A Silent Death Peter May (i read book TXT) 📖

A sign was pinned to the wall above the door of the stairwell. Se Vende, and a telephone number. Mackenzie pressed the buzzer for the top flat. A frightened woman’s voice answered almost straight away. ‘Who is it?’

‘My name’s Mackenzie. I’ve been working with Cristina.’

A long metallic buzz signalled the unlocking of the door. Mackenzie pushed it open and forced himself to run up the four flights of stairs two at a time. He was breathless and perspiring by the time Nuri greeted him on the top landing. She was painfully pale, and Mackenzie saw that she had lost much of her hair. She held a pink nightgown tightly around a wasted body that seemed brittle enough to break if touched.

‘Is Cristina here?’

‘No.’

His heart sank. ‘Do you know . . . ?’

‘You missed her by about ten minutes. She came to leave Lucas with me. But wouldn’t say where she was going.’ Her face crumpled. ‘Oh señor. My husband has been out all night without leaving any word. Cristina didn’t know where he was.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose . . .’

Mackenzie’s mind was filled with the image of Paco impaled on the railings below the gardens at the Condesa Golf Hotel. How could he tell her that? And yet it bothered him to lie. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could say. And he was. Not for Paco. But for Nuri. ‘Was Cristina in uniform?’

Nuri shook her head.

‘So she wasn’t armed?’

‘I don’t think so. She was very upset.’

He exhaled his hopelessness. If she had gone to face Cleland without a gun she would stand no chance. But he knew, too, that she would have had to go to the police station to get it. He turned away to go back down to the car.

‘You’ll let me know, señor? If you hear anything about Paco?’

He hesitated on the top step, and wanted to weep for this fragile creature, widowed without knowing it, and fighting a losing battle against the malignancy inside her. ‘Yes,’ he said, knowing that he wouldn’t.

*

The duty officer looked embarrassed when he raised his head from the desk to see Mackenzie pushing through the door from the street. He stood up. ‘Señor Mackenzie . . .’

Mackenzie looked at his watch. It was 6.15 am. ‘When will the Jefe be in?’

‘He won’t, Señor. He’s at a conference in Malaga today.’ He sucked in his lower lip, steeling himself to make the confession. ‘I’m sorry. When you called earlier I forgot that the Jefe would not be at home. He left word that he was spending the night in Malaga to save himself an early rise.’

Mackenzie closed his eyes. The time he had wasted! ‘Fucking idiot,’ he said in English.

The officer frowned. ‘I’m sorry . . . ?’

‘Do you have any idea where Cristina is?’

He shook his head. ‘No señor. I haven’t seen her since the funeral.’

‘She hasn’t been here, then?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘That information you asked my colleague to request for you yesterday. From the telephone company.’

‘What about it?’

‘It came in late last night from Movistar.’

‘Movistar?’

‘The telephone company.’

‘And?’

‘I put it on the Jefe’s desk, señor, along with a lot of other stuff. He was here quite late last night, but I’m not sure if he saw it.’

‘Let’s take a look, then.’ Mackenzie pushed open the door into the lobby beyond reception. The duty officer emerged quickly from a door behind the counter. ‘You can’t just go barging into the Jefe’s office, señor.’

Mackenzie said, ‘I can, you know. Watch me.’ And he opened the door to the Jefe’s office and walked in. The agitated duty officer followed him. The heads of two officers on night shift raised themselves from books in the office opposite to glance curiously across the hall.

Mackenzie rounded the desk, and found the faxed information from Movistar on top of the pile. He had requested the source number for the two calls made to Cristina’s apartment on the afternoon of Antonio’s murder. The first corresponded, time-wise, to the call which must have sent him to the rendezvous at the Eroski Centre. The second to the call leaving the fake message from Cristina. Both came from a mobile number listed to Nurita Sánchez Pradell. Mackenzie closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. How inept had Paco been in his attempted deception? He had used his own wife’s phone to make the call which had sent Antonio to his death, and then again to leave the message he had somehow cobbled together, probably from messages Cristina had left for her sister.

The duty officer peered at him, concerned for the first time. ‘What is it, señor?’

Mackenzie opened his eyes. ‘Cristina is in serious danger. I think she’s gone to offer herself to Jack Cleland in place of her aunt.’ He almost barked his frustration at the Spanish policeman. ‘But I have no idea where.’ He reached for his phone automatically, before remembering again that it wasn’t there. ‘I need a functioning phone. Do you have a phone?

‘Well, yes . . .’ The duty officer’s affirmative was reluctant.

‘What kind of phone is it?’

‘It’s an iPhone X.’

‘Same as mine. I need to borrow it.’

‘But it’s not a police phone, señor, it’s mine.’

‘I’ll take good care of it,’ Mackenzie said, and had a thought. ‘Wait a minute, if my sim card is still in one piece, I could swap it for yours, then I’d also have access to all my contacts. Wait here.’

He hobbled out to the car and returned a few moments later with the shattered remains of his phone. The duty officer had returned to his place behind the counter, and Mackenzie put his phone down in front of him.

‘Paper clip!’

But the duty officer couldn’t take his eyes of the wreckage of Mackenzie’s phone. ‘Is that what you call taking good care of your phone, señor?’

‘Actually,’ Mackenzie said grimly, ‘it was the phone that took good care of me.’ He reached over to snatch a paperclip from the worktop behind the counter, straightened one leg of it,