Quintin Jardine - Hour Of Darkness

‘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.’

‘Don’t worry about it, kid.’ I almost called him ‘son’, but I couldn’t. ‘I’d probably have done the same.’

Then I turned to Mia, no longer smiling. ‘Why did you have him do that?’

‘I had to,’ she insisted. ‘You see, Bob, I’d never been absolutely certain that you were his father. Do you remember that not long before we met I was raped, by three men in Edinburgh? Three bastards who were carrying a grudge from my schooldays.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I remember what happened to two of them. Hastie McGrew served his life sentence for killing them.’

‘Exactly. I’ve always been sorry about that, sorry for Hastie; nobody asked him to, not me, not Perry. He just did it, as if I really was his sister.’

‘But you must have told him who they were,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but I never thought for a moment he’d do that. I didn’t think any man cared that much.’ As she spoke I could see something new in her eyes, a real depth of misery.

‘I’ve been abused by men all my life: by that beast Alasdair and then by those three drunk, ugly brutes. You were the only man who ever treated me gently, and even you tried to throttle me when you woke out of that dream. Believe this or don’t believe it, I don’t care, but I’ve never been with anyone since you.’

She paused to compose herself. ‘They gave me a morning-after pill at the hospital, when I was treated, then you and I. .’ she looked at me, avoiding Ignacio. ‘You only used a condom the first time, remember. After that we got a little. . overenthusiastic.’

That is true; I’ve never forgotten any of that night.

‘When I fell pregnant,’ Mia continued, ‘I thought it must be yours, but I could never be one hundred per cent certain. Maybe that pill hadn’t done the job properly, for all I knew. I never talked to our son about his father, not until it became necessary for me to find out for sure. I told him, then when I saw that Herald article, I asked him to come here and by hook or by fucking crook get a testable sample from you.’

‘This was the first place I come,’ Ignacio said, taking up the story, ‘and I was lucky, John was looking for a waiter. He gave me a job and I waited on you when you came here.

‘My idea was to steal a glass you had used, and I did, but some clown bumped me in the kitchen and it broke in my pocket. So I went to your house, I wait for you to go out, and I get lucky, I find your trunks and they have hair, lots of it on the inside, with the roots; that you need for testing. I’m sorry, it was very intru. . I don’t have the word in English.’

I supplied it. ‘Intrusive, Ignacio, but you’re forgiven. You want a drink?’

He nodded. ‘A beer, please, sir.’

‘Don’t call me sir. No, don’t call me Dad either, at least not till it’s sunk in.’ I called the waitress over and asked for two canyas.

‘So why, Mia?’ I asked. ‘Let’s strip all else aside, why did it suddenly become necessary, as you put it?’

‘Because of my mother.’

‘Go on,’ I invited her, although by that time, I knew what was coming.

‘The drug route worked well for six months,’ she began. ‘I would send an email to a UK email address from a Hotmail account I created in Spain, giving the time and place of the next handover point. It was secure,’ she explained. ‘I always sent them from open Wi-Fi zones, never from my home IP address.

‘My payments hit the bank, I supplied more product and so on; a nice little cycle, with either end of the chain anonymous so that nobody could shop us if someone was caught in Edinburgh.’

‘And Booth was caught.’

‘It was all over by then anyway,’ she said. ‘A few weeks ago, my money didn’t arrive. I sent an email asking where the hell it was, and got a message back saying I’d have to come to collect it, that things had changed and that the Edinburgh end wasn’t happy to go on without knowing who they were dealing with. I tried to get in touch with Hastie, through the limo firm. . that was how I’d contacted him before. . but I was told that he’d collapsed and was in hospital.

‘I had to go. They. . I thought it was they. . had my money and they were the outlet for my product. I sent an email agreeing and I was told to go to an address in Edinburgh, in Caledonian Crescent. I didn’t want to fly and leave a trail on an aircraft passenger manifest so I drove. We drove, rather; Ignacio insisted on coming with me, to share the journey.’

‘And because I did not want Mama to go alone,’ the boy added. No, scratch that; not ‘the boy’, the young man. Ignacio is a solid lad and could have passed for early twenties, as could I when I was around eighteen.

‘You should have stopped her going altogether,’ I snapped. Listen to me, lecturing him already.

‘He couldn’t have,’ Mia said, ‘any more than he could have stopped you. So we got in the van and we drove, across Spain and France and through the tunnel.’

‘Eight zero nine five H N J’

Both of them stared at me. ‘Fucking amateurs,’ I murmured, sadly. ‘There are far more street cameras now than there were in your time in Edinburgh, Mia. They picked you up early on. Not in Caledonian Crescent, though. There isn’t one there. So, what happened?’