A Silent Death

Chapter Forty-Six

It was a little after 6 am when Mackenzie pulled up outside the apartment at the top of Calle Utopía. At the hotel he had changed his jeans, and dug a used shirt out of the laundry. It had taken him some minutes to clean the blood from his face and hands. There was little that clung more stubbornly to the skin than dried blood. It got into every crease, insinuating its way into every pore. His right hand was already bruised and swollen from having driven it with force twice into Paco’s face. The painkillers given him by the medic at Helicopteros had kicked in and his chest hurt less. But every muscle in his body was seizing up.

He climbed stiffly out of the car. It was still dark.

He pressed the buzzer on the door to the stairwell and waited. No response. He pressed again and held his finger on it for a full ten seconds. Still nothing. A pervasive sense of foreboding took hold.

He stepped back on the pavement and looked up. There were no lights in the windows of Cristina’s apartment. But there was a light shining in one of the windows of the adjoining apartment. He went back to the door and pressed another buzzer. An irate voice barked through the speaker at him almost immediately.

‘Have you any idea what time it is?’ A woman’s voice.

‘My apologies, señora, this is an emergency. I’m trying to contact Officer Sánchez.’

‘She’s not here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I saw her leave with the boy about ten minutes ago. That’s how.’

‘I don’t suppose you know where she’s gone?’

‘How would I know that?’

Mackenzie reached for his phone to try and call her, before realizing that the shirt pocket was empty. His phone in pieces in the car. He pressed the buzzer again.

‘What!’

‘Would you call her mobile number for me?’

‘For Heaven’s sake, señor.’

‘Please, señora. Do you have it?’

‘Yes, I have it.’ Another sigh, then a long pause that seemed to stretch out forever. Then: ‘No reply. It went to the answering service.’

‘Shit!’ Mackenzie’s powers of processing went into overdrive. She had the boy with her. If she was going to keep some ill-advised rendezvous with Cleland, as he suspected, she wouldn’t take Lucas with her. He pressed the buzzer again.

‘If you don’t go away I’m going to call the police!’

Mackenzie raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘I’m going. I promise. I just need Nuri’s address. Cristina’s sister.’

The neighbour growled back. ‘I know who her sister is.’

Nuri and Paco’s apartment was on the east side of town, on the hill below the main street. It was on the fourth floor of an apartment block above a tapas bar, tables and chairs stacked on wooden decking in front of it. It took Mackenzie less than five minutes to get there. He pulled into a parking slot beside the deck and stepped out into cooling air. Finally the oppressive temperatures of the night were in retreat. But with the dawn, and the rising of the sun, the heat would build all over again, and another breathless day lay in prospect.

Across the street, beyond a white wall, a patchwork of fields and vineyards fell away into the night before rising towards the foothills of the distant Sierra Bermeja. The lights of an occasional truck tracked a path through the dark on the motorway that crossed the plain below, its viaducts spanning dried river beds and volcanic valleys.

A sign was pinned to the wall above the door of the stairwell. Se Vende, and a telephone number. Mackenzie pressed the buzzer for the top flat. A frightened woman’s voice answered almost straight away. ‘Who is it?’

‘My name’s Mackenzie. I’ve been working with Cristina.’

A long metallic buzz signalled the unlocking of the door. Mackenzie pushed it open and forced himself to run up the four flights of stairs two at a time. He was breathless and perspiring by the time Nuri greeted him on the top landing. She was painfully pale, and Mackenzie saw that she had lost much of her hair. She held a pink nightgown tightly around a wasted body that seemed brittle enough to break if touched.

‘Is Cristina here?’

‘No.’

His heart sank. ‘Do you know...?’

‘You missed her by about ten minutes. She came to leave Lucas with me. But wouldn’t say where she was going.’ Her face crumpled. ‘Oh señor. My husband has been out all night without leaving any word. Cristina didn’t know where he was.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose...’

Mackenzie’s mind was filled with the image of Paco impaled on the railings below the gardens at the Condesa Golf Hotel. How could he tell her that? And yet it bothered him to lie. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say. And he was. Not for Paco. But for Nuri. ‘Was Cristina in uniform?’

Nuri shook her head.

‘So she wasn’t armed?’

‘I don’t think so. She was very upset.’

He exhaled his hopelessness. If she had gone to face Cleland without a gun she would stand no chance. But he knew, too, that she would have had to go to the police station to get it. He turned away to go back down to the car.

‘You’ll let me know, señor? If you hear anything about Paco?’

He hesitated on the top step, and wanted to weep for this fragile creature, widowed without knowing it, and fighting a losing battle against the malignancy inside her. ‘Yes,’ he said, knowing that he wouldn’t.

The duty officer looked embarrassed when he raised his head from the desk to see Mackenzie pushing through the door from the street. He stood up. ‘Señor Mackenzie...’

Mackenzie looked at his watch. It was 6.15 am. ‘When will the Jefe be in?’

‘He won’t, Señor. He’s at a conference in Malaga today.’ He sucked in his lower lip, steeling himself to make the confession. ‘I’m sorry. When you called earlier I forgot that the Jefe would not be at home. He left word that he was spending the night in Malaga to save himself an early rise.’

Mackenzie closed his eyes. The time he had wasted! ‘Fucking idiot,’ he said in English.

The officer frowned. ‘I’m sorry...?’

‘Do you have any idea where Cristina is?’

He shook his head. ‘No señor. I haven’t seen her since the funeral.’

‘She hasn’t been here, then?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘That information you asked my colleague to request for you yesterday. From the telephone company.’

‘What about it?’

‘It came in late last night from Movistar.’

‘Movistar?’

‘The telephone company.’

‘And?’

‘I put it on the Jefe’s desk, señor, along with a lot of other stuff. He was here quite late last night, but I’m not sure if he saw it.’

‘Let’s take a look, then.’ Mackenzie pushed open the door into the lobby beyond reception. The duty officer emerged quickly from a door behind the counter. ‘You can’t just go barging into the Jefe’s office, señor.’

Mackenzie said, ‘I can, you know. Watch me.’ And he opened the door to the Jefe’s office and walked in. The agitated duty officer followed him. The heads of two officers on night shift raised themselves from books in the office opposite to glance curiously across the hall.

Mackenzie rounded the desk, and found the faxed information from Movistar on top of the pile. He had requested the source number for the two calls made to Cristina’s apartment on the afternoon of Antonio’s murder. The first corresponded, time-wise, to the call which must have sent him to the rendezvous at the Eroski Centre. The second to the call leaving the fake message from Cristina. Both came from a mobile number listed to Nurita Sánchez Pradell. Mackenzie closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. How inept had Paco been in his attempted deception? He had used his own wife’s phone to make the call which had sent Antonio to his death, and then again to leave the message he had somehow cobbled together, probably from messages Cristina had left for her sister.

The duty officer peered at him, concerned for the first time. ‘What is it, señor?’

Mackenzie opened his eyes. ‘Cristina is in serious danger. I think she’s gone to offer herself to Jack Cleland in place of her aunt.’ He almost barked his frustration at the Spanish policeman. ‘But I have no idea where.’ He reached for his phone automatically, before remembering again that it wasn’t there. ‘I need a functioning phone. Do you have a phone?

‘Well, yes...’ The duty officer’s affirmative was reluctant.

‘What kind of phone is it?’

‘It’s an iPhone X.’

‘Same as mine. I need to borrow it.’

‘But it’s not a police phone, señor, it’s mine.’

‘I’ll take good care of it,’ Mackenzie said, and had a thought. ‘Wait a minute, if my sim card is still in one piece, I could swap it for yours, then I’d also have access to all my contacts. Wait here.’

He hobbled out to the car and returned a few moments later with the shattered remains of his phone. The duty officer had returned to his place behind the counter, and Mackenzie put his phone down in front of him.

‘Paper clip!’

But the duty officer couldn’t take his eyes of the wreckage of Mackenzie’s phone. ‘Is that what you call taking good care of your phone, señor?’

‘Actually,’ Mackenzie said grimly, ‘it was the phone that took good care of me.’ He reached over to snatch a paperclip from the worktop behind the counter, straightened one leg of it, and used it to open the sim drawer in his phone. Miraculously, the card appeared to have escaped any damage. He snapped his fingers at the duty officer. ‘Come on, give me your phone.’

Very reluctantly and with a deep sigh, the duty officer handed it over. Mackenzie extracted the sim card and replaced it with his own, then rebooted the phone. Almost immediately an alert sounded to signal a phone message. Mackenzie put it on speaker and tapped play. Cristina’s voice was clear and unambiguous, and Mackenzie could hear the fear in it.

Señor, they want to exchange me for Ana. The Gibraltar Skywalk at first light. If you get this, know that I have no choice but to do what they want.

‘Jesus!’ Mackenzie’s eyes flickered involuntarily towards the street outside. It was still dark, but daylight wasn’t far away.

The duty officer’s eyes were wide with both alarm and astonishment.

Mackenzie said, ‘What’s the fucking Skywalk?’

‘It’s a glass platform near the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar, señor. Built around an old fortified lookout post. A tourist attraction. I took my own kids to see it just last week, but it was closed for maintenance.’ He shook his head. ‘I wish they’d advertised that in advance. It would have saved me a journey.’ Then he paused to think about it. ‘But Cristina wouldn’t have gone to Gibraltar, señor. The Spanish police have no jurisdiction there.’

Mackenzie cocked a despairing eyebrow. ‘She hasn’t gone as a police officer. How long will it take me to get there?’

The duty officer shrugged. ‘This time of day? Probably no more than about thirty-five minutes.’