A Silent Death by Peter May (top books to read .txt) 📗

He listened intently. But the cicadas, like tinnitus, drowned out everything else. All that he could hear above it was the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears. He stepped forward to push the door carefully into darkness. And moved silently into the interior.

For several long moments he stood motionless, letting his eyes accustom themselves to what little light there was. Moonlight fell feebly from an atrium high above reception, and in its cold wash he saw the tracks left by many feet in the dust that lay thick on the floor. Some old, some fresh. They led across marble tiles to a staircase that descended to the spa. Mackenzie moved slowly in the footsteps of whoever had gone before him and started down the stairs.

It was darker here. Light from street lamps in the access road filtered through glass doors to cast deep shadows across empty pools. Mackenzie followed the footprints in the dust, past locker rooms and abandoned massage tables, to double doors obscured by gloom at the far side of the spa.

Now he was in one of the residential wings. Hands painted on the walls of the stairwell pointed up towards numbered rooms on the floors above. He stopped on the first landing. A strangely invasive moan penetrated the darkness. Erratic, repetitive. An almost human sound. Although he knew that it wasn’t. But like chalk on a blackboard it sent an involuntary chill through his body.

This was madness. What could he possibly achieve by coming here on his own, walking straight into a trap so crudely set? He was unsure if he had ever been in greater fear for his life. Perhaps he should have gone to the police station after all. But it was too late for second thoughts. In the end, it seemed, he had been just as foolish as his father. There was nothing for it now but to push on.

As he reached the second landing the moaning grew louder. It came to him from somewhere beyond double doors that led into what must once have been a guest lounge. Settees and armchairs and coffee tables hid like phantoms beneath discoloured dust sheets, and Mackenzie slalomed between them towards a wall of glass with sliding doors that stood open. Outside, a covered terrace overlooked the garden.

Once on the terrace he identified the source of the almost human moaning. The remains of a flag dangled from a pole overhead and swayed gently back and forth in the breeze that blew up from the shore, causing a steel rope to swing on a rusted retaining hinge. An endless eerie refrain heard only by the ghosts of guests past. And those in whose footprints Mackenzie had followed.

He stepped across the terrace and peered over the rail into the shrubbery below. Weeds pushed up through cracked tiles around an empty swimming pool where myriad blue mosaic tiles had flaked off to lie scattered across its debris-strewn floor like glitter.

The sound of broken glass crunching underfoot brought him spinning around, in time to see the silhouette of a man standing in the doorway. He knew immediately that it was Cleland, but all consciousness was drowned out by the sound of the shot that echoed around the gardens, and by the force and pain of the bullet that struck him full in the chest. It propelled him into the railings behind him, tipping him over backwards into darkness. Falling. Falling. Into silence.

*

Cleland watched with satisfaction as Mackenzie toppled backwards over the railing into the garden below. His original assessment of Mackenzie as a knuckle-headed cop vindicated by the stupidity of his coming here alone. It had taken no time at all for Cleland to track Mackenzie down on the internet. A tabloid story of heroism thwarting a bank raid in north London. And the background that the journalist had dug up on a family suicide. His father a cop whose bungled rescue attempt had led to a fatality, and later the taking of his own life. Like father like son. Only it was Cleland who had taken the son’s life.

He crossed the terrace and looked down into the dark tangle of foliage below. There was no sign of Mackenzie in the overgrown ruin of a garden where guests had once sunned themselves on luxury loungers. But no movement either. Cleland had no doubt that he was dead. He had won prizes for target shooting at his gun club and had directed his bullet directly at Mackenzie’s heart. But it never did any harm to be sure.

He turned and saw the shadow of Paco skulking in the doorway. ‘Call your boss and tell him the rendezvous is going ahead as planned,’ he said. ‘Then get down there and make sure that bastard’s properly dead.’

*

Ana is cold. She knows that the air is warm. She can feel it on her skin. But the chill comes from within. So deeply that she is shivering.

Her time here has seemed endless, without any means of communication. Cleland has kept her company only intermittently, and with every interaction between them she has felt only more antipathy toward him.

Much of this time has been spent thinking about Sergio. Dwelling on what she realizes now were the days of their lives. Those idyllic evenings passed together so long ago. At the centre in Estepona. At the seafood restaurant on the beach at Santa Ana. And she has found herself wondering what might have become of the toothless proprietor. She supposes he was younger then than her teenage self imagined. Perhaps both he and the restaurant are still there.

Unlike Sergio.

His meeting with the young Ana had brought him only pain and misery. Her father and his so set against their relationship. The denial of what might have been the young couple’s only chance at happiness. All those lost years, poor Sergio regretting what had never been his fault. Only to die at the hands of Cleland when finally