‘For Christ’s sake, get beyond that macho shit!’ Paco said angrily. ‘They’ve tried to kill me once, and they’ll probably try again. And when that happens, I don’t want you in the firing line.’
Felipe’s smile melted away and was replaced by a serious expression. ‘Being partners is like being married,’ he said. ‘However bad it gets, you’re stuck with each other. Anyway, whether you like it or not, you need me. I’m your only contact with headquarters.’
It was true. Without Felipe, the job would be a lot harder, if not impossible. ‘You can stay on the investigation if you really insist,’ Paco said, ‘but I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks.’
‘I won’t,’ Felipe promised. ‘Can we talk about the murder, now?’
‘Tell me what’s happening back at the station first,’ Paco said.
Felipe trawled the thick soup and captured an almeja on his spoon. ‘Ever seen a headless chicken?’ he asked.
‘It’s as bad as that, is it?’
‘Worse. Everybody from the top down is in a blind panic over Calvo Sotelo’s murder. Captain Condés – he’s the one who’s supposed to have done it, remember – has gone into hiding. Our boys are trying to find him, but the Asaltos are doing everything they can to get in the way of the investigation.’
‘They would,’ Paco said. ‘He’s one of their own.’
‘And it’s not just headquarters that’s panicking,’ Felipe continued. ‘Did you know that last night the socialists, communists and UGT sent a combined delegation to see the Prime Minister?’
‘No, I didn’t know,’ Paco admitted. ‘What did they want?’
‘They demanded weapons for all the workers.’
‘Why? What in God’s name do they imagine that will achieve, except more bloodshed?’
‘The way they see it, the army is about to stage a coup,’ Felipe explained, ‘and if it does, they want to be in a position to defend the Republic.’
Paco was already tired of talking politics – of discussing the big issues. It was enough for a man to do his job and take care of his friends. ‘How are they treating you?’ he asked.
Felipe laughed. ‘They’re treating me like I’ve got the plague. I told them it’s not my fault I was partnered up with an idiot like you,’ he winked at Paco, ‘but shit sticks anyway, and they want nothing to do with me.’ He plunged his spoon back into the soup. ‘To hell with them! Apart from nearly getting killed, did you find out anything useful in the Barrio de Salamanca?’
Paco told him about the girl’s apartment – the satin sheets in a bedroom she hardly ever used, and the slip the porter had made when the maid from the apartment opposite had knocked on the door. ‘So what do we conclude from that?’ he asked when he’d finished.
Felipe signalled for more soup. ‘We conclude that María was Herrera’s mistress,’ he said.
‘I should have worked it out earlier,’ Paco reproached himself. ‘My friend Ramón told me that Herrera was mean over minor things like candles and envelopes. What better example of that meanness could there be than that he gives his mistress his wife’s cast-off dresses?’
‘And so it’s a simple domestic murder after all,’ Felipe said.
‘Except that it’s complicated by the fact that Herrera has so much political power. And we still don’t know who killed her.’
‘Don’t we?’ Felipe asked. ‘I should have thought it was obvious. Herrera finds out she’s two-timing him, and kills her in a fit of blind rage.’
‘But he doesn’t find out who she’s two-timing him with,’ Paco said, ‘or Luis wouldn’t still be working for him.’
‘True,’ Felipe agreed. ‘But apart from that, it seems straightforward enough.’
‘Unless she did it.’
‘Who?’
‘Doña Mercedes. Say she found out about her husband’s mistress. She wanted revenge, but she couldn’t take it out on him because he controls the purse strings.’
Felipe shook his head. ‘I don’t think she’s strong enough to throttle a fit, young girl. Besides, I can’t see a lady like her . . .’
‘I’m not suggesting she did it herself,’ Paco interrupted. ‘But she could have hired someone to do it.’
‘You said she was killed in her apartment, so she must have known the killer,’ Felipe pointed out.
‘Probably knew the killer,’ Paco said. ‘But there’s any number of ways he might have got into the apartment. He might have said he had an urgent message from Don Eduardo. Or maybe Doña Mercedes managed to get hold of the key, and he was lying in wait for her when she got home.’
‘And if she did have María killed, would Herrera take the risk of protecting her?’ Felipe wondered.
‘What risk?’ Paco asked. ‘He’s a powerful politician, and the only people really interested in the murder are two insignificant little cops. Besides, it would be a risk not to cover up for her. Can you imagine the scandal it would cause if she was arrested for murder?’
‘So you’re putting your money on her?’
‘Or Luis,’ Paco said.
‘Luis?’ Felipe repeated. ‘Why would he kill her?’
‘For the same motive you ascribed to Herrera. Jealousy. Say he really loved her, and couldn’t bear the thought of his master touching her. He asks her to go away with him and she refuses. We’re back to the blind-rage theory, only this time it’s Luis who flies into it.’
‘But the lads who attacked you this morning had to be working for Herrera, didn’t they?’
‘Not really,’ Paco said. ‘If Luis is involved with the fringes of the movement – and you’ll admit that’s likely – they might just have done it as a favour to him.’
‘Herrera killed María. Doña Mercedes had her killed. Luis did it. I’m getting a headache,’ Felipe said despondently. ‘God, I hate this fucking case.’
A waiter appeared, carrying a large plate of chorizo. ‘Fresh from the country this morning,’ he told Felipe, with a smile on his face which said he knew he was about to make his customer’s day.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Felipe said.
‘Not hungry?’ the waiter gasped.
‘There are other things in life besides food,’ the fat constable snapped. ‘Take it away. Bring us some more wine.’
Shaking his head in amazement, the waiter walked back towards the kitchen.
‘So, we’ve narrowed it down to three people, where does our investigation go from here?’ Felipe asked.
Paco lit another cigarette. ‘Until we have more evidence, we daren’t go near either Herrera or Doña Mercedes,’ he said. ‘So we’re just going to have to concentrate on the man we can go for – Luis.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
From where he was standing by the phone booth on Serrano, Paco could see the window of the salon where he had interviewed Doña Mercedes and Don Carlos. He wondered if she was in there now, shielded from the world by the heavy velvet curtains and her husband’s influence.
‘I’ll get you,’ he said softly. ‘If you’re the one who killed María, I’ll get you.’
He picked up the receiver, and when the operator came onto the line, he asked to be connected with the Herrera apartment. After he had inserted a coin, there was a ringing tone, then a male voice said, ‘Speak to me.’
‘I want to talk to Luis,’ Paco said.
‘You’re talking to him.’
‘This is Ruiz.’
There was a pause. ‘Inspector Ruiz?’ Luis asked, and Paco could almost see the sneer on his face. ‘Or perhaps I should be calling you Ex-inspector Ruiz?’
That’s right you bastard, have your fun while you can, Paco thought. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.
Luis sighed theatrically. ‘When are you going to give up, Ruiz?’ he asked. ‘When are you finally going to admit you’re beaten?’
‘You mean, how many more attempts on my life will it take before I’m frightened off?’ Paco asked.
‘Attempts on your life? I don’t understand.�
�
‘Don’t you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I still need to talk to you,’ Paco said. ‘Be in the bar on the corner of the block in five minutes.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to you.’
Was he wrong? Paco asked himself. Was María’s second visitor not Luis, but someone else entirely? Or even if it was Luis, had the purpose behind his visits been entirely innocent? He took a deep breath. ‘How would you like your master to know you’ve put the horns on him?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Luis said, just a little too quickly.
‘Bullshit!’ Paco told him. ‘The dead girl in the park was called María Sebastián. She was Don Eduardo’s mistress. He was paying her rent, and you were sleeping with her whenever you got the chance.’
‘You can’t prove that,’ Luis said shakily.
‘Can’t I?’
Another pause. ‘You said the bar on the corner?’
‘Yes. In five minutes.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Luis promised.
*
There was no swagger in the ex-boxer’s walk as he approached the table at which Paco was sitting. He looked instead like a man who had had the rug pulled from beneath him – a man who saw his whole life crumbling before his eyes. He sat down opposite Paco, ordered a brandy from the waiter and gazed into the middle distance. Only when the brandy had arrived and he’d taken a generous slug of it, did he turn to Paco. ‘I’ve served Don Eduardo faithfully for thirteen long years,’ he said.
‘Faithfully!’ Paco said. ‘Do you call screwing his mistress being faithful?’
Luis shrugged. ‘The master gave me his old shirts when he’d finished with them. I don’t see this was much different.’
‘Are you saying he’d finished with her?’ Paco asked.
‘No,’ Luis admitted. ‘But he didn’t know, and so it didn’t hurt him.’ He took another gulp of his brandy. ‘You won’t tell the master, will you?’ he asked, with a look of genuine panic in his eyes.
‘You’ve got more to worry about than Herrera finding out you’ve been cuckolding him,’ Paco said. ‘You’re right in the middle of a murder investigation.’
‘Nothing is more important than serving the master,’ Luis told him. ‘Besides, I had nothing to do with María’s death.’
‘Can you prove that?’ Paco asked. ‘Do you have an alibi for the time she was killed?’
It was a trap, but if Luis was guilty, he wasn’t falling into it. ‘I don’t know whether I had an alibi or not,’ he said, ‘because I don’t know when the murder took place.’
‘Sometime during the afternoon of the ninth.’
Luis thought about it, or perhaps only pretended to. ‘It was my day off,’ he said finally. ‘I went to the bulls.’
‘With someone else?’
‘No, I was alone.’
‘Did you meet anyone you knew?’
‘No.’
Somewhere in there he had told a lie, but Paco couldn’t put his finger on what it was. ‘You were in love with María, weren’t you?’ he said.
Luis laughed. ‘In love with her? Of course not. I enjoyed sleeping with her, but that was as far as it went.’
‘But she was in love with you?’
‘Not that either,’
‘Then why did she go to bed with you?’
Luis shrugged again. ‘Why do people go to bed with each other? For pleasure.’
But that didn’t sound like María. Desperation had forced her into being Herrera’s mistress, but Paco didn’t think she was the kind of girl who would sleep around. Unless . . . ‘What hold did you have over her?’ he asked.
‘Hold?’ Luis said, as if he didn’t understand.
Paco stood up. ‘You’re wasting my time,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go and phone your master.’
The look of panic was back in Luis’s eyes. ‘Sit down again,’ he begged. ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you the truth.’
Paco lowered himself back into his chair. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘She told her mother she was working in a shirt shop.’
‘I know that.’
‘And I told her that if she didn’t sleep with me, I’d tell her family what she actually did for a living. You may not like it, but that’s the truth.’
‘You really are a complete bastard, aren’t you?’ Paco said angrily.
‘She’d already given herself to one man; it was no great strain to give herself to another,’ Luis said, with apparent indifference.
I’m conducting a murder investigation, Paco thought, as he fought back the urge to throttle the valet. I’m conducting a murder investigation, and I must stay calm. ‘How would Herrera have reacted if he’d discovered María had been seeing someone else?’ he asked.
Luis looked shocked. ‘You don’t think the master killed her, do you?’
‘Why not? You know how passionate these Andalucians can be.’
‘He could never have done it.’
‘Because he’s the great Don Eduardo Herrera, and he wouldn’t stoop to anything as low as murder?’ Paco sneered.
‘No, because he’s not physically capable of it,’ Luis replied.
‘Come off it!’ Paco said. ‘I’ve seen him. He’s a big, strong man.’
‘Have you seen his hands?’ Luis asked.
No, Paco thought, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. Because when he’d appeared in the doorway of his apartment block, accompanied by a servant who was carrying his briefcase, he’d been wearing gloves, even though it was already a boiling hot day.
‘What about his hands?’ Paco asked.
‘He’s very sensitive about them. That’s why he wears gloves.’
‘For God’s sake, man, stop playing games!’ Paco exploded. ‘What’s wrong with his bloody hands?’
‘He’s got advanced arthritis,’ Luis said. ‘It’s more than he can do to open a wine bottle. He’d never have been able to strangle María.’
*
Paco sat at the café table long after Luis had returned to the Herrera apartment. How far had he advanced his investigation? he asked himself, and decided he had not advanced it very far at all. Luis had said he hadn’t been in love with María, but he could have been lying. Certainly he had no alibi for the time she was killed. The valet had also told him Herrera had arthritis – which was probably why he’d given up horse riding – but though he couldn’t have killed the girl himself, it would have been easy enough for him to persuade someone else, one of his loyal followers, to murder her. And then there was Doña Mercedes; she was far from in the clear.
He had to talk to Herrera face-to-face, he thought. But how should he go about it? And then he remembered that in less than an hour’s time, they would be burying Calvo Sotelo.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The East Cemetery was a sprawling necropolis criss-crossed by roads, just two kilometres from the bullring. Inside its walls, tombs stretched as far as the eye could see – some large, some small, but almost all of them elaborate. It was a vast, gothic city of the dead, a monument to the frailty of all flesh.
From his vantage point on the high ground in the centre of the cemetery, Paco watched the crowd gather around what would be the final resting place of José Calvo Sotelo, the murdered hero of the Spanish monarchists. There were hundreds of people there, perhaps thousands. Dressed in their mourning clothes and standing shoulder to shoulder, they formed a swaying sea of blackness, broken occasionally by the bright blue of a Falangist shirt.
What business had the Falange attending the funeral? Paco wondered. They had never had much time for Calvo Sotelo when he was alive. Why honour him now? Because, he supposed, this wasn’t so much a show of respect as a show of strength. There were prominent politicians by the graveside, and if even they couldn’t stop armed members of the Falange from attending, then it was, indeed, a force to be reckoned with.
His gaze shifted from the crowd to the small group of Asaltos who were s
heltering from the heat in a clump of trees some way from the grave. They’d probably been to a funeral themselves, that of the lieutenant whose death had led to Calvo Sotelo’s assassination. Now, like the fascists, they were there simply to be seen – to demonstrate the fact that no one was going to intimidate them.
A white Rolls-Royce entered the cemetery through the main gate, and Paco felt his pulse quicken. The moment he’d been waiting for had finally arrived: Eduardo Herrera was in striking distance.
Paco walked down the steps, skirted the growing crowd, and made his way to the road. The Rolls was just pulling up smoothly in front of a tomb which was crowned with a large, indignant-looking angel.
‘Right, you bastard,’ Paco said softly. ‘Now you’re going to have to talk to me.’
The back door of the Rolls swung open, but it was Carlos Méndez, not his brother-in-law, who stepped out. Méndez saw Paco immediately, and a look which was half-way between panic and annoyance came to his face. He poked his head back into the car, to consult the illustrious politician who was still sitting there. When he emerged again, his expression was much more certain.
He had heard his master’s voice, and now knew what to do, Paco thought.
Méndez nodded twice – once over Paco’s shoulder, and then at Paco himself. As if by magic, two large men appeared from out of nowhere, and took up positions on each side of Paco. ‘It’s bad taste to cause trouble at a funeral,’ the one on the left said.
‘It’s bad taste to strangle girls and then dump their bodies in the park,’ Paco replied.
The one on the right laughed. ‘I like a man with a sense of humour,’ he said, ‘but if you try to get any closer to Don Eduardo than you are now, I’m going to have to kill you. Understood?’
‘Wouldn’t killing me be regarded as a little tasteless, as well?’ Paco asked.
The man on the right did not laugh this time. Instead, he grabbed hold of Paco’s arm. It felt like it was being clamped in a vice. ‘It would all be so easy,’ he said. ‘I am carrying a spare gun, and if I have to shoot you, it will be found on your body. You will be just one more would-be assassin who has come to a sticky end. You don’t want that, do you?’
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