Just as they were finishing, three hours later, his private mobile phone rang again.
‘Mr Morris, I hope again this is not an inconvenient moment. You are going to a lot of trouble, most impressive — you are to be commended for your efforts. I will be brief because I’m aware, despite my warning about speaking to the police, that you now have a recording and tracing facility on your phone. But you won’t find me, I’m on one of those crappy little phones that doesn’t have any geo-mapping facility, OK? So, look, you really are wasting resources. You will not find this bomb, trust me. Just pay the money — to avoid having blood on your hands. This club has come so far, don’t you think it would be such a tragedy to see it destroyed for what is petty cash? Please trust me — treat me as your friend, not your enemy. I want to help you. I will call you again later.’
‘Who are you?’ Adrian Morris asked.
But he was speaking to a dead connection.
4
Three days earlier
A few days after her nineteenth birthday, the hour had almost arrived. These past weeks had seemed an eternity. Florentina Shima was excited, but she was also very nervous.
Perhaps he would not come.
The first thing she did when she woke in her room was to look at his photograph. Her fiancé, Dragan.
Well, he wasn’t actually her fiancé, but he soon would be! By the end of today, provided her grandmother agreed the financial negotiations. And not long after, she would be going with him to his home in Serbia, to a new life, to marry a man she would love forever, the way people did in stories, like the way her sister, Eva, had.
Florentina didn’t know exactly where Serbia was, but she knew it wasn’t far, and she knew she would love it there, because she would love anywhere that she was with Dragan.
She looked at his lean, rugged face and beautiful eyes; at his hair, his rich black curls that gave him the look of a bandit in a cowboy film — but a nice bandit! A few years older than her, but not many, she estimated. She liked the idea that he was older — there was so much he would be able to teach her about life, about the world she craved to know so much more of.
The world she read about in books and saw in films and shows on their television. The whole exciting world beyond their remote mountain smallholding in northern Albania, where she lived with her parents and grandmother with their ten goats, twelve hens, twenty-two sheep, three pigs and one cow, as well as two German Shepherds to protect their animals, which gave them their livelihood, from wolves, bears and foxes.
Dragan also reminded her, just a little, of her older brother, Jak, who she had adored, who had been killed in a motorbike accident five years ago. Her younger brother, Zef, was different: he was quiet, dutiful, resigned — or committed, she never really knew which — to helping out with the animals and to toiling on the sixty dunams of land on which they grew their rotation of crops in the poor soil.
All her friends at the village school she’d attended first, and then the high school in Krujë, had met local guys who they later married. But no one had sparked for her. In her heart, she had always harboured bigger ambitions, to venture out into that wider and much more exciting world. And now, finally, with Dragan it was about to happen.
She looked at the pretty dress her mother had bought her, especially for today, which was draped over the chair. She was excited to put it on. Then she picked up her mobile phone, the one Eva had sent her last year as a birthday present, so the two of them could keep in touch. There was a text message from her.
Paç fat!
Good luck!
Four years ago, Eva, twenty-four, always much worldlier than herself, and scared of ending up a spinster, had heard of a broker who could find potential husbands in neighbouring Serbia. Leaving her family to go and live in a country where she didn’t know anyone, or speak the language, seemed a better option to Eva than living out a lonely life here. Some months later, a pleasant, nice-looking man called Milovan had arrived at their house.
Their grandmother had handled the negotiations, and the old woman decided on po — yes!
Milovan paid 20,000 leks to her family and left to buy some gold jewellery and clothes for his fiancée. He returned three weeks later, after Eva had received her passport, to take her away to her new home. Subsequently, she had written regularly to say how happy she was in Serbia, that Milovan had a large farm and was a kind and considerate husband. She now had one baby, with another on the way, and urged her younger sister, Florentina, to try to find a husband the way she had done.
So, she had.
Shortly after midday, Dragan arrived. His name, she had been told, meant joy. But when Florentina saw him she was gripped with everything but. Most of all, revulsion and blind panic.
The sheep farmer stepped towards her with a broad grin, revealing just three teeth in an otherwise empty mouth, and wearing the most terrible clothes. He stank. And he looked nearer to fifty than the late twenties of his photograph. He looked older than her father.
Once again, as with her sister, her grandmother took over the negotiations. Dragan was wealthy, the old woman told her, he had over forty sheep. Two hundred hens. Twelve pigs. What was not to love about him? And he was willing to pay a fortune, 200,000 leks. Twenty times the amount Milovan had paid for her sister!
Again, her grandmother decided on po. Dragan went off to make the passport arrangements, and said he would return as soon as they were done to collect his bride-to-be.
That evening, Florentina made a decision. At midnight, when everyone was asleep, after ramming a few belongings and some bread and cheese from the kitchen into a rucksack, she ran. And kept on running. With few clothes, other than those she stood up in, and little money, she slept the first night in a cave, some miles away, with the rank smell of wild animals all around her, awake most of the night, scared. At daybreak she ate her provisions and left, walking for hours down the narrow, twisting mountain road.
Every time she heard a vehicle approaching she scrambled down over the edge of the road and hid in the bushes, scared it might be her father or Zef, coming to look for her. It grew steadily hotter throughout the morning — for the past few days the temperature had been over forty degrees, and it felt that now. After a few hours she was exhausted, frightened, thirsty and hungry. Many kilometres ahead — she did not know how far — was the city of Tirana, her destination. Perhaps there she could find work, maybe in a bar, and the chance of meeting the man of her dreams.
Shortly before midday, traipsing round a bend in the road, she saw over to her left a large bar and restaurant with a pretty garden in front of it. A handful of people, mostly groups of men, sat at tables, drinking coffee. There were fancy cars parked outside. One, she recognized, was a Mercedes. She knew what it was because the rusted shell of a Mercedes had sat, all her life, next to the stall where the pigs lived. Jak used to tell her that one day he would restore this car and they could go driving in it, in a Mercedes! Then he had died.
She went inside out of the heat. It was almost empty, apart from a group of men smoking at one table, beneath a NO SMOKING sign. A young woman behind the bar, about the same age as herself, took pity on her, gave her water and a plate of eggs and a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. When Florentina told her where she was headed, the woman went over to one of the men at the table and spoke to him. He turned and smiled at her.
She returned and told Florentina that he was a nice guy, her cousin, she could trust him and he would give her a lift to Tirana.