for us. He paused. It’ll all be over then.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Jefe’s villa lay at the end of a long bumpy track that wound up through gnarled cork oaks and the fleshy overhanging leaves of sprawling banana trees. Mackenzie’s ancient Seat strained on the gradient, tyres spinning and throwing up clouds of dust in the moonlight. It was little wonder that the police chief had splashed out on a four-by-four. Otherwise the approach to his home would be impassable when it rained.
Finally the track levelled off, then descended steeply to the faux finca below. This was a beautiful house, with arches and shaded terracotta terraces on three levels. Built in the style of a traditional white Andalusian farmhouse, Mackenzie thought that it was probably no more than fifteen or twenty years old.
Beyond banks of azaleas and bougainvillea, Mackenzie saw a swimming pool reflecting moonlight, and after parking next to the Audi, he followed steps down to a lower terrace. From here a spectacular view of the distant coastline opened up a long way below, lights like glowing beads on a string stretched intermittently along its sweeping contour.
The Jefe sat under a bamboo canopy, a glass in his hand, a half-empty bottle, some water and a second glass on the table beside him. Concealed lighting spilled subtle illumination across the terrace, catching highlights of amber in his glass. He stood up to shake Mackenzie’s hand, then waved him into a chair on the far side of the table.
‘Welcome to my humble abode.’
‘Not so humble,’ Mackenzie said as he watched the chief fill his glass then dilute it with a little water.
‘Extravagant now, I suppose. For a man living on his own. But when I built it there were three of us.’
‘Your wife and . . . ?’
‘My son.’ He raised his glass. ‘Salud.’ They touched glasses and drank. ‘How did you get on with the Policía Nacional?’
‘They kept me waiting for over two hours before they took my statement. I don’t think they liked me very much, Jefe.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for a start I’m a foreigner.’
‘And?’
‘They didn’t appreciate my pointing out the mistakes made securing the crime scene.’
The Jefe threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘I bet they didn’t.’ He looked at Mackenzie with amusement. ‘You just say it like it is, señor, don’t you?’
Mackenzie shrugged, not quite sure what was so amusing. ‘What other way is there to say it, Jefe?’
The chief chortled. ‘With tact, my friend, with tact.’
Mackenzie allowed himself a wry smile. ‘You sound like my wife. Or, rather, ex-wife. Well . . . soon to be ex.’
‘You have children?’
‘Two.’
‘Then you owe it to them to fix whatever is broken in your marriage. You might be feeling pain, but it is your children who are the real victims.’
‘What was it you were saying about tact?’
The Jefe smiled sadly. ‘Not my strong suit either.’
They sat in silence for a while then, sipping the lifeblood of Mackenzie’s native soil, gazing wordlessly at the stars that glittered across a crowded sky. There was no light pollution here, and the clarity was startling.
‘What happened to your wife?’
The Jefe glanced at the Scotsman. ‘Oh, the usual. Cancer.’ He sighed deeply, and some of the bitterness that resided in him seeped out. ‘A diagnosis that comes out of the blue. Shattering your dreams, your hopes and all of your certainties. Then there are the pedlars of false optimism, the doctors with their toxic treatments that are worse than the malady itself. All they can really do is prolong life for a few miserable months. What’s the point in that?’ He sipped his whisky and gazed into his glass for a long time. ‘The thing I have never quite got used to is being on my own. Especially here. Rattling about in this big empty house. At first I wanted to throw everything of Maria’s out. Burn it. Get rid of it. I’m glad I didn’t. At least it feels like a part of her is still here.’ He chuckled and flicked an embarrassed glance towards Mackenzie. ‘There are times when I find myself talking to her. I’ve lost count of just how often I’ve come into the kitchen in the morning and found her at the sink. The kettle boiling on the worktop.’ He hesitated. ‘Not. Or climbing into bed at night and turning to kiss lips on an empty pillow.’ He half-turned in his chair to look back at the house, soft light on white walls against the impenetrable black of the mountain behind it. ‘I love this place. And I hate it. So many happy memories. So many bad ones.’
‘You wouldn’t think of selling, surely?’
‘I’d leave here in a heartbeat, señor. My only future is in looking back.’ He leaned forward to top up their glasses. ‘What do you think of the whisky?’
Mackenzie took the bottle to look at it for the first time and raised an eyebrow. ‘I knew it was good,’ he said. ‘But I’d no idea it was that good.’
‘Sixty-nine Glenfiddich. One of my prized bottles.’
‘I feel privileged.’
‘Don’t. I’ve had it for years, and I’d have finished it long ago. But a whisky that good needs someone to share it with.’
Mackenzie savoured its oaky velvet smoothness. ‘What is it your son does?’
‘He doesn’t do anything, señor. He’s dead.’
Mackenzie closed his eyes momentarily. He could hear Susan whispering in his ear that he should have seen that coming. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, aware of his inadequacy. ‘What happened?’
‘Joachim was a cop. Following in his old man’s footsteps. I think he was hoping that one day he would carry on the family tradition and take over here as Jefe.
And, who knows, he probably would have. Except for a terrorist shooting in Madrid that took him from us at a criminally young age. Just twenty-four years old.’
Mackenzie saw the tears in his eyes catch the light of the rising moon.
‘Amazing how quickly those who give their lives are forgotten by their country. The very people for whom they made their sacrifice.’
Now Mackenzie didn’t know where to look. And he was frightened to speak for fear of saying something crass or stupid or just offensive. It seemed he never knew what to say, and when he tried he usually got it wrong. Or so Susan always told him. Silence spoke with more discretion.
It was the Jefe who broke it. He forced a laugh. ‘I’m sorry, señor, I didn’t mean to be maudlin. It’s been an emotional couple of days.’
Mackenzie nodded. ‘Has Cristina worked under you for long?’
‘Not so long. But I’ve known her since she was a child. Knew her parents.’ He shook his head. ‘Gave her away at her wedding after the death of her father.’ He paused. ‘It’s a tragedy what happened to Antonio. And I haven’t told Cristina about Ana yet. Seemed like that might just be more than she could cope with right now.’ He blinked back the threat of more tears. ‘Sometimes . . . sometimes things just never turn out the way you want them to.’ He forced himself away from the thought. ‘I don’t know how much longer they’ll want to keep you here. I suppose until either Cleland is caught, or he gets away. One way or another, that’s likely to be in the next forty-eight hours.’
Mackenzie emptied his glass. ‘I should have had him. Twice! But today was worse. I let him get away with Ana. If anything happens to her . . .’ His uncle’s words about his father still resonated, even after all this time. He was a total waster, your father. Thought that nothing was beyond him. Well he learned the hard fucking way just how wrong he was.
‘Not your fault, son.’
Mackenzie didn’t miss the paternal undertone. There was something very Scottish about the Jefe’s use of the word son. And when he thought about it realized that the Jefe was probably just about old enough to be his father.
The chief also seemed to realize the implication of what he’d said and quickly shrugged it off. ‘Anyway, don’t beat yourself up. We’ll get him. I’m just really pissed off that I’ve got a conference in Malaga the day after tomorrow. I’ve tried to get out of it, but obviously they think I’m more value there than here.’ He pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘I just hope I don’t miss all the fun.’
CHAPTER FORTY
First light slanted in through a window at the back of the cemetery, falling across the half-open casket, throwing shadows across the serenity fixed by some mortician on Antonio’s face. Cristina sat on a hard settee, as she had through most of the night, Lucas stretched out asleep beside her, his head resting in her lap.
Nuri and Paco had kept her company on the vigil, greeting the stream of visitors arriving to pay their respects, until at last their numbers dwindled to zero around midnight. People had brought food. Soup, and tapas. But Cristina had been unable to eat. Nuri had spent much of the night throwing up in a toilet two doors along, the fruit of the toxins they had drip-fed into her body just the day before. Everyone had heard her retching. Paco slipped out just after sunrise to make final preparations for the service.
More than her grief, more than the desperate desolation she felt for the son who had just lost his father, Cristina had obsessed through all the long hours of darkness about the message they had found on the answering machine at the apartment. How was it possible? How could anyone even believe it had been left by her? Ever since Paco had brought news of it back with him, she had wanted to hear it. To play it at volume through loudspeakers for everyone to hear and scream, See? It’s not me! How could anyone who knew her think it was? And why, in God’s name, did Antonio believe for one moment that she would want to meet him in an underground car park at the Eroski Centre? It made absolutely no sense.
And so she had passed a night divided equally between grief and anger. And frustration. By morning the tears had all been spilled, leaving her drained. Eyes stinging, throat swollen. She had barely heard the procession of muttered commiserations the night before. What did it matter? Her life was over.
The sounds of a car engine idling out front came with the opening of a door somewhere in the building. And voices. Before Paco returned to push his head into the room. ‘We should go and get ready for mass. The undertaker will take Toni to the church.’
It was thought that most of Marviña would be there, the tiny chapel downstairs hopelessly inadequate for the numbers expected.
Cristina looked at her sleeping child, and her heart broke for him all over again. How could she wake him to face the misery of this day when he had found, finally, escape in sleep?
*
The hearse arrived at the church with flowers trailing from the tailgate. As it lifted, the flowers fell to the ground and the pall bearers slid out the coffin to raise it on sturdy shoulders. They carried it in silence through the central arch and into the expectant hush of the cool crowded space beyond. The narrow streets around the church were thick with parked cars. People had come from miles around for the funeral. Some out of respect, others out of curiosity.
For Cristina it passed in a blur. The sonorous voice of the priest, the flesh and blood of Christ, the tribal nature of psalms sung in mourning. And then they were out again into the incongruity of blue skies and sunshine. Another beautiful day. The first without Toni.
It was a long walk in procession behind the hearse back to the cemetery on the edge of town, where rows of vertical tombs, four deep, stepped down the hillside like terracing in a vineyard. Concrete slots for coffins, bought or rented, bones to be removed to the ossuary in twenty years to make way for future travellers to eternity.
Across the hillside, cars paused briefly at the tollbooth on the motorway before passing on their way, oblivious to one life passing into the next in the cemetery below.
The Jefe stood by Cristina’s side, holding her hand as he had on her wedding day. In her other hand Cristina felt her son’s desperate grip, squeezing tightly as they watched the bearers sliding his father’s coffin into darkness, posted to the afterlife. She felt rather than heard the sobs that broke from his chest. And noticed for the first time that Ana was not there.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The town was deserted as Mackenzie walked up the Calle Utopía. Everyone, it seemed, was at the funeral. Most people in town, the Jefe had told him, had bought their cars from Antonio.
The heat had risen early today and was already shimmering in the air as church bells rang out across the rooftops, calling mourners to the requiem mass. Mackenzie glanced across the square towards the ceramic mosaic of winemakers trampling grapes. People came and went, but the wine was eternal, grapes the lifeblood of this community. He wondered who would sell them cars now.
A uniformed police officer was stationed outside Cristina’s apartment. Mackenzie was not sure why. It wasn’t a crime scene, and anyway forensics had already been through it with a fine-toothed comb.
Mackenzie recognized the officer from the briefings. They exchanged nods and Mackenzie asked him to open the door to the stairwell. The apartment itself was not locked and Mackenzie let himself in, feeling a little like an intruder on invisible grief. This was a living, loving place where a family had spent their lives without ever suspecting that tomorrow might never come. For Antonio, at least, it had not. For Cristina and Lucas tomorrow offered only grief. It would be a long healing process.
He thought about Antonio and Cristina, their relationship, the squabbling he had witnessed on each visit. And yet, wasn’t that normal? Couples fought. And when things went wrong, conflict even over inconsequentialities seemed inevitable. Certainly, it had for him and Susan. The fighting between them latterly had been vicious, and conducted all too often in front of the children.
He recalled the Jefe’s words from the night before. You might be fee
ling pain, but it is your children who are the real victims. And he felt laden with regret. Cristina had fought with Antonio, and now he was dead. No way to say sorry, no second chances. How would he feel if something were to happen to Susan? Whatever might have gone wrong between them, their love hadn’t always been broken.
Colourful plastic letters were arranged on the door of Lucas’s bedroom, spelling his name and telling the world that this was his space. He thought about Alex and Sophia, and their spaces that he no longer shared. And the weight of his regret turned to an ache. He pushed the door open and saw a collection of soft toys piled together in a basket on a table. Each one, no doubt, with its own significance, its own special memory, a furry history of childhood.
In a graphic on the wall above the bed, a boy flew through a starry universe beneath the aphorism Me pregunto si las estrellas se illuminan con el fin de que algún día cada uno pueda encontrar la suya. Mackenzie translated it in his head as: I wonder if the stars are shining so that one day everyone can find theirs.
But Lucas had just lost one of the two stars that shone brightest in his life. And again Mackenzie thought of his own kids. And the light that he no longer shone on their lives.
He wandered around the apartment touching things. A coat hanging on the stand in the hall. Candles in the shape of love hearts that sat on a shelf. A scarf draped over the back of a chair. A CD player sitting among a pile of scattered CDs on the coffee table.
The grief was no longer invisible. It was here in everything he looked at, everything he touched. Framed wedding photographs on the wall, a colouring book on the table, an empty spectacle case. All the component parts of deconstructed lives.