A Thousand Cuts

by Thomas Mogford

  Drew answered almost instantaneously. ‘I can’t talk for long. They’ll want me back in the conference room any minute.’

  ‘Where are you, Drew?’ The connection was poor.

  ‘In London. For the GibFuel arbitration. Why? Is something wrong?’

  Spike sensed that he was about to step off a cliff, and this was his last chance to back away. But he forced Jessica’s disapproving face from his mind, and jumped. ‘It’s about your father . . .’

  Drew remained quiet for a long while after Spike had finished talking. When he did speak, his voice was thick with emotion. ‘There must be some misunderstanding.’

  Spike wished he could agree.

  ‘I can’t make it back by six a.m. tomorrow.’

  Spike could tell what was coming . . .

  ‘Dad needs someone with him when the police arrive.’

  ‘I can’t, Drew.’

  ‘Why? Because of Jessica?’

  ‘Jessica, my connection to Eloise Capurro, the Massetti case. Take your pick.’

  ‘I’d do it for you.’

  ‘I’ve already gone out on a limb.’ In the background, Spike could hear Drew’s name being called. ‘Just hold the fort until I arrive, OK?’ Drew said. ‘You don’t have to be there in an official capacity, just make sure the police do everything by the book.’ He lowered his voice, ‘I won’t forget this, Spike.’

  Spike hung up. He had no doubt that Drew meant it. The problem was he knew that Jessica wouldn’t forget it either.

  47

  When he finally got home, Spike had hoped to find everyone in bed. No such luck: Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of cucumber batons and a jar of Nutella. He stared up at Spike with a hint of defiance, then dipped a piece of cucumber into the chocolate spread and licked his lips.

  Rufus was beside the kitchen sink, observing the scene with evident pride. ‘Jessica insisted he start with vegetables. Seemed the easiest way.’

  ‘He’s meant to be in bed by seven, Dad.’ Spike glared at his father. But then he remembered that Rufus had no idea that Marcela was dead, and that Sir Anthony was a murder suspect, and tried to hold his temper. ‘Please don’t play with your food, Charlie.’ He stooped down to pick up the cucumber stick just in time to see another baton hit the floor.

  Charlie slowly raised his head. His dark eyes were hooded; he was practically asleep at the table.

  ‘I spoke to Old Davey today,’ Rufus said. ‘Davey Lavagna?’ he enunciated, reading the blank expression on Spike’s face. ‘Owns the house in Catalan Bay?’

  ‘Right,’ Spike said, only half following what his father was saying. He felt a sudden, irritating buzz against his thigh and checked his phone. The number was withheld – out of habit, he ignored it.

  ‘He said you could go down there tomorrow and take a look.’

  ‘I’m working tomorrow, Dad,’ Spike snapped, hearing Drew’s stricken voice echo in his head. ‘There’s no way I’ll have time to get to Catalan Bay.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Rufus said. ‘Entirely up to you. Forget I mentioned it.’

  Spike forced himself to focus. ‘I’ll give Davey a call, OK?’ His eye fell on another piece of cucumber wilting on the floor. ‘Can you pick that up please, Charlie?’

  The boy ignored him, just dipped a fresh baton into the pot.

  ‘Charlie?’ Spike raised his voice. ‘Get down and pick that up.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Rufus said. Delivered curtly, it was a rebuke. But Spike was already hoisting the boy out of his chair. He set him down on the cork-tile floor and crouched beside him. ‘I said PICK IT UP!’

  Charlie stared up at Spike in shock. His mouth started to quiver, then Spike felt a hand grip his shoulder, surprisingly strong. He swung round to face his father.

  ‘Leave it, son. We’re all just a bit tired.’

  Charlie clamped himself to Rufus’s legs, and as Spike watched the old man scoop him up, he felt his anger fade until all that remained was a healthy measure of self-disgust. He turned away, found an open bottle of red wine and went upstairs.

  Twenty minutes later, he heard a knock at his bedroom door and saw Rufus’s frail frame silhouetted in the light of the landing.

  ‘Is he asleep?’ Spike asked.

  Rufus nodded. ‘I shouldn’t have let him stay up so late, son. That sponsored scoot really took it out of him.’

  Spike lowered his head into his hands. ‘That thing was today?’

  Rufus placed himself gingerly on the futon beside him. ‘I don’t know how you can bear this contraption,’ he grumbled.

  Spike let slip a smile. ‘Sorry about earlier.’

  ‘You need to spend more time with the boy. Both of you.’

  There was a long pause. Spike knew what he wanted to say. That Rufus was a hypocrite who’d preferred to stay late at the school he ran rather than come home to face the fact that his wife was drinking herself to death. But seeing the tender, sheepish look on his face, Spike could tell that his father had anticipated his thoughts, and that, in some way, every kindness he showed Charlie was an attempt to atone for his own failings. So all he said was, ‘I know, Dad.’

  Rufus creaked to his feet. ‘Jessica’s working late again.’

  Spike knew he couldn’t put it off for ever – and he didn’t want to leave it up to Jessica to break the news. ‘She’s still at the station. They found Marcela Peralta’s body this morning in Rosia Bay.’ He reached over and squeezed his father’s bony shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Dad. I know you two were close.’

  Rufus swayed on his feet, pale blue eyes glassy in the lamplight. ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘That’s what Jessica’s trying to work out.’

  Spike stood up to embrace his father, but Rufus was already at the door. He reached for the handle. ‘You think some people are going to last for ever. Stupid, really.’ Then he stepped into the corridor and pushed the door to behind him.

  For a moment Spike considered following him. But he knew his father had always preferred to grieve alone, so he reached for his jacket and took out his BlackBerry. The unknown caller had rebounded with a text. ‘I wondered if you might join me tomorrow for an early breakfast. 6 a.m. at Dragon Trees? All best, Anthony S’.

  Spike sighed. He’d come this far; it was too late to turn back. ‘See you tomorrow’ he texted back. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

  48

  Four pairs of amber eyes tracked Spike’s progress as he climbed the dusty road towards Dragon Trees, an alcohol sweat drying cold on his back. The apes were meant to be a reassuring presence on the Rock, but it didn’t feel that way this morning. Maybe it was just Spike’s hangover, but he was sure that he could sense disapproval in their gaze as they watched him from their rocky crags, scratching at their genitals. As though they knew that he’d pretended to be asleep when Jessica had finally crawled into bed after midnight. Or that he’d done all he could not to wake her as he’d sneaked out of the house at 5 a.m., reluctant to face uncomfortable questions about where he was going and why. So he turned his back on them as well, and pressed the buzzer by the main entrance.

  A minute later, a wooden door set into the stone wall ten yards down the road creaked open, and Sir Anthony Stanford stepped outside. He’d jettisoned his sling, Spike saw as he walked towards him. This morning, he wore a freshly pressed powder-blue suit and, nestling in the silver hairs of his chest, Spike recognised the teardrop pendant he’d seen in Christopher Massetti’s stolen photograph.

  Sir Anthony must have seen the dip of Spike’s eyes, as he tucked the necklace into his collar with a half-smile. ‘I came across it the other day. Quite by chance. It was a gift from my mother.’

  Spike cleared his throat. ‘I’m here because Drew asked me to come. As a family friend, not as your lawyer. I would ask you not to share anything substantive with me.’

  Sir Anthony clasped Spike’s hand in both of his, black eyes wet with emotion. ‘I can’t tell you how grateful we are.’ Then he turned, and Spi
ke followed him down a set of steps hewn from the Rock, feeling the green-painted handrail already warm in the sun.

  The garden was as impressive as Spike remembered, still the largest of any private house he’d seen in Gibraltar. It had been Drew’s mother’s great passion and, until the last months of her illness, she’d delighted in showing it off, pointing out to every visitor each of the plants she’d coaxed to thrive in Gibraltar’s thin, alkaline soil – narcissi, asphodels, candytuft. In the middle rose an antique stone sundial, as accurate as the clock on Spike’s phone, he noted as he saw the shadow line nudging 6 a.m. Beneath the garden’s back wall ran a broad herbaceous border, and in each corner rose the eponymous dragon trees, their trunks bulked out by serpentine roots that had somehow absorbed themselves into the wood, their canopies formed by individual bunches of fleshy, cactus-like leaves. Beneath the largest, a weathered teak table had been laid for breakfast; Sir Anthony sat down at the head and smoothed out a linen napkin on his lap. ‘Does Jessica know you’re here?’

  Spike shook his head. ‘She’s been caught up at the station. They found a body yesterday in Rosia Bay.’ He watched Sir Anthony’s face for his reaction, but the old man barely seemed to register the words. ‘Ships in the night,’ he murmured with a faint smile.

  Spike didn’t smile back, just poured two tumblers of freshly squeezed orange juice from the white china jug and set one down in front of his host.

  ‘It’s all lies, Spike. You must know that. Eloise was a friend. An innocent.’ Sir Anthony fidgeted with the silver cufflinks in his sleeve. One oval was engraved with his initials, the other with the MCC monogram.

  ‘There’s a tape,’ Spike said. ‘A video recording of you entering Eloise Capurro’s house a few minutes before the fire was reported.’

  It was as though Sir Anthony hadn’t heard. He reached out and placed a fond hand on the bark of the dragon tree next to him. ‘Dracaena draco,’ he said, then looked over at Spike. ‘I read Greats at Oxford, you know. Came down from Teddy Hall in 1948. The first member of my family to have had the benefit of a university education. It would never have been possible, of course, were it not for my war service.’ Sir Anthony picked up a stainless steel knife from the table and ran the blade across the bark, and they both watched as a bead of blood-red sap oozed out. ‘Dragon’s Blood,’ he said. ‘Valued as a medicine throughout the ages.’ He stretched the tacky red gum between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Dab it on a human wound and it hardens like a new skin.’

  In the still of the early morning, Spike could hear the cicadas thrumming, a lone blackcap singing merrily in a pine tree. The idyll was broken by the sound of car tyres on the road above, but Sir Anthony continued regardless. ‘It’s not like a rubber tree, you understand. You can’t just keep on tapping it indefinitely. The wounds don’t heal. So the harvesters had to go all out. Make a thousand cuts and bleed the tree dry.’

  The doorbell rang from inside the house. Spike looked over to check Sir Anthony had heard, and saw him clench his lips, then nod to let Spike know that he should answer it. So he stood up and walked across the garden, inhaling the lemony vanilla scent of the last magnolia blooms as he climbed the steps back up to the road. He unlatched the wooden door and called across to a man standing outside the main entrance to the house. ‘Detective Inspector Isola?’

  Isola looked round, holding up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare. ‘Bartoleo,’ he swore in yanito. ‘You’re remarkably well-informed, Sanguinetti.’ He signalled to the men sitting in the police van behind him, then walked up the road towards Spike.

  ‘I’ll need to see a warrant,’ Spike said.

  Isola handed over the document marked with the Royal Crest and waited, arms crossed, as Spike checked all was in order. It was, of course, so Spike held open the gate, hearing the van doors slam behind him. On the crags above, the family of apes slunk quietly back up the Rock.

  ‘Your men can come and go through the basement,’ Spike called over one shoulder as they started to descend. ‘I’ll be in the garden with Sir Anthony. Anything you want to remove, you’ll need to run it past me first.’

  They reached the garden, and Isola peered up at the glass structure protruding from the back of the house, shaking his head in disgust at the extravagance. Then he turned to Spike with such naked hostility that Spike could see why he’d always been the most unpopular senior officer on the Force. ‘The old man better be paying you well’ – Isola screwed the tip of his forefinger into Spike’s lapel – ‘because your fiancée won’t even be able to draw her pension once the disciplinary board is done with her.’ Then he pushed past and called out to his team, ‘Well, get on with it!’, before disappearing inside.

  Spike found Sir Anthony hunched beneath his dragon tree. He’d taken a white handkerchief from his pocket and was rubbing his fingers clean with an intensity Spike found unsettling. ‘Sanguinetti . . .’ he murmured. ‘I’ve always liked that name.’ He must have felt the weight of Spike’s gaze as he looked round with a strange smile. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia, eh?’

  Spike took him by the elbow and guided him back to his chair. ‘Why don’t we sit for a while, Anthony? I expect the police will take their time.’

  They sat opposite one another in what in other circumstances might have been a companionable silence, Spike admiring the espalier fig tree on the wall opposite, its branches drooping with overripe fruit. Then suddenly Sir Anthony spoke. ‘It was Marcela, wasn’t it? In Rosia Bay.’

  And though Spike knew that his indiscretion had already landed Jessica in enough trouble, he reasoned that it was only a matter of time before news of Marcela’s death was leaked to the press. So he told the truth, ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The old man said nothing, but then Spike heard a sharp intake of breath, and when he looked across at Sir Anthony – invincible, incorruptible Sir Anthony – he saw a tear catch in the deep seams of his face. He knelt down by the old man’s chair.

  ‘It’s my fault, son,’ Sir Anthony said. ‘You’ll see.’

  A volley of raised voices came from inside the house. Spike scrambled to his feet to see Drew Stanford-Trench emerge from the basement, dragging a smart black suitcase behind him.

  Sir Anthony beckoned Spike back. ‘Look after Drew,’ he whispered. ‘He needs you.’ Then he found his most congenial smile and stood up to watch his son crossing the paving stones towards him.

  Spike stuck out a hand, but Drew ignored it and threw an arm around him. ‘Bloody hell, Spike. You look even rougher than me.’

  ‘Mr Stanford-Trench?’ came a curt voice.

  They both turned and saw Isola standing in the basement doorway, hands on his lean hips. ‘A moment of your time?’

  Drew leant in, and Spike could hear the tremor in his voice. ‘Thank you.’

  As Drew walked away, Spike turned to see Sir Anthony staring up at his dragon tree with vacant eyes. Spike raised an arm in farewell as he walked past him towards the steps, but if the old man saw him, he made no sign. As he passed the sundial, Spike checked its face, wondering if he would ever see it again. It was only 6.40 a.m. All that for forty minutes.

  49

  Jessica must have oiled the lock at Chicardo’s, as the front door flew open to Spike’s shoulder and clattered against the wall. He put down his briefcase in the hallway, feeling weariness enshroud him like a cloak. The house was silent, which could mean only one thing – Rufus and Charlie were out. The Gibraltar Museum were running Saturday morning activities for under-fives, and Rufus had been threatening for some time to expose Charlie to the joys of simulated cannon fire and papier-mâché Neanderthals.

  Spike was just on his way upstairs for a shower when he heard a noise in the kitchen. He pushed through the bead curtain and found Jessica sitting at the kitchen table, an overnight bag at her feet. Her back was to him, but he could tell everything he needed to know from the way she held her head. When she spoke, it was in a cold voice that frightened him. ‘It’s not my hospital bag, Spike, if that�
�s what you were wondering.’

  He wasn’t sure how to respond, so he just turned to the kettle and flicked it on.

  ‘Isola called,’ Jessica said.

  Spike unhooked two china mugs from the rack.

  ‘At least you can fucking look at me!’

  He’d rarely heard her swear. He put down the mugs.

  ‘How could you do it?’

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered the ramifications of what he’d done, but now that he was standing there, seeing the betrayal in Jessica’s eyes, the reasons seemed so small. ‘Drew’s my friend’ was all he could manage.

  ‘I’ve been suspended, Spike. Pending a conduct review. I think they would have fired me if I wasn’t pregnant.’

  The kettle reached boiling point and began to rattle. As Spike poured out the water, he saw his hands were trembling, so he focused on the ritual – remove bag, add milk, stir . . . He took a sip and it burnt his tongue. Serves you right, he thought.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ Jessica said. ‘I’ll be at my brother’s place.’ As she picked up her overnight bag, he saw her wince a little. Her hips and wrists had been aching for weeks, he knew. He made as if to help her, but she stilled him with a look. ‘Here.’ She slid a package across the table. ‘This came.’ And then she was gone.

  Spike was about to go after her, but for some reason his feet wouldn’t move. So he stood where he was, knuckles white as he gripped his mug of tea, waiting for the front door to slam.