A Murder of No Consequence

by James Garcia Woods

  Hidalgo shook his head, as if he despaired of his inspector ever learning anything about the reality of the situation. ‘It was February when we arrested José Antonio,’ he said. ‘This – in case you haven’t noticed – is July, and the situation has deteriorated very badly in the last few months. If we were to lock up those young gentlemen, it would be like declaring war on the Falange – and before you had time to fart, Madrid would be nothing but a bloody battlefield.’

  The captain reached for his packet of cigarettes, took one himself, and offered the packet to Paco. The inspector shook his head. He wanted a smoke, but somehow – perhaps because of his Moroccan days – he never felt comfortable lighting up in the presence of a superior officer.

  ‘I know what’s going on in that head of yours,’ the captain continued. ‘You’re saying to yourself that our job is to enforce the law, not to play politics. Am I right?’

  ‘More or less,’ Paco admitted.

  ‘We don’t have any choice but to play politics, because no other organization seems to have the will or the ability to stop this country tearing itself into shreds.’

  ‘So the only way we can keep the police force together is to stop behaving like policemen?’ Paco asked.

  Hidalgo took an angry puff on his cigarette. ‘What makes you such a good detective is your single-mindedness,’ he said. ‘You’re like a dog that’s got its teeth clamped on some poor bastard’s leg, and won’t let go whatever happens. But no one, Paco, not even you, can stay blinkered for ever.’

  ‘I just want to do my job.’

  ‘I give up on you,’ Hidalgo said. ‘I really do. All right, Inspector Ruiz, you’re dismissed.’

  Paco clicked his heels together in the approved military manner. ‘At your orders, sir,’ he said.

  Then he turned and marched smartly out of the room.

  *

  Dr Muñoz stood over the dissected body of the victim. ‘She was killed around eighteen hours ago, as nearly as I can guess,’ he said. ‘Cause of death – asphyxiation.’ He looked down at the corpse and laughed dryly. ‘Apart from being dead, she’s in really excellent physical shape.’

  Paco lit a cigarette and inhaled a mixture of nicotine and formaldehyde. ‘Anything else you can tell me that might be of use?’ he asked, though not with much hope.

  ‘Like what?’

  Paco shrugged. Like what, indeed? ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Scars from an unusual operation? A distinctive birthmark?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Nothing like that.’ He looked down at the girl again. ‘Would you say the dress she was wearing when they brought her in was expensive?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘So she wasn’t a street walker?’

  ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Even today, it’s very uncommon to find a girl from a good background who’s lost her virginity.’

  ‘And this one has?’

  ‘Yes. She’s had sex in the last few days.’

  ‘Voluntarily?’

  ‘If you’re asking me if she’s been raped, I’d have to say no.’

  ‘Maybe she was married,’ Paco speculated.

  The doctor lifted up the dead girl’s limp hand for Paco to inspect. ‘No wedding ring,’ he said. ‘And no sign that there’s ever been one.’

  Paco looked at the girl’s face again, and wondered why it was that she had seemed so familiar from the first moment he’d seen her. And then, suddenly, he knew. Shock coursed through his body. He could taste the dry heat of the desert. He could smell the overpowering odour of the camels. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. It was hard to breathe, and there was a pounding in his head.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ the doctor asked. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I have!’ Paco gasped.

  After all those years, she had come back to haunt him, to remind him of his failure. He felt his cigarette drop from between his fingers. On this day of all days – what a present. ‘Happy birthday, Paco,’ he said to himself.

  Chapter Four

  The Puerta del Sol – the Sun Gate – was the heart of Madrid, and hence the heart of Spain and all things Hispanic. Once, it had been nothing more than its name suggested – the gate on the edge of a city through which the first light of day shone. But as the city had grow, the walls had come down, and now Sol was a huge irregular oblong of a plaza, absorbing the traffic which was spewed into it from twelve different streets.

  It was a strange mixture of the civic and the political. Madrileños eating cakes at the famous outdoor café at one end of the square could watch the comings and goings of important personages at the Ministry of the Interior. Then, while they sought shelter from the sun under the awnings of the shops on the north side of Sol, they could let their gazes fall on the Asalto barracks. A little further along, they would come to the symbol of Madrid – the bear standing on its hind legs, eating from the strawberry tree. And even if they knew that strawberries did not grown on trees – and how many had failed to take the Strawberry Train to Aranjuez and see the strawberry cultivation for themselves? – it did not stop them taking pleasure in the idiosyncrasies of the animal chosen to represent the spirit of their city.

  All the major roads of Spain started in Sol, and when the peasants in the far-flung villages heard the chimes of the new year over their wirelesses, they were listening to the clock on top of the Ministry of the Interior, right in the centre of the plaza.

  Sol had both seen history, and made it. Angry mobs congregating there had caused governments to topple and kings to abdicate. It was in Sol that the revolt against the Emperor Napoleon had begun, a revolt led by men and women from the poorer barrios of the city, armed with no more than knives, shovels and axes. Ill-equipped as they had been, they had still put up astounding resistance. People had even fought from their homes, pouring boiling water from their balconies and throwing tiles from their roofs down on the confused French and Egyptian troops. The uprising had failed, as it was bound to, and there had been terrible retribution, chronicled so graphically by Goya in his paintings The Second of May and The Third of May.

  Paco thought about the revolt as he and Felipe crossed the square. It had been both so heroic and so hopeless, and that, he supposed, was what had made it so typically Spanish. He wiped his hand across his forehead. It was two hours before the sun would reach its zenith, but the air was already suffocating. Enough of history and the weather, he told himself, it was time to think about the murdered girl. And though he didn’t will it, he found he was not thinking of one murdered girl, but of two.

  *

  The shop at which the two detectives came to a stop was on the fashionable Calle Alcalá, half-way between the Puerta del Sol and the Cibeles fountain. Alcalá was one of Madrid’s favourite streets, where the rich came to buy and the poor came to look. This particular establishment was called Moda de Paris, and though it had a large plate-glass window, there were only three dresses on display between the dried flowers and freshly cut ferns.

  ‘Who are we today?’ Fat Felipe asked.

  Paco thought about it. ‘In a place like this, we’d better try the big, ignorant lout and his long-suffering companion.’

  ‘And I suppose I get to be the big, ignorant lout,’ Fat Felipe complained.

  Paco laughed. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why is it always me?’

  ‘Because you’re so good at it.’

  Fat Felipe nodded to acknowledge the truth of the remark, and turned his attention back to the shop window. ‘You get more choice than that down the second-hand clothes market,’ he said, slipping effortlessly into his assigned role.

  Felipe opened the door and the two detectives stepped inside the shop. A bell rang in a back-room – not with the harsh jangling sound of shop-bells in Paco’s own barrio, but with a softer, more musical tone. Paco looked around him. There had been only three dresses in the window, but there was none at all in the shop. Instead, groups of gilt-painte
d chairs had been gracefully arranged around low, onyx coffee tables.

  ‘Funny kind of shop,’ Fat Felipe muttered.

  The door to the back-room opened, and a woman emerged. She was around forty, Paco guessed. Her hair was composed into an elaborate structure held in place by pins, and she was wearing a long black dress. She looked more like a customer than a shop assistant.

  She gave the two men a quick inspection, and the expression which came to her face said that whatever her standards were, they both fell well below them.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, without much conviction.

  ‘This is supposed to be a frock shop, isn’t it?’ Fat Felipe said. ‘So where are all the frocks?’

  The woman laughed, lightly and patronizingly. ‘All our dresses are made to order. The client selects the pattern of her choosing from our extensive catalogue, and then our dressmakers produce exactly what she requires.’

  ‘Can’t be cheap,’ Fat Felipe said.

  The woman’s face, never very welcoming, now became positively hostile. ‘No, it isn’t cheap,’ she admitted. ‘So if you were thinking of ordering a dress yourselves . . .’

  Paco laughed, as if he and the woman were sharing a joke. ‘Of course we’re not thinking of buying a dress,’ he said. He slipped his hand into his pocket, and produced his warrant card. ‘We are extremely sorry to disturb you,’ he continued, ‘but we are policemen, and you may know something which could advance our investigation.’

  The woman took two steps forward, just enough to enable her to read Paco’s warrant card from a distance. ‘We’re not used to seeing the police here,’ she said, somehow managing to make it sound much more like a complaint than a statement of fact. ‘And I can’t think of any way I could possibly be of assistance to you. Perhaps if you wished to question one of our dressmakers . . .’

  She broke off, and watched with fascinated horror as Paco put the bag he was carrying onto the coffee table, opened it, and took out the blue silk dress. ‘This has your label in it,’ he said. ‘I wondered what you could tell us about it.’

  ‘Why should the police be interested in one of our dresses?’

  ‘We are not at liberty to reveal the nature of our enquiries,’ Fat Felipe said. ‘Look at it, please.’

  The assistant reached out and relieved Paco of the dress. Her right hand touched his left for the briefest of moments. Her skin felt both cold and dry.

  With neat, backward steps, the assistant retreated a safe distance before stopping to examine the dress.

  ‘Well?’ Fat Felipe asked.

  ‘Yes, it does have our label inside,’ the woman admitted. ‘But I can tell from the cut that it’s not this season’s.’

  ‘So when would you have sold it?’

  ‘I would guess at about this time last year.’

  ‘Who did you sell it to?’

  The assistant stiffened. ‘We pride ourselves on our discretion here,’ she told Paco.

  ‘And we’re conducting a very important investigation, señora,’ Fat Felipe said.

  The woman hesitated, as if deciding whether or not to tell him to go to hell. ‘I’d have to check my records . . .’

  ‘Then please do so,’ Paco interrupted.

  ‘. . . and I’m rather busy at the moment.’

  ‘You do it, or we’ll do it,’ Felipe said.

  The woman shot the fat detective a look of pure loathing. ‘It may take some time.’

  Felipe made a great show of scratching his backside. ‘We’ll wait,’ he said.

  Horror fought with outrage on the woman’s face, then both were replaced by panic as she realized that a customer might come in any minute and see what she’d just seen. She dropped the dress on the nearest chair, turned, and fled to the back-room.

  ‘That really was a very good show you put on,’ Paco said.

  ‘Show?’ Fat Felipe replied innocently. ‘What show?’

  *

  When the assistant emerged from the back-room a couple of minutes later, she was carrying a large leather-bound ledger. ‘The dress in question was commissioned by Doña Mercedes Mendéz Segovia,’ she said breathlessly, as if she’d been running.

  The name sounded vaguely familiar to Paco. Was she famous in her own right? Or only by association, because of who she was married to? He’d read somewhere that in most other countries, a woman took her husband’s surname instead of retaining both her mother’s and her father’s after marriage. It seemed to him to be an extremely sensible system which probably made police work a great deal easier.

  ‘And she is married to . . .?’ he asked, stabbing in the dark.

  The assistant smiled her superior smile, as if just selling the dress to Mercedes Mendéz Segovia put her in the same class as her client. ‘Doña Mercedes’ husband is Don Eduardo Herrera Moreno,’ she said.

  Of course! That was why he recognized her name. So that was who had bought the dress – the wife of one of the most powerful right-wing politicians in the whole of Spain.

  Paco remembered seeing photographs of her in the newspapers, standing by her husband’s side – grainy photographs of an elegant woman in her thirties looking up at a distinguished-looking man in his late forties. She was too old to be the dead girl in the park.

  ‘Did she order the dress for herself, or was it for someone else?’ he asked.

  The assistant consulted the leather ledger. ‘For herself. She had several fittings.’

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ Paco said, stuffing the dress back in his bag.

  ‘Is . . . is Doña Mercedes in any kind of trouble?’ the assistant asked worriedly.

  ‘Now how could anyone as important as her possibly be in trouble?’ Paco replied, walking towards the door.

  *

  While he was still visible through the dress shop window, Paco walked up Alcalá at an amble, but once out of sight he increased his pace to almost a run.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ Fat Felipe asked, as he struggled to keep up.

  ‘I want to get to a phone before that bitch in the dress shop decides to ring up Doña Mercedes Mendéz and warn her to expect a call from the police.’

  Felipe swerved to avoid two unemployed matadors, who were standing around hoping that somebody would recognize them and offer to buy them a drink. ‘But why should you care if she is warned?’ he asked his boss.

  ‘When you’re dealing with a political case, you need every advantage you can grab,’ Paco said.

  ‘Political!’ Felipe repeated. ‘But half an hour ago, you were convinced it was a domestic murder.’

  ‘That was before I knew Eduardo Herrera Moreno was involved.’ Paco pointed across the street. ‘There’s a phone box over there.’

  They crossed the six lanes of traffic, avoiding the trams which were rattling furiously up and down, earning the curses of car drivers who were forced to slam on their brakes.

  ‘You can’t say for certain that Herrera is involved,’ Felipe said, when they were safely on the opposite pavement. ‘All you can be sure of is that the dead girl was wearing his wife’s dress.’

  ‘He’s part of it,’ Paco said with conviction. ‘I just know he’s part of it.’

  They had reached the phone box. Paco flicked impatiently through the phone book.

  ‘You don’t think that maybe you’re going off the deep end on this one?’ Felipe asked.

  ‘No,’ Paco said. His finger had located the number he wanted. He dialled it rapidly.

  It rang five times before someone picked it up. ‘Si? Quié e?’ A woman – a young one – with a thick Andaluz accent, and an uncertain telephone manner.

  ‘This is the police,’ Paco said. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

  There was a sharp intake of breath, followed by a pause, and then the woman said, ‘I am Paulina.’

  ‘You work there?’

  ‘Yes, I am one of the maids.’

  ‘Please tell your mistress that I wish to speak to her.’

  ‘She . . . she is not he
re,’ Paulina said stumblingly. ‘None of them are here.’

  The maid sounded as if she had a guilty conscience, Paco thought, but that didn’t prove a thing. If she was a country girl, then her only contact with authority would have been through the Guardia Civil, so it was hardly surprising that she was worried. And her fear was to his advantage. A more sophisticated girl might have asked for proof he really was who he said he was, whereas this one was frightened enough to tell him anything he wanted to know.

  ‘Who else lives in the apartment besides your mistress?’ Paco asked.

  ‘There is Luis, the master’s valet, Señora Cora, she is the cook . . .’

  ‘The family,’ Paco interrupted – because servants didn’t wear expensive silk dresses. ‘I’m only interested in the family.’

  ‘Well, there’s the master himself . . .’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘The mistress’s younger brother, Don Carlos.’

  ‘Children?’ Paco asked.

  ‘There are no little ones.’

  ‘Is there perhaps a teenage daughter? One who might be taken for a little older? Say twenty or twenty-one?’

  ‘There are no little ones of any age.’

  Paco tried a different tack. ‘You said they are not there. When will they be back?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but the mistress said not to expect them back before two o’clock in the morning.’

  And there was no chance of questioning them at that time of night. ‘Damn!’ Paco said.

  ‘What was that?’ the maid asked.

  ‘I’ll ring again tomorrow,’ Paco told her.

  ‘Am I to tell the mistress that you called?’

  She would anyway, whatever he said, so it was best not to put Mercedes Mendéz on the defensive. ‘If the opportunity arises, by all means tell your mistress,’ Paco said, trying to suggest by his tone that the call was of so little importance that it really didn’t matter one way or the other. ‘Thank you for your help, Paulina.’

  ‘De nada, señor.’

  Paco replaced the phone on its cradle. ‘As I thought, the dead girl isn’t one of the family,’ he said.

  Fat Felipe shrugged. ‘So Doña Mercedes gave the dress away to the daughter of one of her friends. That presents no problem. We have only to ask her who she gave it to, and we’ll have the identity of our victim.’