At 8:00 A.M. Juan Martín’s father called the police, told them what his son had seen and gave his address. As it was the most exciting thing the local police had heard of in the last five years they turned up in their Citroën Picasso within minutes. Juan got into the car and directed them over the railway and under the M50 to Perales del Rio, where they parked and walked down to the river.
As soon as they saw the human foot one stayed with Martín at the site while the other went back to the car to radio it in. Ten minutes later the cop was back with rods and tape and they cordoned off the area.
Over the next hour a team of forensics turned up, a homicide team led by Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita, a prosecutor and a team of four divers. Zorrita interviewed Martín with the prosecutor and one of the forensics listening in. By 9:15 A.M. Martín had been sent home and the forensics were suited up and the divers had walked upstream as far as the railway line and eased themselves into the water.
At 9:20 the photographs had been taken of the crime scene and the bin liner had been moved to a tent set up under the M50 motorway. From the bag the forensics extracted a lower leg, cut at the knee, foot attached. Balled up and sodden at the bottom of the bin bag was some clothing which did not appear to be stained with anything darker than the river water in which it had been found. From this ball they unfolded a minidress which originally had been red in colour and a black jacket.
At 9:35 one of the forensics called the inspector jefe into the tent. On the table was a red European Union passport with a British cover.
‘It was found buttoned up in the inside pocket of the jacket,’ said the forensic.
Wearing latex gloves the inspector jefe opened the pages to reveal a photo of a mixed-race girl with long, thick dark ringlets and the name Amy Akuba Boxer. He took a note of the passport details and handed them over to his sub-inspector to take to the next stage. He walked down to the bank where the diving team were working. Two divers’ heads came up out of the green river. He held up a questioning hand. They signalled back. Nothing.
Boxer was having toast with olive oil, tomato and jamón in a bar with the unambiguous name of Casa de las Tostas, which was not far from his hotel. He’d already had a café con leche with his toast and had just ordered a café solo when David Álvarez called.
‘I have El Osito’s number,’ he said. ‘But look, I’m told by the guy who gave it to me that he won’t talk to you and he certainly won’t meet you. He has to know you. You have to be vouched for, vetted or whatever, if you want direct talks. He also said a kilo won’t be enough. To talk to El Osito directly you have to be interested in at least two hundred kilos a month, which means you’re already a player before you’ve even met and he’ll know more about you than you do yourself. All he did say was that the Spanish market was now dead and they’re looking to expand into northern Europe.’
‘At least I come from the right area,’ said Boxer.
‘London is a place he particularly has in mind for expansion.’
‘O.K. Just give me the number. I’ll work out an approach.’
‘My friend knows an intermediary who can make contact for you, but you’d have to be in the business.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Boxer. ‘The important thing now is that you forget you ever met me. You wipe my name and number from your phone.’
Silence.
‘Did you hear me, David?’
‘I can’t tell you how dangerous this guy is . . . ’
‘You don’t do his line of work without being dangerous,’ said Boxer. ‘You’ve been a great help, David. I can’t thank you enough.’
‘Hey, look, hombre, it was nothing. I’m just sorry I wasn’t able to stop her from getting involved in the first place.’
‘You did the best you could and more than most people would have done. She’s young, headstrong and, by the sound of it, high.’ He entered El Osito’s number in his Spanish mobile, sat back with his beer.
Another call. The Hotel Moderno.
‘We have an Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita here. He would like to talk to you.’
‘It’s very important that Irina Demidova does not know anything about this enquiry into the activities of her son Valery,’ said Mercy.
The headmaster of the Westminster branch of Northwest International School, Piers Campbell, a grey man in his late forties who didn’t seem to be getting enough sunlight, nodded his agreement. The woman was making him nervous with her pacing. He wished she would just sit down and tell him what it was all about.
Mercy looked out of Campbell’s office window across Portland Place to the Institute of Physics on the other side of the road. On the way up it had been unsettling to see apparently balanced sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds piling in and out of their classrooms like normal children while her own had lost herself in Madrid. She asked her questions, keen to get out of there.
Campbell said he hadn’t been told of any late registrations, that the boy Valery was a conscientious student who was doing well in his studies, especially the sciences and maths. He showed Mercy a photograph of a bespectacled boy with narrow shoulders and a crumpled mouth which couldn’t quite decide on laughter or tears. His blond hair and blue eyes were the only positives as far as Sasha’s footballing friend was concerned.
‘Does he have any football skills?’ asked Mercy hopefully.
‘If he does he hasn’t revealed them to us,’ said Campbell. ‘He’s definitely on the studious rather than sportif side.’
‘And his mother? Does his mother have any friends here, among the other parents or the teachers?’
‘I’ve seen her at PTA meetings, but she’s not a great one for picking Valery up and all the school-gate socialising that goes with it. I think she works in an office not far from here, which I believe is where Valery goes after school.’
‘Would you say she’s close to any of Valery’s teachers?’
‘Close?’
‘I mean intimate . . . sleeping with.’
‘Good God, we wouldn’t allow anything like that here.’
‘What about in the Hampstead school?’
‘Of course not,’ said Campbell. ‘Are you implying—’
‘Forget it,’ said Mercy, not quite sure where she was going with this line of questioning. ‘What about that photo? Would you mind if I took a snap of that? We need to check some things out.’
‘I’d really prefer to know what this was all about,’ said Campbell.
‘I don’t like being this mysterious myself,’ said Mercy, ‘but there’s a very delicate situation involving the safety of another boy from the Hampstead school.’
‘That wouldn’t be the Bobkov boy, Sasha, would it?’ asked the headmaster.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Now he is a good footballer, so I’m told,’ said Campbell. ‘And a good chess player. I run a chess club here, and when Valery and Sasha were at the Hampstead school they were very advanced players, far ahead of the other children, so Mrs. Demidova would bring them here.’
‘And now?’
‘Since Mrs. Demidova has moved from where she used to live in Hampstead I don’t think the arrangement is so convenient.’
‘What time does school finish for Valery?’
‘Four thirty except Wednesdays, when it’s two thirty.’
Mercy took a photo with her mobile phone, sent it through to Papadopoulos with an explanatory text.
She waited outside the school for Valery Demidova to come out and followed him for five minutes to an address in Welbeck Street. Mercy watched which bell he rang, waited a few minutes after he’d entered and took a closer look. The company name on the card was DLT Consultants Ltd.
‘There’s no easy way of saying this, so I’m just going to lay the facts out as we know them,’ said the translator.
There were three of them in the o
ffice: Luís Zorrita, Boxer and the translator. Zorrita looked directly at Boxer as he talked in Spanish, and although the translator spoke good English, Boxer only looked at Zorrita. The inspector jefe had been relieved to discover that Boxer was not completely a civilian. On the way to the Jefatura Boxer had revealed the rites of passage he’d been through to become a kidnap consultant. It was a way for both of them to avoid what was coming.
It was never easy to tell anyone that someone close to them had died. The level of impossibility to comprehend and accept was always raised with violence involved. On the two occasions in his career when Zorrita had had to explain the offensively macabre details of a body dismemberment he’d been met by total blankness on the part of the relatives. This facial blankness was just a manifestation of what was going on inside their heads: complete denial.
It was clear from their conversation in the car that Boxer spoke passable Spanish and could understand everything, but Zorrita understood the stress of these situations, which was why he had the translator present. He didn’t want there to be any chink of doubt into which the human mind could dive and cut itself off from reality.
Zorrita pushed the evidence bag, which contained the passport they’d found in the inside pocket of the jacket, across the table towards Boxer.
‘Is this your daughter’s passport?’
‘She probably lost it,’ said Boxer. ‘Or it was stolen.’
Zorrita nodded, pulled the bag back towards him, laid it to one side. They went through the facts as they knew them, starting with Juan Martín’s discovery of the black plastic bin liner. Boxer was aware of himself trying to slow things down, not wanting inevitability to gain momentum.
‘What actually alerted Juan Martín to this black plastic bag?’
‘The excitement of the dog and the very bad smell.’
‘There must have been something else for him to notice something suspicious.’
‘A human foot was protruding from it.’
Silence.
‘That would do it,’ said Boxer.
The translator didn’t know quite what to make of it. He knew English, but not English people so well. Zorrita ploughed on, relentless, with interruptions about time and detail from Boxer, which he patiently supplied. Occasionally he glanced at the photo on his desk of his wife and children, who were a constant presence, not just in his office but in his mind as well. His stomach winced at what was coming.
‘ . . . from their experience the forensics believe that this female had been dead for between seventy-two and eighty-four hours. The leg had been bled and had not been—’
‘The leg had been what?’ asked Boxer.
‘The blood had been drained from the leg, probably from the whole body, prior to dismemberment,’ said Zorrita, watching the ugliness of the crime sinking into the man’s consciousness. ‘There were no bloodstains on any of the clothing within the bag.’
Boxer nodded him on.
‘They think this lower leg had been in the river for around forty-eight hours.’
‘You didn’t mention any divers,’ said Boxer. ‘Have you sent any in there?’
‘The divers arrived at the scene after the forensics.’
‘And what did they find?’
‘As yet, nothing. They’ve searched a one-kilometre stretch of the river. We’re assuming that the bag was dumped into the river from the M50 motorway bridge at night. The river flows from north-east to south-east so they’ve searched three hundred metres upstream and seven hundred metres downstream.’
Boxer asked about the width of the river just to maintain a barrage of questions, hold back the flow of fate. He ran out of steam. Zorrita moved on to the clothing. As he walked over to the plastic sheaths hanging on a rail, he described the colour and material of the dress and jacket. He held it out for Boxer to see.
‘Both came from the shop French Connection. We’ve checked the product codes with the company and they inform us that these items were bought from their store in Terminal 1 at Heathrow Airport on Saturday evening.’
‘With a card?’ asked Boxer desperately.
‘No, with cash,’ said Zorrita, letting fall the sheaths. ‘In the inside pocket of the jacket the forensics discovered one hundred euros, a fifty, two twenties and a ten along with that British passport in the—’
In a couple of strides Boxer was at the rail. The translator flinched at the suddenness of the movement. Boxer held up the dress as if imagining it on a person.
‘This dress,’ he said, ‘is just not the sort of thing she would ever wear. I’ve seen her in short skirts, but in a dress like this and a jacket—never. I’ve never seen her in anything like it. Never.’
‘I understand you were in the Puerta del Sol last night, distributing this leaflet,’ said Zorrita, holding out a piece of paper. ‘You left some at the reception and with the concierge. It shows—’
‘I know . . . ’ said Boxer. ‘I know. I’m just saying . . . that was something put together by her mother from receipts I found.’
‘What receipts?’ asked Zorrita.
‘I found receipts in the jeans she left in her rucksack in the Hotel Moderno. They were for clothes and a pair of shoes.’
‘Where did those receipts come from?’
‘French Connection,’ said Boxer, defeated by himself. ‘Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport.’
The translator was so fascinated by the intensity of the human drama he forgot to translate, but Zorrita, who had almost no English, grasped it all the same.
‘The passport found in the jacket belongs to Amy Akuba Boxer,’ said Zorrita, looking down on his desk.
The plastic sheath fell from Boxer’s hands. He stormed over to the desk, stared down at the passport again, open at the ID page inside its plastic evidence bag.
Amy’s unsmiling face looked back at him.
‘Is that your daughter’s passport?’ asked Zorrita.
11
4:30 P.M., WEDNESDAY 21ST MARCH 2012
Jefatura, Madrid
Do you have something of your daughter’s from which we could extract a DNA sample to confirm the identity of the body?’ asked Zorrita.
No response. Boxer stood, hands splayed on either side of his daughter’s passport, his head hanging down as if its weight had become a terrible burden. Zorrita pitied him, couldn’t help but despise himself as he went on: ‘In order to release the body we’re going to require a DNA—’
Zorrita stopped as his huge desk was shunted forward about an inch by the intensity of the sob that racked Boxer’s frame. Zorrita was about to reach out a hand and take hold of the Englishman, but stopped himself as he realised that this was a man who was used to keeping his emotions under control, used to suppressing all personal feelings, who had now come across something too big to contain. What stopped Zorrita was that he’d never been with the pain on the inside. He still had his parents, siblings, wife and children. He was a homicide detective who was a personal tragedy virgin and something told him this man wasn’t. Boxer’s shoulders heaved another brutal sob that once more inched the desk towards him.
Had Zorrita been able to look inside Boxer at that moment he would have been mystified by the colossal Gothic darkness within. He would have expected a wincing rawness, a laceration of all that was good, but not a bottomless black chasm. Surely that would come later, with the realisation of loss, the terrible emptiness, the endless longing for that unattainable fullness. The unfillable gaps of empty shoes, limp dresses, a hollow in a mattress.
He moved around the desk, lifted Boxer away from the table and got him onto a chair, which the translator, snapping out of his paralysis, held steady. They studied him as if he was a drugged tiger, fascinated but wary. His face was strangely still and dry of any tears while his body seemed to be under tremendous strain, as if trying to withstand some terrible G force.
‘Are you feel
ing all right?’ asked the translator, unused to these emotional crises in his work.
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Boxer, his body smoothing out as if suddenly weightless.
The translator and Zorrita exchanged looks. ‘You don’t what?’ the policeman asked.
‘I don’t have any sample from which you might be able to extract my daughter’s DNA.’
‘What about her mother?’ asked Zorrita. ‘Are you living together or . . . ’
‘We’re separated. Amy lives with her mother but . . . ’ Boxer struggled to find words, ransacked his mind for correct terms. ‘Amy left home,’ he said, ‘and her leaving was extremely thorough.’
‘I’m not sure what that means,’ said the translator.
‘It means she was punishing us,’ said Boxer. ‘She removed all traces of herself. She took everything out of the house—old toys, clothes, drawings, the lot. She vacuumed everything up in her room, every hair from her head, the whole house.’
‘Then we’ll establish her identity with a sample from you.’
‘I think I’d better speak to her mother before anything else happens.’
‘Of course,’ said Zorrita. ‘We’ll leave you to do that. Use the phone on my desk. We’ll wait outside.’
Boxer pulled himself up to the desk and wondered how he was going to do this impossible thing: tell Mercy. His mind was flying off on tangents, remembering when he’d been told something that had inspired intense grief thirty-seven years ago. He pulled himself back to the task. He had to find Mercy first. He decided on Makepeace. Get her back to the office, tell her there. Then call Mercy’s Aunt Grace and ask her to look after her.