by David Hewson
THIRTY-FIVE
When she woke in the hard hospital bed the aftermath of the medication clung to her head, pressing like a metal circlet. She sat upright, supporting herself on her hands. She wore a white hospital shift. In the centre of her back was something padded. A dressing. The wound throbbed, a dull, distant feeling, like a bruise. She felt the wad of bandage with her hand. There was a lump, the size of a small egg, covering the hurt.
‘You’ll live,’ said Menéndez. He was seated in the corner of the small room, in the shadow, just beyond the bright-yellow trapezoid cast by the big, long window beside the bed. She blinked, trying to focus on him. Silence seemed to hang like a cold cloud around his form. It was hard to concentrate. She wondered how long she had slept. Outside, the street was silent. This was strange. Normally the streets would have been alive with traffic and sound, during Semana Santa even more so.
‘It’s so quiet . . .’
Menéndez leaned forward, put his face in his hands, rubbed his eyes. She could see him more clearly now. He looked exhausted, ill.
‘The city’s in mourning. Today the events have been called off. As a mark of respect. People stay at home, I guess.’
‘The crowd? Last night . . . I only half-saw what was happening.’
‘There should have been some better form of control. There were too many people. They came round the corner too quickly, panicked. It’s not the first time. Won’t be the last. Football, the bullring . . . public events, these kind of things happen. They shouldn’t, but . . .’
She waited for him to go on.
‘Two people died. One crushed to death, one heart attack. Amazing it wasn’t more. A lot injured, though few of them serious, thank God. Today, everyone stays home. Just today.’
‘Bear?’
Menéndez’s face moved back into shadow. She could read it no more.
‘He’s here. Intensive care.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘You need to talk to the doctors.’
The events of the night were still blurry to her. They swam around her mind.
‘He saved me. Didn’t he? Without him, I would have been dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Menéndez. ‘I think so.’
‘Will he be OK?’
He paused before answering. ‘He’s unconscious. They say the wound is very bad. He lost a lot of blood. Even if he does live . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Maybe there will be some paralysis. They just don’t know.’
Maria closed her eyes, willed herself not to cry, won the battle.
‘He is a good man,’ she said. ‘You can feel that about him. It’s like sitting next to a fire. You can feel the warmth.’
‘I know,’ said Menéndez. ‘He doesn’t like me. Few of them do. They think I’m too ambitious.’
He rolled the word around his tongue, as if it tasted bad.
‘Maria?’
She was staring at nothing at all.
‘Yes?’
‘You haven’t asked about yourself.’
‘No,’ she said and thought to herself: I don’t care. ‘It hurts a little. It can’t be much.’
‘He threw the dart at you.’
‘I remember,’ she said curtly.
‘The doctors say it was this far’ – he held his hand up in the light from the window, the finger and thumb nearly closed together, casting a shadow like a light-show on the whitewashed wall – ‘from piercing your lung.’
She thought about the wound and it ached on cue, as if in recognition.
‘But it didn’t.’
‘No.’ He seemed puzzled by her lack of self-concern. ‘They say it went through the muscle, stopped there. Maybe this evening you can go home. You have to spend the day here. You should rest.’
‘I want to help.’
‘If you rest, you will be helping.’
‘Don’t patronize me. I’ll be lying here on my back while you keep stumbling around in the dark looking for the person who’s doing this.’
He listened to the steel in her voice and appeared grateful that their opportunities for argument were likely to be few.
‘Did you get a look at him last night? Quemada and Velasco said he had his hood down when they came in.’
‘I saw him. And it was him this time. No disguise. Maybe he thought I would be easy. He wasn’t someone I knew.’
‘If I send in a photofit officer, can you work with him on a description? We can give it to the media.’
She nodded. ‘When?’
‘I’ll call in a few minutes, send someone round.’
She tried to make sense of the sequence of events, tried to pull more out of her memory. It didn’t work yet. Maybe there was nothing more to retrieve.
‘I don’t understand. Quemada, Velasco. They were there? Why is he still free?’
‘It was dark. You were wounded. So was Torrillo. The man ran up the stairs, seems to have got out of the back somehow. He knew what he was doing. They were torn – did they chase him, did they help you? In the end they did a little of one, a lot of the other.’
‘They should have stopped him.’
‘Would you, in the circumstances? They’re cops, but they’re human too.’
‘It was the best chance you’ve had. Maybe the best chance you’ll get.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Neither do you.’
There was a side to his voice, a harshness that came too easily. She was testing his sympathy, his politeness.
‘He picked up my address book. When we were in Castañeda’s office. When I dropped my bag. He phoned me the night before. Just checking. I thought he was a nuisance caller. The type who likes to phone women. I should have told you.’
‘I wondered . . .’
‘He had a key. How could that be?’
‘Someone visited the optician’s yesterday. He said he was from the electricity company. He wasn’t, of course. We think he got a cast of the key. The lock had been interfered with too. He made sure you couldn’t have double-locked it from the inside. He’s very methodical.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
‘What I don’t understand is . . . Why would he want to attack you?’
She tried to remember his face, tried to recall his expression.
‘Is it all just random?’ asked Menéndez. ‘He sees an opportunity, he finds an address book, he takes it. Are we fooling ourselves with this Alvarez idea?’
‘You found nothing?’
‘Nothing. No records in Melilla. There’s some old criminal material here on Alvarez himself.’
‘Criminal?’
Menéndez said, ‘In the sense that it warranted prosecution. Alvarez had a list of complaints an arm long about sexual relations with underage girls. Rape. Some of them were pregnant. None came to court. He was too well connected for that.’
‘He liked young girls?’
‘Seems so.’
‘Before Cristina Lucena? Or after?’
‘These complaints all date from the forties on, and go on for nearly twenty years – and that’s just the ones we know about. After, I guess. Maybe Cristina . . .’
His voice drifted away into nothingness. It seemed a terrible thing to imply.
‘Maybe she gave him the taste?’ she asked.
‘Possibly.’
Maria tried to make sense of what she was hearing. It held some significance, but she could not see what it was.
‘Have you traced any of the girls who complained? The ones who were pregnant?’
‘Not yet. We’re working on it.’
‘And Alvarez never came to court?’
‘Never. What tripped him up in the end was something much more mundane. He was treasurer of the brotherhood. He stole money from them.’
‘A lot?’
‘Probably around two million pesetas, as far as we can see. Maybe more.’
‘That’s a fortune.’
‘Yes. And again, he wasn’t prosecuted, though it seems to have led to
his political downfall. He was out of the council after that, out of the brotherhood. Finished, socially and politically.’
‘And they made him pay it back? The money? They must have done.’
‘You’d think so.’
‘But does it say that? Does it say in the record?’
‘No. But in cases such as this it wouldn’t. If it’s a gentleman’s agreement, you keep what’s on paper to a minimum. Making some formal, written commitment to repay the money would be tantamount to admitting taking it.’
‘The brotherhood’s records . . .’
‘The brotherhood’s records would show, yes. I guess so. Except that the key ones are missing. Maybe – and we are guessing here – maybe they were taken when Castañeda was killed. I anticipated you somewhat there. I am a policeman.’
She found it in her to smile at this distant, yet decent man.
‘So there could be a motive for some of the killings? Not just revenge, money too?’
‘There could be,’ he admitted. ‘But where does that leave a motive for killing you?’
She thought about it. There was an answer. ‘You remember what Bear said. What if some of the killings had a motive and some of them were random? Perhaps the point of the random killings is that they are random. By making them random, he hopes we’ll think they’re all random. That there’s no picture behind it all, no framework, no logic, no structure.’
Menéndez looked at his watch. ‘Is he that clever?’
‘Yes,’ she said, straight away. ‘He is. As Bear said, he likes it. Not just killing people.’ She remembered the care he took with the darts, the precision of the routine. ‘He likes the ritual. He takes pleasure from it. Maybe it’s the only thing he has.’
‘I want this man in jail,’ said Menéndez.
She remembered the words that the man in the scarlet robe had said the night before: that was the last place he thought he was going.
Menéndez glanced at his watch. ‘I’m late. I have much to do. You must excuse me. I will send an artist to see you. After that you must rest. When the doctors have seen you, discharged you, call the station. I will send round a female officer. She can pick up some clothes from your apartment. If you like, you can stay there. I will provide a guard, round the clock. If not, we’ll find somewhere else for you. Think about it. You don’t need to decide now. I will send someone in with something to drink, some food if you like.’
Just the word made her feel ravenous. Her stomach felt empty and hollow.
‘Food would be good.’
He shambled out of the door looking like a man who hadn’t slept in days. Two minutes later a nun appeared holding a tray: coffee, orange juice, some pastries. Maria ate and drank greedily, feeling the strength return, feeling something else too, a certainty that events were moving in some way that she could not yet define. That there would be some conclusion. And that she would be part of it.
The nurse came back to collect the tray. She looked no more than twenty, plain-faced, slim, quiescent. Maria could not, for a moment, understand what would lead someone to that kind of life, at any age.
‘I want to be released,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’
‘You need to see a doctor first,’ said the nun, smiling. A badge on her shoulder said ‘Sister Alicia’. ‘The rules are that only a doctor can sign your release form. This afternoon, I think. That will not be a problem. Why don’t you take it easy until then?’
‘I will,’ she said, then added, ‘There are two friends of mine in this hospital. Before I go, I would like to visit them. Is that possible?’
‘The policeman? The one who came in with you?’
‘Yes.’
She shook her head. ‘He’s in intensive care. The poor man’s very sick. Perhaps the doctor will let you see him from outside the room. He’s unconscious. He won’t know you are there.’
‘I’d like to see him all the same.’
‘And your other friend?’
‘Cristina Lucena.’
‘Ah, Doña Cristina.’
Maria could not read the expression on her face. She guarded it too well.
‘She’s still here?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She makes a little progress, then . . .’ Her hand made a sideways gesture.
‘I may see her?’
‘I can ask.’
Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door and Sister Alicia showed in a thin young man in a denim suit. He carried a notebook computer and introduced himself as the police artist. They spent half an hour looking at faces on the screen: she flicked through noses and eyes and foreheads, adjusted hairstyles, changed the shapes of eyebrows and ears, the jut of a cheekbone, the prominence of the chin. In the end, she thought it was a pretty good likeness. He printed out a draft copy on a small battery printer. They looked at it in more detail. He sketched in some additions with a pencil. It got better. Then they went back to the computer, entered the changes, printed out another draft. This happened three more times: draft printout, pencil revisions, changes on the screen. In the end, she thought, they had him. This was the man.
‘Will you print out two copies?’ asked Maria.
‘Two?’ he said, surprised.
‘I’d like one. To look at. To think about.’
‘Sure.’ He nodded.
When he was gone, she looked at the face again. Tried to imagine it with a thin moustache, tanned by months of hard sun. Then she put it on the bedside table and went to sleep.
THIRTY-SIX
Menéndez looked at the file Quemada had passed him and grimaced. He could tolerate poor police work. He had to tolerate poor police work. People made mistakes. People overlooked things. But this was different. This was just plain sloppy. Someone should have picked up on it earlier, seen the signs. He’d been away when Romero was found, but there were others in the department who ought to have known.
The body of Luis Romero was found by a gatekeeper in a deserted industrial area at six in the morning of 9 February. The dead man was in the driver’s seat of his gold Mercedes saloon. Both wrists were cut. A hosepipe led from the exhaust pipe through the front passenger window. The car had been left idling all night until it ran out of petrol. The autopsy had measured the level of carbon monoxide in Romero’s bloodstream. It was almost non-existent. The cause of death was the cuts on the wrist. No conclusions were drawn from these two facts. The case was marked down as suicide and abruptly closed.
Menéndez tried to understand the premise of the suicide conclusion. The investigating officer, a rank junior, believed that Romero had intended to kill himself in a way that could not be reversed. Sometimes, most times, suicide attempts were not serious efforts to die. People left loopholes – taking just enough pills to be ill, but not enough to kill them. Sometimes they went the opposite way. They wanted to make some kind of statement to the world that they were not attention-seekers. And they did it by killing themselves in a way that brooked no escape. Jump off the top of the cathedral bell tower and you pretty much make sure you’re dead. This, so it was supposed, was what Romero was doing. He fixed the hosepipe to the exhaust, then climbed into the car, put the hose through the window, wound up the window and sat in the driver’s seat, breathing in the fumes. And then he cut his wrists.
He’d talked the findings through with Quemada, who’d retrieved them from the system. The detective read the sour look on Menéndez’s face and said, ‘It stinks. I read that autopsy and, OK, it was done by two different guys – one did the body, the other did the blood analysis – but you’d think they’d be talking to each other. You’d think they’d get together and put the poor cop straight.’
Menéndez thrust his arms out in front of him, wrists uppermost. ‘If you wanted to cut your wrists, how would you do it?’
Velasco was out looking at some more records. Quemada looked as if he hated it when Menéndez wanted to bounce around ideas. That was what Bear was for. Maybe he didn’t like trying to step into those big shoes.
‘You’re smarter than you let on. Stop being the office clown and start being a cop. How are you going to do it?’
He looked at Menéndez’s outstretched arms, wriggled inside his shiny suit and said, ‘You need room. You need space. It’s crazy. He gets out, puts the hose on the exhaust, then climbs back into the car and sits in the driver’s seat. Makes no sense. You seen the wheel on those Mercedes? Like a truck. It’d get in the way. You’d sit in the passenger seat if you had things to do to yourself. Not the driver’s.’
Menéndez dropped his arms onto the desk. ‘He could have cut his wrists, then got over into the driving seat. Where he normally sat. He might be more comfortable there.’
‘Yeah, he could. There was time. Or there should have been time, if he really died in the car. The wrist wounds weren’t that deep. The coroner’s guy I spoke to said it would take maybe an hour if you got cut like that. But the odds got to be that he didn’t die in the car. There’s not enough blood there. And if he spent an hour, with those fumes pumping in from the engine, he’d have been dead of carbon monoxide, not of blood loss. Which he isn’t. In fact there’s hardly any carbon monoxide in his blood. Whatever happened, he wasn’t alive long in the car while the pipe was through the window.’
‘Meaning?’
Quemada glanced around the office. Menéndez wasn’t going to let him go, or let him wisecrack his way out of this.
‘I’m asking you a question, Detective. I want your opinion.’
‘I’m aware of that, sir. Just don’t happen to me a lot.’
‘Well?’
‘Either he cut his wrists outside the car, bled a lot someplace else, put the pipe on the exhaust, then climbed in the car and died. Which, even for a university professor, seems a somewhat complex way to go about things. Alternatively somebody, let’s say, helped him. Somebody cut his wrists for him, put him in the car when he was dead or nearly dead, then stuck the pipe on the exhaust. My guess is the latter.’
‘And this is all the evidence we have?’
Quemada nodded. ‘Everything. The car didn’t get looked at closely. You got the photos there. Don’t tell us much we don’t already know. These guys who did the job, they just assumed it was a suicide from the outset. Stamped the file straight away.’