Last Resort (22 page)

He crossed the narrow street and looked up, at the third floor. ‘There’s a light up there,’ I heard him murmur, to himself rather than me. ‘It could be Jacob’s place, but I’m not sure. Should we go back up?’

I looked at him. He’d probably had more of the wine than I had, and the waiter had poured him a second brandy shot.

‘Better not,’ I told him. ‘As you say, the light might be in another flat; his note said he wouldn’t be back till midnight, remember, and it’s only just gone ten. But even if he is in . . .’ I paused. ‘From what our pal said, Hector could be with him. Given that he might have been in the act of selling you out to Battaglia before she got killed, things could get confrontational between the two of you. It’s better that we come back first thing tomorrow, when our heads are clearer.’

‘My head’s fine,’ Xavi growled, but it wasn’t and he knew it.

‘Come on,’ I said, and we headed up the slope, back towards our hotel.

‘Who do you think the woman was?’ Xavi asked, out of the blue, as we crossed the Plaza Mayor.

‘How the hell should I know?’ I replied. ‘Jacob’s note was for someone called Thais. I suppose it could have been her.’

‘I suppose,’ he conceded, then stopped, almost in mid-stride. ‘You know,’ he continued, ‘that second coffee’s given me a hell of a thirst. Do you fancy a beer?’

‘Do I what?’ I laughed. ‘Look at the two of us. Gentlemen rankers out on a spree. Why the hell not.’

‘I thought it was gentlemen songsters,’ he retorted.

‘You don’t know your Kipling,’ I countered.

‘Then come and tell me about him in that bar over there.’

I couldn’t top that, so I followed him, like a large lost lamb.

As we sat at the table, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I checked it and saw two missed calls from Alex, but when I tried to return them my battery indicator went red and the thing died on me.

‘Fuck it,’ I whispered. ‘It’s been a long day for my mobile too.’

One beer led to a second, but that was it. Even so, Xavi was well the worse for wear by the time we got back to the hotel. ‘I never could handle too much,’ he confessed, just before almost falling into his room. ‘Those fucking brandies were a very bad idea.’

There was a gym in the basement. Every time I go on a trip I pack trainers and shorts just in case, but they’ve never come in more handy than they did next morning. We had agreed to meet at eight next morning, but I knew there wasn’t any chance of him making it, so I headed down there at seven and put in a good hour on the treadmill and the weights, before going back upstairs for a shower.

I was in the breakfast room for eight thirty, but had to wait for another ten minutes before Xavi joined me. His eyes were a shade slitty, but otherwise he looked human.

‘Don’t tell Sheila,’ he muttered as he came over from the service counter with his third glass of orange juice in his hand, the first two having disappeared in an instant.

Even with that delayed start we didn’t imagine that we would miss Jacob Ireland. Other than banks, public offices or cafes, Spain doesn’t switch on much before ten. We lingered a little over breakfast, but even so, when we set out for Calle de la Cruz it was twenty past nine, still relatively early in the daily cycle of Europe’s third largest city.

Before we left, Xavi just had to buy a paper. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s my profession, and I can’t go a day without getting ink on my fingers.’

‘Fine,’ I replied, ‘but you can get it on your pocket for now, and read it later.’

He nodded, bought a copy of
El Pais
from the stall in the foyer, and rolled it up without so much as a glance.

‘We should have checked the television last night,’ he grumbled, ‘for coverage of Valencia’s press conference.’

‘We should,’ I agreed, ‘but we didn’t. We know the story anyway.’

In the grey morning light, Calle Atocha had shed the glamour of the night before; it was just another city street, heavy with traffic as what passes for a morning rush hour in Madrid approached its peak. It was cold, but not desperately so; the clouds overhead were threatening rain rather than snow, and made good on their promise just as we reached our destination.

Fatigas del Querer, or ‘Shagged out’, as I had decided to call it, was locked up; clearly it was not a breakfast destination. It seemed diminished also, in the daylight, and we barely gave it a glance as we stepped into number two hundred and forty-two.

There was a little natural light in the stairway, coming from a skylight that we hadn’t seen the night before. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Xavi muttered as he glanced up at it. ‘Running upstairs between these bloody miser switches is not good for my knee.’

The note was still pinned to Ireland’s door. ‘Looks like Thais stood him up,’ I observed as I pressed the buzzer.

I pressed hard, but not enough to break the lock, so I was surprised when the bell didn’t ring, and instead the door swung open. It had a ball socket rather than a latch, a mortise lock and two bolts, top and bottom, on the inside. All of them were unfastened and a security chain hung from its keeper, twin screws still in their holes in the fastening that had been ripped from the wood.

‘Not good,’ I whispered, as I felt an old familiar tingle running down my spine.

‘What?’ Xavi exclaimed behind me, not having seen the damage.

I held up a hand. ‘Hold on,’ I ordered, as quietly as I could. ‘Stay here and stand to the side, so that you can’t be seen from inside. If anyone gets past me, let him go if you aren’t spotted. Otherwise grab the fucker and throw him down the stairs.’

He stared at me, as if he was struggling to understand, but finally he nodded.

I left him there and moved inside. I didn’t have to do a full search; I only needed to follow my nose, as I had in Barcelona.

In Madrid, it led me to a sitting room off the hall. I stood outside, very still, for almost a minute, listening for the faintest sound from inside, a rustle of movement, a tense breath.

If I wasn’t the only intruder in that flat, I didn’t want to be making myself an easy target. Instead I steeled myself and stepped across the doorway, hoping to make it to the other side. I did, without incident, and from that position I could see a wide wall mirror: it told me that there was no threat. I stepped inside.

The man that I assumed had been Jacob Ireland was tied to a dining chair, by the wrists, with plastic restraints. His head was lolling on his left shoulder; he seemed to be staring at something on the floor beside the door, but that was an illusion because the third eye, the bullet hole in the centre of his forehead, made it very clear that he was staring at nothing.

The poor bastard hadn’t died well, though. He was sitting in his own mess, with a small pool of blood on either side of the chair and a third by his right foot. He was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt and tan trousers, clothing that let me see, very clearly, what had been done to him.

He had been shot through each elbow, and through the right knee. They must have been contact wounds, for each joint was shattered. The man had been systematically tortured, his screams . . . and there would have been many . . . silenced by a blue hand towel that had been jammed into his mouth. It lay in his lap, but I could see fibres caught between his teeth.

‘What the hell is this about?’ I whispered.

If I’d been at home, and I’d been carrying a warrant card, I would have been in a position to find out. But I wasn’t: I was a civilian in a foreign land, staring at my second cadaver inside forty-eight hours. That was at least one too many, by any objective standard.

I could have taken a minute or two to search, but someone had done that before me. There was a six-drawer unit in a corner of the room; its contents lay all over the floor. A laptop sat on a table by the window; it was powered up and the screen showed an open file; it seemed to be a list of names, addresses and contact details. I reached for my phone to take a photo of it, then remembered that the damn thing was dead, and I’d forgotten to pack my charger.

I checked the rest of the place; two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. There was no one else, dead or alive, nor any sign of another person’s presence, other than the lethal visitor, for he had tossed each room, quickly and thoroughly.

That was the point at which I went off the straight and narrow. All my training, all my experience, all my sense of what was right and what was wrong told me that I should pick up the landline phone that sat on top of the chest of drawers and call the European emergency number, one one two.

But it told me also that if I did phone the police we were there for as long as they wanted to keep us, and, putting myself in their shoes, I suspected that would have been quite some time.

We weren’t there for Ireland; we had come in search of Hector. He was the link between the two crime scenes. It was also possible, I reminded myself, that he was their perpetrator, but if he wasn’t, as I still believed, he could be in greater danger than we had ever supposed.

He had been left alive in Barcelona, but had he been the target in Madrid? He had been there, we knew. Then Ireland had been tortured. Why?

To me the answer was obvious, but it was convoluted. To the Policia Nacional, who would be likely to look at circumstances first, motive second, if at all, the simple solution would be that Hector Sureda was their man, a killer on the rampage, covering his tracks.

Best that we had a head start, I decided; I left the phone untouched.

Meanwhile, Xavi was obeying orders, keeping out of sight from the hallway.

‘I’m coming out,’ I said, not wanting to be thrown down that flight of stairs.

‘What’s up?’ he asked, tense as he stepped into view.

‘Go,’ I retorted, pausing only to wipe the surface of the door buzzer with the sleeve of my jacket. ‘Out of here, now.’ I pushed him ahead of me.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, bewildered, as we hit the street outside.

‘Anywhere,’ I replied, turning right and heading down towards Puerta de la Sol.

As we emerged from Calle de la Cruz, I saw a taxi approaching, its green light showing, and flagged it down. It was only when we were inside and heading for the Prado Museum, a flash of inspiration by my friend when the driver asked ‘Where to?’, that my heart rate began to slow to somewhere near normal.

We sat in silence all the way there. I could tell that Xavi was bursting to ask me what had happened, but he had the sense to stay nothing that the driver could overhear.

He dropped us at the main entrance to the gallery, not far from a bronze statue on a high plinth; it immortalised a guy in a long coat with a top hat tucked under his left arm; Goya, I saw from the lettering beneath its feet.

‘Let’s go in,’ Xavi said.

I had no objection to that, for a steady drizzle was falling and it was growing no warmer, but as I pointed out to him, there was a long queue of determined tourists huddled under umbrellas, stretching from the ticket office to the corner of the building and beyond.

‘That’s okay,’ he replied. ‘We don’t need to do that.’

He led the way, past a great stone staircase, towards a second entrance where there was no queue at all. ‘InterMedia is a supporter of the Prado,’ he explained. ‘I have privileges here.’

These turned out to be strong enough for us to be waved straight through the revolving door, into a foyer that was dominated not by works of art but by a souvenir shop, and a cafeteria. We headed for the latter, past a great marble sculpture of what appeared to be a son protecting his father from an unseen assailant. The younger man had suffered some damage in his time: a significant part of him had fallen victim to a hammer, and was no longer to be seen.

Xavi went to the counter, leaving me to choose a table as far away from other visitors as I could find. When he returned he was carrying a tray with two cafes con leche, and four large bottles of water. He drank two of them by the neck, one after the other, straight away.

‘Dehydrated,’ he explained. ‘I can’t remember the last time I got tanked up like we did last night. You Scots guys, you’re fucking lethal company. Now tell me,’ he continued with barely a pause, ‘what was in there?’

‘Jacob Ireland,’ I told him. Then I described the condition in which I’d found him, in detail.

His eyes widened. ‘But only him? Not Hector?’

‘Hector had gone. He’s like fucking Macavity, the mystery cat; when a crime’s discovered, he’s never there.’

‘How do you know that it was Ireland you found?’ he asked, not unreasonably. ‘Neither of us have ever seen him.’

‘There was a framed diploma on the wall,’ I explained. ‘I think it certified him as an official translator. There was a photo in it.’

‘I don’t understand, Bob.’

‘Neither do I. The what, I reckon I know, but how and why are missing. Someone came looking for Hector, in Madrid, of that I’m sure. He wasn’t there, so Ireland was tortured, to make him tell where he could be found. But how did whoever it was make the link between them? And if Battaglia was the target in Barcelona, why are they coming after Hector now?’

‘Who can tell?’ Xavi exclaimed. ‘Surely, though, he’s still safe?’

‘I’d like to think so,’ I said ‘but one thing has me worried. Ireland was shot three times; each elbow and one knee. When he was killed, he wasn’t gagged.’

‘So?’

‘Why wasn’t he shot in both knees? The way I read that, the poor bastard finally had enough. He talked, hence the gag being in his lap, not in his mouth. And when he had told his interrogator what he wanted to hear, he was finished off. We’ve still got to find Hector, Xavi, but I’m worried that we haven’t got much time . . . indeed we might not have any. For all we know he could still be in the city . . . and if he is, he could be dead by now.’

My friend’s eyes seemed to sink back into his head, as he contemplated that prospect.

‘What’s this about, Bob?’ he murmured. ‘Battaglia, Ireland, both killed: what’s all this about?’

He picked up a third bottle of water and leaned back in his chair; as he did so, the newspaper he’d bought in the hotel fell from his pocket on to the floor. He retrieved it and laid it, still rolled up, on the table.