War Games

by Douglas Jackson

  What do you do when the person you love is wasting away before your eyes?

  I thought I had the answer. For twelve months after she was diagnosed with MS I gave up everything and spent each waking hour with her, taking her to concerts and art exhibitions, cooking and cleaning, not letting her squander an ounce of that precious, dwindling energy on the mundane or the ordinary. She ended up hating me for it.

  ‘I can’t live the rest of my life in a bubble,’ she screamed one day. ‘For God’s sake get out of the house and back to work.’

  When I calmed her down, she sat with tears wet on her face and explained to me what I had been too stupid to understand myself.

  ‘You’re smothering me with your affection and your care, and in some ways that’s worse than this thing that’s killing me. What time I have left, I want to live like a normal human being. Give me some space and give me what dignity you can. Help me when I need help, but, please, Glen, treat me as if I’m your wife, not your invalid great-grandmother who has to have her soup spooned into her mouth. I know,’ she sighed deeply, ‘I know that time will come, and I will deal with it in my own way when it does. But for now, let me do what I can for myself.’

  From that day on, her rate of decline slowed, as if the very words had created a chemical reaction within her that fought the corrosive influence of the disease. Her mood lightened, her resolve grew and thanks to the growing availability of the internet she was able to join a support group that allowed her to use her talents to help other sufferers and their carers.

  We’re a two-computer family. Aelish does her thing on an arty-looking laptop in the spare room, while I run my website from a battered old machine in the study.

  The website followed the books. We built this house from the proceeds of my second book,The Psychic Detective. I’ve written five now and said the same thing about the same subject a thousand different ways without bringing my readers one inch closer to the enlightenment they seek. They read things into what I’ve written that I never said, meant to say, or even considered, and come up with their own solutions to questions I haven’t asked. Some of them are fans, some of them think they are my clients, and some, I believe, may be a danger to themselves or others. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve been able to help a single one.

  The website was a natural next step – a virtual clinic for the vulnerable, the gullible and the downright loopy the internet seems to attract. When it was going well it made a fortune, and I never figured out how. I was a man with a special talent that had brought me fame and a certain amount of fortune; one of a select band with acknowledged psychic capabilities that a few enlightened police forces would call on when they hit a brick wall in high-profile murder cases. It all seemed too good to be true. And it was. The calls stopped coming after I was wrongly implicated in the death of an old Army comrade and ended up back in treatment. It didn’t seem to matter much at the time, but as my profile faded so did the income from the website. By then Aelish had the opportunity to try out the latest new wonder drug, a procedure that required regular stays in a private hospital. I had no illusions that going private would be cheap, but the price they’d quoted knocked the breath from me.

  In a way Aelish is fortunate. She has the relapsing-remitting form of the disease, not the progressive variety, which is downhill all the way. She also has long experience of so-called miracle cures, and it hasn’t been good. For every benefit a new drug brings, there can be a dozen serious side-effects, all of which she’s experienced at one time or another: exhaustion, nausea and vomiting, internal bleeding, enormous weight gain and suicidal depression. This one was no different, and the doctors didn’t try to hide it. Thyroid conditions were just the start. The drug was originally created to fight leukaemia. It works by switching off the immune system – which MS turns against the sufferer by making it attack the central nervous system – and then restarting it. In the meantime, it meant months of vulnerability to every kind of infection going. Theoretically, even the common cold could kill her. The doctors only agreed to take her if she stayed in isolation until her immune system began working again. That meant months of hospital bills. Insurance? Try insuring someone who suffers from MS, and see where it gets you. Aelish knows things are difficult, but not just how difficult.

  And that was before the lawyers’ letters started arriving.

  ‘Are you all right, Glen?’

  We talk in a sort of shorthand I think must come to most married couples who last the distance; sentences that say little but contain a dozen hidden messages and subtle meanings. Long flowery speeches are fine for courtship and the honeymoon, but when two people have been living the same life for so long, unnecessary words are discarded and substituted with meaningful silences. What she was actually asking was: did I want to discuss my day. I answered with a grunt that meant ‘No’. My version of shorthand is fairly basic.

  She shook her head at this latest evidence of my Neanderthal tendencies, but her voice brightened as she remembered something. ‘Oh, there are a couple of e-mails you might be interested in. I moved them to the top of the list.’

  I ran my eyes over them.

  ‘Bugger.’

  ‘What is it?’

  The top message was from Assad@Ali.co.uk, the man who urgently needed my help and who I’d entirely forgotten.

  CHAPTER 3

  José Caracol was the first, but I wouldn’t find that out until much later. José was a street-savvy, sixteen-year-old Spaniard, but he was part-Tunisian, part-gitano, which made him a one hundred per cent outsider. In the summer, he scraped a living fleecing the tourists who throng the concrete-canyoned resorts around Malaga, but in season he walked the dusty roads along the Guadalteba river looking for work as an olive picker to raise money for his much extended and entirely undeserving gypsy family. No one was able to figure out why he should be in the heat-scorched Andalusian hill village of Teba that Friday, 25 August, when thousands of red-nosed guiris were asking to be shorn of their euros forty miles away down on the coast.

  Not many guiris make it as far as Teba, because it’s a long and dusty drive on difficult roads, through alternating rocky outcrops where only the buzzards and the vultures soar, and dull, characterless hillsides lined with regimented ranks of olive trees. The main reason tourists make the effort is to visit the Castillo de la Estrella – the Castle of the Stars – the ruin which has dominated Teba and its people since the Romans came to Spain more than two thousand years ago.

  Local legend says that from the castle tower you can reach up and touch the heavens, but now you make the climb to look down on the village, which shines like a silver jewel on a plain of sun-baked red earth that stretches away towards the distant hills of the Sierra Ronda. Teba is pretty enough, in the white-walled, red-tiled Andalusian fashion. Its narrow streets will lead you to a couple of fine churches and a quiet village square. A mile to the south is the garganta – a precipitous gorge which attracts butterfly collectors and bird-spotters. And that’s about it. It’s not really a very interesting place to die in. Or to die for.

  But looks can be deceptive. Seven hundred years ago that innocent plain below the castle echoed to the thunder of a thousand charging war horses. Men fought and cursed and died, and their blood stained the red earth of the plain redder still. The battle they fought has never really ended. José Caracol was one of its casualties. But, of course, he never knew that.

  A farmer discovered the body close by a dirt roadway, in one of the narrow, rush-filled ditches that split the plain. Prudently, he decided to leave José just where he was. By the time the local police summoned their national counterparts up from Malaga the August sun had turned the corpse almost black. Still, it wasn’t difficult to work out how he’d died. Lieutenant Alvares, in charge of the investigation, studied the intensive pattern of knife wounds concentrated around the victim’s face, neck and chest, and wrote the word ‘frenzied’ in his black notebook. His interest was drawn to a particularly large gash in the left breast an
d his moustache twitched with distaste as he recognised the reason for it. ‘Cabrons,’ he muttered. Bastards.

  A search of the dead boy’s clothing had already placed Jose’s identity card in his hand. When he studied the bony, dark-skinned face with its barely concealed sneer it was difficult to keep his interest from waning. He knew what he would find when he typed the name into the Malaga police computer system. A dozen – maybe many dozens – of arrests for theft and other petty crimes, a few short stays in youth prison. His view was confirmed when he questioned the shopkeepers and the villagers of Teba. Sure, we get gypsies around here. They’re pests – no one actually used the word vermin, but it was there just the same – to be watched like the stray dogs that wait to steal from your kitchen. No, no one remembered this particular gypsy.

  Lieutenant Alvares decided to stay overnight in Teba, for form’s sake. He politely asked his counterpart in the local police to identify any groups of gitanos in the surrounding area. Relationships between the two forces had to be conducted like the first tentative steps of the flamenco dancer; one at a time, and always with delicacy. He would question the gypsies the next morning, with the local officer at his side. The thought of the blank, unco-operative faces gave him a slight feeling of indigestion. He tried very hard to fight it, but in his mind he had already filed José Caracol as the victim of a turf war between two rival gitano clans. The only thing that disturbed this certainty was the mutilation done to the body. It seemed very – deliberate, yes that was the word – deliberate, compared to the savage nature of the rest of the attack. It raised certain doubts that would stay with him for many weeks. But, no, these people, they were without morals, without conscience.

  He studied the thing the dead boy had clutched in his hand. Who was to know what messages they sent to each other in their crude un-Spanish way? Still, he would do his best to discover the killers. The location and the date didn’t strike him as significant, unless that it was, for José Caracol, the wrong place at the wrong time. He was right, but not in the way he thought. He wouldn’t find that out until much later.

  CHAPTER 4

  If the powder-blue Aston Martin sitting at the end of the long tarmac drive shouted money, the house beyond fairly screamed it. House? It was a bloody castle. Three storeys of mock-Georgian white stucco, all fancy towers and crenellated battlements. The dimpled rings where a couple of fair-sized trout snatched flies from the sun-sparkled surface of the artificial lake caught my eye and I mentally tried a couple of casts. On the far side a pair of frisky chestnut ponies chased each other around a grass paddock fitted out with white-poled jumps.

  Three worn sandstone steps led up to a solid oak door framed by fluted pillars. To the right of the doorway stood a pair of muddy riding boots. They were nothing special, just the cheap black rubber version. Aelish takes a size five and these looked about the same. But something about the way the boots were positioned ticked a box in my head and I relaxed a little. Everything about this house and this set-up said different. The dirty boots by the front door said normal.

  The same could be said for the man who opened the door when I yanked the old-fashioned bell-pull. Dark-haired and sombre-eyed, with handsome, regular features and skin the colour of a perfect cup of coffee, he stood a little shorter than me – probably around five eleven – and his expensive tan suit, light-blue, button-down shirt and yellow silk tie made me feel like I’d been dressed by a charity shop. He’d be in his mid-forties, and something about the way he wore it told me the smart suit was his normal dress around the house.

  ‘Mr Ali? Glen Savage.’ I offered my hand and he shook it, his grip firm and his palm dry. He looked a little wary, but then most people do when they meet me for the first time. Hell, sometimes when I look in the mirror I scare myself.

  ‘Assad Ali,’ he confirmed gravely, ushering me inside. The interior was a letdown. I’d expected a fusion of Scottish baronial splendour and eastern exotic, with maybe just a splash of filthy rich excess, but it might have belonged to a Victorian bank manager. All gloomy dark wood panelling, tartan carpets and flowery wallpaper, with not a suit of armour or an elephant in sight. As we walked through the hall I caught a glimpse of a pale female face at the top of the broad stairs leading to the first floor, but if Mr Ali noticed he chose to ignore it. ‘Welcome to Chapel House, Mr Savage, and thank you for coming so quickly.’

  I shot him a tight smile that said I’d had to drop everything to get here, but the smile was a lie. As I’ve said, business had been slow lately and Assad Ali’s summons, along with its hint of a big fat fee, had arrived at just the right time. When I’d called him the previous day he gave me directions to the house, just off the main road south of Dalkeith. The underlying tension in Mr Ali’s voice had intrigued me. He said it concerned a family member, but he wouldn’t reveal who or why.

  He waited until I was settled into a cushion-scattered leather couch the size of a small battleship before coming to the point. Gathering his thoughts in front of the big bay window, he stared at a framed photograph he’d picked up from one of several antique dressers and sideboards. ‘This is my daughter, Gurya,’ he said eventually, handing me the picture. ‘She is sixteen. I believe she has been kidnapped.’

  The measured way he said it, in a soft Scottish brogue entirely devoid of any inflection, confused me for a split second. Then the word ‘kidnapped’ sank in. It’s what I do. Find people. Dead or alive. But mostly dead. The questions began to bounce around my head, each of them spawning its own little brood of possibilities, but Mr Ali had the floor and they’d have to wait.

  Gurya Ali was beautiful in a way that belied her age. Raven hair fell in lustrous waves to her shoulders, and she had Cupid’s bow lips and her father’s fine-boned features. Even in her school uniform she couldn’t hide a sensual awareness that should have belonged to a woman about five years older. Somehow, as well as her looks, the photographer had managed to capture intelligence, self-confidence and what looked to be a wicked sense of humour. As I studied the picture I could feel Assad’s eyes watching me. I knew what he was thinking. What I am and who I am creates expectations. In the past I’d succeeded where other – probably more skilled and talented people – failed. Doing the impossible can be tough to live up to.

  Sometimes the dead call out to me and sometimes they don’t. Gurya Ali wasn’t dead – or at least I didn’t think she was – and as I looked down at her smiling face I experienced none of the things Assad Ali wanted me to feel. No great revelations, no white light, no voices from the void or flash of inspiration that revealed a possible location. A big fat nothing. ‘If you believe your daughter has been kidnapped,’ I said frankly, ‘you don’t need me, you need the police. They have the manpower and the resources to find her.’ They’re also cheap. I knew I was talking my way out of Mr Ali’s cash. It had nothing to do with integrity, but everything to do with credibility. I like to think of myself as a professional. If he hadn’t called the cops I needed to know why; it would save a lot of trouble further down the line. I also wondered why he didn’t have his wife with him. I’d been in enough similar situations to know that solidarity is one of the main things that holds a family together in these circumstances. Maybe she felt too distressed to talk about it, but that wasn’t the message I’d got from the face on the stairs.

  ‘I’m not a fool, Mr Savage.’ His features twisted into a grimace as if I’d just insulted him, which I suppose I had. ‘The first thing I did when Gurya failed to come home last Saturday was to call the police. It took them three hours to get here – a woman and a young man – and they did not treat the matter with the urgency it merited. My wife was quite distraught.’

  Saturday was exactly a week earlier. If the girl had been snatched by somebody I was already way off the pace. I ran through all the reasons why the cops hadn’t taken the case as seriously as he thought they should. ‘They suggested she might have stayed over with a friend?’ He nodded. ‘And is that something she’s ever done before?’

/>   ‘Never.’ He said it as if girls staying over with friends only happened to other people.

  ‘Never?’

  He shifted a little in his seat. ‘Perhaps once or twice, with school-friends, but only when I gave my permission.’

  ‘Male or female?’ The question wasn’t strictly necessary, but I was beginning to find Assad Ali’s sanctimonious manner irritating. He may be handsome, impeccably well bred and stinking rich but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be human. He stared at me as if he’d just caught me peeing in his fountain, but I persisted. ‘Did the police follow up their visit?’

  ‘They took a statement and asked some questions I regarded as impertinent.’ He frowned at me, remembering a more recent impertinent question. ‘Two days later they returned and informed me they would “monitor the situation” but did not intend to take further action.No further action!’ The final three words exploded from him, and for the first time he showed the kind of emotion I would have expected from someone whose daughter had disappeared. I realised I’d misjudged him. I’d thought him a hard man; not uncaring, but hard, the way fathers can sometimes be. He was actually a very frightened man who mistook self-control for strength when it’s really only a dam that holds back weakness and helplessness. Now the dam had broken.

  ‘My daughter has been gone for a week, Mr Savage.’ His eyes pleaded with me to help him understand what was happening. ‘Only Allah knows what has befallen her. We did not know what to do or who could help. It was my wife who suggested you.’ He shook his head as if he could barely believe what he’d done and I realised what it had taken for him to pick up the phone. Mr Ali had just confirmed he was a God-fearing Moslem, and to some people – the uninitiated and ill-informed – Glen Savage is the Devil’s disciple. My respect for Mrs Ali grew. ‘We have had no word. The police will not help us. I will do whatever is necessary to get her back, Mr Savage. I will pay anything or anyone.’