For a frozen moment he stands on his terrace and wonders why the alarm has not gone off. Then once again a shadow passes through the light. Quite brazenly. And he turns quickly and heads inside to find his phone.
*
There are three officers on duty in the squad room when the call is picked up by the duty officer at the desk. He thinks that Cristina has been watching him through the glass before averting her eyes when he looks up. He has always thought that women find him attractive. Even though he is long past his sell-by, and a succession of relationships have invariably broken down when the women have got to know him.
In truth, Cristina had been looking at her own reflection, and might have been surprised had she jumped focus to see him watching her with appraisal. For she has just been thinking how old and frayed she looks. Now in her thirtieth year, middle age is only a decade away, and already there are shadows beneath her eyes, crow’s feet at their outer extremities. With her hair pulled back severely in its habitual pony tail, black roots are showing and she regrets ever having opted to dye it blond. Too much maintenance. And soon, she supposes, those roots will start to grey. At least she still has her figure, even after childbirth. She remains slight, petite. Her male colleagues tower over her – even the smallest of them. She looks away just as the duty officer speaks.
‘Suspected break-in. Out at La Paloma.’
Diego’s eyes flicker up from his card game. From the cant of his head and the appeal in the faintest arching of his eyebrows, she knows that he wants her to go with Matías in his stead. Just thirty minutes until the end of his shift, a wife at home with a new and fractious baby awaiting his return, exhausted from giving birth only days before, and desperate for sleep.
Cristina sighs. She knows very well that her job here in this men’s club simply pays lip service to the requirement for quotas. And to the need for a policewoman to conduct the body searches of female suspects. She will never, by choice of her superiors, be entrusted with much more than traffic duty. Although she has graduated with distinction from the police academy at Àvila. Even though she is consistently the best shot at target practice in Estepona. But if Diego goes out with Matías he likely won’t be home for hours. Even if it’s a false alarm the paperwork will take forever.
‘Okay,’ she says, unaware in this counter-serendipitous moment that her act of generosity will ruin her life.
*
The streets of Marviña are deserted as the white Nissan four-by-four with its rack of blue and white and orange lights on the roof pulls out from the underground car park beneath the offices of the Policía Local. Matías is at the wheel, guiding them towards the roundabout at the top of the hill, through the pools of darkness that lie between the feeble lights of street lamps. From here, moonlight washes across the acres of vineyards, newly in leaf, that fall away across undulating fields towards the distant shimmer of the sea. Ugly urbanizations cluster darkly on once virgin hillsides, some abandoned, completed but uninhabited, victims of the financial crash that brought an end to the building boom that once swept this coastline. Above them the Sierra Bermeja mountains cut sharp shadows against a starry night sky. Below, the lights of Santa Ana de las Vides twinkle around the curve of the bay.
Matías drives at speed around the perilous bends of the road that descends to the sea, past the gathering of brick-red apartments that sit above the father-and-son fruit and veg store on the hairpin, and the jumble of white houses that nestle among the folds of the hill away to their left. It takes less than fifteen minutes heading west on the A7 to reach the roundabout from which the road climbs steeply into La Paloma, where wealthy northern Europeans, and more recently Russians, have built multi-million-euro villas with spectacular sea views.
The villa at the address on the call sheet is registered as belonging to the British expat Ian Templeton. It sits proud above a sheer rock face that drops 17 metres to the road below, and has an unbroken view across the Mediterranean to where the mountains of North Africa are darkly visible on clear winter mornings. To the south, the Rock of Gibraltar dominates the skyline, rising into the moonlight, its silvered face tracing a towering outline against the stars.
A light burns in the neighbouring property. The villa belonging to the caller who reported the break-in. But Matías and Cristina are pre-empted from making him their first port of call by the fact that the gates of Templeton’s villa stand half-open. Tall black-painted wrought-iron gates. A Mercedes A-Class saloon car sits pulled up half on to the pavement outside. If asked, Cristina could not have said what it was about the gates that struck a discordant note. But when they pull up to take a look, Matías jumps out of the SUV and finds that they have been forced.
He slashes a finger from left to right across his throat and she reaches over to turn the key in the ignition and kill the motor. The silence that follows is quickly invaded by the creak of cicadas. She slips out of the vehicle to join him at the gate. A glance through the window of the parked Mercedes reveals a wheel brace lying on the passenger seat. Neither stops to consider the obvious: that few burglars drive Mercedes A-Class sedans.
Matías unclips his holster to draw his standard-issue 9mm SIG-Sauer SIG Pro pistol.
