Hollow Mountain (20 page)
Authors: Thomas Mogford
Spike heard a bang, and shot to his feet, but it was just the levanter, blowing closed the broken door frame. Grabbing a chair from the kitchen, he propped it beneath the handle. He couldn’t stay here tonight, he realised. Just then, he felt a sensation in his pocket that made his stomach lurch. A small, persistent vibration.
Sender: Enrico Sanguinetti. Another message from a ghost.
I have the boy. Meet me at 10 p.m. tomorrow by Europa Point Lighthouse. The child in exchange for the phone. Tell the police and I will kill him.
Spike shut his eyes, feeling disgust sweep through his body, horrified by the damage that his digging and interference had caused. He tried to light a cigarette but his hand was shaking. It was time to go to the police. This was too much to handle alone.
He looked again at the text message.
Tell the police and I will kill him
. How could anyone have known about his relationship with Amy and Charlie? Had they tapped his phone? Were they tracing his calls? His texts? He could still go to Jessica for help. But what if they had a contact in the police force, or access to police frequencies?
He poured himself another glass, and then another. Time passed, and when he next looked down, he found that half the cigarettes were gone, and that an idea was starting to take shape. It was messy. Risky and wholly likely to fail, but it was the germ of a plan. He suddenly felt strangely calm.
Throwing some clothes into a bag, he swung open his broken front door and walked out into the street. Inside the phone box on the corner, he watched his fingers hesitate on the push keys. But before he had time to change his mind, he had dialled Clohessy’s number.
It went to voicemail so he left a message – he was learning how effective they could be. ‘I’ve got the ship’s bell. I want two kilos of the silver. Meet me tomorrow at Europa Point Lighthouse. 10.15 p.m.’
Placing the greasy black receiver back in its cradle, he stared out through the mullioned windows into the darkness. Now there was no way back.
Complicated?
Manda huevos!
That is an understatement. Grabbing the child proves easy enough. He doesn’t struggle as I press the gun to his temple, waiting for his mother to write her own suicide note with a trembling hand. A bit of mewling as I tape up his wrists, catching the mother with a truncheon blow to the neck as she surges towards me with surprising courage, apparently undeterred by the gun. He only goes completely quiet when I tape up his eyes, like a bird with its cage covered. So far, so straightforward, but then –
Dios
! Getting him downstairs, his little feet kicking, crying out for his mother who is swinging now from the spindles, so that I have to cover his hot little mouth with my hand, milk teeth nipping at my palm
.
The SEAT is parked outside the tower block. I cover him with a blanket and shove him into the boot, driving around for a while until I find a quieter place. And there it is – a lighthouse. Striped, windswept, the ends of the earth.
Once I’m sure that no one else is around, I roll down the front windows a slit, then reach into the back and shunt forward one of the rear seats. Through the gap, I make out the sound of rapid, muffled breathing. Opening the boot, I reel at the smell and see a stain at the base of the boy’s vest where he has fouled himself. He is sleeping now, perhaps lulled by the motion. I take a sports-cap bottle of water from the glove compartment and slip the teat into his mouth. When half the bottle is gone, I withdraw it and rip off his blindfold. He starts to cry, but not as much as when I pull the gun from my waistband. I show it to him, and his eyes widen. ‘If you kick,’ I say in English, ‘if you scream or make a noise, I will go back for your mother. Your mama. You understand?’ The boy stares at the gun, mute. ‘You understand me, boy?’ He nods, and I let him have the rest of the bottle, which he sucks down greedily, water spilling down his dimpled chin.
I slam the boot, then drive to the multi-storey car park I have scouted near the hotel, choosing a deserted corner on the top floor. The boy is sleeping again; I chuck in another bottle of water, then set off down the stairs, avoiding the CCTV cameras, feeling the film of sweat on my forehead drying in the cool, ventilated air.
Back in my hotel room, with the soft strains of a classical guitar settling my mind, I send a text with the instructions for tomorrow. Sleep feels easy and close: I shut my eyes and wait for tomorrow.
Spike awoke in a single room on the second floor of the Cannon Hotel. He’d stayed here a few times before, back in the days when he and Drew Stanford-Trench had made a game of picking up tourists in town. Spike had proved surprisingly successful – play the Latin angle with the British girls, work the British accent with everyone else. The small functional rooms hadn’t changed much. Perhaps that was why they were almost always available – even at 11.30 p.m., the time Spike had turned up last night.
It was early now, he could tell as he glanced at the window, the sun still hiding behind the Rock. He realised why he’d woken: guitar music was streaming through the thin wall of the adjoining room. Irritatingly jaunty – Rodrigo, it sounded like. A vindictive Spaniard, perhaps, fantasising about a red and gold flag flying from the Rock.
Spike tried to go back to sleep, but images of Amy’s suspended body began to rush through his mind. Then of Charlie, held captive, dangled like bait to lure Spike and his phone. Focus on the boy, he told himself as he slid out of bed. That was all that mattered now.
Wrapping himself in the tiny hotel towel, he paced the corridor to the shared bathroom. The flow of water, though pitiful, helped to clear his mind, and last night’s drunken plan began to take a clearer shape. There were things to be done today, tasks to be achieved.
Back in his bedroom, the music stopped as his neighbour slammed his own door and headed for the shower. Spike scoured the room for somewhere to stash the ship’s bell, settled on the top of the cupboard, then went downstairs to breakfast, hangover mounting with each step.
The owner and her elderly mother were conferring on the ground-floor patio, scrutinising a flier.
‘Have you heard?’ the mother whispered as she passed Spike a leaflet. The upper section was marked ‘RGP’ – Royal Gibraltar Police.
‘A boy’s gone missing,’ she said. ‘Little Charlie Grainger. First his father, now his mum. Poor sweet
chuni
.’
Spike stared down at the photocopied image of a younger, happier Charlie, recognising it with a pang as one which had sat in a frame on the sideboard of Amy’s flat.
‘They’ve closed the border,’ the owner said. ‘All flights grounded until they find him. People are meeting in Casemates Square at 10 a.m. to help with the search.’
Spike thanked them and went through to the dining room. Only one other table was occupied, a reminder of the challenge of running a hotel in a booming economy when cheaper accommodation could be found on the opposite side of the border. His fellow diner was an ageing British skinhead in a singlet and shorts. Curled in the middle of his adjacent place setting was a silver necklace, perhaps belonging to someone he had once come here with.
The owner brought in a plate of brittle bacon, fried eggs and wrinkled sausages. Spike pushed it aside, downed his doll-size tumbler of reconstituted orange juice, then went outside, recoiling from the hazy glare of the early morning.
The atmosphere in town felt immediately different, clusters of concerned locals standing on street corners, handing out leaflets, policemen in fluorescent waistcoats lining Main Street. The skies were quiet, the occasional cackle of a herring gull intermingling with the throaty roar of patrol boats out in the Straits.
Spike hurried to Chambers via the backstreets, glancing in at ground-floor windows and seeing pensioners watching GBC News in their front rooms. Once in his office, he locked the door and opened his laptop. It took him slightly more than an hour to compose a document entitled ‘The Conduct of Neptune Marine and the Salvage of the
Gloucester
’. While it printed, he followed up on a question which had occurred to him late into his restless night. He was certain that he remembered a boozy evening when Galliano had spoken of the illicit nature of ivory. It turned out, as it usually did, that Peter had been right. A Google search revealed that the UK was a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. And if the UK was, that meant Gibraltar was too – while local government dealt with internal issues, matters of foreign policy and defence were still dictated by Whitehall. Under the terms of the Convention, it was illegal to raise even the smallest amount of ivory from the sea floor. The fork that Clohessy had shown to Spike aboard the
Trident
might have seemed innocuous, but it still meant that his company had broken the Convention. Technically, Neptune must halt salvage until the ivory had been returned to its resting place in the sea.
Spike marked the relevant pages of the Convention with a Post-it note and placed them, along with copies of his own document and the manifest of the
Flos Sanctus Montis
, in an envelope addressed to Drew Stanford-Trench. Whatever happened to Spike tonight, at least opposing counsel would have all the information he needed. At the last moment, Spike wrapped the silver
peso de ocho
in a tissue and slipped it inside. Then he grabbed his phone and braced himself for what lay ahead.
Rocky’s Pictures in the ICC Mall was open, a lone tourist printing out repetitive photos of the Barbary Apes, perhaps wondering why the centre of town was so quiet. Haresh, the shopkeeper, looked grimly resigned to the lack of business.
Spike lingered by a display cabinet of cheap frames and T-shirts emblazoned with catalogue images of laughing children until the shop was empty.
‘Not going to Casemates?’ Haresh asked. Despite the fact that his family had settled on the Rock soon after India’s independence, he still spoke with a strong Rajasthan accent.
‘Maybe later,’ Spike said.
There was a pause, then Spike cleared his throat. ‘Listen, Haresh. I need a favour . . .’
Haresh’s frown deepened as Spike explained what he wanted.
‘So you do not want me to send the pictures from your phone to my computer,’ Haresh repeated back slowly.
‘Under no circumstances.’
‘And I must place your phone screen on the scanner and physically capture the images that way.’
‘Then save them on a disc.’
Haresh held out his pink-lined palm, and Spike opened the first picture message and handed it to him, catching a glimpse of Žigon’s shrewd confident eyes on the phone screen. As Haresh placed the device on the scanner, Spike snapped, ‘Careful,’ and he lowered the lid more delicately. The photocopier emitted a flash of light, then the blurry image of a man in a hotel corridor appeared on the monitor above.
‘Can’t you make it any clearer?’ Spike said.
‘I’ll touch it up later,’ Haresh replied defensively as he handed back Spike back his phone. ‘Next.’
‘This one’s from Halloween.’
‘In August?’
Haresh peered down at the gruesome image of Enrico’s body. Through the shop window, Spike saw a group of locals hurrying by, presumably joining in the search for Charlie. He turned back to Haresh, reminded again of the urgency. ‘How long will it take to clean them up?’
‘Should be done by this afternoon.’
Spike gave Haresh a nod, then put his phone back into his pocket and left.
The nurses’ station was empty, the swing doors to the ward propped open, hushed voices audible within. Spike moved towards the entrance and saw a group of people gathered around Peter Galliano’s bed. On the near side was the bird-like form of Hilary Silva, as lean as Peter had been fat, blue mascara blurred as she held her brother’s hand. Crouching beside her was the nurse Spike knew, while two doctors in hospital scrubs stood on the far side of the bed, one peering at Peter’s chart, the other checking his ventilator.
Hilary turned her head as Spike entered the ward. She looked confused, overwhelmed even, and Spike suddenly wished he was anywhere but there. But a moment later, her lips tightened into a smile. Spike glanced at the nurse and saw that she was smiling too.
‘I asked Peter to squeeze my hand,’ Hilary Silva croaked as Spike approached. ‘And he did it, Spike. He squeezed my hand.’
A moment later, Spike found himself embracing her so hard he was worried she might crack. One of the doctors came round to their side of the bed. ‘We don’t want to crowd him,’ she said to Spike briskly.
Spike nodded, smiling as he saw that Galliano’s eyes were half open, irises roving, drool spilling from his mouth, lacquering his beard. He bent down and whispered in his ear: ‘I’m going to sort things out, Pete. I’m not quite sure how, but I will.’
Galliano stared back at him. Then all of a sudden he gave a wink, and Spike felt his smile broaden. ‘Amazing,’ he murmured as the doctor steered him back to the door. ‘Just amazing.’
She herded him past the desk. ‘I’ve already explained this to Peter’s sister, Mr Sanguinetti,’ she said evenly. ‘You need to remember that it’s very early days. We still don’t know how serious the brain injury is. These are encouraging signs, but no more than that.’