Death in the Sun

by Adam Creed

  ‘She sounded like you.’

  ‘Who sounded like me?’

  Staffe tries to weigh Pepa up. Today, she looks different: her hair is tied back; tight, three-quarter jeans; a crisp, white T-shirt and no make-up; a sheen on her neck and shoulders from the relentless heat. He thinks that here and now, she appears to be too young, too demure, to do what he fears she is capable of. He says, ‘There was a woman.’

  ‘Ask Jesús where I was.’

  ‘How long were you with him?’

  ‘You’re a cocksucker.’

  ‘I only said there was a woman.’

  ‘You said she sounded like me. What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’ll go.’ He puts on the shirt.

  Pepa laughs.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You look like someone from the fair.’ She opens the door to her wardrobe and his image angles back towards him – his purple track-suit bottoms and Pepa’s lemon shirt with the buttons popping; white flip-flops and two days stubble, bruising to his eyes. ‘A proper chorizo.’ She puts a hand on his forearm. ‘Let me take you to the hospital.’

  ‘I have to go back to Almagen.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Is that what the phone calls are about?’

  ‘They’re personal.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Don’t you have work to do?’

  ‘I’m doing it. My chief will blame me if anything happens to blacken Raúl’s name. I have to stay on top of this.’

  ‘Cover it up, you mean.’

  Pepa lets his comment slide, shakes her hair loose and tilts her head, brushing hard without the slightest grimace. ‘The English papers want the Barrington story. I can tie it into the demolitions, too. It will be a nice syndication fee for La Lente. As you know, they have a piece of me.’

  Staffe sits on the bed. He wants to sleep. The prospect of having to get a bus back up to the mountains, jostling with stinking men drinking rough wine and chomping on bocadillos de jamón doesn’t appeal.

  ‘I’ll pack,’ says Pepa, tossing her hairbrush onto the bed. ‘Feel free to use it,’ she smiles, going into her bathroom.

  The cliché about enemies being kept close strikes him, so he calls through to the bathroom, ‘When I get back, I need to be alone. For a few hours.’

  ‘I can amuse myself.’ She pops her head out. ‘And in the morning, we’ll get you to the local medico.’

  He puts his hand to his heart and remembers Jadus Golding. Sometimes, you trust people and it cuts you. But if you can’t trust anyone – what becomes of the world, and us in it? ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘And thank you.’

  She looks at him with wide, sad eyes.

  Staffe leans back, wonders if things can ever be the same, since Jadus Golding unloaded two bullets into his body. He closes his eyes, pictures his office in Leadengate, and Pulford and Pennington, Josie too. He’s not sure he can remember what she looks like: her nose, the line of her jaw, the fall of her hair, and the sound of her voice. But you can’t take people apart like that.

  The pictures fade to nothing. Next thing he knows, he jolts in his sleep and then Pepa is tapping him gently on the shoulder. He says, ‘Josie?’ feels something in his heart.

  Pepa says, with a husk in her voice, ‘Who’s Josie?’

  Staffe rubs his eyes.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says in a low, foreign tongue.

  *

  As Staffe rounds the track below the Los Alamos woods, he loses sight of Marie’s cortijo. His new phone vibrates and he opens it up, sees it is a text from Marie.

  dont go 2 house + dont call me. Keep left + low + come 2 wood on yr left. U will b watchd.

  He wants to call her, ask if she is all right and has anybody been to see her, but he does as he is told, his heart racing, and when he gets into the shade of the wood, he leans against a tree and wipes his sodden brow, lets his eyes adjust to the dark of the canopy.

  Staffe hears a whistle and tries to locate it. He hears it again and peers at where he thinks it is coming from. Something moves and he walks slowly, wary of where he treads. Soon, about fifty metres away, he discerns the shape of his sister. He stops dead. She is crouching.

  He moves higher, trying to glean whether she is on her own or whether she has company, but in his anxiety he takes his eye off the ground, steps on a dead branch and it cracks, high and loud, and he ducks, instinctively, squats in the parched undergrowth. Marie stands and he holds his breath. She raises an arm and he waits to see if anyone else shows their hand. She takes a step forward, coming towards him and he goes to meet her, not caring now if it is a trap. What else can he do?

  ‘Are you alone?’ he says.

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Marie steps right up to him, puts her head to his chest, which makes him wince but he swallows the pain as she begins to talk, her voice vibrating against his wound. ‘I don’t know why I thought something good could happen to me. Such an idiot, chasing this bloody stupid dream. That’s all it is – a pipe dream.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I told you there was a body. It’s buried in the earth, like he was standing up.’

  ‘My God.’

  Marie pulls away. ‘What happened to you, Will?’ She places a finger to his bruised face. ‘Who did this to you?’

  ‘A stupid fight.’

  She regards him intently, notices the petal of blood on his fresh shirt. ‘And what’s this?’ She puts a hand on his heart.

  A pinch of pain utters, like a semitone. ‘Does Paolo know about the body?’

  She nods.

  ‘He told you about it?’

  Marie shakes her head, her lip trembling. ‘No, I saw him looking at it but he said nothing to me about it. What’s become of us, Will?’

  ‘Is he at the house?’

  She shakes her head again, on the verge of tears. ‘I think he might be with Jackson. The police are watching the house. I saw them.’

  ‘Is it Quesada?’

  ‘I don’t know. I told you, I heard someone out here the other night. What will you do, Will?’

  ‘Show me the body.’

  Marie leads the way and watches as her brother picks at the soil around the bones. He does it for the best part of an hour, with just one finger and when he is done, he sits opposite the skeleton, just looking at it. The look on his face is familiar to Marie. A look from the past, another country.

  Eventually, Staffe takes his stolen phone out of his pocket, comes to her and she says, ‘You’re feeling the rush, aren’t you?’

  ‘Rush?’

  ‘You get off on this. That rush of the chase – but it could be us being chased.’

  ‘That’s why we have to take control,’ he says, calling Professor Peralta. He tells him what they have found and that he hasn’t told the Guardia Civil, but it’s only a matter of time before they know.

  ‘We must preserve the authenticity of the site. I have friends in the Cuerpo Nacional here in Granada. I’ll be there in the morning. And I’ll have company.’

  When Staffe hangs up, he is unsure as to whether he has taken a step towards the truth or – holding Marie’s hand as they go slowly in the deepening dusk to the cortijo – not.

  Eighteen

  Pepa looks out through the window of what used to be the animal quarters at the bottom of Staffe’s house. The room she is staying in is mainly below ground and its window affords a view of the forelocks of the neighbouring mules as they are loaded up for the trip down to the campo.

  She hears Staffe ease his front door closed and wonders where he is going at this hour, but she has her own agenda and his absence suits her fine. She watches the frayed hems of his jeans fandango between the mules.

  Manolo has been gone four days now and Staffe checks his friend’s front door. Satisfied that nobody is home, and checking around him to make sure he is not seen, he backtracks and clambers up onto the
track along the back of Manolo’s house, which nestles into a slope and from here, he can see onto the terrace at the back. It is where Manolo dries his peppers; his clothes, too. The wall at the back of the house is old, unrendered, and pitted with eroded stone.

  Staffe sticks his boot into a hole in the blockwork and lifts himself off the ground, reaching for another crack with his hand, and then another for his free boot. Two more moves and he feels the lip of the flat roof. As he stretches, he feels a zag of pain across his chest. He hauls himself up onto the roof, scratching his stomach and hooking his leg up over the slate edging and onto the mud and shale roof.

  From here, he can see across the roofs and terraces of his neighbours. He picks out his own, thinks he sees something on his terrace. Could it be Pepa? When he had left, there was no sign of life from her.

  Staffe steps carefully between the racks of drying peppers on the roof – propped up with rocks to make the best angle to the sun – and tests the hatch that leads into the house. It is closed from inside, but through its gauze he can see it is only held by a flimsy hook into an eye, so he puts his boot to the frame and the hatch swings inward.

  He goes in backwards, feeling with his feet for stairs that lead down. There are no windows in this room and it is cool, dark. The smell of jamón and fried peppers is ingrained; sweet and deep.

  The house is sparely furnished, with nothing on the walls in the hall and stairwell. Throughout, the tiled floors are highly polished. The place is brilliantly clean and as Staffe enters the main salon, he is astonished to see a fully loaded bookcase of novels and reference books.

  A fine shotgun leans against the bookshelf and Staffe takes it in hand, breaks it, sees it is unloaded and he snaps it back, weighing it up for balance. When he lines up the sights, something feels wrong. Perhaps it is not as fine a weapon as it appears. He places the stock on the floor again and rests the barrel against the bookcase, then sits in an armchair draped in a brightly coloured, woven throw. It is the only chair in a room not furnished for company.

  He regards the books on Manolo’s shelves. Lorca and Cervantes are here, and a giant, two-volume Collins Spanish–English dictionary. Amongst the prints on the walls is a framed certificate from the convent school in Mecina.

  Staffe stands, inspects the certificate, sees that Manolo had passed his obligatoria with distinction, gaining a bachillerato scholarship to the College of the Sacred Heart in Granada. From everything that Staffe knows about Manolo, he never attended Sacred Heart. He considers what he knows, for sure, about Manolo: how he came to be his friend. Certainly, the first meeting was at Manolo’s instigation – coming across to him, asking him about his background and soon discussing the English police he knew from the television, offering him drink after drink and producing proudly from a pocket his own, home-made black pudding. The friendship was truly cemented when Staffe had defended his new friend in that fight in Mecina.

  He looks across to the Bargueno desk, a beautifully carved chest on high, turned legs. He pulls down the wooden leaf to reveal a three-tiered bank of small drawers. In the left-hand drawer on the bottom row, Staffe removes an elegantly written invitation, embossed in gold leaf, inviting Manolo Cano to the funeral of Gustav Hesse.

  Gustav Hesse? The name is familiar. It is the same as on the document Staffe had concealed in Raúl’s roof. Manolo invited to the funeral‚ and Raúl hiding a copy of the last will and testament‚ of Gustav Hesse.

  *

  As soon as Pepa saw Staffe disappear through the hatch into Manolo’s house, she descended swiftly from his terrace and left, walking quickly along the edge of the lower barrio. She kept her head down and made her way along the acequia in accordance with the instructions she was given. The spiky reeds along the irrigation channel scratched her legs and twice she nearly fell, cursing aloud.

  Where the acequeia curves down and away towards the campo, Pepa makes an arc, through the olive grove, back into the village. Sure enough, a large house with a grand portal stands high, fitting the description. It has no number. The doorway is neoclassical and out of place, cracked down its plinth; the entire façade is flaked away. On the top floor, the rusted balcony sports fresh geraniums – the only clue that it may not be derelict.

  Again, as instructed, Pepa knocks once and waits; then knocks twice and steps back, looking up. A key descends, lowered on baling twine from the ironwork balcony.

  She lets herself in, smells cured, sweet animal fat, and the ingrained pall of burnt wood and thyme. She climbs the eroded, stone stairs.

  ‘To the top!’ calls Immaculada.

  ‘I’m coming,’ responds Pepa, and by the first landing, the mustiness has diminished. The stairwell becomes lighter and the house floods with the smell of fresh flowers. The walls are hung with woollen rugs and Moorish plates.

  ‘Here!’ calls Immaculada and Pepa gets her breath, looks around, following the light into an acotea where the old woman is rocking in a chair by the opening which looks across the wide valley to the Contraviesa mountains. To the left, Mount Gador reigns, like an autocrat.

  ‘You’re a skinny little thing,’ says Immaculada.

  Pepa puts down her bag and instinctively dips into the side pocket for her notebook and pen.

  ‘No,’ says Immaculada, placing her hands slowly to her head, running them deliberately around her face. ‘Nothing official. Not ever, you hear. This is purely for your understanding.’

  Pepa nods, replaces the tools of her trade.

  Immaculada is extremely thin and her hair is white and thick. Her eyes are watery but they glimmer. She is dressed in black – not the way the village widows dress but in a pinafore top and linen trousers. ‘I have made gazpacho. You will take some?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ says Pepa, taken aback. She thought Immaculada would be living up here in some kind of squalor – a woman in mourning, withdrawing into a dark past. Looking out of the acotea, she sees how verdant the campo is, despite the long, scorching summer. When Immaculada returns with the gazpacho, Pepa says, ‘You have a wonderful view.’

  Immaculada puts the tray down. ‘Of the future and the past.’ She hands Pepa a tumbler of the chilled soup and breathes heavily. ‘Hugo is out there.’ She says ‘Hugo’ like ‘You-go’, and points to a V-shape in the landscape where the sea comes and goes. ‘This lot’ – she stabs a thumb over her shoulder – ‘they live in the past. I don’t shy away from my future. I know what happens beyond this valley. Spain is new and the world is bigger than it ever was.’

  ‘Did he show you that?’

  Immaculada smiles. ‘He showed me everything.’

  A landscape painting hangs on the wall. The frame is splintered and the canvas is bleached by the weather. Pepa recognises the period it is from and knows that, whilst it is not the very best Barrington painted, were it well conserved it could fetch sufficient to buy an apartment in Gabo or San José and maybe enough left over to keep a maid.

  ‘It’s a beautiful painting. Were you together then?’

  ‘We were always together. And never. He needed space, and I never liked it up there or that awful Tangier.’

  ‘Up where?’

  ‘In those cortijos. That’s a man’s world.’

  ‘Did you go to Tangier?’

  ‘I went once.’

  ‘With your daughter?’

  Immaculada’s eyes glaze over and she looks up towards Gador. ‘His later work, I’m not so sure about. They say it is magical. So magical it disappeared.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘For a foreign market. He said he was painting one for me, but it never materialised. He never lied to me. Not once. I knew everything he was up to when he and Rubio went off.’

  ‘It would be worth a fortune, if there was another painting. A last Barrington,’ Pepa ventures.

  ‘For what purpose? I won’t be here for ever.’

  ‘What about your daughter? She is your one and only?’

  ‘The first and last, poor thing. I devoted
myself entirely.’

  ‘To your daughter?’

  Immaculada smiles, with sadness in her glimmering eyes. ‘When you say “no” all your life – that is a pure love. And Guadalupe is a pure love. His legacy.’

  Pepa wants to ask about Barrington’s other lovers, wants to know how he coped with being so adored. Instead, she says, ‘You must love Guadalupe very much.’

  ‘I am not a good mother. In fact, I am something of a bad witch when it comes to family.’

  ‘Your father was mayor.’

  ‘He deserved better than the children he got.’

  ‘Your brother, Edu, didn’t get on with Hugo?’

  ‘Edu was too busy trying to fill my father’s shoes to give Hugo a chance.’

  ‘He wants to be mayor?’

  ‘He thinks sitting under a tree with an olive net and a bottle will do it. The things we crave can be our greatest curse and he blamed Hugo for his own failings.’

  ‘Perhaps Edu was being protective. You know what brothers can be like.’

  ‘He was ashamed of me and I’m sure he still is. Sometimes I think it’s because he couldn’t find a love of his own, he tried to destroy mine. But you came to talk about Hugo. Did he do something terrible? What made you come now?’ Immaculada plays with her crucifix, which is white gold and like a tiny Modigliani – a wiry Jesús nailed to his cross. She seems to drift away, to another place. ‘Hugo didn’t believe. The only bad thing he ever did was to question that. I think he might have been a little jealous of my faith.’ She dabs her eye with the cuff of her pinafore top. ‘So I forgive him.’

  ‘For what?’

  Immaculada purses her lips and sets her jaw, looks straight at Pepa. ‘I stopped believing for a while. A short while, but that’s when everything went wrong. I have made my peace.’ She drinks her gazpacho in small swallows, keeping her mouth to the lip of the terracotta tumbler and slowly tipping it higher and higher. She deliberately sets down the tumbler on an inlaid, Moroccan coffee table, wipes her mouth with the back of her index finger, and says, ‘I’m not long for the world.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Pepa.

  ‘I only hope I can be forgiven.’ She hands Pepa a piece of paper‚ makes the pass with trembling fingers, suddenly looking weak, as if she is running out of fuel. ‘You know, I remember Raúl. I would have spoken to him if I could. There’s not many you can trust. I hope you are the same, and I will never see my name in black and white.’