You Will Never Find Me (39 page)

‘We found another bag on the last dive of the day with the girl's head and passport,' said Zorrita. ‘But, as I'm sure you're aware, there's a procedure. I can't reveal anything until the next of kin have been informed.'

‘So what's happened so far?' asked Boxer. ‘If it was on the last dive have you processed your findings in any way?'

Zorrita told him what they'd found and how the preliminary forensic examination had gone but gave him no detail beyond the head, the passport, the upper arms, the handbag and the weight.

‘We filed a report, and a copy was sent to the British consulate, but not until around 10:30 this evening. The consulate won't do anything until tomorrow.'

‘And what will they do?'

‘They'll contact London and send a police officer to visit the next of kin,' said Zorrita. ‘And, Charles, I can't reveal that name to you, so don't ask me. I know you want to find Amy, but you have to put yourself in the other person's place. Her daughter has died and she must be the first person to be told.'

Boxer knew that Luís Zorrita was not a man who was going to bend, relax or ignore this very specific protocol. It would come back on him too easily. They exchanged some final words and hung up.

He sent his text to David Álvarez, his thumbs flashing over the tiny keys: ‘This is urgent. You are in danger. Do not ignore this message. You must stop what you are doing and leave immediately. Get out of the city and go into hiding. Do not go back to your flat. Do not go to a relative or friend's house. You must disappear as if you never existed. They know about us. Tell me when you are safe. Un abrazo, Charles.'

 

By one o'clock Kapital was getting up to full swing. Álvarez had brought the audience to fever pitch. The music was in the floor and walls, shooting up the dancers' legs, pulsing through their vital organs. He didn't want it to end. They were all in a state of ecstatic exuberance, with no past and no future, and as Álvarez merged them into his final track of the night, the next DJ tapped him on the shoulder.

He tore off his headphones. They embraced. Álvarez was wired, more alive than he'd been in months. He decided to stay the rest of the night, wouldn't leave until closing. This was going to be a great, great night.

He went to his changing room, stripped off his sweat-wet shirt, put on a new one, and that was when he received Boxer's text. He read the terrible message, went cold all over.

The one thing Álvarez had on his side was that he knew Kapital inside out. He went straight to the security office on the third floor where they monitored all the CCTV cameras in and outside the building. The security officer was watching three big screens in front of him and had twenty smaller ones off to the side from which he could draw output.

Kapital was a seven-storey building on the corner of Calle de Atocha and a narrow alley called Calle del Cenicero. All the emergency exits came out into that alley. A car was parked about fifty metres up and, leaning against the driver's door, smoking, was a Mexican-looking guy keeping an eye on all the exits.

The security officer pulled up the CCTV feeds from the front of the building, which showed the outside area in Calle de Atocha. Two Mexicans in identical black leather jackets were staring at the front doors. One of them had a view down Calle del Cenicero to his companion by the car.

Álvarez asked the security officer to put the internal cameras up onto the big screens. That was when he saw one of El Osito's freaks, one of the guys who'd been in the Charada that Saturday night.

‘Which floor is this on?' asked Álvarez.

‘Ours.'

‘But where?'

‘Down the end of the hallway.'

‘Say nothing,' said Álvarez and stepped back behind the door. They watched the screen. The Mexican looked in all the doors as he worked his way down the corridor. Their door opened. The man saw the screens but not himself, only the empty corridor. The security officer turned in his chair. Álvarez put a trembling finger to his lips.

‘You're not allowed in here,' said the security officer.

The Mexican backed out, closed the door.

They watched him on the screen. He went to the end of the corridor, came back past the door, disappeared until he reappeared on another screen going upstairs to the fourth floor.

Álvarez went back down to the changing room on the second floor and fitted everything he could into his trouser pockets. He looked at his coat. He'd need it, but he shouldn't be seen wearing it, so he left it behind.

He tore up the copy of
El País
he'd brought with him and dropped it in a metal bin from under the table. He lit two cigarettes, had another thought, picked up his wet shirt, slung it over his shoulder.

He put the two cigarettes under the paper at the bottom of the bin and left the changing room. In the corridor he found the heat sensor and held the bin up to it. In seconds all the music in the club shut down and was replaced by alarm bells.

Álvarez dropped the bin, threw his wet shirt on top and ran down the stairs to the ground floor, where he joined the melee of people pouring towards the emergency exits, which had automatically sprung open.

They ran out into the cold night. Girls screamed. He joined a group of about twenty people who'd all come out dancing together. They crossed to the other side of Calle de Atocha, stood on the pavement and looked back expecting to see flames. Álvarez carried on up the street and slipped down an alleyway past the Madrid Royal Conservatory. Only at that point did he start jogging and then running and finally sprinting with relief into his new life.

T
hey were heading for the disused Rowland Estate in Bermondsey, which Dennis Chilcott had bought from the local council to redevelop into a mixture of luxury flats and affordable housing with his cocaine trafficking profits. Dennis's little joke was that he was creating his future customer base: cocaine for the luxury flats and crack for the affordable housing.

The housing estate backed on to a disused warehouse, which Chilcott also owned and in which he had installed old shipping containers. Some of these had been used for cocaine transportation and were now let for temporary storage. The warehouse fronted on to Neckinger, but access was from the rear of the building through a pair of padlocked barred gates which gave on to a large yard. Trucks could reverse into the warehouse through massive doors where the containers were then unloaded by forklifts.

Lomax was sitting in the back of his car with Amy's head in his lap, making sure she was breathing properly. Tel was driving. Vlad, who'd been keen to involve himself in some way, was sitting braced in the passenger seat as if they were about to be side-rammed.

‘Just tell him to relax, Tel?' asked Lomax. ‘I feel as if we're about to crash-land.'

‘Vlad?' said Tel.

‘
Da?
' said Vlad.

‘
Fucking
calm down,' said Tel viciously.

Vlad unhooked himself from the overhead handle, sat squarely in his seat, his horrible hands folded in his lap. The outline of his head appeared enormous, as if electronic impulses might take days to trek across it.

‘Does he understand any English?'

‘It's more the tone,' said Tel.

Lomax sent a cryptic text to Darren: ‘The angel is with us, we seek only to please the Lord.' He sat back, absent-mindedly stroking Amy's neck. He appeared calm but was nervous at what he'd left behind in the Andover Estate. Alice convulsing on the bed had brought back some horrors. Now he was replaying the scene in his head, trying to remember what he'd touched.

The phone rang in the girl's pocket and he dug it out, looked at the screen: ‘Josh'. He let it ring out, turned it off.

Tel reached the City on the New North Road, doing as he was told by Lomax, driving like his old nan. It was quiet at this time of night so he cracked on straight through the middle: Moorgate, London Wall, Bishopsgate and over London Bridge. In ten minutes they were outside the barred gates on Neckinger. Lomax gave Vlad the keys. He unlocked the padlock, unthreaded the chain, opened the gates and Tel drove into the yard. Vlad repadlocked the gates and unlocked the big warehouse doors. Tel reversed in and shut off the engine. Vlad pulled the doors to.

They got the girl out of the car, Tel on the legs while Vlad tucked her shoulders under one arm. They followed Lomax to the far end of the warehouse, where he unlocked a door that led into a narrow alleyway at the back of the derelict estate. Along the alley were some steps off to the right. Lomax went down them and opened the door to a basement storage area consisting of six windowless rooms off a central corridor.

Dennis Chilcott had bought the estate in 2004, and it was a testament to the complexities of local government planning regulations that nothing had happened to it in eight years, apart from further degradation.

To the Chilcotts' gang members these basement rooms had become known as Abu Ghraib, after the Iraqi prison abuse by the US military came to light. The debtors and recalcitrants they brought here wished never to return. Two of the rooms had been soundproofed so that their screams did not disturb the neighbours.

The room they entered contained the now infamous metal bed known as the Griddle because it could be plugged into the wall.

Lomax unrolled a piece of foam rubber lying in a corner and laid it over the chain-link base of the bed. Tel and Vlad dropped the girl on it.

‘Dead to the world that one,' said Tel. ‘What's she on?'

‘GHB,' said Lomax.

‘So we could give her one and she wouldn't know anything about it?'

‘But
I
would,' said Lomax. ‘And I'd have to tell Darren, and he'd have you riding the Griddle for a week, so don't even think about it.'

‘Now what?'

‘You go back to the warehouse, take my car out, park it legally in the street and give me the keys. By then I'll have her sorted out and I'll see you off the premises.'

‘What about our money?'

‘You'll get that too.'

They left. Lomax put Amy into the recovery position and went to check the other rooms. He found an ugly collection of tools: pickaxe handles, pliers, mallets, claw hammers, rolls of electrical wire, duct tape, meat hooks, lengths of frayed cable. He shuddered at it all. A box contained plastic cuffs, sleeping masks, hoods and gaffer tape.

Back with Amy, he put a sleeping mask over her eyes and cuffed her wrists and ankles to the four corners of the bed. He checked her breathing, obsessed with it.

 

Jesús was telling El Osito how carefully he'd planned the operation to capture David Álvarez in the Kapital nightclub. El Osito was listening patiently on the assumption that it had been successful, and Jesús was spinning it out in the hope of getting a medal. It was only as Jesús reported that, as he was moving from floor to floor, the fire alarm had gone off and the whole club had been evacuated that El Osito's face changed to the sick colour of a storm-laden sky. Jaime stepped in to divert attention from his brother.

‘You know what this means?' said Jaime, drawing El Osito's psychopathic glare from Jesús.

‘Tell me,' said El Osito, as if this was going to be a miraculous revelation.

‘Álvarez was warned,' said Jaime.

‘But we were the only people to know about the operation,' said El Osito.

‘What about Charles Boxer?' said Jaime. ‘He's the only possible connection.'

‘You
have
to find that DJ,' said El Osito. ‘You have to find out where he lives, or his girlfriend, or his parents. You have to find him.'

‘I don't think so,' said Jaime. ‘We'll have to take some defensive action in case the DJ goes to the police and tells them you were seen with the girl in the Charada. There'll be some awkward questions and they'll want to see your apartment.'

‘So what are you suggesting?'

El Osito's mobile signalled a message. He read the text from Dennis.

‘They've got the girl in London,' he said. ‘Charles Boxer's daughter.'

‘Then that is how we deal with this situation,' said Jaime. ‘We tell Charles Boxer we're holding his daughter and that he must warn Álvarez not to talk to the police. In the meantime we have to get you out of Madrid as quickly as possible. We have to clear your flat, remove all the weights and sterilise the place.'

‘I will go to London,' said El Osito. ‘Book me on the first flight out of here. You will come with me, Jaime. Jesús will stay here and sort out this mess.'

‘How are you going to talk to Charles Boxer?' asked Jesús, trying to salvage some respect.

‘Let's hope his daughter knows his mobile number,' said Jaime. ‘You'd better ask Dennis to get that as quickly as possible. Jesús, you come with me.'

The Mexicans left the room, pounded down the clinic's sterilised corridors.

‘What are you doing?' asked Jesús.

‘Getting you out of there before he has you killed,' said Jaime. ‘Now you go to the flat and clean it out. Everything. Clothes, the lot. I don't want a trace of El Osito in there.'

‘That's it?'

‘I'll speak to Vicente.'

 

‘I talked to the two girls,' said Tony, who was calling Boxer from outside the club Sy-Lo. ‘They were
with
Amy on Saturday night. One of them even had a shot on her phone of her friend and Amy dancing together. I'll send it. You might not recognise her. She's had all her hair cut off.'

‘Had they ever seen her with someone who looked like her when she had long hair?' asked Boxer.

‘Yeah. They called them the twins. Said it was a bit freaky. They had the same hair and had it highlighted blonde in the exact same way. They even wore each other's clothes. But they also said that if they were twins they were not born from the same egg. Chantrelle was really wild, into drugs in a big way.'