by Karen Swan
‘Wait – your father too?’ Nathan frowned. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course.’
‘But I haven’t found any reference to that. In the local records I’ve seen, your grandfather and uncles Valentino and Montez signed up to join the Cavalry Regiment on 27 September 1936 – but your father’s name wasn’t there.’
‘No, he didn’t join the fight till the beginning of ’37. He was a lieutenant in the reconnaissance squadron of the National Infantry Division.’
Nathan looked at him intently. ‘And why was that, do you know?’
Mateo shrugged. ‘Age? My father was the youngest son; he would only have been sixteen when the war broke out.’
Nathan pulled a sceptical face. ‘Many soldiers were that age though, or not much older.’
‘Well, he was also fiercely pacifist. My father has always said there are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.’
‘So then what changed?’
‘He grew older? He grew up?’ Mateo shrugged. ‘Principles are well and good, in principle, but I suppose when men are dying around you . . .’
‘Ah yes, that’ll be it,’ Nathan nodded. ‘Your grandfather and uncles were killed in December 1936 – not fighting on the battlefield, but dragged from their beds and murdered. If your father signed up shortly after in ‘37, then that timing isn’t a coincidence.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it would be,’ Mateo agreed after a short pause, sitting back as Mayra came out with a steaming pot and poured him some coffee. ‘So then my father joined the war to avenge his family, his sister ran away with the enemy and that’s why they were estranged?’ He seemed almost disappointed by the anti-climactic revelation. ‘It makes sense. It just seems a shame they’ve drawn out the grudge for so long when the rest of the country has managed to move on.’ He looked into the distance wistfully for a moment. ‘Still, my father has reached out the olive branch and forgiven her. I only hope she will see the generosity of his act and behave likewise.’
Charlotte frowned as she ate her grapefruit, remembering something Señora Quincy had said to her in the bedroom yesterday.
‘Charlotte? You seem unsure,’ Mateo said, catching sight of her expression.
‘Well, it’s just that . . . your aunt said something yesterday that suggested it wasn’t your father who was the one in a position to do the forgiving.’
Mateo’s beneficent smile soured. ‘And what did she say exactly?’
‘That he may not have been why she left. But that he was the reason why she stayed away.’
There was a silence.
‘Well I would take that to imply her continuing anger that her brother fought against her husband during the war,’ Nathan said shortly.
‘Quite,’ Mateo agreed. ‘Exactly.’
‘But why be so angry at your father for that?’ Charlotte said, keeping her gaze firmly on Mateo and away from Nathan. She didn’t even want to look at him now. ‘She had run away six months earlier, before he’d even signed up. Plus she had to have known that out of the two of them, she was the one doing the “betraying” – to her family, her heritage – not him.’
‘Perhaps because she understood him to be a pacifist, learning that he was fighting at all was the betrayal,’ Mateo suggested.
‘Seems unlikely though, don’t you think?’ she asked. ‘She’s really going to hold on to that “moral disappointment” for eighty years?’
‘Oh, I think people can hold on to their moral disappointment for a lot longer than you realize,’ Nathan sneered, scorn dripping from his words as he savagely cut up a peach. He stopped suddenly. He looked at Mateo again. ‘. . . Wait – reconnaissance squadron, you said?’
‘Hmm?’ Mateo murmured, sipping his coffee.
Nathan sat back in his chair, concentrating hard, lost in thought.
‘What is it?’ Mateo asked him, setting down his cup.
Nathan was quiet for another moment, a deep frown creasing his brow. ‘I’m pretty sure . . . in fact I’m almost certain that the attack in which your aunt’s husband was killed was carried out by a recon squad.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There’s a lot of paperwork on it on the Nationalist side. I’ve been looking up anything with Jack Quincy’s name in it and it was clear from the report I saw that things had gone badly wrong. The unit was there only to assess potential screen barriers, guard cover and the area’s security. The orders from the FSC commander were logged as purely a preliminary survey of the premises—’
‘What’s FSC?’ Charlotte interrupted tersely.
‘Forward Support Company,’ Nathan muttered, as though that would mean anything to her. He looked at Mateo again. ‘They knew the church was being used by a militia group they had been tracking – Hijos de la Noche – but the FOB wasn’t in position to move. No one was supposed to die that night. It was information-gathering only.’
She didn’t bother to ask what FOB stood for.
Mateo stared at him. ‘So what happened?’
‘One of the soldiers somehow got inside the church and killed the two men in there: Jack Quincy and another man, his accomplice – Santiago Esperanza.’
‘Esperanza?’ Charlotte murmured, forgetting her hostility for a moment. ‘You’ve mentioned him before.’
‘Yes, he’s from around here. It was his father who was supposedly killed by Mateo’s uncles and, in turn, he was reputed to have had a hand in their deaths. He had worked closely with Quincy almost from the beginning and we’re pretty certain Quincy was involved in the midnight raid that saw them thrown from the bridge, so chances are Esperanza was in on it too.’
‘And this soldier broke into the church and killed these two men?’ Charlotte asked.
Nathan nodded. ‘The army brass were not happy they had been killed – they’d wanted the men taken alive, believing they had valuable information about planned Republican attacks.’
There was a silence, everyone’s minds whirring.
‘. . . What was the soldier’s explanation for disobeying his commander?’ Mateo asked finally.
‘That he had seen through one of the windows that they had taken a Nationalist woman hostage.’
Charlotte’s eyes narrowed. ‘Had they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she killed too?’
‘No, she was pulled out in a pretty poor state though. She was hysterical. Mad even, which wasn’t particularly unusual given what she must have been made to endure. Sent to a psychiatric facility, the report said . . .’
Charlotte didn’t reply. She remembered all too clearly his words at the bullring, and the fate of any captured woman, red or white. Death would indeed have been preferable.
‘. . . But now I’m wondering if that was just a cover story,’ Nathan murmured.
A low drone came into earshot and they all looked up into the faultless blue sky, a tiny speck in the distance growing ever larger, drawing ever closer.
Mateo looked back at him. Time was short now. ‘What do you mean, professor?’
‘I don’t think the hostage was the reason he broke rank. Any soldier would have known that disobeying a direct order would risk his being shot for insubordination. But if revenge was what he had signed up for in the first place, if he had joined the recon squad with the sole aim of tracking and finding the men responsible for his family’s deaths . . . ? For him, that was probably a price worth paying. What else did he have to lose? His parents were dead, his brothers were dead, his sister was missing, probably presumed dead. I think this was personal.’
There was a long silence, the two men holding each other’s gaze, neither one wanting to say the words.
Finally, Mateo stirred. ‘You’re saying you believe that soldier was my father?’
Nathan nodded. ‘I’m afraid I do.’
Charlotte stared into the distance, trying to run the images in a loop through her head – Carlos Mendoza, intent on revenge, had found his target, not knowing he was killing his own
sister’s husband. No wonder Marina had hated him; enough hatred to last a lifetime.
‘Dear God,’ Mateo murmured, sitting back in his chair and looking ashen, as the helicopter headed straight for the lush estate, an oasis in the arid sierra. ‘What are we doing?’
He was carried off on a stretcher, a team of white-suited orderlies met by his domestic team and handing over notes, medical kits and bags.
Charlotte and Nathan stayed back, well clear of the down-draught and watching as Mateo ran in a half-crouch towards his father, his jacket splaying out in the wind. They saw him reach forward and clasp the old man’s hand, leaning down to kiss his forehead as the medics carried him over the grass. Behind, Mateo’s wife climbed down from the helicopter and hurried to catch up with them, trying with one hand to stop her long dark hair from flying everywhere.
The team hastened into the house – efficient, deft, silent, no commands needed, doors being held open automatically, everything prepared.
Gone again.
‘Oh.’ Charlotte sighed at the sheer speed of it, feeling somehow disappointed. All they had seen of him had been a shiny head and that thin, pale arm extending from the covers, holding Mateo’s hand.
‘Well, that’s that then. The client’s got what he needed,’ Nathan said flatly, his words a gross understatement to the scale of the tragedy they had just unearthed. He turned and moved off. ‘I can pack and get out of here.’
‘Back to your family,’ Charlotte called after him, a cutting edge in her voice, as he walked off without even glancing at her. She was perfectly aware of the scale of her betrayal, her personal shortcomings – perhaps everything he’d said last night had been true but where was his remorse? Why was he so determined to heap all the guilt onto her? She saw him falter, move as if to turn back and cut her down again, but instead – worse – he carried onwards, disappearing into the house too. Done.
She stared into the void he left behind. She wanted to scream at his back, claw at his skin. Make him react. Make him be sorry. But he wasn’t. He’d done what he’d come to do and now he was leaving without a backward glance. He was packing right now. He’d be gone in the hour . . . It was done. Over. Finally, this was their ending.
Heart pounding, panic flooding her, she grabbed her phone and pressed redial, trying the number again. Forget the hotel room in Madrid, that kiss in the bullring, the way her skin prickled under his every gaze, the flip in her stomach every time he walked into the room . . . She wasn’t Carlos Mendoza. She knew it was happiness that was the best revenge.
‘Hi, you’ve come through to Stephen Rathbone. Leave a short message. I’ll call you back.’
‘Stephen, please . . .’ she hesitated, not knowing what else to say. ‘Please call me. We have to talk.’ She sighed and hung up, sinking back into her chair in a defeated heap. Three days, twenty-four messages, no reply. Fish learnt faster than this.
‘He’s here.’
She was standing in Señora Quincy’s room, watching as Marina brushed and styled her grandmother’s hair. The omens didn’t look good. She was wearing a funereal black linen dress, no jewellery today apart from a cameo brooch. It was a severe, unfriendly look. Hostile, even.
‘How did he seem?’ Señora Quincy asked, staring dead ahead as her granddaughter fussed over her.
‘Weak. I could barely see him, to be honest. They carried him through on a stretcher.’ She went and perched on the edge of the linen sofa, watching blankly. The bed had been made, the room so pristine it was almost as if everyone in it was hovering, not touching the surfaces.
‘Awake?’
‘Yes, seemed to be. I saw him grasp Mateo’s hand.’
‘That is awake enough then.’
Charlotte wondered what exactly the old woman planned on saying to her brother. What could she say to the man who had murdered her husband? What could he say to the sister whose husband had murdered their family? ‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’
‘Of course.’ But she offered no explanation. Instead she regarded Charlotte with her usual critical, clear-eyed gaze. ‘. . . You look pale.’
‘Do I?’ Charlotte’s hand rose to her cheek.
‘My granddaughter tells me you are getting married in a few days.’
Charlotte opened her mouth . . . but the lie stalled. What was the point? She was leaving now anyway. It was over – Carlos Mendoza had his sister back, Mateo had his answers, Marina’s rights as an heir were automatically protected by law even if her grandmother rebutted them. There was no further reason for her to be here. ‘Actually, no, I’m not.’
‘But last night—’ Marina protested, looking up.
‘I know. It was called off at the weekend, that’s why I was delayed coming back.’ She bit her lip. ‘I didn’t feel like I could tell Mateo after he’d gone to the trouble of organizing the present.’ She stared down at her hands. ‘I won’t accept it, of course.’
‘What happened?’ Marina beseeched her, looking concerned. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask? I shouldn’t ask – it’s personal.’
Charlotte gave a wan laugh. ‘I think we’re beyond that now, don’t you?’ She gave a sigh so weary, her shoulders rose two inches and dropped four. ‘The truth is, I can’t marry my fiancé – because I am still married to my first husband.’
‘First husband?’
‘A man not known for his organizational skills. Or any skills, in fact. He didn’t “get round” to filing the decree absolute and now my fiancé thinks I did it deliberately.’
There was an astonished silence.
‘But you’re so young for—’
‘A second marriage? I know. We got married at university.’
‘That’s still very young.’
‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. I’d recently suffered a great loss and was struggling to cope, and marrying him seemed . . . well, I thought it was a way to be safe.’
‘Safe from what?’ Señora Quincy asked, watching her closely.
Charlotte was quiet for a moment. ‘My past. My family. My destiny.’ She stared at her hands, spying a tiny white crescent moon in the pinks of her fingernail, still able to hear her mother’s words in the bathroom that night. She gave a sigh. ‘My family is . . . prominent. Like yours, it’s a name everyone knows and they all want a piece of you, the glamour by proxy.’
Marina gave a tiny gasp of understanding. ‘So that’s why you do this. You know what it’s like,’ she said quietly.
Charlotte nodded. ‘People on the outside have no idea of what it’s like to be born into a family with no purpose, no rules, no limits. No one ever said “no” to me, or even “later” – I could have whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. But the problem with that is when you can have everything, you value nothing. It was my problem – and it was my father’s too.’
‘It was him you lost,’ Señora Quincy said, presenting it as a fact.
She nodded. ‘He’d had a drug problem for a long time. My mother had finally had enough. She was leaving him . . . I found him.’ She pressed her lips together firmly, taking another breath. ‘And the papers loved it. As far as they were concerned, the story was heaven-sent – rich and sordid and wasted and debauched. They trailed us everywhere for months. Some of my friends who I thought were protecting me, I found out later were selling stories about me to the press. There was nobody I could trust.’ She stared into the distance, remembering it again, the moment he’d batted away her games, seen through her act. ‘Except one. He kept himself apart, he wasn’t like the rest. He wasn’t from my world and he didn’t care about that stuff. He just seemed to like . . . me.’ Her voice cracked on the last word.
‘So what happened?’ Marina asked, her jaw slack with concern.
She shrugged. ‘I messed it up, I was papering over the cracks. I loved him but I hadn’t come to terms with my father’s death and the more I loved him, the more frightening it felt. Everyone thought I was with him for the sheer novelty, my mother, my friends, they all told
me it was some sort of rebellion – me trying on a different life. And the more they said it, the more I began to believe they were right, that he was just another obsession and that in trying to escape being like my father, I had become more like him than ever.’
‘And so you decided to marry the other guy? Go with convention.’
‘It wasn’t as conscious as that, but yes. We had both been invited to a mutual friend’s family wedding in Edinburgh so we agreed to travel up together.’ She shrugged. ‘We weren’t together at that point, but I drank too much, as I always used to back then, and he . . . he jokingly suggested we were bound to get married sooner or later and that we should just elope. Things were difficult for him with his parents too. It just seemed to solve so many problems at a stroke.’ She shook her head. ‘I really thought it was the best idea I’d ever heard in my life: it seemed so obvious, standing there in the registry office – if I could change my name, I could change my destiny.’ She looked at Señora Quincy. ‘You can understand that, can’t you? You turned your back on your financial fortune, you changed your name, your politics. Your circumstances.’
The old woman nodded.
‘And so you know that it makes no difference to who you are inside. That deep down we can’t change our nature. The girl who left this house eighty years ago vowing never to return – she’s still there, isn’t she, though you’ve tried to hide her, deny her? Isn’t that why you’ve come back?’
Señora Quincy was very still, before she nodded again. ‘In spite of it all, he is my twin. We came into this world together.’
Marina looked between the two of them, seeing the affinity – the parallels – between them. ‘So what happened to the ex? Boyfriend I mean, not husband.’
He’s upstairs packing, she didn’t say. ‘He’s moved on. He’s living abroad and got a family of his own now.’
‘Are you in touch?’
She swallowed. ‘Not really.’
