‘Go home and kiss the NCA goodbye. It’s clear to me now that I should never have been a cop in the first place. Not cut out for it. Just like my father. We both failed.’
Cristina shook her head. ‘You succeeded in almost everything, señor.’
‘Except saving Ana.’
She gazed at the floor. ‘You and I both.’ Then she looked up to meet his eye. ‘But it was Ana herself who took that out of our hands. Whether she thought she was saving me, or avenging my murder, we’ll never know. But she saved both our lives in sacrificing hers.’
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘So what will you do if you quit the police?’
Mackenzie’s laugh lacked any humour. ‘For a man qualified on paper for almost anything, it seems I am patently unsuited for almost everything. Short answer, I have no idea.’
‘You should teach,’ she said, remembering how he had sat with Lucas to reveal the mysterious secrets of calculating percentages. ‘You’d make a good teacher.’
Self-consciousness coloured his cheeks. ‘What I do know . . . what you taught me . . . is that your children are everything. So the first thing I must do is try to be the father I’ve never been. I never had a role model to teach me what a good parent was. Until now.’
Cristina blushed. ‘You’ll be good at that too.’ She pushed herself up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, John Mackenzie.’
And she turned to walk briskly towards the sliding doors, and all the uncertainty of the world beyond them. He watched her go with an almost overwhelming sense of sadness, before turning away to join the queue to a future unknown.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most of my research for A Silent Death was done in situ. I have written my last five books in this part of Spain, where I have an apartment that overlooks the Mediterranean and is eminently suited to winter writing. I owe a debt of gratitude to my many British and Spanish friends who helped me strip away the veneer of beaches, sea and sun that tend to characterise the tourist view of this Andalusian coast to reveal a slightly more disturbing reality in the book. In particular, I owe thanks to the chief of the Policía Local at Manilva, whose name ‘Paco’ I borrowed for my errant Guardia, and to single mother Isabel Reina Gil, who became my invaluable translator, researcher and font of all things Spanish, whose apartment I used for Cristina and whose son was the model for Lucas. Finally, I offer both thanks and sympathy to all those deaf-blind victims whose testimonies in the book Deaf-Blind Reality, edited by Scott M. Stoffel, provided a bleak insight into lives without sight or sound.
Peter May
France 2020
Table of Contents
A Silent Death
Also By
Title
Copyright
Epigraph
Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS