Death in the Sun

by Adam Creed

  ‘But that was up in the mountains. Jesús is in Almería.’

  ‘You’re his father, Angel. Can’t you ask him to help me? Your nephew is missing. Sometimes, two plus two is four.’

  ‘That Dane, Hansen, who died in the plastic was a druggie. Bad things come to people like that. My Jesús didn’t join the force to save lost souls. No good will come of this.’ He stands. ‘But if Manolo is missing . . .’ He looks at his phone, clicks a button, and says, ‘I’ll tell Jesús. But now, I must get on.’

  As Pepa goes, she can still taste the chicken livers. She will be back for more, some other day. In the meantime, she calls the Cuerpo headquarters, not content to wait and see if Angel bothers to trouble his son.

  *

  Staffe shades his eyes from the high sun and makes his way up the alleyway to Raúl’s flat, looks up at the room which bridges each side of the small street. What a place for a journalist to write about the world, looming above it like that, its people passing beneath.

  His phone rings and he sees it is Marie. His heart stops for a moment. ‘Is it the baby?’ he says.

  ‘I’ve seen something,’ whispers Marie. ‘Can you come?’

  ‘I’m in Almería.’

  The line falls silent.

  ‘What is it?’ he says.

  Marie whispers so quietly he can almost feel her breath. ‘Can you come tonight?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘You must. But call first. I’ll make sure Paolo isn’t here. I can send him to the village.’

  ‘What’s he done? I’ll . . .’

  ‘Nothing, Will. I don’t think it’s him.’

  ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s a body, Will.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I have to go.’

  He stares at the phone, sees she has gone. He tries to call her back but as he waits for the connection, someone comes out of Raúl’s building and he holds the door for them. It is a woman with a pushchair. He fusses over the baby, waves them off, and sidles in, stealing up the stairs. On the first floor landing, he reaches up to the lintel, feels for a key, pulls down the plum.

  Staffe lets himself in quickly because someone is coming in through the main door. Their steps echo up the stone stairwell and he reaches up, replaces the key and holds his breath. Inside, he goes straight to the study and draws the curtains closed, checking as he does that nobody in the street can see.

  *

  Jesús is at the police compound up the coast on the road out towards Gabo. He looks at the red Alfa and immediately sees the two blue stripes on the passenger side that the journalist had mentioned. He has seen the photographs of the bridge up in the mountains, knows that anyone who cared could glean that the car must have hit the bridge on the opposite side and at the wrong end from where it had breached the bridge and plunged into the barranco.

  ‘What you up to?’ says a mechanic in overalls, ambling towards him with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wipes a spanner on his thigh and looks at the tool, then at Jesús. ‘I’m going to crush that thing. We’ve stripped it for parts.

  The wheels are off the Alfa and Jesús sees they’ve had the radio and the steering wheel.

  ‘I said, what you up to?’

  Jesús wonders what he is up to, but the Englishman is his uncle’s friend, and now his uncle is missing. Last night, his father had sat in his chair rocking back and forth, looking at photographs of the family, some with Manolo as a boy. When he was done, Angel had said, ‘Jesús. You have to take care of this. For the family,’ and he had gone to bed, leaving Jesús to leaf through the album. He had forgotten what his father looked like with hair. Jesús has masses of strong, wavy hair and he wondered what his toll will be.

  ‘I need to look in the car.’ The window on the driver’s side is smashed and Jesús pokes his head in, jags of glass just inches beneath his throat. There is no splatter of dried blood on the pillar, where Raúl’s head would have impacted and no significant blood projections on the passenger seat, roof or dashboard consistent with the amount of blood that soaked Raul’s tattered shirt. ‘Did you clean this up? Was there more blood than this when it first came to you?’

  ‘I wasn’t told anybody would be round snooping.’

  ‘I only want to know the car’s condition.’

  The mechanic taps the spanner against his leg.

  Jesús says, ‘You were told to get rid of this car quick, right?’

  The mechanic smiles, takes a step closer.

  Jesús backs away, tips his cap, says, ‘It’s all right. I’ve seen what I came for.’ He turns his back and walks away, but as he gets into his car, the man with the spanner is onto the phone. Jesús sighs, wonders what he has allowed himself to become involved in.

  He drives away, watching the mechanic fade in his rear-view mirror. Ahead of him, a few hundred yards away, the journalist waits. As he approaches, she raises her sunglasses, perches them in her hair. Her hair is glossy black and the breeze blows it across her face. She brushes it away and when she sees it is him, he could swear her eyes light up. It makes him fluttery in the stomach. But what should he tell her?

  Jesús drops the glove compartment and puts the police report and the photograph of Hansen, the battered Dane, away.

  ‘What did you see?’ asks Pepa. She rests her bottom on the bonnet of his car and crosses her legs at the ankle.

  ‘Nothing new, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Were they pleased to see you?’

  ‘They’re only interested in what they can get for a wooden steering wheel.’

  ‘You didn’t stick around for long.’

  He wants to ask if she would come to dinner with him. He wonders what her words might sound like, soft in his ear – further down the line. ‘The car has been scrapped.’

  ‘And what about the police report on Raúl?’

  ‘What about the report?’ She has a dimple on the top of her cheek, like the slash a baker puts in his dough.

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

  ‘I’m a journalist. You will never be named. Not ever.’

  ‘I should know more.’ He shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘So take me for dinner.’

  ‘You’ll come out with me?’

  ‘Do you think I should trust a policeman? Especially a shy one.’

  ‘I’m not shy.’

  ‘Then you’re deceiving me.’ She stands up, reaches into the back pocket of her skirt, and pushes a piece of paper into his chest, presses her fingers on him as she says, ‘Call me and we can talk properly, but bring the report, and a photo of the Dane, if you can.’

  When she is gone, he gets the report from the glove compartment, reads it again. Gutiérrez’s clothes were stained with significant spatterings of blood, yet there was very little blood on the fabric and frame of the car. He knows this because it was on the first report he read, but not the final, official report to which the coroner referred in his ultimate declaration.

  And as for Piquet’s declarations, Jesús looked at the report for the other body – the Dane in the plastic. The man had a dislocated jaw, broken nose and a fractured eye socket. Six of his ribs were cracked.

  Jesús thinks twice, concerned at the transparency of when the coroner’s report claims things happened.

  On 15 August – the day of the fiesta of the Virgin of the Sea – the Dane’s body was found and Jesús was called down to the plastic. Most of his colleagues were on annual leave, or tied up on fiesta duties. Fortunately – or not – he was close by, having attended a family dinner not a mile from where the Dane died, but it was not until the early hours of the 17th that the body was eventually removed from the plastic and taken to the Coroner. Jesús’s instructions even when he arrived at the scene shortly after the ambulance, had been clear. Under no circumstances at all was the body to be interfered with until Comisario Sanchez had come back from Majorca. Sanchez was holidaying with his family and he
got the first available flight. But that didn’t stop the coroner dating his report ‘15 August’.

  *

  Staffe scrutinises the Barrington on Raúl’s wall. From the little he has managed to learn, it hails from Barrington’s middle period: still figurative, but experimenting with colour – not as much as in his later works.

  He thinks that this painting might have been painted around 1980, when Raúl would have been a junior reporter. Even then, Barrington was a known artist and his work was collectable. The painting would have cost him many months’ salary. Of course, he could have inherited some money. Or he could have received it as a gift – were he an acquaintance, or something more.

  Staffe sits in Raúl’s chair, at the desk from where you can see the top of the colonial façade of the Maritime Building. He looks for something he might have missed last time. The desk is Dutch and the oak is light, the patina beautifully deep and unblemished. It is a desk that has been loved. He pulls out the top drawer and it slides easily, comes all the way out, banging into his shins. A ream of blank paper falls to the floor and Staffe curses, then something else hits him. The drawer is too short.

  He runs his hand along the desk, the way you might a lover’s shoulder in their sleep. He places the top drawer carefully on the floor. Then he pulls the bottom drawer all the way out and places it upon the top drawer. The bottom drawer is six inches longer.

  Staffe stretches, takes a firm hold of the lips of either side of the writing surface, and heaves the top of the desk from its pedestals. He twists, places it on the floor, and feels a tweak in his side, rubs it, looking down on the frame of the desk, seeing what he wants.

  To the rear of the top drawer is a secret compartment. He slides his hand in and feels around, but there is nothing there. He leans right over and squints into the dark void, sees an unevenness in the surface and runs his hand along again. His fingers snag and he takes a grip, yanks away a cardboard folder which was taped to the back of the front surface of the void.

  Staffe holds his breath as he opens the folder, removes a series of photographs. One, he has seen before, it is the image from the exhibition with Roberts and Barrington, Rubio and the beautiful, dark Astrid. There is another picture of her alone, her eyes heavy and her smile far away. She is wearing a burnous and there are mountains behind, a sugar-cube village nestled into the fold of a mountain which could almost be the Alpujarras – except the houses are painted the lightest indigo. Clearly, it is North Africa.

  In another photograph, Rubio and Jackson Roberts stand with a matching pair of Bultaco scrambling bikes, the red petrol tanks faded by the years. In the background, Barrington looks on from beneath a wide-brimmed, straw hat.

  He flicks through, pulling out a photocopy of a marriage certificate, between Francisco Cano and Astrid Hesse in Hannover, 1973, and the certification of Manolo Cano, son of Astrid and Francisco. Why would Raúl have gone to such lengths to secrete public documents?

  There is a noise in the hallway below, or maybe on the stairs. There are more papers and he flicks through them quickly, not even time for his heart to flutter as he sees cuttings which cover the death of his parents and the flight of Santi Etxebatteria. Such a random clutch of articles, with only one thing to bring them together.

  Quickly and quietly, he returns the drawers to the carcass and lifts the writing surface back onto the pedestals.

  The outside door to the apartment creaks. Then it is silent. He thinks it must be Pepa. She would be wary, entering Raúl’s apartment. He could call her name, but what would he gain? A piece of paper lies on the floor. He must have dropped it and he picks it up – a folded and sealed document with a Germanic lexicon, saying ‘Letzter Wille und Testament von Gustav Hesse’. He quickly opens the window and reaches down, feeling for a gap in the flashing where the roof tiles meet the stone ledge of the window. He shoves the document into the gap as firmly as he can and closes the window as the door handle turns.

  Staffe dashes behind the door, holds his breath, pressing his back to the wall. The door unclicks, then a whole wall of darkness comes straight at him, fast, his nose cracking, his legs giving way. He sinks to his knees and the door bashes into him again, cracking the side of his head.

  The heavy door swings mightily into him again, and again. His chest seizes. The floor rises to meet him and the door catches him full on the skull. Before the lights go out completely, the scent of cologne.

  Seventeen

  Staffe blinks and his eyelids scratch the lens of his eyes. When he squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again, rings of yellow project onto what he thinks must be a blindfold.

  He smells cologne, says, ‘Quesada? Quesada, is it you?’

  There is no reply and he pushes himself up so he is sitting and shuffles back, feeling what might be a wall against his shoulders, then his back. It is cold and he feels his bare chest with his hand. He hears water running and then his breath is taken completely away as the water is thrown onto him. ‘Bastards!’ he shouts, then a slap across his face and a woman shouting, ‘Shut up!’ She has a husk to her voice and he thinks it might be familiar.

  ‘Pepa?’ he says, quietly. ‘Is it you?’

  The woman laughs, says nothing but someone takes a hold of his hair. A profound, dull weight presses on his chest. He twists and they pull him flat to the floor, holding his legs, then an excruciating pain to his heart.

  He shouts, can’t stop himself, and realises they have something pressed to the thin scar tissue that is taut and fresh over his wound. They press harder and he bites back on the scream.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ says the woman.

  ‘What did you find?’ says a man. He can’t place the voice.

  They press his scar tissue harder until he can’t bear it. He struggles to breathe, thinks he is going to faint, then loud in his ear, ‘You let this lie, Guilli. We know you.’

  And he passes out.

  *

  He can see. A patch of sky above is brilliantly blue and he can smell ozone. He is swelteringly hot and his chest is sticky. He blinks his eyes and forces himself up, sees that he is nude save his boxer shorts. His chest is brown and flaking with dried blood. ‘Bastards,’ he says, flinching, seeing that his wound is weeping. Looking around, he is surrounded by the plastic of a large, dilapidated greenhouse. Beside him, a hole has been dug in the ground – big enough to fit a kneeling man.

  Staffe senses someone is present and he looks around. There is an opening in the plastic that gives onto the scrubland sloping down to the dirty beach. Between him and the opening is the African in his burnous. It is blue and yellow and he is black and blue. One of his eyes is swollen. He is shaking and his nose is askew.

  He remembers what the two Moroccans had said about this man: that nothing could hurt him. Staffe stands, staggers across to the man in the burnous, says, ‘Who was it?’

  The African shakes his head.

  Staffe moves closer to the African, but from behind him, the tall Moroccan in the Bulls vest shouts, ‘Stay away from him.’ He strides across to Staffe, a machete hanging by his leg. He takes hold of Staffe and pulls him away. The sun glints off a ruby stud in the youth’s ear.

  In his home, made from pallets and corrugated sheets, the Bulls youth gives Staffe a pair of torn, purple flannel track-suit bottoms. Staffe’s mind spins to the phone call he had from his sister. Her number would be the last call in his phone. His device surely in the hands of people who had practically plucked at his heart. ‘I need a phone. Do you have a phone?’ he says to the Bulls youth.

  ‘I don’t have much credit.’

  ‘Just one call. Please.’

  The Bulls youth shakes his head.

  Staffe forces a look of c’est la vie, thanks the Bulls youth for the trousers, and holds out his hand. The Bulls youth takes it and they shake, his machete still hanging loose and Staffe sees a glimmer of humanity in this man’s eyes and clinches that moment, biting his lip against the pain and with the three middle fin
gers of his free hand, he jabs the Bulls youth in the throat, thrusts his knee into the balls, just missing the blade of the machete, hearing it fall, watching the Bulls youth bend double. He puts a foot on his throat, reaches down, puts his hand into the youth’s pocket, and says, ‘Sorry. I really am sorry. I will compensate you.’

  He takes the man’s wallet and phone and machete, then ties him to the iron stove that has been made from old truck wheels welded together. Staffe says, ‘Really, I’m sorry, but I have no choice. Really, I don’t.’

  Then he thinks of Marie, up in the mountains with another body.

  *

  Pepa grimaces as she dabs the iodine-soaked lint into Staffe’s reopened wound. His bottom lip is white from the continued biting. He gasps, looks as if he might faint again, and she says, ‘I think it’s clean, but we need to get you to the hospital.’

  Staffe looks at the phone he took from the Bulls youth. He feels a stab of guilt, then a slow wave of fear. Marie still hasn’t responded to his calls and texts. He says to Pepa, ‘Where were you today?’

  ‘Who are you calling?’ she says, folding the lint so she has a clean corner, pouring more iodine.

  ‘They won’t answer.’ He waits for her to look up. ‘Like you.’

  ‘I told you before. I was with the young policeman.’

  ‘And what did he have for you?’

  ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something to do with the police report. He won’t show it me, but I’m sure he has a copy.’

  ‘You have good relations with the police.’

  ‘It’s a thin line. They are cautious of me – you must know that.’

  ‘I know a journalist can be a friend as well as an enemy. So, is there anything you haven’t told me?’

  ‘No!’

  Staffe takes her hand. ‘How would they have known I was at Raúl’s?’

  Pepa pulls her hand away and gives the lint to Staffe. She goes to her wardrobe and picks out the biggest blouse she has, throws it to him. ‘I don’t like what you’re implying.’