The Cassandra Sanction (3 page)

Ben glanced around him. A corner of the room was set aside as a little study area. Above the desk hung a crucifix, to the left of it a framed degree certificate from the University of Madrid, awarded to one Raul Fuentes for achieving first-class honours in English. To the right
of the cross, a poster was tacked to the wall depicting a forlorn-looking polar bear cub alone on a melting ice floe that was drifting on unbroken blue water under a bright and sunny sky, with the legend
STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW
.

Next to that hung a smaller framed photo of the Spaniard, grinning and laughing on a white-sanded beach somewhere hot, with his arm around the shoulders of a strikingly
beautiful dark-haired woman. She was laughing with him, showing perfect white teeth. It was a happy picture, obviously from a happier time not so very long ago.

‘Raul Fuentes,’ Ben said. ‘That would be you?’

The Spaniard nodded. He slumped on the rumpled sofa. Leaned across to pick up one of the beer cans to give it a shake, in case there might be some left inside.

‘No beer for you,’
Ben said, stepping over to snatch it from his fingers. ‘Which way’s the kitchen? I presume you have coffee in the place.’ Raul Fuentes flopped back against the cushions and sighed, wagged a hand in the direction of a door.

The kitchen was a mess, though Ben could tell it hadn’t always been. Copper saucepans hung neatly on little hooks above the worktop, next to a shelf with a collection of
cookbooks. An ornamental wine rack was loaded with a selection of decent bottles that Raul hadn’t yet got around to emptying down his throat. The ones he had filled the bin and stood around the surfaces, along with more empty beer cans and piles of unwashed dishes. Ben shoved them to one side and set about making coffee.

Raul had a real percolator and real fresh-ground beans. Ben approved.
The instant stuff was essentially dehydrated military rations, popularised during successive world wars. You shouldn’t have to drink it unless there was no other choice.

As he waited for the coffee to bubble up on the stove, Ben thought about the picture on the wall above the desk and wondered whether the woman in it was the reason behind Raul Fuentes’ troubles.
She’s not worth it, mate.
The
yob’s words had evidently touched a nerve.

When the coffee came up, he poured the contents into two cups. Straight, black, as it came. Milk and sugar were trivial nonessentials at a time like this. He carried the cups back into the other room and set one down in front of Raul.

‘Drink it while it’s hot. It’ll do you good.’

Raul slurped some, and pulled a face.

‘It needs to be strong,’
Ben said.

Raul braved another sip. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said, looking up.

‘Ben,’ Ben said.

‘You’re not from around here.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘You’re English.’

‘The half of me that isn’t Irish.’

‘What are you doing here in Frigiliana?’ Raul asked. ‘Are you on vacation or something?’

Ben wasn’t about to reveal to a stranger how he’d been wandering
aimlessly through Europe for the last couple of months, never lingering long in one place, staying in cheap hotels to preserve his savings, travelling by public transport wherever whim or random choice took him.

‘I wanted to see the castle,’ he said.

Which, as far as it went, was true, although Ben hadn’t been aware of the existence of the ancient Moorish fortress – whose ruins topped
the hill overlooking Frigiliana – until he’d happened to pick up a discarded magazine on the bus from Sevilla, just for something to read. Then, just for something to do, when he’d got off the bus he’d made the long, hot, dusty hike up the hill to visit the lonely ruins that marked the site of the battle of El Peñon de Frigiliana, where in 1569 some six thousand Christian soldiers had stormed the
last stronghold of the Moorish empire and spelled the final end of Muslim rule in Spain.

Once he’d got to the top, Ben had wondered why he’d bothered. He’d seen all the battlefields he ever wanted to see in his life, both ancient and modern. The remains of the fortress didn’t look much different from crusader ruins he’d observed in the Middle East or the smoking rubble of killing zones in
Afghanistan, from back in the day. It was a sad old place, haunted by the same ancient ghosts as all such places inevitably were.

Ben had perched on a crumbled wall and smoked a few cigarettes while looking out over the valley below, then got thirsty and come wandering back down the hill into Frigiliana to find a cool drink. The rest of the story, Raul didn’t need telling.

‘Well, I’m glad
you showed up when you did,’ Raul said after another grateful slurp of coffee. It seemed to be reviving him a little already. ‘I can’t believe the way you went through those idiots. You must be some kind of seventh-dan Aikido master or something.’

‘It’s just a few simple tricks,’ Ben said.

‘Tricks.’ Raul considered that for a moment. ‘Well, whatever, you saved my ass from a serious beating
back there. Probably saved my job, too. Respectable schoolteachers aren’t supposed to get into drunken fights and turn up at school all bruised up.’

‘You teach English?’ Ben said, glancing in the direction of the degree certificate.

Raul nodded. ‘In a secondary school, just a few kilometres from here.’

‘It’s the middle of the week. Is there a holiday?’

Raul said quietly, ‘No, I
… I’m taking time off.’

Ben didn’t ask why. ‘Respectable schoolteachers don’t generally have such a useful right jab, in my experience.’

Raul gave a sour laugh. ‘I was an amateur boxing champion in my teens. It’s been years since I so much as threw a punch. Stupid.’ He sat hunched over with his elbows on his knees, toying with his cup and frowning. ‘I shouldn’t have gone in there in the
first place. As if I hadn’t already got enough booze in this place to drink myself into a hole in the ground. Maybe I was looking for a fight. Maybe I wanted it to happen.’

‘Whatever it was about,’ Ben said, ‘it’s none of my business. I’m going to finish up my coffee and get out of here. Do us both a favour and try not to get yourself killed with a repeat performance, okay? A broken heart’s
not worth getting beaten to death over. No matter how pretty she is.’ Ben pointed back with his thumb at the picture over the desk.

Raul hung his head down so low that it almost touched his knees. He whispered, ‘Was. And she was more than that. She was a lot more.’

Ben said nothing.

‘See, everything anyone says about her now has to be in the past tense. Even I catch myself doing it.
As if she really had gone, as if she were no longer a part of the world. That’s what the police would have everyone believe.’

Ben still said nothing.

‘And now Klein says it too,’ Raul murmured. ‘I thought maybe he’d see it differently, but he’s just like the others. Nobody but me can see it’s just bullshit.’ He closed his eyes, held them shut for a few moments. When he opened them, they
were bright with wetness. ‘And so there it is. Catalina’s dead. That’s what I’m supposed to believe, too. But I can’t. I just can’t. So I won’t talk about her as if she were. Everyone else can play that game. Not me.’ He put the coffee down on the table. ‘You were kind to help me. But it’s no good. I’m just going to keep drinking. I’m going to drink until I can’t think about anything any more. Except
another drink.’

‘I can’t stop you,’ Ben said. ‘But you’re going to have to get off your arse and pour it yourself.’

Raul looked at him. ‘Some friend you are.’

‘I’m not your friend, Raul.’

Ben looked at Raul and felt the depth of his pain. But Ben also sensed he was in danger of getting drawn in. There was an untold story here, and he didn’t want to hear it.

He drank the last
of his coffee and stood up. ‘I’m sorry your life turned to shit. I’m sorry your girlfriend died.’

Raul Fuentes raised his head from his knees and slowly turned to look at Ben. The muscles in his face looked tight enough to snap.

‘Not my girlfriend. My sister. She’s my twin sister. Don’t you get it? That’s how I know they’re wrong.’

Chapter Three

Ben felt a brother’s grief hit him like a fist to the face. He went silent. Glanced again at the woman’s picture over the desk, and now he could see it. The similarity in the eyes, the nose, the cheekbones. The same fine, lean Latin features. He looked back at Raul, feeling suddenly torn between walking away and staying to hear more.

‘My sister did not kill herself,’ Raul
said, with as much absolute rock-solid unflinching certainty as Ben had ever heard in a person’s voice. ‘My sister is alive.’

Ben made no reply. He hesitated, then sat down again. It was the least he could do for the guy to listen.

‘They’re saying she drove her car off a cliff into the ocean,’ Raul said. ‘Just let it roll right off the edge. They say it was suicide.’

Ben could imagine
it. The beautiful dark-haired young woman in the picture sitting at the wheel. Her face strained with terror and resolution as she let off the handbrake and let herself trundle towards oblivion. The car falling into space, plummeting down to smash itself to pieces as that fragile body inside it was pummelled and broken. He pictured torn metal and shattered plastic and bloodied glass. But something
about the picture was wrong. Something Raul didn’t believe. Ben remained silent for a moment longer before he said, ‘Are you going to tell me there was no body inside the car when they found it?’

Raul’s eyes brightened visibly, the way a prisoner’s on death row light up when they tell him about the last-minute stay of execution that’s just been granted. ‘Exactly. All they pulled out of the
water was an empty car. What does that tell you?’

‘It tells me the body could have been flung free of the car, Raul.’ He hated dashing the guy’s hopes like that. But better to face reality than to be tormented by wishful fantasy for the rest of your life.

Raul flinched as if Ben had pulled a gun on him. ‘How would you know? How can you assert something like that?’

Ben wished he’d said
nothing at all. The thing he’d wanted to avoid was happening. He was getting sucked in. ‘Tell me where this happened, Raul.’

Raul calmed a little and replied, ‘Germany. Catalina moved there, for her work. She’s a scientist. Well, kind of a bit more than that.’

Still resisting speaking about his sister in the past tense, Ben noticed.

‘I know this is hard, Raul. But did Catalina have
any reason to harm herself?’

‘Why should she? She’s successful, she’s achieved all she ever wanted and more. She’s a happy person.’

‘People can look happy on the outside,’ Ben said.

‘While inside they suffer such torment that they want to end it all. I get it. I know. But I know my sister, don’t you see? I know her better than anyone in the world and I know she wouldn’t have killed
herself. She’s a happy person. She has everything to live for. When she walks into a room, she fills it up with laughter and smiles. People love her.’

‘An accident, then,’ Ben said.

‘You think I haven’t thought about that? Okay, let’s say she accidentally drove to the edge of the cliff and then accidentally forgot to stop, and the car went over. Same story. There’s the car, but where’s
she?’

Ben could have told him there were a hundred ways for a corpse to vanish at sea. The tides could draw it miles out, where it would eventually sink to the bottom before the bacteria inside the gut and chest cavity would start to produce enough methane, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide to float it back up to the surface. That process could take days, during which time the cadaver would
become an ever more appetising meal to the numerous species of shark and other carnivorous fish that frequented those waters. Such details were best left unmentioned under the circumstances, so he kept his mouth shut.

‘I mean,’ Raul went on, ‘it’s been nearly three months. A body would surely have turned up by now.’

Ben looked at him, surprised. ‘Three months? I thought this must have
only just happened.’

Raul sank back deep into the cushions of the sofa, as if suddenly deflated. ‘It was July sixteenth. Eighty-three days ago. A place called Rügen Island. She apparently drove for hours to get there from her home in Munich. She …’ He closed his eyes for a moment, as if it was too painful to say more. ‘The German police closed the case not long afterwards. There was all kinds
of bureaucratic bullshit. My parents, they flew out there. Neither of them had ever been on a plane before. Never even left Valdepeñas de Jaén until then.’

‘Did you go with them?’

Raul shook his head sadly. ‘Couldn’t bring myself to go. I felt like a dog about it then and I still do. I just couldn’t deal with it. Had to let them go alone. They were there for five days. My father, he looked
like a little old man when they got back, with nothing to show but a wad of police reports. Three more weeks went by, still no body. Can’t have a funeral without a body, right? So they had a service for her at the church in Valdepeñas de Jaén. Now they won’t even speak to me, because I wouldn’t attend it. They think it’s like I don’t care. Like I cut myself away from the whole thing, and from
them.’

‘They might have needed your support at a time like that,’ Ben said.

Raul turned the red-rimmed eyes back on Ben. ‘Yes, and that’s something else for me to feel like shit about, isn’t it? But I didn’t want to be there, because to be there would have been like accepting that Catalina was dead. How could I go through the motions of a phony funeral when I was completely certain that
my sister was still alive? They’d all given up on her; I hadn’t. As they were all gathering to mourn her, I was searching the internet for someone who could help me. That’s when I found Klein.’

‘You mentioned him before. Who is he?’

‘A former police detective who’s supposedly the best private investigator in Germany. Certainly the most expensive. I hired him to find out what the police
couldn’t.’

‘And did he?’

Raul sighed. He dug in his jeans pocket and came out with a rumpled, folded envelope that he handed to Ben. ‘This came two days ago.’