Mackenzie squinted up at him in the sunlight. The chief was silhouetted against the sky, and Mackenzie couldn’t see the expression on his face. ‘No,’ he said.
‘That none of our people thought to check if the bastard had a boat here.’ He turned a disapproving gaze on the Scotsman. ‘It was a good thought, señor. Just a poor execution.’
Mackenzie could not disagree. His eye was caught by the movement of a diminutive figure pushing through the crowd. It was Cristina. Mackenzie’s heart sank. He could only imagine what she would say. She strode along the pantalán adjusting her hair in the band that gathered it at the back of her head. She nodded to the Jefe and glared at Mackenzie. ‘Can’t leave you alone for five minutes, can I?’
Mackenzie attempted a smile. ‘Apparently not.’
The Jefe said to her, ‘Get him out of my hair. Take him for something to eat. Tell him we don’t operate like cowboys here. There’s a meeting at the station called for five this afternoon. We’ll go over everything we know then. Just make sure he’s back in time.’
‘I am here, you know,’ Mackenzie said. ‘I can hear you.’
The Jefe glowered at him. ‘Not sure I feel like talking to you right now.’
*
As they walked back along the access road to the port, Cristina said, without looking at him, ‘That was a smart piece of work.’
He kept his eyes on the tables and chairs outside the cafes and restaurants that flanked the harbour ahead of them. ‘Thank you.’
‘The first part. Not the second.’
‘I think the Jefe already made that clear.’
‘You’re lucky he didn’t throw you into the harbour.’
Mackenzie pressed his lips into a grim line.
‘I think he likes you,’ she said, and Mackenzie turned a look of surprise in her direction. She flicked him a glance. ‘God knows why.’
The Nissan SUV was parked at the top of the steps which had been Cleland’s escape route from the port. As she opened the driver’s door Cristina said, ‘Are you hungry?’
Mackenzie nodded.
‘Well, you’ll have to wait. I have to go into Estepona first and call in on my aunt. We can grab something to eat afterwards.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ana’s excitement is palpable. It consumes her every thought, fills her physical being. It is a feeling she has not known in all the years since the shutters came down on her world. A feeling that brings back hope, like stumbling upon water unexpectedly in a desert. A feeling that perhaps life might just be worth rekindling.
Her fingertips tingle from the braille that she has read and reread on her screen. He will not have heard her voice, and she has no idea how it might have sounded to the operator who passed it on in text on a screen. Whether she spoke too loudly, or too softly, or if it still has that husky little catch that always surprised her when she replayed a recording of it. Something she never heard herself in real time.
Had the operator, she wonders, discerned at all the emotion conveyed in the brief exchange of words for which she had been the conduit?
Sergio’s call was so unexpected, so undreamt of, Ana still finds it hard to believe it really happened. All those years ago she had been able to hear his voice, and now has to imagine it from the patterns that raise themselves beneath her fingertips, capable only of drawing its rich soft cadences from recollection. Whatever hesitation it might have contained was impossible to interpret from the braille. Whatever apprehension lost for ever in the ether. Just his words in cold, hard little dots.
‘Hello, Ana. It’s Sergio.’
She had responded to the call, prompted by the buzzer that vibrated at her breast. Never, in any lifetime, expecting to read those words. At first she had been at a loss as to how to respond.
‘Sergio?’ Which had seemed so inadequate, given how laden this call was with its own history.
‘I want to say sorry to you a million times over, Ana. But not in a phone call.’
No words had come. She had sat frozen with disbelief, then fear that somehow this was some wicked hoax. It was more than twenty years since they had last spoken.
‘I have only now discovered where you are living. I cannot believe it. All this time, and only a few streets away. Oh, Ana, say you’ll see me. Let me come and tell you myself. You owe me nothing, I know. But I owe you everything. Not least an explanation. I could come later this afternoon, or early this evening. It depends when I can get away from work. Please, Ana.’
Finally she had found her inner voice and let it speak through the operator. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Sergio. And even if I could there’s nowhere for me to go.’
‘I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ll tell you everything then.’
And so the call had ended, leaving her to thrash about in a sea of emotions, drowning in her own past.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ana remembered the first time she ever set eyes on Sergio. He had not immediately endeared himself to her.
It was 1997. She was in her
