She can feel his tension in the trembling of his hands. ‘I always suspected,’ she says, ‘that my father had something to do with it.’
‘You have to understand, Ana, that I was dependent on my parents for everything. For money, the roof over my head, the car that I drove. I could not have continued my studies without their support, and without a job I could not support myself.’ His deep, tremulous breath transmits itself to her through the divining rod of his whole body. ‘At first I refused. I told them there was nothing they could do to me that would make me give you up. But then my father told me that if I chose you over them I would no longer be welcome in their house, and that he would withdraw his financial support. I knew my father, Ana. He was not a man to make threats lightly. I realized that he meant what he said, and I simply didn’t have the strength, or the courage, to defy him.’ He pauses for a long time, and she feels him shake with emotion. ‘I was miserable for weeks, and I’ve regretted it every day of my life since.’
Ana imagines then the silence that falls between them, hanging heavy in the room. Hands and lips and voices still. Motes of dust suspended in the sunlight that slants in through a gap in the shutters. She has no idea what to say herself, and senses that there is more to come. And she is right. She feels him draw breath.
‘One day about two months later, I was still inconsolable and my mother sat me down and told me the story of her first love. A young man she met at university in Madrid. A boy from a poor working-class family in Valencia who had only got to university on some kind of scholarship. Her family was appalled. He was not of the same... class. They made her give him up by threatening to take her away from university, withdrawing their financial support. And she always suspected that her family had paid off his family, because the boy himself did not fight it. She was heartbroken at first, she said. But then in time she met my father and never looked back. She said there was no future for me with a girl who was deaf and blind. That I would spend the rest of my life as a carer.’ She feels ironic laughter in the movement of his hands. ‘The moral of the story, I suppose, was that I would get over you. That I, too, would meet someone else and put you behind me.’ He pauses. ‘I never did. And there never has been anyone else.’ Another pause. ‘Never will be.’
His hands raise themselves to her cheeks, long fingers gently brushing away her tears. She lifts her hands to cup his face and feels his tears, too. His pain, and hers, in the hot copious unrestrained flow of them. Two people wilfully kept apart by parents who thought that they knew best.
Gently he takes her hands in his again, and resumes signing. ‘My father died five years ago, Ana, but it wasn’t until my mother passed away in March that I finally plucked up the courage to try and track you down. It was easier than I thought, though I could never have guessed that all this time we were quite so close. In all my wildest dreams I never actually thought I would find you. But now that I have...’ his fingers go still, resting against her palm ‘... I never want to let you go again.’ Another pause. ‘If you’ll have me?’
She extricates her hands from his and raises them to his face again, running her fingers and palms over all its planes and surfaces, fingertips pushing up into his hair. She stops and says, ‘You’re losing your hair, Sergio.’
He takes back her hands. ‘And I’m developing a bit of a belly. I’m happy you can’t see how badly I have aged.’
‘While you can see my every fault. Every grey hair, every line, every wobble of my flesh.’
Which made him laugh. ‘Ana, you are as beautiful today as the day I met you. Beauty is who we are, not what we look like, and to me you will be beautiful till the day you die.’ Then more hesitation. ‘You never answered. Do you... do you think you could ever take me back?’
Ana shakes her head solemnly. ‘No Sergio. I don’t think I could.’ She waits to let the impact of her words sink in. ‘I know I could. But above all, I want you back, more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.’
In an instant, his lips are on hers. His hands on her face. She slips her arms around him and pulls him closer, realizing for the first time that he has dropped to his knees in front of her. She places a hand behind his head and draws it to her breast, holding him there, feeling his sobs transmit themselves from his body to hers. And all the years since they last touched are washed away like dust in rain.
They remain like this for a long time, bodies generating heat, flushing faces, until finally he draws away and takes her hands again.
‘Ana, I have to go. Having finally found you, I could not wait until this evening to see you. I made an excuse to get away from work, but I’ll have to go back.’ He rests his head for a moment on their conjoined hands. ‘The irony is that I work just a few streets away at the Banco de Sabadell. When I finish work this evening I will come straight back. I promise.’
But she doesn’t want to let him go. Not just yet. After all the years of hopelessness, on her own in the dark, Sergio has finally brought hope and light back into her life. ‘Don’t be too long,’ she whispers, and when he is gone she weeps unashamedly.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At the end of the hall in the Marviña police station, a door opened into a large meeting room that was also accessible from the street. Mahogany desks and leather seats stood arranged in a semicircle beneath a drop-down banner at the far end of the room. They faced rows of hard plastic seats set out for an audience. The local council held public meetings here, and one wall was lined with paintings of the men and women who had at one time or another filled the honoured post of mayor. Light flooded into the room from two large windows on the outside wall, and it was already packed by the time Cristina and Mackenzie arrived. They took seats at the back.
The Jefe was leaning, half-sitting, on one of the desks, his arms folded across his chest. Another man was addressing the assembly. He was tall, thin and bald. Sweat patches darkened the armpits of his white shirt. His suit jacket lay draped over a chair behind him.
Mackenzie leaned towards Cristina and lowered his voice. ‘Who is everyone?’
‘The man speaking is the Juez de Instrucción from Estepona. The examining magistrate. I guess, nominally, he’s in charge of the case. But really it’s homicide in Malaga who’re handling it.’ She nodded towards a group of plain-clothes officers lounging on seats near the front and breathed her derision. ‘These guys think they’re starring in a Hollywood movie. All designer suits and sunglasses.’ She turned her gaze towards the other side of the room. ‘That’s UDYCO over there, also from Malaga. They specialize in drugs and organized crime.’ Then she leaned forward to look along the back row towards a group of young men in jeans and T-shirts. ‘Instituto Forense de Malaga. Forensics. But these ones are from Marbella.’ She cocked an eyebrow at Mackenzie. ‘Notice how many women there are among them.’ She sat back. There were none. ‘The rest are Policía Local from here in Marviña. But we’re just the foot soldiers.’
The examining magistrate was perspiring freely. ‘We have established that the boat in the marina at Puerto de la Condesa did indeed belong to the criminal Cleland, under his alias of Ian Templeton. But he doesn’t appear to have been sleeping there. We’re assuming he risked a visit to the boat perhaps to get money, or weapons, or drugs. It’s anyone’s guess. But at any rate, he was interrupted by the British investigator Mackenzie who failed to apprehend him.’