He thought about Antonio and Cristina, their relationship, the squabbling he had witnessed on each visit. And yet, wasn’t that normal? Couples fought. And when things went wrong, conflict even over inconsequentialities seemed inevitable. Certainly, it had for him and Susan. The fighting between them latterly had been vicious, and conducted all too often in front of the children.
He recalled the Jefe’s words from the night before. You might be feeling pain, but it is your children who are the real victims. And he felt laden with regret. Cristina had fought with Antonio, and now he was dead. No way to say sorry, no second chances. How would he feel if something were to happen to Susan? Whatever might have gone wrong between them, their love hadn’t always been broken.
Colourful plastic letters were arranged on the door of Lucas’s bedroom, spelling his name and telling the world that this was his space. He thought about Alex and Sophia, and their spaces that he no longer shared. And the weight of his regret turned to an ache. He pushed the door open and saw a collection of soft toys piled together in a basket on a table. Each one, no doubt, with its own significance, its own special memory, a furry history of childhood.
In a graphic on the wall above the bed, a boy flew through a starry universe beneath the aphorism Me pregunto si las estrellas se illuminan con el fin de que algún día cada uno pueda encontrar la suya. Mackenzie translated it in his head as: I wonder if the stars are shining so that one day everyone can find theirs.
But Lucas had just lost one of the two stars that shone brightest in his life. And again Mackenzie thought of his own kids. And the light that he no longer shone on their lives.
He wandered around the apartment touching things. A coat hanging on the stand in the hall. Candles in the shape of love hearts that sat on a shelf. A scarf draped over the back of a chair. A CD player sitting among a pile of scattered CDs on the coffee table.
The grief was no longer invisible. It was here in everything he looked at, everything he touched. Framed wedding photographs on the wall, a colouring book on the table, an empty spectacle case. All the component parts of deconstructed lives.
Finally he lifted the phone and replayed the message. Toni, meet me in the car park at Eroski. I’m there now. We’ve got to talk. Then he replayed it again. And again. And again.
The quality of it was even poorer than he remembered. Full of pauses and clicks, like a signal interrupted. He was certain she’d had no opportunity to leave that message after they had met outside Zhivago’s. It was always possible, he supposed, that she had called before he arrived. He was hazy on the exact timing. But it was his impression that he had got there before 14.47.
The recording certainly sounded like her, and it had been enough to fool Antonio, who had been married to her for ten years. But if it wasn’t Cristina, then who was it and how had it been done?
He took out his iPhone and opened the Voice Memo app. He replayed Cristina’s message and held his phone to the speaker to record it, then listened to it on his own phone. It was a good representation of a bad recording. He saved the file then attached it to an email addressed to a forensic audio expert he had worked with at the Met. Mick Allbright was a geek, as socially inept as Mackenzie, which was perhaps why they had got along. Mackenzie had no idea how much could be gleaned from such poor-quality audio, but if anyone could dissect it with accuracy, Mick could. He tagged it Urgent.
Outside the heat struck him anew. The officer on guard had sought shade inside the doorway and looked guilty as Mackenzie emerged. But Mackenzie was preoccupied. Had things really got so bad between Cristina and Antonio that she had threatened to leave him? That’s what Paco said Antonio had told him. Mackenzie tried hard to re-conjure the conflict he had witnessed between the brothers-in-law at the golf course. He had been some distance away, but did it really look as if they had been arguing over a marital break-up?
Across the road, the sun reflected off a dark glass globe mounted on the wall above the door of the mini-market. A CCTV camera. There was a good chance it had caught Antonio leaving the apartment. Mackenzie loped across the road, half-running, and was perspiring by the time he stepped into the comparative cool of the shop.
The owner regarded him suspiciously from the far side of the counter and refused to let him review the footage. Some foreigner without so much as a badge or an ID! Mackenzie crossed the street and returned with the officer guarding the entrance to the apartment. This time the owner was reluctantly acquiescent. He led Mackenzie into a back room where an ancient PC whirred and groaned on a scarred table top. Footage from the camera, he said, was recorded on to an external disc and automatically rerecorded every forty-eight hours, wiping the previous recording in the process. It was less than twenty-four hours since Antonio had been murdered.
Mackenzie pulled up a stool and scrolled back to the previous afternoon, pausing the time-code at 14.45 before setting it to play. The camera gave greatest coverage to the front of the shop, but the entrance to Cristina’s apartment across the road fell just inside the upper right corner of the frame. If Antonio’s car was parked at the kerbside it was out of shot. Mackenzie sat and watched the minutes tick by. No one came or went. A full five minutes passed. Surely after receiving the call, Antonio would have left straight away?
Mackenzie was puzzled. He let the recording run for another five minutes. Nothing. By now Antonio would have had difficulty in reaching the Eroski Centre before the first reports of the shooting. A full fifteen minutes and there was no sign of Antonio. Which is when it occurred to Mackenzie that if Antonio had actually taken the call, there would have been no need for Cristina to leave a message. So how did he know to go to the Eroski Centre?
He rewound, scrolling back a full ten minutes prior to the time of the call, then set the recording to play again. At 14.40 a scowling Antonio emerged from the apartment block, hands in pockets, fishing out his car keys as he went. He vanished out of shot. The last time anyone had seen him alive, apart from his killer, or killers. And a full seven minutes before the call from Cristina.
Mackenzie left the mini-market with the hard disk in his pocket and the proprietor’s complaints ringing in his ears. It took him less than two minutes to cross the square to the police station and climb the steps to reception.
The duty officer looked at him in surprise. Perhaps he thought that Mackenzie should have been at the funeral. Mackenzie laid the hard disk down on the counter. ‘I need to enter this in evidence,’ he said. ‘And I need you to do me a favour.’
Chapter Forty-Two
It was late afternoon by the time Cristina got home.
The Jefe had broken the news to her about Ana after the funeral. She had been furious. Boss or no boss, she laid into him. He had no right to keep something like that from her! But distress had displaced grief in her emptiness, and for a short while fear for Ana had replaced the heartbreak of losing Antonio.
They had all returned to Nuri and Paco’s house, and despite her illness Nuri had done her best to feed them all. Neighbours had helped, arriving in constant procession with fish soup and goat stew and paella. But Cristina had been unable to eat. She had grilled the Jefe on every detail of Ana’s disappearance. Mackenzie’s sighting of her in the street with Cleland. The chase through the feria. The body found in her house. Neither she nor Nuri had the least idea who Sergio García Lorca might be, or what his connection to Ana was. If any.