Sing Like a Canary

Chapter 2

2

OLD SALT WORKS, LOS COCOTEROS, LANZAROTE, THURSDAY 14 MARCH 2019Billy yawned over his toast. He took another slurp of coffee, hoping to shake off the tiredness. He’d had a rough night, a rarity for him. He hadn’t had a disturbed night’s sleep in decades.

He’d got off to sleep fine, but he awoke in the small hours from a nightmare. He never had nightmares. And this one had him sweating. As the various disconnected elements of the dream had presented themselves in his half-awake awareness, he’d hunkered down beneath the covers, spooked. His hearing had grown sharp. A distant knock and he was convinced he had an intruder. He got out of bed and crept through the house in the dark, checking every door and window. He even checked in the cupboards. On his return, his dog Patch looked up at him from her bed in the corner of his bedroom, c*****g her head to one side. It was only her nonplussed expression that caused him to get back into bed, reassured there was no intruder. It had all been a dream, first one faceless guy after him with a g*n, then another with a knife. He’d escaped being shot, and narrowly avoided having his throat slit, and he’d woken up as he was hiding, terrified, in some property’s cistern, convinced he was about to drown. He had a horror of drowning. Only equalled by his fear of heights.

The nightmare was cinematic, vivid, blood-curdling and all too real. If he hadn’t known better, he would have treated it as a premonition.

But a dream was just a dream, only a dream.

A dream that, even in the clear light of morning, had left him rattled.

Forty years had passed since he’d had to think about the likelihood of his own violent death. Forty years of relative tranquillity. What had triggered that nightmare? Nothing, as far as he could tell. It was that nothing that instilled him with unease.

Patch sat dutifully by his side as he ate. The toast had gone limp and the coffee tepid. He took another bite and washed it down. Then he took his plate and cup to the sink before putting a handful of dog biscuits in Patch’s bowl. She always ate second. Patch knew her place.

He’d found her in a pound five years back and trained her well. She was a pint-sized Labrador-dominant mongrel, black and tan with one floppy and one pointy ear, and a large white patch over her left eye. She looked odd and none of the rescue-dog browsers had wanted her at the pound, mostly on account of her eye patch. Their loss. His gain. She had turned out to be his ideal companion. And after he lost Natasha last year, that dog had been a huge comfort to him.

He went and slipped on the flip flops he wore outside, and she came trotting over.

It was still early, but the wind was up. In the cool of the shade cast by the house, he took in the expanse of white-painted concrete that had taken on a yellowish-brown patina. Dust. He’d been putting off the task for days. As he surveyed the obvious, he had to lecture himself into action. No one else was going to come along with a yard broom. Natasha would have had a fit seeing it in such a state. All that dust, tracking into the house, making more work, for her. The grit underfoot wasn’t that pleasant either, especially for Patch.

In the end, he did it for Patch.

It took him the next half hour, sweeping and hosing. Patch sat in the shade and watched.

He should have gotten houseproud in his old age. Not that he was old. Seventy-five wasn’t old, was it? Or maybe it was. His back thought it was. As did his knees and his hips. He wasn’t the agile man he once was. But he ignored the twinges. Doctors were expensive, he had no private health cover, and he was hardly going to announce his whereabouts to the British government and claim free health care under the reciprocal agreement with Spain. He couldn’t claim the aged pension for the same reason. He would rather rot on Lanzarote than be one of those poor bleeders who disappeared shortly after their arrival back in the motherland, or one of those crims arrested on their hospital bed back in London twenty or thirty years after the fact. Eyes never stopped watching. The mind once crossed never forgot. A bunch of elephants with very long memories. You couldn’t escape it. If Billy had known in the 1970s what he’d come to know as he aged and aged some more, he would have chosen a different path. A straight and narrow path. Stuck with his legitimate job as a milkman and nothing more. Would that even have been possible? Probably not. Not for the likes of Billy Mackenzie.

Still, he thought, leaning his arms on his broom and looking around at his handiwork, he’d done all right for himself on this desert island.

The patio was large and skirted by a concrete-block wall about two metres high, rendered and painted white, marking the perimeter of his property. Entry was via a pair of rusted metal gates positioned in the southern wall. The solid panels matched the height of the walls, with a decorative metal grille in the form of a cactus inserted in the centre of the left gate at about eye level. In the north-western corner of the patio was a garage, also built of concrete blocks, rendered, and painted the same. Everything was rendered. Everything was white. So much white. Reflected the heat but hard on the eyes. That starkness was broken up by three raised beds fringed with basalt boulders, containing a cactus, a palm tree, and a drago tree. He could see the mountains and the volcanoes above the patio wall to the west. In all, the property was private, sheltered, and very pleasant.

An unexpected noise, a rustle maybe, and he was instantly alert. He cautioned Patch to stay and went over to the gates and peered warily through the decorative grille. Maybe it was nothing, but he opened the gates and stepped outside. He scanned up and down the length of wall that stretched all the way down to the cliff. There really was nothing. Even so, he remained wary.

As he lifted his gaze, he spotted his neighbour or rather his neighbour’s hat – a white bucket hat hiding his near-bald head – poking up above his own patio wall. A loud woof followed by a faint, ‘What is it, Penny?’ and the neighbour Tom looked over, and, seeing Billy outside his gates, he waved. Billy was forced to wave back, which he did as he closed his gates, hoping to make it clear the brief encounter was not a signal to visit. Billy didn’t much like Tom, and Patch didn’t much like Penny, a barely trained pure-bred Weimaraner.

Billy knew Tom could no longer see him, but he felt the man’s eyes on his back anyway. He deposited his broom and dustpan in the garage and went inside with Patch, embracing the ambient feel, the cool, the absence of wind.

The house was more than adequate for the needs of a family – it had five large bedrooms – which was why Billy was able to devote one of the bedrooms to his jigsaws.

Forty years incognito on a desert island? A man needed a hobby. Jigsaws were time-consuming, soothing, and suited the solitary life.

Some he’d had framed – a still life, a castle, a map of the world. He only did two-thousand-piece puzzles and in that dedicated puzzle room, he had four on the go at once. He found it relaxing. He’d become something of a collector, too, favouring the most difficult puzzles, the rarities, the relics. As long as they had all their pieces.

He eyed the castle puzzle nearest the window and spotted a portion of the crenelations in among the masonry pieces lying outside the frame. The piece fit. He looked for more pieces and found three. After that run of luck, nothing.

He went over to the window and gazed out at the deep blue ocean. He was listless. The dream still lingered in the recesses of his mind. Then there was Natasha. The constant gnawing heartache of missing her. And, lodged smack in the middle of his mind, there was something else he did not want to think about. Another death. Alvaro. His son.

He left the puzzle room and wandered back through the house. The living room was spacious and peaceful. Something about the dim interior facing the brilliance outside. Glass sliding doors looked out over the ocean beneath a deep open porch. Close to the house was a swimming pool. Billy kept the cover on unless he wanted to use it. He had never felt entitled to such luxury. A large home with a pool and a stunning ocean view – who would have thought? Although life here wasn’t all sunshine and daffodils. You can be lonely in paradise, that much he knew all too well as he went over and drank in the ocean blue, one loss compounding another until he didn’t know how to position himself mentally. The avoidance was draining.

Patch came and pressed her nose against the glass then looked up at him expectantly. He slid open the door.

The land sloped down to the low basalt cliff. Billy had landscaped the slope into a series of low terraces that he’d planted up with groundcovers and succulents. The perimeter walls reduced in height by shallow increments, the rear wall only a metre high. Down there at the property’s coastal edge, Billy saw no point in attempting any sort of beautification. The trade wind was too strong, the salty air too harsh and corrosive, and the only plants that would survive the exposure were euphorbias which tended to look scrappy unless watered and cared for, and he couldn’t be bothered trudging down there with a watering can. Or so he told himself. Truth was, at that end of the property he was visible, much too visible to anyone wandering along the cliff path or in a boat out at sea. Someone with binoculars maybe. And then there was his only neighbour, Tom, who was something of a busybody.

Billy pretty much left the bottom of the land for Patch. He went down every couple of days to collect her poo. When he did, he wore dark sunglasses and a hat. She made her way down there now as he watched, pausing to sniff this and that, and trotting along happily. There was nothing to harm her in his walled yard, but he stayed outside anyway, on guard with the morning sun on his face and the ocean breeze blowing back his hair, pressing his T-shirt to his chest.

The peace didn’t last long. Something had disturbed Tom’s dog Penny. A visitor? A bird? Billy was hardly going to stand on a chair and peer over the wall to find out. Penny was apt to bark at anything for no reason. The very worst kind of guard dog. A hound, really. That breed was a hunting dog. Patch didn’t issue a reciprocal bark. She was the quietest dog he had ever come across, too quiet maybe. If there had been an intruder, would she have barked then? Or cowered?

Penny’s barking stopped as abruptly as it began. Something and nothing then.

Tom’s property was of a similar size to Billy’s and a good fifty metres away to the south. They shared that small stretch of rocky headland, Billy’s property situated above a small bay to the north. There was a beach of sorts down in the bay, although that, too, was rocky and no good for swimming. On the other side of the bay were the salt flats of Los Cocoteros. There were a few farms in the hinterland between the coast and the volcano. Not much went on in the fields. Billy had hardly ever encountered those farmers. The area was as remote as you could get while remaining in easy reach of everywhere. Access was via a gravel no-through road. Even in the height of the tourist season very rarely did a car come by. The location might not suit many but it suited Billy down to the ground.

Billy considered his neighbour Tom an interloper. Billy had got there first. He’d met with a stroke of good fortune in the first week of his new life on the island back in 1980, when he’d sat propping up the bar of a nightclub in the then tiny but burgeoning resort town of Puerto del Carmen. He was on the hunt for real estate, and he found himself sitting next to a down-on-his-luck Swede desperate to sell his half-built house after his daughter had died and his wife had left him. A chance encounter. They moved to a table and agreed a fair price over a bottle of Tequila. Billy went to inspect the place the next day. Torbjorn fell over himself with gratitude, it being near impossible to sell anything half-built. And, of course, there was no estate agent taking a cut. The guy even left Billy five pallets of concrete blocks and the phone numbers of a few expatriate tradespeople. Billy soon learned the local building ways that majored in rustic and cheap, and in basalt and concrete. Little to no wood. To build, you needed muscle more than skill and back then, Billy had plenty.

Good fortune had shone on Billy as he slid into his new life after witness protection. He’d even left his old London life with what amounted to a tidy sum in Spain. An only child, he’d inherited his parents’ – originally his maternal grandparents’ – large semi-detached house in a sought-after part of Plumstead in London’s southeast. A recent property boom thanks to Margaret Thatcher encouraging a council-house selloff meant he then sold his family home for over forty-thousand pounds. In pesetas, that was an enormous amount. He was able to pay Torbjorn in cash and, aiming to capitalise on the looming tourism boom, for the next decade he bought, renovated, and on-sold properties for a healthy profit and ended up with a good bank balance. Eventually he held on to three properties to rent out as holiday lets. He’d been living off the income those properties generated ever since. Living in hiding meant he never wanted anyone to know anything about him. To that end, he paid his cleaner Maria a generous rate in return for her silence. And his booking agent Marisol was the soul of discretion.

There was a period early in his home renovations phase when he was forced to get by on his savings, a period in which he got involved in another sort of business. Observing Patch sniffing about down at the bottom of the terraces, he fought against remembering that time. Up until Natasha’s death, he had never thought about the early 1980s. He had just about erased all that from his mind. Sealed it off. Now cracks appeared. Maybe that dream was not a harbinger but an echo of a memory.

The ocean, shimmering a deep sapphire, rose and fell on the swell. It was mid-March, and the morning sun began baking the rock that was Lanzarote. Patch came trotting up the path and he ushered her inside and closed the sliding door on the freshening wind.

Patch went to her water bowl and Billy headed to his home gym for a workout. Usually he played music – Billy Joel was his favourite – but the nightmare had left him disconcerted for no good reason and he needed silence. To hear. It was Thursday and on Thursdays he did a much longer gym session and focused on his upper body. It was a lengthy routine, but he had nothing else on. And for the whole of that time, he listened and listened hard for any out-of-the-ordinary sounds.

Over the decades he had become a creature of habit. More so since he’d lost Natasha. Acclimatising himself to his life of solitude, he’d carved up his week and allotted different activities for each day. On Mondays he cleaned the house, did the washing, and went grocery shopping. Tuesdays he drove to Arrecife for lunch. Wednesdays and Saturdays were golf days. Fridays he did nothing. Sundays he drove to a village market or to some other tourist location just because he could. At home he had his jigsaws and his gym room and Patch.

Two hours of punishing lateral raises and shoulder presses and bench presses later, he spent fifteen minutes stretching and then took a much-needed shower.

With Patch pitter patting behind him on the terracotta-tiled floor, he went to the kitchen and made one of his deluxe coffees from the organic coffee beans he ordered in from Colombia and ground himself. The local coffee was bitter and tasteless by comparison. He took his coffee and his book – he was reading Talking to GOATs by Jim Gray and finding it entertaining enough – out to the front patio where, over by the drago tree in the corner beside the house, shielded from the sun and wind, he’d built a seating area from concrete blocks comprising a corner seat, a low table and two more seats to complete the setting. The table and seats he’d rendered and painted white as was the custom. He’d had a bunch of foam seat pads made. Natasha had covered the seat pads in brightly coloured fabric and decorated the setting with an array of cushions. It was comfortable if a bit dated. The whole place had a vintage 1970s feel, the result, obviously, of its age.

He was four pages into the chapter on Tiger Woods when he heard a car engine in the distance. He paused and looked up, waiting. The sound grew closer. Patch looked up as well, a sure indication that the car was heading their way. He left his book, face down on his seat, and went over to the gates. He watched through the grille as a white Mazda drove past Tom’s, kicking up dust in its wake. He waited. There was a brief moment of stillness while the engine idled. The tourists, they had to be tourists, had reached the road’s end. Then, as anticipated, the engine revved a few times then issued a steady thrum. On its way by, the car moved at a crawl. The driver was male and young, as was the female passenger. They were craning their necks looking every which way, pointing, and stabbing the air. Seemed to be having an argument. Typical tourists. No doubt lost. He wasn’t about to open the gates and help with directions. Satisfied they presented no danger, he left them to it and went back to his coffee and his book.

What mattered to Billy Mackenzie each and every day even after forty years in hiding was not only not being seen much but not being recognised ever. Sometimes he missed the old days, the action, the thrills. But he’d learned to keep his head down after those escapades on the island early on had nearly landed him in a lot of trouble. If wistful thoughts crept in, thoughts of a life that was anything other than humdrum, he reminded himself that he was more than lucky to be alive – in fact, it was something of a miracle.

He took a gulp of his coffee and settled back with Tiger Woods.

It wasn’t until lunchtime that his thoughts touched on what he’d been trying to avoid all morning. Something about the slice of beetroot that shot of out the side of his sandwich as he cut it in half. Truth be known, he’d been avoiding the same thoughts all week.

Alvaro was dead.

That was bad enough.

But Alvaro was not only dead. He’d been murdered.

Which came as no surprise. But when he dwelt on it, he was catapulted back to his old life in London, to his other kids, the ones he’d had to leave behind. And to Marjorie, who’d made it all happen and saved his life.