The Weekend Away

by Sarah Alderson

  I nod. I guess that’s one word to describe the mafia.

  ‘I drove for them at first,’ he explains. ‘Then they discovered I had trained to be a doctor. So that’s what I became for them.’

  I frown, not understanding.

  ‘They would come to me when they needed help to fix things. When they could not have the police asking questions.’

  Oh. The penny drops. He must mean beatings or gunshots or stab wounds: injuries that would arouse suspicion and maybe police interest.

  ‘I did not want to keep working for them, but there are not many choices for a man like me and the more helpful I was to them the harder it was to get out. And then, if I’m honest, it felt good to be using my medical training for something. And to be able to help people.’

  ‘So you’re not a hitman, then?’ I ask, laughing despite myself.

  He pulls a face, not sure if I’m joking with him, but then laughs. ‘No. Is that what you thought?’

  It’s my turn to shrug. ‘They told me you had criminal associates. I assumed …’ I break off. I can’t trust any of my assumptions these days.

  Konstandin shakes his head ruefully. ‘Is it the stubble? Does it make me look criminal? Do I need to shave?’

  I smile. ‘No, I think it’s the fact you make threatening people look like the easiest thing in the world.’

  He gives a half smile but then his expression turns serious. ‘I never killed anyone. Not even for revenge,’ he tells me. ‘I had the chance. It was offered to me. Revenge on the neighbour who led the soldiers to my house. Goran brought him to me as a gift for saving his brother. Killing him wasn’t going to bring my family or Milla back though. Whatever was left of my life, I wanted to live it well. So instead I asked him to help me escape from Kosovo.’

  ‘Do you still work for them?’ I ask.

  ‘Sometimes. But most of the time I drive an Uber. But the police, they do not know this. It is why they suspect me,’ Konstandin says. ‘And why it’s so important we find the truth about Kate. I don’t think the police care about the truth, you see. They just want to be able to say they have caught someone and put them in jail.’

  I nod. He’s right. That’s been my feeling for a while now. Reza and Nunes weren’t interested in finding Kate and now they’re not interested in finding who killed her. They just want to tick it off their to-do list and look like they did their jobs.

  Konstandin pulls down a dark street and parks. I glance out the window. ‘Where are we?’ I ask.

  ‘The taxi company.’

  ‘What taxi company?’ I ask.

  ‘There are only two big taxi companies in Lisbon. This is the biggest. We start here.’ He gets out the car and I follow after him. The office is in a side street close to the railway station and even though it’s later in the evening there are still lots of people milling around. I’m nervous and check my reflection in the window of the car, seeing my cheek is swollen with a purple line across it from the book that Sebastian hit me with. There’s nothing I can do about it so I dart after Konstandin who is already walking towards the taxi office.

  Inside there’s a man sitting behind a desk reading a newspaper. I can’t follow the conversation that Konstandin has with him but whatever Konstandin says works. I don’t think he threatened him, as the man smiles at me, then looks at his computer screen and starts fiddling with the mouse as though looking something up. After a minute he glances over at Konstandin and says something to him.

  Konstandin nods, grateful, and I make out the word ‘obrigado’ several times. Thank you. Then he takes me by the elbow and leads me a few steps away from the desk to a row of plastic chairs by the window.

  ‘I told him that you lost a valuable ring inside a taxi last week,’ he says in a murmur. ‘It belonged to your dead mother and you are desperate to get it back. I gave him the address of the apartment you stayed in. They record all the rides their drivers make. Each time they pick up a passenger the driver has to call in with the address. He found a driver who picked up at the corner of Paraiso just after three in the morning on Saturday. That’s just around the corner from your place.’

  I stare at Konstandin in amazement. ‘You think it might have been Kate that he picked up?’

  Konstandin shrugs. ‘The driver’s coming here now. We can ask him.’

  I drop down into one of the plastic chairs, exhaustion overwhelming me. Konstandin sits down beside me. Ten minutes pass before the door pings and a man enters. He has a beer gut hanging over his belt and a shirt, undone to the chest, revealing a religious medallion lying in a nest of grey chest hair. He seems defensive from the moment he walks in, barrelling over to us, scowling, chest thrust forwards. No doubt he thinks he’s been summoned by someone accusing him of stealing jewellery.

  Immediately he starts talking to Konstandin, waving his arms about and shouting. I assume he’s denying everything and it takes a while for Konstandin to find a break in the stream of anger and cut in. I can’t follow any of the conversation, but after a few seconds Konstandin turns to me. ‘Show him a picture of Kate,’ he says.

  I pull out my phone and scroll to my camera roll and pull up the first photo of her I find – the one of us that we took at the airport, both of us grinning in anticipation of the upcoming trip. The taxi driver looks at the photo and then at me and finally at Konstandin. His anger has faded. His shoulders slump. ‘Is girl on news,’ he says in broken English.

  I nod, standing up straighter, my hopes rising even though I try to keep a lid on them. ‘Yes, do you recognise her? Did you pick her up on Friday night?’

  The man has started fumbling with the medallion around his neck, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. He looks like the textbook definition of the word shifty. ‘You know something,’ I say. ‘Did you pick her up?’ My hopes rise and I try to keep a lid on them.

  The man glances at me, then quickly away. Definitely shifty.

  Konstandin takes a small step towards him, getting into his space and the man steps back in alarm but I’m right there, blocking his exit. There’s no way we’re letting this man get away without telling us what he knows; even if it’s something tiny that leads nowhere, we need to know it.

  ‘Did you pick her up or not?’ I demand. ‘Answer us or I’m calling the police right now.’

  The driver glances over Konstandin’s shoulder at the man behind the desk who is on the phone but keeping one curious eye fixed on us. The taxi driver shakes his head at me. ‘No. It wasn’t me,’ he says in broken English. ‘I did not drive taxi that night.’

  ‘That man over there told us you picked someone up from outside my apartment at just gone three in the morning …’

  The taxi driver darts a furtive glance at the man on the phone – possibly his boss. ‘My cousin drive,’ he whispers.

  I don’t understand and look to Konstandin in confusion.

  ‘He’s not allowed to lend his taxi to anyone else,’ he explains to me. ‘It’s against the rules.’

  ‘Don’t tell! Please,’ the driver says. ‘I lose my licence.’

  ‘Where’s your cousin?’ Konstandin asks him.

  The man bites his lip and looks away, obviously torn.

  ‘Please,’ I say, pulling on his sleeve. ‘You don’t know how important this is.’

  ‘He not do it,’ the man says, hissing at me under his breath. ‘He not bad. He has a wife, children. He not hurt anyone.’

  ‘We just want to know if he picked her up and if so, where he took her, that’s all.’

  ‘We won’t involve the police,’ Konstandin reassures him.

  The man looks between us, still weighing it up. ‘OK,’ he nods finally. ‘We go see him.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Thirty minutes later, it’s almost midnight and we’re on the outskirts of the city, somewhere near the airport where high-rise apartment blocks sprout thick as bushes. We park in a car park beside one particularly run-down one, and the taxi driver who led us here in his taxi, gets
out of his car and walks over to ours. Konstandin winds down the window.

  ‘My cousin come,’ the taxi driver tells us, then pulls out a cigarette packet. He offers one to Konstandin who takes one, then to me. I take one too, to settle my nerves.

  The three of us stand outside the car, smoking. Konstandin chats in Portuguese to the taxi driver and I pray silently that this man who is meeting us – his cousin – is the man who picked up Kate on Saturday morning and that he can tell us where he took her and give us another clue to what happened. What if he did something to her though? He isn’t going to tell us that.

  The taxi driver keeps checking his phone and finally his cousin skulks out of the building, pulling a beanie hat on low, and shoving his hands in his pockets. He looks suspicious, darting dark glances between Konstandin and I as the taxi driver introduces us. We don’t shake hands. He seems to take some convincing from his cousin to talk to us, but finally he nods.

  Konstandin takes over the questioning. He shows him Kate’s photograph on my phone and the man nods. They seem to be speaking a third language, not Portuguese. Maybe Arabic or Turkish?

  ‘He picked her up!’ I say.

  Konstandin confirms it. ‘Yes. He picked her up.’

  ‘Where did he take her?’

  The man starts to wave his arms about, talking rapidly. ‘What’s he saying?’ I ask, impatiently.

  Konstandin finishes the conversation and turns to me. ‘He says she told him to follow another vehicle. An Uber.’

  I nod. ‘The one with Joaquim and Emanuel in.’

  ‘She told him that the men in the Uber had stolen her handbag.’

  The cousin starts gesticulating angrily. ‘What?’ I ask, tugging on Konstandin’s arm.

  ‘Money!’ the man says to me. ‘You give. Me. Owe.’ His English is broken and I look at Konstandin.

  ‘She didn’t pay him.’

  I shake my head in disbelief. ‘She had her bag stolen! That’s why she couldn’t pay him.’ I rummage in my bag and pull out my wallet but before I can open it Konstandin is already handing over a couple of ten-euro notes from his own wallet.

  ‘Did he follow Emanuel and Joaquim back to their apartment?’ I ask, on tenterhooks.

  Konstandin asks the question and even I understand the answer.

  The cousin shakes his head and then says a few more words.

  Konstandin looks at me. ‘He says he lost them. They hit a red light, and then got caught in a one-way system.’

  I frown. ‘So where did he take her after that?’

  Konstandin pauses before answering. ‘The police station.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘If he dropped Kate at the police station then …’ I break off. ‘I don’t understand,’ I say to Konstandin.

  We’re pacing a few steps away from the taxi driver and his cousin, who both look concerned and seem to be having some kind of whispered argument between themselves. They’re both worried about being drawn into it, I suppose, and I can’t blame them. I’m a whirlpool dragging everyone who comes close to me towards an unfortunate end.

  ‘The cousin is an illegal,’ Konstandin says, drawing heavily on another cigarette. This whole affair has got him chain-smoking, or perhaps he’s always smoked this much. My own hands itch to take the cigarette from his mouth and steal a drag. ‘It’s why they didn’t go to the police when they saw the news about Kate. He shouldn’t have been driving the taxi.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, frustrated. ‘I just want to know what happened to Kate.’

  ‘He says she went inside the police station.’

  I stare at Konstandin in shock. ‘Really? He saw that? He actually saw her walk inside the building?’

  He nods. ‘He remembers because he was nervous about taking her to the police station. He stopped down the street but remembers looking in his mirror as she walked inside.’

  I glance at the taxi driver. He’s on his phone now, talking to someone, and the cousin is watching us, chewing on his thumbnail.

  ‘Which police station?’ I ask Konstandin.

  ‘The one in the centre of town. The same one where I took you to report her missing. It’s the main one for tourist crimes. That’s why he took Kate there. He knew they spoke English and that they’d be open at that time in the morning.’

  I start to pace up and down, trying to puzzle my way through the mystery. ‘But if she went inside she would have filed a report, wouldn’t she?’

  Konstandin nods, frowning. He’s on the same page as me. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, how come the police never mentioned it?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s strange.’

  It is. I walk a few paces then stop. ‘Unless the person who took the report never made the link between Kate and the missing person’s report I made a day later.’

  ‘But her name would have been on both,’ Konstandin says.

  We pause, musing on it. Konstandin’s right. It is strange, though feasible I suppose. But I’ve got a funny buzzing feeling in my gut, like we’ve finally found a thread. It feels like we should tug on it, but we need to be careful, in case the thread snaps before we can pull whatever’s on the end of it out into the light.

  ‘We need to find out who was working that night. Who was on duty at the police station,’ I say. ‘Whoever took her statement might remember where she went next.’

  Konstandin nods.

  A sudden shriek fills the air. I turn around, startled to see a police car in the distance, heading our way, its sirens blaring and its lights flashing.

  ‘Shit,’ I murmur, wondering for a second if they’re there for us because how on earth could they have found us? Unless they were following us! My first instinct is to run and I glance around frantically for a way out. The taxi driver’s cousin has disappeared. And the taxi driver is jumping in his car, gunning the engine. Did he call the police? Why? I think of the pizza delivery guy we ran into outside Sebastian’s apartment. Did he deliver the pizza and find Sebastian? Has it been on the news? Perhaps they’ve put out an alert and someone spotted us.

  I look at Konstandin. He’s watching the police car too, and I see a flicker of panic cross his face. He hesitates just a second before he turns to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, then before I can ask what for, he takes off, sprinting not for his car but towards a dark alley that runs down the side of the apartment building.

  I stare after him astonished. I want to shout after him. What the hell?! But I’m frozen, a hare caught in headlights, or rather a hare with my neck caught in a snare. For a brief second, I think about following him but I know I won’t get far and if I run it will only be worse for me. So I force myself to stand there, my gut twisting into knots and my heart racing as the blue and red lights get nearer and the screaming wail gets louder, until the police car eventually swerves in front of me to a stop.

  The doors fly open. Two policemen in uniform jump out and run towards me, yelling at me in Portuguese. Terrified, I raise my hands in the air. They rush me, hauling my arms behind my back and snapping on a pair of handcuffs, shouting something in a language I can’t understand.

  The metal tears my skin and I gasp in pain but they don’t care. They hustle me into the back of the police car and I start to hyperventilate, the world distorting like a hall of mirrors as I look out the window, at the alley down which Konstandin vanished, the buildings seeming to grow giant, closing out the sky. Another patrol car arrives and the officers leap out of that car and race off in pursuit of Konstandin, though he’s had a head start.

  By the time we arrive back at the police station some twenty minutes later, I’m so dazed that I can barely focus on what’s happening to me. I am led places and forced into chairs and given pieces of paper to sign. I should ask for a lawyer but I can’t seem to speak. It feels as though I’m underwater. Everything – every word and every face – is blurry and distorted. I’m sinking further and further to the bottom, drowning, just like Kate, I think to myself.
>
  I’m searched and my belongings are taken away from me. A bored-looking woman behind a desk asks me to hand over the laces from my shoes and I bend down to unthread them but I take so long, my fingers so rubbery and useless, that Nunes – who has appeared, along with Reza, probably both to enjoy this moment of triumph – interrupts and tells them it’s fine, to leave me be. Eventually I find myself sitting in a room with a mirror along one wall, and a table with two chairs on either side. Reza sits down opposite me with a large manila folder. Nunes stands in his usual sentry position in front of the door.

  ‘Are you arresting me?’ I ask. I don’t know what the policeman who cuffed me and brought me here said, as it was in Portuguese, but I’m assuming they were arresting me.

  ‘Yes,’ Reza says. ‘You’ve been charged with murder.’

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I say, then stop myself from saying anything more.

  ‘What’s that bruise on your face from?’ Reza asks.

  My hands instinctively move to touch my cheek. I shake my head. I can’t tell her.

  ‘Why did you try to kill him?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Who?’ she repeats, snorting with derision at my playing dumb. ‘Sebastian. Your landlord. We found him an hour ago. We were there to arrest you for one murder and what do we find? You’re leaving quite a trail. Any other murders we should know about?’

  ‘He’s dead?’ I stammer in horror. We shouldn’t have left him.

  Reza holds my gaze. ‘No. You’re lucky. He was found in time. We know it was you who called the ambulance. We have the recording. So there’s no point in denying it. You had a motive. You were angry with him for telling us about you and Konstandin. Maybe he knew more. You wanted to silence him.’

  ‘No! It was an accident,’ I splutter. ‘I can explain …’

  ‘So, you’re admitting you caused the injuries?’ she asks, leaning forwards, eyes flashing with triumph.