The Armada Legacy

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘And yet it’s true. I spent my childhood in the slums of Mexico City. My brothers and I had to beg for food while my mother cleaned toilets and my father picked watermelons for a few pesos a day. Our whole family lived in two rooms that were not fit to keep animals in.’

  ‘I’m overwhelmed with sympathy.’

  Serrato looked at her sharply. ‘I am sure you would have been, if you could have seen the way we lived. It was a squalid existence. As a boy I would watch the rich men drive past in their big cars and I knew that I was destined for better things. My grandfather used to tell us that for all our poverty and unhappiness, there was noble blood in our veins. Noble blood,’ Serrato repeated, ‘dating back to the time when the Spanish Empire covered half the world. My mother and father used to laugh and tell us not to listen to an old fool’s tales. It was not until I was much older that I learned that my grandfather was right.’

  Brooke didn’t reply.

  Serrato seemed about to continue, then restrained himself. ‘But I have no right to bore such a charming companion with stories of my past. Won’t you take some foie gras?’

  ‘Stick your foie gras. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Perhaps this will whet your appetite.’ Serrato reached behind him and picked up a square, flat jewellery box, which he slid across the table towards her. ‘A gift.’

  ‘You think I’d want anything from you?’

  ‘Please, I insist.’

  Brooke opened the box. Inside was a diamond and emerald necklace that looked as if it must be worth about the same as her flat in Richmond, together with a matching bracelet. ‘What the hell are these?’

  ‘They’re yours. And I should very much like to see you in them.’

  The green dress matched perfectly with the sparkling emeralds: it was clear that Serrato liked to plan every little detail. The way he was looking at her was deeply unsettling, but she met his eye and replied fiercely, ‘I’m not your doll, or anyone else’s, to be draped in bangles and beads.’

  ‘You’re a woman of strong opinions,’ Serrato said. ‘I have every respect for that.’

  ‘Then why are you dressing me up like this? Is this how you get your kicks, kidnapping women and making them wear this stuff? It’s sick.’

  ‘It seems to me that you underestimate your own beauty,’ he said. ‘Whereas I do not. And you would greatly oblige me by putting the jewels on.’

  Brooke saw a strange light in his eye. Something told her she shouldn’t push him too far. ‘If you insist.’ She plucked the bracelet from the box and tried it on.

  ‘As I thought, a perfect fit,’ Serrato said admiringly. ‘And now the necklace.’

  Brooke knew she couldn’t refuse. ‘Let me take this off first,’ she said, and reached behind her neck to undo the clasp of the little gold chain Ben had given her. She removed it with real reluctance, picked the cold, heavy necklace from its velvet liner and slipped it round her neck in its place. The clasp was awkward to fasten.

  ‘Allow me,’ Serrato said. Rising from his chair he stepped behind hers, and she felt his fingers delicately touching the back of her neck. ‘There, it’s done. It looks as wonderful on you as I had thought it would.’

  She could see herself in the gilt-framed mirror opposite, and him standing over her, watching her as if she were something in a museum to be admired and gawked at. His hands brushed her shoulders. She twisted away from his touch.

  ‘You have such fine features,’ he said, carefully studying her face in the mirror. ‘If you were to tie your hair up it would accentuate them even more. Let me show you. There. Like this.’

  ‘Please tell me what’s going on. Tell me what I’m doing here.’

  ‘You’ll understand in due course,’ he said, returning to his chair. In the meantime, there is something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’ Taking a small envelope from the pocket of his blazer, he opened it and produced a tiny photograph. ‘Is this the man you mentioned, this Marshall person?’

  Brooke instantly recognised the photo of Ben, taken the previous spring at Le Val. Even when it had looked as though their relationship was over forever, she hadn’t had the heart to throw it away. Serrato must have found it in her purse.

  There was a gleam in his eye as he waited for her reply. It suddenly struck her what his expression was. It was the look of a jealous lover, and it turned her blood cold to think what might happen if she told the truth.

  ‘That’s nobody,’ she said carefully.

  Serrato scrutinised her face for a long moment. ‘Are you quite sure? Not, for example, the man who bought you that?’ He pointed at the slim gold chain that Brooke was holding in her hand.

  ‘Forget him,’ she said. ‘He’s not important.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Is there anyone else … important in your life?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. There’s nobody.’

  Serrato gazed at her a moment longer, then smiled and seemed satisfied she was being truthful. ‘What about some wine?’

  ‘Just a little,’ she said, and held out her glass for him to fill. She hated playing this game that he seemed to enjoy so much, but she badly needed something to steady her nerves.

  ‘You should eat, as well,’ he said, scraping pâté onto a sliver of toast. ‘We don’t want you becoming too thin.’

  Why, then I won’t fit your fucking dress collection any more? she wanted to yell at him, but kept her mouth shut. After a few moments she reluctantly began to pick at the food.

  ‘Good, no?’

  ‘Better than I had in my last prison,’ she said dryly.

  ‘I love your sense of humour.’ Serrato rang a little bell and the two servants instantly filed in to clear away the hors d’oeuvre plates and bring in the main course and more wine before disappearing as quickly as before. Serrato lifted the lid of a silver platter and breathed in the aromatic steam that rose up. ‘Salmon poached in fino sherry, with a butter and parsley sauce,’ he said with relish. ‘It’s wonderful together with these sautéed potatoes and steamed asparagus tips.’

  ‘You really must give me the recipe,’ she muttered.

  He picked up a silver fish slice. ‘Let me serve you.’

  ‘I’ve had enough to eat. I want to leave now.’

  ‘You wish to return to your rooms?’

  ‘I wish to return to my country. To my home, my friends, the ones you and your thugs haven’t murdered. To my life. It’s been left kind of interrupted, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Your life is here with me now,’ he said quietly after a pause. ‘That is how it was meant to be.’

  The words hit her like a slap across the face. She nearly laughed at the surreal absurdity of it. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You’ll soon forget your old life,’ Serrato told her, delicately laying a slice of salmon on his own plate. ‘Believe me when I say that the one I have to offer you is far superior in every way. I have so many plans for us. There’s so much we can do together. Once my plans are finalised, the world will truly be ours.’ He reached for the vegetables.

  ‘You’re mad. Who do you think I am?’

  Serrato began eating and made no reply.

  ‘Who’s Alicia?’ she asked suddenly, breaking the silence.

  Serrato put down his knife and fork with such a loud clatter that it made her jump. He looked across the table at her with a hard, wild glare in his eyes. His tanned face had turned almost white. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me. Consuela and Presentacion keep talking about someone called Alicia, and looking at me. Who is she? Do you think I’m her? Because I’m not. You know my name. It’s Brooke Marcel. Not Alicia someone-or-other.’

  Looking as though he was making a huge effort to control himself, Serrato wiped his mouth with a satin napkin and rose from his seat. He left the dining room without a word.

  Brooke sat there alone at the empty table. A minute went by, then another. She carefully pushed the little gold chain into the cup of he
r bra, for want of a pocket. It was more precious to her than a million emerald necklaces and she didn’t want to lose it.

  Because a crazy, dangerous, irresistible idea had just come into her mind. She stood up, slipped off her shoes and crept silently across to the door through which the guards had brought her. After listening for sounds outside the door and hearing nothing, she gently opened it a crack and peeked through. There was nobody around.

  She swallowed. You’re as mad as he is, she thought. But the opportunity was too tempting to resist. She stepped out of the dining room and glanced around her. The wide hallway had four other doors, all gleaming walnut with shiny gold handles, any of which could lead to some kind of exit.

  Brooke was committed now. She padded furtively across the hallway to the nearest of the doors, pressed her ear to it for a moment and then turned the handle.

  The room behind the door was a lounge that looked like something from a gentlemen’s club circa 1850: heavily varnished panelling, yet more artwork, a mirror over the fireplace, Chesterfield furniture. Brooke searched the room for a phone. She had no idea what country she was in, let alone what number to call for the police, but if she could make a call to Ben’s mobile, she might be able to get through to him. The thought of being able to speak to him made her heart jump.

  But there was no phone. Brooke was about to leave the room and try another when the sudden tap of approaching footsteps outside made her back away from the door and press herself against the wall. The footsteps paused outside. Voices: two men, speaking Spanish.

  She held her breath. The door was a couple of inches ajar, and leaning forward she could just about make out the two guards in the hallway. Both were armed with pistols. They’d paused so that one could show the other something on his phone, some picture that made them both laugh. Brooke drew away from the door. Would they notice it was hanging open and come inside to check the room? For a terrifying instant she glanced about her for a hiding place, convinced she was about to be caught – but then the guards moved on and she could breathe again.

  Their footsteps grew fainter. She counted one – two – three –

  And stopped at four.

  She stopped because she’d just realised that what she’d taken to be a mirror over the fireplace, framed in ornate gilt wood, was actually a painting.

  It was a portrait of a woman. A woman in a shimmering green dress, with long, curling auburn hair that was elegantly swept up to show off the diamonds and emeralds around her neck. The slender hand posed resting on her lap wore the matching bracelet. Her green eyes looked straight into the viewer’s, stunningly lifelike and filled with joy and excitement. She was smiling.

  Brooke gaped at the painting. It couldn’t be … was it … ?

  It was of her.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Her mind reeling so much she could hardly walk straight, Brooke crossed the room to stare at the painting more closely. It seemed incredible, impossible.

  And yet it seemed true. The woman had her face, her hair. The dress in the picture was the exact same one that she was wearing. The jewels were the ones that Serrato had given her at dinner. Brooke couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  It was only when she got right up close and stared hard at the detail of the picture that she began to make out subtle differences and realised that the painting was of someone else. The eyes were a slightly different shade, and slightly closer together than hers. The shape of the nose, the ears, the chin. But nonetheless the resemblance was unsettling.

  Brooke ran her hand along the bottom of the painting’s ornate frame and her fingers found something. She looked at it: a small rectangular plaque sculpted into the golden wood. A plaque that bore, in tiny black script, the name ‘Alicia’.

  Her thoughts were racing as she left the room and ran up the passage in the opposite direction that the guards had gone, searching left and right for an exit as she went, the marble floor hard and cold under her bare soles. The notion of trying to escape now, dressed as she was, barefoot, totally vulnerable and lost, was insane – it was against everything she’d ever learned or taught. But none of her training or knowledge were of any use to her now. She was no normal hostage; and this Ramon Serrato, whoever the hell he was, was certainly no normal kidnapper.

  Alicia. Did Serrato truly believe that Brooke was Alicia? It was hard to grasp what was happening to her. She almost wished he was holding her for ransom in a dank cellar, hooded and chained up. Anything was better than this bizarre, fetishistic kind of slavery. She had to get out of here.

  Doors; more doors. They passed in a flurry as she ran on, gathering up the hem of the dress to keep it from tangling up her legs. Nothing that looked like an exit, and there could have been a bunch of guards standing right behind any of them. She’d never been inside such a huge house before – it seemed to go on forever and now she was starting to panic, her breath coming in gasps as she thought about what would happen when Serrato returned to the dining room to find it empty. A whole army of his men would go storming through the whole place searching for her. She couldn’t possibly evade them for long.

  A glimpse of a window as she tore down a passage and went hurrying down a narrow flight of steps told her night had fallen. This part of the house was workmanlike and plain, dimly lit with bare walls and rough concrete floors that chafed on her bare feet as she ran. She hurried round a corner and had to fling herself into a shady alcove for cover as a set of doors swung open and she almost ran right into two men dressed in catering aprons. The place they’d emerged from was a kitchen, but from the pungent aroma of grease, fried beans, tomato and chilli that wafted out of the doors she guessed it catered for Serrato’s troops rather than meeting the elevated gastronomic tastes of the man himself. She waited hidden, holding her breath, for the cooks to pass by, then ran on.

  She was quite lost now, and becoming more panic-stricken by the second. The passage she was heading down was getting narrower and seemed to be leading nowhere. Brooke was on the verge of turning round to head back the way she’d come or find another route through the house, when she suddenly stopped dead.

  She’d heard something. And as she stood there tensed up in the gloomy passage, she heard it again. The sound of a woman’s voice not far away. She cocked her head, listening in alarm. No, there were two distinct voices – two women.

  And they were both screaming in fear.

  Brooke moved along more slowly now, wondering where the terrible keening sound was coming from. She paused at a door, gave it a tentative shove and peered inside as it creaked open. It was a laundry room, with a row of large, squat washing machines along one wall and stacks of laundry baskets along another. Near the ceiling above the machines was a window, thick with dirt and cobwebs. She realised she’d wandered into a basement.

  Her escape attempt was forgotten for the moment as she felt herself drawn to the source of the awful, continuous screaming that she now realised was coming from through that high window. A bright white light, like a floodlamp from outside, was glaring through the dirty glass.

  Despite the awkward dress Brooke managed to clamber up onto one of the washing machines, so that the window ledge was about eight inches above her head. She reached up to the ledge with both hands and hauled her chin level with the window sill, scrabbling with her bare toes to get a purchase on the wall, then peered through the dirty glass.

  The window was a few inches above the ground level of a brightly-lit concrete yard, about ten metres square and surrounded by a whitewashed block wall. There were six men standing in the yard, one of them just inches from where Brooke was straining to peer through the window, so that the leg of his combat trousers half-blocked the view. But she could see enough.

  At the opposite side of the yard, the two guards who’d brought her from her quarters earlier, the muscular ponytailed one and the one with the damaged ear, were violently dragging and shoving the Brazilian maidservants against the wall. Presentacion was clinging desperately
to her mother and sobbing hysterically in the glare of the floodlights. Consuela let out another high-pitched scream as the ponytailed guard ripped her daughter away from her and sent her sprawling to the concrete.

  Brooke wanted to scream ‘Stop it! Leave them alone!’ But all she could do was hang there from her fingertips and stare in horror as she realised what was about to happen.

  A tall figure in a cream suit stepped into view. He had his back to the basement window, but she knew Serrato well enough now to recognise him instantly even from behind. He appeared quite unfazed by the frantic screams of the two women as he walked over to them. Consuela tore herself from the grip of the guard holding her and threw herself at his feet, clutching at his trouser legs, her face covered in tears, pleading with him in her native Portuguese. Brooke understood every plaintive, sobbing word.

  ‘Don’t harm my child, I beg you! I’m to blame, I swear. Punish me, but please don’t hurt my baby! Please!’

  Serrato’s reply was too quiet for Brooke to catch through the glass, but she didn’t need to hear to understand. He shook his head, brusquely pushed the weeping mother away with his foot, and took three slow steps back. He reached out his hand. One of the guards unholstered an automatic pistol and passed it to him, butt-first. In no hurry, Serrato checked the weapon over and then aimed it down at Consuela’s bowed head.

  Presentacion let out a wailing, inhuman shriek. Brooke almost screamed, too. He was going to slaughter the Brazilian maids just the way he’d slaughtered Sam and her employer, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

  The gunshot reverberated sharply round the walled yard. Consuela gave a lurch and then slumped over on her side. There was a spatter of blood up the white wall behind her.

  Then Serrato turned the pistol on Presentacion. The ponytailed guard who’d been tightly gripping the screaming girl’s arm now let go. Presentacion had nowhere at all to run, but in her desperation she raced for the far wall and almost reached it before the pistol cracked a second time in Serrato’s hand.