Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  When the Germans obligingly departed a few minutes later, Carmen almost ran across to Docherty. ‘Did you see anything?’ she asked excitedly, and Docherty hated being the one to dim the light of hope in her eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I heard a woman’s voice. It was raised, so it was hard to tell at first…’

  ‘She was shouting?’

  ‘Aye,’ Docherty lied. ‘The Army captain who took me in said it was a man, one of the prisoners, but he was lying. I’m sure it was a woman.’

  ‘What did you see?’ Shepreth asked.

  ‘Hardly anything. They’d rigged up the first room inside the front doors as an interview room, and Bazua was brought to see me there.’ He gave them the gist of the conversation. ‘I got him angry, but it didn’t help. All in all, I think I got more out of visiting the military post. There’s no more than twenty men based there, and they seem to have only one working helicopter at the moment.’

  ‘Yeah, but how many more men are there inside the prison?’ Shepreth wanted to know.

  Docherty shrugged. ‘I doubt if there’s any soldiers stationed there permanently – they’d probably ruin the social ambience. No, I reckon it’s just him and his sicarios – probably no more than a dozen in all. I mean, it’s obvious he’s not expecting to be attacked, or at least not from the land or the sea. I’d guess his main fear is a bombing run by one of the other cartels, so he’s probably got an air-raid shelter in there somewhere.’ Docherty smiled. ‘If it wasn’t for the women and the records I’d be recommending that our boys try dropping a few.’

  ‘But…’ Carmen began, thoroughly alarmed.

  ‘As it is,’ Docherty went on, ‘we’ll have to go in on the ground, which means knowing the layout inside out. We’ve got the aerial photographs, which should…’

  ‘I had a talk with a few of the locals this morning,’ Shepreth interrupted him, ‘and it seems that nearly all the building work on this island is done by a firm in Cartagena – Sánchez Construcción.’

  ‘They are the biggest firm in the city,’ Carmen said.

  ‘So they should have the architect’s plans of Bazua’s prison,’ Shepreth concluded.

  ‘It’s worth a shot,’ Docherty agreed. ‘And while you’re there Carmen could try talking to her friend again.’

  ‘I can try,’ she said, without much enthusiasm.

  ‘You should get off the island yourself,’ Shepreth told him.

  Docherty shook his head. ‘It’ll look kind of suspicious if I leave and then come back. And anyway, I don’t think Bazua will risk having a go at me on Providencia – it’d look a bit obvious.’

  9

  Carmen and Shepreth managed to get seats on that evening’s flight from San Andrés to Cartagena. They neither sat together nor acknowledged each other on either the short hop across to San Andrés or the hour-long trip south to the mainland, which they shared with a strange mixture of Colombians on business and gringo travellers leap-frogging past Panama on their way from Central to South America. At Cartagena airport they went through a pantomime of running into each other, then took a taxi together to her flat.

  As Carmen had hoped, this was one of the weekends which Pinar spent in Bogotá with a tour group. It wasn’t the possible lack of room which had worried her – Shepreth could easily sleep on the sofa in their living room – but the avalanche of questions which his presence would have precipitated. It had been a long time since she’d invited a man back to her home.

  He hadn’t wanted to come, of course, and had argued that it would be safer for her if he stayed in a hotel. She had talked him out of it, fearing that having got her away from Providencia he might just leave her high and dry.

  The fridge was low on supplies, but there were enough vegetables for a stir-fry, which they ate in front of the TV. Both were conscious of the fact that they’d been thrown together by circumstance rather than choice, and felt somewhat awkward because of it. It was not much past ten when Carmen announced that she was tired enough for bed, and wished him goodnight. She lay down, intending to get her thoughts in order, but the next thing she knew it was morning and there was no sign of him in the flat.

  A few angry moments later she noticed that his bag was still there. She’d just finished showering and dressing when he returned with a bag full of pastries for breakfast. ‘It’s a lovely day,’ he said.

  They sat out on the small balcony, eating the pastries and drinking coffee, enjoying the sunshine and the slight breeze blowing up from the sea. A month ago Carmen would have taken such simple pleasures for granted, but now she found herself treasuring each minute.

  ‘You’re going to call Victoria’s aunt?’ Shepreth asked, breaking the spell.

  ‘Yes, I’ll do it now,’ Carmen said, getting up.

  The aunt, whose name was Elena Marín, answered the phone almost immediately, as if she’d been sitting with a hand poised over the receiver. Carmen asked how Victoria was, and after a short pause Elena replied that she was no worse. ‘Are you coming to see her?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘This morning, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Oh yes. That would be wonderful.’

  Carmen went back out on to the balcony and told Shepreth, who said, ‘While you’re seeing Victoria I’ll take a look at Sánchez Construcción.’

  Ten minutes later the taxi arrived to take Carmen out to Elena’s house on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t earned any wages for several weeks now, and she’d intended taking the bus, but Shepreth had insisted on giving her the fare. Later that day she would have to see her parents, but she hadn’t yet worked out what she was going to tell them. Her father wouldn’t keep financing trips to Providencia without a good explanation – he’d be too worried that she would do something stupid.

  Elena’s house, though quite small, stood in almost a hectare of land. After greeting Carmen at the door, Elena led her through to the kitchen, from whose window they could both see Victoria. She was sitting with her back to one of several large trees just behind the house, staring into space.

  ‘She spends hours like that,’ Elena explained. ‘She cries a lot, which I suppose is understandable, though it almost breaks my heart.’

  ‘What did the specialist say?’ Carmen asked.

  ‘Not much. He recommended psychotherapy and gave me the name of a man here in Cartagena, but Victoria refused to talk to him.’

  ‘I’d have thought a woman therapist would have been better,’ Carmen said, surprised.

  ‘I know. I talked to this man, and I don’t think he believed the story we agreed on.’

  ‘Hell,’ Carmen murmured. They’d tried to re-create the circumstances of Victoria’s ordeal in a different setting, because anything connecting her to Providencia and Bazua might get her killed.

  ‘You know,’ Elena said after a few moments, ‘the terrible thing is, when she’s not crying she actually seems quite happy.’

  Maybe, Carmen thought, but it seemed like an amnesiac’s kind of happiness. Shepreth had offered her a photo of Bazua to show Victoria, and she had brought it with her just in case, but the young woman in the garden didn’t seem in any state to take a shock like that. As she stepped out through the kitchen door Carmen came to the sudden realization that before Victoria’s healing could begin Marysa and the others would need to return.

  ‘Hello,’ she said from a distance, not wanting to give the woman a shock.

  Victoria looked startled anyway.

  ‘Remember me?’ Carmen asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Victoria said, wrapping both arms around her knees and pulling them towards her chin. ‘You’re the one who brought me home.’

  Shepreth strolled round the old part of the city for the best part of an hour before heading towards the head office of Sánchez Construcción. Carmen had already known where it was, because the firm’s move into one of the oldest and most beautiful houses in the walled city had been big news a couple of years earlier. They had apparently had two reasons for doing a n
o-expenses-spared restoration job on the sixteenth-century house – the eldest of the Sánchez brothers was a history buff in his spare time and his two younger siblings were eager for the lucrative government contracts which similar jobs would provide.

  The classic two-storey Castilian villa was in the heart of the old city, right next door to the San Ignacio church. It had an interior courtyard, and through the intricate wrought-iron gates Shepreth could see a riot of vegetation and hear what sounded like a fountain. There were no obvious signs of an alarm system, though, which was somewhat surprising.

  Or maybe not, Shepreth thought, walking on before his loitering became noticeable. If the building was used only for office work and impressing clients then there was unlikely to be anything worth stealing on the premises.

  The same could not be said of the next house in the row, which housed the City Museum. There was likely to be all-night surveillance in one form or another.

  He walked on to the end of the street, spent a few minutes staring at the sea, then started back. There was no way he could go in over the iron fence facing the street, for even if the latter was, by some miracle, empty, there were too many overlooking windows. Entry via the museum would just double the risk of tripping an alarm. It had to be either the rear wall or the church.

  The rear wall, he discovered, stood above a six-metre drop. Below it was a busy road, and beyond that the sea.

  It had to be the church. The building itself stood about thirty metres back from the road, at the centre of a large paved area. Several large trees kept most of this in shade, and a dozen or more adults were chatting on the scattered iron benches while their children chased each other around the two circular fountains. Shepreth slowly circumnavigated the church, enjoying the age-old simplicity of its design and surreptitiously studying the wall which separated its grounds from the offices of Sánchez Construcción. It was only about two metres high, and in one place a bench had been placed right underneath it. Getting over would be no problem, but getting over unseen might be. Latin Americans loved spending evenings sitting out in places like this, and since it was Saturday there’d be a Midnight Mass.

  He walked back to the flat, thinking about Carmen. It was a long time since he’d felt so attracted to someone, but he didn’t really know anything about her. She’d told him she was a tour guide, and that she worked here in Cartagena, mostly for several foreign tour companies. She lived with a female friend and didn’t apparently have a boyfriend, which would have been more surprising if he hadn’t known about the abduction of her sister. Something like that might well have forced her in on herself.

  She was obviously brave, stubborn and loyal. But was she clever, kind, naturally curious? Did she have a sense of humour? He couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh, but considering the circumstances that wasn’t very surprising.

  He let himself into the flat with the spare key she’d given him, set up and turned on the coffee machine, then stepped out on to the balcony just in time to see her paying the taxi driver. She looked up, saw him and smiled.

  He had known this woman less than forty-eight hours, but it was hard to think of anyone he had felt so connected to.

  ‘How was it?’ he asked as she came into the kitchen.

  ‘Sad,’ she said. ‘And not very useful. There was just one thing which might help – she went through the usual list of things like the water-bed and the fan and the birds singing and this time she added something – she kept talking about the moon filling the window. Which suggests an east-facing window. If she was in Bazua’s bedroom…’ She looked at Shepreth. ‘I know it’s really thin.’

  ‘You never know,’ he said.

  ‘So how did you get on?’

  ‘You remember the house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the only way in seems to be over the wall by the church. If I can get over that without being seen…’

  ‘You’ll need a diversion,’ she said.

  It was a little after ten and the grounds surrounding the church were far more densely populated than they had been during the day. The two fountains were the preserve of the younger teenagers, the benches reserved for their paired-off elder brothers and sisters. On the pathway from the street to the open doors of the church several beggars were waiting for alms from the midnight congregation. Every so often a military patrol would ride past in a jeep. According to Carmen they followed a regular route around the walled city through the night, mostly to protect tourists who couldn’t resist the spell of the narrow streets by moonlight.

  The two of them had been sitting on the bench by the wall for about an hour now, since bribing the previous occupants to leave. ‘Any minute now,’ Shepreth said looking at his watch, and at that moment they could hear the jeep coming up the street. It drove slowly by, the driver waving at a group of girls while his companions smiled, their cradled sub-machine-guns pointing at the sky.

  As the jeep disappeared from view Carmen got to her feet and started across the rough paving stones towards the opposite corner of the grounds. Shepreth had enjoyed the last hour, sitting close together and sharing family histories, and as he watched her walk gracefully away a pang of desire shot through his loins.

  He watched her light a cigarette, stop by the litter bin as if she was searching for something in the plastic bag, then drop the bag in. He looked at his watch. About two minutes, she had said. When she was a kid she and her friends had done this all the time. And since the home-made fuses had never let them down they’d never been caught.

  She disappeared behind the church on her way back round. Half a minute went by. A minute. She was only about ten metres away when the firecrackers went off in the litter bin, jerking every head towards them. Shepreth had been expecting it, and even he felt a momentary pull.

  No one was looking their way. He put one foot on the top of the bench and rolled himself over the wall, almost in the same motion. Leaping over a wall without knowing what was on the other side was rather unnerving, but he landed in nothing more dangerous than a bush. He squatted there for a moment, letting his eyes get used to the darkness and listening out for any sign that his arrival had been noticed. On the other side of the wall the string of firecrackers exhausted itself, and he found he could hear the waves crashing against the rocks a hundred metres away.

  Satisfied, he headed towards the back of the darkened house. The sudden sound of a distant police siren caused his stride to falter for an instant, before his brain reassured his nerves that it couldn’t have anything to do with him.

  It crossed his mind that the last time he’d broken into an office he’d nearly ended up in the Panama Canal. Which wasn’t a pleasant thought.

  Breaking into this one was easier than expected. He had no difficulty springing open the shutters on one of the rear windows, and the sash windows themselves weren’t even properly fastened. A few seconds later he was examining a typical board room with his pencil torch.

  The door was locked, but no match for his steel ‘credit card’. He edged out into the courtyard, which was mostly in darkness – the setting half moon was casting its silver spell on only the uppermost leaves of the various ornamental palms and the apex of the fountain. There was no sign of any human occupancy.

  He started working his way round the ground floor, unlocking and where possible relocking each door in turn. In one of the rooms facing the street he found what he was looking for – a mountainous map cabinet with some forty drawers. After checking that the shutters were as lightproof as possible, he checked under P for Providencia. Nothing. Rather less hopefully, he tried B for Bazua. Nothing there either. He was just about to start going through the whole cabinet from top to bottom when another idea occurred to him.

  He looked under ‘M’ for Ministry of the Interior, but eventually found it under ‘I’. The Sánchez brothers had obviously done a lot of work for the government, most of it in Cartagena, from schools to military barracks, police posts to waste-disposal depots. And they had a
lso built both a military post and a correction centre on Providencia. Shepreth spread the two sheets out on the floor. The correction centre plan not only included interior diagrams for the two buildings familiar from the satellite photographs, but also placed the two new constructions within the context of the site.

  He was still rolling up the two sheets when he saw the photocopier. It would certainly be much better to leave the originals here, because if their absence was noticed and Bazua informed, he wouldn’t need a brain transplant to figure out why they’d been stolen. But could he risk the light?

  Who dares wins, he thought, remembering the SAS motto. His watch told him he had another ten minutes before the patrol went by.

  He switched on the machine and when it had warmed up he folded the plan in two, put it in place and lowered the lid. If he’d been wearing a jacket he could have used it to cover the machine, but he wasn’t. So he draped himself across it instead, rather like someone trying to X-ray their own stomach.

  A faint light flared twice in the dark room. He stood up and went through the process again for the other half of the diagram. And then twice more for the military post. There were no cries from the street, no police sirens. He pulled out his shirt, stuffed the copies into his waistband and tucked the shirt back in.

  He put the diagrams back, switched off the copier and made his way back round the ghostly courtyard to the room through which he’d entered. He relocked the door from the inside and went out through the window, pulling the sash down and then, with some difficulty, refastening the shutters from the outside. As he approached the wall he heard voices on the other side.

  Shepreth had been gone only a couple of minutes when they appeared in front of her. She couldn’t remember either of their names, but the faces were familiar from her school days.