A Silent Death

by Peter May

  ‘Jesus!’ Mackenzie’s eyes flickered involuntarily towards the street outside. It was still dark, but daylight wasn’t far away.

  The duty officer’s eyes were wide with both alarm and astonishment.

  Mackenzie said, ‘What’s the fucking Skywalk?’

  ‘It’s a glass platform near the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar, señor. Built around an old fortified lookout post. A tourist attraction. I took my own kids to see it just last week, but it was closed for maintenance.’ He shook his head. ‘I wish they’d advertised that in advance. It would have saved me a journey.’ Then he paused to think about it. ‘But Cristina wouldn’t have gone to Gibraltar, señor. The Spanish police have no jurisdiction there.’

  Mackenzie cocked a despairing eyebrow. ‘She hasn’t gone as a police officer. How long will it take me to get there?’

  The duty officer shrugged. ‘This time of day? Probably no more than about thirty-five minutes.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Large silver letters affixed to the wall reflected the light of his headlamps as Mackenzie swung his car through the roundabout. La Paloma. He knew the name at once. It was here that it had all begun, the night Cristina and her colleague went to investigate a reported break-in at what turned out to be Cleland’s villa.

  He accelerated along the cliffs, the Mediterranean washing phosphorescence upon the beach below, and fumbled with his borrowed iPhone to autodial the number of the NCA in London. It would not yet be 6 am in England. He put it on speaker and dropped it on to the passenger seat. The voice of the night duty officer filled the car. ‘National Crime Agency, how can I help you?’

  ‘Investigator John Mackenzie. This is an emergency.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I am on deployment in Spain and I urgently need a name and contact number in the Royal Gibraltar Police. There is a major drugs deal going down on the Rock, and the lives of two women are at risk.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll need to confirm your identity and clear this with a higher authority.’

  Mackenzie drew a long slow breath to contain his exasperation and fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet and ID. He flicked on the dash light and squinted to read the number off his card and keep an eye on the road at the same time. Then he said, ‘Contact Director Beard for authorization and call me back.’

  He had no sooner hung up than the phone began to ring. Too fast to be the NCA. He glanced sideways to hit the answer icon. ‘Mackenzie.’

  ‘Señor, this is Detective Gil from GRECO in Marbella. I’m sorry to get you out of your bed at this hour, but it is a matter of some urgency.’

  Mackenzie was not about to explain why he was not in bed. He said, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘As we discussed a couple of days ago, my boss agreed to resume surveillance on Delgado and Rafa, along with the other principals on our list. One of our teams arrived to install themselves at Puerto Banus early this morning. Delgado’s yacht was missing from its berth. The port authority confirmed that it left harbour just after five. So the team conducted a routine check of CCTV footage.’ He paused. ‘Señor, a truck entered the marina and parked at the Pantalán where the yacht was berthed a little after three o’clock. Four men unloaded somewhere in the region of thirty bales, which were then stowed aboard the yacht before it set sail. One of those men was identified as Vasquez. When the yacht left it was confirmed that Delgado was on board.’ Mackenzie heard him sighing. ‘Unfortunately, we have no idea where it was headed.’

  Mackenzie said, ‘I do. It’s going to Gibraltar. I’m halfway there right now.’ He didn’t wait for Gil to register surprise. ‘I know that the Spanish and the Gibraltarians don’t really talk to each other, detective, but if you don’t start right now Cleland and the rest are going to get away.’

  There was a brief hiatus. ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘Yes. Cleland has taken Officer Sánchez Pradell’s aunt hostage and she is meeting him in Gibraltar to try to secure her release. But you and I both know he’s going to kill her.’

  Another pause. ‘We have contacts in HM Customs in Gibraltar. I’ll alert them.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  From here the bay of Gibraltar seemed circled by lights. Strings of them like luminous pearls followed the curve of the coastline. Black waters dotted with tankers and freighters sending shimmering spears of light to pierce the depths. Long, illuminated wharves reached out like protective arms from docks and container terminals, providing safe haven in calmer waters for giant ships. At the far side of the bay, tucked in beneath the mountains, lay the Spanish port of Algeciras, and beyond that the ferry terminal at Tarifa where cars and passengers trafficked back and forth between Spain and Morocco. Immediately below, the lights of Gibraltar town cast their pollution into a sky still dark.

  Cristina sat in numbed silence in the back of her taxi, trying to ignore the ramblings of the driver, a man more used, so he told her, to conducting circuits of the Rock with a car full of tourists.

  The one-way road to the peak was overhung by dark trees and rose steeply through hairpin bends snaking up into the night.

  ‘You see those big metal rings set into the road?’ her driver was saying. ‘The British used them as part of a pulley system for hauling cannon to the top of the Rock. Sheer brutal manpower.’ When she didn’t respond he said, ‘Spanish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought so.’ He sighed. ‘So many of the young ones don’t even speak it now. My people were from Malta. Lot of Italians came here, too. Only twenty per cent of Gibraltarians are of British descent, you know.’

  Cristina glanced at the back of his head for the first time. It was half-turned towards her. She saw dark Mediterranean features. ‘But you think of yourself as British?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Born under the union flag,’ he said proudly.

  They slowed to take a bend in the road where it almost doubled back on itself, and for a moment Cristina had a view out across the strait. The first glimpse of dawn, burgeoning somewhere in the hidden east, cast its pale misted light across brooding waters. The darker outline of the mountains of North Africa were clearly visible, the shadow of a nearer peak cutting its silhouette against the palest of light in the sky beyond.

  ‘Ceuta,’ the driver said. ‘One of the Pillars of Hercules. Gibraltar is the other. Hercules is said to have cut through the mountains with a single blow of his sword and used his great strength to separate the two continents and create the strait.’ He chuckled. ‘I leave you to decide whether or not there is any truth in this story.’ It probably went down well with tourists, but was lost on Cristina, her mind already wandering.

  The driver glanced at her in the mirror.

  ‘You know, there really is no point in going to the Skywalk. Like I told you, it’s closed for maintenance work. All you’re going to find up there are apes. And nothing else is open yet. St Michael’s Cave, the tunnels, the cable car . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cristina said. ‘Just drop me at the Skywalk.’ Her apprehension was so intense now that the shivering which had accompanied her across the border had become a deep, numbing chill. Her whole body was rigid as she sat gripping her seat in the back of the taxi.

  *

  The Spanish border town of La Línea was deserted apart from traffic on the arterial road leading to the frontier. As Mackenzie accelerated through a series of roundabouts, street lights cast a ghostly yellow across the dual carriageway, vehicles travelling in one direction only. On his right, beyond the marina, the waters of the Bay of Gibraltar reflected the lights of myriad ships at anchor. Vast areas of covered parking stretched ahead, and beyond that the tail lights of vehicles queuing to cross the border into Gibraltar. The queue had started early, as it always did, to process the more than 23,000 people who came from Spain to work on the Rock every day.

  As Mackenzie joined the tail of the queue he cursed and glanced at his watch. If this was how it was early on a Saturday, God only knew what it would be l
ike on a weekday. It was almost 7 am and he could see first light in the sky beyond the black shape of the Rock. He lowered his head to glance up, impressed by the scale of it rising sheer into the night, dwarfing customs and immigration buildings and the airport runway below.

  His phone rang and he grabbed it. ‘Mackenzie.’

  ‘Sir, pleased to connect with you. Detective Sergeant David Greene. I’m with the serious crime squad of the Royal Gibraltar Police. I’ve been briefed by the NCA in London, and my colleagues in Customs and Excise have received an alert from GRECO in Marbella. Where are you, sir?’

  ‘I’m stuck in bloody traffic in La Línea, waiting to cross the border.’

  ‘Dump the car, sir, and come through on foot. It’s much quicker. I’ll meet you on the other side.’

  Mackenzie pulled the wheel hard to his right and swung out of the queue. He turned into the entry lane of one of several car parks that sprawled behind mesh fencing, and snatched a ticket from the machine to lift the barrier. He slotted his car into the first available space, then took off on foot, trying to ignore the pain that jarred through his body with every juddering footfall.

  People were arriving, it seemed, from nowhere now. Dropped perhaps from cars, or coming on foot from homes in La Línea itself. Gibraltar was a major local employer. Everyone was heading for passport control. Mackenzie pushed his way unceremoniously through the crowd.

  On the far side of the entrance to customs and immigration, a huge animated billboard shone its advocacy of Watergardens Dental Care into the dark before dawn. Vehicles backed up in two lanes for several hundred metres, idling and belching fumes into the cool morning air, waiting to pass through laborious checks put in place by the Spanish to irk the British.

  Mackenzie ran past rusted fencing, beneath twin arches that marked the crossing point for vehicles, and towards the single doorway that led to the immigration hall. Here a queue had already formed at a row of automated passport control gates. Mackenzie shoved his way to the head of it, ignoring a barrage of complaints, and made for the first available gate. From a window on the far side, inscrutable immigration officers eyed him suspiciously as he held his passport in the digital reader and waited for the flash of the camera to record his image. He endured what seemed like an interminable wait before the light ahead of him turned green and the barrier let him through.

  Moving with the flow of people passing through the narrow opening from one hall to the next, he waved his passport at a bored British official sitting at a raised desk, a perfunctory pretence of passport control, and ran through a wood-panelled customs hall where uniformed officials were more interested in chatting than checking.

  Immediately outside, in Winston Churchill Avenue, a stocky middle-aged man in a dark suit and open-necked white shirt loitered by an old-fashioned red-painted British telephone box. It seemed strangely incongruous here at the southern tip of Spain, just fifteen kilometres from the continent of Africa. The man glanced down at a faxed ID sheet in his left hand, then up again at Mackenzie. He stepped forward, his right hand extended. ‘Mr Mackenzie. Pleased to meet you, sir. DS Greene. I have a car over here.’

  Greene’s silver-grey Honda Civic was pulled in at the back of a taxi rank where drivers stood around smoking and chatting among themselves, waiting for early morning business. Across the road, a huge expanse of floodlit tarmac stretched away to the new terminal at Gibraltar Airport.

  Greene slipped a flashing light on to the roof of the Honda and started his siren as he pulled off into the stream of traffic heading for town. But even lights and siren did not give him precedence over the barriers that fell to stop traffic in both directions where the road crossed the runway. Greene tapped his wheel with impatient fingers as they waited for an early easyJet flight to take-off.

  ‘Fifth most dangerous airport in the world,’ he said. ‘And not just because the road goes right across the runway. We have terrible cross-winds here. Not too bad this morning.’ He leaned forward to peer up at the Rock through his windscreen. ‘It’ll be windy up there, though. You can count on it.’ He glanced across at Mackenzie. ‘We’ve got armed uniformed officers on the way up by car. You and I are going to take the cable car. Much faster. I had to get the operator out of his bed. It’s not normally open for another couple of hours, and wind conditions this morning would usually mean a cancellation of service.’ He smiled grimly. ‘But needs must, eh?’

  Lights turned green, the barriers lifted, and Greene leaned on the horn to augment his siren in forcing the traffic ahead out of his way. Mackenzie had the sense that he was enjoying this.

  They accelerated through several roundabouts between tall buildings and passed broken-down sections of the old city wall. Dark space opened out on their right, and Mackenzie saw containers lined up along a dock, yachts in a marina, and the lights of Algeciras twinkling distantly eight kilometres away across the bay. The light of dawn cast itself in pale pink across the peaks of the mountains beyond.

  Gibraltar old town lay somewhere off to their left, and as they passed the Trafalgar Cemetery Greene said, ‘Are you armed?’

  ‘No I’m not. You?’

  ‘Yes sir. I’m a trained firearms officer. And I checked out a sidearm before leaving base.’

  Opposite an art deco fire station, he pulled in at the kerbside, and they jumped out of the car. Mackenzie glanced up to see huge pylons set into the hillside at precarious angles, support for the cables that would haul their car to the summit more than 400 metres above. He followed Greene into the docking station.

  *

  Cristina watched the tail lights of her taxi vanish over the brow of the hill to make its way back down to the town below. No need to wait for her. She knew she wasn’t coming back. The wind tugged at her hair and yanked at her clothes. It was fresh, almost cold in the first light of dawn.

  Above her, the glass platforms of the Skywalk stood on two levels, constructed around an old stone watchtower where the British had once installed a Bofors gun. A lift, not functioning at this hour, climbed to the topmost level. Red and white tape was stretched across the stairs that led up to both, and a red triangular sign announced that the Skywalk was closed for maintenance.

  Beyond it, the Rock fell sheer to an arc of coastline almost 340 metres below, the Mediterranean washing white along its contour. On the bay side, it dropped away steeply on a tree-covered slope to the lights of the town and the harbour reflecting in the bay. To her right, the Rock swept upwards on a knife edge to its second-highest peak. On her left it rose towards the cable car station and the highest point of this British overseas territory.

  The stars were fading now in a sky that went from blood red along the distant eastern horizon, through the palest of turquoise to the darkest blue of the vanishing firmament.

  Cristina breathed deeply. There was something invigorating in drawing on this fresh clean air in the final minutes of her life. Something, perhaps, almost poetic about dying in this most beautiful of places as the sun sent its light scattering across the sea, which had been such an ever-present through all of her days.

  But still her heart weighed like a burden in her chest as she stepped over the red and white tape to climb the stairs to the platform above. And all she could think of was the son she was about to orphan.

  She reached the lower platform which extended out across the drop. Tourists flocked here during the season to step gingerly over the glass and look at the terrifying drop that fell away beneath their feet.

  There was no one there.

  She climbed the steps to the observation platform above. It, too, was deserted. The wind battered her here, and she held on to the glass barrier wondering if somehow she had got it wrong. Was it not at the Skywalk she was supposed to meet Cleland? Or had she missed him? The Spanish coastline stretched away to the north, before sweeping eastwards. She could see the lights of Estepona, and more distantly the conurbation of Marbella. And somewhere in the dark fold of the hills lay Marviña. Her home. The land of her
father and mother. Of her aunt. Another kind of fear gripped her. And she wondered if Ana was already dead.

  Then she saw a light flashing from the southern peak, another 60 metres up. Once, twice, three times. A signal. She was certain of it. They wanted her to come to them. Perhaps it was too exposed here on the Skywalk. She slipped a torch from the pocket of her anorak, and in its beam saw steps carved into the rock six metres below. They wound their way up and along the crest of the Rock towards the summit. She climbed down to the foot of the stairs, and began the steep ascent into the dawn to meet her destiny.

  *

  Ana feels the wind wrapping itself around her, almost violent in its caress. It fills her mouth, and makes her sightless eyes water as though she were crying. Her hair is pulled back from her face like the repeated strokes of a brush fighting to remove every tug. She has to brace her feet firmly on uneven ground to keep from losing her balance.

  The journey by boat had seemed to last for ever. She had not been on water since childhood, and although the sea was not rough, a heavy swell had made her feel quite nauseous. Cleland had sat with her, holding her hand for most of the journey, fetching her water when she asked for it and holding the container to her lips.

  When finally they had disembarked, she’d had the impression of a great sense of open space around her. An industrial smell. The stink of motor oil and smoke. Solid ground beneath her feet again had come as a relief.

  Then there had been the short journey by car. Climbing ever upward through bends that tipped them in their seats, one way then the other. Cleland’s hand ever-present.

  Emerging from the car, she had immediately felt the force of the wind, and experienced a great sense of height. She could feel the difference in pressure, the temperature of the air. And then Cleland’s hand on her arm, guiding her up endless crooked steps that turned and twisted, up and up until her legs ached and her lungs were close to bursting. Apprehension grew with every step.