by Adam Creed
Terry says, without turning round, ‘And the house is still bloody illegal and falling down.’
‘He gets frustrated.’
A car roars by on the track above them and Pepa says, ‘Can I look at the barranco?’
‘Branco?’
‘The ditch that breached.’
‘You won’t paint us in a bad light, will you, my love?’
‘I promise not to. My article will say that the demolitions are preposterous and need to be stopped.’
‘Go on then.’
Staffe says, ‘You hear the cars on this track quite clearly.’
‘There aren’t many. Just people going up to their cor-tee-yoes.’
‘What about the other day? It would have been Thursday, there was a commotion early in the morning.’
‘That fella who died?’
‘Don’t you say anything, Sand,’ says Terry.
Sandra whispers, ‘He says not to say anything, but I didn’t see anything, just something on the bridge.’
‘A car?’
‘You can see it from our front, but my eyes aren’t good.’
‘There was another car on the bridge?’ says Pepa.
‘I don’t know. But it was red, whatever it was. Then Terry called me in.’
Staffe stands, remembers Gutiérrez driving up the track, behind Manolo’s red Bultaco.
‘Is that what made him crash?’ says Sandra Harbinson – and Terry suggests that Staffe and Pepa leave.
*
Staffe looks up from the bridge where Raúl perished. Sure enough, he can just see the Harbinsons’ cortijo between the chestnut trees. ‘How are you getting on?’ he asks Pepa.
She taps her computer notebook and says, ‘Like I thought, your friend Quesada was in the Guardia when Barrington was here. Then he moved away for a while.’
‘Where to?’
Pepa hands him the notebook, puts a red nail to the downloaded article on her screen.
Staffe reads it twice, taking in every detail. ‘So he went all the way to teniente on his watch here in sleepy old Almagen. That’s some progress.’
In 1990, Quesada, lance-corporal, had acquired information about a shipment of Ecstasy pills which was being brought across from Morocco on a pleasure craft, into the marina at Aguadulce. Quesada had been steadfast in refusing to disclose his source and the court eventually respected his right to protect his information. Shortly after, three traffickers were convicted and Quesada was promoted to sergeant. Thereafter, he continued to be a favoured son within the Guardia Civil.
‘Guess who wrote the article,’ asks Pepa.
‘Don’t tell me. Raúl Gutiérrez.’ Between the lines of his piece, Raúl suggested Quesada must have had a dubious relationship with dealers up in the mountains. ‘Our friend Quesada got fat on some local misfortunes and now he’s sitting pretty.’ Staffe hands back the computer and they walk towards the breach which the workmen had repaired. ‘I saw a rag down below the bridge. A blood-stained rag, and it disappeared.’
‘But Raúl died inside the car.’
‘Wearing his seat belt.’ Staffe stops, closes his eyes, remembers what he heard the day Raul died. ‘I am the Resurrection’, going round and round, then cut dead by the policeman who cut through Raúl’s seat belt.
‘What track is “I am the Resurrection”?’
‘It’s the last song.’
‘And “She Bangs the Drums”?’
‘Second track.’
‘There’s half an hour between the two.’ He looks up at the Harbinsons’, back down to the bridge. ‘From Edu’s to here – that’s not going to take more than ten minutes.’
Silent for a while – they each think about Raul and his car and his music‚ and Staffe contemplates the plight of the English. Earlier‚ before he met with Pepa‚ Staffe popped into CasaSol, the local estate agents.
CasaSol had overseen the sale of Paolo and Marie’s land. It had been owned by four siblings who now live in Malaga, Andorra and Madrid, and they had held out and held out for the best possible price and it nearly sold a year earlier, but at the last moment, an American had stepped in and made a better offer.
‘Jackson Roberts?’ Staffe had said.
‘How do you know? He didn’t buy it in the end,’ said the estate agent. ‘I knew the first time I saw him he didn’t have the money.’
‘Did he seem at all desperate?’ Staffe had said.
The estate agent had looked at him quite quizzically, said, ‘Yes, actually. How did you know?’
‘I didn’t,’ Staffe said. Now, he looks at Pepa and wonders how much of his sister’s affairs he wants to disclose to a journalist. He points at the bridge, where the workmen repaired it. ‘Just there. See the new concrete?’
‘It’s not big enough for a car to get through.’
‘No. But there was a collision.’ Staffe strokes the railings where the blue paint is grazed. ‘It was Raúl’s car. That missing paint is on his car. We can go down and I’ll show you.’
‘Show me what?’ says Pepa, peering into the barranco.
Staffe looks down. There is no car in the barranco. When he looks up, towards the Harbinsons’ house, an immaculately coiffured man with a Roman nose and waxed moustache is looking down on them. Staffe nudges Pepa, who waves up at the man.
Quesada waves back, then shuffles off.
Staffe says, ‘We need to find that car, and we need to speak to the coroner.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘And we need a photograph of that dead man in the plastic.’
‘My editor told me to steer clear of Raúl’s death.’
‘I know somebody we might be able to persuade. His name is Jesús.’
Fifteen
Staffe sifts through Raúl’s articles in La Lente’s web archive. From his computer in Almería’s Hotel Catedral, he searches a year either side of Quesada’s Ecstasy bust, but there is no further mention of Quesada, nor does it seem that Raúl took a particular interest in the Alpujarras. Quesada’s career had been newsworthy once, and only once.
He changes the search within the range of articles written by Raúl Gutiérrez from ‘Quesada, Almagen’, to ‘Quesada, Barrington’. The programme only runs by year, so each time he has to go back and forth, but each time, the outcome is ‘0 results for your search’. Before long, he has drawn a complete blank, having come up to present day and gone all the way back to when the digitalisation of copy had started.
Next, he tries the same with ‘Jackson Roberts, Almagen’, and gets nothing, but then he tries ‘Jackson Roberts, Hugo Barrington’. He gets ‘2 results for your search’.
The first is a routine report of the opening of an art exhibition in San José, thirty miles or so down the coast near Gabo. Beneath the headline ‘San José on the International Stage’ is a précis of the main contributors, a brief biography of the English painter, and a photograph, in which Barrington is a lean figure with waif shoulders but a strong jaw and narrow eyes. His hair is full and long for a man of his age and swept back. Beside him is Jackson Roberts, in a baggy-shouldered suit with a T-shirt beneath. He has what became known at the time as ‘designer stubble’ and a ponytail; is strikingly handsome. His arm is around Barrington. The two seem totally at ease. Alongside them is a large-featured, dark-haired woman with her arm around Jackson. At the other end of the foursome, like an awkward bookend, is Francisco ‘Rubio’ Cano.
The photograph is described by Gutiérrez thus: ‘The English painter with fellow artist, the American Jackson Roberts, and their friends Rubio Cano and his wife Astrid.’ Staffe prints off a copy of the photograph.
The second result is a report on Barrington’s funeral. The funeral took place in his ‘beloved’ Almagen. Jackson Roberts is again pictured and again has Rubio at his side, this time without the coffin. They both seem somehow distracted, amongst a crowd of people at the cemetery. Staffe squints at the computer screen, but can see no sign of Edu or Manolo, or Astrid. He also examines the image, o
f a long trail of people behind the coffin on the track up to the cemetery. In the background, beneath a walnut tree, stands Quesada. Again, he prints.
Staffe tries La Lente’s search facility for ‘Astrid Cano’ and comes up empty.
He closes down the tabs from all his searches and the La Lente home page reverts to a collage of its latest edition, flagging an imminent report of the full police statement on the ‘dead druggie in the plastic’. Across the bottom of the screen‚ the tickertape tells Staffe that the dead man is a thirty-eight-year-old Danish male called Jens Hansen who has a history of minor drug charges. He has no permanent address in either Denmark or Spain and the police have tried and failed to find any family to inform.
*
Marie can’t remember the last time the baby kicked, but she can feel it’s coming. She can also sense Harry growing ever more distant. Today, she drove down into the village to meet him from school. Whilst Gracia and her friends swarmed around, asking about the baby, Marie waited for Harry to come to her. She watched Rueben and his friends go off without saying a word to him, and she watched him watch them go. She wanted to take him to them and make them like him. Instead, Gracia tried to hold his hand and he had shrugged her away, came to his mother. She gave him lunch up at El Nido and then he took his gaming device and walked off, traversing the mountain.
All day, Paolo has been up in their wood. When they went to release their water from its reserve into the balsa this morning, nothing came. The balsa is empty.
Marie knows the baby will bring a new centre to their life and she tries to picture what it will be like. She is tired, but lately sleep has been hard to find, with the baby bearing down on her and last night, she went out onto the veranda and looked for the moon. She could have sworn she heard something in the wood. She told Paolo and he said she was imagining things.
Will had bought her a gross of nappies, but Paolo said you can’t get rid of them, they don’t degrade. She also has a pulveriser for when the baby wants more than her tit; and a pushchair. Paolo built a cot and spent weeks sanding it smooth. This is the extent of her preparations for the baby and now she gets a panicky feeling: that there is a whole host of things she has stupidly overlooked, but she realises the only thing that is utterly essential is the water. She looks across the mountain, and Harry is nowhere to be seen. She looks down towards the village, feels afraid.
She walks past the balsa and into Los Alamos. The stream is on the far side of the wood and she expects to hear Paolo digging or dragging rocks, but there is no sign of movement; as she becomes aware of the silence, she stops moving, lightens her breathing, takes one careful step after another – almost as if she is spying. Why would she do that? She should call him.
But she doesn’t.
Her eyes adjust to the dim light of the canopy; a faint rustle brushes the poplar leaves, and when it is spent, the wood is dead quiet again. There are no cicadas up here, unlike in the village.
As she takes small steps, a low sound emerges: in the heart of the wood, somebody moans. Marie thinks she sees a body hunched on a rock and she edges closer. Within a dozen smaller paces, she slows even more, seeing that the hunched figure is Paolo.
Marie keeps a wide berth, going higher so she can see exactly what is happening, and as she does, she finds herself above him. He has his back to her, which is what she wants in order to be able to see what he is doing, with whom, but all she can see is that his head is in his hands, his fingers busy in his hair, and now the moaning morphs into an utterance. And another. It sounds like ‘fuck’. Over and again, he says, ‘Fuck.’
She edges a couple of paces closer, determined not to be discovered until she knows what he is up to. She holds her breath, sees that he is looking down and to his right. Beyond him, and making its way to his feet, a thin trickle of water glimmers. She takes a final step, to be sure.
He has dug a channel, to divert the stream water to their balsa. Marie puts a hand to her mouth, gasps.
At his feet, in the channel, is a skeleton: the skull and shoulders embedded in the bank of the channel. The head seems to be looking at him. With its bone pressed to the earth in that manner, at that angle, the skeleton seems to be sitting up, begging.
Marie crouches down, sits on the stump of a felled tree. She presses the palm of one hand to the lump of the baby she carries. The other clasps her mouth and she wonders how this will affect her. Eventually, Paolo stands and covers the skull and shoulders with branches and twigs then moves off, into the light.
She goes to the skeleton, removes the branches. The head is curiously small and white as chalk, the shoulders thin and sharp. She thinks she can detect flesh where the pit of the arm ought to be and she feels sick. The baby kicks and she gasps.
Paolo calls her name, far away. She wants to scream. The baby kicks again, which she thinks must surely be a sign, but her head rules her belly and she resolves to keep quiet about this. Let him show his hand. As she retraces her steps, something gold flutters in the undergrowth. She bends, picks up a paper band of black and gold and puts it in the pocket of her elasticated jeans.
Marie scuttles across from the top of the wood to the goat shed behind the balsa, takes a milk jug, and works her way down. As she does, she sees Harry sloping across the sierra, his head down, like Christmas didn’t show up.
She sees Paolo, too. He has the telescope trained on her and she arranges the muscles of her face into a smile and jiggles the milk jug at him. Paolo waves back, comes to meet her.
‘How did you get on with your water?’ she asks, her heart beating hard.
‘Where were you?’
‘Getting some milk. I think the goat is off.’
‘I got the milk this morning.’
‘No wonder I came up dry.’
‘I told you I did it. We had a conversation.’
‘Tell me about the water.’
‘It’ll take a day or so.’
‘But you can do it?’
He steps close and holds her by the hips, feels her swollen tummy against him and whispers, ‘Trust me, baby.’
Over his shoulder, a disconsolate Harry stomps onto the terrace. ‘My batteries died.’ And in a filthy Alpujarreño accent, he shouts, ‘This whole place is dead, sons of whores.’
Sixteen
Staffe identifies his quarry, steps into the fat man’s path, saying, ‘Amodor Piquet?’
‘Who the hell are you?’ says Piquet, outside the coroner’s office down by Almería port. Piquet is the same height as Staffe, but with a bulging sack of a belly and a rush of curly brown hair.
‘I saw you down in the plastic where the Dane, Hansen, was murdered.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘And I knew Raúl Gutiérrez.’
‘So?’
‘There wasn’t much blood in the car.’
‘Of course there was.’
‘Raúl’s car hit the other side of the bridge. Explain that.’
‘Who do you think you are?’ Piquet pushes past Staffe.
‘Hansen was no run-of-the-mill drug killing. They say there is antagonism, down in the plastic. The farmers aren’t getting their water; not since the golf courses.’
Piquet is out of breath from the short walk to his car. ‘I am a busy man.’
‘Strange, then, that they allocate you such disparate bodies to pronounce upon. Why are you assigned to a car crash in Almagen?’
‘If you have anything to say, talk to the comisario.’
‘Sanchez? Actually, I want to see the police reports and the autopsy photograph of the Dane. Can that be arranged?’ Staffe takes out his wallet.
‘Go fuck yourself.’
‘I have friends in the press.’
‘Believe me, you don’t want to see those photographs. And there’s no way we would ever let them get out. You wouldn’t believe the state that poor bastard was in. It’s a miracle we got an ID.’
‘But you did. And the farmers still have no water. And up the road they charge a
hundred and fifty for a round of golf.’
‘All I can do is assign a cause. It is a pure truth, not like yours. They don’t afford me the luxury of speculation. I can’t flash my badge and bully people.’
Staffe steps aside, pocketing the new truth: Piquet knows he is police. How could he know that, when Staffe didn’t get as far as showing his warrant card? As Piquet gets into his car, Staffe says, ‘Is it true that the Dane was dead before they buried him?’
Piquet looks up at Staffe, his mouth open. He starts up the car and says, ‘You have proof?’
‘You have the proof.’
‘Precisely.’
*
Pepa is in the tiny comedor at the back of the Quinta Toro with Angel, the father of Jesús. He plies her with chicken livers in a rich, thick gravy with its hint of star anise.
She says, ‘You must be proud of Jesús.’
‘He is a bright boy. He will do well, but he could have had this.’ Angel places a hand on his shiny pate and gestures around him. ‘The way I had it from my father. Perhaps some day, if he does the right thing, it will be his. And there for his children.’
Pepa thinks of the way her brother, Hilario, followed his father into the sea. She looks around, thinks the Quinta Toro might not be quite what it was. There was a time when there’d be six staff on the go. Now, Angel seems to be managing with just one woman to help him in the kitchen.
‘There is something you wish Jesús to do?’ says Angel.
‘You know Manolo is missing?’
Angel shrugs. ‘He’s an independent one.’
‘You heard about the journalist who died?’
‘Of course – it was in Manolo’s village.’ Angel stops himself dead in his tracks. His eyebrows come to meet each other. ‘He was drunk, they say.’
‘He was a friend of mine.’
‘My God.’ Angel stares into nothing. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not convinced my friend Raúl died the way the police say.’