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

She had improvised a tagliatelle carbonara and ladled it out of the pot on to three plates. The cooking time had been spent thinking about Ana. She wanted to phone the police station to see if there was any news. But she knew that if there were they would have called her. She carried the plates through to the table, and sighed as she saw the detritus that Mackenzie had piled there from around the room. She set the plates down, and with a single sweeping movement of her arm sent it all tumbling to the floor. Then marched through the hall to throw open the door to Lucas’s room. The sight that greeted her stopped her in her tracks.

Lucas and Mackenzie were sitting together at the little desk below the window, poring over an open jotter, textbooks all around them. Lucas turned shining eyes towards his mother. ‘Señor Mackenzie is teaching me maths, mamá. It’s so easy. I’m going to be top of the class. And make papá really proud.’

*

By the time they had finished the tagliatelle Cristina and Mackenzie had consumed almost a bottle of red wine between them. Lucas had eaten quickly and retired again to his room to do more maths. But when Cristina had peeked in, he had been lying sound asleep on the bed with his jotter open beside him, his pencil still loosely clutched between crooked fingers.

Rather than lubricating conversation between them, the wine had only made things more sticky. Mackenzie had quickly exhausted his very limited supply of small talk, and Cristina seemed less than inclined to speak at all. Only the background burble of the TV filled the silence in the room.

Finally Mackenzie said, ‘Why did you and Antonio want to break up? Could you not have talked things through?’

She turned eyes on him that blazed both anger and astonishment. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You told Antonio you were going to leave him and wanted custody of Lucas.’

She was on her feet now. ‘That is complete rubbish! Why would you even say something like that?’

He was taken aback by her ferocity. ‘It’s not true, then?’

‘No, it’s not!’

He was at a loss. ‘I was only here twice and you were fighting both times.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. Couples fight! Don’t you ever fight with your wife?’

He shrugged and tried to find a smile. He didn’t want to tell her just how much.

‘It doesn’t mean a thing.’ Almost as if she were trying to convince herself. ‘I think maybe it’s time you left.’

He stood up, red-faced with embarrassment. Somehow he had only managed to make things worse, and was desperate to try and make up for it.

‘I found CCTV footage from the mini-market across the road. It shows Antonio leaving the apartment seven minutes before you left that message.’

‘I didn’t leave any message!’

‘That’s not even the point. How could he know where and when to meet you if you didn’t leave the message until after he’d left?’

Which gave her pause for thought. But only for a moment. She glanced at the phone and knew she would listen to the message after all. Once Mackenzie had gone. ‘Go señor. Please.’

He glanced awkwardly at his feet, then up again and nodded. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, I suppose.’

She followed him to the door. But he turned before she could close it behind him. ‘It was Paco who told me.’

She frowned. ‘Told you what?’

‘That you and Antonio were breaking up.’

Her face creased with consternation. ‘Why would he say something like that when it’s not true?’ She breathed her exasperation. ‘Just go.’

And she slammed the door in his face.

*

Mackenzie’s room at the Hostal Totana seemed cold and unwelcoming, in spite of the heat. A question of mood rather than temperature. He knew he had misspoken at the meal with Cristina, and it distressed him to think he had upset her. But still, he knew now that Paco had been lying about the argument with Antonio. Why?

He stripped to his boxers and lay on top of the bed in the dark, but found it difficult to breathe in the airless heat. He swung his legs off the bed and crossed the room to wind up the shutters, sliding open the glass doors and stepping out on to the balcony.

Everything in the main street below was closed up for the night and there was not a soul stirring in the town. He stood gulping down the slightly cooler night air and heard the beep of an incoming email on his phone. He went into the room to fetch it from his shirt pocket and took it back out to the balcony. The email was from Mick, his audio forensic expert at the Met.

Hola my Spanish Warrior,

I’m guessing you don’t want the full forensic transcription or the detailed Primeau Forensics analysis, because you never possessed my delight for detail. Such things you may require for future reference, but here for your delectation are the facts in brief.

This is an absurdly amateurish cobbling together of bits and pieces of other recordings. Other phone messages would be my best guess. It would take a matter of minutes with a couple of mobile phones to assemble something this bad, assuming you had the raw material to hand. Wouldn’t stand up in a court of law for five minutes. If you want more, I am at your service.

El Cid

Mackenzie smiled at his old friend’s childish sense of humour. But his email only confirmed what Mackenzie had already suspected. That someone had called Antonio to make a rendezvous at the Eroski Centre, then allowed time for him to leave the apartment before calling again to leave Cristina’s phoney message. The caller could not have known exactly where Cristina might be at that time, whether she would have an alibi or not. But at the very least it would sow the seeds of confusion. Sometime tomorrow, he hoped, he would be able to identify exactly who