Blacklight Blue (18 page)

Anna said, ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t want any secrets from the people I loved. Secrets are poison, Kirsty. You need to let them out.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Of what?’

‘That it’ll change things.’

‘It already has. You said it had changed everything.’

But Kirsty was still confused by a surfeit of conflicting emotions. ‘I don’t know what to think, or what to say.’

‘If you loved him before, then you love him still. He hasn’t changed, and neither have you. You can’t alter the past, but you
can
make the future.’ She turned away, then, staring out across the vast central plateau of her native land, and Kirsty saw the hint of a tear in the corner of her eye.

‘What is it?’ She took her arm.

But Anna blinked away the tear, and smiled to cover it. ‘I never knew my own father that well. I was always too busy. Always thought there would be a tomorrow. Some time when we would sit down and talk and get to know each other, finally. Then he upped and died on me, and there
were
no tomorrows, no going back.’

Kirsty looked at her. ‘When was that?’

‘Ten years ago.’

And a strange stab of apprehension spiked through Kirsty’s pain.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Although the sun was low in its winter sky, there was a good deal of warmth left in it. The display in Enzo’s hire car had shown twenty degrees celsius. Parking in the Plaça Frederic Rahola was no problem at this time of year. La Plaja Grana, beyond the statue of Salvador Dali, was deserted. Only a couple of tables on the seafront café were occupied. He walked around past the Casino and the Entina tapas bar and into a tiny cobbled square where leaves clung stubbornly to the trees that would shade it in summer. He checked the map he had acquired in the tourist office then looked up to see a narrow slated street climbing steeply up through an archway into the old town.

He shrugged aside the ghost of last night’s revelation about Kirsty and Simon. It had haunted him all through the flight and the drive north from Barcelona. But now he sensed that he was only a touch away from Rickie Bright. Bright would know that, and like an animal cornered, become even more dangerous. Enzo needed all his concentration.

Many of the street names and shop fronts here owed their origins to a strange Catalonian language that hovered somewhere between Spanish and French. The streets were paved with slabs of slate, laid end on, an uneven surface cambered for drainage, and so narrow that they never saw the sun, except in high summer.

A gaggle of schoolkids passed him on the steep climb, satchels slung across shoulders, spirits high at the end of the school day. A man on a ladder was painting a wrought-iron balcony. Ahead of him, an old lady wearing a headscarf, fresh from her siesta, sat on the doorstep of her house, hands folded on a pink apron. She watched him pass with a dull curiosity.

Through a maze of tiny, intersecting passageways, Enzo found himself, finally, on the street that ran straight up to the church. The house he was looking for, he knew, was immediately below it at No. 9. On his right, below a gnarled bougainvillea vine, he passed a small restaurant called El Gato Azul. There was a painting of a blue cat on the panel beside the door. On the wall opposite was a menu spattered with paw prints. A little further up, on the other side of the street, was a double door the colour of dried blood. Next to it, the number 9.

Enzo looked up at the white washed three-storey house. All its shutters were tightly closed, and his heart sank with the thought that he might have come all this way only to find that she wasn’t at home. There was a bell-push above the letter box at the side of the door. He pressed it, and heard a bell ringing distantly, somewhere in the depths of the house. After a moment, he heard slow footsteps beyond the door, the rattle of a lock, and one half of the doors swung open to reveal a small, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age. She was dressed all in black, except for a white pinafore. Her skin was olive dark, and her face deeply lined. This was not, he knew, the woman he sought. She looked at Enzo half-obscured by the dark interior of the hall, and he felt the house breathe its cold, damp air in his face.

‘I’m looking for Señora Bright.’

The dark-haired woman shook her head. Enzo tried again in French, but still she didn’t seem to understand, and his grasp of Spanish was limited.

‘
Donde esta Señora Bright
?’

She raised a single finger, bidding him to wait, and she turned away to be swallowed by the dark. He waited for what seemed like forever, until she returned to hand him a scrap of paper. On it she had scrawled the word,
iglesia
. It was close enough to
église
, the French word for church, for him to understand. He pointed up the street.

‘Up there?’

She nodded and closed the door abruptly in his face. He shifted his satchel from one shoulder to the other, the weight of his laptop computer starting to make the muscle ache, and climbed the last few metres into the tiny square in front of the church. A panel on the wall read,
Església de Santa Maria.
A cat sitting on the step watched him with wary eyes.
Església
, Enzo figured, must be the Catalan for
church
. He had read in the archive, downloaded from the internet, that Señora Bright prayed for her lost son here every morning. Perhaps she was also in the habit of saying an evening prayer for Rickie.

Inside it was cool and dark, and he wandered the length of the nave looking for a face amongst the handful at prayer that he would recognise from the newspaper photographs. It wasn’t until he had discounted them all, that he noticed the small side chapel behind net drapes. A solitary figure knelt at its altar, candles burning on either side. He brushed the drapes apart and walked down the aisle between the pews. The squeak of his rubber shoes on the polished tiles echoed high up into the roof. He stopped beside the lady in black. ‘Señora Bright?’

And when she turned to look up at him, he saw that it was her. He saw, too, a strange look in her eyes. Of both fear and hope. And he suddenly felt like a harbinger of doom, bearing news from the Gods. Good news and bad. ‘Yes,’ she said, and got stiffly to her feet.

‘I think I might have news of your son.’ The words she had waited thirty-six years to hear.

***

As he walked with her down the steep incline to the house, the sun was setting beyond the red-tile roofs, the sky a blaze of red beyond the hills. The bay below, as still as glass, was the colour of copper.

She opened a door at the side of the house, almost obscured by ivy and bougainvillea, and he followed her into a small, walled garden shaded by tall trees. Grass and flowers grew between the paving stones, and water tumbled across a tiny rock garden into a pool half-hidden beneath fleshy lily leaves. She flicked a switch beside French windows leading to the house, and hidden lamps cast soft light around the garden. They sat in chairs around a white-painted, wrought-iron table, and Señora Bright lifted a small bell and shook it vigorously.

‘Tea, Mister Macleod?’

‘Thank you .’

‘I only have Earl Grey.’

‘That’s fine.’

The maid who had opened the door to Enzo just fifteen minutes earlier emerged from the dark of the house and Señora Bright spoke to her rapidly in Spanish. The maid gave a tiny bow and disappeared again inside.

The old lady sat and looked at Enzo thoughtfully, almost as if she were putting off the moment. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and examined them for several seconds. Then she looked up again, courage summoned, ready to hear the worst. ‘So, tell me.’

‘I’d like to hear your story first, Señora.’

‘Angela,’ she said. ‘Only the Spanish call me Señora.’ She sighed. ‘Are you determined to torture me, Mister Macleod? I’m sure you must have read all about it in the newspaper archives.’

‘I’d prefer to hear it from you.’

She breathed her exasperation into the night, worn down by the years, and endless disappointments. ‘We were a little later than usual that night. We’d met another couple from Essex and Rod had ordered a second bottle of wine. Oh, how we laughed together. When all the time someone was upstairs stealing our son.’ She looked very directly at Enzo. ‘Have you any idea how destructive guilt can be? It eats away at you, Mister Macleod, from the inside out, until there’s nothing left but the most hollow of shells. Just what you see before you.’

‘You had employed the hotel babysitting service.’

‘Oh, yes. Promised to check in every fifteen minutes. Some young girl distracted by the kitchen apprentice. Our son lost to teenage hormones. They were both sacked, of course, but that didn’t bring Rickie back. When we got up to the room Billy and Lucy were fast asleep, like nothing had happened. But my baby was gone.’

‘Did you have any thoughts, then or now, who might have taken him?’

‘At the time I was almost sure I knew who’d done it. I told the police, but I think they thought I was imagining it.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s funny how certainty diminishes with time. Now, I can barely even recall the moment. Just my telling of it.’

‘What moment?’

‘The previous day, I’d taken Rickie down to the pool. It was hot, about midday, and most people had gone for something to eat, or found patches of shade to lie and sleep in. But Rickie had been fractious all morning. Hot, almost feverish, and I thought I would take him into the pool to cool him down. When we came out of the water I took him into the shade of the umbrella to dry him off, and there was a woman sitting at the next table. Rickie was still in a bad mood, trying to push away from the towel, whining and fighting me at every turn. And she was just watching, with this sort of smile on her face, looking adoringly at Rickie. I told her he was hungry. You know, just an excuse for the way he was behaving. And she got all defensive on his behalf. Everyone gets grumpy when they’re hungry, she said. God, I can still hear her!’

‘What nationality?’

‘Oh, she was English. No doubt about that. Bit posh. Sort of Home Counties.’

‘Age?’

‘Thirty, early thirties. I don’t know. Difficult to tell. She had a good figure, but wasn’t showing it off. She had a kind of old-fashioned one-piece swimsuit. Her hair was sort of frizzy, pulled back in an untidy knot. She wasn’t very pretty.’

‘And what made you think it might have been her?’

Angela Bright shook her head. ‘I have no idea. Just something about her. Something in her eyes. Something like hunger. Or jealousy. I don’t know. The way she looked at Rickie. She never once met my eye.’

‘You hadn’t seen her around before?’

‘No. Not that I was aware of. And then when the police began their investigation, there wasn’t anyone staying at the hotel who even looked like her. They definitely thought she was some figment of my imagination. But women have an instinct, Mister Macleod. That woman coveted my child. I didn’t realise it at the time, but when I thought about it later…’ She broke off, almost choking on her words. ‘Too late. Too damned late!’

The maid returned with a silver tray laden with cups, a teapot, hot water, and white sugar. She laid it on the table, then retired once more to the house. Angela Bright poured. She had recovered her composure.

‘Sugar, Mister Macleod?’

‘No, thank you.’ Enzo poured in a little milk and took a sip. He hadn’t tasted Earl Grey for years, and for a moment it took him back to another place, another life. Perhaps that’s why Angela Bright persisted with the habit. A reminder of who she had once been, in her previous life as wife and mother of three, happier days when her family was still intact. He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘The newspaper reports said there was blood all over the hotel room.’

‘They exaggerated. There was a little blood. Smears on the floor, some spots on Rickie’s panda. It seemed so vivid then. Spatters of red on white fur. All gone brown now, like faded rust.’

‘You still have it?’ Enzo felt his pulse quicken.

‘Of course. In the end I persuaded the police to let me have it back. It’s the only thing of Rickie’s I still have. The only part of him that still belongs to me.’

‘May I see it?’

For the first time she seemed reluctant to co-operate. ‘Why? Who are you, Mister Macleod?’

‘I used to be a forensic scientist, Angela. Thirty-six years ago, the only thing anyone could have told from the blood they found in Rickie’s hotel room was the blood type. Now, we can tell a whole lot more about a person. Their genetic code, for example. Their DNA. It’s unlikely that whoever took your son will be found in any DNA database. It all happened too long ago for that. But we can at least tell the sex of Rickie’s abductor.’

‘From thirty-six-year-old spots of blood on a cuddly toy?’ She seemed incredulous.

‘With luck, yes. Then we’d know for certain whether it was a man, or maybe your woman at the pool, who took him.’

Angela Bright rang again for the maid, and issued a curt instruction. Then turned back to Enzo. ‘You told me you had news of my son.’

Enzo hesitated, uncertain of how much to tell her. ‘I’ve been trying to track down a missing person,’ he said. He chose his words carefully. ‘In the course of my investigation, I discovered two identical samples of DNA, each of which came from a different person. Which is impossible.’ Again he hesitated. From here there would be no going back. ‘Except in the case of identical twins.’

Even in the gathering darkness, Enzo could see that her face had drained of colour. She was not a stupid woman. ‘And one of them was Billy’s?’

‘Your son, William, yes.’

‘Which means that Rickie is still alive.’

‘It meant he was still alive in 1992. It was from then that we recovered his DNA. I also believe that six years earlier he broke into William’s flat in London and stole his passport, and his identity.’

Enzo watched closely for her reaction. But it almost seemed as if she were no longer there. Her eyes were glazed and distant. Then, in a tiny voice that whispered into the night, she said, ‘I knew it.’ And she dragged herself back to the present, finding focus again on Enzo. ‘It was twelve, fourteen years after he’d been taken, sometime in the mideighties. I was sure it was him. As sure as I’ve been of anything in my life.’

‘You saw him?’

‘In a minimarket in town. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. For a moment I thought it was Billy. But Billy had gone back to England. He was just standing there, staring at me. And when I saw him, he turned and ran out of the store. I went after him, but by the time I got into the street he was gone.’ Her eyes lifted slowly towards a darkening sky studded with stars. ‘I’ve replayed that moment so many times. You’ve no idea. So often that in the end I began to doubt it had ever happened.’ She looked back at Enzo. ‘Until now.’

The door from the house opened, and the maid emerged, clutching a toy panda, the same size as a child’s teddy bear. It was tousled, and dirty, and threadbare in places. She gave it to the lady of the house, and Angela Bright pressed it to her chest as if it might have been her lost boy. Enzo held out his hand. ‘Can I see?’

Reluctantly she handed it to him, and he very quickly found the spots of dried blood, still caked amongst the clumps of wool. Some of it had flaked off and it’s colour was faded, but there was enough left to obtain a decent sample. Enough to run any number of tests.