Capital Punishment

  ‘Piss the bed, Alyshia. Lie in your own urine until it dries,’ said the voice. ‘And then your next question will be for a wash and the one after that for a fresh pair of panties. Do yourself a favour.’

  ‘I call my boss “The Sacred Cow”.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ said the voice. ‘Anybody could know that. I want something deeply personal between you and your mother. Think.’

  She didn’t want to reveal personal things to this voice. She wanted to keep them inside, for her own strength.

  ‘It’s just so that we can prove to her without a shadow of doubt that you are alive and well,’ said the voice. ‘It’s a part of the process.’

  ‘What process?’

  ‘The kidnap process.’

  ‘You mean for ransom?’

  ‘Well, ransom is rather a simplistic way of putting it,’ said the voice. ‘You’ve probably realised from the elements of the process that you’ve experienced so far that we’re not in this for a few hundred thousand.’

  ‘So what are you in it for?’

  ‘You’re trying to earn your right to go for a pee, if I remember correctly,’ said the voice. ‘You’re very close to your mother, aren’t you? Or at least you were. You still see her once a week. You’re due there for lunch tomorrow. I think she should know that you’re in good hands before you put in an uncharacteristic no-show.’

  ‘If I don’t show,’ said Alyshia, ‘and I don’t answer my mobile, my mother will go straight to the police.’

  ‘Well, there’s some extra motivation for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If your mother goes to the police, we’ll have to kill you,’ said the voice. ‘You’ll be all right because you’ll be dead. Maybe your father will be able to handle it because he’s got a new family now. But your mother? I think it would destroy her.’

  ‘My mother’s mother is Portuguese,’ said Alyshia. ‘The Portuguese for granny is vovó. She’s always had a lot of energy, so when I was small I called her vo-vó-voom.’

  It was two-thirty in the morning but he wasn’t tired. The players agreed to take a break. Boxer went for the door.

  ‘That’s some pretty good cards you been getting, Charlie,’ said Don, the American. ‘Where d’you get them from?’

  ‘Down my boots, Don,’ said Boxer. ‘The old tricks are the best.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Don’t you run away now.’

  ‘Just going to breathe some air, Don. Back in half an hour.’

  He left the other players smoking and drinking small bitumen coffees in the bar of the private room hired by the syndicate, and went out into the cold night air. Almost as if to spite Amy’s absence, the cards had been good to him. He checked his watch, walked fast down the Alameda dos Oceanos, turned left towards the river, cut diagonally in front of the ticket office to the Oceanarium, through some gardens to the Camões theatre and along the river to Diogo Chaves’ apartment building. Seven minutes.

  He opened the front door, confirmed Dias’ security woman’s report that there were no cameras, went up to the first floor and listened hard at the apartment door. Nothing. He let himself in. No alarm system, no security chain. He moved through the rooms, committing the furniture to memory. He checked the sliding doors to the balcony, the railings around it and the drop. He preferred to do it inside but there was nothing suitable. He went into the hall and noticed that the ceiling there was lower than in the living room and bedrooms.

  The light from Boxer’s mobile phone found the tell-tale lines in the ceiling, three metres from the front door. He took a step ladder from the kitchen, opened the trap into a narrow crawl space. He heaved himself up with the mobile phone in his mouth. At the back were two empty suitcases and a used shoebox packed with $50 bills in sheaves. What was left of the ransom? He took a note of several serial numbers. Finally he found what he was looking for: a steel rod, partially exposed from the concrete.

  Five minutes and he had everything back to normal and was outside on the path next to the river. There was nobody around. He jogged, keeping to the river. Skeletal cable cars hung empty in the dark, swaying in the wind, ghostly and threatening as he made for the huge sea-slug dome of the Atlantic Pavilion. He felt driven, all doubt as to the madness of this mission banished from his mind. He didn’t notice the black hole in his centre anymore.

  Ten minutes later he was at the Ipanema, listening to the music of Bebel Gilberto and drinking whisky on the rocks. Diogo Chaves was at a table with a group of lively Brazilians, sucking on a caipirinha, which looked as if it was his tenth of the night. His laughter was delayed by the fuzziness in his brain. The slackness of his face meant that his smile never completely made it. His eyes were rheumy and charcoal-smudged. The group suddenly got up, said their goodbyes. Chaves was still struggling out of his seat as they all left and dispersed out of the door in both directions. By the time he got outside he was alone for the walk home. He stuck his hands in his pockets and set off into the dark, drifting down to the river in the direction of his apartment. Five minutes later, Boxer was back in his seat at the poker table.

  ‘Nice of you to show, Charlie,’ said the American, looking at his watch. ‘You had me worried.’

  ‘What sort of a person do you take me for, Don?’ said Boxer.

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie. I ain’t never been able to read you.’

  3

  12.00 P.M., SATURDAY 10TH MARCH 2012

  High Street Kensington, London

  Isabel Marks was shopping for food for her lunch party on Sunday. Two writers from her publishing house were coming with their wives. A case of Bourgogne Aligoté and another of a Portuguese red called Cortes de Cima, along with two bottles of Taylor’s twenty-year-old tawny port, had already been delivered to her Kensington home. She’d bought a bottle of cachaça and a bag of limes to make the opening caipirinhas in a way that would, hopefully, give the party a lift without smacking the uninitiated into catatonia. It seemed like a lot of drink but, in her experience, Sunday lunch parties in London with writers, who didn’t have to be up early on a Monday morning, expanded to consume the hours and booze available.

  She’d also invited Jason Bigley. He was a young screenwriter who’d tried to persuade her to take on his new serial killer novel but she already had five women on her list turning out horrors like that and she didn’t need any more. He was, however, good-looking and she’d always been a sucker on that score and she hoped, in that hopeless, motherly way, that Alyshia might take to him.

  No, she thought, be honest with yourself: she’d sniff Jason Bigley out in seconds.

  Isabel had an uncomfortable understanding of Alyshia’s taste in men, which she wanted to change. There had been very few, as far as she knew, but the ones she’d seen had not exactly been eligible. Initially, she’d had high hopes for Julian, a PhD student from Oxford, until she saw a photo and could tell from his sheer arrogance that he was bad news. Fortunately he’d been dropped when Alyshia had gone to Mumbai. Her father had said she hadn’t taken to any of Mumbai’s richest bachelors, which didn’t surprise Isabel. Since Alyshia had come back, there’d been no one. For a twenty-five-year-old dazzling beauty, with a billionaire father, that was not normal.

  Isabel shrugged away the monotonous cycle of maternal preoccupations. Couldn’t help herself. She’d been married and had had Alyshia by the time she was twenty.

  She concentrated on the food. She was going Portuguese for this lunch. Prawns in her mother’s sauce, followed by arroz de pato, shredded duck with rice cooked in its own stock with spicy sausage and black olives, and the Portuguese version of crème brûlée to finish. She loved shopping in the Whole Foods Market in the old Barker’s building on Kensington High Street. Everything under one roof, all nationalities catered for, from Armenian to Zimbabwean. Despite being American, it was the perfect London store – apart from the ridiculous prices.

  Her mobile rang. She hated taking calls when she was out and on the move, but the screen told her it was Chico, w
hich meant it was her ex-husband, Francisco D’Cruz, Alyshia’s father. Isabel always called him by the Portuguese diminutive, Chico. Everybody else called him Frank.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re in London,’ she said.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked urgently, panting.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Bombay,’ he said. He rarely called it Mumbai.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’m on the bloody fucking exercise bike, what do you think?’

  Chico swearing somehow never sounded like swearing.

  ‘It must be nine-thirty at night with you.’

  ‘Try telling that to Sharmila. She has a preternatural ability to divine the precise moment my arse hits the sofa and I start watching a movie.’

  ‘You must be getting too fat,’ said Isabel, who could hear the TV in the background

  ‘No, no, no, Isabel,’ he said. ‘I’m not too fat. I’m slimmer than most men in their fifties. It’s just that I have a younger wife who thinks I should still look like I did when I was in the movies.’

  ‘She’s good for you, Chico,’ said Isabel. ‘How are the little ones?’

  ‘Spoilt to buggery,’ said Chico, who still had access to a lot of Isabel’s father’s expressions. ‘We’re creating monsters with voracious appetites but with no sense of value. I love them to distraction. Name me a parent who doesn’t have the same problem.’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Yeeees,’ said Chico thoughtfully, ‘that’s true. You’re sure you’re all right, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Chico. I’m fine. I’m out shopping for a lunch party for tomorrow. Alyshia’s coming.’

  ‘Ah, yes, she’s not answering her bloody mobile when I’m calling.’

  ‘She was out last night,’ said Isabel. ‘A leaving party. I don’t think she’ll surface until much, much later.’

  ‘So who’s coming to the lunch party?’ asked Chico.

  ‘Just some writers.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘A screenwriter called Jason Bigley.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Chico. ‘But Bigley? She can’t marry someone called Bigley. Alyshia Bigley. She’ll be a laughing-stock.’

  ‘You’re calling me because you’re bored, Chico. Leave me alone to do my shopping.’

  ‘No, no, Isabel. I’m calling you because I had one of my things.’

  ‘A premonition?’ said Isabel. He was famous for them.

  ‘Yes, you know, that something somewhere is not good. So I’m calling the people closest to me to make sure they’re all right.’

  ‘You’re too stressed, Chico,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s nothing to do with us; more likely to do with business.’

  ‘No, no, this was something close to my heart . . . right in my chest.’

  ‘Before you started cycling?’

  ‘Oh yes. I had my check-up last month. My doctor says I have the constitution of a bull elephant,’ said Chico. ‘No, no, no, you see business hits me in the stomach and I can’t eat. But I’m eating very, very well. Too well for Sharmila, which is why I’m always running, running, running.’

  ‘Call me tomorrow but about five hours earlier. Alyshia will be at mine by midday.’

  ‘Look at these bloody people.’

  ‘Chico?’

  She heard the volume come up on the TV.

  ‘These bloody, fucking people . . . these slum dwellers in the middle of Bombay . . . they’re on the BB bloody C.’

  ‘I think you’ve just had the answer to you premonition, Chico.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Bloody fucking people.’

  The door opened. Two pairs of feet across the floor. The cuffs on wrists and ankles removed. Her feet swivelled off the bed. Large hands under each armpit. Men’s hands. They lifted her.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  No word from the men.

  ‘You’ve earned your right to pee,’ said the voice. ‘They’ll walk you to the bucket.’

  They took her four or five yards from the bed. Alyshia was unsteady on her legs. Dizzy. Something to do with the drug they’d given her. They turned her. Her heel hit the metal bucket. One of the men bent down, lifted a lid.

  ‘Squat,’ said the voice.

  ‘Do these men have to be here?’

  ‘Yes, they do. You can’t see. They have to guide you.’

  ‘I’ll take off the sleeping mask.’

  ‘You haven’t earned the right to remove the mask.’

  This new world tightened around her. Her bladder creaked under the pressure. She shuddered, steeling herself against the humiliation. She pulled her pants down to the tops of her thighs, squatted. The relief was ecstatic. Toilet paper was pressed into her hand. She wiped herself, dropped it in the bucket, yanked up her pants. They took her back to the bed while she thought about the last time she’d peed in front of anyone, which was her mother.

  ‘Please don’t handcuff me.’

  ‘Do you agree to leave the sleeping mask on until you’ve earned the right to remove it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The feet retreated. The door opened and closed. She lay back down on her side, brought her knees up to her chest.

  ‘Be kinder to yourself, Alyshia,’ said the voice. ‘You can’t put yourself through that every time you want to have a pee.’

  Every time? She began thinking her way around this new regime, checking her instinct for rebellion because, for the first time in her life, she was up against a system of management that would not easily give way. Her teachers at St Paul’s in London had called her ‘opinionated’ to her face and ‘single-minded’ in their reports. Her psychology tutor at the Saïd Business School in Oxford had referred to her as ‘fiercely independent’, but that was because she didn’t like him, had smelt his vanity and sexual interest on the first day. A managing director of one of her father’s companies in Mumbai had been astonished by her immediate boldness. And ‘The Sacred Cow’ wasn’t in her league. But this? This was a force of total ruthlessness and the strange thing was that the only other time she’d come across a regime like this was when she was working for her father. He was a dictator and not always benevolent.

  That tapas bar, the kids from Bovingdon Recruitment, drunk, Toola on her bum on the pavement, all that mayhem in the Strand, seemed like a different era – a strangely innocent one by comparison. She played it all back to herself like news footage or CCTV product. Not quite real. Not as real as the images she didn’t want to see flickering behind her dark, velvet mask.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Alyshia?’ asked the voice.

  Silence. The two men had terrified her in their white smiling masks, but nothing had been as ghastly as their brutally engorged faces in death.

  ‘Alyshia?’

  ‘What are the rules?’ she asked.

  By ten o’clock that evening, Boxer was seated once again at a table for two in the Japanese restaurant in the Parque das Nações in Lisbon and was eating a set meal for one of sushi and sashimi.

  After playing poker until six o’clock in the morning, he’d slept late. At midday, he’d hired a car and spent the rest of the day going to the sights he’d planned to see with Amy. Despite the clear, sunny, warm spring day, he felt bleak, lonely and cold. He missed her, hated this loneliness, which was different to being a loner with purpose.

  Later, sitting on the beach with a cold wind from the Atlantic battering his face, it hit him that he’d had every intention of playing cards while Amy slept. The reason for the ferocity of the row was his anger at being found out. He was disgusted by himself: a man who lied to his own daughter. There was something missing in him. Maybe the same thing that had been missing in his own father, who probably hadn’t spared him a moment’s thought in thirty-odd years. A failure to connect. An inability to reach out. He held himself by his sides, not through the chill of the wind, but because he felt the hole inside him expanding.

  His thoughts made him edg
y. He needed to reel himself in. He drove back to the Parque das Nações to prepare for his night’s work.

  He finished his meal and went to the underground car park near the Camões theatre, where he’d left the car and picked up his afternoon’s purchases. He let himself into Diogo Chaves’ apartment building and listened at the door. Silence. He unlocked the apartment, checked the rooms. Empty. He took the step ladder and heaved himself up into the storage area and looped the rope he’d bought that day behind the exposed steel rod and secured it. He placed the shoebox full of the ransom cash by the trapdoor. He paid the rope out and measured it, took a knife from the kitchen and cut it to the right length. He replaced the trap with the rope coiled over it and the money on top. He put everything back in its place, found a broom in the cupboard and swept the hall. He walked through the rooms, committing everything to memory one last time.

  Isabel Marks was in bed, make-up removed, the dull sheen of night cream on her face. She had an iPad propped up on her knees, reading an author’s typescript, with her mind only partially on the job. The smell of duck stock filled the house. She’d boiled the birds with an onion stuck with cloves, bay leaves and peppercorns. Now the stock was in the fridge, the fat congealing on top for her to skim off in the morning.

  She’d shredded the meat and put that in the fridge, too. All the time she was working, she was subliminally conscious of a sense of unease. Stripping the skin off the duck and tearing a fork through the flesh had left her feeling apprehensive. She fingered the mobile phone on the duvet. Alyshia couldn’t stand phone calls concerned for her safety. Her voice had the terrible scathing edge of someone who’d never known the fear of loss. Isabel toyed with using the excuse of Chico’s premonition. That might amuse Alyshia in a way that maternal worry wouldn’t. Isabel knew now that she wouldn’t sleep unless she called. What the hell.

  The phone rang once before it was answered by a male voice, slightly distorted.