A Murder Most Literate

by Jefferson Bonar

“It was so awful that next morning. It took us awhile to even realise he was gone. By that afternoon, the whole town was out in the fields looking for him. We asked all the farmers who live in the sheds up there, even some of the surrounding villages. But no one had seen him. He was just suddenly gone. We never did find out what happened to him. That was the worst part. Not knowing what happened…or why….”

  Señora Martinez put a hand to her mouth to compose herself, then returned to her cooking.

  Armada was sorely tempted to tell her that her boy had been found. But she probably wouldn’t be able to answer any questions after that. The emotions would be too much. He had to wait until the end. He needed his answers first. He had to first make sure that there wouldn’t be another death like Aurelio’s.

  “Did a lot of other people know that Aurelio was being sponsored by Lady Florentia?”

  “Of course! Everyone in the pueblo knew. We made sure of that. Lady Florentia makes it clear she wants only the best student. My Aurelio worked very hard to get the best marks in the whole village. It was a proud moment when we received the letter from Lady Florentia. Everyone knew.”

  So, jealousy could have played a role, Armada thought. Perhaps one of the other boys didn’t handle their loss well?

  “How many other boys were competing for this sponsorship?”

  “Oh, there were ten or fifteen at least. And they weren’t all from this village. Lady Florentia was looking for students in all the pueblos in this area.”

  Armada’s heart sank. It would take ages to question each family, each boy that competed with Aurelio for that sponsorship. He didn’t have that kind of time.

  “Have you ever heard of the Mendoza family? Juan Mendoza, specifically?”

  “No. They can’t be from this pueblo. There are no Mendozas here. And to be honest, I’ve rarely travelled anywhere else. Too much to do here. I still have two other children, you know. And they’ll be home soon.”

  It was her subtle way of telling Armada to finish up his interrogation. But he still hadn’t gotten anywhere with it. He was still poking about in the dark, looking for any kind of clue without knowing what it was or what to focus on. Interrogations like these took time.

  “Did Lady Florentia ever meet your son personally? Did he ever travel to her villa?”

  “Oh no. The mad old woman is a hermit. It stated very clearly in the letter we were not to visit. She said she would make all the arrangements herself.”

  “Have you ever met her? Or anyone else in the pueblo that you know of?”

  “No, I don’t think so. At least none that I’ve heard.”

  Armada was starting to get frustrated and felt his temper get short. But he couldn’t let it show to this woman. He wouldn’t find what he was looking for if he got curt with her. Besides, something she’d said was still echoing in his mind.

  He just snuck off in the middle of the night.

  So, what had drawn Aurelio out? At some point between winning Lady Florentia’s sponsorship and the night he died, somebody had given him a reason to leave the house and travel to Salamanca in the middle of the night. Aurelio had been convinced that it was so important, he had told no one.

  And it had to be connected with the school. It was the only major event happening in Aurelio’s life that was connected to where he died. What could someone have told him to convince him to behave so irrationally?

  Was it possible Juan Mendoza’s mother hadn’t told him the whole truth? Did she perhaps make contact with Aurelio, tempting him out in the middle of the night in order to kill him so her son could take his place? She was certainly motivated enough to do so. Most mothers Armada had met would do anything to secure the future of their children. But he had yet to meet one who would kill for them. It was a crazy theory, but if it was true, he had to prove she’d made contact with Aurelio. And where could he find that?

  “Señora Martinez, I’m afraid I have news about…,” Armada began, but he cut himself off.

  A thought had occurred. A memory, really. He had suddenly thought of a time last year, when he’d been on a case with Lucas. They had been camping out under the stars, and although Lucas didn’t know, he had swapped mattresses with the boy, as his own mattress was getting much too thin for his old bones. He hadn’t been able to sleep and had been tossing about when he heard a strange crumpling sound that didn’t fit. Feeling about inside the mattress, he found a small bit of paper. It was a page from a book, but instead of words, it was a drawing of a young, beautiful woman. She was looking off to the left and rather forlorn, her bodice having fallen most of the way down off her bosoms. It wasn’t difficult to figure out why the curious young boy had taken the page and kept it stashed deep within the recesses of his mattress, where he figured Armada would never find it.

  “May I see Aurelio’s room?” Armada asked suddenly.

  The woman stopped, hesitating.

  “I understand it’s sacred,” Armada said. “But it might help me figure out what happened to him. Please.”

  Señora Martinez made no secret of her reluctance, but she still led Armada into a back room separated from the rest of the house by a heavy bit of fabric hanging in the door.

  Armada entered, finding little of interest as he cast his eyes about. The room was tiny and very sparse. Just a simple bed, a table in the corner with a few books Aurelio had been studying, and a pile of carefully folded clothes in the corner where his mother had put them the day before he disappeared.

  Armada could feel the heat of the woman’s eyes on his neck. He knew the unwritten rule was that he wasn’t to touch anything. And he would have loved nothing more than to honour that rule.

  But he didn’t have the time.

  Armada went to the mattress and lifted it up. It was a simple mattress, just two bits of canvas stitched together and stuffed with hay. Armada ran his hand along the seam until he came to a bit where the seam was coming apart. A rip, just large enough for a boy to stuff his hand through.

  Armada grabbed this seam and pulled it apart, breaking the seams and incurring the woman’s wrath.

  “What are you doing? Stop that! I didn’t say you could do that!” the woman screeched, pulling on his arm.

  Armada ignored her and continued ripping Aurelio’s mattress. He then plunged his hand inside the hay, feeling the greasiness that came from absorbing the boy’s sweat for most of his life. He was beginning to regret having been so bold when his fingers floated over the sharp edge of a bit of paper. Armada grabbed it and ripped it out of the mattress.

  It was a letter, and one that he hoped would be from Angeles Mendoza. He prayed God would make this easy for him. Just this one case. For Lucas’s sake, for Señora Martinez’s sake. For Aurelio’s sake.

  Armada unrolled the letter, its sudden appearance having placated Aurelio’s mother for the moment, and read it over.

  As he suspected, it was a letter inviting Aurelio Martinez out on the night he disappeared. He was to report to San Bartolomé, where the boys knew he would be attending in the fall. Before he could start, however, he would need to be initiated, and he was to report to the pupilaje at midnight and tell no one he was coming. The letter was signed Julian de Benaudalla, on behalf of San Bartolomé.

  Armada’s heart seized with rage. But before he could let it entirely consume him, there was one thing he had to do first.

  “Señora Martinez, we found your son’s body. And I think I know what happened to him that night….”

  Señora Martinez listened, her mouth agape, as he told her everything he knew so far.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Armada saw no reason to be nice. He pushed past Ambrosio, who had come to open the door for him, and ignored his pleas to know what was going on and whether that bellaco boy of his was going to return to work.

  “Everybody in the common room!” Armada screamed from the foyer. “Now!”

  It was the middle of the night, with Armada having sped back to Salamanca as fast as he could. As he pred
icted, Ambrosio’s pupilaje was still intact and not burning. The boys had not gone through with their plan to blow it up the night before the election. Armada knew why—they were too cowardly to do it without Julian. It had been Julian who had secured the serpentine, and he was probably the only one who knew how to ignite it. The other boys had probably only read about serpentine in books, for when would the children of titled nobility ever have gotten their hands dirty in such a way?

  Armada bounded up the stairs to the first door that led to one of the boys’ rooms and pounded on it.

  “Everyone get up! Right now!”

  The door cracked open a little and the sleepy, hungover eyes of a boy who had spent the afternoon drinking too much peeped out at him.

  Armada reached his hand in and grabbed the boy’s collar, pulling him out of the door. The boy stumbled into the corridor and Armada threw him toward the common room.

  “Common room! Go on!”

  The boy, sensing Armada was not about to take arguments, stumbled awkwardly down toward the common room in the back.

  Armada walked down the hallway, banging loudly on each door as he went. Soon, all the boys and Ambrosio were sitting in the common room, with a couple of candles Ambrosio had thought to light flickering in eyes that gawked at him.

  Armada slapped the letter Aurelio had received down on the table in front of them.

  “Tell me about this.”

  All the boys glanced at it and Armada could see recognition in their eyes. None of them wanted to pick it up.

  “I’m waiting!” Armada screamed.

  Finally, the eldest, the boy Lucas had called Marco, reached down and picked up the letter. He looked it over.

  “It’s…it’s just the letter we sent to Aurelio….”

  “Why?”

  “To initiate him.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Julian…I think….”

  “Don’t think! Be sure!”

  “Julian…definitely Julian…,” Marco stammered, unable to hide his fear.

  “What was the plan?” Armada said. “Kill him here? Or ambush him outside of town?”

  “Kill him?” one of the boys said. “We didn’t want to—”

  “We weren’t going to kill him—”

  “So why draw him out in the middle of the night? Because whoever did stuck a dagger in him, and then buried his body under the Roman Bridge. Which means someone in this room is a murderer.”

  Heads quickly swivelled about as the boys looked at each other, not knowing what to do or say. Ambrosio gasped, but said nothing. Armada sensed he was enjoying the fact that one of them was about to get a comeuppance that boys of their status rarely got.

  “We didn’t kill him!” Marco said. “We just wanted to initiate him. That’s all.”

  “What’s the initiation?”

  “It’s a drinking game. It’s harmless.”

  “Keep going.”

  “You get him to drink a few ales, then you hit him in the stomach a few times until he’s sick, then tell him if he doesn’t drink another, he won’t get in. The rule is if he takes a sip, no matter how small, he’s in. That’s it. Nobody was going to kill him. He was going to be one of us, for God’s sake!”

  Armada suddenly began losing his rage. He didn’t see guilt in any of these boys’ faces. They were frightened, but no more than anybody would be when confronted by such accusations. They all knew they were a long way from the protective influence of their parents at the moment. They were alone in a room with a constable of the Holy Brotherhood, who could do as he liked before anyone could reach them. And each one of these boys was feeling real fear, probably for the first time.

  But it didn’t make sense. If none of these boys did it….

  “Who delivered the letter after Julian wrote it? Who gave it to Aurelio?”

  “I did,” said the youngest boy, meekly raising his hand.

  “So, what did you think when Aurelio arrived for his first day?”

  “Um…that he was…a coward….”

  Armada was suddenly confused. He’d been hoping to hear why the boy didn’t realise the Aurelio who showed up for his first day of class was a different boy than the boy he delivered the letter to. Cowardice didn’t factor into it.

  “A coward? Why?”

  “Because he never showed up,” Marco said. “We were here waiting for him all night. He never came.”

  “But you still saw his face,” Armada said at the youngest one.

  “I didn’t…I didn’t know what he looked like. All I knew to do was go to Alteatejada and just ask around. I told everyone I was a cousin who was visiting and this nice lady in the plaza told me where his house was. I saw his mother putting out the wash round the back, so I slipped in and put it under his pillow. It wasn’t hard to figure out which room was his. Then I left. That was it.”

  “So, you never actually saw him before he arrived for that first day of lectures?”

  “No.”

  Armada’s heart sank again. Was all this only destined to leave him at a dead end once more?

  “Did anyone else besides you boys know about the letter? Did you tell anyone else about it? Or show it to anyone?”

  “No, definitely not,” Marco said. “Julian was clear about that. We were to tell no one.”

  “Did you all keep to that rule?” Armada asked, casting his gaze about the boys. They all nodded back to him, including the youngest.

  “And you encountered no one on your way to Alteatejada?”

  “No. No one,” the youngest said.

  The problem was that Armada believed him. But it left him with nothing.

  To begin with, these boys had no motivation. They had no idea the Aurelio they had lived with was not the real Aurelio. There was a period of time, before Gregorio Cordoba and Julian de Benaudalla had found Aurelio’s body, when all was well within the group. The boys had accepted the fake Aurelio just fine. And why wouldn’t they? They had never met the true Aurelio Martinez.

  Perhaps Juan Mendoza? Or his mother? But how could they have possibly known where Aurelio was going to be that night? His whereabouts were known only to San Bartolomé and he was moving about at night when he couldn’t be seen. They had motivation, but neither of the Mendozas would have had the opportunity to do so.

  The thought of Enrique crossed his mind, but there was no connection that Armada could see to Aurelio’s death. It seemed extremely unlikely that Enrique killed Gregorio quite randomly, having no idea about Gregorio’s discovery of Aurelio’s body. There was no way those events were not connected, but Enrique had no knowledge of Aurelio. And his actions on the night of the murder made no sense, anyway. Why hang about outside such a gruesome crime scene? And then claim innocence? Enrique had the whiff of trickster about him, but he was no idiot. If he was the culprit, he would have fled the scene and never come back.

  Which left Armada with nothing. The case had come to a halt on the one night when Armada most needed a solid lead. His inability to solve this case was now putting Lucas’s life in danger. It was happening all over again. For it was he who put Lucas’s life in danger in the first place by trying and failing to solve the murder of his parents. He was failing Lucas and didn’t know how to put things right.

  And now Lucas would die as a result.

  Before he knew it, Armada stood up and kicked over the table in frustration before letting out a growl. He couldn’t solve cases under such stress. It wasn’t how his mind worked. He needed to calm down. He needed a sherry. He needed rest. He needed to sort out everything he knew about the case, lay it all out and see if there was anything he missed.

  He needed Lucas.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Armada knew it was mad. It would mean the end of his career. The end of his freedom. And if he’d gotten it wrong, a killer would go free. It was desperate, he knew. And rarely had anything good come when he’d acted upon his most desperate notions. But there was no more time. He no longer had the luxury of t
aking things slow and measured and following his moral conscience. In the next twenty-four hours, he would be ejected from the city and Lucas would lose his life. And then it would all be over.

  Armada couldn’t let that happen. Despite what his instincts told him, he was already racing back to his room to enact his mad plan. But he had to be quick. He only had tonight to work with. A precious few hours of darkness. He had to make the most of them.

  Armada arrived at the building he was staying at to find Rodriguez standing at the front entrance. No doubt with orders to take Armada into custody and escort him out of the city as quickly, and quietly, as possible.

  Taking a small alley that led along the side of the building, Armada dashed into the back and entered through a small door he’d found earlier, creeping his way up the stairs toward his room. There was something he needed first, and he wasn’t sure where it was. It had gone dark, which meant he would have to find it mostly by feel, as he couldn’t risk lighting a candle to show Rodriguez he’d returned.

  Armada opened his eyes, trying to take in as much of what little moonlight trickled in through the windows as possible. He kicked the leg of the sherry barrel stand and cursed himself quietly, then made his way toward the back wall where Lucas had organised their provisions.

  Feeling the bags, Armada stuck his hand inside one to find it full of clothes, another with small sacks of fruit they’d brought. Then another with some of Armada’s writing supplies. He rooted around at the bottom of this bag, until his fingers curled around the sharp metal edge of what he was looking for. It had been wrapped in a bit of black satin cloth for safekeeping, a cloth that rarely came off. Armada pulled it from the cloth and tucked it away inside his jacket.

  He left out the back door once again and, being careful to keep his head turned away, snuck down the road toward the Rúa de San Martín before turning north toward the plaza.

  The plaza was empty and quiet, littered with debris from that day’s market, debris that wouldn’t be cleaned up until the next morning when the merchants returned once again.