Inhuman Remains

Seventeen

For some reason, I’d been carrying a mental image of Lidia Bromberg as a Nordic type, a leggy blonde. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She was small, five-two tops without the heels, voluptuous but edging towards fleshy, and with a head of thick, jet-black hair, razor-cut, I guessed, as I stared at her. She wore white shorts that ended just above the knee, and her formidable bosom was crammed into a sleeveless pink top that was barely fit for purpose, to quote a former politician.

She wasn’t alone. Caballero was standing beside her, still in his lightweight cream suit, and in his hand he had a brutish-looking gun, made even uglier by a silencer. Okay, so they hadn’t come to sell me a share in the casino project.

If I’d been more alert, and if I hadn’t been hampered by a toe that I was not certain was cracked, maybe I’d have slammed the door shut and legged it, but staring down a gun barrel does have a certain hypnotic effect. So, instead, I stepped into my room.

That’s not to say I was completely stunned. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded. ‘There’s no wagon outside so you can’t be chambermaids, and you don’t fit my image of hotel-room thieves.’

‘I think you know who I am, Mrs Blackstone,’ Bromberg replied. ‘I believe we have spoken, yes? The way things stand, it looks as if you are going to be late for a meeting with me, yes?’

‘I’d decided to give that a miss. I had you checked out, you see, by a friend of mine, a security consultant, so I know that the whole project’s a con. I don’t really fancy pouring my money into a suitcase for you bastards to run off with.’

‘You’re totally off your head,’ said Caballero, angrily, in Spanish.

‘That’s been remarked upon before,’ I told him, in his own tongue, ‘but it’s never proved to be true. I’m clever enough to have made sure that my friend knows exactly where I am right now. I’d guess that in the last hour he’s tried to call me a couple of times on my mobile.’ I took it from my bag and held it up for him to see. ‘The battery’s dead; I only came back here for the charger, but he’s not to know that, is he? By now, he’s either called the police, or he’s about to.’

‘In that case, we’d better not delay,’ he said roughly. In that moment, I believed, truly, that he was going to shoot me. Instead, just as I felt my legs start to give under me, he picked up the charger from the dressing-table and tossed it to me. I caught it, one handed. ‘You’d better take this. We might want you to call your friend, to reassure him, and it’ll be most convincing if you do it on your mobile. Now this is what we’ll do,’ he continued. ‘We use the service list and we go out of the side door, to my car, which is parked outside.’

‘Maybe it’s been towed by now,’ I suggested helpfully.

He treated me to a small smile; he wasn’t a bad-looking bloke and I found myself reacting to it, clinging to it in the hope that he wasn’t all that bad in any respect. ‘My car doesn’t get towed in Sevilla,’ he advised me. ‘Now be good and come with us quietly. Killing you would be a last resort, but you have been a Goddamned nuisance, so I won’t feel too bad if I have to.’

So long, Mr Nice Guy! I looked at the gun, and considered it. Of course it could have been a replica, but it looked real enough, and when it comes down to it one doesn’t bet one’s life on such chances. There was also the silencer; it occurred to me that I’d seen fake firearms often enough in shops in L’Escala, and real ones in shops in the US, but I’d never seen a silencer, real or pretend, on display. The thing was like an exclamation point, emphasising my peril.

That was when I realised that I can’t do the Wonderwoman stuff any more. I have known a couple of moments. . and I’m not including the plane crash. . when my life could have come to a sudden, painful conclusion. On each occasion I took my chances, and came through. But things are different now. No reward could ever balance the risk of not seeing my son grow up, watching him turn from a boy into a man through his teenage years, feeling my chest swell with pride as he becomes a doctor or a scientist, or whatever. I realised in that room how much I’m looking forward to crying at his graduation, and at his wedding, and later on, to holding my grandchildren in my arthritic, stiffening fingers while I still can. No reward could ever make up for all that, and I hadn’t even gone south in search of one. I was doing a favour for an aunt I had barely known for much of my life and for a cousin who didn’t bloody deserve to have her as a mother. Bugger it! I was even paying my own air fare and hotel bill.

‘Okay,’ I said submissively, tucking the phone charger away in my bag. ‘You’re the dealer, whatever you say.’

‘Smart woman,’ Bromberg sneered. I really didn’t like her, I decided. She reminded me of someone I’d seen in a TV sci-fi drama a few years before, a character who’d worn an attractive human skin to conceal the voracious creature within. That wasn’t the moment to tell her, though. That wasn’t the moment to say anything more.

Instead I stood quite still as they came towards me, flanking me as she opened the door and took a quick look into the corridor. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, then took my elbow, pulling me roughly after her. I will tell you at this point that in the second half of my twenties, when I signed on as a nurse in an African war zone, I decided I should learn how to take care of myself, so I took up mixed martial arts. I was quite good, and trained with a couple of the UN soldiers in my base while I was away. They also taught me to shoot. Since then I’ve kept up my skills at classes, whenever I could. Maybe I was exaggerating with the Wonderwoman claim, but at another time, I might have broken a couple of Lidia’s fingers for the way she grabbed me.

At another time, when I didn’t have Caballero on the other side, and the gun, which I saw him tuck into his belt. I went with them meekly. They led me along the corridor, then to the right to a lift door that I hadn’t seen in my time there. Lidia pushed the call button. Nobody spoke as we waited; they had what they wanted and I knew there was no point in winding them up.

When the lift arrived, it was occupied by a chambermaid, with her trolley. She looked at us in surprise as she pushed it out. ‘This is the staff lift,’ she said, in a hard accent that told me she was from Ecuador, Guatemala or another of the Latin countries that provide Spain with much of its cheap labour.

‘City council,’ Caballero snapped, and she backed off, cowed. I guessed that she had read it as a threat, since not all of those migrant workers have legal status.

We rode the lift down to the ground floor. It opened into an area of the hotel that seemed to be closed to the public; the floor wasn’t carpeted and cleaning implements were propped against the wall in a corner. My captors must have studied the place on a plan in the city offices, I guessed, for they seemed to know exactly where they were, and where to go.

They walked me to a door and through it into another corridor, wider and with a fire exit at the other end. As we reached it Caballero raised his right foot and kicked the crash bar, releasing it and opening the door outwards into the street. It was still deserted. Just my luck to be snatched at the hour when all of Sevilla was eating or asleep.

The big black car was almost directly opposite us: I was close enough to recognise the Chrysler badge on the back, and the model number, 30 °C. At least I was being kidnapped in style, I thought. . until Caballero reached into his pocket, produced a key and pressed it. The boot popped open. ‘You get in there,’ he said. ‘Wait a minute!’ I protested involuntarily.

‘Don’t worry, you won’t suffocate. I don’t want you to see where we’re going, plus I’m not having you wave at every police car we pass on the way there.’ He dropped the key into his jacket’s right-hand pocket, took the gun from his belt, handed it to Bromberg, on my right, and grabbed my upper arms, as if he expected me to resist being put into that dark oven.

I probably would have too, even if things hadn’t started to happen very fast. Suddenly, I was aware of a new shape, moving just at the edge of my peripheral vision, and behind Lidia. I saw a hand clamp on the wrist that held the gun, and then a flash of metal. She screamed and dropped the weapon. As she did, Caballero loosened his grip on me, enough for me to wrench myself free and to dig my left elbow into the pit of his stomach. I heard him gasp as I spun round on my undamaged foot, dipping a little to allow me to bring my right forearm up, hard, between his legs, and to a very firm conclusion. The gasp turned into the sort of squeal of pain that I’m told no woman can make, or even understand. As he began to fold into himself, I snatched the pistol from the ground, dropped it into the bag that, by some miracle, was still slung over my left shoulder, and then grabbed him. Quickly, I retrieved the key from his pocket, along with a cell phone I found there, then pushed him, bundling him into the car’s capacious boot, the prison he had planned for me. ‘Sorry, mate,’ I hissed, as I slammed the lid shut, ‘but I’m told you won’t suffocate.’

class="calibre15"› Bromberg was on the ground, writhing and whimpering, her hands clasped to her right buttock, from which blood was seeping, turning her white shorts a deep red. The idea of helping her didn’t even occur to me. Instead, I looked at the Chrysler’s key, saw which button released the locks and pressed it. class="calibre15"› As I slid behind the wheel, I called to my rescuer. ‘Get in!’ He had become a spectator, but he did as I ordered, while I found the ignition slot, and looked at the controls. I was vaguely aware, from an audible thud, that he had tossed something heavy into the back, but not of him, not at that point: all my concentration was devoted to flight.

By happy chance, my Jeep’s a Chrysler too, and automatic, so everything was familiar. I fired up the engine, hit the brake-release pedal, slammed the gearstick into drive rather more firmly than is necessary and drove off.

‘Thanks,’ I said to my passenger, then turned to take a proper look at him, as the first thumps and muffled shouts came from the boot.

He smiled back at me; a modest smile, yet one that was on the edge of being dazzling. ‘No problem, cousin,’ said Frances Ulverscroft McGowan.