His first stop before buying a one-way ticket to London at Glasgow Central railway station had been the cuttings library of the Glasgow Herald. It took very little time, searching the archive, to find the report on the suicide of a Glasgow police officer found hanging by the neck in the stairwell of his tenement home in Partick. He had gone almost straight to it, because he knew that his father’s death had fallen just two days before his thirty-first birthday. Without making a direct connection, the single-column piece referred to his attempt the previous month to rescue a woman taken hostage by an escapee from a psychiatric prison in Lanarkshire.
Flicking back through the editions of the paper, he had found the original report. The police officer concerned, unnamed in this story, had defied orders to await the arrival of an expert in hostage situations, deeming the threat to the woman’s life imminent. His attempt to rescue her, at the risk of his own life, had failed. Her captor had slit her throat with a butcher’s knife, so forcefully that he had very nearly decapitated her.
Mackenzie rose stiffly from his old bed and knew that there would be very little sleep for him tonight. He opened the Velux window in the slope of the ceiling and looked down into a back garden grown wild with neglect. It had once, he remembered, been his Aunt Hilda’s pride and joy. Hours spent weeding borders, planting annuals, pruning her precious roses. And it only occurred to him now that all that time spent in her garden was her way of escaping from Arthur.
An odd sound rose up from the house below, like a muffled cough, repetitive and raw. Curiosity got the better of him and Mackenzie climbed carefully down the ladders into the gloom of the hall. The light outside was fading.
But it wasn’t until he pushed open the kitchen door and saw the old man seated at the table, head in hands, that he realized it was sobbing he had heard. A painful retching sob that tore itself with involuntary regularity from his uncle’s chest.
Mackenzie stood watching him impassively for several long moments before the old man became aware of his presence. He turned red-rimmed eyes towards his nephew and swallowed to catch his breath. He said, in a voice like torn sandpaper, ‘I don’t . . . I can’t . . .’ He sucked in a trembling breath. ‘I don’t know how I can go on without her.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s a hot one. The words of Santana’s ‘Smooth’ reverberated around Cleland’s head like an earworm. And he tried to stay cool just like in the song. But it was hard in the olid airless space of this armoured truck. He wore a pair of freshly pressed linen trousers and a crisp white shirt, brought to his cell first thing that morning by his abogado before they transferred him to the truck. He had showered, shampooed and deodorized, determined to look and feel his best. But already his thick, blond-streaked brown hair had fallen across a forehead beaded by sweat. He felt a trickle of it run down the back of his neck.
If he could, he would have held his breath. Neither of the armed Guardia who sat with him in the back of the truck had showered this morning, of that he was certain. The stink of stale body odour and last night’s garlic filled the air. But he tried hard to remain impassive, keeping his own counsel.
He could feel the smooth surface of the AP7 motorway beneath the tyres. They had not yet, he knew, reached Marbella, a town classier than most along this stretch of coast. The Cannes of the costas, he had heard it called. It was here, and in Puerto Banus, that he shopped for his clothes in the best boutiques, where he bought his wines in the most discerning stores – Priorat a favourite, a Catalan wine rarely available in this southern part of Spain, its grapes cultivated in a unique terroir of black slate and quartz soil many kilometres to the north.
He sat on the bench opposite his two guards, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, hands cuffed together between his thighs. He endeavoured not to look at his captors for fear of igniting the rage that burned inside him, a rage that he had kept tamped down with reluctant restraint, a patient biding of time.
The truck slowed. One of the guards stood up and slid aside a small hatch that opened through bars to the front cab. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Peaje,’ the driver called back. They were approaching the tollbooths at the San Pedro turn-off.
The Guardia slid the hatch shut and resumed his seat. But instead of coming to a stop immediately, the van swung right and made a long looping curve down the off-ramp before coming to a juddering halt.
‘What the hell . . . ?’ The officer was on his feet again and pulling the hatch open. He could see quite clearly that they were at the tollbooth on the exit road. ‘Where are you going?’ They were all jumpy.
‘Diversionary route,’ the driver shouted above the rumble of the engine. ‘They said the autopista would be too risky.’ The guard glanced at the armed officer who sat up front with the driver, but all he did was shrug. Nothing to do with him.
Again the hatch slammed shut and the officer sat down heavily as the truck lurched off on the uneven surface of the road. This would not be as smooth a journey as the motorway. He glanced at his fellow Guardia then glared at Cleland. The prisoner sensed eyes on him and raised his own to meet them. The guard immediately looked away, uncomfortable.
They bounced and bumped over a deformed and potholed road, the truck leaning dangerously at times on its camber. Ten or fifteen minutes passed before Cleland felt the driver
