Capital Punishment (55 page)

‘I think Skin had a thing for you, too,’ said Boxer, ‘playing footsie with you in the interview.’

‘Pity,’ said Mercy wistfully, ‘that my only admirers are drug dealers and murderers. Why’s it that only criminals think I’m hot? And what does that say about you?’

‘Me?’ said Boxer nervously, checking her for insight, but she was more occupied by her food.

‘What is it about bad guys?’ said Mercy, sipping her wine.

‘Perhaps they like a bit of strictness,’ said Boxer. ‘Anyway, what I meant was, now that Alyshia is safe—’

‘Oh yes, the gorgeous Isabel might feel very differently about her knight in shining armour.’

‘You did a lot more than I did to get Alyshia back.’

‘Thanks for the recognition from the private sector.’

‘No, Mercy, you did a great job.’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking at the empty chair, but not shrugging this time, seeing her failure sitting there. ‘There
are
things I’m good at.’

They drank more wine.

‘So,’ said Mercy, unable to leave it alone. ‘Isabel?’

‘Didn’t I say?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’m in love with her.’

‘That might be difficult for you, Charles Boxer,’ said Mercy, hurt, his words slicing through her.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never wanted a woman more in my entire life than Isabel Marks. She ... she’s ... she’ll...’

‘She’s got all the right tenses, anyway,’ said Mercy, annoyed with herself for always hiding her feelings behind humour. ‘She must remind you of the mother you never had.’

‘When are you going to meet the father you never had?’

‘That’s our problem,’ said Mercy, grinning, reaching across to hold his hand. ‘If we hadn’t been such lost souls, we might have stayed together.’

He squeezed her hand, thinking:
Jesus, Isabel was right.
Mercy still hadn’t let him go. Was she living in hope? He looked at the chair again, as if that, in his mind, was all that was left of their relationship.

‘Shall I call her?’ asked Mercy.

But, despite the feeling of humiliation trembling at the outer limits of the hole in his chest, he wouldn’t let her.

Finally, just as the plate of lamb kebabs arrived, someone asked if they could take the chair. They nodded and saw it removed to a table where it was introduced into another family and was sat upon by a young girl, who turned and smiled at them. And they realised that all their parental expectations were tied up in that wretched chair.

They left the restaurant and went to hail taxis on Edgware Road, where the Lebanese men were sitting outside the cafés, huddled in their coats, smoking their
hookahs.
He put Mercy in a taxi heading south, crossed the road and took another heading north.

His mobile rang. Isabel. His heart leapt.

‘How’s Alyshia?’ he asked.

‘She’s fine. She’s recovering well. She’ll be out tomorrow. I’ve left her at the Bupa Cromwell with Deepak and I’m at home on my own. I’d like to see you. I think we should have a talk.’

He redirected the cab to Aubrey Walk, staring straight ahead, mouth set. He knew what ‘having a talk’ meant. Maybe Frank’s warning about him had finally brought Isabel to her senses and this was going to be the brush-off. He felt sure she would have the lightest of touches, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the hole expanding in his chest after two rejections in one night.

He paid the cabbie, made his way past the fake Georgian façade to her door, feeling the emptiness now, both inside and out. He rang the bell.

She opened the door for him and he knew instantly that everything was going to be all right. There was no hesitation. She opened her arms and he walked into them, heard her gasp in his ear as he held her to him and kissed her neck.

They sat with the bottle of scotch and the ice tray, their hands threaded across the kitchen table, smiling, on the brink of laughing.

‘How’s it going between Alyshia and Deepak?’

‘I don’t ask. He’s still here. They talk,’ said Isabel.

‘And Frank?’

‘I think she was struck by his remorse and surprised by his magnanimity, but under no illusions about his capacity for change,’ said Isabel. ‘What about Amy?’

‘I’m trying a new approach and it seemed to work at first, but now I realise it hasn’t. Not for her, but for me.’

His phone rang, he checked the screen.

‘Mercy,’ said Boxer. ‘She’d only call if it was important. I’ll have to take it.’

He listened, blinked, said nothing, dropped the phone, looked to the window, where he saw through their cheerful reflection to the darkness beyond.

‘What is it?’ asked Isabel.

‘Amy’s gone,’ said Boxer. ‘She left a note on her bed. The last line was:

“YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME.”’

I would like to thank everybody who helped me with this book especially my old school friend, Robin Clifford, who introduced me to a number of people working in the private security company industry. Those I spoke to have asked to remain anonymous. What I can say is that, to a man, they were extremely impressive people with what struck me as an unimpeachable moral centre, unlike a number of characters in this novel.

My thanks, too, to my old friend Steve Wright, who reported to me a conversation he’d had with his then six year old son, Calum. This was introduced into the mulch of my cerebral composter and ten years later got worked into some barren patch where it has produced this fruit.

There is no such thing as an unedited book. This one went through quite a few processes even before it saw the light of day. When it did finally come out into the open I was grateful to have Andrew Kidd on hand to give me some very valuable editorial notes. Most of these I incorporated into the text prior to the novel being submitted, which undoubtedly affected its positive reception.

There are days when writing can seem like the most exquisite torture ever conceived by the devil himself. Hours of writhing on a skewer of your own invention to produce a few droplets of sweat, which fall to the page and blur the four words you’ve managed to wring out of your severely gnawed pen, can seem like a terrible way to earn a living. On the other hand, hitting the vein and getting a gusher, with the brain motoring faster than the ink flows and the stack of blank pages falling visibly as they’re filled with wild imaginings, can make it all feel worthwhile. I have paid rare visits to these extremes while spending most of my time in the ground in between and I can tell you that the one thing I’m deeply grateful for is not to be doing it alone. I would therefore like to thank my wife, Jane, for cajoling me back to sanity while I’m writing, for her infinite patience and perceptions in the editing process, for the endless shoring up of the edifice once the work has gone and for her love, which I value above all else and return with all my heart.

1

Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 03.00 hrs

The phone trembled under the warm breath of the brutal night.

‘
Diga,
’ said Falcóon, who was sitting up in bed with a file from one of the hundreds concerning the 6th June Seville bombing resting on his knees.

‘You’re awake, Javier,’ said his boss, Comisario Elvira.

‘I do my best thinking at this time in the morning,’ said Falcón.

‘I thought most people our age just worried about debt and death.’

‘I have no debts ... not financial ones anyway.’

‘Somebody has just woken me up to talk about death ... about
a
death,’ said Elvira.

‘And why were you called, rather than me?’

‘At some time before eleven thirty-five, which was when it was reported, there was a car accident at kilometre thirty-eight on the northbound motorway from Jerez to Seville. In fact, on both sides of the motorway, but the deaths have occurred on the northbound side. I’m told it’s very nasty and I need you to go out there.’

‘Something that the Guardia Civil can’t handle?’ said Falcon, glancing at his clock. ‘They’ve taken their time.’

‘It’s complicated. They originally thought there was just one vehicle, a truck, which had crashed into the central reservation barriers and shed its load. It took them a while to realize there was another vehicle, beyond some pine trees down a bank on the other side of the motorway.’

‘Still no reason to involve the Homicide squad.’

‘The driver of the northbound vehicle has been identified as Vasili Lukyanov, a Russian national. When they finally got round to looking in the boot of his car they discovered a suitcase had split open and there was a lot of money ... I mean a hell of a lot of money. I understand we’re talking about millions of euros, Javier. So, I want a full forensic examination of the vehicle and, although it’s clearly an accident, I want you to investigate it as if it was a murder. There could be implications for other investigations going on around the country. And, most important, I want that money fully accounted for and made safe. I’ll get a security van sent up there as soon as I can raise someone.’

‘I assume we’re talking about a Russian mafia gang member,’ said Falcón.

‘We are. I’ve already spoken to the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre. They’ve confirmed it. Area of expertise—prostitution. Area of operation – Costa del Sol. And I’ve contacted Inspector Jefe Casado – you remember him? The guy from the GRECO, the Organized Crime Response Squad in the Costa del Sol.’

‘The one who gave us a presentation back in July about setting up a GRECO in Seville to handle the mafia activity here,’ said Falcón. ‘And nothing’s happened.’

‘There’s been a delay.’

‘Why can’t he handle this?’

‘That’s the delay, he’s in Marbella running about twenty
investigations down there,’ said Elvira. ‘And anyway, he hasn’t started work on the situation in Seville yet.’

‘He’ll know more than we do
and
he’ll have the intelligence on Lukyanov’s Costa del Sol activity.’

‘Exactly, which is why he’s sending us one of his own men, Vicente Cortés, who’ll bring someone from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre with him.’

‘Well, I’m awake, so I might as well go,’ said Falcón, and hung up.

Shaving was the usual morning trial, facing the full prosecution of his stubbled face. Same old story with a few more lines. The mind engraving its doubts and fears. They’d all told him that the ultimate solution to the Seville bombing was not expected of him. He knew it himself. He’d looked at the other inspector jefes who did their ugly work in the world of violence and left it in the office. But that was not for him, not this time. He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. The life-changing events of the last five years had turned the salt and pepper to steel grey and he didn’t dye it, unlike the other inspector jefes. The light and the remnants of his summer tan brought out the amber in his brown eyes. He grimaced as the razor made lanes through the foam.

Dressed in a navy blue polo shirt and chinos, he left the bedroom, rested his hands on the railing around the gallery and leaned out. No visible stars. He looked down on to the central patio of the massive eighteenth-century house he’d inherited from his disgraced father, the artist, Francisco Falcón. The pillars and arches were roughly sketched in by a solitary light whose sulphurous glow lit the bronze boy tiptoeing across the fountain and brought up the far recesses behind the pillars of the colonnade, where a plant, dried to a rustling husk, still lurked in a corner. He must throw that out, he thought for the hundredth time. He’d asked his housekeeper, Encarnación, to get it done months ago, but
she had her strange attachments: her mobile Virgins, her Stations of the Cross, that wretched plant.

Toast with olive oil. A small, strong coffee. He got into his car with the caffeine sharpening his reactions. He drove through the stifling, uneasy city, which still seemed to be panting from the uproar of the day, its tarmac ruptured into thick biscuit, cobbles piled on pavements, roads ploughed up to reveal vital inner workings, machinery poised to strike. Every street, it seemed, was fenced off and taped, bollarded to kingdom come. The air reeked of Roman dust uncaked from subterranean ruins. How could anybody settle down in this tumult of reconstruction? But, of course, everything had its purpose. This was nothing to do with the bombing of a few months ago but the mayoral elections which were to take place in early 2007. So the population had to feel the torment of the incumbent’s beneficence.

It was fast work getting out of the city at this time in the morning, still dark, four hours to go before sunrise. He was across the river and out on the ring road in minutes, flying down the motorway towards Jerez de la Frontera inside a quarter of an hour. It wasn’t long before he saw the lights: the surgical halogen, the queasy blue, the unnerving red, the slow, revolving, sickly yellow. He pulled up on the hard shoulder behind a huge tow truck. Disembodied luminous jackets floated in the dark. There was hardly any traffic. He crossed the motorway and entered the noise of the generator powering the lights that brutally illuminated the scene. There were three Nissan 4x4s in the white and green of the Guardia Civil, two motorbikes, a red fire engine, a Day-Glo green ambulance, another smaller tow truck, halogen lighting up on stalks, wiring all around, a spray of glass diamonds from the crashed truck’s windscreen swept on to the hard shoulder.