Cristina walked with him to security. Neither of them was in any hurry.
They had shared the ordeal, singly and together, of a remorseless debrief. Forty-eight hours of it. And the emotional hits just kept on coming. Nuri’s discovery that Paco was dead. His betrayal. And his complicity in the death of Antonio. How she and Cristina would ever get over that, Mackenzie could not begin to imagine.
At least Lucas still had his mother. It was the sole consolation.
The bodies of Cleland and Ana had been recovered from a grassy slope just above the narrow road that followed the contour of the coast below the Rock. Neither recognizable after the fall.
Ana had been buried the following day.
Delgado, Rafa, Vasquez and others had been arrested, and nearly two tons of cocaine recovered, along with almost forty million euros. The Spanish and Gibraltarian authorities would doubtless fight over custody of both for the foreseeable future.
Mackenzie couldn’t have cared less.
They reached the queue for the security gates and stood awkwardly at the moment of parting, not sure how to accomplish it without embarrassment.
‘What will you do?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘What all survivors do, I guess. Carry on, and wonder why I’m the only one left standing.’
‘Lucas needs you.’
‘I know. That’s all that keeps me going.’ She paused. ‘And you?’
‘Go home and kiss the NCA goodbye. It’s clear to me now that I should never have been a cop in the first place. Not cut out for it. Just like my father. We both failed.’
Cristina shook her head. ‘You succeeded in almost everything, señor.’
‘Except saving Ana.’
She gazed at the floor. ‘You and I both.’ Then she looked up to meet his eye. ‘But it was Ana herself who took that out of our hands. Whether she thought she was saving me, or avenging my murder, we’ll never know. But she saved both our lives in sacrificing hers.’
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘So what will you do if you quit the police?’
Mackenzie’s laugh lacked any humour. ‘For a man qualified on paper for almost anything, it seems I am patently unsuited for almost everything. Short answer, I have no idea.’
‘You should teach,’ she said, remembering how he had sat with Lucas to reveal the mysterious secrets of calculating percentages. ‘You’d make a good teacher.’
Self-consciousness coloured his cheeks. ‘What I do know... what you taught me... is that your children are everything. So the first thing I must do is try to be the father I’ve never been. I never had a role model to teach me what a good parent was. Until now.’
Cristina blushed. ‘You’ll be good at that too.’ She pushed herself up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, John Mackenzie.’
And she turned to walk briskly towards the sliding doors, and all the uncertainty of the world beyond them. He watched her go with an almost overwhelming sense of sadness, before turning away to join the queue to a future unknown.
Acknowledgements
Most of my research for A Silent Death was done in situ. I have written my last five books in this part of Spain, where I have an apartment that overlooks the Mediterranean and is eminently suited to winter writing. I owe a debt of gratitude to my many British and Spanish friends who helped me strip away the veneer of beaches, sea and sun that tend to characterise the tourist view of this Andalusian coast to reveal a slightly more disturbing reality in the book. In particular, I owe thanks to the chief of the Policía Local at Manilva, whose name ‘Paco’ I borrowed for my errant Guardia, and to single mother Isabel Reina Gil, who became my invaluable translator, researcher and font of all things Spanish, whose apartment I used for Cristina and whose son was the model for Lucas. Finally, I offer both thanks and sympathy to all those deaf-blind victims whose testimonies in the book Deaf-Blind Reality, edited by Scott M. Stoffel, provided a bleak insight into lives without sight or sound.
Peter May
France 2020