Mark Billingham - From the Dead

Over a few more beers they talked, or at least Fraser did, about Job background and families. About the ups and downs of working away from home. For much of the time, Fraser spoke to Samarez in Spanish and Samarez nodded as he listened, his eyes on Thorne until he leaned in towards Fraser to say something himself.

Still no sign of the man's teeth.

Thorne was hungry as well as keen to crack on towards the business that needed to be done, so when his meal came he got stuck in quickly. Huevos estrellados con morcilla, chorizo y patatas. Thorne had recognised two out of the four ingredients, and the English translation on the menu had told him the rest.

'All traditional Spanish ingredients,' Samarez said. 'But it's basically the big English breakfast you all seem so fond of.'

Thorne looked up and stopped chewing for a few seconds. Until that moment he had presumed that Samarez spoke next to no English. He smiled, trying to mask his surprise, and swallowed. He said something about how they must have known he was coming, but now he found himself wondering what Fraser and Samarez had been talking about earlier.

'Is it good?'

Thorne said that it was.

'Christ on a bike,' Fraser said. 'How many Spaniards go to London and order paella?'

' I do,' Samarez said. 'No offence, but it's sometimes difficult to find anything very good over there.'

Despite the language thing, which was almost certainly nothing more sinister than a gentle wind-up, Thorne was starting to warm to his Guardia Civil colleague. There was a dryness he liked. It might have been wishful thinking, but Thorne also suspected that Samarez thought Fraser was as much of an idiot as he did.

They all moved their chairs a little closer to the table when the coffees arrived. Lowered their voices. Samarez produced a large envelope from his briefcase and, once there was room, laid out a series of photographs for Thorne.

An Alan Langford gallery.

'So, it seems we are all interested in a man called David Mackenzie.' Samarez pointed to a couple of the pictures. 'Though we now understand he used to be called Alan Langford.'

Thorne stared at the dozen or so shots: Langford/Mackenzie walking along a street with another man; smoking outside a restaurant; talking on the phone behind the wheel of a silver Range Rover. Most looked as though they had been taken with a long lens, some even from the air, above the grounds of a luxurious villa. Clearly, the operation in Spain ran to helicopter surveillance.

'It's a nice place.' Samarez pointed at a photograph of Langford by his swimming pool. He lay on a sunlounger, two fingers raised lazily towards the photographer high above him. 'Up in the hills above Puerto Banus. One day I hope to see the inside.'

Fraser laughed. 'We've not had an invitation as yet.'

'You know how it works down here?' Samarez asked Thorne.

Thorne did not need another version of the Costa del Crime primer he had been given twice already. He nodded and said, 'I can guess what he's up to.'

'There's not much Mr Mackenzie isn't involved in,' Samarez said. 'Over the years, he's done very well for himself. He's made a lot of influential friends, and if he's made any enemies, they don't appear to have been around for very long.'

Thorne raised an eyebrow, but Samarez shook his head.

'We can prove nothing,' he said. 'We've had him under surveillance on and off for the last few years. We've been monitoring his mobile-phone calls, but it is clear he knows we're on to him, so he does all his business on a secure line that we have no access to.'

'He's bound to slip up some time,' Thorne said.

Samarez took a slurp of coffee and leaned further forward, towards Thorne. 'He is a cut above most of those in the same business, you understand?' A smile suddenly appeared, but it was cold, wolfish. 'This is a man who is seriously careful.'

Something else Thorne did not need telling.

'Bastard hasn't put a foot wrong,' Fraser said, 'and he never puts himself on the line. Always the silent partner, whatever the deal. Drugs, half a dozen clubs and restaurants between Marbella and Malaga, and he's got his paws into several of the big golf resorts and the gated communities, some of which are still being built.'

'It's all very mysterious.' Samarez widened his eyes sarcastically. 'I don't know how he does it, but the building firms that get these contracts are never the most attractive bidders.'

'Maybe he's just lucky,' Thorne said, equally facetious.

Samarez shook his head. 'This is the one thing Mackenzie is definitely not, because he does not believe in luck. He does not commit himself until he's weighed everything up very carefully. It does not matter what kind of profit he stands to make, if it's a high-risk enterprise, he simply will not get involved.'

Fraser nodded. 'I know for a fact that he's said "no" to bankrolling a couple of the armed-robbery firms over here because he knows they're not careful enough. He thinks a long way ahead, does Mr Mackenzie. Plays the long game, because he's seen plenty go down over the years that have taken the easy money and paid for it.' He waved over a waitress, asked for more coffee, then waited until the girl had left. 'Look, he definitely knows how to put the squeeze on if he has to, and there's obviously a good few people afraid of him, but the bottom line is, in terms of anything we can actually prove, he's clean as a whistle.'

'This is your problem, Mr Thorne,' Samarez said.

'One of them.'

'Yes, of course. You need evidence that Mackenzie and Langford are one and the same man.'

'Can't be too hard, can it?'

Samarez gathered up the photographs and produced a second batch from his case. Four or five different women, some alone and others with Langford outside clubs or cosying up by the pool. 'He has a number of women he sees, but there is one semi-regular girlfriend.' He pointed to a photograph of a tall blonde woman in a red bikini. 'She is the one I think we can make use of for your purposes.'

Thorne pulled a series of three photos across the table and stared down at them. Langford in a car with a different girl; young, dark-haired. The same girl getting out. Langford's hand in the small of the girl's back, guiding her towards the front door of the villa.

'Tasty,' Fraser said.

'This is his daughter,' Thorne said. 'This is Ellie.'

Fraser shrugged, evidently not thinking it made any difference to his assessment.

Samarez nodded. 'The mother hired a private detective to find her, yes? Miss… Carpenter?'

'Anna,' Thorne said. He looked up, saw a small nod of understanding from Samarez, of sympathy. The Spaniard had clearly been comprehensively briefed.

Fraser continued to stare at the photographs with more than professional interest, until Samarez cleared them away. Then he called for the bill. 'We going on somewhere else, then?'

'Early start tomorrow,' Samarez said.

'Tom?'

Thorne shook his head without bothering to look up. He was thinking about the call he would be making to Donna first thing the next morning. Had things turned out differently, he would have been happy to let Anna make it. But, despite the twist in his gut caused by thinking about that, he was looking forward to giving Donna the news and confirming her suspicions that Ellie had been taken by Langford. The prospect of trying to answer her first question was not quite so pleasant, though.

What would he say when she asked, as she surely would, what he was planning to do about it?

'Looks like I'll be drinking on my own, then,' Fraser said.

Thorne guessed that he was used to it.

Back at the hotel, Thorne called Louise. She sounded as though she had just woken up. Thorne looked at his watch, saw that it was not yet 10.15, 9.15 in the UK, but he said sorry anyway, that he hadn't realised it was so late.