Mike realised that she was alone – not at that moment, but in life generally, she was alone. Weren’t moments like this meant to occur when aged parents died in your arms, not outside of the double-glazed kitchen door of a Spanish villa? Her parents were in Oregon and, apart from them, she had, well, nothing. No husband, no siblings, no anything. It made her realise that Randy, her brother-in-law, was part of a very small group.
On top of all this, her body was still recovering. Her left leg was only half-functioning and her hair had now completely fallen out, all a consequence of the incident in Holland – or the ‘accident’ as Leonard liked to call it. Damn! Why had she brought Leonard into her thoughts?
“I was looking for my brother-in-law,” she said after exhaling smoke towards the rear gardens.
“And you didn’t find him?” he asked gently.
“No.”
“This sounds like a two-cigarette conversation. Or more?”
“I’d probably get lung cancer before I finished telling you.”
“Then you’d better start telling me.”
“My husband, Dylan, was killed in a road accident in Holland. I was in the passenger seat, hence my leg and the wigs. His brother, Randy, is meant to be living between places in Málaga and Marrakech. I don’t know him well. A mutual friend” – here, Mike paused, imagining that describing Leonard as a friend would have made him smile – “thinks he has gone missing and asked me to check out his apartment.”
“Does he do this regularly? Disappear, I mean?”
She looked across at Wazz. “He works for the CIA.”
“Ah. So, you don’t really know what he’s doing in Málaga?”
“I have an idea, but whatever he’s doing, I don’t think he had been in the flat for weeks.”
“And you didn’t find anything to help you?”
“No.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“Try to avoid going to Marrakech.” She stubbed out her cigarette.
“Do you have an address?”
“Yes, a riad.”
“Marrakech is an hour-and-twenty-minute flight from Málaga. You can see the Moroccan coast from here on a clear day.”
“Have you been there?”
“Yes, twice. Escorting nervous wives on shopping trips.”
She smiled knowingly. “We had better check up on Charles,” she said, changing the subject.
“He’s talking to his wife and daughter on Zoom.”
“They’re hardly awake, I wouldn’t have thought. He’s probably forgotten the time difference with Mexico.”
“They are at home in England. They flew in yesterday.”
“Oh for …!” Mike’s eyes were wide open. “And they’re alone at the Manor, I expect, while we’re all cosy in Spain.” With that, she rushed off to find Charles.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You need to fly out here,” was all he had said.
“Charles, we’ve only just got back from Mexico and we’re jet-lagged. You know that I can’t sleep on planes. Why can’t this wait?” Maria had asked.
He was trying to strike a delicate balance between frightening the life out of them and communicating the urgency of the situation. However, this was taken out of his hands, literally, as Mike had grabbed his phone.
“Maria, you trust me, don’t you?” This was rhetorical, and she didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re both in serious danger. This is no joke. You need to get out of the house now and fly out here. Fast!”
There had been some mumbling from Maria and a shriek from Angelica.
“Maria, everything will be fine. Just do as I say. I’ll get Charles to sort out the transport.”
“OK.” Maria had tried to take all of this in.
Patrick Redwood had needed a day off from his police work and so had spent a very pleasant Sunday in the city of Mulhouse, twenty-eight miles to the south of Colmar, forgetting about murdered ministers and their hospitalised aides. Having been car-obsessed since he was a child, he couldn’t miss the opportunity that a random visit like this to the Alsace offered to someone like him. He drove to the Musée National de l’Automobile, which was housed in an old spinning mill in the French textile city of Mulhouse. It exceeded his wildest dreams. He couldn’t believe his eyes as he gazed on the largest collection of old cars in the world. There were over 400 Bugattis, Hispano-Suizas and every other make he could think of.
His disbelief was not dissimilar to that experienced by the textile-union activists who, after a stand-off in March 1977, had staged a sit-in strike at their employer’s offices and broke into one of the Mulhouse spinning mills to find not textile machinery but an astounding number of rare and valuable cars. Their employers, the secretive Swiss Schlumpf brothers, had built up a huge private collection of cars under the noses of the entire workforce. When the brothers got into financial difficulties in the late 1970s, the French government and unions concocted a plan to keep the collection together under group ownership. Hence the Musée National de l’Automobile.
After the short drive back to his hotel, Patrick Redwood received an update from London. This was to be no relaxed Sunday away from work and family. He was so pleased that he had managed to snatch a few hours of joy because he now knew he was involved in a major ongoing international incident and there would be no let up.
It was his boss, Commander Ben Cox, who had phoned. “Patrick, sorry to ruin your Sunday in sunny France, but I think everything has just hit the fan, including the brown stuff. We haven’t told the French yet, but this Brendan Dowell from our embassy in Paris has gone missing. He was Walter Flushing’s boss … well, sort of.”
