“That I’m confident you will soon find his wife. With my help, of course.”
“What makes you think I need your help?”
“Let’s not spoil an otherwise pleasant evening.”
“And if I accept your offer? What would be our first move?”
“We’re going to reconstruct Alice Winter’s movements during the seven days she spent on the island. The restaurants where she dined, the nightclubs where she danced, the boutiques where she shopped. And then we’re going to review every minute of surveillance video we can lay our hands on.”
“This might come as a surprise to you, Señor Allon, but I’ve already done that.”
“And what did you discover?”
“Absolutely nothing of value.”
“That’s because you were looking for thieves instead of kidnappers.”
“And how do kidnappers look?”
“That depends on the kidnapper. I have a feeling that Alice’s were of the highly professional variety. And they would have been watching her from the minute she and her friends arrived on Ibiza.”
Inspector Aragón refilled his glass with the Majorcan wine. “Unless, of course, there were no kidnappers.”
Eva Aragón met Gabriel at nine the following morning at Calma, the popular harborside restaurant where Alice Winter had taken herlast meal on Ibiza. The manager, a put-upon Spaniard called Rodrigo, escorted them to a cramped office next to the kitchen and with a heavy sigh sat down behind a computer.
“The same date and time?” he asked.
The inspector nodded.
“The video hasn’t changed, you know.”
“Just get on with it, Rodrigo.”
He tapped a few keys, and a shot of the restaurant’s open-air dining room appeared on the screen. The inspector pointed toward the woman sitting alone at a sunlit table at the edge of the pier.
“There’s our girl.”
“Surprise, surprise,” said the restaurant manager beneath his breath.
“May I see her arrival?” asked Gabriel.
Rodrigo displayed the feed from the camera at the restaurant’s entrance and rewound the video at three times the normal speed. A moment later Alice shuffled backward across the screen. Then Rodrigo clicked theplayicon, and she approached the entrance at an unhurried pace, a bag over one shoulder.
“Did she have a reservation?”
“No.”
“Table for one?”
Rodrigo nodded.
A middle-aged couple entered the restaurant next, followed by a pair of dark-haired men in their thirties. Gabriel snapped a photograph of the two men with his mobile phone, then said, “May I see the dining room again, please?”
Rodrigo switched the feed and adjusted the time stamp. Alice Winter sat alone at her waterside table, phone in hand, arm extended. The photo would appear on Instagram at 2:17p.m.My last day onIbiza...It would be her last post as well. She left the restaurant twelve minutes later. No one followed her.
They headed next to La Casita, scene of Alice’s quarrel with her friend Phoebe Chadwick, then to La Plaza, where Winter and party had been three in number rather than their usual four. At neither establishment did Gabriel notice anything unusual in the surveillance video. The same was true of every other restaurant where the women had dined during their stay on the island, including La Gaia, the Michelin-starred eatery in Gabriel’s hotel.
After a break for lunch—it was a quick slice of pizza rather than the traditional Spanish midday feast—Gabriel and Inspector Aragón set off for Ibiza’s world-renowned nightclubs. The largest were multilevel venues that could accommodate thousands of revelers. Even so, Gabriel had no trouble spotting Alice amid the flashing lights and pulsating bodies; she was the sort of woman who stood out in a crowd. Not surprisingly she was the subject of no small amount of male attention. Gabriel studied the faces of the men who lingered too long in her presence, and those who appeared to watch her from afar. At a club called Amnesia she threw a drink into the face of a handsome young man who tried to pull her onto the dance floor. At Pancha, reputedly Ibiza’s most glamorous nightclub, a surveillance camera spotted her entering a private room.
