I quickly scanned the living room, study/office and downstairs toilet, then the two bedrooms, bathroom and junk room on the floor above, and ended up in the kitchen, which filled the rear extension. The fridge was empty and switched off, but the kettle still sparked up. I found a box of Yorkshire Tea and a can of condensed milk in a nearby cupboard, so the trip was already a success.
I sat at Trev’s table, watching the steam spiral off the surface of the brew, and started to get in the zone. Part of my training with the Det had been about cutting through other people’s homes like a scalpel, either to identify and uncover their most carefully concealed secrets, or to find the most perfect place to leave something that would compromise them later, and allow us to fuck them over pretty much any way we wanted.
To begin with I’d thought that after growing up in Bermondsey I had nothing left to learn, but 14th Intelligence Company took me to a whole new level. We honed our covert entry skills until they were so sharp we could cut ourselves on them, and combining speed and precision became second nature. It wasn’t just about infiltrating somebody’s house: it was about burrowing into the fabric of their life.
Trev had been through the programme as well. It didn’t guarantee that I’d find something here, but it did mean that if I came away empty-handed, it wouldn’t be because I’d messed up.
Trev didn’t like surprises … But he loved puzzles
… The words repeated themselves in my head like a mantra as I went through his place again, from top to bottom, with a fine-tooth comb. He made mistakes, sure. We all did. But he didn’t do anything by accident.
I kicked off by hoisting myself into the roof space through a hatch above the top landing. There was nothing folded into the insulation strips or nestling in the cold-water tank. I lifted a couple of loose floorboards under Trev’s bed. There was nothing taped underneath them, and there were no false linings to the cupboards. Someone else had already given every mattress a seeing-to, including Icarus’s – clinically, with a razorblade or a Stanley knife, not like a berserker – but I was pretty sure they’d been wasting their time.
No, not just pretty sure.
I knew it, beyond any doubt.
Trev would need me to find my way to Ella if he couldn’t make it, but no one else. Which meant that every known location, from a favourite rented villa to an apartment belonging to a distant cousin – even somewhere you might spot in the background of a holiday snap – was too high risk.
I went through his desk and his filing cabinet anyway, scanning every document and every random scribble on every scrap of crumpled notepaper, looking for any hint of a signal that was meant only for me.
There was an amazing amount of shit to sort through. Trev’s enthusiasm for languages – which basically boiled down to an enthusiasm for shagging the girls who spoke them – had taken him all over. Sweden was still high on his list of favourites, but so were France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, even Russia – though he’d kept very quiet about that.
The shelves in his work area were heaving with dictionaries, phrasebooks, maps, guides, military and cultural histories, language-course CDs.
The Dangerous Book for Boys
leaned against a copy of
Brainteasers for Kids
, in case I hadn’t yet got the message. I gathered a selection, fixed myself another brew and flicked through them at the kitchen table.
Some had the corners of their pages turned over to mark an entry that had triggered his interest. Some didn’t. Some were circled in red. Some weren’t. I couldn’t see any logic to it, any pattern. And I began to understand that that was the whole point of the exercise.
Speed. Precision. Speed. Precision. And no random surprises.
It had taken a while, but I was suddenly in Trev’s space. All this stuff added up to one big tease:
Looking for Ella? She could be anywhere
. I could hear his voice in my ear. And I knew he would have been as amused by the idea of her pursuers rushing around on a series of wild-goose chases as he must have been when he named Icarus.
I started seeking out the gaps, and that was when my antennae started to go into overtime.
Why would Trev risk leaving me a message written in plain sight, on the off chance that I might be passing by, when he was going to take the trouble to meet and tell me what he needed me to know?
There was a crash about ten feet away from me, followed by the splintering of wood. I whipped the Browning out of my waistband and hit the deck. In the silence that followed I heard the creak of rusting hinges, then another crash.
I moved to the window by Trev’s side entrance and saw his garage door flapping around in the wind. I washed up my mug, put it back in the cupboard and reclaimed my Timberlands. Then I found a padlock in the top drawer of a nearby utility chest and fastened the thing shut on my way out.
The little concrete Buddha by the step just kept on smiling.
12
I swung the Skoda in alongside Defender of the Faith and stood on the anchors. A nanosecond later I hammered on Father Mart’s door. When he pulled it open, I piled straight past him. ‘Where’s Icarus?’
He followed me to the kitchen and gestured towards a newly installed fleece-covered beanbag in front of the range. ‘Where else?’
Icarus was stretched out on top of it, on his back, like he’d been spatchcocked. He opened one eye, gave me a look of extreme displeasure, and closed it again.
Father Mart tilted his head.
‘Trev said something by the dam. It’s only just clicked. “When your own semi becomes the battle space, what’s the world coming to? You, Father Mart and the dog are the only people I can trust.”’
I undid Icarus’s collar. A small brass disc hung from its buckle; the kind that carried your phone number or the contact details of the local vet in case your dog did a runner. It had a smiley face embossed on one side and a six-digit sequence scratched on the other. 121492. It sounded like a grid reference but, without the right map, it meant nothing to me.
Father Mart picked up on my disappointment and held out his hand. ‘Well, you’ve done your bit, and Icarus has too. So I guess that means it’s my turn.’
He sat by the table and I pulled up the chair opposite him. He gave the surface of the disc a rub with his thumb. ‘One, two, one, four, nine, two … He won’t just have left us with part of a telephone number, so what else could it be? A licence number? A car registration?’
He turned it over and over.
‘A date, perhaps? There aren’t fourteen months in the year, so maybe there’s some American angle. The fourteenth of December 1992?’ He looked up at me. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Were you with Trevor in December ’ninety-two? Somewhere in particular?’
I shook my head. ‘We were in Sweden that May, then I got sent to try to talk some sense to the FBI during the Mount Carmel siege the following spring, but Trev wasn’t part of the team.’
‘Mount Carmel?’
‘Waco, Texas. David Koresh. You remember. A bunch of religious nutters bent on self-destruction …’ I gave him my naughty-schoolboy smile.
He wasn’t listening.
‘Perhaps it’s nothing to do with you two. What if he’s trying to draw our attention somewhere else? The second of January 1492. A Columbus connection? Maybe. But Columbus discovered the New World later …’
He sprang up and went next door, where I could hear him riffling through his desk and bookshelves. He returned with an A5 Jiffy-bag and a battered volume from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. ‘Just been doing what you might call some joined-up thinking …’
He slid a small and very beautiful book of photographs of the Alhambra from the bag. ‘This arrived for me after you left for London. A gift from Trevor.’ He handed me the card that had been attached to the jacket with a paperclip. I’d recognize Trev’s scrawl anywhere. It was even worse than mine.
You’ll like this, Father
, it read.
Your team won
. The caption beneath his message told me that the picture on the other side had been taken from the Comares Tower.
I scratched my head. ‘Now I’m feeling really stupid …’
Father Mart was firing on all cylinders. He could barely keep the lid on his excitement as he flicked through the
Britannica
. ‘Here we are. Abu ’Abd Allah Muhammad XI, last Nasrid Sultan of Granada, Spain … They called him Boabdil. Ferdinand and Isabella captured his stronghold on the second of January …’
‘… 1492.’ I was getting the hang of this. ‘A famous victory for the left-footers.’
‘I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Boabdil. He had the mother from hell. She turned him against everyone, including his father, and the poor lad lost everything. Even then she wouldn’t let up. As he turned to catch his last glimpse of the Alhambra from the pass through the Sierra Nevada, he got a bit emotional. She just sneered at him and said, “Don’t weep like a woman for that which you failed to defend like a man.”’
I grinned. ‘Some of my mates on the estate had mums like that.’
I asked him if he had a good-sized map of southern Spain.
The thing he brought back had seen some action in its time. Much folded and dog-eared, it looked like a veteran of several Sierra Nevada missions. We spread it out on the table between us, and Father Mart ran his index finger down the route that Boabdil would have taken from the city he lost to the Catholic invader. I pictured his mum giving him regular clips around the ear as they went.
‘Here’s the Alhambra. And here’s the Puerto del Suspiro del Moro. Their path must have followed what’s now the main road to Motril.’
I asked him to repeat the Moro bit.
‘Puerto del Suspiro del Moro.’ He beamed. ‘The setting for my favourite part of the story. It means the Gate of the Moor’s Sigh. Needless to say, it’s become a bit of a tourist attraction.’
I scanned the area around it. Padul. Otura. It didn’t seem too densely populated, probably because of the mountains, until you got to the city of Granada, about eleven Ks to the north.
It was time for me to brush up on my flamenco.
1
Plaza de la Marina, Málaga
Monday, 6 February
The Air France flight from Charles de Gaulle was heaving with retired couples, elbows out, dripping with bling, en route to the Costa del Sol. They seemed to have sprayed each other a uniform shade of orange to help get themselves in the mood.
This time I’d taken a parking spot in the long stay at Gatwick and doubled back to St Pancras via Victoria. I exited the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord and messed around with the usual anti-surveillance drills before catching the RER B train to CDG. If Father Mart had read Trev’s signal right, I didn’t want to lead the opposition straight to Ella’s hidey-hole.
After freezing my bollocks off in Glencoe, the Black Mountains, Moscow and Belgrade, the south coast of Spain provided a very welcome dose of Vitamin D. I began to see why the Old and the Gold were so determined to be first onto the transfer bus. Fifteen degrees wasn’t exactly sweltering, but it was a whole lot better than Eskimo weather.
I hired a Seat Leon with a bit of extra welly under the bonnet and pointed it onto the main. The sky was a blinding blue and the signposts told me I was a hundred Ks east of Gibraltar. I hadn’t been down there since 1988, and that was no holiday either. The Det weren’t legally authorized to operate outside the Province, but when you were in pursuit of an IRA active-service unit with a wagonload of high explosive, you had to bend the rules. We’d followed them onto the Rock and taken out all three before they’d had the chance to initiate the device.
I could still reach Granada in time to find a hotel and have a mooch around before dark o’clock, but only if I went direct and didn’t check the rear-view on a regular basis. I bought the most detailed map of Andalucía I could find and took the scenic route instead, first to Málaga harbour, then into the maze of high-rises and historic ruins at its centre, where Moorish castles, Roman ruins and the huge Baroque cathedral rubbed up against formal gardens, upscale boutiques, Michelin-starred restaurants and bustling
tapas
bars.
Then I drove west through the urban sprawl and along the coast to Marbella as the sun began to dip below the peaks of the Sierra Blanca, floodlights bathed the gin palaces in the marinas and the shadows cast by the palm trees lengthened across the beaches.
Throughout the process I concentrated hard on getting lost and doubling back as often as you would when you’re a Brit tourist who didn’t know what he was doing on the right-hand side of the road and hadn’t paid the extra euros for a satnav. Once I was satisfied that nobody in the queue of traffic behind me was performing the same tricks, I worked my way north towards Córdoba, then looped back through an endless succession of olive groves to the city Boabdil had surrendered just over five hundred and twenty years before.
2
The Hotel Villa Oniria was a newly restored nineteenth-century residence that marked the third point of a triangle linking the Alhambra and the Plaza Bib-Rambla, a square near the cathedral that seemed to be the place to go if you were in the mood for a drink and a bite to eat. I’d never been to Granada before, so it seemed as good a place as any to start my quest. It was also small, quiet and friendly, had its own parking garage, a floodlit fountain in the atrium as well as in the garden, and several exits.
The receptionist was very pleased to see the colour of my money, and didn’t seem too alarmed by the purple bruise that had started to make its escape from beneath the dressing above my temple. I was shown to a room on the third floor.
I left the dressing in place but had a shit, shower and shave, then sat and studied the map to get my bearings. I wasn’t going to get on Trev’s Boabdil trail until first thing in the morning, but I hated not knowing which way was up.
The first thing I noticed as I hit the streets was that although the city was not stuffed with holidaymakers and the locals were obviously suffering from the economic downturn they were incredibly welcoming – and didn’t take the piss at the first sniff of a cash transaction.