Makepeace came on the line. They knew each other.
‘How’s it going, Charles?’
‘It’s not good, Peter.’
‘Oh Christ.’
‘Do you know where Mercy is?’
‘I can find out.’
‘I don’t want to tell her . . . tell her this thing when she’s on her own out in the street somewhere. I want her to be with people.’
‘I’ll bring her back to my office.’
‘I’ll get someone from her family to be there with her.’
‘When you know, give me a name and I’ll alert security.’
‘What I’m going to tell her is very hard, Peter,’ said Boxer. ‘It looks like Amy’s been murdered.’
‘What do you mean by “looks like”?’
‘A body has been cut up and disposed of in a river.’
‘My God.’
‘What’s been found is a leg, the clothes she was wearing and her passport.’
‘I’m sorry, Charles. I’m so sorry.’
‘They’re searching the river now, looking . . . looking for . . . ’
‘Yes, I understand,’ said Makepeace, who knew how impossible it would be for any parent to have to say ‘the rest of her’.
‘Call me when Mercy’s with you and I’ll speak to her.’
Boxer put the phone down and went out into the corridor. Zorrita was up by the stairs on his mobile.
‘They’re calling her mother back to her office and I’ll speak to her then,’ he said.
Zorrita turned, hung up. They went back into his office.
‘That was the head of the diving team,’ said Zorrita. ‘They’ve been searching near the bridge further upstream where another motorway crosses the river. They’ve found a second bag, identical, which had partly split open. The forensics are looking at it now.’
‘I want to go to the toilet,’ said Sasha, who’d worked out that there was a microphone in the room and they could hear him remotely.
After a minute the door opened and he was handed a cardboard bottle.
‘What’s all this about?’ said the voice. ‘You just been . . . less than an hour ago.’
‘I want to go number twos,’ said Sasha.
‘What’s that?’ said the voice.
‘Er, a shit,’ said Sasha, thinking that was more their language.
‘O.K.,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll take you for a shit.’
The man hauled him off the bench, shoved him towards the door, opened it for him. They shuffled into a room where the walls were also wood-panelled. The man reached over his head, pushed another door open and Sasha felt cool air on his face. He was shunted sideways into a second room only a few metres across and through yet another doorway where he ran into something like a washing machine.
‘Go to your left. The toilet’s at the end.’
Sasha put his hands out, trailed them along the wall on his left and other electrical goods on his right. His knee hit the toilet. He put the seat down and turned.
‘Don’t watch, or I’ll never go,’ said Sasha.
He heard the door shut. He leaped to his feet and started feeling the wall behind the toilet, hoping for a window. There was nothing, just a blank wall.
‘You’re underground,’ said the voice.
Sasha spun round, realising that the man was still in the room. He flinched as he heard feet lunge towards him. The first slap across the face knocked him onto his backside by the toilet. The man grabbed him by the scruff and hit him again with the back of his hand, and then again with the palm. Blood came into his mouth from his torn cheek.
‘No more games,’ said the voice, dragging him, feet trailing, out of the room.
Mercy was in the sitting room with Bobkov and Kidd, who’d long given up trying to play chess. Bobkov didn’t have the concentration for it. Still no call from the kidnappers. Nearly twenty-four hours of silence. The front doorbell rang. Bobkov stiffened. Sexton, who was in the kitchen making tea, took it.
‘George for you,’ he said, sticking his head in the sitting room, nodding at Mercy.
She went out to the hall. George was looking wary.
‘What’s the story?’ he asked.
‘No story,’ said Mercy. ‘No contact. Let’s go to the kitchen.’
They passed Sexton coming out with a mug of tea.
‘I’ve got as much as I’m going to get on the football wizard kid,’ said Papadopoulos, sitting at the table, ‘so now I’ve started working on the car that turned up every morning and which I’m pretty sure brought the bait to manoeuvre Sasha into the trapping zone.’
‘So no takers on the photo of Valery I sent you?’
‘Definitely not the kid in question.’
‘Tell me about the car.’
‘It’s a black Mercedes, which was all I knew until this morning. Now I’ve got a bit closer in and established that it’s a four-door saloon,’ said Papadopoulos. ‘I went to the Mercedes dealership at Fortune Green and they showed me all the different models it could possibly be. I took the brochure round to my witnesses and I’ve got lucky because the C, E and S classes are kind of the same to look at, but the CLS is a very different beast. The kidnappers’ car was a CLS.’
‘Did any of the witnesses see inside the car?’
‘Tinted windows.’
‘Registration number?’
‘Not yet, not in full. They all agree that it started with an L, so it’s London, and either LC or LG. The number they’re pretty sure is 61, so the end of last year. That’s as far as I’ve got.’
‘Irina Demidova works for some people called DLT Consultants Ltd on Welbeck Street. The letters stand for Dudko, Luski and Tipalov. They find clients and investors for Russian businesses and offer investment advice to Russians looking to buy in the UK and Europe,’ said Mercy. ‘You might want to see if the company or any of its people, including Demidova, owns a Mercedes CLS with corresponding plates.’
Her phone went. Makepeace calling her back to the office.
‘Is that really necessary, sir?’
‘It is, Mercy. It’s very important. Soon as possible in my office.’
‘Have the phone trackers found where they’re holding Sasha?’
‘No, it’s something else entirely.’
He hung up. Mercy shrugged, left the house, got into her car. Boxer called Mercy’s Aunt Grace. No response from her mobile. He called her Ghanaian restaurant in Peckham. A young man answered and explained that Aunt Grace was away in Ghana for the funeral of Uncle David. Boxer remembered now why they’d had to send Amy to his mother’s while he and Mercy had worked the Alyshia D’Cruz case. The whole of Mercy’s Ghanaian family had left the country. Funerals were huge occasions in Ghana and everybody in the family would attend. The ceremony lasted three or four days, but it would be a reason for them all to stay for weeks. He put the phone down, walked around the room, thinking.
‘Problem?’ asked Zorrita.
‘I need someone to look after Amy’s mother once I’ve told her this news and her whole family’s gone away.’
He stopped by the clothes rail where Amy’s dress and jacket hung. On the floor inside a plastic bag was a blue circular weight with 5kg written in white on it.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s what the killer used to weigh down the bag so that it sank in the river,’ said Zorrita. ‘We’re lucky that the bridge is wide and the river narrow at that point so the bag landed partly in the water, partly on the bank. Otherwise we’d never have found her.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘None,’ said Zorrita. ‘These weights are sold in a large sports department store called Decathlon, of which there are five in and around Madrid.’
While Boxer picked up and handled the weight, the translator and Zorrita spoke to each other briefly in Spanish
.
‘What about you?’ asked Zorrita. ‘Do you have anybody you can stay with in Madrid?’
Boxer shook his head.
‘You must come and stay with my family,’ said Zorrita. ‘I don’t think you should be on your own in an hotel.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Boxer, whose mind as he held the weight was already filling with what he wanted to achieve tonight.
‘I insist,’ said Zorrita. ‘No man should be alone with what you’ve discovered today. It could be . . . dangerous. You know, the mind can play games with you.’
Boxer assured him that he would be fine and in the same moment had an idea. He asked them to leave the room again. He called Isabel Marks. He told her the terrible facts as Zorrita had just told him to a phone so absorbingly dead that he had to ask her several times whether she was still there.
‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this,’ said Isabel.
‘The only reason I can believe it myself is that I’ve seen her clothes, her passport.’
‘No, I mean, I don’t know how you, Amy’s father, can say these things . . . these terrible, terrible things.’
‘To be honest with you, Isabel, it’s because I’m not quite on the inside of it yet myself,’ said Boxer. ‘My brain has taken it in, but it hasn’t gone anywhere else, and that’s because the rest of me is thinking and feeling for Mercy. It’s going to be devastating for her. I’ve no idea how she will react.’
‘You haven’t told her yet?’ she said, astonished.
‘They’re trying to find her, bring her back to the office in Vauxhall so I can speak to her,’ said Boxer. ‘But her whole family is in Ghana at the moment and I need someone to look after her until I can get there tomorrow.’
‘Do you think I’m the right person for that job?’ asked Isabel, as it dawned on her what he was asking. ‘This is family. Someone who knows Amy should be with her. Maybe your mother is the right person for this.’
‘Mercy can’t stand my mother and Esme finds Mercy very difficult.’
‘These are special circumstances, Charlie.’
‘Remember how it was between you and Frank during Alyshia’s kidnap? You think people should be able to make exceptions under stressful circumstances, but invariably they can’t. Especially when there’s history.’
‘O.K., Charlie. Mercy and I might not have any history, but we met at a major historical moment. You’re Amy’s father. Mercy is still in love with you. And we’ve just started a relationship.’
‘There’s nobody else I can trust on an emotional level to take care of her. My mother can’t do it. Her colleagues don’t know her. She liked you on sight, I could tell.’
‘Of course I’ll do it,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ll do it to help you at this terrible time and for Mercy if she’ll let me. But you’d better make out that you haven’t told me first. She wouldn’t like that. This is between the two of you. It’s . . . ’
‘It’s what?’
‘Nothing.’
She couldn’t say to him what she’d thought many times on seeing her ex-husband during her daughter’s kidnap, preparing herself to accept those awful words: the end of our creation.
Mercy parked in the underground car park and went up to Makepeace’s office. He was on the phone but beckoned her in, showed her a seat. He finished his call in seconds. Mercy sat down in the fake-leather armchair against the wall.
‘I’ve had a call from Charles in Madrid,’ said Makepeace, dialling the number. ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘What?’ said Mercy, suddenly afraid. ‘No.’
‘Hello, Charles, I’ve got Mercy here.’
He handed her the phone. She wouldn’t take it.
‘No,’ she said, eyes wide with panic. ‘There’s no need for this. He knows my number.’
‘Take the phone, Mercy. Just talk to him. I’ll wait outside.’
‘No,’ she said, taking the phone.
‘I’ll be right outside. Just here,’ he said, closing the door.
She looked dumbly at the phone in her hand, could hear Boxer’s tinny voice calling for her. She fitted the phone tentatively to her ear.
‘It’s me,’ she said in a voice that even to her sounded very far off. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘It’s about Amy.’
‘Have you . . . have you found her?’ said Mercy. ‘She said we’d never find her, but you’ve found her. I knew you would.’
‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ he said tenderly. ‘It’ll take some time, so you’d better sit down.’
She kicked off her shoes, drew her knees up to her chest, jammed herself in tight between the arms of the chair. She stared into the floor with the phone to her ear.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Boxer started and didn’t stop until he’d got to the end of Inspector Jefe Luís Zorrita’s terrible facts.
Mercy said nothing. She didn’t feel anything. She didn’t think anything. All she knew was that something big had cracked inside her as she listened to his words. Her structure looked the same, but she knew it could collapse at any moment.
The news left her at a strange distance from the world. Was this what people called an out-of-body experience? She couldn’t react emotionally or proceed intellectually. She was stuck with this persistent feeling of difference. She’d witnessed this state from the outside when she’d worked in homicide and gone into people’s front rooms and told them their world’s most damaging news. Being on the inside of it was odd. Painless and yet horribly new, like coming to in a familiar place where everything was lit to a terrifying brightness.
‘Mercy?’
‘I’m still here,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’
‘You shouldn’t be on your own tonight.’
‘I’ll be O.K.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said Boxer. ‘You’re going to have to tell your family and none of them are in London. I checked.’
‘They’re all in Ghana. Uncle David . . . he died,’ said Mercy. ‘But he was very old, you know.’
‘I’m going to ask Isabel to look after you for tonight . . . until I get back to London tomorrow.’
‘Isabel?’
‘You and I worked together on the kidnap of her daughter.’
‘Oh, you mean, your Isabel.’
‘You liked her . . . and she likes you.’
‘Yes,’ she said, half statement, half question.
‘I’m going to call her, get her to come to the office and pick you up.’
‘No, it’s all right, really. Don’t worry.’
‘I want you to be with someone who can help you do the things you have to do.’
‘I won’t be on my own.’
‘Who are you going to stay with?’
‘When do they think it happened?’ asked Mercy. ‘The . . . the killing.’
‘Sunday morning.’
‘She was so convinced of herself,’ said Mercy, ‘and she didn’t even last twenty-four hours on her own.’
‘She was in Madrid. If she’d been in London maybe she’d have been able to read the signs better.’
‘The signs?’ asked Mercy.
‘The people signs. The way people behave. Spain’s a different culture. She couldn’t read people so well.’
‘Sorry, I’m being a bit stupid,’ said Mercy. ‘Are you going to call your mother?’
‘I’ll call Esme soon.’
‘I don’t want to speak to her,’ said Mercy. ‘I don’t want to even see her. She’s got some responsibility for this. She’s poisoned Amy’s mind. It’s no accident this happened after Amy had been staying with her for that week.’
‘I’ll talk to Esme.’
‘Why don’t you come home now?’
‘I have to help the police with their enquiries for a little longer,’ said B
oxer. ‘They haven’t interviewed me yet. I want to see if the divers find anything more.’
‘That could take weeks,’ said Mercy. ‘Searching every bridge across every river in the area of Madrid.’
‘And I have to give a blood sample so that they can extract my DNA and confirm—’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘What’s there to confirm? They’ve found her passport, the clothes she bought and some body parts,’ said Mercy, suddenly furious. ‘What more do they want?’
‘It’s a procedure for positive identification so that they can release the body.’
‘It’s ridiculous. And if they’re going to use anybody’s DNA to identify my daughter, it’s going to be mine.’
Silence. This was vintage Mercy: fine on the face of it, fully in control, capable of speech and action, but inside was turmoil with violent storms of emotion, irrationality and insecurity.
‘They can use samples from both of us.’
‘No,’ said Mercy, vehemently. ‘I’m her mother.’
‘And I’m her father,’ said Boxer. ‘Ideally they’d like a sample of Amy from your house, but I’ve explained the situation there. So, you send a cheek swab down, I’ll supply them with my sample here and we’ll get the necessary confirmation.’
‘No.’
‘Without it we won’t be able to bring her back.’
‘I want Amy to be identified from me and me alone,’ said Mercy, bursting into tears. Chunky sobs blattered down the line to Madrid.
‘O.K.,’ said Boxer. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’
‘The point being,’ said Mercy, the emotion clearing as rapidly as it had come on, ‘that I already have my DNA. There’s no need for them to derive it from a sample. We all have ours on file here in the office. I can email it to you.’
‘Then that’s how we’ll do it,’ said Boxer. ‘Send it to my email address. That’s fine. And in return will you do this one thing for me? Let Isabel look after you. At least for this first night.’
‘O.K.’
12
6:45 P.M., WEDNESDAY 21ST MARCH 2012
Jefatura, Madrid
Esme, this is Charlie.’