You Will Never Find Me (23 page)

‘
No, no, no . . . por favor, no,
' said the girl, imploring, shocked at the way things were careering out of control.

A terrible sound. A mixture of a smack and thump as the girl's face absorbed some unseen punishment and the back of her head made contact with the hard tiled floor. Boxer weighed the warmed shaft of the heavy-headed adjustable spanner in his hand. The girl was gurgling and spitting, coughing tears.

The electronic signal of the message arriving sounded loud in the echo of the building's hard walls. It was enough to draw El Osito's attention. He reached into his pocket for his phone, opened the message and his head jerked back.

Boxer shoved through the door, right hand holding the spanner, arm across his body. Two steps, and with a backhand drive he smacked the head of the spanner into an area behind El Osito's left ear. The Colombian went down hard, his face hitting the floor with an audible crack. His feet slid out behind him, his arms lifeless at his sides, palms up. The mobile phone spun on the tiles close to the floundering girl. She propped herself up on an elbow. Her left eye was already closing. She touched her face with her fingertips, spat blood onto the tiles.

Boxer straddled the unconscious El Osito, rolled him over, unzipped his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. He let him fall back and stripped both bits of clothing from his insensate body. He secured El Osito's wrists behind his back with the gaffer tape. A police siren came up in the night and receded into the distance. He pulled the girl's knickers from El Osito's trouser pocket and the apartment's keys came with them, which he pocketed. The girl put her arm up in defence, turned her face away as Boxer stepped towards her. He picked up El Osito's phone, the screen showing Amy with her long ringletted hair wearing the red minidress. He put it in his pocket, went down on his haunches.

‘Don't be afraid,' he said in Spanish. ‘I'm not going to hurt you.' He put a hand out to her shoulder, touched her gently. She was crying hard now, blurting snot, blood and tears. He cradled her, put her on her feet, took her to the lift, which was still there. The doors opened. He walked her in, got her leaned up against the wall of the lift.

‘Go now,' he said. ‘Run for your life. You understand?'

He held the doors for a moment while he checked her, made sure she was going to make it.

‘Can you hear me?' he asked.

She nodded. He put her pants into her hand. She looked at them, uncomprehending.

‘You've been very lucky tonight,' he said.

She nodded again.

‘Now forget everything. Only remember that tonight you could have been killed.'

‘
Gracias
,' she said without looking at him.

He gave her twenty euros, told her to take a taxi and let the doors close. The building swallowed the lift.

El Osito started to come round, blood seeping from the wound at the back of his head.

Boxer opened the apartment, slapped on the light, grabbed El Osito by his ankles, turned him through a hundred and eighty degrees and hauled him all the way into the living room. The blinds were already down. Probably always down. He went back and shut the door, pulled a chair out from under the table. El Osito was groggy as Boxer pulled off his boots and yanked off his trousers to reveal the man wore no underpants. He put his hands under El Osito's arms and lifted him up onto the chair.

A mistake. El Osito wasn't quite as groggy as he appeared to be. His knee came up between Boxer's legs, not with any force but enough to propel him forward. They toppled back, El Osito's face in Boxer's stomach. El Osito's head hit the tiled floor first with Boxer's weight on top of him. It was enough to knock him back into unconsciousness. Boxer rolled away. The girl wasn't the only lucky one tonight.

 

Isabel had given Mercy a sleeping pill, which she'd only taken because it was called Halcion, and she knew she'd need something to stop the nose-to-tail circulation of the horrors churning in her mind. It had worked like a club to the head for four hours.

On surfacing she had a fraction of a second's grace before consciousness engaged, Amy entered her mind, her heart contracted and her stomach plummeted into the dark. She lay alone in the silent house, her hands involuntarily clasping, as if wanting to hold on to something. She tried reaching for the good memories, but her mind was too relentless. Perhaps her own sense of guilt was making her do this. She hadn't been there to protect, hadn't been there to prevent some unprovoked violence. She forced herself to confront her daughter's final terror. It unleashed a bout of crying so intense she had to bury her face in the pillow to suffocate the pain. She rolled onto her back, gasping for air. She had nothing inside but a deep, hollow emptiness.

And it came to her more forcefully than before that there was somebody she could fight for, the Russian boy Sasha. And she decided there was only one thing for it: to get back to work. There was no chance of sleep now. She got dressed, left a note for Isabel in the kitchen and left.

Driving through the quickening city but still in the woolliness of her drugged mind, she attempted to dissect last night with a blunt knife. Her feelings about Isabel were ambivalent. When she'd first met her, during the initial hours of Alyshia's kidnap, she'd liked her immediately and had felt it reciprocated. Then, as Isabel's involvement with Charlie became apparent, some jealousy set in. Last night that ambivalence was even more pronounced and she knew why. Isabel's kindness had led Mercy to entrust her with her deepest fear. Mercy was guilty of omission rather than outright deceit. She'd never mentioned the affair with the green-eyed sergeant because the lifelong connection she craved was with Charlie and not the other guy. Now that it was out, or rather there was the potential for him to find out from another quarter, and with her daughter gone, she might have condemned herself to a Boxerless future.

So why had she told her? It took a while for her to come clean to herself. What she'd done was bind herself to Isabel by telling her that secret. It had created loyalty, put them in league. By giving Isabel something she would find impossible to tell Charlie, Mercy had made herself a presence in their relationship.

The traffic was beginning to stretch its legs as she drove south to Streatham. She turned her mobile on, flipped through the missed calls and messages. A few of them were from Marcus Alleyne. At some point she was going to have to work out why the hell she was going to bed with a petty thief and fence from Brixton.

At home she showered and changed. Within half an hour she was out on the road again, doing the only thing she believed she was good at: working.

It was too early for the rowers. She was quite often early for stake-outs. She liked to see the world preparing itself for the scenario she wanted to observe. The river was barely visible, only the occasional shouldering current picked up a glint of light from the shore and bridge. She went off on foot trying to find somewhere selling coffee and something to eat. Nothing was open.

Back down on the river she had to take a firm grip of the ice-cold railing to curb that desire to throw herself in, even though she knew she wasn't the suicidal type. Makepeace had described her as one of life's terriers. She knew she'd clamped her teeth on the rope of life a long time ago, and no amount of shaking would persuade her to let go.

This strange mental turmoil made her think of her father's four-day funeral. In her own selfish way she'd expected no one to turn up, even though he was what the locals would call a Big Man. The turnout had, in fact, been enormous. The number of people who came up to her and told her how much they admired her father was absurd. Her brother had arranged for some tiered seating to be built around the dance floor because there were always traditional performances at a Ghanaian funeral. It was packed every day. She was stunned to find how much love there was for this man who'd had so little to give his own children and wife. Towards the end she'd met an old boyhood friend of her father's, a man in his late eighties, who was permanently bent over, holding on to a staff in his black funeral robe.

He'd told her a story about her father when he was a boy: how happy he was, how popular, how he was going to marry the prettiest girl in the village. Then there was a dispute over land between different tribes in the area, and before the British could step in to arbitrate there was a night of violence. Men went through the village with machetes. The prettiest girl did not survive the attack, nor did a number of older people. Mercy's father was never the same. He went into the police force so that there would never again be a night of violence, not on his watch.

The old man left; company was tiring for him. Mercy sat with his story in her lap, unable to associate it with the man in the coffin. She mentioned the story to others who'd known her father. Nobody knew about the night that had made her father unknowable. She'd filed the story away in her mind as if it were an old photo album featuring unrecognisable people, over which fingers hovered and moved on. Then she'd dust it off and bring it out on a night like this, when somebody in the world had taken the life of another and ruined somebody else's corner of it for good.

The cold made her tear up. She went back to the car and waited for the rowers.

 

Boxer taped El Osito's ankles to the chair legs and righted it. He arranged the man's arms around the sides of the chair and taped his elbows to the struts. He pulled El Osito's head back by his hair and looked into his eyes with a pen torch from his pocket. The pupils reacted. His breathing was regular. He let the head drop back and went to check the other rooms in the apartment.

The master bedroom had been changed into a weights room. A floor-to-ceiling mirror occupied the central third of one wall: pumping iron the spectator sport for an adoring audience of one. There were a hundred and seventy-five kilos on the bench press bar and two hundred and fifty kilos on the higher squat bar. Beyond it was a rack of dumbbells and another rack of blue barbell discs with their kilo weights written in white. There seemed to be a number of weights missing from the five-kilo section. He unthreaded one from the rack, went back to the living room and confirmed his taping was secure. He didn't want this monster suddenly on the loose.

The bed, with its duvet humped in the middle, was in a smaller room. A wall-mounted TV was connected to a cable channel box on top of a DVD player. DVDs were spread over the floor, unnamed recordings. Boxer used the remote and found the TV was on the Mexican bullfight channel before it switched to a DVD showing tattooed gangsters indulging in violent porn. Blood sports and hard core for El Osito to sleep on, or maybe to brighten his day when he woke up in the afternoons. He turned it off.

The wardrobes were full of neatly arranged clothes in plastic dry-cleaning sheaths. One cupboard held a metal rack of highly polished boots, some intricately tooled with pointed silver tips. In the chest of drawers under the socks was a handgun. Boxer knew the make, a Star Firestar M-43 with eight rounds, a weighty piece. He took it with him in case El Osito got free. In the bottom drawer was a tangle of women's underwear, possibly as many as fifty or sixty pairs. The collector's haul. It made him think this was obviously a regular activity, but he couldn't have killed them all. There would have been a manhunt for a serial killer by now.

The third bedroom contained three empty suitcases, a video camera mounted on a tripod and some baseball bats leaned up in the corner. Baseball was not, as far as Boxer knew, a Spanish sport. The bats looked new and undented by contact with any ball. Several were painted white with
NEW YORK YANKEES
emblazoned in blue. One in natural wood had a brown stain. Old blood. Punishment bats for slow or non-paying customers? He took one back to the living room.

El Osito came round to find, in his blurred vision, a man sitting in front of him, head propped up on an elbow. As his vision sharpened he realised that he'd seen this man before but couldn't quite remember where. He saw his own handgun on the table. Nausea slewed in his head and the pounding between his temples made him narrow his eyes to cope with it.

‘
Hablas ingles?
' asked Boxer quietly.

No answer. Pure hatred from slit-dark eyes.

‘I think you do, El Osito, because my daughter barely has a word of Spanish.'

El Osito blinked once.

‘Do you remember my daughter?' asked Boxer, holding up El Osito's mobile phone with the photo of Amy in the red dress.

El Osito shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off Boxer, still trying to work out where he'd seen him.

‘Last Saturday, 17th March, you spent the night with her. She was staying at the Hotel Moderno, but I doubt you met her there.'

Boxer saw that the Hotel Moderno triggered some sort of memory in El Osito's brain. The narrowed eyes widened a millimetre.

‘Remember anything more than that?'

‘You were in the bar,' said El Osito. ‘Standing at the table
con mis amigos
.'

‘A coincidence,' said Boxer. ‘Happens to me all the time when I get a nose for people.'

Nothing from El Osito, just a long hard look, as if he was sculpting him into his mind.

‘Tell me what this is all about,' said Boxer calmly. ‘I've seen the drawer in the bedroom full of underwear. Then there was the girl tonight, the one that got away. She looked similar to my daughter, don't you think? A bit older maybe. My daughter wasn't as lucky as she was tonight. No guardian angel for her. So what's going on in there, Osito?'

He leaned forward and tapped him on the forehead. El Osito jerked his head away, winced at the pain.

‘What was it? A miserable childhood? Bad mother? Abusive aunt? Nasty sister? Lost love? Did you fall for the girl who didn't like you, thought you were below her? It looks like a pattern. Young, dark-skinned, long hair in ringlets, pretty, innocent face, nice legs. So what is it about this kind of girl that . . . makes you so angry?'