Jenny looked despairingly at Adam. He put his hands behind him and gestured to her to do as he said. She wrapped the tape around his wrists, bit it with her teeth and snapped it off.
“Sit down on the floor.” Adam did as he was told. “Now tie the tape around his ankles.”
D’Almeida made her fasten up Leticia in the same way. When she and Adam were on the floor, he got Jenny to help him to sit them up against the cabinets, under the window.
“Right, your turn now.” He put the pistol on the table and stepped across to her. “Give me the tape and turn around.”
She handed it over to him. As he reached out to take the roll, it fell from her hand and rolled across the marble tiles.
“Clumsy bitch!” He stooped to get the tape.
Jenny grabbed the empty wine bottle from the counter and smashed it down at his head. Sensing the movement, d’Almeida looked up and raised his right arm to fend off the blow. The bottle struck him on the right shoulder and bounced out of her hand. It shattered on the tiles, fragments flying through the air. He fell to the floor with a cry, holding his injured shoulder.
Leticia and Adam watched in disbelief as she quickly retrieved the serrated knife from under her cardigan on the bench seat. The knife that she had taken from the mugger in the park and placed out of reach of unwary hands. On the shelf above the coat rack in the hall.
“Lie still, or I’ll stick this in you!” She waved the knife in his face.
“You fucking piece of work! You’ve broken my shoulder!” He reached up with his left hand to hold the edge of the counter and pull himself to his feet.
“I told you not to move!” She smashed the knife down onto his fingers. He pulled his hand away and the blade slid across his knuckles. He fell to the floor again, blood welling from a gash on the back of his hand. The knife rebounded off the granite surface of the counter, jumped from her grasp onto the marble tiles and skidded across to the other side of the kitchen.
She turned, grabbed the pistol from the table and trained it on him, holding the weapon with two hands, arms outstretched. “Don’t move or I’ll pull the trigger. I don’t care if I kill you, it’s what you deserve.”
The Angolan gazed implacably into her eyes. He pressed the back of his left hand to his mouth, staunching the flow of blood from the incision then wrapped a handkerchief from his pocket around the wound. “Good try, Jenny, I’m very impressed.” He pulled himself to his feet. “Only problem is, you forgot to release the safety catch, stupid woman!”
Jenny knew nothing about guns. She looked at the pistol, trying to work out what to do. D’Almeida stepped towards her, his hand out to take the weapon. She pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger. A loud crack rang out. The recoil from the gun pushed her backwards and pulled her hands up so that it was pointing over his head. A small hole appeared in the middle of one of the copper bottomed pans hanging over the ceramic hob and they heard the smack of the bullet penetrating the plaster.
She jumped back and dropped the gun onto the floor in fright. D’Almeida stooped down and snatched it up.
“Christ Almighty. I don’t believe it!” He turned the gun on her. “You’re a quick learner, Jenny. Firearms lesson number one, aim at the chest and pull the trigger. This gun doesn’t have a safety catch, but it does have quite a kick. If I didn’t need you to perform for me later on, I would show you how it’s really done.”
He transferred the gun to his injured hand and gave Jenny a mighty smack across the face with the other. “Now, behave yourself. I’m starting to get really annoyed with you.”
She fell against the table, holding on tight to it to stop from falling down. Her knees felt weak and her face and head were pounding.
“Leave her alone, you cowardly bastard! Was that your speciality when you were a gigolo, beating up women?” Adam was trying desperately to sound brave, but inside he was shaking with fear. He knew the man intended to kill them. It was just a matter of time.
D’Almeida ignored him and went back to stand by the counter, covering them with the handgun. He rubbed his shoulder with his left hand, wincing with the pain, blood from the wounded hand leaving a stain on his jacket. “Normal service is resumed. Come here, Jenny.”
She came slowly back to the counter, breathing deeply. Trying to calm herself down after the rush of adrenalin that had spurred her on through the fight. A feeling of overwhelming tiredness swept over her and her cheek was burning where he had hit her. Suddenly, she felt like a little girl, frightened and lost amongst a group of crazy adults. She tried to push the fear and pain away. Tried to think and plan. She’d seen him wince when he rubbed the damaged shoulder. It must be badly bruised, or maybe even broken. How can I take advantage of that?
“Now, turn around and put your hands behind you.” Holding the gun against her back with his injured hand, he clumsily wrapped the tape around her wrists. He pushed her down to sit with the other two then did the same to her ankles.
Adam tried to encourage her with a smile, despite his fear. He’d been mesmerised by her attack on the Angolan. He hadn’t seen her in action before. He couldn’t credit his eyes when she smashed the Angolan’s shoulder with the bottle. And to have smuggled in that murderous looking knife. She’d almost cut his hand off. My God! She’s twice the man I am. I’m sitting here, incapable of doing anything, while she’s trying to save us all. And she almost succeeded!
Leticia had her eyes tightly closed. She pretended it was just a dream, a bad dream. If she didn’t look at him, maybe he would go away and leave them without harming her little boy.
“Very good. Now we can get on with our business.” D’almeida picked up the wet towel, rinsed it in the sink, and wrapped it around his hand. The bleeding had lessened but it was stinging and his fingers were cramping up. He sat in one of the kitchen chairs in front of the hostages and swigged back the last of the wine. After the initial shock of the blow, his shoulder was starting to throb with pain. A deep, nagging ache that ran through his shoulder and up into his neck. His head was pounding and he felt nauseous. He shrugged off the pain and looked at Jenny, a cynical smile on his face. You’ll pay for that, later, he seemed to be thinking.
He studied his watch then pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket and lit one up. The cigarette smouldered a lot, it looked wet. He inhaled the smoke deeply.
Adam’s head and cheekbone were throbbing. He could hardly see from his left eye, the wound on his cheek was stinging and his face was covered with dried blood. He realised, like Jenny, that their only hope was to attempt to win time. To give them a chance to find a way out, or be rescued. But by whom? On a Sunday night in Marbella in the torrential rain. Who’s going to come to our rescue? This maniac will kill us and the gardener will find our bodies tomorrow morning. His blood ran cold at the thought.
Desperately trying to pull himself together, he looked straight at the Angolan, taunting him to get him to continue talking. “So, it’s the Raymundo Melo d’Almeida, the Homicidal Maniac Show, is it? How come you’re bragging about four murders? Taking your sick dreams for reality? Is that how you jerk off every night before you go to sleep?”
D’Almeida ignored the jibe. “If you make the calculation, it isn’t very profitable work. Two years of hard graft, busting my balls to learn how to pass for a lawyer. Raising enough money to come and get back my family’s fortune and then working for that idiot José Luis. And what’s my reward in the end? Twelve million dollars for four bodies. That’s only three million a head. If you’d made the last transaction it would be six million a head. That’s twenty-four million dollars. Now that’s worth killing for. I felt like killing you when I found out you missed your deadline. But I waited. No need to rush, we’ve got time.”
He came over to Adam and kicked him in the hip, almost absent mindedly. “You just can’t get good help these days.”
Adam winced, but asked him again,“What are you talking about, four bodies?”
“Well, as I
said, there’s been a lot of accidents about.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “I mean, take Charlie, for example. That was most unfortunate, he seemed like a nice guy. But he’d had a long and happy life, and it was virtually painless. Anyway, I don’t approve of screwing your employees when you’re nearly seventy years old.”
“It was you who printed out the contract from Charlie’s machine, after you drowned him in the pool.” Jenny’s heart was beating as if it would burst. She felt sick, light-headed, as if she would faint. Over the last week, Charlie had become a kind of a hero figure to her, he had achieved so many amazing things and never even spoken of them. Now she realised that his life had been snuffed out by this crazy, monstrous creature.
Leticia burst into tears at this cold blooded confession. She had loved Charlie and he had loved her. Their child would grow up without a father because of this man’s murderous greed and hatred. She was incapable of speaking, terrified by the ranting, evil creature who had suddenly burst into their lives. Frightened of saying something that might put them into even more danger. Not just the three of them, but also her son, asleep just twenty-five metres away. She closed her eyes and tried to shut the scene out of her mind, but there was more to come.
“I already had the contract from Bonneville’s BlackBerry,” the Angolan continued, “I was just confirming the date, to be sure the money would be there.” He looked balefully again at Adam, took a drag on the cigarette and went on, “Anyway, don’t get so upset about Charlie. Just think of that shit, Raffael, or Roddy, as he called himself in the bars and on the Internet. That bastard didn’t deserve to live. The guy was a paedophile, a bottom feeder. A sick, disgusting animal, who preyed on kids and vulnerable women. He never did anything worthwhile in his whole existence. He got his money from his old man and he pissed it down the toilet all over the world. Wherever he could buy the crap he fed on.
“Huge, fancy apartment on Central Park, full of the most sickening filth I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t imagine it in your worst nightmares. Do you know his Internet name was “Silver Rod”? Fucking arrogant pervert, he was a disgrace to mankind. Made me ashamed to be born in Angola. That was a service to humanity getting rid of him. I hope he burns in hell!”
He didn’t mention Cindy, the prostitute. Shame about her, he thought. Nice tits.
“You crazy, pathological, inhuman piece of garbage. How can you sit there and tell us that you’ve served humanity by murdering four people. Tell us that they were accidents, that they deserved it, trying to justify your insanity to us. You’re never going to get away with this. You think that the police won’t come looking for you in every corner of the world when they find this out?” Adam struggled to get out of the bindings. His wrists were red raw with the twisting, but the tape wouldn’t give.
“Ok, you don’t believe me? Here’s a genuine accident, the fourth one. Actually, it was the first one, but it makes no difference.”
“NO!” Jenny gave a strangled scream. She felt a red mist come down over her eyes. She knew what was coming next. She had known for a long time but she didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t want to know for sure.
He ignored her and pulled on the cigarette again, it was almost burned down to the end. “I don’t know how you can live in that wet and miserable place, Ipswich, Jenny. It was freezing rain when I was there. I rented a car, just to have a look around. I was kind of reconnoitring, you know? I found the garage and by an amazing stroke of luck, while I was sitting there Ron came out. I could see him under the street light. I’d seen him when he came to stay at Charlie’s house when he was sick. He was with some young chick. He walked her across the road to her car, gave her a big kiss and she drove off.
“He stood looking after her for a while, stupid prick. It was dark and wet and when he stepped onto the road to go back in, my car just kind of jumped forward and knocked him over. I honestly didn’t mean it. It was just an accident. I was really lucky there was no damage to the car. Just a couple of tiny scratches on the wing. I went through the car wash twice and gave it in at the airport. They didn’t see a thing, didn’t charge me.
“I was surprised when I got back and José Luis told me he was dead. That’s when I realised that accidents can be very unpredictable. So I became a bit of a specialist. I got rid of all the complications like that, and now here we are, just the four of us together. Clever me.”
“You murdered my husband. You knocked him over and left him to die in the rain, in the dark, on the road, like an animal. YOU SADISTIC, FUCKING, MURDERING MANIAC!” Jenny couldn’t go on. She couldn’t find any more words. She just wanted to crawl away into a corner and sit and cry. To grieve for Ron at last, knowing who was responsible for his death, why he had died. For no good reason at all, just for money.
“But Jenny, he was having an affair, he was screwing his secretary or whoever. I was doing you a service, people shouldn’t treat marriage so lightly. You’re a lovely woman, he should have respected you.”
“YOU HAD NO RIGHT! You had no right,” she sobbed. “He was my husband. For better or for worse he was my husband and I loved him. We had a life. I had a life. You took away my life and left me with nothing.
“So Ron wasn’t perfect. Are you? Am I? Is anybody perfect? NO! In your deranged mind you’ve decided that all of these people are better off dead and you’re some kind of avenging angel, cleaning the world up. WELL, YOU’RE NOT. You’re a sick, twisted, calculating, cold-blooded murderer. That’s all, nothing more, nothing less.”
She sat forward, staring the man down, trying to force her words through, into his mind. “Maybe you had a miserable childhood. Yes, you lost your mother and you lost your father. Is that our fault? We’ve lost our families too. We didn’t start the war in Angola. We didn’t make you work at four jobs to feed your family. We were unaware of your existence. It’s not our fault, how could we possibly know? What could we have done? What could Charlie and his friends have done? Nothing, nothing at all! Because in the middle of a war-zone nobody knew anything about your father or his family. You’ve just told us they were running and hiding, so how could anyone know?
“You think you’ve all been cheated? Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t give you the right to go around murdering innocent people. Did it ever occur to your sick mind to contact us and tell us this story before starting on your murder spree? Before kidnapping us and tying us up in our own home?
“And in the end, why are you doing it? For justice? To avenge your family’s honour? To put the world to rights, as written in the bible according to St. Raymundo?” She laughed contemptuously. “No, you’re not doing it for any of these reasons. You’re doing it for only one reason. Just for the money. All the money! And that’s why you’re threatening to kill us too, just so that you get everything. Not a share. Not what your father, or Henriques would probably have asked for and we would certainly have given, willingly and we still would. But it’s not enough is it Ray? It’s got to be all or nothing. But in the end, that’s what you’re going to get, nothing, because that’s what you deserve. You’re going to get what you deserve and it won’t be a bucketful of money.”
Jenny was now past tears, she was as mad as hell. She sat back against the wall and turned to Adam and Leticia. “Don’t let this crazy, sadistic pervert get to you. We’ll make it through this, I know we will.”
Adam looked at her in consternation. He hadn’t known the details of Ron’s death. This murdering bastard had just admitted that he’d killed her husband and he’d been more concerned about scratching the car than about the man’s life. And Jenny had given back as good as she’d got. She’d refused to be browbeaten by his insane ravings and pathetic excuses. She was incredibly brave. Braver than him. He was scared to death. The man was a maniac, a pathological maniac. There was no way they would get out alive.
Leticia sat immobile. White faced, still saying nothing. She was terrified that d’Almeida would discover that Emilio was asleep just along the corridor. She was praying sil
ently under her breath. Praying that if she died, her son would survive.
“Well, Jenny, that’s all very well, I have my point of view and you have yours. I do love a good argument, but time is short and we have business to attend to.” The Angolan stubbed out his cigarette in the sink and looked at his watch. “Almost eleven, time to send some messages, with your help.”
Wincing again at the movement, he took out Laurent’s BlackBerry and a sheet of paper from his inside pocket and placed three small electronic keys on the table. Thanks to Esther Rousseau, they were labelled ‘J’, ‘L’ and ‘A’. “Let me see.” Holding the BlackBerry clumsily in his left hand he typed a few phrases and numbers from the paper onto the keyboard. “Twelve million dollars exactly. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Right, Jenny or Leticia, tell me your PIN number.”
“Don’t do it! He’s going to transfer the money by the Internet. He’ll never be able to do it if you don’t give him the number. He’s murdered four people and he probably killed the real Francisco too. Let him rot in hell.” Adam was still struggling to get free.
Leticia opened her eyes and looked at Jenny. Neither of them spoke. D’Almeida picked up the pistol and went over to Adam. He pressed the muzzle against his forehead. “You have exactly five seconds. Then whatever brains this idiot has got are splattered all over the floor.”
Adam’s face blanched, but he said again. “Don’t do it, he’s bluffing.”
The murderer’s finger tightened on the trigger. They heard the first click of the double action firing mechanism. Adam closed his eyes, waiting for the shot. His mind spun away, thinking of all the things he wouldn’t be able to fix. He’d attacked and robbed Stanford. He’d lied to his brother and provoked the car crash that had killed him. He’d faked letters and showed them to his parents and to Nick and the others. And after all that, he’d tried to steal from these two women. He’d tried to steal from his new partners. He felt nothing but contempt for himself. Payback time, he thought.
[African Diamonds 01.0] The Angolan Clan Page 55
