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

How very close he had come. So very close.

Tears fill her eyes, fuelled by her pain and anger. How unfair it all is. As if she has been cursed. A curse unwittingly passed on to the man she loved.

A change in temperature signals Cleland’s return. When he comes close she smells him. She is sitting by the window, another chair beside her, a table to her left with water and biscuits. All that she has been given to sustain her.

From the adjoining chair his hands take hers, and she feels his finger tracing words on her palm. His breath is rank. And there is a strange smell from his hands, like the odour of nitroglycerine she had identified from Cristina’s gun.

– Leaving now.

‘Where’s Cristina?’

– Never mind.

‘Don’t harm her, please. You have me.’

– Yes. A pause. We’re going on a boat. Not for long. Don’t be afraid.

‘Cristina . . .’

He puts a finger to her lips to silence her.

– She’s at home with Lucas. Safe. No need to hurt her now.

She raises a hand unexpectedly to his face, taking him by surprise and catching the smile that still lingers on his lips. She knows he is lying.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Paco cursed his luck. He hated Cleland with a vengeance. Shooting him in the leg had been no part of the deal. ‘I had to make it look real,’ Cleland had told him later. ‘Just a flesh wound. Avoided the bone and the femoral artery. You’ll live.’

Yes, in constant bloody pain! The price he was paying for Nuri’s treatment. He screwed up his face as he hobbled around the side service road to access the garden. There was no way, it seemed, to reach it from inside. All doors leading out were firmly locked.

He toyed with the idea of going back and telling Cleland that he had found Mackenzie, and that he was well and truly dead. But what if he wasn’t? Cleland was unpredictable. Brutal. Mad. There was no telling what he might do.

A service ramp sloped down to a shuttered cellar beneath the gardens where the pumps that powered the spa and the pool were housed. From the pavement, steps led up to a padlocked gate with spiked railings and barbed wire that gave on to another level. Yet more steps rose to the garden itself.

Paco climbed to the gate, leaned his crutches against the wall and unclipped Cleland’s wire-cutters from his belt. They sliced easily through the chain, and he let the links and padlock fall away. The gate swung open with a rusty complaint, and he grabbed his crutches to help propel himself up the last half-dozen steps to the garden itself.

The grass was almost waist-high here, the dead fronds of untended palms dangling in profusion all around and rustling in the breeze. The moon was rising now over the roof of the hotel, casting deep shadows in the empty pool. Paco pushed his way through barbed branches and tangling hedge. Thorns scratched his face and arms. The hanging leaf of a banana tree slapped him heavily in the face, and he had trouble keeping his balance.

He looked up and saw that he was directly below the terrace from which Mackenzie had fallen. That smug fucking Scotsman. At least he had got what was coming to him. But there was no sign of the body. Just the crushed leaves and snapped branches of thick foliage that must have broken its fall. Where the hell was he?

As Paco looked up again to check that he was in the right place, a shape took shadowed form and emerged from the darkness with such force that it knocked him from his feet, landing on top of him with full crushing weight to force the air from his lungs. A fist slammed into his face. He felt teeth breaking and sinking into the soft flesh behind his lips. Another blow. Blood bubbling into his mouth and spurting from his nose. He swung desperate fists in the dark and struck solid bone. He gasped and gurgled and squirmed his way out from beneath the weight of his attacker. Whatever damage Cleland’s bullet had done to Mackenzie, it had not killed him.

Paco scrambled to his feet, crutches discarded, and went charging off through the undergrowth, ignoring the fire in his wounded leg. Fear launched him blindly into darkness until his shins struck a low stone wall at the perimeter of the garden and tipped him forward into space.

His fall ended abruptly and in searing agony. It seemed to consume his whole body for just a second. Before darkness took him. And the pain and everything else went away.

Mackenzie staggered after the hapless Spaniard, legs buckling beneath him. He was half crippled by pain. But unlike Paco’s, Mackenzie’s pain wasn’t going away any time soon. He reached the wall and dropped to his knees and peered down to see Paco staring back at him. The man lay full-length along the top of the railing below, spikes protruding from his chest and stomach and groin, skewered like a sardine in readiness for the flames. Dead eyes gazing into the firmament, and to eternity beyond.

The lights of a vehicle sent shadows firing off into the night as it swung around a bend in the service road below, and by the reflected light of the headlamps Mackenzie saw, as it passed, Ana’s pale frightened faced pressed against the passenger window.

*

The bleary-eyed medic on the desk at Helicopteros Sanitarios looked up from his computer as the outside door slid open. His eyes opened wide as the dishevelled figure of a tall, fair-skinned man with a blood-stained white shirt staggered in out of the night. He was on his feet in an instant. ‘Señor, what’s happened?’

Mackenzie responded through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve been shot.’

The medic helped him through to a treatment room at the back and sat him up on the examination table. He was obliged to inform