‘That’s true, I didn’t. Nor her son.’
‘Can I have your number?’
‘Only if you give me yours and let me call you and ask you technical questions.’
‘It’s a deal,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a big help.’
‘It didn’t sound like it.’
Boxer lay spreadeagled on the hotel bed trying to think. The one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that El Osito would never forget his face. The way the Colombian had stared at him was like an artist clearing away the onion layers of the persona to get down to the real and memorable man. He’d looked at him as if he might learn something about himself from such a face. He knew El Osito would take his visage to the grave with him, would remember him so well that he’d be able to come looking for him in another life. And he wouldn’t have to wait that long. Boxer had been stupid. He should have just done what he set out to do. Taken his revenge. Killed him for murdering his child. He had no idea why he’d started questioning him or what he’d hoped to gain from such a ridiculous interrogation.
That was when he got his first glimmer. It shunted him up and off the bed and in front of the full-length mirror. Staring at his reflection, he realised he hadn’t been looking for an insight into El Osito’s bizarre brain, but hoping to see inside his own. He stood, hands on either side of the mirror, as if he had to steady himself to confront his own presence. What was going on in there?
Nothing came back at him. He pushed against the wall, willing the monster inside to come clean. He shoved himself away.
It was impossible now to stay in this room, the last place in which he knew his daughter had been alive, the place where he’d got uncomfortably close to himself, the place where El Osito knew to come looking. He packed his bag, went down to reception and checked out.
The receptionist gave him a package, which had been personally delivered by Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita late last night. He had expressly asked for Señor Boxer not to be disturbed and had written an explanatory note. Boxer asked them to call a cab to take him to the airport and read Zorrita’s note.
Because of the recent cuts, the police forensic laboratory would not be able to derive DNA from the tissue taken from Amy’s body for another three weeks. There was a backlog of DNA samples that stretched to November 2011 and there was nothing Zorrita could do. He knew how important it was for parents to bring their child’s body home, but in this particular case, because of lack of facial ID, the authorities would not allow repatriation unless there were matching DNA samples. Zorrita had been able to persuade the lab to prepare tissue slides taken from the leg, which he enclosed in the box attached. He had also persuaded the Spanish authorities to accept a UK lab’s analysis of the tissue samples matched to the mother and father’s DNA to allow the release of the body.
The cab arrived to take him to Barajas Airport. He sat in the back and tapped out a message to Mercy, asking if the police forensic lab could get a DNA match done in less than three weeks. Then he remembered their last conversation on that issue and saved it as a draft, didn’t send it.
He sent a text to Zorrita, thanking him for the attention he’d given to Amy’s case. As they headed through the northern outskirts of the city he couldn’t help but find the inspector jefe’s total integrity admirable. He wondered how many murderers Zorrita brought to justice every year. Real justice. A justice that the victims might equate with the terror they’d suffered and whose families could weigh against the grief they’d endured. As he performed this ridiculous balancing act he realised what he was doing. Assuaging his guilt. He’d just caught sight of himself on the integral scale between good and evil, where Zorrita was at one end and El Osito at the other, and he was closer to El Osito’s end than he was to Zorrita’s.
The cab dropped him off at departures. He went through the tedium of check-in and security and only started thinking last night through more carefully when he had a cup of coffee in front of him in the departure lounge.
What had gone wrong at El Osito’s apartment last night? Why had his ‘freaks’ turned up? El Osito had split away with the girl. If he’d wanted the others involved he’d have stuck with them. So how did they get to be there? He must have had a way of alerting them, but Boxer had picked up the Colombian’s mobile outside his apartment and had taped his hands behind his back as well.
Was there a panic button somewhere in the flat? If El Osito had product there and money it wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. He’d been unconscious when Boxer had dragged him in. Then he remembered El Osito kneeing him in the crotch as he’d lifted him onto the chair. It hadn’t been a brutal blow that caused any damage and he’d put that down to the Colombian being groggy. Maybe rather than trying to inflict pain he’d been kicking out at a button under the table.
And what had he shouted out? What was the command he roared to his freaks? The first word had been ‘No’. He remembered that, and the second had three syllables. He replayed the scene in his head. The swing and the miss. The shattered glass. The bat on the floor. Recovering it. The men bundling down the corridor. Driving the baseball bat through the doorway. The grunt of pain. The flash of chrome. A gun clattering across the floor. El Osito, on his back by then, must have seen it all.
Boxer connected to the Internet and went to a free translation site. On a hunch he entered, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and asked for the translation in South American Spanish. The answer came back: ‘No disparar.’ That was it. El Osito was telling them not to shoot, and he hadn’t done that through fear of bringing the police to his door.
El Osito wanted him for himself.
17
8:30 A.M., THURSDAY 22ND MARCH 2012
Clinica Privada Iberica de Madrid
Your left ankle was broken into a number of pieces, which we have pinned together. Your right ankle was undamaged, but you have sustained a fracture to the lower part of the fibula,’ said the surgeon. ‘Your knees? Well, both patellae have been broken: the left in two pieces, the right into four. The end of the femur and fibula on both sides sustained cracks but luckily nothing has broken off. The medial ligaments on both sides have been torn—’
El Osito, lying in a hospital bed, held up his large left hand. He didn’t need to hear anything more about the damage.
‘When will I be able to start walking again?’
‘Two to three months if everything—’
‘Two months?’
‘Possibly three,’ said the surgeon. ‘Look, you’ve refused to tell me what happened to you, but I can tell that these four joints have sustained severe, directed blows from something hard. This was done to you with the specific aim of causing you maximum pain and making sure that, if you did walk again, it would always be with difficulty and discomfort. You’ve been lucky that some of the blows weren’t as accurate as others. Had they been, you’d probably have had to be in knee braces for the rest of your life and your ankles would have required multiple operations.’
El Osito’s big left hand came up again.
‘Two months it is,’ he said. ‘Send in mis compañeros.’
The surgeon was used to being dismissed like this, especially by private clients who didn’t have any insurance and wanted to pay in cash. He left the room, glad to get out. He nodded at the two men sitting in the corridor. He’d just treated the one with the ponytail for cracked ribs. He knew, by the look of them, the types he was dealing with, which was why he hadn’t bothered offering to send the police to the victim’s bedside to take a statement. They went into the room without acknowledging him.
This was the first time they’d spoken to El Osito since they’d cut him free from the chair and, in total agony, he’d ordered them to take him down in the lift and put him in the back seat of the BMW they’d arrived in. Jesús knew better than to make any fuss about this or to whinge about his own cracked ribs. He could tell from the sweat standing out on El Osito’s forehead in the cold n
ight air that this was a man in serious pain. Jesús had elected to stand guard over the apartment until someone else came to relieve him. Jaime drove El Osito to the clinic.
They stood at the end of the bed, one on either side, faces arranged to mask both dismay and concern that their boss was in such a state. They were glad to see he was no longer in pain and hoped that the self-administered morphine would take the edge off his rage.
‘So, who was he?’ asked Jaime. ‘We’ve got everybody on full alert here, including up in Galicia and down on the costas. Was he Russian?’
‘The Russians haven’t forgiven us,’ said Jesús. ‘They still think we tipped off the police before Operation Scorpion.’
‘He was English.’
‘English?’
‘He was the guy in the bar.’
‘What guy?’
‘When I came into that bar where we first met last night, there was a foreigner standing at your table, drinking a beer,’ said El Osito. ‘Him.’
Jesús and Jaime looked at each other as if they might have been in some way responsible for this.
‘The man thinks I killed his daughter, cut her up and threw her pieces into the River Manzanares.’
Silence. Jesús and Jaime barely dared to breathe. They knew this was distinctly possible. Their boss, Vicente, had warned them about El Osito and his odd habits before the Colombian had arrived in Madrid. He liked to live in downbeat neighbourhoods, he lifted superhuman weights, he used his own product and he didn’t like black girls or mulatas, liked to beat them up.
‘You mean this English guy is some crazy person,’ said Jesús, remembering that they shouldn’t show too much knowledge about El Osito’s foibles. They also knew about guys who used too much of their own product and its tendency to short the wiring in their paranoid brains, resulting in blowouts of uncontrollable rage.
‘You’re going to do two things for me and you’re going to do them fast,’ said El Osito, calm with the morphine in his system. ‘You’re going to talk to our friends in the police and you’re going to find out the name of the girl who was killed last Saturday, or maybe Sunday, and whose body was found cut up in bags in the river. I want as much information as possible. He said the police found her passport, so I want a photocopy of that passport. If it costs money, you pay. That investigative journalist you spoke to, giving him the dirt on the Russians in Marbella, what was his name?’
‘Raul Brito.’
‘Tell him you want the favour returned. You want to know the inside story about this girl. Everything. You understand?’
‘Is that it?’
‘I said there were two things.’
‘The police and the journalist,’ said Jesús.
‘That’s two people but about the same thing,’ said El Osito. ‘You’re going to find out why the Englishman thought it was me who killed his daughter.’
‘How do we do that?’ asked Jesús.
‘You have to use your head. No, Jesús, sorry, my mistake; you have to use the brain inside your head,’ said El Osito. ‘The other thing the Englishman told me was that his daughter stayed in the Hotel Moderno and that she was seen leaving Kapital with me. There was a photo of her wearing a red dress. He sent it to my phone.’
‘Where’s your phone?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the Englishman took it. Use the tracker software, see if you can find it. If you find it, you might find the Englishman. Why d’you need me to tell you these things?’
‘I don’t . . . ’ started Jesús.
‘Start using your brain, Jesús, or you’ll end up with more than a few cracked ribs. You understand me?’
‘We know the people on the door at Kapital,’ said Jaime, saving his brother from El Osito’s attention.
‘Maybe it was the people on the door who told the Englishman . . . ’
‘No, no, no. They don’t talk to anybody. They know you’re connected to us. They wouldn’t tell anybody you left with any girl. They need their blow as much as the people inside.’
‘And the Charada,’ said El Osito. ‘You ask around there too. Maybe Joy. You know the clubs. Somebody’s got to have seen something.’
‘And if we find the guy—’ started Jesús.
‘Not if. When you find the guy you take him to La Escuela and I will go down there and do the talking. You know what I mean, Jesús?’
They knew what La Escuela was: an old warehouse in the middle of the country, distant from any villages. The walls were still standing and about half the roof. It was called the School because it was where they took people to learn hard lessons about money, debt and interest payments, and in the event that they found these lessons too difficult to take in, they were given the hardest lesson of all.
‘I’m very sorry about Amy,’ said Papadopoulos, brown eyes concerned under his heavy black eyebrows. ‘I couldn’t believe it when the DCS told me. You must be devastated, Mercy. I mean . . . are you really O.K. to deal with this sort of crap? Wouldn’t you rather—’
‘Sit at home?’ said Mercy. ‘No thanks.’
She was glad that Papadopoulos wasn’t one of the touchy-feely coppers who’d become more prevalent in the force in the age of New Sentimentalism. He didn’t try to put an arm around her shoulder when he was somebody who’d normally salute her. He kept a respectful distance, said his piece, maintained eye contact but was still slightly awkward. Technically they were partners, but she was his superior and he the understudy, which meant that they were not equals and he shouldn’t seek to comfort too much. Mercy didn’t want any of that from her colleagues. She’d never liked the enfolding kind, the ones she suspected used the tragedy of others as an excuse to find out what it was like to hold someone in their arms.
‘But thanks anyway, George,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. The DCS told you to report me if you thought I wasn’t up to the task.’
Papadopoulos nodded.
‘As long as you don’t do that we’re going to be fine,’ said Mercy. ‘What’s going on here?’
They both looked at the door to the office building they were standing outside.
‘No answer,’ said George, who was now certain that Mercy didn’t know what he’d been involved with last night and wasn’t sure how he should play it.
‘Still early,’ said Mercy. ‘What’s the matter with you, George? You’re looking . . . stricken. I don’t need you to look like that. No kid gloves, O.K.? Just act normal, or as normal as you can.’
‘I checked with Chris Sexton to see if they’d heard anything from the gang,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘You could smell the sweat coming down the line. Thirty-six hours and still nothing.’
‘That wasn’t it.’
‘What?’
‘That look,’ said Mercy. ‘Don’t ever hide stuff from me, George.’
‘I was on Hampstead Heath last night, looking for Charles Boxer’s mother,’ he said, looking across the traffic. ‘We found her unconscious with the best part of a bottle of vodka inside her and plenty of temazepam. I got her to the Royal Free as fast as I could. She’s on life support.’
Mercy stared into the gutter. He was surprised to see her frowning, her lips tight over her teeth, muttering, ‘Fucking typical.’
A young blonde woman fiddling with a set of keys passed between them. She opened the door to the DLT Consultants building. She was in a grey pencil skirt and very high black patent-leather heels.
‘You with DLT?’ asked Papadopoulos.
‘What’s it to you?’ she asked, checking him out head to toe, unimpressed.
‘We’re police,’ said Mercy.
They flipped out their warrant cards. The blonde shifted her blue eyes to Mercy, parted her chilli-red lips. Mercy was still furious. Typical of Esme to make a scene, for it to be all about herself, and irritating as well to be outdone on the emotional stakes. There was more to this. Es
me had to have been involved in Amy’s plans and now felt responsible.
The blonde turned back to Papadopoulos, who was more restful to the eye.
‘We’d like to talk to Messrs Dudko, Luski and Tipalov and Irina Demidova,’ said Mercy, putting away her card.
The blonde shouldered through the door, didn’t hold it for Papadopoulos, who had to lunge forward to stop it closing. She picked up the post, dropping to her haunches while Papadopoulos held the door.
‘Mr. Luski is in Tashkent, Mr. Tipalov is in Siberia.’
‘Then it looks like we’ll have to settle for Mr. Dudko,’ said Papadopoulos.
The blonde gave him a ‘think you’re clever’ look as she slowly came back up to his height.
‘He’ll be here soon.’
‘And Irina Demidova?’
‘Now there we have a problem,’ said the blonde. ‘I don’t have the first idea who you’re talking about.’
‘You don’t?’ said Mercy, producing a photo of Demidova. ‘We’re talking about this woman?’
‘Then you’ll be referring to Zlata Yankov,’ said the blonde.
‘Will we?’ said Mercy, intrigued now.
‘Yep, and Ms. Yankov is a law unto herself.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I don’t always know where she is or what she’s doing.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Ask Mr. Dudko when he gets here. He hired her.’
They followed her upstairs, Papadopoulos behind the swinging hips, the taut material of the pencil skirt practically creaking under the strain of containment. She took it slowly as if she might be enjoying the induced mesmerisation behind her.
She unlocked the office, keyed in the alarm code, turned on her computer and the Nespresso machine. She put on a headset and listened to the messages. As she listened she took notes and sent emails. After five minutes she tore off the headset.
‘Coffee?’ she said. ‘We don’t do Greek, I’m afraid.’
You Will Never Find Me Page 20
