Питер Мэй - A Silent Death

‘You won’t stay to watch?’

‘I prefer to play.’

Paco looked at Mackenzie. ‘You’re not here to play, though.’

Mackenzie’s laugh was genuine now. ‘No. That would not be a pretty sight.’ But he decided not to elucidate on the real reason for his being there. ‘Maybe see you later.’

And he turned to head off back towards his car.

When he slipped into the driver’s seat he unplugged his phone and switched it back on. He could see beyond the reflections on his windscreen that the two men had resumed their argument. But he was immediately distracted by an alert from the phone. It was a text from Cristina. Where have you been? Meet me ASAP in the car park of Zhivago’s. It’s a restaurant in Marbella. Find it on Google maps.

When he looked up again Paco had vanished, and Antonio was striding angrily towards his car, where he raised the boot and threw in his clubs before slamming it shut. Mackenzie watched as he drove off with a squealing of tyres, and wondered exactly what it was that had passed between the brothers-in-law.

Zhivago’s was located in a leafy north-west corner of Marbella known as Little Russia. Wealthy Russian expats hung out here in exclusive clubs and bars among a proliferation of palm trees. They built themselves beautiful bodies in luxury gymnasia, treated their wives to prohibitively expensive sessions in stylish beauty parlours, ate in any one of a number of restaurants offering international haute-cuisine. There was even a school of Russian ballet where daughters could be deposited while parents sipped French wines in upmarket Russian cocktail bars. All within a few hundred metres of some of the most expensive marina real estate in Europe. There they could park their luxury yachts for the purchase of a mere 400,000-euro lease, and dine easy in the knowledge that there would be no parking ticket waiting for them on their return. It was rumoured that Putin himself owned a hacienda in the hills less than five kilometres away.

Mackenzie squinted towards his iPhone resting in the passenger seat, trying to decipher Google maps and listening to computerized instructions from an anodyne female voice. He turned off the motorway and followed an access road down to a roundabout before turning on to a winding access road that took him into the heart of suburban Marbella.

You have reached your destination , his phone told him, and he saw the single-storey white-painted building angled around lush gardens behind a hedge designed for ultimate privacy. Advertising hoardings sat on the shallow pitch of the Roman-tiled roof advertising a galería of wines and a bodega for fine food. The restaurant’s name, Zhivago’s, was inscribed in discreet letters below an imperious image of Bacchus gazing skywards.

The food and wine complex sat directly across the road from a private Russian club called Azure Beach. The club stood at the entrance of what appeared to be a gated labyrinth of suburban streets filled with luxury apartments and elegant villas that shimmered mirage-like in the heat of the afternoon sun. Somewhere beyond the palms and willows and bougainvillea that draped themselves over fences and walls, the same streets sloped gently away towards the port below, where the Mediterranean lay coruscating across the bay.

As he turned his Seat into the car park, Mackenzie noticed Cristina’s SUV parked some way down a side street leading towards the marina. He stopped, and was about to reverse out again, when Cristina stepped from a dark grey Kia Sportage and waved him over.

He parked and walked across to the Kia. Without a word she opened the rear door for him and slipped back into the front passenger seat. A perspiring and overweight middle-aged man with precious little hair half-turned in the driver’s seat and nodded as Mackenzie climbed in.

‘Detective Gil,’ Cristina said by way of introduction. ‘He’s with GRECO here in Marbella.’

Mackenzie nodded. He remembered Gil from the meeting at Marviña the day before. He stretched forward a hand and received a damp one in return.

‘He’s got a video you need to see.’

Gil reached for his Samsung Galaxy and started a video playing, then held it up for Mackenzie to watch. Mackenzie recognized the entrance to Zhivago’s and realized that the footage must have been taken on a long lens from somewhere across the street, a hidden vantage point beyond the Azure Beach.

Gil said, ‘Surveillance footage. Taken a couple of months back. We were watching a guy called Rafa. Long suspected of laundering drug money. He has this business selling yachts.’ His laugh contained not a trace of humour. ‘You and I couldn’t even make a living on the handful of transactions he does each year. But somehow he manages to turn a handsome profit.’ He jabbed his finger at the screen. ‘That’s him going in. The one in the middle.’

Mackenzie leaned forward for a better look. Three men in designer suits were climbing out of a black Porsche Cayenne. Rafa was the tallest of them, elegant in shiny Italian shoes, dark hair gelled back in crinkled curls from a handsome brow.

‘Fancies himself, does Rafa,’ Gil said. ‘Smart guy. He buys his yachts at trade prices, then sells them to wealthy Russian clients for astronomical profits.’

‘And the Russians don’t mind being ripped off?’

‘No they don’t. In fact, no sooner have they bought the yachts than they sell them again for millions less than they paid for them.’

Mackenzie said, ‘So effectively paying Rafa for goods or services unknown.’

Gil nodded. ‘Exactly. And without the recording of any transaction other than the buying and selling of the yacht. We’d been trying to establish exactly what these payments were for. Almost certainly drugs. But we had no proof. The only real drugs connection came in the shape of the agent who was bringing Rafa and the Russians together. Alejandro Delgado.’ Again he pointed at his screen. ‘He’s the one on Rafa’s right.’ A much shorter man, prosperously round, a cigar burning between big-knuckled fingers. ‘We’ve got nothing at all on Delgado, except that his brother got caught smuggling a shitload of cocaine into the country two years ago. The two brothers ran a yacht-rental agency, and although Delgado himself was never implicated in the drugs bust, it’s inconceivable that he didn’t at least know about it. He and his brother were like that.’ He interlaced fore and middle fingers.

Mackenzie was interested now. ‘How did you catch the brother?’

‘The cocaine came in first by boat to Gibraltar. There the contraband was divided among several smaller vessels which were meant to head up the coast and offload at various Spanish ports. But we had been watching it all the way from North Africa by satellite, courtesy of the US. A fleet of coastguard vessels intercepted the transfer boats as they sailed out of Gibraltar into Spanish waters. Delgado’s brother was on one of them. The ringleader.’ Gil glanced at the video still playing on his phone. ‘We’d been hoping that by keeping both Rafa and Delgado under surveillance we could start making connections, not just between them, but with others we didn’t yet know about.’

‘This is all very interesting, Detective Gil,’ Mackenzie said, ‘but what’s the connection with Cleland? That’s what I’m here for after all.’

‘Patience, Señor Mackenzie, patience.’ Gil found a hanky in one of his pockets and wiped away the beads of perspiration quivering along the line of his brow. His fingers were steaming up the screen of his phone. ‘When Officer Sánchez Pradell made her request for further information on Roberto Vasquéz a little alarm bell went off in my head. Vasquéz dined here at Zhivago’s a few times at gatherings hosted by Rafa. A very unlikely dinner guest, given the somewhat classier company that Rafa and Delgado usually kept. Local businessmen, politicians, the odd Russian oligarch. This is not a cheap restaurant, señor. And Vasquéz is the epitome of cheap. A low-life hoodlum.’ Gil used his handkerchief to clear the condensation from the screen of his phone and only succeeded in smearing it. He scrubbed at the glass in annoyance. ‘So, anyway, I went back and had a look at some of the surveillance footage to refresh my memory, and suddenly another face jumped out at me.’