Then nothing once more. For several long seconds. Before she senses the other chair being drawn in close, Cleland’s heat, his earthy masculine smell. Another vibration at her chest.
— Show me.
She doesn’t understand how he can be typing when he is sitting next to her. Then conjures a picture of him with the keyboard on his knees. It is wireless, so perfectly possible. ‘Show you what?’
— How to touch-sign.
She feels her breath trembling as she fills her lungs to try to stop herself from sobbing. All she can think is, what has he done to Sergio? Her voice catches in her throat. ‘You can’t learn to touch-sign just like that. It takes weeks, months.’
— Ana, I have all the time in the world. A pause. At least until Cristina comes again. Will she be here tomorrow?
‘I... I don’t know.’
— I think you do, Ana. But don’t worry, I have endless patience. I learned at school that revenge is a dish best served cold. It’s a maxim I have lived my life by.
She doesn’t know what to say.
— I want you to teach me to touch-sign. It was intriguing, what I saw passing between you and Sergio. It looked... A longer pause while he searched for the word. Intimate. I want that, too. I want to be intimate with you, Ana.
She could not stop the shudder that shook her body. A wave of disgust. And she wonders if it shows.
— But not right now. I have to leave for a while.
Her heart leaps. If he leaves, then somehow, some way she will be able to raise the alarm. A call to the operator. An email to Cristina. But his next words send fear spiking into her soul.
— He’s a nice kid, your niece’s boy. What’s his name, Lucas? And such a good school they send him to. What a shame if anything were to happen to him. You’d be to blame. You know that, Ana, don’t you? If that little boy were to come to any harm. So you’ll just sit here quiet and wait till I get back. Or do I have to tie you up?
With lead in her heart Ana knows that she will do exactly as he wants. The threat of harm to Cristina’s little boy binds her more efficiently than any rope he might use to secure her. But if Cleland has patience, then so does she. She’s had twenty years to nurture it, to make it a virtue. Her time will come. Of that she is now determined.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sophia stood at the top of the staircase watching him as he lifted one weary leg after the other and climbed towards her. He had been waiting so long for this chance to tell her how sorry he was about the concert, to put his arms around her and hold her close and tell her he loved her.
He wouldn’t say anything about her unfriending him on Facebook, but he would watch his page for her friend request to reunite them again across the ether. It was just a temporary huff. She couldn’t hate him for ever. Could she?
He was almost there. Three steps, two steps. He reached out his hand towards her. She turned and fled across the landing, into her room, slamming the door behind her. He summoned all his strength to reach it before she could turn the key in the lock. But even as his hand closed around the handle, he heard the click of the deadbolt slipping into place.
‘Sophia!’ His own voice sounded distant, desperate.
Hers on the other hand thundered in his head. ‘Go away!’
‘Sophia, let me in.’
‘I hate you!’
As tears came to his eyes he started hammering on the door with his clenched fist. ‘Sophia!’ Nothing. No response. He hit the door harder. ‘Sophia, please...’
He sat bolt-upright in the darkness, heart pounding in his throat, the echo of his own voice dying around him. He was soaked in sweat, bedsheets twisted about his body, sticking to his legs and chest. But the banging on the door had not stopped. His confusion lasted for only as long as it took him to realize where he was. A room at the top of the Hostal Totana in Marviña. And someone was banging on the door. He heard Cristina’s voice from the other side of it.
‘Señor Mackenzie! For God’s sake, hombre, what’s going on in there?’
He blinked and took in the blurry red numerals on the bedside clock. It was a little after 6 am. He scrambled from the bed, boxer shorts bought in Estepona clinging to every perspiring contour, and unlocked the door. Cristina stood on the landing looking at him. She was in full uniform, no make-up, sleep still in her eyes, hair pulled back in its customary ponytail. Severe, unforgiving. Her gaze wandered down to the boxers and quickly back to meet his eye.
‘Who’s Sophia?’
‘My daughter.’
She peered beyond him into the empty bedroom. ‘Why were you shouting at her?’
‘Was I?’
‘I’d be surprised if there’s anyone still asleep in the whole of Marviña.’
Mackenzie looked sheepish. ‘It was a bad dream.’
She looked at him for a curious moment, then said, ‘Get dressed. We’ve got a multiple homicide up in the hills.’
His brow creased in a frown. ‘And what does that have to do with Cleland?’
‘They think it’s drug-related.’
The headlights of Cristina’s Policía Local SUV picked out great swathes of undeveloped countryside, dusty and deserted in the moonlight, before the road began climbing and winding its way through the forest in the foothills of the mountains. They passed lonely farmhouses, and the occasional family restaurant tucked into folds in the hills — Venta García, Venta Victoria.
The moon had disappeared from view, and the first light was burgeoning in the east, reflecting pink light on dawn cloud over the sea.
They turned off the asphalt road on to a concrete track that cut its way through overhanging cork oaks. It almost glowed in the early light, like the trail left by some giant drunken slug. The SUV bounced and rattled its way over an uneven surface made worse by wholly unnecessary speed bumps. Climbing, climbing, sometimes dropping sheer away into dark bottomless gullies, until they reached a fork in the road, where a signpost dating back to at least the early part of the previous century had been struck by some errant vehicle, and lay twisted and half-buried in the hillside. Originally intended to guide drivers towards two different destinations — Cabezas del Río and La Peña — it was no longer clear which way led to which.
Cristina pulled the SUV to a halt, and it sat idling at a precarious angle while she leaned over Mackenzie to search for a map in the glove compartment. When she found the one she was looking for she opened it against the steering wheel and flicked on the dash light. Mackenzie squinted at the map to see her tracing their route with her finger. She stabbed it at a tiny winding road that headed north-east into the hills. ‘That’s the one we want. Finca Los Fernández is on the road to La Peña.’ She pushed the map at Mackenzie, released the handbrake and swung the wheel to their left, lurching off through the half-dark towards the lost village of La Peña.
After a couple of kilometres the concrete ran out, and the road became little more than a dirt track, rutted and potholed, throwing the SUV and its occupants forwards and sideways, and reducing their progress to a snail’s pace. Finally they emerged from the forest into grassy uplands that swept away to the left and right in bold strokes through valleys and ravines towards the mountains. Nothing much grew up here except grass for grazing, almond trees in pink and white blossom, and the odd wild olive. An even narrower track took them off to the left, and down into a tiny sheltered valley where a whitewashed finca and a collection of agricultural outbuildings huddled in the shade of a copse of fig trees.