Finding Daylight

By Lorna Gray

Finding Daylight is the story of Pedro Alonso, a man whose seemingly perfect life is turned upside down after he dreams of his own death - and then meets his supposed assassin the very next day! Set in New York and in Madrid, the story follows Alonso on a journey of self-discovery as he sets out to investigate and expose his new colleague as the cold-blooded killer he knows him to be. Faced with jealousy, weakness and self-doubt, he struggles to maintain his composure as a husband, father and skilled political negotiator. As he loses his grip on his job, his family and his morals, he is drawn ever closer towards the seemingly unavoidable outcome of his dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lorna Gray
• Release date: May 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310149504

Lorna Gray

British expat, living in Italy. She welcomes honest reviews - please consider leaving one after you've finished reading FINDING DAYLIGHT!Lorna loves her rescue cat, Ulisse, as well as thunderstorms, jumping into ice-cold lakes, snowflakes, her tiny balcony garden and a good G&T. When she's not writing, she's teaching English Literature to Middle School students in Milan.She will read almost anything and her favourite authors are varied: Yrsa Sigurdadottir, Tom Robbins, Donna Tartt, PG Wodehouse, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Fowles, Virginia Woolf, Martin Amis, Muriel Barbery, Tolkien, Enid Blyton.

Book preview

FINDING DAYLIGHT

By Lorna Gray

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2014 Lorna Gray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PART ONE

How lovely are the portals of the night, When stars come out to watch the daylight die. -Thomas Cole

PREFACE

What would you do if you knew exactly how and when you were going to die? What if you had already seen the face of your killer?

It was clear that she wanted to help him. He had no choice but to trust her, to believe her incredible story. Not that his was any more believable. Here he was, a grown man, running for his life because of what? Bad dreams? If anyone could have read his mind, they would have taken away his prestigious job, his lofty office and laughed him off as a crazy, a classic case of mid-life burnout. He stared at the profile of her face intently. The cab zig-zagged through the streets towards mid-town Manhattan. If there was one person in the world that he could trust -- other than Julia -- it was her. They had a long history together. Briefly, he wondered if he was still in love with her, but there were more urgent things at hand. The answer to that question would have to wait.

CHAPTER ONE

Pedro Alonso was a practical man. Everybody knew that. People said he was utterly reliable, scrupulously tidy and perfectly calm. So why was he sitting in his kitchen in the early hours of the morning, uneasy and unable to sleep? The answer was as trivial as it was simple, at least to him. A bad dream had broken his night’s rest; a bad dream had caused him to thrash and shout, and, after his wife had elbowed him hard in the ribs, he had got up, and here he was. In the kitchen at 4a:m. The light here was bright and cheerful. He loved this kitchen, this apartment. He stood up and filled the kettle.

Just a stupid dream. It must have been the peace talks -– things had felt bad the whole day yesterday.

Alonso, as he was known, was a director of Political Affairs for the United Nations. He was immensely proud of his brass sign on his office door – he’d worked long and hard to get it. Yesterday, he’d spent his day with two people who clearly would rather have leapt across the table and throttled each other. Instead, he’d taken them out for an exorbitant dinner in down-town Manhattan and had endured their polite, meaningless banter and tight smiles.

And people thought his job was cushy.

He had flopped gratefully into bed after 2am, exhausted and gritty, only to be woken after what seemed like a second by a well-placed poke in the ribs.

He had taken a shallow breath and covered his eyes, clutching the sweaty sheet with frantic relief. His heart was beating so fast he had felt it pounding in his head.

"What were you dreaming about?" Maria had mumbled sleepily. He had glanced at the clock next to him and groaned. 3:52am.

"It was terrible," he’d murmured.

Now he sat at the bulky wooden table waiting for the kettle to boil, resting his head on his arms in front of him. The rest of the apartment was dark and cool; its tasteful décor testimony to Alonso’s eclectic and successful past. He knew he was lucky to have bought it when he had. An address like this one, on the Upper East Side, would fetch a good price if he put it on the market.

Not that he would, ever.

Maria was fond of saying that the only way he would leave would be when they carried him out in a pine box. A chill ran down his spine and he shivered. He shook his head, laughing at himself; he really was spooked.

The nightmare has been one of those surreal sequences that last all of two minutes but feel like twenty. He tried to remember it all in order. There had been a room. Dark. He could see nothing. Then things had turned odd when a door had simply appeared in the wall -– as they tend to do in dreams -- and a man had walked into the room, circling him and chanting his name the whole time: AlonsoPedroAlonsoPedroAlon… Then the room had disappeared – all of it – and he was left floating in the darkness. But he wasn’t alone. They were suspended in space, just inches from each other. He could remember this part clearly, each detail vivid. He had leaned in close, so close he could smell the sour cigarette-breath, and had examined every inch of the face, the eyes staring straight ahead. Such cold, black eyes. The man had smiled devilishly -- sharp, tiny teeth inside a perfectly defined mouth -- and nodded knowingly, as if he could read Alonso’s thoughts, knew his sudden, unnamed fear. Then -- and this was the part that still made his stomach contract -- the man’s mouth had opened wider and wider, until Alonso was staring at the obscenely pink, wriggling tongue and the gaping abyss beyond it. Then the enormous mouth had swallowed him whole. He’d fallen endlessly, shouting the whole way down, his voice echoing as he fell.

The kettle was taking too long. Alonso pushed his chair backwards and stood up stiffly, glancing out of the window. The sky was no longer the matt black of midnight, but was several shades of darkness -– the kind of sky that tells the sleepless that the first fingers of daylight aren’t far away. It wasn’t so much the dream, as the feeling he was left with. He could still see that face, smiling menacingly. He wandered into the next room and aimlessly plumped up a sofa cushion. He heard the click of the kettle and shuffled tiredly back to the kitchen, where he’d already looked out a single cup and saucer -– Alonso was nothing if not meticulous. He filled the plunger with coffee grounds and boiling water and sat down again while it brewed, turning the coffee tin in his hands.

A minimum of five minutes is required to draw out the full body and aromatic flavour, he read. Alonso put the coffee on the table and turned his attention to his legs, sticking out from his white boxer shorts. He trained as often as he could at a small fitness centre close to work. To his eyes he was still in good shape, but thought now about hiring a personal trainer; someone to push him a little harder. Someone to keep old age from knocking at his door. He smiled suddenly -- the gesture illuminating his whole face -- as he remembered how his wife always teased him about how hairy his legs were. She loved to tell him he was the archetypal Spaniard: the olive skin, the brown eyes, thick black hair -– the big nose…

He’d met her five years previously, on a trip to an African game lodge and had gone back time and time again to the same resort, not sure if it was his love of the African wildlife or his attraction for the lodge’s manager that kept him coming back. When he’d eventually summoned up enough courage to make his move -– after several staggering cocktails -- Maria had been surprisingly unsurprised.

Pedro Alonso, she’d said matter-of-factly, I was beginning to give up hope! She’d accepted his proposal with the same knowing smile as she had his first kiss and had taken to her new home as if she’d never known anything but life in Manhattan. She was a dedicated mother, superb hostess and had easily made friends. His sister, Lucia, had initially dismissed her as a ‘trophy wife’, but Maria had quickly won her over. Thank God, because his fiery sister could make life difficult if she chose. Whatever people thought, Alonso liked having Maria as his wife. There was no denying she was a great-looking woman. He liked the way she threw back her head when she laughed, a cloud of thick, blonde hair falling away and exposing a long neck; he loved too the wide-mouthed wickedness of her smile, her lips parting to reveal a minute gap between her front teeth; and most of all, her funny, flat accent that he was so fond of imitating.

He straightened up suddenly, a small smile on his lips. Maybe he’d give the coffee a miss. Go back to bed and wake his wife for the second time.

There was nothing to worry about.

Maria hadn’t gone back to sleep since Alonso’s bad dream had woken them both. When he came back to bed and kissed the back of her neck, she had responded warmly enough to his advances. Afterwards, when he’d rolled off her, she’d lain on her back and listened as he’d fallen fast asleep, snoring loudly. She looked at the ceiling blankly, watching as the shadows slowly gave way to the light. It wasn’t that she was bored, exactly. Alonso provided her and their son, Luca, with a wonderful life. She lived in one of the most exciting cities in the world, had enough money, went to all the right parties, knew all the powerful people. She just felt empty, as if there was some small, infinite thing missing. She sighed and rolled onto her side. It was time to get up.

When the buzzing of the alarm clock forced Alonso to finally open his eyes, Maria was already out of bed and feeding Luca. He tilted the bedroom shutters and squinted as the light hit his eyes. He didn’t feel particularly chirpy this morning.

Maybe he was coming down with something.

He dressed carefully after a quick shower, selecting his tie from a neatly automated rail, humming to himself. Suddenly, he fumbled and pulled three ties off the rail at once, dropping all of them. It must be this peace deal that had set him on edge. He really hoped he wasn’t facing another day like the previous one. Everything had gone wrong, including the fact that Alonso had felt irritated with the two disputing leaders all day. The deal was complex, perhaps one of the most challenging of his career, and he needed all his faculties to maintain control of an already-explosive situation. Neither party could easily be categorised into a right or a wrong positioning. The opposing sides both had (he felt) legitimate claims and grievances and it was entirely up to him to resolve the eighteen month-long battle that had left their country broken and scarred. At this point, he truly believed that the fighting was continuing merely to appease the gargantuan egos of the country’s president and its equally powerful dissident leader.

Maria looked at Alonso’s toast and coffee on the kitchen table and wondered what he was doing. It wasn’t like him to dawdle in the mornings. She flung open the bedroom door and sashayed into the room, flinging her arms tightly around him.

Hey you, she smiled flirtatiously. That was a nice way to wake up, she said, kissing him and straightening his collar at the same time. Your breakfast is getting cold.

Alonso shook his head, laughing at her as she pretended to cha-cha around the room and out again, and stepped over to the large walk-in closet for a pair of shoes. He stopped and stared at the floor. The quiet voice, the one his grandmother said never to ignore, was whispering to him, warning him, urging him to be careful.

Nonsense, he muttered under his breath, and swatted at his face as if pestered by flies.

CHAPTER TWO

The weather, humid and overcast, did little to improve Alonso’s deepening mood. An ugly sky. He wrestled off his jacket after only a block, cursing the heat. The back of his shirt clung to him, wet, and he fanned himself with the morning’s paper. Maria couldn’t understand why he still took the subway when they had a perfectly good car. But usually, even on days when the air was so thick it was difficult to breathe, Alonso liked to walk the streets of New York. Usually, he loved to feel the energy of this city; the place where, as a young man studying Political Science in Madrid, he’d always dreamed of living.

Not today. Today he felt like a formless, mindless blob and breathed out heavily as he reached his station and joined the river of people who flowed purposefully down the staircase. The subway was just pulling in as he marched around the final corner of the underground passageway, and the blast of air was cool on his damp skin. He jostled his way into one of the small pockets of people that formed at regular intervals along the platform; each one marking exactly where the doors would open, as they did at the same time, every day. As the final passengers exited the train and his group surged forward, he found a place to stand and stood staring into space, careful not to make eye contact. You never knew what kind of crazy you’d find down here. As if on cue, the crowd parted for a staggering panhandler, railing against the injustices of society. Alonso stared pointedly at the ‘Poetry in motion’ display above the carriage window. It was a haiku, of all things..

didn’t those go out of fashion in the eighties?

..something quite dreadfully sentimental about being alone in the spring blossoms. Suddenly a filthy brown hand grabbed the pole just above his, and the beggar shoved his face into Alonso’s, his fetid breath warm on his cheek. Alonso was transfixed by his mouth, slurring vague obscenities at him, the teeth yellowed and blunt. He stared at the tongue rolling around in the man’s mouth, brown and furry, the sound of his words far away. He snapped his eyes shut and pulled himself upright.

Get lost, he said firmly, waving his hand. He got off the train at Grand Central Station and joined the throng of commuters, just one of almost half a million people who used the terminal every day. He made a small detour to buy a bottle of cold water and, out of habit, looked up as he walked across the main hall. The ceiling vault was covered with paintings of the twelve signs of the zodiac. It should have been impressive, but it wasn’t. It didn’t do the rest of the building justice. When he surfaced a few minutes later, he didn’t know which was worse: the heat in the train or at street level. He resigned himself to the heat and plodded purposefully all the way along 42nd Street. His pace slowed as he passed the dark façade of the Church of the Covenant, a neo-Gothic chapel that