She turned her head to glare at him. ‘I did not join the police to play nanny to some foreigner with dirty underwear.’
Mackenzie nodded, ignoring her ire. ‘And they’ll need to be cotton. I react to man-made fibres. Particularly my feet. I get heat blisters between the toes.’
Her glare turned to incredulity. ‘Do you really think that is something I want to know?’
‘I’m only providing you with the information that will allow you to make an informed decision about where to take me.’
‘I’ll take you where it’s cheapest. And you’ll take what you get.’
He nodded. ‘As long as it’s cotton, and the shirts have pockets. Two’s fine, but I must have one on the left.’
She blew exasperation through pursed lips and shook her head. ‘I always knew I didn’t like the English.’
Mackenzie smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Neither do I. I’m Scottish. And I don’t much care for the Spanish either.’
The squeal of tyres echoed around the car park as Cristina accelerated towards the exit, leaving rubber on concrete.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Cleland’s villa – actually Templeton’s villa, since it was rented in that name – sat in its own extensive gardens in an elevated position above cliffs that fell away to the A7 below. From its terrace it appeared as if the infinity pool poured itself in a long waterfall over the edge of the cliff, and the house was set far enough back for almost none of the traffic noise from the road to reach it. In fact, from the house you would not have known there was a road there at all. The view was straight out to sea towards North Africa.
The sun was dipping now towards the west, throwing a pink cast across the few feathery clouds that stretched along the horizon. Palm trees in twos and threes were dotted around the grounds, among a profusion of flowering shrubs: bougainvillea, jasmine, oleander. Pink, red, white. A large Mediterranean pine cast a deep shadow at the end of the garden. The warm evening air was heavy with its fragrance.
It was the first time that Cristina had been back to the villa since the night of the shooting. She drew in behind the Guardia jeep parked outside the gate, and waved acknowledgement to the two officers sitting smoking inside it. She and Mackenzie stepped over the crime-scene tape stretched across the open gate and started up the path towards the porticoed main entrance which was at the back of the house.
They had taken a diversion into Estepona on the way here for Mackenzie to buy what he needed for a stay of indeterminate length. Cristina had driven the police SUV along the pedestrian Calle Real and parked, lights flashing, outside a shop selling men’s clothes at budget prices.
Mackenzie had given her a look. ‘Is it legal to park here?’
‘We’re the police.’
‘Which doesn’t mean we’re above the law.’ He recalled being on the end of a similar look from the traffic cop on Boston Road in Hanwell just a few days earlier.
‘It’s an emergency,’ Cristina had told him dryly.
And he’d frowned. ‘What emergency?’
‘An underwear emergency. Apparently.’
Mackenzie had emerged ten minutes later with two large plastic carrier bags bulging with his purchases, and presented her with a receipt to be reclaimed on police expenses. He had asked if she would like to see what he’d bought. She had not even thought it worthy of a response and driven off in silence.
Now she was filled with apprehension. Just being here, albeit in daylight, brought back the full horror of that night, whose consequences had not yet played themselves out.
Mackenzie caught her by the arm to stop her on the path. ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ he said, and reluctantly she took him through the events which had unfolded in the dark that fateful night. From the discovery that the gates had been forced, to Matías’s stumble on the front terrace, over what later turned out to be a heat lamp, to Cristina’s entry through the open door. Her recollection of the moment that had almost certainly saved her life was unbearably vivid. Cleland silhouetted suddenly in the inky dark by light spilling from the bedroom behind him. His panic as he swung around to discharge his weapon three times at the figure who had stepped into the light. And then the realization that he had just shot his lover as she emerged in all innocence from the bedroom. Cristina could still see the blood pooling on the floor around the dead girl’s body, and hear the anguish that ripped itself in anger from Cleland’s throat as he directed blame for his actions entirely at her.
She relived every moment of it before returning to the present and becoming aware of Mackenzie’s eyes on her, his fingers still wrapped gently around her arm. She saw intensity in his hazel eyes. And something else. Not pity. Sympathy. But she was not sure she wanted the sympathy of this big Scotsman who towered over her, taller than most of her colleagues. Freckle-spattered skin, strangely pale as if it never saw the sun. She retrieved her arm from his grasp.
‘Do you have the key?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Then let’s go in.’
*
The door opened into a strange stillness, the air dusted with dusky light from all the windows that let it in from every wall and ceiling. The hall was wide and ran the length of the house from back to front, leading into a main living
