by P. R. Black
The orderly gave a cheery greeting as he rapped the door. The woman inside the room answered him in an alarmingly frail voice. She was sat upright in a chair, perched on teetering cushions like a fairy tale Sultan. A fan whirred, stirring her hair, surely too close to her for comfort.
She was heavy-set, but had extraordinary braids of long silvery hair over her shoulders. These reminded Becky of a daguerreotype photo of a Native American woman.
There were few ornaments or personal decorations in the room, although a stack of books in a language Becky didn’t recognise clung to the edge of a dresser.
‘Someone to see you, beautiful,’ said the orderly in a bright voice. The old lady’s eyes opened a little wider, as if she’d been asleep. She smiled at the orderly, then turned her gaze upon the newcomer. Her skin was sun-damaged, Becky thought, her colouring slightly mottled in the air-conditioned atmosphere.
‘I don’t think I know this one,’ the old lady said. She reached for some glasses on a table by the side of her armchair, but the orderly was already there, fixing them over her ears with the easy dexterity of long practice.
The lady’s eyes were comically magnified under the lenses, but their shade was still beautiful, a delicate green flecked with hazel. Gypsy eyes; added to the well-tended hair, Becky wondered if she had been beautiful.
‘No… I don’t know this one.’
‘I’m from England,’ Becky said. ‘I want to talk to you about your time in Spain. I’m a writer, researching a book on the ex-pat life. I understand you’ve been in Spain for a number of years?’
‘That’s right,’ the old lady said. ‘Nearly thirty years. Sit yourself down, girl. Gregory will get you some water, if you wish?’
‘Water would be lovely, actually.’
She glanced at Gregory, who poured her some water from a carafe near the sink. To Becky’s annoyance, he remained in a far corner, paying close attention to the exchange.
‘My name is Jane,’ Becky said, flashing a doctored NUJ press card at the woman. ‘My book is about how life in Spain has changed since Franco. Can I ask your name – it’s Elizabetha, is that right?’
She nodded.
‘And your second name is?’
‘Grillo.’
‘That’s an Italian name?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’ Her eyes were questioning, as though searching her brain for the knowledge behind the name. ‘My husband was Spanish, though.’
‘And where did you meet him?’
‘In Seville. Before we go into that… can I ask how you got my name?’
‘I was researching families who had moved to Spain from lots of different places. But I’m particularly interested in people who might have come from Eastern Europe.’
‘Eastern Europe,’ the old lady repeated.
‘Yes. Specifically, the former Communist states.’
‘Former Communist states.’ The woman did not change the pleasant intonation of her voice; she might have been making an empty inquiry about how a great-grandchild’s day had gone at school. But the eyes had taken on a curious animation now, a gleam of activity like slow traffic crossing a bridge at night.
‘Indeed. I’m interested in your original name. Where is it you said you were from?’
‘I didn’t say I was from anywhere.’
‘Ah right. Was it Bulgaria?’
The old lady laughed. ‘No, Romania. Though the name was from Croatia, originally. Or what you now call Croatia.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I had some bad information.’ Becky scored something out on her notepad.
The old lady chuckled. ‘I hope you are a better writer than you are a liar, miss.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘This book you say you are writing… the life of ex-pats, you say? Living in Spain, from Eastern Europe?’ She turned to the orderly and laughed, uproariously. ‘I cannot say I am looking forward to the movie, Gregory. Are you?’
Gregory was deathly serious. ‘Do you want me to ask her to leave, beautiful?’
Elizabetha raised an arthritic hand like a knotted fencepost. ‘No, my love, peace. I’m curious now.’ With an effort, she sat forward in her chair. ‘Why do you really want to speak to me?’
Becky smiled. ‘You’re sharp as a tack. I am lying to you. I’m not really writing about ex-pats. I’m writing about unsolved murders.’
Elizabetha’s kindly expression faltered. ‘Murders?’
‘Yes. I’m looking for information about an incident which took place outside of Galati in 1980.’
The old lady glanced at her hands, then turned them over.
‘It involved a family known as Kranczr.’
She drew breath to speak, then settled herself.
‘Elizabetha, I am trying to find the man who killed the Kranczr family.’
‘Kranczr… I do not know that name.’
‘The Kranczrs had a son, Constantin. He was active in underground politics, which was how I was able to track back to the case. The curious thing about the Kranczrs was that I only found out about what happened to them because Constantin was known as a traitor during the Ceaușescu era – or at least, those were the references I discovered. Many of the press cuttings and online references have been obliterated. This was something I came across several times in reference to murdered families across Europe from the eighties to the present day. I managed to find out that Constantin had three younger sisters, the youngest being just 10. They all died along with Constantin, as did his father, Adrian. Only the mother survived. You. That was your family, Elizabetha. Yes?’
The old lady’s hands shook. She covered her eyes with them, then drew them down her face.
Gregory’s thick eyebrows concertinaed, a fuzzed line of static across his brow. ‘Enough. This interview is over.’
‘I know you found them, Elizabetha. I know it’s hard. Believe me, I know. I think the same man killed my family. He killed families all across Europe. I need to make the connection without making official contact with the police. How did you survive?’
‘I was late,’ the old lady said, eyelids quivering. ‘My friend at the factory, Masha, had an accident as we got off the bus. She twisted her ankle. I had to help her. We had no telephone. It took hours to get her to a doctor and have her leg put in plaster. If that had not happened, it should have been me, too…’
‘You found them, Elizabetha. What was marked on the walls? Was there a mark?’
‘Words… “This is how sluts end their lives”. Then a marking… a face, or an animal. Maybe an insect.’
‘Was it like a face? Or a skull?’
‘Yes. It could have been.’
‘And what else did you see? Elizabetha, how did they die?’
‘Their heads. He took their heads, after he had his way with them.’ Her voice was barely above a whisper. Then, with feral suddenness, the old lady’s face twisted with hate. Yellowed teeth split her lips as she growled: ‘God’s curse be upon you!’
Gregory’s hands gripped Becky’s wrist. He tried to pull her to her feet, but with a flick of her arm she was free. She gave herself some space, and took an aggressive stance, her pen locked rigid at the knuckles between her second and third fingers.
‘Don’t touch me again, Gregory. Or I’ll split your eyebrow in half.’
‘Get out,’ he said. ‘And never come back. Don’t make me call the police.’
Becky charged along the corridor, trying to ignore the wailing that grew shrill at her back.
32
Becky drove too fast on the way back over the hill. She tried to forget the woman’s final imprecation and focused on what she’d gleaned.
The decapitations fit the MO nicely, though she tried to swallow the rising tide of enthusiasm.
She imagined what Elizabetha might have said to Rosie Banning, had she spoken to the woman in the nursing home and not Becky. ‘There’s no absolute proof just yet, just coincidence,’ Becky might have said, once Rosie had reported back. But there was no denying
that Elizabetha’s corroboration was a good start. So there was that killing, in Romania, early eighties; then the Polish family in 1982; after that, the Baumlisch family went missing in 1988, never to be seen again. The murders moved further west, including a case in France, then one in Spain in 1992 – a family of four, mother and father, two daughters under 16.
Families were the link; that was what he wanted to destroy.
But there was little physical evidence connecting any of these cases, and few breakthroughs in the inquiries. More intriguingly, someone had been convicted for the Vladek family killings in Poland, and the murderer had subsequently been garrotted in jail. That case seemed very firmly closed. And if the families had been killed in the midst of some problems in their business dealings – even Elizabetha’s family were implicated in fraud, as well as their political difficulties – then that broke the link between that string of cases and the one involving Becky’s family. There had been no business problems linked to Becky’s mother and father, real or imagined.
The all-media search accessed through her still live connection to the newspaper had been uncharacteristically slow in dredging up prior material on these cases. In instances where bodies had been found, the details were scant, particularly in the former Soviet states – especially the Gursky case from just recently.
In the western murders, there was always room for doubt; a family in debt, links to the criminal world, people trafficking, a suggestion that missing girls had been sold to slavery while the parents were butchered.
In most cases, the families had simply vanished. You never could tell without bodies, without solid witnesses. But Becky had to admit, some patterns made a compelling fit.
Being in Spain to check out the Kranczr link gave her the chance to kill two birds with one stone, having spoken to Elizabetha. Now she could head to the fishing town where the Ramirez family had disappeared without trace in 1992. That was the final case Becky had been able to uncover before the killing of her family, which took place a few years later.
‘God bless you, Rupert,’ she murmured.
She was adjusting the sat-nav to direct her to the nearest petrol station when she noticed the car keeping a steady distance behind her. The vehicle was nondescript, a dark smudge trailing a sirocco of dust in its wake. It was only a couple of hundred yards above and behind her as the crow flew, growing to half a mile taking into account the weave and twist of the mountain road. There was nothing especially dodgy about this, but the past few weeks meant Beck knew she should cleave to any suspicion whatsoever.
She increased her speed on the straights, braking hard when the corners approached.
A quick glance upward told her there was no appreciable difference in the speed of the black car.
The mountain route flattened out after a spell as the road twisted through the valleys, still well above sea level. Becky would have enjoyed the splendour of the ocean view but for that blocky pursuer in her rear-view mirror.
The blur remained a steady presence behind her.
‘I’ve seen too many movies,’ she muttered. A quick glance at the red thread running through the sat nav screen revealed a petrol station a mile or so ahead.
Easing up a little on the speed, she waited for the car to come closer in order to get a better look at the details – or better still, the driver. But the car kept its distance. It might have been a dirty mark on her wing mirror, bad enough to risk wiping while in transit.
When the sign for the petrol station appeared, Becky pulled in much too fast, without indicating, and stopped in one of the empty parking bays.
She kept an eye on any traffic coming in. After maybe twenty seconds or so, with the inside of Becky’s hire car still ticking in the heat, the dark smudge rocketed past.
It could have been one of the blockier VWs, or maybe even a Mercedes, either black or inky blue, but there was no way of making an accurate assessment. She waited, drumming her hands on the steering wheel, before moving the car into the filling area and topping up the tank. Soon she was back on the road.
Becky hadn’t consciously decided to keep an eye out for a dark smudge anywhere as she pulled back out onto the motorway, but she kept her speed low in any case.
When the same car pulled out behind her, emerging from the shadow of a truck parked in a lay-by maybe three hundred yards away from the petrol station, Becky felt a curious thrill of satisfaction.
‘Now it’s a game, my friend.’
She did nothing out of the ordinary until she reached the nearest town, a quiet place with villas poking out of the hillsides, flecked with sparkling blue shards of swimming pools.
The dark blur swung onto the exit not long after she did. There was a suggestion of a single occupant, probably a man, and a tall one at that.
Then she reached a roundabout, slowed right down, and made a full right turn, back onto the opposite side of the road she had just emerged from.
The blur had followed her, but slipped back a little in her mirror, perhaps to buy some thinking time. This was a mistake, as it allowed Becky to get a good look as she passed him going in the opposite direction.
A man, for sure; dark-haired, white, possibly wearing a collar and tie.
Becky smiled grimly. Now for the clincher.
Once on the motorway, with the bluish smudge at its regulation distance behind her, Becky took the next available exit and doubled back on herself, heading back into the town.
The car followed her.
‘Schoolboy stuff, this,’ she said, chuckling.
Heading through the town, her plan seemed to arrive fully-formed, based on a strange icon which popped up on her sat-nav screen. A sign and a set of lights confirmed her initial impressions, and she sped up as the road narrowed on the edge of town, heading towards the mountains.
In a valley just ahead, a set of lights flashed a warning ahead of some barriers.
Perfect.
Becky scanned the trees at the side of the road; coming up to her right was a brown track, edging into the cover of some desiccated pine trees.
She jammed on the brakes, overshooting the dirt road, her head lurching towards the wheel and her guts following in tandem. Now things had got more real, less detached; she spun the wheel frantically and reversed, expertly pulling the car into the dirt road. It was stony, the car lurching to and fro over it and her backside bouncing in the seat. Becky cursed the light plume of dust stirred by her wheels, hoping it would settle before her pursuer arrived.
She stopped the car on a bend in the dirt road, keeping her eyes on the level crossing visible through the trees. The barriers were down, but there was no sign of the train just yet. Becky palmed some sweat off her brow, unzipped her handbag, and waited.
*
The dark blue car crept along the road, slowing down as it approached the crossing. The man in the car was wearing shades; a slim tie lolled like a dog’s tongue beneath an open collar and bulky shoulders. He didn’t look good in a suit – he was built like a prizefighter, and sweating like one, too.
The car reached the crossing and the man stopped and got out, running a hand through longish dark hair, glancing up and down in irritation. He checked his watch and cursed in English. Then he spotted the dirt track, his expression changing from anger to confusion. He started up the path, and quickly spotted Becky’s car.
Becky was not in it.
He did not approach the car, flipping open a phone while keeping a close eye on it. ‘Yeah,’ he said, in a south London accent, ‘Level crossing. Not sure where she’s got to. I reckon it may be time to pull out. I’ll get someone else to pick it up later, I think she’s spotted me. She ain’t daft, mate, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
*
Becky waited until he’d flipped the phone closed and placed it in his pocket before shooting him.
The twin prongs of the stun gun dart punched into the back of his neck, in the middle of the hairline just above the collar. Becky had only seen the death-ray effect
once before in the flesh, but it was no less fascinating.
The man’s body jerked like a fish on the line, just as the report of the weapon sounded, a near-subliminal crackle. He fell awkwardly, dark glasses tumbling across the dirt, landing face first, and hard.
Becky pulled out the stun dart and reeled it in while the man lay flat, panting. Puffs of dust rose above his gasping mouth like tracer fire. When he managed to lift his head, Becky had swapped the stun gun for the mace; one quick blast into the mouth, and the game was over.
With some difficulty, she dragged him into the treeline, her back and shoulder muscles taut with the strain. He did not scream too much; neither did he protest to any great degree when she rummaged inside his jacket and pulled out some ID. She took a photo of everything with her phone – bank cards, driving licence, even a library card – while the man lurched upright, drooling. His cheeks were sodden with tears while an altogether more unsightly shadow crawled across the front of his trousers.
Becky took aim with the stun gun. ‘I don’t want to hurt you any more than I have. So let’s make this quick.’
The man gasped; when he managed to open his eyes, they were Hammer-Horror red.
‘First, tell me who you are, and who you’re working for. Then you can have a nice glass of water.’
The man shook his head.
‘Aw, don’t be shy. What I can do now is make a citizen’s arrest, and contact the Guardia Civil. They really enjoy processing people like you. How’s your Spanish, incidentally? All right?’
The man said nothing.
‘Bit shy. That’s okay. Know what else I could do?’ Becky gripped one of his ankles, and dragged him through the dust, teeth gritted, muscles straining at her neck.
‘Hey,’ he wheezed, arms flailing. ‘Wait!’
‘Let’s take a look at this train. It can’t be far away.’ She dragged him up the bank of the rail track. He still didn’t have full control back of his limbs, though he clutched uselessly at the loose stones. Above them, shimmering in the heat, the rail lines quivered.
The man’s eyes were trying to crawl from their sockets, and he gaped and flapped at the ground like a landed fish.
