David Monnery - Days of the Dead

She was woken by the barely risen sun shining through the window, and after showering and dressing she made her way down to the empty beach and walked along it, a few feet from the gently breaking waves. She felt apprehensive about her meeting with the American police, but really glad that she had come. Whatever had happened to Marysa, she told herself, life was better than death.

The small Cuban café which she chose for breakfast served the best coffee she had ever tasted, which had to be a good omen.

Back at the hotel she smartened herself up, checked the directions she’d been given and set out for the police station. The walk took ten minutes, and once inside the incongruously modern building she was kept waiting for only a couple of minutes before being shown into Lieutenant Trammell’s office. He was a harassed-looking man well into middle age, with an argumentative jaw, big mouth and thinning grey hair. His greeting was warm enough, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping his faded blue eyes open. Fortunately, he was not personally in charge of the case – that honour belonged to Detective José Peña, whose overflowing desk in the squad room was her next port of call.

Detective Peña also seemed harassed, but at least he was looking at her with wide-open eyes. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, once the introductions had been made and Trammell was back in his office.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.

‘Cream and sugar?’ He was speaking Spanish now.

‘Just one sugar,’ she answered in the same language, and examined him as he programmed the machine. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, with short, wavy hair and a face that managed to be both handsome and friendly. The photo of a woman and two children on his desk suggested he was also married.

He presented her with the plastic cup of coffee, and she took a token sip. Pretty good, she thought – in two hours she’d had the best and worst coffee of her life.

‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ he said with a smile.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

They stared at each other for a couple of seconds. ‘So what is it you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Everything,’ she said shortly. ‘All I know is what was in the newspaper – that Placida was carrying drugs – inside her – and that one of the packets burst and killed her. And that you found out who she was from Victoria…How is Victoria?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to say. I’ve tried talking to her several times and sometimes she’s almost lucid, sometimes she just stares at me as if she can’t understand a word I’m saying, sometimes she just can’t stop crying.’ He looked up at her, and she could see in his eyes that he’d found the experience a more than usually distressing one. ‘Whatever they did to her,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t pretty.’

‘Where is she now?’ Carmen asked.

‘She’s in a hospital. She’s pregnant too,’ he added. ‘So was Placida Guzmán.’

Carmen bowed her head, then lifted it again. ‘Can I see her?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘I want to take her back to Cartagena with me. Her parents are both dead, but she has an aunt who’s willing to look after her.’

Peña looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know when that will be possible,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m not sure what the legal situation is right now.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, both surprised and alarmed.

‘She has admitted to bringing in about half a million dollars’ worth of heroin,’ he said mildly.

Carmen was appalled. ‘But she can’t have been acting willingly,’ she said angrily.

He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’m on her side. But she and the Guzmán girl had been in Miami for three days before they were found. Even if they had been forced to ingest the drugs there was nothing to stop them telling the officials at the airport what had happened. If they had, both of them would have received immediate medical treatment, and Placida Guzmán would probably still be alive.’

‘They were probably too frightened.’

‘Probably. And don’t quote me on this, but I expect something can be worked out. It should be obvious to anyone that the girl needs help, not a jail cell.’

Carmen took a deep breath. ‘Has she said anything about who did this to them? Or where they came from?’ And where my sister may still be, she thought.

‘Not yet. The plane they arrived on came from Bogotá via Panama City, but there’s no record of them getting on at either place. And whenever I’ve asked her about either place, or anything about the time before she arrived, she just started to cry. She was crying when the uniform found her on the beach,’ he added.

‘She told you where Placida was?’

‘Not exactly. “In the hotel,” she said, but she couldn’t remember which one. So we just started with the closest, worked our way outwards, and found the place the next day. Placida wasn’t there, but there was a lot of blood and…’

He stopped for a moment, and she could see that he was picturing the scene.

‘The body was found in a canal about twenty miles away – they hadn’t done a very good job of weighting it down.’

‘In the hotel room, weren’t there any clues to where they’d come from?’

‘He’d cleared it out. Jesús, he told them his name was – Victoria remembered that in one of her lucid moments. He was young, Hispanic, medium height – one of a million.’

‘What about the passports?’ she asked.

‘The only stamps were ours. But the passports themselves are probably forged anyway.’

She felt disappointed with the information she had gathered, but could think of nothing else to ask. ‘Maybe Victoria will find it easier talking to me,’ she said, mostly to bolster her own spirits.

‘Did you know her before?’

‘Only by sight. My sister was – is, I hope – five years younger than me, and we didn’t have the same friends.’

‘Well, I’ll try and arrange a visit for tomorrow, OK?’

She managed a thin smile of gratitude. ‘I have no other reason to be here.’

John Dudley took his eyes off the lighted windows of the timber-yard office and turned to his partner. ‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘They just took a corner,’ Martin Insley told him from the armchair. ‘Seaman caught it.’

‘But how’s it going?’

‘Sounds pretty even so far. But you never know with Spain.’

‘He should have given Fowler a game,’ Dudley muttered as he put his eye back to the mounted telescope. Through the open window he could hear traces of the match playing on several TV sets, and over the gabled roofs to the south-west he thought he could make out the faint glow in the sky above Wembley Stadium. Everyone in London seemed to be watching the damn game – everyone but him and Insley. If only the damn boat had come in a day later.

It had docked at Tilbury soon after dawn that morning and had begun unloading almost immediately. The four thousand logs of tropical hardwood from Venezuela had been one of the first shipments ashore and after a cursory customs examination the importers had been cleared to reload them on the waiting fleet of trailers. A thorough search would probably have resulted in the seizure of a large haul of Colombian heroin, but the British authorities were hoping for more than drugs to burn. MI5 and the Drugs Squad were eager to break the new and highly ominous distribution link-up between the Colombians and the local Turkish mafia, while MI6 were more interested in the foreign end of the pipeline, and the man who ran it.

The logs had all been delivered to the timber yard in north-east London by mid-afternoon, no small feat considering the state of the capital’s traffic, and had been stacked in no apparent order in the open-sided shed. Since then Dudley and Insley had been watching them from the upstairs room of an empty terraced house some seventy yards away.