The girl gave a barely perceptible nod of her head.
‘What kind of clothes were they?’
‘There . . . there was a blue silk dress.’
‘What else?’
The question seemed to confuse the girl. ‘I don’t understand what you’re asking.’
‘Doña Mercedes said she gets rid of a lot of clothes that way. What else was there with the dress?’
The natural red of Paulina’s face was intensified by a fierce blush. ‘There was . . . a . . . I don’t remember,’ she stuttered.
Or to put it another way, Paco thought, her peasant imagination was incapable of conjuring up any imaginary clothes without help. ‘Is it always your job to give the clothes away?’ he asked.
‘I . . . no . . . it was the first time I’d ever done it.’
‘And the last?’
‘Yes.’
‘So on just this one occasion, your mistress entrusted you with that particular task, and it’s never been repeated?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who normally gives the clothes away?’
‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the other servants.’
Paco sighed. If only he could do that. But he’d been pushing his luck to get as far as he had. ‘Tell me about the rag-and-bone man,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘Did he come here, to the apartment, or did you have to go out looking for him?’
‘I heard him in the street. You know what they’re like. They drive their carts slowly along the road and shout chatarrero at the tops of their voices. They’re so loud that you can hear them even from the back of the apartment.’
‘So you heard him and you took the dress – and the other clothes which you can’t remember now – down to the street.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did he pay you anything for them?’
‘No, he . . . he just took them.’
‘The silk dress alone was worth a lot of money. Why didn’t you ask him for a few duros?’
Paulina gazed down at the table. ‘I just didn’t think to,’ she mumbled.
‘What did he look like?’ Paco asked.
‘He was a gypsy.’
‘Most of the rag-and-bone men are. Was he tall or short?’
‘About the same height as you.’
‘His hair colour?’
‘The same as yours.’
‘Did he have a moustache?’
‘I don’t remember. It was weeks ago.’
‘What about his cart?’
Paulina shrugged. ‘It was just a cart.’
‘Was it pulled by a horse or a donkey?’
‘I don’t know.’
Paco stood up.
‘Is that all?’ the girl asked, the relief evident in her voice.
‘That’s all,’ Paco confirmed. ‘You can show us out now.’
*
The traffic ahead had been reduced to a crawl, and Paco – who would have liked to make some speed, if only to relieve his frustration – was forced to shift down to second gear.
‘Do you know what really pisses me off about that stuck-up bitch back there?’ he asked Felipe.
The fat constable scratched his belly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What does piss you off?’
‘That she’s so confident of their own position – her own superiority – she didn’t even bother to come up with a half-way decent lie.’
Felipe wormed his finger through his bulging shirt and scratched his belly button. ‘You don’t believe that the rag-and-bone man exists?’ he asked.
‘If he does, Paulina never saw him.’
Ahead of them they could see what was causing the delay. A mule train, half a dozen or so teams of the animals each pulling a bright blue cart painted with vines and flowers, was progressing slowly down the street.
‘They should keep mule trains out of Madrid,’ Paco growled.
‘If they did, where would we get our charcoal, olive oil and wine from?’ Felipe wondered.
It was true, Paco thought. Without the mule trains, so many goods would never be moved. It was strange. Spain prided itself on being a modern, European country, but in so many ways, it hadn’t changed since he was a child. Enough of abstract speculation – he was right behind the mule carts now, and he signalled to overtake.
‘What makes you so sure that Paulina never saw the rag-and-bone man?’ Felipe asked.
‘I’m sure because she comes from the same peasant stock as I do,’ Paco said.
‘You’re being – what’s the word – enigmatic,’ Felipe said.
Paco grinned. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to be. Your mother was a washer-woman wasn’t she, Felipe?’
‘That’s right,’ the constable agreed. ‘I was brought up by the side of the river.’
‘So you’re a city boy, through and through. And you can’t have any idea how a peasant thinks.’
Felipe stuck an exploratory finger in his left ear. ‘How does a peasant think?’
‘A peasant has a nose for a deal. They’re all born with it. Sometimes, it’s the only thing they’ve got in their favour.’
‘So?’
‘So it’s simply inconceivable to me that a girl like this Paulina would hand over an expensive silk dress without expecting something in return.’
Felipe removed his finger from his ear, and inspected the wax on the end of it. ‘Maybe she did get something in return, and simply lied about it,’ he suggested.
‘Then there was the animal,’ Paco continued, ignoring the implication because it didn’t fit in with his theory.
‘What animal?’ Felipe said.
‘I asked her whether the car was pulled by a horse or a donkey. She said she didn’t remember. I wasn’t surprised when she couldn’t describe the rag-and-bone man, but a girl from the country would remember the beast he had with him.’
‘So what you’re suggesting, jefe, is that the family instructed her to lie?’
‘Of course I am. That’s why Don Carlos – who seems to be little more than his sister’s errand boy – was out of the room for such a long time. He was briefing the poor, frightened kid on what she should say to us.’
Felipe attacked his right ear with the same methodical approach he had adopted with his left. ‘Are you sure you’re not letting your personal prejudices cloud your judgement?’ he asked.
‘Personal prejudices!’ Paco repeated, as he turned off Velazquez and narrowly avoided a collision with a truck full of live pigs which was coming from the other direction. ‘What personal prejudices?’
Felipe shrugged his fat shoulders. ‘You’ll admit you don’t like Doña Mercedes won’t you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t like anybody who immediately treats me as if I was an insect that’s just crawled in under the door,’ Paco replied.
Felipe nodded. ‘And because you don’t like her, you automatically assume she’s lying, and got her brother to tell the maid to lie, too.’
For some reason he couldn’t explain, Paco was starting to feel defensive. ‘That seems a reasonable assumption to me,’ he said.
Felipe examined the results of his labours on his right ear. ‘Reasonable, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But only because you haven’t left yourself open to considering the alternatives.’
‘And what exactly are they?’
‘Say, for the sake of argument, that Paulina wasn’t lying to save her employers. Say she was lying to cover her own back.’
‘And why should she do that?’ Paco asked, though he already had an inkling of where Felipe was going.
‘Put yourself in Paulina’s place,’ Felipe said. ‘Doña Mercedes gives her a dress which she could never afford herself, and tells her to throw it out. You say peasants are good at sniffing out deals – well, maybe she did. But she knows she can get a better deal than the one offered by the rag-and-bone man.’
‘So she sells it to someone else?’
‘Or gives it away to a friend. It doesn’t really matt
er, because, either way, when Don Carlos tells her the police want to talk to her, she flies into a panic.’
‘Go on,’ Paco said.
‘She can’t tell us she’s disobeyed her mistress, because she might lose her job,’ Felipe continued. ‘On the other hand, she can’t describe the rag-and-bone man, because there never was one. Perhaps that’s why Don Carlos was out of the room for so long. Maybe Doña Mercedes was right, and you were wrong. Isn’t it possible that he really was trying to calm her down?’
They had reached the Plaza de la Cibeles, the end of the fashionable side of Alcalá. To their right lay the gothic Palace of Communications, which was so impressive that tourists often mistook it for the world-famous Prado Museum, and wandered in to find no masterpieces, but scores of clerks selling stamps and registering parcels. Was Felipe right? Paco wondered, as he swung the steering wheel round. Had Don Carlos been doing nothing more than helping a country mouse get over her nervousness before she met the big, bad policemen?
The statue of Cibeles herself lay ahead of them now, sitting in her chariot pulled by two powerful lions, surrounded by the fountains which spouted in her honour. Paco looked into her carved face, almost as if he thought that would give him inspiration. But the Mother of All the Gods merely stared stonily down at him, each haughty line of her features suggesting that the death of an unknown girl in Retiro Park was far too insignificant an event to merit her attention.
Which was pretty much the attitude Doña Mercedes adopted, too, Paco said to himself.
He tried to put himself in Paulina’s shoes, and decided that Felipe’s reconstruction of her actions and motives made a lot more sense than the idea that the wife of one of Spain’s leading politicians would lie about what she’d done with her dress.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Felipe asked.
‘I think I hate you,’ Paco told him.
Felipe grinned. ‘Being hated, now and again, is what partners are for. But can you honestly tell me, jefe, that everything I’ve said since we left the Herrera apartment has been a load of shit?’
‘No I can’t,’ Paco admitted in disgust. ‘Joder! Another good theory gone out of the window.’
Chapter Nine
When Felipe announced that the new bar he’d discovered was close to the Montaña barracks, Paco’s first reaction was to suggest that they should go somewhere else. Then he told himself he was being stupid. It was nearly half a lifetime since he’d finished his military service, he argued, and it should surely be possible to confront the ghosts of his past without flinching. Yet as they sat at the pavement table, waiting for the raciones Felipe had ordered, he found his eyes slowly and reluctantly climbing the grassy slope up to the barracks. And when those eyes finally settled on the Montaña itself, he felt a shudder run through his body.
The barracks squatted malevolently on the crest of the hill. Its windows seemed to gaze down disapprovingly at Paco, and the slanting roof above them looked like one long, disapproving eyebrow.
‘Papa knows an important official who can get you an exemption,’ Pilar had said, all those years ago when he’d received his call-up papers.
‘I don’t want exemption. It’s my duty to serve,’ the young Paco had replied, with the idealism of youth. ‘Anyway, I should have thought he’d be glad to see the back of me.’
‘Papa just wants me to be happy.’
And wasn’t that the truth? He wanted her to be happy, and not just eventually, but at the very moment she wanted it. Which was why he agreed to give into her tearful demand that she be allowed to marry the young engineering student from the country who had just enrolled at the University of Valladolid. It would have been better for all of them, Paco thought, if Pilar’s father had been firmer.
He ran his eyes along the lower wall which enclosed the drill square he had marched endlessly up and down as a raw recruit, and wondered if he’d have given his wife the same answer if he’d known then what he knew now. Probably. His time in the military had changed his life for ever – and not for the better – but his sense of duty was still with him, hanging like a great weight round his neck.
A waiter arrived, and placed two earthenware dishes on the table. One contained kidneys cooked in sherry, the other calamar rings in batter. They were accompanied by two hunks of bread the size of small mountains.
‘Now this is what I call a good snack,’ Fat Felipe said enthusiastically, spearing one of the juicy calamares and popping it into his mouth.
Paco forced himself to turn away from the barracks. You may be able to face your ghosts, he thought, but you can’t alter what they’ve made you into.
‘Why don’t you have something to eat while it’s still hot, jefe?’ Felipe urged him.
Paco tried one of the kidneys. It was good – very good – but he didn’t really feel like food at that moment, and when he’d chewed the kidney for a few seconds, he swallowed it as if it were an indigestion pill.
‘No one else on earth eats the way we Spaniards do,’ Felipe said, attacking his fourth or fifth calamar. ‘If it was an Olympic event, we’d win the gold medal every time.’
Paco broke off a small section of bread and rolled it moodily across the table until it was the shape of a pellet. ‘I’m going to go back to that apartment,’ he said.
Felipe stopped munching. ‘You’re going to do what?’ he asked.
‘Go back to that apartment.’
The fat constable laid his fork on the table. ‘Tell me it’s not the Herrera apartment you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘You were right when you said I let my prejudices against the family influence the way I handled the interrogation,’ Paco told his partner. ‘This time, I’ll make sure I do it right.’
‘You were pushing your luck the first time. Try it again, and Doña Mercedes will complain to her husband. And then Herrera will get his pals at the Ministry to roast you alive.’
‘Doña Mercedes won’t even know I’ve been there,’ Paco argued. ‘Paulina will answer the door, and I’ll walk her down the corridor and say what I should have said this morning.’
‘And when she tells her mistress . . .’
‘If she’s any sense, she won’t do that – because if she does, she’ll be landing herself in trouble.’
Felipe looked down at his food, and then back at Paco. ‘Well, they say that the condemned man always enjoys a hearty breakfast, don’t they? So if you wouldn’t mind giving me a few more minutes to finish off this . . .’
‘I said, I’m going back to the Herrera apartment,’ Paco told him. ‘You’re not coming with me.’
Felipe narrowed his eyes and looked suspiciously at his jefe. ‘Why are you leaving me behind?’ he asked. ‘Is it because you don’t want to drag me down into the shit with you?’
‘There’ll be no shit . . .’
‘Well, then?’
‘. . . but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.’
*
Paco had noticed that the corridor carpet was blue on his last visit, but now he realized that it was exactly the same shade of blue as the Falangists’ shirts. He wondered whether it was just coincidence. It didn’t seem likely.
He reached the apartment door, rang the bell, and waited for Paulina to appear. It would all work out just as he’d promised, he told himself. He’d take Paulina down the corridor, and within a minute she’d be telling him whether she’d sold the dress or given it away. Whichever was the case, it wouldn’t be long before he had the name and address of the dead girl.
The door opened, and Paco’s heart sank as he looked at the complete stranger in a maid’s uniform. How much chance was there now of talking to Paulina without Eduardo Herrera finding out? And when the politician did, would he, as Felipe had predicted, be so furious that he’d get on to his friends at the Ministry and demand that heads roll?
‘Can I help you, señor?’ the maid asked.
His best course of action would be turn around and walk away, Paco thought. That was cer
tainly what any sane, sensible man would do. ‘I’m from the police,’ he said briskly. ‘Go and tell Paulina that I want to see her immediately.’
‘Paulina?’ the girl repeated, pronouncing the word as if it were in some kind of foreign language.
‘Paulina Ortega. Don’t act as if you don’t know who I’m talking about. She’s one of the maids.’
The girl bit her lower lip. ‘But . . . but she’s . . .’
‘She’s what?’
‘She’s . . . she’s . . .’
‘Out with it, girl!’
The maid, her eyes fixed firmly on the ground, was already backing away. ‘Wait here,’ she mumbled. And then she closed the door behind her.
Paco checked his watch, then lit a cigarette. He had almost smoked it down to his fingers when the door opened again. This time, he found himself looking at a large, dark-complexioned man of about thirty-five who was wearing a red and white striped waistcoat and black trousers with red fluting. ‘I am Luis, Don Eduardo’s valet,’ he said, his tone suggesting that he expected Paco to be impressed, and his accent parodying the upper-class speech of his mistress. ‘One of the maids has just been to see me in a very distressed state. She says you claim to be a policeman.’
‘I am a policeman,’ Paco told him. ‘I was here earlier in the day.’
‘I know nothing of that,’ Luis told him, ‘and before I say any more, I want to see some identification.’
Paco took out his warrant card and handed it to Luis. The valet made a great show of studying it. ‘So what business do you have here?’ he asked curtly, giving the card back.
‘I wish to speak to Paulina Ortega,’ Paco said.
‘That is not possible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she isn’t here.’
‘Then where is she?’
The valet shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s her day off. She could be anywhere in the city.’
‘Her day off?’ Paco repeated.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Then why was she here when I called earlier?’
‘Because she knew that you wanted to speak . . .’ Luis began, before seeing the trap that the policeman had led him into.
A Murder of No Consequence Page 5