yawned and reached for the tube of mints on the dashboard. ‘I wonder what Rosa really wants,’ she murmured.
In the Colombian city of Cartagena it was almost five-thirty in the afternoon and the lengthening shadows were throwing the crenellated walls of the old fortifications into dramatic relief. Carmen Salcedo, who had just finished her spiel on the era of piratical sackings and let her tour party loose to explore the walls on their own, watched the mostly American tourists happily ambling away, camcorders whirring, cameras poised.
It was certainly a beautiful evening. She stood leaning against one of the abutments, enjoying the blues of sea and sky, the gold-flecked waves and the buildings of the old city glowing in the evening sun. For all its problems – which ranged from drug traffickers through political corruption to air pollution – Cartagena was still a magical city.
Carmen had lived there for all of her twenty-six years. Her parents still lived in the hills behind the city, but she now shared a two-bedroom flat with Pinar, a fellow tour guide. They were going to the cinema that evening, she remembered, and looked at her watch. She should have given her charges twenty minutes, not half an hour.
But it was too late to worry about that now, and so far this group had proved more reliable than most. She walked back across to the bus and found Mariano squinting at a sex comic which he was holding only a few inches away from his eyes.
‘Getting short-sighted?’ she asked sweetly, making him almost jump out of his seat.
‘Don’t do that!’ he half shouted, glaring at her.
She didn’t think he had ever quite forgiven her for turning down the offer of a date, but he was a good driver, and on the streets of Cartagena that was no small matter. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a smile.
He huffed and puffed, then went back to the comic.
The Pearsons, an American couple in their sixties who had commandeered the front seats of the minibus on day one and, despite several heavy hints, never surrendered them to anyone else, had left a Miami newspaper to guard their precious space. It was almost a week old, but better than nothing, and Carmen sat down to improve her already near-perfect English.
She read the entertainment section first, hoping for a preview of the films which she would be able to see later that year in Cartagena, but they all seemed to be the same old boring hi-tech thrillers. She hadn’t heard of any of the bands mentioned in the music section, and if their music bore any relationship to the way they looked in their photographs she doubted if she was missing much.
She ignored the sports section, and was just skipping through the local news when she saw the headline ‘COLOMBIAN GIRL KILLED BY DRUGS’. Underneath it the sub-head claimed that ‘Traffickers cut her open to reclaim shipment’. Jesus, she thought, and then the two names stopped her in her tracks, and she could suddenly hear her own heart beating. She read the whole paragraph:
‘Another girl, whose Colombian passport identified her as Victoria Marín, was taken into custody by police last night. She was carrying a second passport, which enabled police to identify the dead girl as Placida Guzmán, but was either unwilling or unable to further help the Miami Beach PD with their investigation.’
She read on, but there was nothing else, no mention of the other three, no mention of her sister.
‘Could you take a picture of us, dear?’ someone asked, disturbing her reverie. It was one of the Englishwomen, with her husband hovering behind her. Carmen nodded dumbly, climbed down from the bus, pointed the camera and pressed the button, still in a state of shock.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman asked, a concerned look on her face.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Carmen replied, smiling. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘Well, you’ll soon be rid of us for the night,’ the woman said with a twinkle.
Carmen smiled again, and looked at her watch. Ten minutes more.
They went slowly, but everyone was on time. On the drive back to the hotel she went through the next day’s itinerary – they were visiting the nearby Corales del Rosario National Park – and then asked the Pearsons if she could borrow their newspaper for the evening to help brush up her English.
Mr Pearson seemed a bit reluctant, but his wife was only too happy, probably seeing it as a down payment on their continued tenure of the best seats. At the hotel she counted them all out, remembered to re-check the next morning’s pick-up time with Mariano, then headed for a phone. Pinar was upset that their evening at the cinema was off, but she could tell from Carmen’s voice that something serious had happened. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Carmen explained, and rang her parents’ home. Her mother answered.
‘I’m coming up,’ Carmen told her. ‘I have to talk to you both.’
‘But we’re going out at eight…’
‘Just wait for me,’ Carmen insisted. ‘It’s about Marysa.’
‘What about her?’ her mother asked, sounding almost angry.
‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’
It was an hour’s journey on the bus, maybe even more at that time of day, so she decided on the luxury of a cab, as much for the privacy as the gain in speed. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to immediately ring her parents, but the tone of her mother’s voice had given Carmen cause to wonder. Should she have sat on this information for a few hours, thought about what she wanted to do with it, before putting herself at the mercy of her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s selfishness? What were they going to say to this? The last time she’d raised the issue with them they’d both been really angry with her, as if somehow it was her fault that their other daughter had been taken from them.
The trouble was, their instinctive approach to anything potentially disturbing was to ignore it, in the hope that it would go away. And it worked for them, or at least it did in the sense that they managed to avoid most of the disturbance which other people called living. But it had never worked for Carmen.
The traffic seemed worse than ever, but shortly after seven the taxi deposited her at the foot of the bougainvillea-bordered drive. Her parents were fairly rich by legal Colombian standards, her father having inherited the family footwear business. It was the combination of this wealth and the lack of a ransom demand which had eventually convinced them all to accept the police investigator’s conclusion that Marysa was dead.
They had likewise assumed that Placida Guzmán and Victoria Marín were dead. And Irma. And Rosalita.
Carmen let herself in through the front door, and a few moments later found her parents putting the finishing touches to their evening’s apparel in the enormous bedroom.
‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t tie your hair back like that,’ were her mother’s words of greeting. ‘Can’t you afford a proper styling?’
‘I don’t want a proper styling,’ Carmen said, running a hand over her severely pinned black mane.
Her mother just looked at her.
Carmen laid the newspaper out in front of her on the dressing table. ‘Read that,’ she ordered, pointing out the item with a finger.
Her mother sighed and started reading,
