by John Connor
‘Did you have anything particularly valuable in your home?’
She shook her head, then said, ‘That car – the one buried there – I think it belongs to my husband …’
‘Yes. We can talk about that,’ he said, and she had a feeling that he was holding something back. She thought, So Juan is in the car or the house. That must be it. If he was, she assumed he would be dead, because if he was only injured they would be taking her to him. The thought disrupted her concentration like an awful shadow. She tried to turn away from it. ‘I don’t want to sit and talk to you,’ she said. ‘Right now I need to be looking for my child.’
He nodded sympathetically, looked like he was considering that, then said, ‘In a short while they will have checked the house and made sure it’s safe. But it’s only firemen I have in there. They are pursuing ordinary checking procedures, on the basis that burglars set a fire, which ignited something in your home. Maybe they did that deliberately. Is there any reason that assumption might be false? Is there any reason you can think of why I should pull the firemen out, to protect them, then wait for a specialist bomb disposal team to get here?’
She looked straight at him, straight into his eyes, held his gaze and said, ‘Why would someone plant a bomb in my home?’
He stared back. ‘I don’t know. You don’t know either?’
‘No. I sell ice cream. My husband too. Why would someone want to plant a bomb here?’
He considered that for a while, brows knitted, still looking at her, then looked away and moved a hand up to push the beautiful blond lock away from his forehead. ‘OK,’ he said, looking at his feet. ‘There’s something I need you to do for me. I’m sorry, but it’s not pleasant and it may involve something tragic for you.’ He looked up at her again. ‘There are two dead bodies in your home …’ He saw her reactions starting at once. ‘Not your daughter. There is no child here, as I told you. We will find your child. But two other people were killed in the blast and I will need you to come in with me and try to identify them.’ He took a breath. ‘I should warn you – it is possible that one of them is your husband.’
13
She hadn’t loved Juan Martin, not ever, not how she understood the word. The only person she had ever loved, as she saw it, was Alex. But love like that – an overwhelming thing that dominated your existence – love like that was useless in the real world. It was like a life on heroin. You couldn’t live with it, at least not a normal life.
In the beginning she had shared something different with Juan, something a little like love, a little like friendship, something that had allowed them to lead normal lives – an accommodation with the real world. The shared sentiment had trailed off, without either of them properly noticing, years ago – but they had remained bonded nevertheless, pending a resolution that would now never occur. So his death would be affecting her, she knew, beneath the surface. If it were all that was happening his death would have been a fact close to devastating.
They had taken her in to identify him. They hadn’t warned her about the woman he had been with – perhaps because they had wanted to watch her reactions – and it had been an unpleasant surprise to see her body there, in their ruined house, and work out what must have been happening. Juan had come home early with the ex-waitress called Maria. The fact quickly paled into insignificance as the horror of the scene sank in, but it was an additional shock nevertheless, something more she had to absorb and control.
She told them the identity of the woman, though without seeing her face – they hadn’t let her see the face – it was really a guess. It was possible it was someone else, she told them. It was possible Juan was seeing more than one woman. She had only glanced at Juan’s face, from a distance, and nodded. She hadn’t wanted to look at him, lying there like that, so obviously interrupted in something, humiliated, naked. She hadn’t wanted to let any of it in. She didn’t want to collapse crying. So she had flicked her eyes onto him and off, bolted down the thoughts. The desperation caused by Rebecca’s absence was constant, her panic reactions so barely suppressed that she felt continually on the edge of an uncontrollable screaming fit.
She had waited now nearly three hours at the house, either in the car Molina placed her in, her own car, or standing around outside as the helicopter clattered overhead. The helicopter had quickly found something – over in the next valley – but it wasn’t Rebecca. Two more dead bodies. She wasn’t told who they were.
Molina had obviously briefed a couple of the uniformed officers, who were now hanging around the garden and road, to watch that she didn’t leave. They seemed unsure whether they should treat her as a suspect or a victim. When Molina wasn’t personally occupied with asking her questions, there was always one of them near, ready to tell her to wait, or stay where she was. They had confiscated her phone and then later demanded the access code using some official, legal wording. Was it meant to scare her? She had given the code, hoping that would be it, but then they wouldn’t let her leave. She hadn’t been formally arrested, and they hadn’t searched her, so she wasn’t sure what her rights were.
Before the helicopter started she had wanted to run down into the valley, where the stream was, about five hundred metres below the garden wall. She knew Rebecca went for walks down there. There were men she could see searching down there, but she thought Rebecca might be hiding, and wouldn’t come out unless she could hear her mother calling for her. But Molina wouldn’t let her go near the house again.
At some point they had found Rebecca’s school bag, lying at the side of the road. Molina had shown it to her – to identify it – wrapped up in a big brown paper bag with a transparent window. She had wanted to touch it, but that too was forbidden. It was ‘evidence’.
They were saying now that it looked like a bomb had been planted in the guest bathroom. It meant someone had got into the house at some point without them knowing, someone who had wanted to kill Juan. Or so Molina was suggesting. Now that she had made Juan’s infidelity clear she wondered how long it would be before he arrested her. She had to be a suspect, though presumably it suited him to pretend she wasn’t at the moment. They were asking her lots of questions about Juan and his past, but she knew that was the wrong track.
There were three of them who spoke to her – Molina and two sidekicks, one of them the aggressive woman about her own age. Usually they did it in the back of a car, whilst other cars and vans arrived and left all around them, emergency lights flashing interminably. Molina had told her she would have to come to the station in Marbella and answer formal questions, put to her by an investigating judge. They were still waiting for the judge to arrive.
In between questions, she sat in her car, angry and scared, fretting and crying, digging her nails into her palms so much that they bled. The panic was like something alive twisting inside her. She kept telling herself that she was being unreasonable, because by five o’clock there must have been nearly a hundred police officers searching the valley, plus the helicopter. They were doing their best. They were professionals. But she couldn’t stand not being a part of it. She wanted to drive out of the valley and try calling Rebecca from somewhere where there was a signal. There was no signal throughout the valley and they were trying to work out why – they thought it was part of the ‘attack’. But leaving the scene was out of the question. So all she could do was wait, uselessly, answering their misguided questions while the fear ate at her insides, the constant adrenalin making her shiver like she had a fever.
It was almost six now. Soon the light would be fading. Molina was walking up to the car again, signalling her to get out. She got out and stood in front of him, then listened as he told her that the helicopter was leaving, that her daughter wasn’t in the valley or on any of the adjoining hills. ‘It has infrared search devices,’ he explained. ‘It’s very easy to find people. She’s not here.’
She felt an acid emptiness opening inside her, a differ
ent feeling to anything she had ever experienced before, even back in Russia – it was something physical, real, like a heart attack. She had to crouch down and gasp for air. He bent beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, said half-comforting things about finding Rebecca, about the resources available.
‘Where is she, then?’ she stuttered. ‘Where is she, if she’s not here?’
‘We have to work on the assumption that she’s been kidnapped,’ he told her. ‘By this person she called “Carl”.’ There was tremendous sympathy in his eyes, but she didn’t want it. She wanted to wake up, she wanted this all to go away. She wanted to be sick. She could see a group of plain-clothes officers back down by the body of the shot man. The body was still lying there in front of her driveway. They were taking photos of it now.
‘Do you know anyone called Carl?’ he asked quietly. ‘We have to identify him.’
She shook her head. Her daughter had been kidnapped. She felt like she would fall over, black out. She didn’t want to believe it.
‘You read her text?’ she said, then forced herself to look up at him. Her legs were shaking and the bile rising in her throat. He nodded.
‘She’s confused,’ she said. ‘She might have got it wrong. She said there was a policeman shooting at her …’
Molina nodded again. ‘I’m assuming the officer was trying to shoot the man she was with, trying to stop him. She made a mistake.’
She frowned, then pointed towards the dead man. ‘You mean that man is police?’ she asked. ‘He’s a police officer? Rebecca was right?’
‘She was right he is a police officer, yes. But he won’t have shot at her. He’s from the municipal police here. Ricardo Perez. He was only twenty-two years old. We think he tried to save your daughter and was shot. Again, we assume this “Carl” person has killed him.’
She glanced towards the body, in disbelief, then looked back to Molina. He was staring at her, questioningly. Her eyes shifted focus to the house behind him, all the movement and activity, the policemen going in and out. The images moved and rearranged themselves. What she had seen before – all these policemen working to find her daughter – was suddenly in doubt. She knew her daughter, knew how she had brought her up. If Rebecca said that the policeman lying there, on her drive, had tried to shoot her, tried to kill her, and had been stopped by this stranger called Carl, then she had no doubt that that was exactly what had happened.
Now there was a new tension in her muscles, a different kind of fear. I have to get out of here, she thought. I have to get away. She leaned in a crouch against the ground and tried to make sense of all the options and interpretations. But she couldn’t do it. There were too many open questions. A policeman had tried to kill her? Until this moment she had thought it could not be true. She started to retch, but there was nothing in her stomach.
‘I need to leave,’ she muttered. She stood up and faced him. ‘I need to go right now.’
He shook his head.
‘Am I under arrest?’ In confusion she used the English phrase.
‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘If you wanted to leave I would have to detain you – you can be detained as a suspect or witness. But if you don’t try to leave then we don’t get into all that. I need you to stay because I need your help. It’s the quickest way to get Rebecca back.’
Could she trust him? She didn’t think so. Now she didn’t know what was happening. She needed time to think it through. She turned abruptly away from him and got into her car, closed the door with a bang. The car was empty. She pressed the button to wind up the passenger window, shutting herself off from him. He watched her for a moment, looking concerned, then another officer came up to him, said something in his ear. They both walked off quickly.
Up the hill she saw one of the green military vehicles belonging to the guardia civil arriving. It stopped because it couldn’t get down any further – there was a queue of vehicles all the way back up the track. A man in military uniform got out and started walking down towards Molina. She had the impression someone of higher rank had arrived. Molina looked bothered as he went up to greet him. They exchanged salutes. The man was tall, older – at least fifty years old. He stood in a way that suggested he was in charge, that Molina was nobody. He leaned over Molina, jabbed a finger into his chest. She half considered opening the door and making a run for it while they were distracted. But at that moment the female officer opened the driver’s door and got in. She leaned back and demanded the keys. ‘I will drive you to the station,’ she said. ‘That’s where they want you now.’
14
Eight-thirty in the evening. Darkness, finally. Carl stood at the balcony doors of a hotel room reeking of cigarette butts, the dirty net curtains half pulled so he could keep behind them, the twin doors open onto a narrow concrete platform with a metal guardrail. They were on the tenth floor, just off La Plaza de la Constitucion, in La Linea, the last Spanish town before the British colony of Gibraltar. The balcony faced south, giving him a good view across the run-down apartments, parks and roads between there and the border, less than two kilometres away.
To the left the night sky was dominated by the Rock, a four-hundred-metre peak rising sheer out of the flat landscape at the southern tip of Spain. A dense clutter of brightly lit buildings – houses, apartments, hotels – hugged the lower slopes, spreading south and west on the narrow strip of land that skirted the high ground, out to the promontory called Europa Point. Above the buildings the black unlit hump rose steeply to its pointed summit, the slopes forested, the peak crowned with radio masts and warning beacons for any aeroplanes that might somehow mistake the lie of the land. The east side of the thing – the sheer face – was lit with very powerful floodlights, so you could see the cliffs from many kilometres away. The lights cast a diffuse glow against the sky all around, blotting out any real darkness, obscuring stars and cloud alike. To the west, where the town ended, lay the dark waters of a horseshoe bay with the lights and dock cranes of Algeciras at the other side, about ten kilometres away. Beyond the bay was the Strait of Gibraltar, a mere fourteen kilometres of the Med, separating Europe and Africa.
There was a British airstrip just over the flat strip of land that constituted the international border between La Linea and Gibraltar. The single runway, running west–east, cut straight across the only road into the town from Spain. They had to stop the traffic across the border whenever a plane took off or landed. He was hoping to be on one of those planes in just over three hours.
Viktor had arranged – or promised to – a charter flight from a tiny outpost of the UK to a private airstrip somewhere in Kent. Carl had spoken to him about an hour ago and listened to the astounded silence as he had recounted his decision not to shoot the girl. The conversation had been in Finnish, with Rebecca right beside him. It was true to say that thereafter Viktor’s main worry hadn’t been the girl but what the consequences would be for Carl. He was sure the cartel would want to save face with the contract owner, the person or persons who wanted the girl dead. He still didn’t know who that was, but would be working on it full speed.
Discussing the arrangements with Viktor had been his standard practice each and every time over the last ten years, and this job was no different. If something happened, if something went wrong, then at least Viktor knew where he was and what he had been doing. And just in case there were complications, Viktor had always been able to trace the funds and identify the people behind the job. The cartel was meant to guarantee anonymity, but nothing was anonymous these days, not if it was set up through a computer system of some kind. Usually they were people Viktor knew well, people Carl had even met, very wealthy people who had got to where they were via these kinds of techniques; Russians, one and all – no surprise there. But unravelling the electronic trail hadn’t proved so easy with this one, and now everything was urgent.
There wasn’t much Viktor could do to smooth things at the b
order between Spain and Gibraltar, which meant Carl was still going to have to show a passport, still work out some way to get the girl across either just with her ID card, or without showing anything at all. His preferred option would be to put her in the boot of the car, but she would have to consent to that. She had relaxed a little since the fake message from her mother, but maybe she would draw the line there. He was thinking about alternatives.
The car Jones had hired was in a side road off Plaza de la Constitucion and that was the actual reason they were in this shabby room. Besides keeping an eye on the crossing point itself, he wanted to watch the car while the clock ticked over. He had no intention of taking that car across the line – he would find another from somewhere when they went out – but he wanted to see if it attracted any attention. He needed to gauge how much the local police knew about him. Did they know he had that car, for example? If they did it would reveal something about how Jones was working, how deep his support in the ranks of local law enforcement.
But in the two hours he had been watching no one had come near it. There were police down on the streets, but it didn’t seem as if there were more than might be usual. La Linea – aside from a few half-built condos near the waterfront – had the feel of a town that had thrived for too long on drug, cigarette, alcohol and petrol smuggling, then had to do without even that, because of the economic crisis – so the police presence was constantly visible, mostly patrol cars. But over at the roads leading to the crossing point Carl could see no unusual activity. He had used the spotting scope to check.
He had got rid of the overalls and anything surplus to requirements in woods off one of the back roads on the way here – not an ideal solution, but it would do. He still had the backpack with the pistol and ammo, his spotting scope, the GPS satnav he had brought with him from the UK, a hunting knife, the phone and the basic rations he had put together the day before, most of which had now been eaten by Rebecca. He was keen to get rid of the phone, but needed a replacement and hadn’t found a suitable shop yet. He had her phone in the pack too, the SIM card removed. She had agreed to give it to him ‘temporarily’, to make sure nobody traced her.