A Silent Death by Peter May (book recommendations website txt) 📕

was not locked and Mackenzie let himself in, feeling a little like an intruder on invisible grief. This was a living, loving place where a family had spent their lives without ever suspecting that tomorrow might never come. For Antonio, at least, it had not. For Cristina and Lucas tomorrow offered only grief. It would be a long healing process.

He thought about Antonio and Cristina, their relationship, the squabbling he had witnessed on each visit. And yet, wasn’t that normal? Couples fought. And when things went wrong, conflict even over inconsequentialities seemed inevitable. Certainly, it had for him and Susan. The fighting between them latterly had been vicious, and conducted all too often in front of the children.

He recalled the Jefe’s words from the night before. You might be feeling pain, but it is your children who are the real victims. And he felt laden with regret. Cristina had fought with Antonio, and now he was dead. No way to say sorry, no second chances. How would he feel if something were to happen to Susan? Whatever might have gone wrong between them, their love hadn’t always been broken.

Colourful plastic letters were arranged on the door of Lucas’s bedroom, spelling his name and telling the world that this was his space. He thought about Alex and Sophia, and their spaces that he no longer shared. And the weight of his regret turned to an ache. He pushed the door open and saw a collection of soft toys piled together in a basket on a table. Each one, no doubt, with its own significance, its own special memory, a furry history of childhood.

In a graphic on the wall above the bed, a boy flew through a starry universe beneath the aphorism Me pregunto si las estrellas se illuminan con el fin de que algún día cada uno pueda encontrar la suya. Mackenzie translated it in his head as: I wonder if the stars are shining so that one day everyone can find theirs.

But Lucas had just lost one of the two stars that shone brightest in his life. And again Mackenzie thought of his own kids. And the light that he no longer shone on their lives.

He wandered around the apartment touching things. A coat hanging on the stand in the hall. Candles in the shape of love hearts that sat on a shelf. A scarf draped over the back of a chair. A CD player sitting among a pile of scattered CDs on the coffee table.

The grief was no longer invisible. It was here in everything he looked at, everything he touched. Framed wedding photographs on the wall, a colouring book on the table, an empty spectacle case. All the component parts of deconstructed lives.

Finally he lifted the phone and replayed the message. Toni, meet me in the car park at Eroski. I’m there now. We’ve got to talk. Then he replayed it again. And again. And again.

The quality of it was even poorer than he remembered. Full of pauses and clicks, like a signal interrupted. He was certain she’d had no opportunity to leave that message after they had met outside Zhivago’s. It was always possible, he supposed, that she had called before he arrived. He was hazy on the exact timing. But it was his impression that he had got there before 14.47.

The recording certainly sounded like her, and it had been enough to fool Antonio, who had been married to her for ten years. But if it wasn’t Cristina, then who was it and how had it been done?

He took out his iPhone and opened the Voice Memo app. He replayed Cristina’s message and held his phone to the speaker to record it, then listened to it on his own phone. It was a good representation of a bad recording. He saved the file then attached it to an email addressed to a forensic audio expert he had worked with at the Met. Mick Allbright was a geek, as socially inept as Mackenzie, which was perhaps why they had got along. Mackenzie had no idea how much could be gleaned from such poor-quality audio, but if anyone could dissect it with accuracy, Mick could. He tagged it Urgent.

Outside the heat struck him anew. The officer on guard had sought shade inside the doorway and looked guilty as Mackenzie emerged. But Mackenzie was preoccupied. Had things really got so bad between Cristina and Antonio that she had threatened to leave him? That’s what Paco said Antonio had told him. Mackenzie tried hard to re-conjure the conflict he had witnessed between the brothers-in-law at the golf course. He had been some distance away, but did it really look as if they had been arguing over a marital break-up?

Across the road, the sun reflected off a dark glass globe mounted on the wall above the door of the mini-market. A CCTV camera. There was a good chance it had caught Antonio leaving the apartment. Mackenzie loped across the road, half-running, and was perspiring by the time he stepped into the comparative cool of the shop.

The owner regarded him suspiciously from the far side of the counter and refused to let him review the footage. Some foreigner without so much as a badge or an ID! Mackenzie crossed the street and returned with the officer guarding the entrance to the apartment. This time the owner was reluctantly acquiescent. He led Mackenzie into a back room where an ancient PC whirred and groaned on a scarred table top. Footage from the camera, he said, was recorded on to an external disc and automatically rerecorded every forty-eight hours, wiping the previous recording in the process. It was less than twenty-four hours since Antonio had been murdered.

Mackenzie pulled up a stool and scrolled back to the previous afternoon, pausing the time-code at 14.45 before setting it to play. The camera gave greatest coverage to the front of the shop, but the entrance to Cristina’s apartment across the road fell just inside the upper right