THIRTY-SIX
Thorne woke with an idea.
He called Yvonne Kitson and asked her to dig out
Langford’s file; to look through the list of his blood relatives
and get dates of birth and phone numbers for any who were still
alive. When Kitson called back fifteen minutes later, he scribbled
down the information on a scrap of hotel notepaper.
‘Sorry about this Chambers thing,’ Kitson said. ‘It
must feel like a kick in the teeth.’
‘It’ll blow over,’ Thorne said.
Then he called Samarez.
He gave the Guardia Civil officer the significant
dates and numbers and explained what he was looking for. Samarez
said he would check the phone records and get back to him later in
the day.
‘I don’t need telling that Mackenzie is Langford,’
Thorne said, ‘and I know this probably won’t stand up in court. But
until we’ve got the print evidence, it’ll have to do.’
Samarez told him that they would not have too long
to wait for the fingerprint match. ‘Candela met up with Mackenzie
in a nightclub last night. She told him she had a headache and left
early with Mackenzie’s champagne glass in her handbag. So, with
luck . . .’
‘I hope she was careful.’
‘She is not stupid.’
‘Neither is Langford,’ Thorne said.
They talked for a few minutes about how the inquiry
might best be taken forward, both skirting around the fact that
until there was some new information, either in Spain or from the
UK, it was likely to go precisely nowhere. Samarez said that he was
busy on other cases for the rest of the day, and that Fraser had
called in sick. He asked Thorne what he was planning to do and
Thorne said he had no idea.
‘You should get up to Ronda,’ Samarez said. ‘It’s
really very nice.’
‘So I hear.’
‘It might do you good to relax for a few
hours.’
Coming from Samarez, the suggestion seemed less
like an attempt to get Thorne out of the way than it had done from
Fraser. Thorne wondered if Samarez might be right. There was
nothing else that could usefully be done while they were waiting
for Forensics to lift a print off the glass Candela Bernal had
provided. To scan the results and send them through to London for
comparison. A trip would certainly kill some time and might help
take his mind off Langford for a while.
Off Anna Carpenter and Andrea Keane.
‘I’ll see how I feel,’ he said.
He left the hotel and found a café. He drank two
cups of milky coffee and made short work of scrambled eggs, fried
potatoes and chorizo. Then he walked down towards the commercial
area of the village to collect his hire car.
The enthusiasm in Thorne’s voice had been clear
enough when he had called the previous afternoon. His voice always
rose a little higher when he was fired up and he talked faster.
Everything he had suggested made sense, and Holland and Kitson had
gone about their task with all the dedication they could muster.
But Holland could not help but feel that increased hope would only
lead, in the end, to increased disappointment.
That penalty kick he was destined to fluff had just
become even more important.
Going back as far as Thorne had requested had
eventually yielded another eight candidates. Having made certain
that each one was still missing, Holland and Kitson had arrived at
work that morning to begin the laborious process of contacting the
next of kin, making appointments, and arranging wherever possible
for DNA samples to be collected. As with the list they had worked
through in February, most of the stories were simple yet terrible.
The reasons why these individuals might have vanished without a
trace, for the holes left in other people’s lives.
Drugs. Abuse. Mental illness.
Or nothing at all.
A case that fell firmly into the last category
caught Holland’s eye halfway through the morning. Just for a moment
or two, it made him feel as though he might have his penalty-taking
boots on after all. Having talked to Brigstocke, he and Kitson
decided they would not tell Thorne until they were sure there was
really something to get excited about. But everyone agreed that it
looked promising; that they should focus all their attention on
this case.
Find out who was in that Jag, Dave. He’s the key
to all this.
It seemed to Holland as if it had risen up from the
stack of files like a card from one of Brigstocke’s magic
decks.
The car was stifling and smelled plasticky when
Thorne picked it up, but once the air con had been running for ten
minutes, the drive up into the hills was pleasant enough, although
the concentration it demanded left little time to take in the
scenery. It was a far steeper climb than the one up to
Mijas, with alarming drops on his left-hand side and more
than a few hairy corners. Thorne was amazed to see signs warning of
snow on the road, which were not only incongruous, considering the
hot weather, but made him wonder how in hell any driver managed the
climb – and worse yet, the descent – in freezing conditions. Chuck
in the risk of rock falls and the occasional wandering goat, he
thought, and it would be astonishing if anyone made it up or down
in one piece.
It took him the best part of an hour to reach
Ronda, and within a few minutes of parking the car and starting to
walk towards the centre of the ‘white town’, he was out of breath.
He stopped and looked down from one of the bridges into the canyon
on which the town was perched, carved out by the river which now
divided it in two. He took a minute. The view was undeniably
spectacular, and he was content to put the breathlessness down to
the fact that he was several thousand feet above sea-level, rather
than blaming the several pounds he could do with dropping.
The big breakfast might have been a mistake, he
thought.
He picked up a map from a tourist information
office and followed it past rows of small shops and quirky museums
to the historic bullring that Fraser had mentioned. There were far
fewer visitors around than there had been in Mijas, but Thorne put
that down to the feria. This town had a different
atmosphere, too, something almost reverential, and it was certainly
quieter.
He paid his four euros and walked through a
turnstile into the empty bullring. The sandy floor sloped very
gradually up towards the centre and was harder than he had
expected. A couple was taking photos on the far side, and more
people were moving in the stands, but despite their presence, and
the late morning sun overhead, the place felt strangely cold and
spooky. Resonant of a past that made Thorne uncomfortable. He found
himself wondering how many animals had died there . . . and how
many men. How much blood had soaked into the floor beneath his feet
over two hundred and fifty years.
Standing in the centre of the ring, looking towards
a pair of scarred, white, wooden gates, it was easy to imagine the
heat and the roar of a frenzied crowd. Thorne could almost taste
the adrenalin, coppery in the mouths of those waiting to face the
bulls. He tried to gauge the distance between the centre and the
edge, asked himself if he would make it, should he ever find
himself running from a charging bull. He still fancied himself as
reasonably quick if he needed to be, in short bursts at any
rate.
He decided he would not even get halfway.
He spent a few minutes walking around the
bullring’s museum, taking no more than a passing interest in the
old photographs and mounted bulls’ heads. He looked briefly at the
antique suits of lights displayed behind glass and wondered why
vintage clothes always seemed so small, before walking across to a
bar on the edge of the main square.
He waved to attract a waiter’s attention and was
ignored.
On the table, he laid out a handful of leaflets for
some of the town’s other attractions. There was certainly no
shortage of museums, but each exhibition seemed more gruesome, more
bloodthirsty, than the last.
A history of hunting.
Torture during the Spanish Inquisition.
Five hundred years of capital punishment.
Looking at pictures of some of the exhibits, Thorne
was not sure that Ronda was quite as ‘nice’ as everyone kept
telling him.
It was hotter now, and Thorne turned again to look
for the waiter. The bar was busy and he cast an eye across the
customers, half expecting to see the man with the newspaper he had
spotted twice already. But when he heard a chair being scraped
back, he spun around to see an even more familiar figure.
Thorne could only watch as Alan Langford dropped
casually into the seat opposite.