by Peter May
He stripped to his boxers and lay on top of the bed in the dark, but found it difficult to breathe in the airless heat. He swung his legs off the bed and crossed the room to wind up the shutters, sliding open the glass doors and stepping out on to the balcony.
Everything in the main street below was closed up for the night and there was not a soul stirring in the town. He stood gulping down the slightly cooler night air and heard the beep of an incoming email on his phone. He went into the room to fetch it from his shirt pocket and took it back out to the balcony. The email was from Mick, his audio forensic expert at the Met.
Hola my Spanish Warrior,
I’m guessing you don’t want the full forensic transcription or the detailed Primeau Forensics analysis, because you never possessed my delight for detail. Such things you may require for future reference, but here for your delectation are the facts in brief.
This is an absurdly amateurish cobbling together of bits and pieces of other recordings. Other phone messages would be my best guess. It would take a matter of minutes with a couple of mobile phones to assemble something this bad, assuming you had the raw material to hand. Wouldn’t stand up in a court of law for five minutes. If you want more, I am at your service.
El Cid
Mackenzie smiled at his old friend’s childish sense of humour. But his email only confirmed what Mackenzie had already suspected. That someone had called Antonio to make a rendezvous at the Eroski Centre, then allowed time for him to leave the apartment before calling again to leave Cristina’s phoney message. The caller could not have known exactly where Cristina might be at that time, whether she would have an alibi or not. But at the very least it would sow the seeds of confusion. Sometime tomorrow, he hoped, he would be able to identify exactly who had made those calls.
His phone vibrated and pinged in his hand. It was a Facebook alert. He went into the app and saw a red dot attached to the double head-and-shoulders icon that represented friend requests. He tapped it. A single name appeared. Sophia Mackenzie. Confirm or Delete. His heart filled up with love for the little girl who just forty-eight hours ago had unfriended him.
He tapped Confirm.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The persistent single trill of the telephone penetrated troubled dreams that vanished from recollection the moment he awoke. It took a second to remember where he was, and then another to reach for the bedside phone.
‘Yes?’
The voice that sounded in his ear could almost have been computer-generated. It was monotone and curiously stilted, as if the speaker were trying to disguise it. And if it was someone Mackenzie knew, he was making a good job of it. He spoke in Spanish. ‘Condesa Golf Hotel. Thirty minutes. Come alone. Simple exchange. You for the blind lady.’ And the caller hung up before Mackenzie could even respond.
He sat upright on the bed. Perspiring, breathing hard. He could feel his heart punching at an already tender rib cage.
He ran every possible eventuality through his head at high speed, and each one led him to the same conclusion. However clumsily contrived, it was clearly a trap. But an oddly honeyed trap, almost as if its architect knew how irresistible it would be to Mackenzie. The chance to make amends for his father’s mistake all those years ago. Sacrificing himself to save the hostage. But how could anyone know about that? And how could anyone think he was stupid enough not to realize that a trap was a trap. In contradiction of the popular aphorism, there was no honour among thieves, so there was no guarantee that the promise of any exchange would be respected. Cleland simply wanted to kill him. He knew it in his bones.
But what to do?
He weighed everything in his mind. He could not involve Cristina. She had more than enough to contend with. But he had a location. The Condesa Golf Hotel. It was just possible that Cleland might actually be there. Mackenzie had noticed it the other day, sitting up above the A7 overlooking the sea half a mile short of the Eroski Centre. Green-smoked glass and pale yellow walls. An air of abandonment. Closed shutters, overgrown gardens, and two letters dangling at odd angles from the name of the hotel above the front entrance. Of course, it was perfectly possible Ana wasn’t even there.
But what to do?
He took his own phone from the charger and called the police station. A sleepy-sounding duty officer responded, and took more than a moment to realize who Mackenzie was.
‘I need a number for the Jefe,’ Mackenzie said.
‘Well, isn’t there something I can help you with?’
‘No, I need to talk to the Jefe.’
He heard the officer sigh, then after a moment he read out a number. ‘He won’t be happy to hear from you at this time in the morning.’
Mackenzie hung up and dialled. He was not going to make a decision on this by himself. Unlike his father, he would defer to a higher authority. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the phone ringing in the dark of the Jefe’s home somewhere up in the hills. He rehearsed what he was going to say. But the phone just rang and rang, until finally Mackenzie hung up and his carefully thought out words scattered in the winds of uncertainty.
‘Shit!’ His own voice whispered back at him from the walls. He glanced at the bedside clock. It was 4.17 am, a good five minutes now since the call. The caller had said thirty minutes. Time was running out. By the time he got to the police station and explained himself to the duty officer, that thirty-minute window would have closed. He had to go now.
Cursing under his breath, he dragged on a pair of jeans and pushed his feet into white trainers. His only fresh shirt was a white one. He would be seen coming a mile off. He shoved the shirt tails into his jeans and dropped his phone into the breast pocket, then took a moment to steady himself, fingers pressed into the soft flesh at either side of his temples. He forced himself to take a deep breath, then ran silently down the stairs to search for his car in the underground garage.
*
There was no traffic on the A7 as Mackenzie pulled off it, slipping his car into neutral and drifting to a halt in front of the golf club. He cut the engine. The hotel itself stood at the top of a short rise beyond the clubhouse and languished in profound darkness. He glanced at his watch. The thirty minutes were almost up.
He stepped out of the car and stood listening. All he could hear was the creak of cicadas, and an offshore breeze that rattled the fronds of palm trees overhead. A waning moon and a star-studded sky provided enough light to see by.
He ran cautiously up the hill staying close to the retaining wall, then sprinted for the deep shadow of rusted canopies that raised themselves above the overgrown slots of an empty car park. From here he surveyed the front entrance to the hotel, half hidden by foliage. It all seemed closed and secure. There were no lights inside.
Keeping to the shadows, he moved around the far side of the building to where a spa occupied the basement on a lower level. The hotel was built in wings enclosing an overgrown garden. Steps led up to a gated entrance. Everything was padlocked.
Mackenzie drifted across the access road, and found a path that curved back around the slope towards the front of the hotel. He pushed through tangling bushes to reach steps that climbed to a side entrance. There he stopped and stood quite still. A chain hung from the padlock that Cleland had severed and the door itself stood half open.
He listened intently. But the cicadas, like tinnitus, drowned out everything else. All that he could hear above it was the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears. He stepped forward to push the door carefully into darkness. And moved silently into the interior.
For several long moments he stood motionless, letting his eyes accustom themselves to what little light there was. Moonlight fell feebly from an atrium high above reception, and in its cold wash he saw the tracks left by many feet in the dust that lay thick on the floor. Some old, some fresh. They led across marble tiles to a staircase that descended to the spa. Mackenzie moved slowly in the footsteps of whoever had gone before him and started down the stairs.
Now he was in one of the residential wings. Hands painted on the walls of the stairwell pointed up towards numbered rooms on the floors above. He stopped on the first landing. A strangely invasive moan penetrated the darkness. Erratic, repetitive. An almost human sound. Although he knew that it wasn’t. But like chalk on a blackboard it sent an involuntary chill through his body.
This was madness. What could he possibly achieve by coming here on his own, walking straight into a trap so crudely set? He was unsure if he had ever been in greater fear for his life. Perhaps he should have gone to the police station after all. But it was too late for second thoughts. In the end, it seemed, he had been just as foolish as his father. There was nothing for it now but to push on.
As he reached the second landing the moaning grew louder. It came to him from somewhere beyond double doors that led into what must once have been a guest lounge. Settees and armchairs and coffee tables hid like phantoms beneath discoloured dust sheets, and Mackenzie slalomed between them towards a wall of glass with sliding doors that stood open. Outside, a covered terrace overlooked the garden.
Once on the terrace he identified the source of the almost human moaning. The remains of a flag dangled from a pole overhead and swayed gently back and forth in the breeze that blew up from the shore, causing a steel rope to swing on a rusted retaining hinge. An endless eerie refrain heard only by the ghosts of guests past. And those in whose footprints Mackenzie had followed.
He stepped across the terrace and peered over the rail into the shrubbery below. Weeds pushed up through cracked tiles around an empty swimming pool where myriad blue mosaic tiles had flaked off to lie scattered across its debris-strewn floor like glitter.
The sound of broken glass crunching underfoot brought him spinning around, in time to see the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway. He knew immediately that it was Cleland, but all consciousness was drowned out by the sound of the shot that echoed around the gardens, and by the force and pain of the bullet that struck him full in the chest. It propelled him into the railings behind him, tipping him over backwards into darkness. Falling. Falling. Into silence.
*
Cleland watched with satisfaction as Mackenzie toppled backwards over the railing into the garden below. His original assessment of Mackenzie as a knuckle-headed cop vindicated by the stupidity of his coming here alone. It had taken no time at all for Cleland to track Mackenzie down on the internet. A tabloid story of heroism thwarting a bank raid in north London. And the background that the journalist had dug up on a family suicide. His father a cop whose bungled rescue attempt had led to a fatality, and later the taking of his own life. Like father like son. Only it was Cleland who had taken the son’s life.
He crossed the terrace and looked down into the dark tangle of foliage below. There was no sign of Mackenzie in the overgrown ruin of a garden where guests had once sunned themselves on luxury loungers. But no movement either. Cleland had no doubt that he was dead. He had won prizes for target shooting at his gun club and had directed his bullet directly at Mackenzie’s heart. But it never did any harm to be sure.
He turned and saw the shadow of Paco skulking in the doorway. ‘Call your boss and tell him the rendezvous is going ahead as planned,’ he said. ‘Then get down there and make sure that bastard’s properly dead.’
*
Ana is cold. She knows that the air is warm. She can feel it on her skin. But the chill comes from within. So deeply that she is shivering.
Her time here has seemed endless, without any means of communication. Cleland has kept her company only intermittently, and with every interaction between them she has felt only more antipathy toward him.
Much of this time has been spent thinking about Sergio. Dwelling on what she realizes now were the days of their lives. Those idyllic evenings passed together so long ago. At the centre in Estepona. At the seafood restaurant on the beach at Santa Ana. And she has found herself wondering what might have become of the toothless proprietor. She supposes he was younger then than her teenage self imagined. Perhaps both he and the restaurant are still there.
Unlike Sergio.
His meeting with the young Ana had brought him only pain and misery. Her father and his so set against their relationship. The denial of what might have been the young couple’s only chance at happiness. All those lost years, poor Sergio regretting what had never been his fault. Only to die at the hands of Cleland when finally he had tried to turn back the clock and remake the past.
How very close he had come. So very close.
Tears fill her eyes, fuelled by her pain and anger. How unfair it all is. As if she has been cursed. A curse unwittingly passed on to the man she loved.
A change in temperature signals Cleland’s return. When he comes close she smells him. She is sitting by the window, another chair beside her, a table to her left with water and biscuits. All that she has been given to sustain her.
From the adjoining chair his hands take hers, and she feels his finger tracing words on her palm. His breath is rank. And there is a strange smell from his hands, like the odour of nitroglycerine she had identified from Cristina’s gun.
– Leaving now.
‘Where’s Cristina?’
– Never mind.
‘Don’t harm her, please. You have me.’
– Yes. A pause. We’re going on a boat. Not for long. Don’t be afraid.
‘Cristina . . .’
He puts a finger to her lips to silence her.
– She’s at home with Lucas. Safe. No need to hurt her now.
She raises a hand unexpectedly to his face, taking him by surprise and catching the smile that still lingers on his lips. She knows he is lying.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Paco cursed his luck. He hated Cleland with a vengeance. Shooting him in the leg had been no part of the deal. ‘I had to make it look real,’ Cleland had told him later. ‘Just a flesh wound. Avoided the bone and the femoral artery. You’ll live.’
Yes, in constant bloody pain! The price he was paying for Nuri’s treatment. He screwed up his face as he hobbled around the side service road to access the garden. There was no way, it seemed, to reach it from inside. All doors leading out were firmly locked.
He toyed with the idea of going back and telling Cleland that he had found Mackenzie, and that he was well and truly dead. But what if he wasn’t? Cleland was unpredictable. Brutal. Mad. There was no telling what he might do.
A service ramp sloped down to a shuttered cellar beneath the gardens where the pumps that powered the spa and the pool were housed. From the pavement, steps led up to a padlocked gate with spiked railings and barbed wire that gave on to another level. Yet more steps rose to the garden itself.
Paco climbed to the gate, leaned his crutches against the wall and unclipped Cleland’s wire-cutters from his belt. They sliced easily through the chain, and he let the links and padlock fall away. The gate swung open with a rusty complaint, and he grabbed his crutches to help propel himself up the last half-dozen steps to the garden itself.
The grass was almost waist-high here, the dead fronds of untended palms dangling in profusion all around and rustling in the breeze. The moon was rising now over the roof of the hotel, casting deep shadows in the empty pool. Paco pushed his way through barbed branches and tangling hedge. Thorns scratched his face and arms. The hanging leaf of a banana tree slapped him heavily in the face, and he had trouble keeping his balance.
He looked up and saw that he was directly below the terrace from which Mackenzie had fallen. That smug fucking Scotsman. At least he had got what was coming to him. But there was no sign of the body. Just the crushed leaves and snapped branches of thick foliage that must have broken it
s fall. Where the hell was he?
As Paco looked up again to check that he was in the right place, a shape took shadowed form and emerged from the darkness with such force that it knocked him from his feet, landing on top of him with full crushing weight to force the air from his lungs. A fist slammed into his face. He felt teeth breaking and sinking into the soft flesh behind his lips. Another blow. Blood bubbling into his mouth and spurting from his nose. He swung desperate fists in the dark and struck solid bone. He gasped and gurgled and squirmed his way out from beneath the weight of his attacker. Whatever damage Cleland’s bullet had done to Mackenzie, it had not killed him.
Paco scrambled to his feet, crutches discarded, and went charging off through the undergrowth, ignoring the fire in his wounded leg. Fear launched him blindly into darkness until his shins struck a low stone wall at the perimeter of the garden and tipped him forward into space.
His fall ended abruptly and in searing agony. It seemed to consume his whole body for just a second. Before darkness took him. And the pain and everything else went away.
Mackenzie staggered after the hapless Spaniard, legs buckling beneath him. He was half crippled by pain. But unlike Paco’s, Mackenzie’s pain wasn’t going away any time soon. He reached the wall and dropped to his knees and peered down to see Paco staring back at him. The man lay full-length along the top of the railing below, spikes protruding from his chest and stomach and groin, skewered like a sardine in readiness for the flames. Dead eyes gazing into the firmament, and to eternity beyond.
The lights of a vehicle sent shadows firing off into the night as it swung around a bend in the service road below, and by the reflected light of the headlamps Mackenzie saw, as it passed, Ana’s pale frightened faced pressed against the passenger window.
*
The bleary-eyed medic on the desk at Helicopteros Sanitarios looked up from his computer as the outside door slid open. His eyes opened wide as the dishevelled figure of a tall, fair-skinned man with a blood-stained white shirt staggered in out of the night. He was on his feet in an instant. ‘Señor, what’s happened?’