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

throws herself at Cleland. She feels her face strike the bone of his shoulder. He staggers, taken by surprise, the full weight of her body and her fury driving him towards the void. His panic, arms flailing, as they join in unbalanced union to tip into the abyss.

And now they are flying. Together. She reaches blindly into space to find his hand, holding it in hers as they seem to soar into the morning. It feels wonderful. Transcending all the years of darkness. Winging their way to eternity, and a final reckoning with her maker.

*

Cristina and Mackenzie watched frozen in horror as the unexpected weight of Ana’s lunge caused Cleland to stagger sideways, his leg catching on the low stone wall to propel them together over the edge.

At the last moment, Mackenzie dived to try and catch her. But his fingers closed only around fresh air. And all he could do was watch as Cleland and Ana fell together, hand in hand, towards the tiny strip of beach below. She fell in silence, the same silence with which she had lived for all these years. His scream echoed into the early light, carried off by the wind from Africa.

And Mackenzie felt as bereft as his father must have done before him.

CHAPTER FIFTY

The sounds of a thousand passengers milling in the departure hall rose high into the void, lost in a fog of brilliant sunshine flooding in through tall windows.

Mackenzie had no need to check a bag. The clothes he had bought, laundered by the Totana, fitted easily into the overnight bag he had brought with him. It seemed like an eternity since he had left Glasgow on that wet Tuesday morning after his aunt’s funeral. And yet it was only a few days. How his life had changed in that short time.

Cristina walked with him to security. Neither of them was in any hurry.

They had shared the ordeal, singly and together, of a remorseless debrief. Forty-eight hours of it. And the emotional hits just kept on coming. Nuri’s discovery that Paco was dead. His betrayal. And his complicity in the death of Antonio. How she and Cristina would ever get over that, Mackenzie could not begin to imagine.

At least Lucas still had his mother. It was the sole consolation.

The bodies of Cleland and Ana had been recovered from a grassy slope just above the narrow road that followed the contour of the coast below the Rock. Neither recognizable after the fall.

Ana had been buried the following day.

Delgado, Rafa, Vasquez and others had been arrested, and nearly two tons of cocaine recovered, along with almost forty million euros. The Spanish and Gibraltarian authorities would doubtless fight over custody of both for the foreseeable future.

Mackenzie couldn’t have cared less.

They reached the queue for the security gates and stood awkwardly at the moment of parting, not sure how to accomplish it without embarrassment.

‘What will you do?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘What all survivors do, I guess. Carry on, and wonder why I’m the only one left standing.’

‘Lucas needs you.’

‘I know. That’s all that keeps me going.’ She paused. ‘And you?’

‘Go home and kiss the NCA goodbye. It’s clear to me now that I should never have been a cop in the first place. Not cut out for it. Just like my father. We both failed.’

Cristina shook her head. ‘You succeeded in almost everything, señor.’

‘Except saving Ana.’

She gazed at the floor. ‘You and I both.’ Then she looked up to meet his eye. ‘But it was Ana herself who took that out of our hands. Whether she thought she was saving me, or avenging my murder, we’ll never know. But she saved both our lives in sacrificing hers.’

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

‘So what will you do if you quit the police?’

Mackenzie’s laugh lacked any humour. ‘For a man qualified on paper for almost anything, it seems I am patently unsuited for almost everything. Short answer, I have no idea.’

‘You should teach,’ she said, remembering how he had sat with Lucas to reveal the mysterious secrets of calculating percentages. ‘You’d make a good teacher.’

Self-consciousness coloured his cheeks. ‘What I do know . . . what you taught me . . . is that your children are everything. So the first thing I must do is try to be the father I’ve never been. I never had a role model to teach me what a good parent was. Until now.’

Cristina blushed. ‘You’ll be good at that too.’ She pushed herself up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, John Mackenzie.’

And she turned to walk briskly towards the sliding doors, and all the uncertainty of the world beyond them. He watched her go with an almost overwhelming sense of sadness, before turning away to join the queue to a future unknown.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of my research for A Silent Death was done in situ. I have written my last five books in this part of Spain, where I have an apartment that overlooks the Mediterranean and is eminently suited to winter writing. I owe a debt of gratitude to my many British and Spanish friends who helped me strip away the veneer of beaches, sea and sun that tend to characterise the tourist view of this Andalusian coast to reveal a slightly more disturbing reality in the book. In particular, I owe thanks to the chief of the Policía Local at Manilva, whose name ‘Paco’ I borrowed for my errant Guardia, and to single mother Isabel Reina Gil, who became my invaluable translator, researcher and font of all things Spanish, whose apartment I used for Cristina and whose son was the model for Lucas. Finally, I offer both thanks and sympathy to all those deaf-blind victims whose testimonies in the book Deaf-Blind Reality, edited by Scott M. Stoffel, provided a bleak insight into lives without sight or sound.

Peter May

France 2020

Table of Contents

A Silent Death

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Title

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER