A Silent Death

Chapter Two

Cristina sat in the interview room, elbows planted on the table in front of her, head tipped forward into her hands. She rubbed thumbs into her temples trying to alleviate the ache. Her eyes were stinging. Although they had sent her home after the initial debriefing, she had been unable to sleep.

Miguel the station chief — or Jefe as he was known to everyone — had been roused from his bed, along with her immediate superior, to take both Matías and her through separate debriefs. It mattered that their stories were in sync, and Cristina saw no reason why they wouldn’t be. Still, she had the feeling that somehow blame was being attached to her, and she had no idea what it was that Matías had told them.

After the debrief, she had written her report on the computer in the administration room. A blow-by-blow account of everything that had happened from the moment she and Matías left the building here in Marviñas to the shooting at La Paloma. She’d not had sight of the report turned in by her fellow officer.

A little after 08.00 a call at home asked her to return to the station. There, a ballistics expert from Malaga accompanied her downstairs to the gun room, where she unlocked and removed her gun from its drawer. It was routine, he told her. A check to ascertain whether or not her weapon had been fired.

‘I never pulled the trigger,’ she said. ‘There was no reason to.’

He had smiled and nodded, and placed the SIG Pro in a heavy-duty plastic envelope.

She had been at the station most of the day since. Much of the time spent here in the interview room. Senior officers were coming from Malaga to question her, the Jefe had told her. But they didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon. Two men in dark suits. One around fifty, with crisply cut steel-grey hair, the other younger, with hair that touched his collar and fell untidily across his forehead.

They were gone now, after what had seemed like hours. Cristina repeating the story she had already told in detail several times over. She had been exhausted, her mind starting to wander. To her row with Antonio over breakfast when she had told him he would have to drive Lucas to school. To the call she had made to her sister late afternoon, asking her to pick Lucas up at the end of the day. A call she’d been reluctant to make, given all the troubles poor Nuri faced herself.

Now, all these hours later, she was just numb, wondering who was watching her through the two-way mirror on the wall opposite. There would doubtless be further rows when finally she got home. Issues that could no longer be ignored, but which she had no desire to confront — especially after the events of the last twenty-four hours.

She sighed, and wondered why she was still here.

And where was Matías?

She turned her head as the door opened and a grim-faced Jefe strode in. He was a small man, inclined to portliness, with cropped silver hair that bristled across his scalp. He had a habit of standing with his thumbs hooked into his gun belt, or with his arms folded across his chest. He never pulled rank. Didn’t have to. The insignia on his shoulder, with its single baton and two stripes, spoke for his status. But he carried his own authority with the same ease he wore the cross around his neck, or the Ray-Bans dangling from his breast pocket. He had never been anything but scrupulously fair with Cristina, and courteous, verging on avuncular, and she liked him a great deal. She got to her feet.

‘What’s happening, Jefe?’

‘Sit down, Cristina.’

‘I’ve been sitting on my ass all day, sir.’

He forced a smile and folded his arms. ‘Malaga have come back to us with an identity on the man who shot the girl in the villa last night.’

Cristina frowned. ‘But we know who he is. Ian Templeton. The villa is registered in his name.’

The Jefe nodded gravely. ‘Yes. But that’s an assumed identity, Cristina. His real name is Jack Cleland, and he tops the fugitives list of the British National Crime Agency.’

Cristina couldn’t stop her mouth falling open just a little. ‘What’s he wanted for?’

‘Trafficking in Class A drugs — and the murder of a police officer.’