by Peter May
The excitement occasioned by a flare exploding high above Puerto de la Condesa and seen for miles along the coast had long since subsided.
Mackenzie sat on the concrete box that supplied power and water to Cleland’s Princess 52 from the pantalán, and winced as a medic in dark green and yellow uniform applied antiseptic to his damaged face. The medic had previously removed Mackenzie’s T-shirt and felt carefully around the bruising on his ribs. He didn’t believe there was anything broken, but suggested an x-ray and support-strapped it in the meantime.
A forensics team from Estepona had arrived, sweltering beneath plastic jumpsuits as they worked their way systematically from one end of Cleland’s boat to the other, taking fingerprints, scrapings from a bloodstain found on the carpet, hair, nail clippings from one of the toilets, a razor, a toothbrush.
The Jefe stepped off the boat on to the quay and glared at Mackenzie. ‘You couldn’t have called for back-up? We’d have caught him red-handed.’
Mackenzie winced as the medic applied fresh antiseptic. ‘I was about to,’ he said. ‘Then this girl unlocked the gate and I thought I’d just take a look.’
‘What girl?’
Mackenzie flicked his head towards the far end of the pantalán where Sally was giving a statement to a couple of Policía Local. ‘She cleans boats.’
‘Not Cleland’s, apparently,’ the Jefe said. ‘It’s filthy. A treasure trove of forensic evidence. Unfortunately, there’s just one thing missing. Cleland himself.’ He paused. ‘What possessed you to fire off a flare?’
Mackenzie shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I was going to try to shoot him with it. But there were too many people around. I just fired it in frustration.’
‘You’d have been in big trouble if you’d hit him.’
Mackenzie nodded his acknowledgement. ‘I know.’
The Jefe sighed and hooked his thumbs into his belt. ‘I don’t know that he’s been here much. None of the beds have been slept in. There’s some dirty laundry tossed on to one of them. Looks like maybe he just came for a change of clothes, something to eat and a coffee. There’s a half-drunk cup in the kitchen and the remains of a sandwich on the counter top. Seems you disturbed him before he could finish it. There might also have been some cash on board. He’s very probably running out.’ He glanced along the quay to where a phalanx of police vehicles, blue lights flashing, clustered around the open gate to the pantalán. An ambulance stood on the other side of the access road, engine idling. A large crowd of onlookers, managed by a couple of uniformed Guardia, waned and waxed in turns, holidaymakers and locals exercising their curiosity. ‘You know what really hacks me off?’
Mackenzie squinted up at him in the sunlight. The chief was silhouetted against the sky, and Mackenzie couldn’t see the expression on his face. ‘No,’ he said.
‘That none of our people thought to check if the bastard had a boat here.’ He turned a disapproving gaze on the Scotsman. ‘It was a good thought, señor. Just a poor execution.’
Mackenzie could not disagree. His eye was caught by the movement of a diminutive figure pushing through the crowd. It was Cristina. Mackenzie’s heart sank. He could only imagine what she would say. She strode along the pantalán adjusting her hair in the band that gathered it at the back of her head. She nodded to the Jefe and glared at Mackenzie. ‘Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I?’
Mackenzie attempted a smile. ‘Apparently not.’
The Jefe said to her, ‘Get him out of my hair. Take him for something to eat. Tell him we don’t operate like cowboys here. There’s a meeting at the station called for five this afternoon. We’ll go over everything we know then. Just make sure he’s back in time.’
‘I am here, you know,’ Mackenzie said. ‘I can hear you.’
The Jefe glowered at him. ‘Not sure I feel like talking to you right now.’
*
As they walked back along the access road to the port, Cristina said, without looking at him, ‘That was a smart piece of work.’
He kept his eyes on the tables and chairs outside the cafes and restaurants that flanked the harbour ahead of them. ‘Thank you.’
‘The first part. Not the second.’
‘I think the Jefe already made that clear.’
‘You’re lucky he didn’t throw you into the harbour.’
Mackenzie pressed his lips into a grim line.
‘I think he likes you,’ she said, and Mackenzie turned a look of surprise in her direction. She flicked him a glance. ‘God knows why.’
The Nissan SUV was parked at the top of the steps which had been Cleland’s escape route from the port. As she opened the driver’s door Cristina said, ‘Are you hungry?’
Mackenzie nodded.
‘Well, you’ll have to wait. I have to go into Estepona first and call in on my aunt. We can grab something to eat afterwards.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ana’s excitement is palpable. It consumes her every thought, fills her physical being. It is a feeling she has not known in all the years since the shutters came down on her world. A feeling that brings back hope, like stumbling upon water unexpectedly in a desert. A feeling that perhaps life might just be worth rekindling.
Her fingertips tingle from the braille that she has read and reread on her screen. He will not have heard her voice, and she has no idea how it might have sounded to the operator who passed it on in text on a screen. Whether she spoke too loudly, or too softly, or if it still has that husky little catch that always surprised her when she replayed a recording of it. Something she never heard herself in real time.
Had the operator, she wonders, discerned at all the emotion conveyed in the brief exchange of words for which she had been the conduit?
Sergio’s call was so unexpected, so undreamt of, Ana still finds it hard to believe it really happened. All those years ago she had been able to hear his voice, and now has to imagine it from the patterns that raise themselves beneath her fingertips, capable only of drawing its rich soft cadences from recollection. Whatever hesitation it might have contained was impossible to interpret from the braille. Whatever apprehension lost for ever in the ether. Just his words in cold, hard little dots.
‘Hello, Ana. It’s Sergio.’
She had responded to the call, prompted by the buzzer that vibrated at her breast. Never, in any lifetime, expecting to read those words. At first she had been at a loss as to how to respond.
‘Sergio?’ Which had seemed so inadequate, given how laden this call was with its own history.
‘I want to say sorry to you a million times over, Ana. But not in a phone call.’
No words had come. She had sat frozen with disbelief, then fear that somehow this was some wicked hoax. It was more than twenty years since they had last spoken.
‘I have only now discovered where you are living. I cannot believe it. All this time, and only a few streets away. Oh, Ana, say you’ll see me. Let me come and tell you myself. You owe me nothing, I know. But I owe you everything. Not least an explanation. I could come later this afternoon, or early this evening. It depends when I can get away from work. Please, Ana.’
Finally she had found her inner voice and let it speak through the operator. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Sergio. And even if I could there’s nowhere for me to go.’
‘I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll tell you everything then.’
And so the call had ended, leaving her to thrash about in a sea of emotions, drowning in her own past.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ana remembered the first time she ever set eyes on Sergio. He had not immediately endeared himself to her.
It was 1997. She was in her final year at secondary school and facing an uncertain future. The hearing problems which had dogged her from early childhood were getting worse. School had been a hostile environment. As her auditory perception deteriorated and she was forced to wear hearing aids, so the friendships she had made in the early years fell by the wayside. One by one. N
o one wanted to be friends with a girl who couldn’t hear, as if they too might be tainted by her disability. It wasn’t cool. It made her seem stupid, and slow. Besties became bullies, playing tricks on her behind her back, indulging the apparently endless capacity of children for cruelty. Relentless mimicry, humiliation. And her tearful response only encouraged further ridicule, somehow whipping former friends into a frenzy of heartlessness.
Her teachers were just as bad, or perhaps worse, since they were at least adults. Their cruelty came more in the form of thoughtless neglect than cold-hearted design. Ana had been refused a place at a special needs school. Her hearing deficiency was not deemed serious enough, and from the earliest age the only concession to her problem was to place her in a seat at the front of the class. Her teachers would then proceed to address the others over her head, or speak while facing the blackboard, so that Ana could not even read their lips.
For Ana herself it had resulted in slower than average progress and disparaging report cards.
Ana doesn’t pay attention.
Ana is clever, but she just doesn’t try.
Ana is lazy.
Ana doesn’t do her homework.
So unfair! Ana only ever missed her homework when it was delivered verbally to class, and she either misunderstood, or didn’t hear at all. Not one of her teachers took the trouble to write it down for her, or ensure that she understood what was being asked. She was just an irritation, an additional problem they didn’t need. A lumpen girl who sat at the front of the class. A girl who never responded, never participated, failed her exams and forgot her homework.
A girl who ached inside, hiding her misery and her loneliness from the world – even from her parents.
Her father was loving in his own way, but hardly ever there. A travelling salesman, he spent days on end, sometimes weeks, away from their home in a small apartment in Marviña old town, leaving Ana in the sole care of her mother. Although her mother came from a poor working-class family in a village in Catalonia, she had a certain conceit of herself, and always stood on her dignity. She adored Ana’s elder sister, Isabella, who was everything Ana was not. Pretty, clever, socially adept. And the ten-year age difference between the girls meant that they had virtually nothing in common, sharing very little of the childhoods that were always at very different stages of development. By the time Ana was nearing the end of secondary school, Isabella was already married with two young girls of her own.
Ana was viewed almost with embarrassment by her mother, as if her deafness were somehow her own fault, contrived to reflect shame on her family. When her husband was away she frequently chastised her daughter for failing to listen or understand, shouting at her quite unnecessarily when Ana was perfectly able to hear. Then, overcome with regret, she would smother the girl with love and tears, only to revert to type when Ana next frustrated her.
It was with some trepidation that Ana received the news her father brought home with him one night that he had obtained a place for her at a voluntary centre for the deaf in Estepona. Her mother was none too pleased either. It would be like announcing to the world, she said, that their daughter was disabled. Ana herself was less than happy. She was hard of hearing, she said, not deaf. But her dad had been insistent. The centre was run by a charity, but received government money in the form of a grant from the Junta de Andalucía. They provided facilities for the visually impaired, as well as the – and he chose his words carefully – hard of hearing. But it meant that Ana would get the opportunity to learn sign language, and that could only be a good thing. Ana was not so sure.
*
The centre was tucked away in a back street off the Plaza de las Flores in the old town of Estepona. Ana’s father drove her there on the first evening. After parking his car he took her by the hand and led her through the square up into a gloomy side street. ‘I’ll come and get you at nine, cielo,’ he said. ‘If you like it, you can get the bus next time.’ The centre was open three evenings a week, but Ana didn’t think there would be a next time.
An unprepossessing entrance led to a dark hallway that in turn opened into a large room set with tables and chairs, a couple of settees and several old armchairs. A hatch leading to a small kitchen released the smell of freshly brewed coffee into the crowded room. A young woman with short dark hair shook her father’s hand, and then Ana’s. ‘Welcome, young lady,’ she said. ‘Your father tells me you have hearing difficulties, but that you’re not deaf.’ Ana saw her eyes wander to the hearing aids in each of her ears. She nodded. ‘Good. Then that’ll make things much easier when it comes to learning sign language. We have an instructor who comes twice a week.’ Again Ana nodded. She didn’t want to let on that she had no intention of learning sign language. It would be like admitting that she was deaf. Perhaps, she thought, there was more of her mother in her than she might have wanted.
When her father had gone the young woman led her to a table and told her that someone would come shortly to speak to her and take down all her details. Ana sat and looked around with dismay. This was a gloomy room, with scarred and damp-stained yellow-painted plaster, and there was almost nobody here, she decided, under sixty.
‘Hola, how are you doing?’
She looked up to find herself gazing into the eyes of a young man in his early twenties. A shock of unruly brown hair tumbled across a strong brow with thick, dark eyebrows. He possessed a long aquiline nose, and full lips that seemed pale set against the deep tan of his face. He was tall and quite skinny and smiled at her, and for the first time in her life Ana felt her stomach flip over.
‘I’m alright,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Good,’ he said. Then made a series of signs with his hands that left her mystified.
She shrugged helplessly.
‘You lip-read?’
She nodded. Reading lips had never been a conscious process, simply something she had learned to do over the years out of pure necessity. She said, ‘But I’m not completely deaf.’ She saw him watching her lips intently.
He said, ‘I am stone deaf. I could hear perfectly well until I was seven years old, then a virus damaged my auditory nerves and I’ve been unable to hear anything since. I don’t like to speak now, because I’m always afraid I sound like a deaf person.’ He laughed. ‘Which I am, of course. But it’s safer to sign.’ He paused. ‘Have you come to learn?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m here because my father brought me. I doubt very much if I’ll be back.’
His smile faded, replaced by a look of disappointment. ‘Oh, you must. You can’t leave me here on my own with all these old people.’
She glanced around self-consciously and he laughed again. ‘Don’t worry, they can’t hear me. They’re deaf.’ Which made her laugh, too. Of course they were. ‘Blind people come on Thursdays to learn to use the white stick. The lucky ones get guide dogs.’ He paused. ‘I sometimes wonder which is worse – being deaf or blind. But I think losing your sight would be the worst of all. I can’t imagine not being able to see the world around me.’ He glanced towards the kitchen hatch. ‘Someone will likely come and take your registration details shortly. Can I get you a coffee?’
She nodded. ‘Please.’ And she watched him cross to the hatch. He had an easy gait, and she could see from his T-shirt that he had well-developed arms and pectorals, in a wiry sort of way. He wore tight-fitting jeans, and she found her eyes drawn to the lean but well-rounded buttocks that filled the seat of them.
He returned with two mugs of black coffee. ‘I forgot to ask if you wanted black, or . . .’
‘I prefer it with milk.’
‘No problem.’ He set the mugs down on the table and hurried away to the kitchen, returning a few moments later with an open carton of milk. He poured milk into her coffee until a wave of her hand indicated that it was enough. But as he put the carton down he was too busy looking at her, and caught it on the edge of the table. It slipped from his grasp, and milk went cascading down the front of her blouse and over th
e legs of her jeans. He leapt back as if he had been burned, and her chair toppled backwards as she jumped to her feet. Both mugs of coffee went flying.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. Wait, I’ll get a cloth.’ He hurried off again to the kitchen.
Ana stood with milk dripping on to the floor and running in white threads through dark pools of coffee. She looked around with embarrassment, expecting all eyes to be on her. But apart from an old lady at the far side of the room, no one seemed to have noticed. The young man returned with a tea towel and began feverishly wiping it up and down the front of her blouse. Before suddenly realizing that his fingers were brushing her breasts.
‘Oh my God!’ he said again, and once more jumped back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’ He held out the tea towel for Ana to use for herself. ‘Honestly, it was an accident.’
Ana fought hard to keep a straight face. In truth she was furious at him for ruining her blouse and her jeans. But she had also quite enjoyed the sensation of his fingers touching her breasts. Only once before had a boy put his hands on them. It was after a school dance and he had offered to walk her home. There had been a kiss, and then his hand sliding slyly beneath her blouse. She had slapped his face.
The young man blushed furiously.
She tried to soak up the milk from her blouse then glared at him. ‘Well, since you have managed to ruin almost everything I’m wearing, the least you can do is tell me your name – if only so I can take it in vain.’
It was clear from his face that he was not quite sure if she was being funny or not. ‘I’m Sergio,’ he said, and held out an awkward hand.
She thrust the milk-soaked tea towel into it. ‘I’m Ana. And maybe this time you’d like to get me a proper café con leche, without spilling milk all over me!’
*
They spent the next two hours just talking and drinking coffee. His lip-reading was better than hers, and she had at least some hearing to augment her comprehension. After ten minutes Ana had completely forgotten that either of them was anything other than a normal young person having a normal conversation. It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t aware of her handicap. That it didn’t seem to matter. That there were no obstacles to communication.
