Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) (4 page)

‘He’s waiting to hear from you. Seems we all are.’ She stared up again. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘when I saw your number come up, I assumed you actually wanted to talk.’

‘I’ve been busy.’

He watched her beautiful eyes narrow with anger. ‘Don’t work too hard,’ she said. ‘All that paper-pushing is ageing you.’ She half reached up to touch his face, then let her hand fall as a clank came from above. The portcullis door of Her Majesty’s Prison opened to reveal a junior warder accompanied by a sullen, handcuffed youth in a tracksuit.

Spike walked Jessica up the slope. She signed a clipboard, escorting the pickpocket back down to her van as Spike and the warder continued on to the entrance, the fifteen-yard passage that represented the thickness of the castle’s thousand-year-old walls. There’d been attempts to move the prison wholesale to a shiny new facility on the other side of town. It still hadn’t happened.

Before going inside, Spike turned to see Jessica sharing a joke with her ward. Then she slammed the double doors behind him.

Chapter 7

Alan Gaggero stood up from the front desk. Behind him rose a bank of elderly CCTV monitors. Spread before him was the
Gibraltar Chronicle
crossword.

‘Stuck?’

Gaggero grinned. His grey comb-over and kindly eyes were unchanged. ‘What’s it been now, Spike?’ he said. ‘Two years?’

‘Three.’

‘Three years,’ Gaggero repeated as he ran Spike’s briefcase through the scanner.

‘Thought they were shutting this place down,’ Spike said.

‘Overspill.’

They headed in single file down the side stairs. ‘How’s your old man doing?’ Gaggero asked.

‘
Está haleto
. But he can still finish the crossword in ten minutes flat.’

‘I’ll have to up my game then.’

Gaggero jangled his key fob and unbolted the steel door. ‘Back in a mo,’ he said, leaving the door ajar.

Spike listened as Gaggero’s rubber soles squeaked away down the corridor. The off-white walls of the interview room were windowless and the strip lights hummed. The air smelled of disinfectant and was as dank as might be expected in the deepest reaches of a medieval castle. A table was nailed to the lino, carved like a school desk with initials and incomplete slogans of protest. In the corner, a black CCTV camera peered from its bracket like an alien eye.

Once Gaggero’s footsteps had faded, Spike walked over to the far wall. Leaning back against it, he took a tissue from his pocket and worked the two leaves of the material apart. He tore off a fingertip-sized piece, which he moistened with his tongue. After checking the door, he reached up and stuck the tissue to the CCTV lens. Then he returned to the table.

Tipping one of the chairs onto its side, he brought a brogue crashing down on the pivotal leg. With a few more kicks, the wood splintered. He propped the chair back up in front of the table, then went round to the other side and sat down.

His briefcase held a single-deck tape recorder, which he took out and positioned on the table. Moments later, the door opened fully and Solomon Hassan appeared, Alan Gaggero behind. ‘You remember the form,’ Gaggero said, gesturing at the wall buzzer beneath the camera.

Spike nodded.

‘
Vale
,’ Gaggero said. ‘Enjoy.’ He withdrew, sliding the bolt into place.

Solomon was back in his supplicatory position, head bowed, hands behind back. He wore prison denims now – belt-free trousers, coarse button shirt – and tatty flip-flops with, for some reason, a minute Brazilian flag on the straps. His skin was paler and his plump cheeks stubblier, like wintry copses seen from the air.

‘Have a seat,’ Spike said.

The chair leg gave way at once. Solomon let out a yelp, making a lunge for the table but toppling sideways onto the lino.

Spike moved round to his side. ‘You all right there, Solly?’

Solomon lay on the floor in the foetal position, snapped chair beside him.

‘Here, let me help. Have mine.’ Spike hauled him up and brought his own chair round. Solomon sat down carefully, shaking his head.

‘I’ll perch,’ Spike said, sitting on the table. ‘So are they treating you OK?’

‘I have a slop bucket in my cell.’

‘Ouch.’

‘And the guy next door keeps praying. I can’t sleep.’

‘It is called the Moorish Castle, Solomon. You didn’t care for Drew Stanford-Trench, they tell me?’

‘He was vague on extradition treaties.’

‘Well, I’m briefed on those. Want to hear?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s good and bad news. The good is that you won’t have to see Drew Stanford-Trench again.’

Solomon gave a nod.

‘Nor me for that matter.’

Solomon wrinkled his nose as though confronted by a sudden stench.

‘Because the bad news is that there’s a new Order-in-Council, extending the Extradition Act 1870. Only passed at the start of the year, part of a broader deal made by the Gibraltar government. Trying to seem squeaky-clean to the EU – any fraudsters skip across the Straits, we get them back. But it cuts both ways. So if the Kingdom of Morocco requests the company of Mr Solomon Hassan, they need only say the word.’

‘But I haven’t done anything.’

‘They just need a prima facie case.’

‘They don’t even have a proper justice system.’

‘Oh, I hear Moroccan public defenders can be pretty good. Some of them even speak English.’

Solomon laid both hands on the table. His thumbs were criss-crossed with dark-flecked scabs. ‘Why are you –’

‘They’ve still got the death penalty in Morocco, you know that, Solly? Not used much, but in your case, a defenceless girl, a foreigner –’

‘I’m innocent, Spike.’

‘You ran.’

‘I told you, as a Jew –’

‘Where are the witnesses who saw you leave? Where’s your alibi?’ Spike dismounted and came round to Solomon’s side. ‘Let me tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Stop me if I veer off track.’ He crouched down to Solomon’s level. ‘You’re on the beach, right? The sun is setting; it’s romantic, almost.’

Solomon stared into the middle distance, picking at his thumbs. Spike leaned in closer. ‘This girl’s new in town, and she likes you, you can tell. You’ve had a few drinks, you’re sitting on the sand, and then suddenly you realise. This is it. This is why you left Gibraltar. This is what you’ve been pumping iron for all those nights alone in your flat. So you lean across and kiss her. And it was that way round, wasn’t it, Solly? But she just laughs. She doesn’t say “Sorry” or “Can’t we just be friends?” She just laughs in your face. And it all starts to come back. Solly the Wally. Simple Solly. Shoved around the playground by the younger boys. You thought you’d left all that behind, the big shot who went to Africa to make his fortune, but now you see that’s how it’s always going to be, and something inside you snaps. You smash your bottle of beer, or maybe you use something on the beach. You jab forward and suddenly she’s not laughing any more. Stop me if I’m wrong, Solly.’

Solomon blinked behind his spectacles; Spike reached to the floor and picked up the broken chair leg. ‘Take it,’ he said, wrapping Solomon’s thick fingers around the shaft. ‘How does it feel? That weight in your hand. Is that how the knife felt?’ Solomon’s right fist gripped the chair leg, veins rising on the back like worm casts. ‘She was laughing at you, Solly, and she’s Spanish, and God knows, we Gibbos have all had enough of that. So you lunge at her, and now you’re staring at a corpse, and something takes over, an instinct, and you’re rolling her into the water, but she’s heavy, you can’t get her far, but the tide will come in, won’t it, so you’re running from the beach, slowing as you reach the coast road, then it’s home safe to a football match, just to say you’ve done something, and in the morning even you can’t believe it,
did
you do it? Except the police turn up. They’re all corrupt in Tangiers, who wouldn’t run? And here we are.’

Solomon was trying to speak.

‘Sorry?’

He shook his head, blinking.

‘When did your father leave?’ Spike said, moving in closer. There were flakes of dandruff in Solomon’s hair, dazzling against the greasy blackness. ‘Twenty years ago, was it? Left you and old
Mother
Hassan behind. She came to see me, Solly.’

Solomon’s head turned a fraction. The red lines in the whites of his eyes were back.

‘That’s right,’ Spike went on. ‘Came to my office this morning, low-cut top, legs akimbo.’

Solomon’s fist clenched more tightly around the chair leg.

‘After your dad left,
ima
kept you close, didn’t she? No one good enough for her boy. But you got away. Made it over the Straits, promised to send her money, got to Tangiers where no one was watching. Somewhere you could make a move on a girl. Somewhere you could punish a girl.’

Solomon’s teeth gritted. The chair leg rose, angling towards Spike.

‘Away from old
ima
nothing counts as much, so when a girl laughs at you, the one girl you thought might actually like you, you can shut her up and it won’t matter at all.’ At the periphery of his vision, Spike checked the dimensions of the room. ‘Murders happen all the time in Tangiers, who’s going to notice some Spanish
chochi
who drank too much and –’

There was a clatter as Solomon’s grip slackened and the chair leg dropped to the ground. His head slumped down, two oily lines exuding from behind his spectacles. ‘No,’ he said. ‘
No
.’

Spike moved behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder, feeling the surprising tautness of the muscles. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I just had to check.’

As soon as Solomon’s sobs subsided, Spike sat down on the table and hit ‘record’ on the tape recorder. ‘Twenty-first of August, fifteen twenty hours,’ he said into the speaker. ‘Room 2, Moorish Castle Prison. First client interview.’

Solomon glanced up.

‘Mr Hassan, why, in your opinion, is it unsafe for a Jew to be held in prison in Tangiers?’

‘Is this –’

Spike nodded.

‘But you –’

‘Answer the question, please, Mr Hassan.’

Solomon took off his glasses, dabbing at the teardrops with his denim shirt. ‘There was a home-made bomb. Six months ago. At a synagogue in Casablanca.’ He sniffed moistly. ‘The King rounded up all the Islamists. There’ve been reprisals in the prisons.’

‘Presumably Jewish inmates are held in separate wings.’

‘The attacks happen in the yard. In the canteen.’

‘Is this documented?’

Solomon slid his glasses back on. The lenses were still mottled. ‘The media still gets censored. But people know.’

‘And you’re a Sephardic Jew?’

Solomon nodded.

‘Speak up, Mr Hassan. The machine doesn’t register gestures.’

‘Yes-I-am-a-Jew.’

Spike clicked off the tape as Solomon’s lips peeled back. ‘What the hell was
that
?’

‘My peace of mind.’

‘Your what?’

‘If I’m going to represent you.’

There was fresh blood on Solomon’s thumbs. He continued to pick at them, oblivious. Spike reached over to stop him and he snatched both his hands away, hiding them beneath the tabletop. ‘So I won’t have to go back to Tangiers?’

‘We can try and stall them on the Jewish angle,’ Spike said as he walked over to the wall buzzer, ‘but no promises.’

After counting to ten, Spike peeled the flake of tissue from the camera lens. Thirty seconds later, the metal bolt began to slide.

‘Find out the time of death,’ Solomon said hurriedly as the door creaked open.