Ana sits in silence, fingers dancing across the screen to read his rambling. None of it, she thinks, requires a response.
— Of course, there’s no danger of Angela ever putting on weight now, is there?
‘Where’s Sergio?’ She isn’t going to play his game, and can almost hear him sighing in the pause before his reply.
— He’s gone.
‘What did you do to him.’
— I didn’t do anything. Pause. Well, I did. I hit him over the head. I’m sorry. He’s going to have a bad headache this morning, but he’s probably more upset by what I told him.
‘What did you tell him?’
— That you didn’t want him to come back. Ever.
She knows he is lying. How could he possibly have explained to Sergio why he had struck him? And then just let him go. She is consumed by fear for her teenage amour. But knows she has to keep Cleland talking. About anything. The more she can build a rapport with him the less likely he is to hurt her. She hopes.
‘Why are you doing this?’
— Because your niece killed the woman I was going to marry. The woman who was carrying my child.
This is news to Ana. Did Cristina know that Cleland’s woman was pregnant? But she wants to steer him away from that. ‘No, I mean, everything you do, everything you are. After Cristina told me about you, I searched the internet for more information. There is plenty out there about you. Newspaper articles. Police bulletins. Even a page in Wikipedia.
— Really? I didn’t know that.
She somehow detects pleasure in this response and decides to play on his ego. ‘I suppose you’re a little bit famous in your own way.’
— Just a little bit?
Which only confirms for Ana that Cleland is more than just a little bit self-obsessed. Image is a skin people wear to hide their real selves. And Cleland is clearly concerned with his. Even to the point of lying to himself about who was actually responsible for Angela’s death. Because, after all, how could he live with himself if he were to admit responsibility for killing the mother of his child, along with the child itself? It wouldn’t fit with his own carefully cultivated self-image. Invincible dealer in drugs, respected and feared in his own circles, always one step ahead of the police. Living the life of a wealthy retiree on the Costa del Sol, right under the noses of the authorities. She says, ‘Quite a lot, I suppose.’ Then hesitates. ‘What I don’t understand is why.’
— Why?
‘Your parents were wealthy.’
— So?
‘They sent you to the best schools, paid your way through Oxford. You never wanted for anything.’
— Nothing material, no.
‘So what possible reason could you have for turning to crime?’
There is a very long pause.
— That’s a good question, Ana. And I don’t pretend there’s any easy answer.
His subsequent response is peppered with long pauses as he reflects, perhaps for the first time, on why he has taken this particular route through life.
— It all sounds very grand, doesn’t it? Wealthy parents, private schools, an Oxford education. The reality was something else. Parents who never wanted me in the first place. A mother and father who couldn’t wait to shuffle off responsibility to nannies and schoolmasters. I was just an inconvenience. We lived in Edinburgh, for God’s sake, and yet they had me board at Fettes, less than a mile from the family home. Lavished with everything money could buy. Except for love. Which, of course, you can’t buy, as The Beatles so eloquently pointed out to my parents in their youth.
A very long pause now. So long that Ana begins to wonder if he is still there.
— I have no doubt you could regale me with tales of growing up in impoverished southern Spain. But you could never understand how hard it was for a boy abandoned by his parents to spend all his young years in a series of soulless dormitories. Where if you weren’t bullied to tears by the big boys, you were punished for crying by the masters. On my 17th birthday my father had a car delivered to my door. A red Porsche 911. The envy of every other boy in the school.
Again he pauses.
— I’d have given all the Porsche 911s in the world for just a little of his time. But, oh no, my father never had time. At least not for me. Packed me off to Oxford with a generous allowance and the keys to my own apartment. God, how lucky was I?
Although she could neither see nor hear him, she could feel the bitterness in his words.
— It became clear to me, Ana, that if no one else was going to have time for me, then I would just have to make the time for myself. Amazing how quickly the calluses grow and the hurt goes away. Extraordinary how you can segue from being the receiver of pain, to being the giver of it. And what pleasure there is in that.
She can visualize the cursor blinking on his screen as he composes his thoughts for what is to come next.
— Those bullies... the ones who made my life so bloody miserable... I came across a few of them in later years. Well, actually, I sought them out. And they found out pretty fucking fast that dealing with the adult Jack was a whole other experience from beating up on some pathetic kid. That’s what you call taking back power, Ana. And there are very few feelings in this world quite that good.
She does not know now if he has finished, if he has spent his ire. Or whether there is more to come. So she prompts him.
‘I read that you were one of the top traders in the biggest commercial bank in London.’
— Best trader on the floor.
‘You couldn’t have been short of money, then.’
— If there’s one thing I learned from my folks, Ana, it’s that money isn’t everything. But there I was, Mr Dealmaker, buying and selling just seconds before stocks soared or plummeted. Making fortunes — for someone else. So it was back to the old axiom. Look after Number One. Along came a different kind of deal. One in which I controlled everything, including the profits.
‘Drugs.’
— A street commodity, he corrects her. Following the basic precepts of Capitalism. Supply and demand. There was a demand, I supplied it. But it’s a very different environment from the trading floor. Get it wrong and people want to kill you. So you get tough. You learn that there’s no place for sentiment. If someone wants to kill you, you kill them first. Law of the jungle. And I was good at that. Mad Jock, they called me. Still do, for all I know. We Scots have a certain reputation to maintain.
She doubts very much if it is a reputation that John Mackenzie would approve of. And almost as though he has heard the thought echoing in her darkness, she detects vitriol in his next words.
— They’ve sent another Jock to catch me. But he’s no match for me, Ana. I smelled his breath, and his hair gel and his aftershave. I heard his Glasgow brogue. Some knucklehead cop looking to make a reputation at my expense. I’m going to kill him, too.
For the first time, Ana feels despair wash over her. The skin of Cleland’s self-image fits him so tightly there is no room for reason. The calluses so thick he has no sense of other people’s pain, never mind his own. She says, ‘I grew up in a religious family, and though I’ve never had any time for God I would never knowingly hurt another human being, or take from him or her what is not mine. I’ve heard that abused children often become abusers themselves. I have never understood that. Surely no one better knows the pain of abuse? I find it hard to have sympathy for you.’