Mackenzie saw the tears in his eyes catch the light of the rising moon.
‘Amazing how quickly those who give their lives are forgotten by their country. The very people for whom they made their sacrifice.’
Now Mackenzie didn’t know where to look. And he was frightened to speak for fear of saying something crass or stupid or just offensive. It seemed he never knew what to say, and when he tried he usually got it wrong. Or so Susan always told him. Silence spoke with more discretion.
It was the Jefe who broke it. He forced a laugh. ‘I’m sorry, señor, I didn’t mean to be maudlin. It’s been an emotional couple of days.’
Mackenzie nodded. ‘Has Cristina worked under you for long?’
‘Not so long. But I’ve known her since she was a child. Knew her parents.’ He shook his head. ‘Gave her away at her wedding after the death of her father.’ He paused. ‘It’s a tragedy what happened to Antonio. And I haven’t told Cristina about Ana yet. Seemed like that might just be more than she could cope with right now.’ He blinked back the threat of more tears. ‘Sometimes... sometimes things just never turn out the way you want them to.’ He forced himself away from the thought. ‘I don’t know how much longer they’ll want to keep you here. I suppose until either Cleland is caught, or he gets away. One way or another, that’s likely to be in the next forty-eight hours.’
Mackenzie emptied his glass. ‘I should have had him. Twice! But today was worse. I let him get away with Ana. If anything happens to her...’ His uncle’s words about his father still resonated, even after all this time. He was a total waster, your father. Thought that nothing was beyond him. Well he learned the hard fucking way just how wrong he was.
‘Not your fault, son.’
Mackenzie didn’t miss the paternal undertone. There was something very Scottish about the Jefe’s use of the word son. And when he thought about it realized that the Jefe was probably just about old enough to be his father.
The chief also seemed to realize the implication of what he’d said and quickly shrugged it off. ‘Anyway, don’t beat yourself up. We’ll get him. I’m just really pissed off that I’ve got a conference in Malaga the day after tomorrow. I’ve tried to get out of it, but obviously they think I’m more value there than here.’ He pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘I just hope I don’t miss all the fun.’
Chapter Forty
First light slanted in through a window at the back of the cemetery, falling across the half-open casket, throwing shadows across the serenity fixed by some mortician on Antonio’s face. Cristina sat on a hard settee, as she had through most of the night, Lucas stretched out asleep beside her, his head resting in her lap.
Nuri and Paco had kept her company on the vigil, greeting the stream of visitors arriving to pay their respects, until at last their numbers dwindled to zero around midnight. People had brought food. Soup, and tapas. But Cristina had been unable to eat. Nuri had spent much of the night throwing up in a toilet two doors along, the fruit of the toxins they had drip-fed into her body just the day before. Everyone had heard her retching. Paco slipped out just after sunrise to make final preparations for the service.
More than her grief, more than the desperate desolation she felt for the son who had just lost his father, Cristina had obsessed through all the long hours of darkness about the message they had found on the answering machine at the apartment. How was it possible? How could anyone even believe it had been left by her? Ever since Paco had brought news of it back with him, she had wanted to hear it. To play it at volume through loudspeakers for everyone to hear and scream, See? It’s not me! How could anyone who knew her think it was? And why, in God’s name, did Antonio believe for one moment that she would want to meet him in an underground car park at the Eroski Centre? It made absolutely no sense.
And so she had passed a night divided equally between grief and anger. And frustration. By morning the tears had all been spilled, leaving her drained. Eyes stinging, throat swollen. She had barely heard the procession of muttered commiserations the night before. What did it matter? Her life was over.
The sounds of a car engine idling out front came with the opening of a door somewhere in the building. And voices. Before Paco returned to push his head into the room. ‘We should go and get ready for mass. The undertaker will take Toni to the church.’
It was thought that most of Marviña would be there, the tiny chapel downstairs hopelessly inadequate for the numbers expected.
Cristina looked at her sleeping child, and her heart broke for him all over again. How could she wake him to face the misery of this day when he had found, finally, escape in sleep?
The hearse arrived at the church with flowers trailing from the tailgate. As it lifted, the flowers fell to the ground and the pall bearers slid out the coffin to raise it on sturdy shoulders. They carried it in silence through the central arch and into the expectant hush of the cool crowded space beyond. The narrow streets around the church were thick with parked cars. People had come from miles around for the funeral. Some out of respect, others out of curiosity.
For Cristina it passed in a blur. The sonorous voice of the priest, the flesh and blood of Christ, the tribal nature of psalms sung in mourning. And then they were out again into the incongruity of blue skies and sunshine. Another beautiful day. The first without Toni.
It was a long walk in procession behind the hearse back to the cemetery on the edge of town, where rows of vertical tombs, four deep, stepped down the hillside like terracing in a vineyard. Concrete slots for coffins, bought or rented, bones to be removed to the ossuary in twenty years to make way for future travellers to eternity.
Across the hillside, cars paused briefly at the tollbooth on the motorway before passing on their way, oblivious to one life passing into the next in the cemetery below.
The Jefe stood by Cristina’s side, holding her hand as he had on her wedding day. In her other hand Cristina felt her son’s desperate grip, squeezing tightly as they watched the bearers sliding his father’s coffin into darkness, posted to the afterlife. She felt rather than heard the sobs that broke from his chest. And noticed for the first time that Ana was not there.
Chapter Forty-One
The town was deserted as Mackenzie walked up the Calle Utopía. Everyone, it seemed, was at the funeral. Most people in town, the Jefe had told him, had bought their cars from Antonio.
The heat had risen early today and was already shimmering in the air as church bells rang out across the rooftops, calling mourners to the requiem mass. Mackenzie glanced across the square towards the ceramic mosaic of winemakers trampling grapes. People came and went, but the wine was eternal, grapes the lifeblood of this community. He wondered who would sell them cars now.
A uniformed police officer was stationed outside Cristina’s apartment. Mackenzie was not sure why. It wasn’t a crime scene, and anyway forensics had already been through it with a fine-toothed comb.
Mackenzie recognized the officer from the briefings. They exchanged nods and Mackenzie asked him to open the door to the stairwell. The apartment itself was not locked and Mackenzie let himself in, feeling a little like an intruder on invisible grief. This was a living, loving place where a family had spent their lives without ever suspecting that tomorrow might never come. For Antonio, at least, it had not. For Cristina and Lucas tomorrow offered only grief. It would be a long healing process.