Hour Of Darkness (34 page)

‘I owed Perry,’ she whispered, then fell silent as John appeared with his order pad.

‘You ready to order,’ he asked, ‘or you want to wait for the third person?’

‘No,’ Mia said. ‘We’ll eat. We’ll be joined later. I’d like fish.’

‘Me too,’ I added.

‘The sea bass is best today. I do two of them, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I agreed, ‘in the oven, and a nice white wine, an Albarino, maybe.’

She waited until he had gone before taking up her story once again. ‘Perry Holmes saved my life,’ she said, frown lines appearing around her eyes. You have no idea what that brother of his was like, that Alasdair. I was thirteen or fourteen, Bob, not much older than your Alex was when I met her, when my uncle, my very own uncle,’ she hissed, ‘first forced me to go with him. You spared me the details, you said. I’ll do the same for you but only because I can’t repeat them, not even to myself.

‘I think Al Holmes would probably have killed me in the end, if Perry hadn’t found out about it. For all the things they say that he was capable of himself, he was a very moral man when it came to children. He burst in on us one night when Al had me tied to the bed, face down for a bit of variety . . . get the picture? . . . and he beat him like a dog. He threatened to castrate him, and he promised he would, if he ever caught him with a kid again. And then he untied me and took me home with him.’

She paused as a waitress arrived with the wine, opened it and poured.

‘Nice,’ Mia said, after she’d tasted it. ‘I know a bit about wine, you know.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

She didn’t react to my remark. ‘To be honest,’ she continued, ‘when Perry took me away I expected more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He asked me about my family life and I told him about Uncle Gavin and how he’d pretty much sold me. He asked me about my mother and I said she’d known and hadn’t cared.’

If I hadn’t known her better I’d have thought she was going to cry. ‘I don’t know why my mother hated me, Bob,’ she whispered, ‘but she did, always. Years later when I was on the radio she found out about it, and extorted money from me. You must remember that; you put a stop to it.’

Yes, I remembered. Mia told me about it during one of our first meetings, and I had given old Bella a serious talking to, one that Alf Stein would have been proud of.

‘As vicious as Al had been,’ she said, ‘Perry was the absolute opposite. He bought me a lot of new clothes, then he took me through to Hamilton and gave me a room in his wife’s place. I know they weren’t married but that’s what he called her. I went to school with Alafair and I got to know Hastie too, whenever he came back from the forces on leave. I had a decent home, for the first time ever, not one that was full of hate, and violent boys and men. I did well at school and then Perry put me through university. Yes, Bob, I had a new life and my mother never knew where I’d gone.

‘So yes, I owed Perry and when he asked me to set up a meeting with my brother, because he wanted to ask him some things about Tony Manson, I did it without a second thought.’

‘I never asked you this at the time,’ I said, ‘maybe because I thought I’d be better off not knowing, but I will now. Did you know about the hoods from Newcastle?’

She shook her head and winced. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘They arrived just before nine, and told me Perry had sent them to take Marlon to him.’

‘Did you know that Manson was porking Alafair at the time?’

‘No, she didn’t tell me that; she wouldn’t, the way things were between him and Perry.’

‘How did you feel when you heard what had happened to Marlon?’

She sipped her wine then looked me straight in the eye. ‘How do you think? I was gutted, because I’d been deceived. Was I overcome with grief? Honestly, no, because Marlon had chosen that sort of life, in spite of what happened to Gavin and to Ryan, my other brother. He knew what Tony Manson was.

‘And this too,’ she added. ‘My brothers were always the best loaf in the house; mother’s pride. They treated me like shit as well; I was their servant too.’

Silence fell between us as the sea bass arrived, and it stayed there, more or less, as we did it justice. Any talk was merely that of a renewed acquaintance, and all of it came from Mia. She asked me about my kids, although I sensed that she had no real interest.

‘Do you still have that cottage in Gullane?’ she ventured. ‘I loved that place the first time I saw it. For a very short while, I imagined what it would be like to live there with you.’

‘What?’ I said, with more than a little derision. ‘Me and Perry Holmes’s foster-child? Get real, Mia.’

Yet even as I spoke and saw the flash of hurt in her eyes, I thought of Sauce Haddock and his partner, the granddaughter of a criminal who’d been . . . I hoped my tense was right . . . almost as big a player as Perry.

Then I recalled the young woman who’d hooked me and I thought,
Maybe, just maybe.

I kicked that notion into touch and focused on the present as we finished our meals.

‘Okay,’ I said when I was ready, ‘you think you’ve got a hold over me that you can use in some way. Back then, you might have, but this is now. Claim that I tipped you off, and I think you’d find that you’d be asked to prove the allegation. Not just that, Mia,’ I added, ‘you’d find that nobody cared. The truth is, I didn’t tell you to get out of town to save you from being arrested for Marlon’s murder. You’ve just told me you didn’t know those guys were going to be there, and I believe you. I’d have believed you back then, just the same.

‘You wouldn’t have been an accused, you’d have been a witness, but that case was never going to come to trial, ’cos you can’t put dead people in the dock, and by that time, Hastie had taken care of the Newcastle end.’

‘So why did you warn me?’

‘I did it to protect you. Not from Tony Manson, for he’d never have crossed me, but from Bella. She was another animal altogether.’

‘You mean she knew that I’d invited Marlon to my place?’ she asked, her eyes narrowing.

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘I told her.’

‘You told her,’ she whispered, incredulous. Her expression froze. ‘Why, in God’s name, did you do that?’

‘Because I wanted her to know,’ I said. ‘I wanted her to see how she’d destroyed her children, I wanted her to see what an evil cow she was. That’s why I told you never to come back to Scotland, and to forget that you ever had a mother. You were so much better off without her.’

‘Jesus,’ Mia gasped. ‘You told her. Bob, you don’t know what you did.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘I’ll get there,’ she replied, ‘but first tell me, how much do you know about her death?’

‘I can only tell you what the Edinburgh investigators have pieced together. As you know, it’s not my force any longer. But why should I do that? Let me guess. You want to know whether they’ve found out about you and the methamphetamine supply. Right?’

She nodded and offered a small grin.

‘What’s so fucking funny?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll deny any involvement in that.’

‘Sure, because you were smart enough to burn your bodega to the ground before you did a runner from the Spanish drugs cops. Yes, they know about it in Edinburgh. Why, for God’s sake, Mia, did you get into that racket? Tell me; it won’t go any further.’

‘I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘You know the old saying about taking the boy out of the ghetto? Maybe in my case it runs along the lines of, you can take the girl out of the family, but you can’t take the family out of the girl.’

She picked up her glass in both hands and took a sip. ‘Let me tell you how it was with me, Bob,’ she murmured. ‘I struggled for a few years after I moved to Spain, getting by on presenter jobs on English shows on local radio, until my Spanish became good enough to get me into the mainstream stations. It was tough, but over the years I managed to put a little money together.

‘Then I did something fairly daft. I bought a sherry bodega in a place called El Cuervo. It’s not quite the end of the earth, but probably a stopover on the way there. The guy I bought it from stayed on for a while, to show me the ropes, and we ran profitably for a while. Then, about two years ago, he died, very suddenly, just as the recession was starting to bite. That’s when Ignacio came in.’

‘Ignacio being?’ I asked, although I knew from Pye’s file.

‘My son.’

‘I don’t recall him in Edinburgh.’

‘No, he was born in Spain, eighteen years ago. He told me that he knew someone who had a brother who could put the place to good use, if we didn’t ask any questions. I could see myself being penniless again, so I said yes, and I didn’t ask. Sure enough, reasonable money started to roll in, and there was no comeback . . . for a while, that is. Then, about nine months ago, Ignacio came to me again and said that his pal wanted to quit, as the local markets were becoming a bit risky, not so much from the police but from other people, a crew of Mexicans who didn’t like what he was doing.’

I recalled a note I’d read on the file, by Karen Neville, after an unofficial chat with Alafair Drysalter. ‘So you had the bright idea of creating another route?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you approached Hastie McGrew, fresh out of the nick?’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘At first he was suspicious; I’d had no contact with either him or Alafair since I left. He doubted me at first; he was worried that the cops might be trying to set him up again, but I was able to tell him some family stuff that convinced him I was who I said I was.

‘Hastie said he’d think about my proposition. A week or so later he came back and told me that he’d set something up, although he could not get anywhere near it himself. You understand why?’

I nodded. ‘Of course. But he never would have. He must have learned from Perry: never let anything be traced to you, anything that can be proved.’

‘Just so,’ she agreed. ‘It was simple,’ she continued. ‘I couriered the drugs across to Britain in a van loaded with stuff I was taking back home for the ex-pat Brits that are bailing out of Spain in the thousands. That was my cover. I always hid the drugs in their items, never in the van, so that if I was caught . . . unlikely as that was on the crossings I used . . . I’d be able to claim innocence.’

Good thinking, Mia
, I thought.
You’re the smartest Watson of them all . . . not that that would be too hellish difficult.

‘I was met,’ she went on, ‘wherever I said, by a guy I knew only as Patrick. He took the consignment, and that was that. The money flowed to me by a different route.’ She leaned forward, looking at me earnestly. ‘That’s the truth, Bob.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not quite. At least it’s not quite as the Spanish drugs police see it. They believe that Ignacio synthesised the stuff himself, that there never was any pal. They checked his school records and found that his chemistry results were off the scale.’

‘Shit,’ she murmured. ‘Then I need your help even more.’

‘How do you imagine I can help you with all this?’ I protested. ‘I have no jurisdiction here, and as for Scotland, it’s gone too far for that. Remember my young DC, Andy, the blond boy with the green eyes? He’s now the head of our Drug Enforcement Agency, and he takes his job very seriously. I can’t call him off.’

She stared hard at the tablecloth.

‘The guy Patrick,’ I went on, ‘if you’d been checking up on him in the Edinburgh online papers as well as on me, you’d know that he was busted last week. In the process, he shot his girlfriend dead, instead of the cop he was trying to kill. As you can imagine, he’s singing his fucking head off.’

‘Oh Jeez,’ she sighed. ‘It never rains, eh? Bob, I’m not too worried about the Spanish police. They’re too busy chasing the Mexicans and the Colombians to bother about little old me. But your people, they’re different. You couldn’t tell them the route’s closed down now, could you?’

‘They know that already, Mia. But they’re not going to send you a letter of thanks, and they can’t just forget it ever existed.’ I thought for a second or two. ‘However . . . if they stuck you in a line-up, what are the chances of Patrick Booth identifying you?’

‘As long as I’m not the only one there wearing a poncho, a woolly hat and shades so big they almost cover your face, I’d say they were pretty poor.’

‘Then maybe you don’t need help,’ I suggested; then I frowned. ‘But something tells me that’s not your biggest worry, is it?’ I ventured.

‘No.’

‘That has to do with this deep dark secret, I guess, the one you say will hole my career below the waterline.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I suppose it’s time you found out what it is.’

She took a mobile from her small gold handbag, keyed in a text and sent it, then leaned back in her chair. I did the same, catching up with the Albarino in the silence. If I hadn’t glanced to my left I wouldn’t have seen the look on John’s face, the surprise in his eyes as he looked at a point behind me and exclaimed, ‘Nacho?’

And then he was standing beside me, the newcomer, the third place at the table. I’d seen him in a similar position before, but then he’d been wearing a waiter’s uniform.

‘This is my son,’ Mia said, ‘Ignacio Centelleos.’

I looked at him as he took his seat, and all sorts of things clicked into place, dates, details of a night three months off a year before the kid was born, the way he looked almost exactly like a photograph I have at home of another teenage lad: me.

‘This is our son,’ his mother added.

‘I don’t know if I should say, “Hi, Dad,”’ Nacho murmured. ‘It is very new to me too.’

Mia took something else from her bag, a document, folded down to quarter size. ‘If you doubt me,’ she said, ‘that’s a DNA analysis report. If your Spanish isn’t good enough to read it you can have it officially translated. Either way, it’ll tell you definitively that you and I are Ignacio’s parents. If you still doubt it we can run another test, no problem.’

I couldn’t help smiling, as if I was admiring my son’s ingenuity, as in fact I was. ‘You stole my swimming trunks from my garden,’ I chuckled. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, solemnly. ‘I had no choice.’