Hour Of Darkness

Sixty-Seven

Mia was right; I could get there and I did. I went online as soon as I got home, and found a flight that evening from Edinburgh to Barcelona. I booked it with about half an hour to spare, and also a room for the night in the gastronomic hotel in Placa Reial that Sarah and I had enjoyed on our homeward journey.

Naturally I told her, about Mia’s phone call and her strange insistence. When I was finished, she looked up at me and said, ‘This woman meant something to you, Bob, didn’t she?’

‘I can’t deny that,’ I replied, ‘but it wasn’t for long. Sure, I had the hots for her, but I was glad when she left.’

‘No secret longings afterwards?’

‘None at all. Then or now. I wanted her gone, and I hoped she’d stay gone.’

‘Was she right about Clive Graham?’ she asked. ‘Would he like you out of the picture?’

‘Probably,’ I told her. I’d been asking myself the same question. ‘But that won’t be his decision. He set this Police Scotland thing up, against the wishes of most objective senior cops. Now he has to live with the consequences; if he doesn’t like them, fuck him.’

‘What do you think this secret of Mia’s is?’

‘I have no idea. Maybe she bought a lottery ticket in my name and it came up.’

She frowned. ‘Bob, don’t be flip. I’m worried about this.’

‘Then come with me,’ I offered, even though I was standing in the hall with my travel bag in my hand, ready to leave. ‘I’ll book another seat.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got three autopsies booked for Monday. Sweetheart, what if this is a set-up?’

‘If I thought that for a millisecond, would I have asked you to come with me just now? Mia wants to meet on my turf. If she had bad intentions, she wouldn’t be doing that.’

‘If anyone calls and asks where you are, what do I say?’

‘Nothing. Whoever it is, tell them I’m going away for a couple of days, and can’t be contacted. I’ll do my best to get back on Monday.’

I kissed her, said goodbye to the kids and hit the road. I was on my way to Spain, but my preparations weren’t complete. One phone call from the car took care of the rest. It was to Sammy Pye; I asked him to have an overview of the Bella Watson murder investigation emailed to me the following morning.

I knew he was surprised by my request, and wondering whether he should comply. ‘I may be able to contribute something, Sammy,’ I told him, ‘so I’d like to see what’s been happening. But I may be wrong, so I’d rather this stayed confidential between us for now. There’ll be no flak over it, I promise.’

He agreed. Pye and I go back to his earliest days in the force. He was efficient even then, and so conscientious that he once tried to deny me entry to a crime scene.

I had no bags to check in when I arrived at the airport, and so I went straight to the gate. I was on the steps up to the airport and on the point of switching my phone to flight mode when it sounded, in my hand. I looked at the screen and saw that Maggie Steele was calling me from her home number.

An update on Cheryl Mackenzie, I guessed; frankly, I’d had enough of that saga, and the queue in front of me started to move just at that moment, so I rejected the call and went offline.

I have a confession to make here. I don’t like eating alone in a restaurant nor do I like spending a night alone in a hotel. I had to do both in Barcelona, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, I felt unhappy and anxious.

I had gone charging off in answer to Mia’s summons, lured by her secret, without having the faintest idea of what it was. What if Sarah’s fear was right after all? What if it was a set-up? The woman was a combination of Watson and Holmes, after all, and maybe that added up to a Moriarty.

What we call ‘the small hours’ in English, the Spanish call ‘madrugada’. I spent most of that time thinking about Mia, questioning my decision and my judgement and wondering whether she’d go through with her threat if I didn’t show up.

After all, I owed her nothing, I didn’t give a damn about her dead mother and I no longer gave a damn about her. Our relationship had lasted all of one night and ended in acrimony, so what the hell was I doing there, I asked myself in the Barcelona darkness?

And yet I knew I had to go. I had to find out what it was that I ‘could not possibly survive’. If it was real, I couldn’t let it do me in unknowingly.

I went back to sleep eventually, and I woke late. My body clock was set to UK time, and it’s pretty reliable. I showered, then went out for breakfast in a café on the Ramblas. My taxi driver from the airport had described it as a street ‘muy peligroso’, very dangerous. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s always been a mecca for pickpockets and the Spanish economic crisis has made it worse.

I wasn’t bothered though; in fact part of me was hoping that somebody would try to dip my wallet, for my madrugada edginess had given way to annoyance, and I was feeling pretty dangerous myself. What the hell right did Mia think she had to summon me with a cack-handed blackmail threat?

I fuelled myself with a chorizo sandwich, and an espresso. . I was sure that Sarah would have allowed me one in the circumstances, although she’s been keeping a close eye on my intake. . then walked back to the hotel. As soon as I reached my room, I retrieved my iPad from the safe and checked my email inbox.

The report was there, waiting for me. I read it slowly and carefully, taking in every step and every detail of the investigation, and when I was finished I knew why Mia wanted to see me. . or I thought I did.

I caught a train from Passeig de Gracia, one of the slow ones that stops at Camallera, not far from my Spanish town. There was a taxi parked outside the bar across the street from the station. I found its driver inside, and once I’d satisfied myself that he’d been on coffee rather than brandy, I had him drive me home.

I had almost five hours before my meeting with Mia. I spent one of them swimming, thinking unrelated thoughts, and wondering in their midst how Cheryl Mackenzie and the uncle who had ruined himself for her had handled their first night in custody.

I’d begun to doubt whether Max would survive any term of imprisonment and so I’d decided to do what I could to try and keep him out. It wouldn’t be easy, but the least I could do was talk to the Lord Advocate, a golf buddy of mine. If that didn’t work, there was always the possibility of a word with Archie Nelson or Phil Davidson, two of the most influential judges on the Scottish Bench.

When I came out of the pool and back into the real world, I checked my emails once again. There was only one, another missive from Pye, updating the stuff he’d sent me earlier. I’d been wondering how I was going to play my meeting with Mia, and specifically, what I was going to do when it was over. Sammy’s message more or less made my mind up for me.

I dressed for the evening, in slacks and a light cotton jacket, then made a couple of phone calls on my landline. (The mobile had stayed switched off all day; I didn’t want any interruptions.) The second of them was to Sarah.

‘How are you?’ she asked me anxiously.

‘I’m missing you like hell,’ I told her, truly, ‘but otherwise I’m okay. The sooner this is over and done with the better.’

‘Maggie Steele called last night. She said she needs to see you, about something very important. I said she’d have to wait for a couple of days. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but she sounded really uptight about it.’

‘Uptight or not, she’s still going to have to wait. I may call her once this business is done, or I may leave it until tomorrow. I just want this woman out of my hair. I can’t look at anything else until she’s dealt with.’

‘You’ll call me when she is, yes?’

‘Promise.’

I wanted to walk to my dinner date. Normally it would take me half an hour, but I had a call to make on the way, so I left early. Summer was over, but the evenings usually stay warm until well into October.

How had I known for sure that Mia had meant us to meet in La Clota? She had more or less quoted directly from an interview I gave to the Herald newspaper in Glasgow, after I’d been confirmed in the Strathclyde job. That’s how closely she’d been tracking me. I had a vague and slightly ridiculous feeling of being stalked, but I laughed it off.

I paid that call en route, spoke to the people I’d arranged to see, then went on my way. I’ve never been any good at strolling, and so I arrived at the port area five minutes early. I didn’t want to be there first so I killed that time by taking a detour along the marina, admiring some of the larger boats that were moored there. The majority flew Catalan flags and pennants, but there were several other nations on show, French, German, Italian, British, and one single Scottish saltire.

I walked up to it for a closer look. . and my stomach flipped. It was big by comparison with most around it, at least forty feet long, but it was the name that reached out and seized me.

Palacio de Ginebra. A Scottish boat with a Spanish comedy name, The Gin Palace. It was no joke of a yacht, however, but a serious open-water vessel, that needed proper crewing.

I knew that because unless there were two of them, and there weren’t, for the closer I looked the more familiar it became, I had been its deckhand myself for one glorious weekend. By one of those bizarre coincidences that make life completely unpredictable, Sarah had mentioned it not long before, and there I was looking at the very same vessel.

It was mothballed, its binnacle and hatches covered, so there was no clue to its current ownership, but when I sailed it. . I know I should say ‘her’. . it had belonged to Alison Higgins’ brother, Eden, a Scottish furniture magnate.

She and I and Alex had been invited for a weekend on the Firth of Clyde with Eden and his son Rory. It was a catharsis for me, that trip. Doing things that were completely new, being part of an entirely different kind of team, had made me think in an entirely different way. By the time we got back to Inverkip after our round trip to Campbeltown, I had decided that I was going to jack in the police, buy a yacht as big as Eden’s and sail it myself, for fun and commercially.

That notion lasted for a few minutes, until my next phone call, one that dragged me back into the live case I had then, at the heart of which was. . Mia Watson. By the time that was over, the spell was broken.

I encountered Eden on a couple of occasions after that, the last being at Alison’s funeral. We haven’t kept in touch subsequently, for Ali and I had been ancient history by then, but he’d loved that boat, so I couldn’t imagine him having sold it. On the other hand, he’d loved his sister too. Had there been too much of her left in it?

I resolved to find out. It’s an intention that I still have, but that night I had other matters in hand.

I slipped into the restaurant through the back door in the decked, marquee-like outdoor section, rather than entering from the seafront as most people do. My thinking was that I’d rather see Mia before she saw me.

I looked around the place; half the tables were occupied, some by familiar faces in twos and fours, and as many unfamiliar. But there were no unaccompanied people, and definitely no Mia. . unless she’d aged very badly since last I’d seen her, and acquired a fat Gauloise-smoking husband with a ludicrous Errol Flynn moustache.

‘Bob!’ John, the owner, called to me from the doorway to the main restaurant. ‘What you do here?’ He’s Catalan, but his mother is Scottish, so his English is pretty good; better than my Catalan, that’s for sure.

‘I’m meeting somebody,’ I replied. ‘It’s business; a lady.’

He nodded. ‘Ah, I understand now. The lady’s Scottish, yes. She call last night and book a table for three. She spoke Spanish good, but her accent is just like my mum. That’s you there.’ He pointed to a table with the best sea view in the place, with a ‘Reserved’ sign. As he’d said, it was set for three.

‘What do you want to drink?’

‘Vichy Catalan.’

He chuckled. ‘Fizzy water? You? This must be a serious meeting.’

I chose the middle of the three seats, on the side of the table that looked out across the marina. There had been a little wind, so John had rolled down the canvas wall. Its plastic window obscured the view slightly, but that didn’t stop me from spotting a woman. She was sitting on the other side of the road that runs in front of La Clota, on the wall near the water’s edge, but she wasn’t looking out to sea. No, she was looking around her, and I could read caution in it.

When she was satisfied, she stood up, and started to cross the road. I didn’t watch her. Instead I poured some of the water that John had put on the table. I stood as she reached me, extending my hand, to ward off any attempt to kiss me on the cheek.

‘Hello, Mia,’ I greeted her.

‘Hello, Bob. It’s good to see you. Thank you for coming.’

‘You didn’t give me much choice,’ I observed.

She had taken care of herself, no mistake about that. Mia has one of those elfin faces, high cheekbones, pointed chin, big expressive eyes, the sort that never seems to age. She looked pretty much as she had the last time I’d seen her, and if I’d got her out of her simple, cream, square-shouldered dress, I’d have bet that her body would have checked out just as well.

‘How have you been?’ she asked.

‘You should know already,’ I replied. ‘You seem to know everything about me, right down to this place.’

‘Don’t be offended,’ she pouted. ‘I have a special interest in you. I always did, ever since we met.’

‘I’m sorry to be brutal,’ I retorted, ‘but my interest in you ended when you drove out of the Airburst car park all those years ago.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘You know why. You set your brother Marlon up to be murdered, Mia; my people found a text on his phone from you, sent on the day he died. It invited him to your place, at nine that evening. When he got there, the two hoods from Newcastle that Perry Holmes had hired were waiting for him.’ I paused, but only for a second.

‘You know what happened next,’ I went on. ‘They took the poor lad down to the old Infirmary Street Baths. The council had closed them down by then, but the equipment was still there. They threw Marlon off the high board into the empty pool, and they kept on doing it until he was dead. I was there afterwards,’ I told her. ‘I spared you the details at the time, but let’s just say it remains one of my more vivid memories.’

‘I owed Perry,’ she whispered, then fell silent as John appeared with his order pad.

‘You ready to order,’ he asked, ‘or you want to wait for the third person?’

‘No,’ Mia said. ‘We’ll eat. We’ll be joined later. I’d like fish.’

‘Me too,’ I added.

‘The sea bass is best today. I do two of them, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I agreed, ‘in the oven, and a nice white wine, an Albarino, maybe.’

She waited until he had gone before taking up her story once again. ‘Perry Holmes saved my life,’ she said, frown lines appearing around her eyes. You have no idea what that brother of his was like, that Alasdair. I was thirteen or fourteen, Bob, not much older than your Alex was when I met her, when my uncle, my very own uncle,’ she hissed, ‘first forced me to go with him. You spared me the details, you said. I’ll do the same for you but only because I can’t repeat them, not even to myself.

‘I think Al Holmes would probably have killed me in the end, if Perry hadn’t found out about it. For all the things they say that he was capable of himself, he was a very moral man when it came to children. He burst in on us one night when Al had me tied to the bed, face down for a bit of variety. . get the picture?. . and he beat him like a dog. He threatened to castrate him, and he promised he would, if he ever caught him with a kid again. And then he untied me and took me home with him.’

She paused as a waitress arrived with the wine, opened it and poured.

‘Nice,’ Mia said, after she’d tasted it. ‘I know a bit about wine, you know.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

She didn’t react to my remark. ‘To be honest,’ she continued, ‘when Perry took me away I expected more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He asked me about my family life and I told him about Uncle Gavin and how he’d pretty much sold me. He asked me about my mother and I said she’d known and hadn’t cared.’

If I hadn’t known her better I’d have thought she was going to cry. ‘I don’t know why my mother hated me, Bob,’ she whispered, ‘but she did, always. Years later when I was on the radio she found out about it, and extorted money from me. You must remember that; you put a stop to it.’

Yes, I remembered. Mia told me about it during one of our first meetings, and I had given old Bella a serious talking to, one that Alf Stein would have been proud of.

‘As vicious as Al had been,’ she said, ‘Perry was the absolute opposite. He bought me a lot of new clothes, then he took me through to Hamilton and gave me a room in his wife’s place. I know they weren’t married but that’s what he called her. I went to school with Alafair and I got to know Hastie too, whenever he came back from the forces on leave. I had a decent home, for the first time ever, not one that was full of hate, and violent boys and men. I did well at school and then Perry put me through university. Yes, Bob, I had a new life and my mother never knew where I’d gone.

‘So yes, I owed Perry and when he asked me to set up a meeting with my brother, because he wanted to ask him some things about Tony Manson, I did it without a second thought.’

‘I never asked you this at the time,’ I said, ‘maybe because I thought I’d be better off not knowing, but I will now. Did you know about the hoods from Newcastle?’

She shook her head and winced. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘They arrived just before nine, and told me Perry had sent them to take Marlon to him.’

‘Did you know that Manson was porking Alafair at the time?’

‘No, she didn’t tell me that; she wouldn’t, the way things were between him and Perry.’

‘How did you feel when you heard what had happened to Marlon?’

She sipped her wine then looked me straight in the eye. ‘How do you think? I was gutted, because I’d been deceived. Was I overcome with grief? Honestly, no, because Marlon had chosen that sort of life, in spite of what happened to Gavin and to Ryan, my other brother. He knew what Tony Manson was.

‘And this too,’ she added. ‘My brothers were always the best loaf in the house; mother’s pride. They treated me like shit as well; I was their servant too.’

Silence fell between us as the sea bass arrived, and it stayed there, more or less, as we did it justice. Any talk was merely that of a renewed acquaintance, and all of it came from Mia. She asked me about my kids, although I sensed that she had no real interest.

‘Do you still have that cottage in Gullane?’ she ventured. ‘I loved that place the first time I saw it. For a very short while, I imagined what it would be like to live there with you.’

‘What?’ I said, with more than a little derision. ‘Me and Perry Holmes’s foster-child? Get real, Mia.’

Yet even as I spoke and saw the flash of hurt in her eyes, I thought of Sauce Haddock and his partner, the granddaughter of a criminal who’d been. . I hoped my tense was right. . almost as big a player as Perry.

Then I recalled the young woman who’d hooked me and I thought, Maybe, just maybe.

I kicked that notion into touch and focused on the present as we finished our meals.

‘Okay,’ I said when I was ready, ‘you think you’ve got a hold over me that you can use in some way. Back then, you might have, but this is now. Claim that I tipped you off, and I think you’d find that you’d be asked to prove the allegation. Not just that, Mia,’ I added, ‘you’d find that nobody cared. The truth is, I didn’t tell you to get out of town to save you from being arrested for Marlon’s murder. You’ve just told me you didn’t know those guys were going to be there, and I believe you. I’d have believed you back then, just the same.

‘You wouldn’t have been an accused, you’d have been a witness, but that case was never going to come to trial, ’cos you can’t put dead people in the dock, and by that time, Hastie had taken care of the Newcastle end.’

‘So why did you warn me?’

‘I did it to protect you. Not from Tony Manson, for he’d never have crossed me, but from Bella. She was another animal altogether.’

‘You mean she knew that I’d invited Marlon to my place?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing.

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I told her.’

‘You told her,’ she whispered, incredulous. Her expression froze. ‘Why, in God’s name, did you do that?’

‘Because I wanted her to know,’ I said. ‘I wanted her to see how she’d destroyed her children, I wanted her to see what an evil cow she was. That’s why I told you never to come back to Scotland, and to forget that you ever had a mother. You were so much better off without her.’

‘Jesus,’ Mia gasped. ‘You told her. Bob, you don’t know what you did.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I’ll get there,’ she replied, ‘but first tell me, how much do you know about her death?’

‘I can only tell you what the Edinburgh investigators have pieced together. As you know, it’s not my force any longer. But why should I do that? Let me guess. You want to know whether they’ve found out about you and the methamphetamine supply. Right?’

She nodded and offered a small grin.

‘What’s so fucking funny?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll deny any involvement in that.’

‘Sure, because you were smart enough to burn your bodega to the ground before you did a runner from the Spanish drugs cops. Yes, they know about it in Edinburgh. Why, for God’s sake, Mia, did you get into that racket? Tell me; it won’t go any further.’

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘You know the old saying about taking the boy out of the ghetto? Maybe in my case it runs along the lines of, you can take the girl out of the family, but you can’t take the family out of the girl.’

She picked up her glass in both hands and took a sip. ‘Let me tell you how it was with me, Bob,’ she murmured. ‘I struggled for a few years after I moved to Spain, getting by on presenter jobs on English shows on local radio, until my Spanish became good enough to get me into the mainstream stations. It was tough, but over the years I managed to put a little money together.

‘Then I did something fairly daft. I bought a sherry bodega in a place called El Cuervo. It’s not quite the end of the earth, but probably a stopover on the way there. The guy I bought it from stayed on for a while, to show me the ropes, and we ran profitably for a while. Then, about two years ago, he died, very suddenly, just as the recession was starting to bite. That’s when Ignacio came in.’

‘Ignacio being?’ I asked, although I knew from Pye’s file.

‘My son.’

‘I don’t recall him in Edinburgh.’

‘No, he was born in Spain, eighteen years ago. He told me that he knew someone who had a brother who could put the place to good use, if we didn’t ask any questions. I could see myself being penniless again, so I said yes, and I didn’t ask. Sure enough, reasonable money started to roll in, and there was no comeback. . for a while, that is. Then, about nine months ago, Ignacio came to me again and said that his pal wanted to quit, as the local markets were becoming a bit risky, not so much from the police but from other people, a crew of Mexicans who didn’t like what he was doing.’

I recalled a note I’d read on the file, by Karen Neville, after an unofficial chat with Alafair Drysalter. ‘So you had the bright idea of creating another route?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you approached Hastie McGrew, fresh out of the nick?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘At first he was suspicious; I’d had no contact with either him or Alafair since I left. He doubted me at first; he was worried that the cops might be trying to set him up again, but I was able to tell him some family stuff that convinced him I was who I said I was.

‘Hastie said he’d think about my proposition. A week or so later he came back and told me that he’d set something up, although he could not get anywhere near it himself. You understand why?’

I nodded. ‘Of course. But he never would have. He must have learned from Perry: never let anything be traced to you, anything that can be proved.’

‘Just so,’ she agreed. ‘It was simple,’ she continued. ‘I couriered the drugs across to Britain in a van loaded with stuff I was taking back home for the ex-pat Brits that are bailing out of Spain in the thousands. That was my cover. I always hid the drugs in their items, never in the van, so that if I was caught. . unlikely as that was on the crossings I used. . I’d be able to claim innocence.’

Good thinking, Mia, I thought. You’re the smartest Watson of them all. . not that that would be too hellish difficult.

‘I was met,’ she went on, ‘wherever I said, by a guy I knew only as Patrick. He took the consignment, and that was that. The money flowed to me by a different route.’ She leaned forward, looking at me earnestly. ‘That’s the truth, Bob.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not quite. At least it’s not quite as the Spanish drugs police see it. They believe that Ignacio synthesised the stuff himself, that there never was any pal. They checked his school records and found that his chemistry results were off the scale.’

‘Shit,’ she murmured. ‘Then I need your help even more.’

‘How do you imagine I can help you with all this?’ I protested. ‘I have no jurisdiction here, and as for Scotland, it’s gone too far for that. Remember my young DC, Andy, the blond boy with the green eyes? He’s now the head of our Drug Enforcement Agency, and he takes his job very seriously. I can’t call him off.’

She stared hard at the tablecloth.

‘The guy Patrick,’ I went on, ‘if you’d been checking up on him in the Edinburgh online papers as well as on me, you’d know that he was busted last week. In the process, he shot his girlfriend dead, instead of the cop he was trying to kill. As you can imagine, he’s singing his fucking head off.’

‘Oh Jeez,’ she sighed. ‘It never rains, eh? Bob, I’m not too worried about the Spanish police. They’re too busy chasing the Mexicans and the Colombians to bother about little old me. But your people, they’re different. You couldn’t tell them the route’s closed down now, could you?’

‘They know that already, Mia. But they’re not going to send you a letter of thanks, and they can’t just forget it ever existed.’ I thought for a second or two. ‘However. . if they stuck you in a line-up, what are the chances of Patrick Booth identifying you?’

‘As long as I’m not the only one there wearing a poncho, a woolly hat and shades so big they almost cover your face, I’d say they were pretty poor.’

‘Then maybe you don’t need help,’ I suggested; then I frowned. ‘But something tells me that’s not your biggest worry, is it?’ I ventured.

‘No.’

‘That has to do with this deep dark secret, I guess, the one you say will hole my career below the waterline.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I suppose it’s time you found out what it is.’

She took a mobile from her small gold handbag, keyed in a text and sent it, then leaned back in her chair. I did the same, catching up with the Albarino in the silence. If I hadn’t glanced to my left I wouldn’t have seen the look on John’s face, the surprise in his eyes as he looked at a point behind me and exclaimed, ‘Nacho?’

And then he was standing beside me, the newcomer, the third place at the table. I’d seen him in a similar position before, but then he’d been wearing a waiter’s uniform.

‘This is my son,’ Mia said, ‘Ignacio Centelleos.’

I looked at him as he took his seat, and all sorts of things clicked into place, dates, details of a night three months off a year before the kid was born, the way he looked almost exactly like a photograph I have at home of another teenage lad: me.

‘This is our son,’ his mother added.

‘I don’t know if I should say, “Hi, Dad,”’ Nacho murmured. ‘It is very new to me too.’

Mia took something else from her bag, a document, folded down to quarter size. ‘If you doubt me,’ she said, ‘that’s a DNA analysis report. If your Spanish isn’t good enough to read it you can have it officially translated. Either way, it’ll tell you definitively that you and I are Ignacio’s parents. If you still doubt it we can run another test, no problem.’

I couldn’t help smiling, as if I was admiring my son’s ingenuity, as in fact I was. ‘You stole my swimming trunks from my garden,’ I chuckled. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, solemnly. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Don’t worry about it, kid.’ I almost called him ‘son’, but I couldn’t. ‘I’d probably have done the same.’

Then I turned to Mia, no longer smiling. ‘Why did you have him do that?’

‘I had to,’ she insisted. ‘You see, Bob, I’d never been absolutely certain that you were his father. Do you remember that not long before we met I was raped, by three men in Edinburgh? Three bastards who were carrying a grudge from my schooldays.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I remember what happened to two of them. Hastie McGrew served his life sentence for killing them.’

‘Exactly. I’ve always been sorry about that, sorry for Hastie; nobody asked him to, not me, not Perry. He just did it, as if I really was his sister.’

‘But you must have told him who they were,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but I never thought for a moment he’d do that. I didn’t think any man cared that much.’ As she spoke I could see something new in her eyes, a real depth of misery.

‘I’ve been abused by men all my life: by that beast Alasdair and then by those three drunk, ugly brutes. You were the only man who ever treated me gently, and even you tried to throttle me when you woke out of that dream. Believe this or don’t believe it, I don’t care, but I’ve never been with anyone since you.’

She paused to compose herself. ‘They gave me a morning-after pill at the hospital, when I was treated, then you and I. .’ she looked at me, avoiding Ignacio. ‘You only used a condom the first time, remember. After that we got a little. . overenthusiastic.’

That is true; I’ve never forgotten any of that night.

‘When I fell pregnant,’ Mia continued, ‘I thought it must be yours, but I could never be one hundred per cent certain. Maybe that pill hadn’t done the job properly, for all I knew. I never talked to our son about his father, not until it became necessary for me to find out for sure. I told him, then when I saw that Herald article, I asked him to come here and by hook or by fucking crook get a testable sample from you.’

‘This was the first place I come,’ Ignacio said, taking up the story, ‘and I was lucky, John was looking for a waiter. He gave me a job and I waited on you when you came here.

‘My idea was to steal a glass you had used, and I did, but some clown bumped me in the kitchen and it broke in my pocket. So I went to your house, I wait for you to go out, and I get lucky, I find your trunks and they have hair, lots of it on the inside, with the roots; that you need for testing. I’m sorry, it was very intru. . I don’t have the word in English.’

I supplied it. ‘Intrusive, Ignacio, but you’re forgiven. You want a drink?’

He nodded. ‘A beer, please, sir.’

‘Don’t call me sir. No, don’t call me Dad either, at least not till it’s sunk in.’ I called the waitress over and asked for two canyas.

‘So why, Mia?’ I asked. ‘Let’s strip all else aside, why did it suddenly become necessary, as you put it?’

‘Because of my mother.’

‘Go on,’ I invited her, although by that time, I knew what was coming.

‘The drug route worked well for six months,’ she began. ‘I would send an email to a UK email address from a Hotmail account I created in Spain, giving the time and place of the next handover point. It was secure,’ she explained. ‘I always sent them from open Wi-Fi zones, never from my home IP address.

‘My payments hit the bank, I supplied more product and so on; a nice little cycle, with either end of the chain anonymous so that nobody could shop us if someone was caught in Edinburgh.’

‘And Booth was caught.’

‘It was all over by then anyway,’ she said. ‘A few weeks ago, my money didn’t arrive. I sent an email asking where the hell it was, and got a message back saying I’d have to come to collect it, that things had changed and that the Edinburgh end wasn’t happy to go on without knowing who they were dealing with. I tried to get in touch with Hastie, through the limo firm. . that was how I’d contacted him before. . but I was told that he’d collapsed and was in hospital.

‘I had to go. They. . I thought it was they. . had my money and they were the outlet for my product. I sent an email agreeing and I was told to go to an address in Edinburgh, in Caledonian Crescent. I didn’t want to fly and leave a trail on an aircraft passenger manifest so I drove. We drove, rather; Ignacio insisted on coming with me, to share the journey.’

‘And because I did not want Mama to go alone,’ the boy added. No, scratch that; not ‘the boy’, the young man. Ignacio is a solid lad and could have passed for early twenties, as could I when I was around eighteen.

‘You should have stopped her going altogether,’ I snapped. Listen to me, lecturing him already.

‘He couldn’t have,’ Mia said, ‘any more than he could have stopped you. So we got in the van and we drove, across Spain and France and through the tunnel.’

‘Eight zero nine five H N J’

Both of them stared at me. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ I murmured, sadly. ‘There are far more street cameras now than there were in your time in Edinburgh, Mia. They picked you up early on. Not in Caledonian Crescent, though. There isn’t one there. So, what happened?’

‘We found the address,’ she continued, ‘just after midnight as ordered. Ignacio pressed the button for flat one stroke one as we’d been told. A woman’s voice came through the speaker, telling us to come up, and we were let in.’

She paused, to take another drink, and I saw that her hand was shaking. Her voice was steady, though.

‘I was behind Ignacio when she opened the door, so I didn’t see her properly at first. And she didn’t get a look at me either, as I was wearing night driving glasses and my woolly hat. I took them off as we were following her into the kitchen. When we got in there and we got a good look at each other. .’

‘Una pesadilla,’ Ignacio whispered. Yes, I could see that it would have been a nightmare to him, when the women of the Watson family came face to face.

‘It was my mother,’ Mia said. ‘I couldn’t believe it, and neither could she. She was as surprised as I was. Then her face just twisted into something awful, it just filled with hatred.

‘She picked up a meat cleaver and she came for me, swinging it at my head. I threw an arm up to protect myself; the cleaver hit me but it didn’t cut all the way through my jacket. She’d have killed me, Bob, if Ignacio hadn’t grabbed her from behind and hauled her off.’

She looked into my eyes, searching for belief. I tried to show her nothing.

‘When he did, though, she tried to hit him with the thing, waving it behind her. . until I picked up a knife and stabbed her, again and again, until I hit something vital and the blood started pumping everywhere, and she gurgled and her eyes rolled and she died.’

I looked at her for a while, not knowing for sure what to make of her. ‘You’d just killed your mother. How did you feel?’ I asked.

‘I’d just saved my son,’ she retorted. ‘I felt pleased.’

‘It won’t always be that way, Mia. You’re not done with those pesadillas yet. I doubt if you ever will be.’ I didn’t dwell on the thought. ‘So, that done and dusted, how did you get the body into the river?’

‘Ignacio found a big blanket chest in her bedroom. It was big enough to take her, so we crammed her in there. We checked there was nobody around, then between us we got it downstairs and into the van. We took the money too; she had that in a supermarket bag in the kitchen.’

‘Why? Why did you do all that? Why not just leave her there?’

‘Now, I don’t know for sure,’ she admitted. ‘I suppose we hoped it would give us time to get out of the country before she was found. And it did.

‘There’s a road beside the river where I used to go running when I was on Airburst. We took the van down there and got lucky. It was high tide; we took her out, stripped her clothes off so there was nothing to identify her, and dropped her into the water off some rocks, then we heaved the chest in after her. Then we headed home. We took the clothes and burned them on the way.’

‘As you burned your old bodega?’ I held a hand up, stopping any response. ‘No, don’t answer that. That happened here in Spain, so I don’t want to know, just in case I’m ever asked whether I do or not.’

I picked up my beer and drained most of it, then looked at them, first at my son, and then at his mother. ‘What’s the bottom line, Mia?’ I asked her. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to protect Ignacio. And I want you to give me a head start. If I’m arrested, it all comes out, and your career will be over. You couldn’t possibly be appointed to that big new job.’

I looked back at her and felt utter despair wash over me. ‘So fucking what?’ I hissed. ‘When Sarah and I were over here,’ I told her, ‘I decided that I’m withdrawing my application. I don’t want the job. It’s not for me. If that means my police career is over, so be it. My job doesn’t get me up in the morning, not any more. Sarah does, and my children do. Earlier you said to me that I didn’t know what I’ve done. Well, neither do you.’

‘Yes I do,’ she protested. ‘Exactly.’

I shook my head. ‘No you don’t. You could have protected him eighteen years ago, by telling me about him. Do you think, seriously, that I wouldn’t have acknowledged him? Of course I would; I’d never have considered otherwise.

‘You and me, that might not have worked, but as his mother, you would have been untouchable, by Bella, by Tony Manson, by anyone who feared my wrath descending upon them.’

I had to pause to stem my rising anger.

‘But you didn’t,’ I hissed at her. ‘Instead you’ve destroyed our boy.’

‘How?’ she protested.

‘Your story is flawed, Mia. It doesn’t work. My wife did the post-mortem examination of your mother. She will stand in the witness box at any trial and say under oath that the angle of Bella’s wounds prove that she was killed by the person, a much taller person than her, who restrained her from behind. You couldn’t have done it; you’re no taller than she was, and you’re probably not strong enough. It was Ignacio that killed her, not you, and all three of us here know it.’

I looked at him and he nodded. ‘Perdon, Papa,’ he whispered. ‘Lo siento.’

‘I’ll confess to it, Bob.’ Mia’s protestation turned to pleading. ‘I have done, to you, and I’ll stick to it.’

I’d have been happy to let her, but I was forced to set her straight.

‘You can confess until they make you a saint, but proof of guilt is still required in Scotland, and if your story can be disproved forensically, the worst thing that can happen to you is five years for obstructing justice. It won’t help Ignacio. Because there’s more.’

‘How can there be?’

‘The ottoman. The blanket chest. You should have taken it away with you and burned it as well,’ I said. I was angry with her, and that confused me as, after all, I was sitting with a murderer and his accomplice.

‘The fucking thing washed up on the other side of the Firth,’ I said. ‘The local bobbies thought nothing of it, but Edinburgh asked about it and it was handed over. The Fife people hadn’t even bothered to look inside. When the investigators did, they found your mother’s blood, and they found a kitchen knife with two sets of DNA traces on it. They’ve been able to match them to Bella and to Ignacio. And just to put the tin lid on it, they found other blood traces in the box. There was a nail on the inside, with skin fragments on it.’

I turned to Ignacio. ‘The last time we met you had a plaster on the back of your left hand, isn’t that right?’

He nodded, extending it towards me, so that I could see a scar, healed but still vivid, and recent.

‘You tore the back of your hand open when you put your grandmother’s body in the chest, or when you took it out. Either way, it’s crucial, incontrovertible evidence. And it’s done for you.’

Mia reached out and caught my arm, gripping it hard. ‘Surely you can do something about that. In your position you can destroy evidence.’

‘Do you know what I did yesterday?’ I asked her. ‘I spent much of it destroying what’s left of the life of an old man, an old friend, an old colleague, because he did just that. Now you’re asking me to do the same thing.’

‘Yes,’ she acknowledged, ‘I am. Will you?’

Would I have? I hope not, but I’ll never know for sure, because the question was academic by then.

‘Even if I tried,’ I sighed, ‘it’s too late. Sammy Pye and his people in Edinburgh have proved beyond the faintest, most unreasonable doubt that Bella Watson was killed by her grandson.

‘They know that she had two grandsons, and that the other one did not do it. Because of that. .’ I took my iPad from a pocket of my jacket, activated it and showed her a document that appeared on screen. ‘That’s a European arrest warrant, sworn out today in Edinburgh, in Ignacio’s name. They don’t issue those just to pick up suspects, only for people who will be charged with a specific offence, in this case, murder.’

I pointed through the plastic screen and across the road. Neither Mia nor our son had noticed the car that had been parked there for several minutes, or the two men who were standing beside it.

‘See those guys?’ I said. ‘They’re detectives of the Catalan police force. When I saw that warrant, I was duty bound, as a serving police officer, to seek to enforce it. I arranged for them to be here, Mia, because I had a suspicion that I would be meeting the man named on it. However, I had no suspicion that he was my son. So, my dear, you have put me in the position of being forced to hand him over.’

‘You could say it isn’t him,’ Mia suggested, hopelessly.

‘But John knows it is,’ I pointed out. ‘He’ll have his name on his employment records. Those cops know John; everybody in fucking L’Escala knows John.’

‘He could run for it.’ She was desperate.

‘No way. Those cops are armed; I’m not having him shot trying to escape.’

‘They could take me instead.’ She was starting to cry.

‘No, they couldn’t. Mia, you didn’t leave any DNA in the apartment, and you were never photographed behind the wheel of your van. Any traces you might have left on the outside of the chest were washed off in the water. There is no evidence that you were ever there.’

I glanced across the road again, and saw the two detectives begin to move towards us.

‘This is what’s going to happen,’ I said, quickly. ‘They’ll take Ignacio into custody, and I will ensure that he’s extradited to Scotland at once. I can have two guys on a plane tomorrow. Once he’s there,’ I promised, ‘I’ll arrange for his case to be handled by the best young lawyer in Scotland, who just happens to be his half-sister.

‘Mia, you’ll get yourself to Edinburgh and you’ll tell the story of what happened. . the true story, mind, all of it. . to Detective Inspector Sammy Pye.’

I took Ignacio by the arm and drew him to his feet.

‘You’ve done some stupid things in your life so far,’ I told him, ‘but as far as I can see you did them to protect your mother, and I respect that.’

I did and still do, but one question disturbs me. If I had brought Ignacio up, or been around to influence him, would he have turned out as he has, lumbered at age eighteen with a back story that will follow him all his life? Of course that’s another way of asking, if I had been in his shoes, if I had experienced the same circumstances, would I have done anything differently?

Lately that’s been dominating my madrugada thinking, and so far I haven’t been able to persuade myself that I would. But one thing I do know: from now on, as James Andrew grows, I will be watching him like a hawk, remembering my father’s words, with his dying breath, ‘Blood will out, always.’

‘When you’re in Scotland,’ I promised Ignacio, ‘I’ll use all the influence I have to get the best result I can for you. Whatever the outcome is, I promise you this. You’re my son and you’ll always be under my protection.’

I rode with him in the cops’ car, back to the Mossos d’Esquadra station, and I saw him booked in, all the way to the holding cell. I made it very clear also, to the officer in charge, that I’d be back to see him next morning, and that if there was a single scratch on him, their head man in Barcelona would hear all about it.

When I came out, Mia was waiting.

‘Have you got a car?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’d better run us back down to La Clota. If I left without paying the bill, John would never let me forget it.’

‘What’s going to happen to Ignacio?’ she murmured as she parked beside the restaurant. I could see that her cheeks really were stained with tears, and that pleased me in an odd way. I had doubted that she was capable of them.

‘Worst case, life,’ I replied, harshly. ‘Best case, an acquittal on grounds of self-defence. I’d guess somewhere in between. I was going to ask for a sentencing favour for someone else, but that’ll have to go by the board now. I’ll use all the influence I have, call in all the debts I’m owed, for the boy.’

Tough luck, Max, but I’m sure you’d understand.

‘What will happen about the drugs,’ I continued, ‘I don’t know for sure, but if Booth can’t identify you, there’s a good chance you may be in the clear. If so, you’re a lucky little idiot. Honest to God, Mia, I wish it was you in that cell and not him.’

‘Lucky? You think I don’t wish that too?’ she retorted, bitterly. ‘Bob, what should I do now?’

‘Are you in a hotel here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then stick around until Ignacio’s on the way to Scotland. They’ll let you see him, I’m sure; I’ve squared that. Once he’s gone, follow him, as I told you. You’ll probably be arrested, but I’m pretty sure I can get you bail. Stay with Alafair, if she’ll have you. Actually she might welcome your support. I’m told that Hastie died this morning.

‘Hey,’ I exclaimed, unashamedly cynical, ‘that’s even more luck for you. He’d have been pressured into giving evidence against you in the drugs thing. Another secret gone to the grave. As it is now, unless Booth can identify you in a line-up, and unless the Spanish decide they’re interested after all, you’ll probably be in the clear.’

I got out of her car. As I watched her drive into the night, I couldn’t help wondering what future part she might play in my life. None, if I can help it. On the other hand, if she had come to me when she found out she was pregnant. . Who knows?

But I do know this, a man can’t have so many children that he can afford to miss a single moment in the life of any of them. Mia robbed me of eighteen years of Ignacio. I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss any more, whatever really lies inside him, whatever his terrible genetic mix has put there.

I went back to La Clota, squared up with John, and told him what had happened, leaving out the family side of things. Then I had another beer, sat on a couch in front of the restaurant and called Sarah, my place of safety in my hour of darkness. I knew that some more tough, sleepless time was looming, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

The place was almost deserted by then and I was glad, for I got pretty emotional. So did Sarah. When we were done, I don’t believe we’ve ever felt closer to each other.

I made one more call before I headed home, to Sandra Bulloch’s direct line, dropping a message on her voicemail to tell her I wouldn’t be in the office before Wednesday, and instructing her to call the Police Authority first thing in the morning and advise them that they would soon be receiving formal notice of the withdrawal of my application for the exalted post of Chief Constable of the new Police Scotland.

It had nothing to do with Ignacio, and his situation. I had decided, before I ever knew about him, that if the politicians wanted to make a stupid, unnecessary mistake, I wasn’t going to help them make it work.

I left then and started the walk home, the first steps of a longer journey. I have no clear idea where it will take me. My future may be within the police force, it may be outside. Whatever, it’ll be on my terms.

Who knows? As I reflected that night, as I passed the Palacio de Ginebra once more, this time I might even buy that damn boat.