A Murder Most Literate

by Jefferson Bonar

  By the light of one of the candles that had been knocked on the floor and now slowly spread hot wax everywhere, Lucas could see Julian sprawled out on the floor, a broken brandy bottle having been smashed and used as a weapon to pierce his gut. One hand was wrapped around it, suggesting he’d used his last few minutes of life trying to pull it out. But the amount of blood on the floor showed his efforts were futile.

  Julian de Benaudalla was dead. Murdered along with his butler, whose only crime had been getting in the way. Despite the horror of the scene, Lucas found his thoughts drifting toward the case.

  This was conclusive proof that Julian had known a lot more than he’d let on. There was a good chance that whomever did this horrific deed tonight also killed Gregorio Cordoba for the same reason. But what lay at the centre of it all?

  Lucas’s thoughts were interrupted by the sudden appearance of an older couple at the doorway of the kitchen, with looks of horror as their eyes gazed down at their dead son.

  For Lucas, his pain that night had only begun.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Armada was woken by a violent shake of the shoulder. His first thought was anger at being roused from such a rare deep sleep. He hadn’t even believed he would get any rest the night before, having stayed up long into the night drinking sherry, trying to temper his worrying. As soon as Rodriguez had left him, he had gone to Ambrosio’s pupilaje to learn that both Lucas and Julian had snuck away together into the night. Lucas was now out of Armada’s reach. He could no longer protect the boy.

  All the sherry in the world couldn’t quiet the guilt he’d felt. If Lucas were to end up dead as Gregorio did, he would never forgive himself for having put Lucas’s head into the lion’s mouth like that. If only he’d put it all together sooner! Now all he could think of was the sight of Gregorio Cordoba’s office, and the brutality it showed. It was so easy to see Julian being the holder of that savagery, and as the night wore on, it became ever more real in Armada’s head.

  Which was why it was such a surprise to be awakened to see the sunlight coming in through the window.

  The headache hit him first, and as Armada sat up, a sickness spread through his stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything last night and had drunk too much sherry. His mouth was as parched as a desert, his head throbbing. The thought of food only made it worse.

  Armada looked up to see who had so rudely woken him to find Rodriguez.

  “Yes, yes…,” Armada grumbled as he climbed to his feet. “At least give me the dignity of a bit of breakfast before you kick me out.”

  Armada found it unusual that Rodriguez said nothing. There was a bowl of water in the corner and Armada splashed a bit of it on his face to wake up, then dried himself with a rag before looking over at Rodriguez, who looked deeply worried.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes, sir…,” Rodriguez said. “It’s…it’s your page. That boy, Lucas.”

  “What about him?” Armada shouted, coming over to Rodriguez.

  “I bring news.”

  “Has something happened to him? What?”

  “Last night…he—”

  “Is he alive? Go on!”

  “…he killed someone…Julian de Benaudalla. Him and his butler…at the villa of the Duke of Frades. They took him into custody last night. He’s in the ayuntamiento right now.”

  “Killed them? Lucas?”

  All thoughts of his hangover left him as Armada hurried from the room and to the ayuntamiento as quickly as he could.

  “Lucas?”

  Armada’s voice echoed about in the dark jail cell, disturbing the peaceful stillness that had been there moments before. Armada found himself holding his breath, not moving his body, as if the noise of living here would be too much for Lucas, who was lying on a bench underneath the tiny window just above his head. He was laying on his side, his left leg awkwardly extended as it was too painful to curl up with his other. He wasn’t moving, but the painful wheezing coming from his nose made it clear he was alive.

  “Sir….”

  Armada wasn’t sure what tone to take. He knew he should be angry, if only to give Lucas what he’d been expecting. But he didn’t feel it. There were too many other thoughts bouncing around in his head at the moment. He couldn’t make sense of them.

  “How are you?” An inane question for someone who was injured and starving in a jail cell. But Armada didn’t know what else to say.

  “Are they going to hang me, sir?”

  Armada wanted to assure him they wouldn’t. He wanted to say that he would be out of this cell and recovering back in Granada within a few days.

  But it wasn’t true. And Lucas was the one person Armada couldn’t lie to. Especially after everything that had happened. It wasn’t fair to him.

  “No. Of course not.” It was like Armada had heard someone else say it. Where had that come from?

  “You don’t believe I did it, do you?”

  “Of course not, Lucas. I’ve known you long enough to know you’re not a killer. But I would like to know—”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry….”

  Armada realised Lucas was weeping. He hadn’t seen Lucas do that for a long time. He wondered why that was.

  “Yes…,” Armada said. “Don’t worry about that now.”

  “I never should have left, sir. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking….”

  “I think I do,” Armada said, leaning against the bars. “You were thinking your friends, these glorious friends of yours. They are the most important thing in your life now. And you would do anything for them. They are your future. They define you. You have a role in a group, even if it is just to be picked on. It makes you feel alive in a way you can never be with me. With me, all you ever seem to feel…is death.”

  Lucas looked up at Armada through his tears, having no response to such a brutal truth.

  “I know how that feels. Whether in university, or in the army, the actual work that is required of you is ignored whenever possible, there is far too much drink and violence, and you make friends that you feel you would die for. In the army’s case, this feeling is frequently tested.”

  “Are you angry, sir?”

  “For what?”

  “I told Julian you were going to arrest him. That’s why he went back to his home. He thought his father would protect him from arrest. And I went with him…I don’t know why…but I shouldn’t have….”

  “Yes, I suspected that,” Armada said. “I’m just glad you survived your encounter with the killer. Did you happen to get a look at him?”

  “No, sir. He was wearing a hood. I managed to grab his leg at one point, but he kicked me. I couldn’t hold on. It hurt too much.”

  “It’s all right, Lucas.”

  “So, are you angry, sir?”

  Armada was surprised Lucas asked that again. Was that what his mind had been on since they’d locked him up in here? The boy must have gone through quite an ordeal with nothing but thoughts like that to keep him occupied.

  “I don’t know,” Armada heard himself say. It was an honest answer, but he wasn’t sure he should have given it. What was the alternative? To lie to the boy? To let him believe there were no consequences? It was all too complicated for Armada to consider right now. He wasn’t even sure he should punish the boy, or how. He was tempted to let the matter go. It was simpler. But what if it happened again? How could he be sure Lucas would remain loyal to the case?

  I don’t know. It was the only answer he had right now.

  “I suppose this means Julian didn’t kill Gregorio Cordoba,” Lucas said. “I thought for a while it might be Federigo, the butler. But he was killed, too. It means it must be Aurelio, right?”

  Armada was impressed. After everything, the boy was still thinking about the case. His mind couldn’t let it go. The puzzle still had to be solved.

  “That would be an easy assumption to make, if it were not for Aurelio having been in a cell of his own, in this very jail,,
all night.”

  “So, if it isn’t Aurelio, and it isn’t Julian, and it isn’t Federigo…?”

  Armada began to pace about outside Lucas’s cell. Despite the circumstances, it was good to be going over the case with Lucas again, like the old days.

  “We may not have a suspect, Lucas, but we have a timeline. Thus far, there have been four murders. Aurelio Martinez was the first, occurring months before we got here.”

  “Aurelio Martinez, sir?”

  “The real Aurelio Martinez, whose body was discovered by Gregorio Cordoba and Julian de Benaudalla, both of whom were killed in order to keep them quiet. The killer has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide this first murder. They are growing desperate, which means I am getting close. ‘Now the mast of patience is broken and fear blows the ship wildly from its course.’”

  “Calderon, sir?”

  Armada smiled. It wasn’t. It was Lope de Vega, one of Armada’s favourite lines from his masterwork Fuenteovejuna. It didn’t seem the right time to correct Lucas’s citation, so he let him believe he’d gotten it right. Anything to cheer the boy up.

  “Did you see the spot where Aurelio’s body was found?” Lucas asked. “Did you know where it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should go back, sir. Look around at the site. Riselo says there can be impressions left behind in the dust that might suggest what kind of shoe—”

  “Oh Lucas, not that damned Italian book again.”

  “No, sir, it could help. Riselo says to catalogue all the footprints you find. One of them might be an impression of the killer, which could give you a foot size, or—”

  “You and your bits and pieces, Lucas. Enough!”

  “But sir—”

  “I said, enough!” Armada hadn’t realised how upset he was getting. He’d shouted loud enough for the murmurs of pedestrians outside the window to wonder what was going on. He was panting, and his palms were becoming sweaty.

  “Sir…?”

  “Yes, Lucas,” Armada said through gritted teeth.

  “Are you angry?”

  “You already asked me that. I don’t have time to—”

  “I know, but you didn’t really answer it. Are you angry?”

  “Of course, I am!”

  Lucas flinched from Armada’s forceful reply this time. The cast iron bars between them, that had once seemed so solid and immovable, now seemed to dissolve away.

  “You are the one person, Lucas. The one person in this world I could trust. And after last night…you’ve ruined it. I don’t know what to…say…about that. I understand you are growing up, becoming your own man. But I’m not sure that’s what this is.”

  “So, what is it, sir?” Lucas asked with a desperation that cracked his voice.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know….”

  Armada turned and began walking back toward the door, signalling he was about to leave. It may well have been one of the last times he would ever see Lucas alive, should things not go well. And there was so much he wished he could say. But the words, they weren’t there. It was all wrong. He was still angry. He needed to be angry. He could hardly get sentimental now. He felt his insides were like a clenched fist, ready to strike. That was no way to say goodbye to a friend. Perhaps he would try to come back later today. Lucas needed him to get through this harrowing time. But it wasn’t in him. He had to solve the case. It’s why he was here, wasn’t it? He didn’t have time. There was no time.

  “Sir…,” he heard Lucas plead from behind him. Armada tried to ignore this.

  “Sir!”

  Armada stopped walking, but did not turn around.

  “They’re going to set off a bomb tonight, sir. San Bartolomé. It was that barrel of powder Julian had. They’re going to set it off inside their own building tonight and blame it on the boys at Arzobispo. They think it will help them win the election.”

  Armada nodded. “Thank you, Lucas.”

  There was nothing left to say, and Armada walked down the lonely corridor and back out of the ayuntamiento, up to the street, and into the fresh air. He waited until he was far enough away from the building and anyone who might know him to finally let his right hand out of his sleeve, watching it shake uncontrollably. There was little he could do to stop it. He was an old man. He was losing control of his body. It happened to old men.

  But this was different. Somehow, his hand knew Lucas’s life was in danger. It knew how little time he had to save the most valuable relationship he’d ever had. It knew that he had said all the wrong things in there and that it might be the last time he saw Lucas alive. It knew once Lucas was gone, there would be no repairing the damage.

  Somehow, it knew all of this and shook so that the rest of him wouldn’t have to.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  There was no better place to start than the beginning. In this case, the night that the real Aurelio Martinez was killed. This involved a trip to Aldeatejada, the tiny pueblo just two hours south, where Aurelio was born and had lived his short, tragic life.

  The trip was short in a mule-pulled cart, but it felt much longer. He had always enjoyed travelling. All the new places and experiences helped to keep the worst of the nightmares from his past under control. He could easily distract himself with meeting new people, new places, new events everywhere he went. He needed the sense that he was always on the move, never letting the ghosts catch up to him. Soon, they would be entirely crowded out of his mind by the new memories he was making, if he made enough of them. At least, that’s what he desperately hoped when he’d taken this job so many years ago.

  But no new experiences could distract his mind today. Being alone with his thoughts for even a moment was agony. It gave him ample time to ponder what would happen if Lucas was to hang. The guilt would crush him, Armada knew. He would never survive it. How had it come to this? He had worked as a constable for years before Lucas had come along and he had gotten along just fine. Now, suddenly his ability to continue in it rested on saving Lucas and somehow repairing their estranged relationship. Although he still had no idea how. Lucas was drifting further and further from him all the time, getting ready to strike out on his own. Armada always knew Lucas wouldn’t stay with him forever, and yet deep in the darkest corner of his mind, where no one else was allowed, the voice he only listened to when sleep would not grant him relief in the dead of the night, he secretly hoped Lucas never would.

  Armada tried to distract himself with the surroundings, but out here there was little to ponder. The terrain was very flat and treeless, the road unnaturally rocky and the mule in no hurry. This land had been devoted to raising livestock, meaning much of the browning fields were dotted with distant herds of grazing cattle and very little else to look at. It was also why the road leading north toward Salamanca, and its lucrative daily market, was in such bad condition, as it was constantly being chewed up by the hooves of heavy animals being herded north to be sold.

  Armada finally reached Aldeatejada in the late afternoon. It was a tiny village, just a handful of white-plastered buildings cobbled around a tiny square, as most villages were. Armada guessed there wouldn’t be more than a few hundred people living here. He moved into the plaza to find a few elderly men sitting by a dry fountain with walking sticks leaning against their knees.

  They were friendly enough when Armada spoke to them and they directed him to the house of the Martinez family. Despite the vast expanse of space all round, the house was butted up against a narrow lane where many other houses loomed to maximise shade for all of them.

  “Señora Martinez?” Armada asked of the woman who answered the door. She was somewhere in her forties, looking a bit too skinny to be healthy, and wiping her thin, large-knuckled hands on the soiled apron she wore over her black dress.

  “Yes?”

  “I am Domingo Armada, of the Holy Brotherhood. I wanted to talk to you about Aurelio.”

  “A buenas horas…,” the woman mumbled under her breath as he step
ped inside.

  The house was very typical of a small Spanish village, with a large wooden table in the middle just in front of a fire pit where the woman was making a large pot of something that smelled of cabbage. There were a couple of small rooms to the back, both of which seemed to be empty. He was alone with her, for the moment.

  “Is it all right to speak of him now?” Armada asked.

  “Yes, of course! Nobody else wants to speak of him. They don’t want to upset me. Like I’m going to burst into tears at the very mention of his name. But he was my son, I always like talking about him. It’s my husband. Carlos is the one that pretends our boy never existed. That’s his way, I guess. He just works more, drinks more, and pretends everything is fine. But it bothers him. He is mourning, same as me. I can tell. A wife can always tell. He would feel so much better if he just…well…that’s men for you.”

  Armada wasn’t sure how much of that last remark was directed at him. The way the woman spoke, it seemed almost a relief for her to speak, her words somehow shedding some great weight that her soul had borne for so long.

  “Can I ask about the day he disappeared? What happened?”

  The woman took a breath. “I don’t know. I wish I did! He just snuck off in the middle of the night. He didn’t tell any of us where he was going, or why. My Aurelio, he was an angel. He had never done anything like that before. It was just so unusual.”

  “Had he been acting strangely before then? Perhaps upset about something?”

  “No! Quite the opposite. He was excited. It had only been a few weeks since Lady Florentia said she was going to sponsor him for university. He was racing about all over this house trying to get ready. He was always asking me to sew him new clothes, or cobble some new shoes, or make a new canvas bag. My Aurelio just had a mind that wouldn’t quit. He wanted to make sure he didn’t forget anything when he went to school.”

  “So, he went out that night and never came back?”