by Anna Smith
TO TELL THE TRUTH
TO TELL THE TRUTH
Anna Smith
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor,
South Block
London
W1U 8EW
Copyright © 2012 by Anna Smith
The moral right of Anna Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 0 85738 424 9
ISBN 978 0 85738 296 2 (TPB)
ISBN 978 1 78087 164 6 (HB)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Also by Anna Smith
The Dead Won’t Sleep
For my mother, who gave so much, and climbed a mountain every day.
‘I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.’
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
PROLOGUE
Costa del Sol, July 1998
In the blink of an eye she was gone. It was easy. The kid was just sitting there on the beach, picking up handfuls of sand and letting it run through her fingers. She was like a little fairy, smiling up at him with one eye closed against the harsh glare of the midday sun. She didn’t even make a sound when he scooped her up. It was only when he walked swiftly, carrying her to his car on the little sidestreet, that she shouted loud for her mummy, but he was too quick. He bundled her into the boot and sped out of the street. Minutes were all it took. As he cut onto the dual carriageway, he turned up the radio to drown out her muffled cries. He lit a cigarette and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Job done. That’s how it all began. As quick as that.
In the bedroom of the beachside villa, Jenny was coming so hard she nearly passed out. But somewhere in her euphoria she heard the cry. Call it a mother’s instinct, something primal that needs no explaining that your entire world has come tumbling down.
‘Christ! It’s Amy!’ She heaved Jamie off her and leapt out of the bed, throwing on a robe over her naked body. Heading to the door, she tripped over clothes and flip flops, discarded earlier in the heat of forbidden passion.
‘What the fu—?’ Jamie rolled over. Then he sat up, asking ‘What’s the matter?’
But Jenny was gone. All he could hear were her shouts: ‘Amy! Amy!’
‘Oh, fuck!’ He jumped up and pulled on his shorts and T-shirt. ‘Oh fuck, no!’ he muttered, hurrying into the kitchen, from where he saw through the open patio door Jenny running up and down the beach, calling.
‘Amy! Amy! Amy!’
She put her hand to her mouth and almost buckled to her knees as Jamie ran towards her. He held her.
‘Oh, Jamie! She’s gone. She’s gone, Jamie, Amy’s gone. She was sleeping. She must have got out. Where is she? Where is she, Jamie? What if she’s gone into the sea?’
‘Sssh, Jen. She’ll be here,’ Jamie said, attempting to comfort her. But his stomach dropped as his eyes darted across the stretch of deserted beach. Nothing. A windsurfer was just a speck on the horizon.
‘She can’t be far, she’ll have wandered off. You wait here and I’ll run round the back and see if she’s walked somewhere.’
He let go of Jenny and ran into the sidestreet, desolate and chilly in the shade. A shiver ran through him. He looked around at the empty street, silent but for the roar of speeding traffic above on the nearby dual carriageway. He shivered again and swallowed to stop himself being sick.
‘Jesus,’ he murmured.
Right there and then, Jamie knew his life, everyone’s lives, had changed forever. This was his best friend’s little girl, and he’d just been shagging his best friend’s wife. Shit! Maybe he would wake up in a second. He ran back to the house, dizzy with panic. Jenny’s face crumpled in sobs when she saw him return alone. They looked at each other.
‘Oh, Jamie!’ She collapsed in his arms, clinging to him. ‘What have we done? Jesus, what have we done! Call the police. We have to. Phone Martin. I need to get Martin … Oh, God, Martin!’
Jamie reached into his pocket for his mobile phone. He took a deep breath. Whatever he said, both of them said, in the next ten minutes would come back to haunt them if they didn’t get it right. Twelve years as a criminal lawyer defending liars had taught him that. He took Jenny by the shoulders and spoke calmly.
‘Jenny. Listen. We’ll find her. I promise.’ His mouth was tight. ‘Go and put some clothes on. I’ll call the police. I’ll phone Martin. He’ll be on his way back by now. We have to get our story right. We have to.’
He shook her shoulders gently. He hoped he was getting through to her. Guilt was for another day.
Two people witnessed this drama as it unfolded, but nobody could see them. They were high up on the balcony of a villa cut out of the craggy coastline, from where they could look down at the shimmering heat and the soothing surf washing onto the shore.
The older man groaned as he spilled himself into the mouth of the teenage boy, who looked up with smiling eyes as he swallowed.
He ruffled the young Moroccan’s thick wavy locks. ‘Taha. You are the sweetest boy,’ he said. Taha stood up, his naked brown body glistening in the sunlight. Then they heard the screaming.
‘What the hell’s that?’ The older man sat forward in his chair, pulling a white bathrobe over his nakedness.
‘A woman screaming, sir,’ the boy said, pointing down. ‘Look. Is from the place we saw the small girl on the beach.’
The man stood up and strained to look, careful not to get so close that anyone passing could spot him. Discretion was everything.
‘Hmmn. Certainly seems to be some kind of panic on.’ He was always a master of understatement.
Taha continued to watch as the older man went indoors and returned fully dressed, buckling the belt in his khaki linen trousers.
‘Maybe is the girl, sir.’ The boy turned around and looked him up and down. ‘You know? The man? Remember when we were on the balcony at first? He took her?’ The boy looked out to the beach. ‘Maybe she stolen.’
The older man’s eyes narrowed.
‘Time to go now, Taha.’ He ran his hand across the boy’s bony shoulder. ‘You have a vivid imagination, dear boy.’ He smiled, looked at his watch. ‘Come on, get dressed. Time I got back. I have a late lunch engagement.’ He handed the boy a one-hundred-euro note. ‘You know the drill, Taha. Let yourself out.’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you.’ The boy took the money and bowed, almost like a servant. ‘I see you again? Maybe next week, sir?’
The older man smiled like a benign headmaster to his favourite pupil, then turned and left.
Taha went back to the edge of the balcony and watched the couple standing on the beach. He could see the woman was crying. Then he heard a police siren. He went back into the villa, pulled on his shorts and vest and shoved the money in his pocket. He would be rich tonight, even after he had given his Russian pimp boss his cut.
As he was about to leave, he saw something on the floor. It looked l
ike a credit card, but when he picked it up he saw it was some kind of pass, with a photograph of the man who had just paid him a hundred euros to rent him for two hours of sex. Taha tried to read the card. He couldn’t understand what Rt. Hon. meant, and the name was different, but he recognised the picture of the man he knew as ‘Thomas’.
He shrugged, stuffed the card into his pocket, then left.
CHAPTER 1
Rosie stretched out on the lounger, relishing the late afternoon sunshine. It felt luxurious after the coldness of the pool. Fifty straight lengths she was up to. She congratulated herself. By the time she got back to Glasgow in ten days, she would be as fit as a butcher’s dog. Get yourself fit physically, she’d told herself as she’d packed for Spain, and the head will follow. But it hadn’t really, not yet.
The first week had been the worst, her mind still rushing around the deadlines that ruled her life even though there weren’t any here. She created them herself: a time to eat, a deadline to swim, to walk, to read, even to drink. Deadlines made it easier, that was for sure. No time to think of all the crap. Having this much time on her hands had frightened the hell out of Rosie during the first few days, but now she was at least getting there. Opening the boxes inside her head. Tidying them. Putting them away again.
The mobile on the table rang and she picked it up. She could see it was McGuire’s private number at the Post.
‘Gilmour! Howsit going?’
‘Try to picture the scene, McGuire.’ Rosie smiled, glad of the distraction. ‘From where I’m sunning myself on the roof terrace of my villa, I can see little fishing boats in the harbour, where hard-working fishermen with calloused hands have just sailed in with something for my dinner tonight. Need I go on? Still pissing down in Glasgow?’
‘And how,’ McGuire replied, ‘but stop gloating about the weather. Have you seen the news today?’
‘No, Mick. I have not seen the news today. You told me not to watch the news. Remember?’
‘Yeah, I know I did, Rosie.’ McGuire’s tone changed a little. ‘But listen sweetheart. There’s a big story going on down in the Costa del Sol, few miles from Marbella. Missing Scots kid. Little girl of three and a half has vanished from the beach.’
‘God almighty! Really?’ She knew what was coming next. ‘What’s happened?’
‘We know fuck all at the moment. The Spanish cops never tell anybody anything. It only happened yesterday and we didn’t get word about it until last night. Late. But this could run and run.’
Rosie wondered why he wasn’t sending one of his best news reporters down to Spain. She wasn’t a hack any more, after all. Since all the trouble six months ago when she nearly got killed in Glasgow, she’d taken the assistant editor’s job in charge of investigations. She didn’t have to get her hands dirty these days.
‘Why me, Mick? I’m off the road.’
Pause. She could imagine McGuire putting his feet up on the desk and pushing back on his chair.
‘Well, Rosie, missing kid? It’s too big to send anybody but you. I can’t afford to be on the sidelines, leaving some youngster to work with the pack of journos, churning out the same old shite. I want you to do it, Rosie … Can you get yourself down there? I’ll make it up to you … Another time …’
Rosie knew it wasn’t really a question. ‘Yeah. Sure you will.’ She stood up and walked across the terrace. ‘What’s the sketch? Do we know anything at all?’
‘Only that it’s three couples on holiday with their families. All friends. The kid vanished from the beach in broad daylight. The villa is in quite a secluded area. They’re not poor, these people. One of them owns some vineyard in France, and the kid’s dad’s a property dealer in Glasgow. Mother’s some kind of insurance broker.’
‘Where were they when the kid went missing?’
‘Don’t know yet, Rosie.’ McGuire sounded like he didn’t want to talk all day. ‘That’s why I want you down there pronto, sweetheart. Think the mum just turned her back for a minute and the kid was on the beach. One minute she was there, then she wasn’t.’
‘Jesus, that’s awful. Is there no intelligence on it? What’s the thinking?
Rosie was already running through the possibilities in her mind. She’d covered plenty of missing kids in her time. Some came home. Most didn’t.
‘Christ, who knows?’ McGuire said. ‘Plenty of sickos out there. Paedos, serial killers, gypsies stealing kids. All sorts of shit.’
‘Right. OK, Mick.’ Rosie was already walking towards her bedroom. ‘Get Marion to call me. She’ll have to get me a hotel in Marbella. And I’ll need money. Who you sending pic-wise?’
‘Matt,’ McGuire said. ‘He’s on a plane this afternoon. He’ll call you when he arrives. I’ll get Marion to phone you shortly.’
‘OK.’ Rosie felt that little punch of adrenalin that had been missing. ‘I’m on it.’
‘Great,’ McGuire said. ‘I’ll sleep tonight. Thanks, Rosie, talk tomorrow. Good luck.’ The phone clicked.
Rosie shook her head. Good luck? Jesus! At the end of the day, McGuire was hoping for good luck not so much for the kid as the story. Some things never change.
She dragged her suitcase from below the bed, opened the wardrobe, and looked at her watch. From where she was on the Costa de la Luz, it would take three hours minimum to drive to Marbella but she should be there for dinner. She felt really alive for the first time in six months.
On the motorway, Rosie kept to the outside lane for a while until she got used to the speed of the road. She hated driving on the right, and even on a motorway she freaked out a little when cars came thundering past her on the inside. Having a car for her month-long holiday in Spain was not something she would normally have done, but the villa, the whole trip, had been arranged by the Post, so she’d decided she might as well give it a go. She’d enjoyed the challenge of driving for the first few days because it had given her something to focus on. Something to get stressed about. And in truth, once she got the hang of it, she loved the freedom of being able to flit in and out of little villages dotted along the west coast that she would otherwise not have seen.
These last days had been the best Rosie had felt in a long time. After the beating in February by the hoodlums who wanted to stop her story, she had been ordered off work when she got out of hospital. But by the start of the third week, she was going stir crazy in her flat. She’d insisted on coming back to work to get stuck into her new job as assistant editor. It had felt really odd at first, not getting out on the streets for the big investigations, but Rosie had been enjoying the newness of it. She hadn’t realised until now that she’d actually missed being on the road so much, and she hadn’t even reached the scene yet! She smiled to herself, wondering when she would ever learn.
McGuire had told her to take a month at the company’s expense as a thank-you for the work she’d done in bringing down that bastard police chief Gavin Fox and exposing the sex scandal at the children’s home. And she’d decided that getting completely off the treadmill for a month would do her a world of good. The truth was that she’d been fighting off panic attacks in the aftermath of the beating, so the holiday had been partly under doctor’s orders. Game on.
In three weeks she’d blitzed all the tourist haunts around Jerez, including the obligatory sherry tour which had left her with an almighty hangover she was convinced might actually be terminal. Rosie had read so many paper-backs she was having trouble working out what was real life and what was fiction. With so little to do, it was only a matter of time before she fell into the wrong hands – literally. And so the clichés came rolling in faster than the Atlantic breakers on the beach at Rota – the little gem of a town where she was living in some splendour in a villa overlooking the ocean.
In one local restaurant she’d got a lot of attention from the owner, a handsome Spaniard with a story to tell and a twinkle in his eye. She felt a little embarrassed even now that she’d allowed him to charm his way right into her bed. The single brooding
woman all alone, and the handsome Spanish man who was allegedly different from the usual Lothario. Jesus. Such a cliche. He’d be using his B-movie script on some other bird next month.
Brits were few and far between in Rota. But the US Naval base at the edge of the town ensured there was plenty of beef to look at on the beach for a woman with far too much energy. Her next distraction was in the solid shape of a US Marine Major with a crewcut, whom she’d met in a cafe one lazy afternoon. Rosie never could resist a man in uniform, and she knew what was on the cards even before they made a lunch date for the following day. After lunch, he’d taken her to a secluded beach nearby, where they played out the rest of the afternoon not unlike the classic scene in From Here to Eternity. The recollection still brought a smile.
These interludes had lifted the ennui and the loneliness which, even in the beautiful surroundings, had sometimes pulled Rosie down. And what the heck, the sex had been particularly good, and she’d resolved to take it up as a proper hobby when she got back home. At least while she was preoccupied with uncomplicated sex, she could put the misery of TJ out of her mind.
She flipped on the stereo and pushed in a CD. The sweeping soundtrack from the movie Out of Africa filled the car. Soothing. Perfect for the time of day, with the sun lower in the sky and twinkling on the sea. Sure beat the hell out of the East End of Glasgow on a wet Monday.
As always in her quieter moments, no matter how hard she tried to forget, Rosie’s thoughts drifted back to TJ. She couldn’t believe he had never once got in touch with her after he left for New York. She’d tormented herself with all sorts of thoughts of what happened that morning when she couldn’t keep her date with him because she was in hospital. In truth, she didn’t even know if she’d have kept it anyway. The night when the killer came to her house, she’d been planning to take the whole evening to make up her mind. In the end, she didn’t get a chance. And from then on she was tortured with ‘what if’ agony, that TJ may have been standing waiting for her at the airport. But his words that day when he’d told her he was going and had given her the airline ticket, still rang in her ears.
