LITMIR.BIZ

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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, still fiddling with her earrings as she did so. Then her hand suddenly stilled, leaving the filigree ornament swaying in mid-air. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said softly.

      ‘What is it?’ her husband asked, leaning over her shoulder to read.

      ‘Guzmán and Marín are common names,’ Carmen’s mother said in a small voice, as if she was arguing with herself.

      ‘Not that common,’ Carmen said gently. ‘And Victoria Marín and Placida Guzmán together – it’s too much of a coincidence. It even says that Victoria is twenty-three, which would be right.’ She looked at her parents, both of whom seemed to have been suddenly aged by the news. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘This means there’s hope.’

      ‘We understand,’ her father said, and the look in his eyes seemed to add: we’ve lost her once and now we’ll get the chance to lose her all over again.

      Carmen felt like slapping them both. ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked her father abruptly.

      He looked at her for a moment. ‘Talk to the Chief of Police, I suppose, and get him to contact the police in Miami.’

      ‘Don’t you think you should go there yourself? I’ll come with you,’ she added – his English had never been good.

      He shook his head. ‘The police in Miami are more likely to listen to a fellow-officer than a Colombian civilian.’

      Which might well be true, she thought. ‘So will you call now?’

      He smiled wryly. ‘He won’t be in his office.’

      ‘His home then.’

      ‘I don’t have his home number, and even if I did…Carmen, the newspaper article is a week old. Putting the man’s back up to save a few hours is not worth it.’

      ‘And we’re going to be late,’ his wife added, earrings finally in place.

      ‘You’re still going out?’

      ‘What do you expect us to do – spend the evening wringing our hands?’ her mother asked.

      ‘No, I suppose not, but…You will ring first thing in the morning?’

      ‘I’ll go and talk to him in person.’

      ‘Good.’ She felt relieved.

      ‘There’s food in the kitchen if you want some,’ her mother told her, and once they’d gone she toyed with a plate of warmed-up fish risotto for a while before deciding to head back into town.

      On the bus she found her mind running through the events of that fateful August. The five young women, all from good families, all in their last year at college, had taken

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