Death in the Sun

by Adam Creed

  Quesada hands Staffe a clutch of clear evidence bags. ‘I’ve done it.’

  Staffe examines the items: a picture of Astrid, embracing Manolo. He must have been fourteen: just before she ‘went missing’. Over a thousand euros in large-denomination notes. Finally, a small roll of high-strength baling twine.

  ‘You have seen that before?’ says Quesada.

  Staffe nods, remembering how the body in the plastic had been trussed into its kneeling position, the twine cutting into the neck. ‘Do you know anything about the other druggie who was washed up?’

  ‘In Mojácar?’ says Quesada. He shakes his head.

  ‘Manolo was my friend,’ says Staffe, breaking down. ‘I’d like a moment alone.’

  Quesada takes back the evidence bags. ‘A moment.’

  The instant Quesada leaves, Staffe rushes into the next room. He steps over his friend’s body, saying a prayer but he keeps on moving, lifting the lid on the chest and rummaging quickly for Gustav Hesse’s will. It’s not there. Outside, the horn toots. He empties the chest, checks again, then hears footsteps coming back into the cortijo. He piles everything back into the trunk and leaves, none the wiser, but knowing for certain that whatever is in that will, is worth concealing.

  *

  Staffe knows that Pepa will be on her way to Mojácar, and would have taken the last Barrington. He leans the red Bultaco against the gatepost of Edu’s cortijo, watches the lights to Quesada’s Land Rover dim and die. Getting out of his Land Rover, Quesada withdraws his pistol from its holster. He has a tremor in his voice when he says, ‘I have never killed a man.’

  ‘You surprise me‚’ says Staffe.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’ Even with all the death that has crossed Staffe’s path, he is still unable to imagine what it demands – to take a life. Save one. Save Santi Etxebatteria. So often, he has fantasised that bloody murder.

  ‘But you’d like to? Let me warn you, my friend, Etxebatteria is not to be touched. ETA have surrendered arms and it’s not the time to rattle his cage.’

  Standing on the terrace, Staffe looks at Edu’s door. He thinks back to the long, lazy afternoons they spent here, when Edu would tell him about his crops and the Contraviesa wine. And he thinks, too, about all the more important things that Edu never talked about: his sister; her lover – the man whose body he carried to be buried. He says to Quesada, ‘Why did Edu carry Barrington’s body at his funeral, if he hated him so?’

  ‘Perhaps he was happy to see the man buried. Or maybe he did it for his sister. I prefer the second option. And he is from a proud family. His father was the mayor and his father before him. As you know, all he wanted was to be mayor himself.’ Quesada lifts the latch. ‘But if he was involved in some forgery scam, we’ll find out.’ He kicks open the door and follows the barrel of his gun into Edu’s cortijo.

  Inside, it is dark and Staffe hesitates. Two flashes light up the interior of Edu’s cortijo. He thinks Quesada’s pistol has fired twice. The sound is deafening and Staffe throws himself to the floor, screams as he jolts his bad shoulder. Quesada is breathing heavily and he fires another single shot, illuminating a body, swinging from the poplar beams above where the dining table used to be. Then the body falls. It slaps the stone floor like a beast in a butcher’s back room.

  Quesada flicks on the light and Staffe, prostrate on the cold floor, looks Edu in the eye. His face is blue, his eyes are open wide and his tongue is fat and black.

  ‘You were firing at the rope,’ says Staffe. ‘Good shot.’

  Quesada sits heavily upon a straw-seated chair and sighs. ‘How the hell will I account for all this?’

  *

  Jesús approaches Pepa, looking over his shoulder. He says, ‘They’re moving the body in the morning. I don’t think we’ll get to see it before it goes to Almería.’

  ‘You have to do better than that, Jesús.’ Pepa leans into him, whispering. ‘I think that body is your primo.’

  ‘Manolo!’

  She puts an arm around his shoulder, her hand on the V of hair at the nape of his neck. ‘We have to find out.’

  ‘I don’t even know the people at the morgue down here,’ says Jesús, his voice cracking.

  Pepa keeps her hand on his neck. ‘You have to try and get us in there.’

  ‘I have to make a call first,’ says Jesús, moving towards the lobby of the parador.

  ‘What’s wrong with your mobile?’

  ‘A landline will be better. I don’t want anybody getting their wires crossed.’

  Pepa doesn’t quite understand why he is being so cautious – who it is that he doesn’t want to catch the scent – but she is pleased he is gone and she hastens to his car, intent. When she is done scrutinising the contents of his glove compartment, she gets the rolled-up rug from the Cinquecento’s back seat and waits for him by his car. So far, she has everything she needs.

  *

  Staffe rubs his shoulder and looks at the Bultaco. Riding it down from Manolo’s cortijo to Edu’s had been the worst of it, surely. He pops another Ibuprofen.

  ‘I wish I could give you a lift, but as you can imagine, I have some paperwork to get into.’ Quesada walks to Staffe, slaps him on his good shoulder and wraps his big arms around him, squeezes him tight, and says, ‘Thank God, we can have some peace, finally. You have done well, my friend.’

  Staffe still feels sick and hollow from discovering Manolo – and now Edu. ‘Pease’ is the wrong world. ‘We can rest once we know who exactly is buried in that wood.’

  ‘Sometimes, in our job we have to draw a line, call something finished. When will you be back?’

  ‘As soon as I can. I’m going to be an uncle again, don’t forget.’

  ‘I’ll make sure Marie is in good shape. The medico is a good friend. She isn’t on her own.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Staffe. ‘But there’s no need.’ He wraps his leg over the Bultaco’s ruby-red petrol tank.

  ‘Take it easy with that shoulder.’

  Staffe kicks it into first and looks up. The moon is small tonight, but full.

  ‘Maybe you should go in the morning.’

  Staffe says nothing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He thinks about Yousef and the shanty where he lives. He must get some cash to give to the man with the Chicago Bulls vest. Staffe slowly lets the clutch go, pain firing up his arm.

  The Bultaco’s headlamp lights the trail up for fifty metres or so. He expects the darkness to swallow him up, but the headlamp shows each curve as it sneaks up. Soon, Almagen reveals itself. Far away, between the mountains and the sea, Almería’s soft electric glow lights the sky.

  Thirty

  Jesús assures the night porter that he will procure a disability car-parking badge for his mother and the man shows Jesús and Pepa into the tiny morgue which the police use in the basement of the Immaculada hospital on the eastern fringe of Mojácar.

  The porter pulls out the stretcher, says, ‘You can have two minutes. They’ll be coming soon to take it to Almería for autopsy.’ Pepa raises her eyebrows towards Jesús. She mouths the name ‘Sanchez’.

  Jesús says, ‘Wouldn’t this normally go to the morgue in Vera?’

  The porter shrugs.

  With her finger and thumb, Pepa pinches the sheet covering the cadaver and slowly pulls it down, revealing the greyed, gaunt face; the soul has long since fluttered away. This is simply the casings of what used to be a life. A breath gusts away from her. She makes sure that her body is between the porter and the corpse, sneaks out her phone, raises it.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ hisses Jesús.

  Pepa clicks the camera. She leans towards the body, scrutinising, sees there is no piercing to the nose. But even so, she thinks, he’s a dead ringer, for the images she has seen, of the Dane, Jens Hansen.

  She replaces the sheet and thanks the porter, says, ‘When they come to take this body, tell them it is a man called Jens Hansen. Tell them he is from Denmark and if
they don’t let his parents know, they will burn in hell.’ She smiles at the porter. ‘Got it?’

  The porter smiles back, grateful for the fact that his job has been brightened, this one night. He watches the young woman go, all the way to the stairs, and he says the name, ‘Jens Hansen,’ committing it to memory.

  *

  Staffe leans the Bultaco against the wall of Raúl’s building. He looks up at the study, bridging two buildings above the alley. Staffe walks backwards until he can see the bottom ledge of the mansard window, beneath which he had stashed the package containing Gustav’s will. In the moonlight, he can’t see if it is still there.

  To his right, the wall rises sheer, three storeys. Impossible to scale. To his left, a two-metre wall seems to give onto a small garden. The wall runs up to Raúl’s building so he wheels the Bultaco to the wall. Here and there, the sounds of dogs and carousing breaks the stillness.

  Staffe climbs onto the seat of the Bultaco and then onto the wall. Slowly, he balances, stands upright and walks gingerly towards Raúl’s study. A metre away, his footing slips and he throws himself forward, reaching at full stretch, grabbing the downpipe that runs down past the window to Raúl’s studio. It is metal and his hand slips, but snags on the lipped joint where the pipe feeds down to the street. His legs swing, night air all around him now and just the flimsiest grip, but he goes with the swing, manages to hook his ankle onto the window ledge.

  Now, straining to look up, he sees the package he had stashed. His grip on the drainpipe falters, though, and his shoulder feels as if it might pop out again. He can’t take the pain and the drop is twelve, fifteen feet. With a final effort, he kicks out at the package, dislodges it. His grip gives way and he tries to right himself, mid-air.

  The package slides down the roof, stops on the guttering.

  Staffe falls, the street rising fast to meet him, and he grabs at the wall, manages to straighten himself and his arm scrapes down the render. His feet compact as he hits the ground and he crumples onto his back, hears his body slap the cobbles and rolling to protect his shoulder. Looking up at the night, he sees the last will of Gustav seeming to flutter, as if it could fly away, whisper its secrets to the wind.

  Then it falls. It floats to earth, lands on Staffe’s chest.

  *

  The youth in the Bulls vest holds an eight-inch chef’s knife and has two friends with him on the fringe of their shanty. It is the break of dawn but they seem set for business. One holds a piece of wood and the other a metal baseball bat with the tarnished lettering of ‘Louisville Slugger’ running its length. They form a semicircle and edge towards Staffe one pace at a time.

  ‘I am here to repay my debt,’ says Staffe. On the way, he stopped at the 24-hour Copo and picked up a prepaid mobile with fifty euros of credit. He also went to the cash point, took out a thousand euros using each of his cash cards. He put five hundred up the crack of his arse, just in case this all goes horribly wrong.

  He tosses the phone, still in its thermosealed and super-sturdy plastic casing. The Bulls youth knows better this time and steps aside, lets the phone drop to the floor.

  ‘It’s real,’ shouts the boy with the baseball bat. He squints at the label. ‘It’s got fifty credit on it!’

  ‘He owes me more than that.’

  ‘And I’ve got more than that,’ says Staffe, reaching into his right pocket, pulling out four fifty-euro notes. ‘I’m “sorry” for what I did the other day. But I had no choice.’

  ‘Your honour is worth two hundred? What kind of a man are you?’

  Staffe goes in his other pocket, pulls out five twenties. ‘There! You’ve cleaned me out.’

  The Bulls youth tells the other boy to get it and he scampers up to Staffe, pulls the money from his hands.

  ‘Right,’ says the Bulls youth. ‘We’ll soon be even.’ He holds the knife out in front of him and the other two talk nervously in patois French. Staffe tries to engage the Bulls youth, but his eyes are flitting, this way and that, and then an almighty thud rings out. The youths look around and one of them screams, falls to the ground clutching his head. He is bleeding and Staffe looks all around them, quite slowly, sees Yousef on a rock above the shanty twirling a length of leather in the air. He loads another pebble into his slingshot, has a brace of partridge slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Yousef!’ calls Staffe. ‘Stop!’ He picks up the phone and hands it to the Bulls youth, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’ As he hands it to him, he checks out the ruby stud in the youth’s ear, says, ‘I like your jewel. Where’d you get it?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘I’d like to buy it – if I can.’

  He shrugs again, holding out his hand for the other youth to hand across the three hundred.

  Yousef appears at Staffe’s side and he flicks the Bulls youth’s ear with his sling. He does it with such deftness that the butterfly grip floats in the air.

  Staffe goes into his back pocket for two hundred, says, ‘And now, you really have fleeced me.’ He holds it out.

  The Bulls youth smiles and reaches for the money.

  Staffe makes a fist, concealing the notes. ‘Tell me where it came from.’

  Yousef flicks him again and the Bulls youth’s knife twitches. Nothing more.

  ‘The dead body?’ says Staffe.

  The youth nods.

  Staffe unfurls his fist and the youth takes his loot, hands over the evidence.

  *

  Staffe is drinking char in Yousef’s shack when Pepa and Jesús arrive. Yousef is pleased to see Pepa, who sits cross-legged beside him. He looks at Jesús as if he is the enemy. She wraps both hands around her tea, blowing into the metal cup. ‘Jesús is helping us. We know what happened, now.’ She nods towards the sea and the plastic greenhouse where the murder took place.

  Pepa opens an envelope and removes two ten-by-eight photographs of the dead man that Yousef and his young neighbour in the Bulls vest discovered that day a fortnight ago. ‘This is him?’

  Jesús says, ‘Where did you get that? That’s a police photograph?’

  ‘It was in your car. I was looking for a lighter,’ says Pepa. ‘We agreed to share our information. Remember?’ She turns to Yousef. ‘Is it him? The dead man?’

  Yousef nods.

  Pepa places a finger on one image. The photograph is a close-up of the corpse’s face: horribly bruised but it is clear from the photograph that the nose is pierced in its left nostril, but unadorned. ‘There was a ruby here?’

  ‘This ruby,’ says Staffe, holding out the gem the Bulls youth had been wearing.

  Yousef nods again, his mouth sad, his eyes enquiring.

  She says, ‘This man is called Agustín Cano.’

  ‘No!’ says Jesús. ‘You can’t tell who it is. Look at the state of him.’

  ‘Why’d they kill him?’ says the youth in the Bulls vest.

  ‘You’re better off not knowing,’ says Staffe.

  ‘You shouldn’t have those photographs,’ says Jesús.

  ‘Surely you would have been able to see it was Agustín. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Jesús says, ‘I didn’t know what I was dealing with‚ and that’s the truth.’

  Pepa says to Yousef, ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘He’s going home,’ says the Bulls youth.

  ‘You must travel safely.’

  ‘He has money. He has thousands. Me? I’m going to America. That’s the next stop for me.’ The Bulls youth taps his chest with a clenched fist, on the ‘O’ of Chicago.

  Pepa says to Yousef, ‘Is there anything you need?’

  He shakes his head, clasps her hands and slowly bows his head.

  ‘He’s going tomorrow. In a week, he will be with his family again,’ says the Bulls youth.

  ‘Why did they cut his tongue?’ says Pepa.

  ‘He talked too much, I guess. Most times, it’s better to say nothing – at least in our world.’

  *

  Staffe travels with Pepa
and Jesús back into the city, mindful that they have the Barrington. Jesús would have to work until he was a hundred to earn what the painting might fetch. A few hundred metres from the plastic, they pass the El Morisco restaurant. The maître d’ is out front, smoking, chatting to a fisherman who shows his catch from a styrofoam container on the back of his pick-up. As they drive by, the maître d’ raises his hand, calls, ‘Jesu!’ but Jesús ignores him. Staffe turns to Jesús, says, ‘There’s more bad news.’

  ‘How can there be?’ says Jesús.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ says Pepa.

  ‘Last night, Manolo . . .’

  ‘No!’ says Jesús.

  ‘He was killed in his cortijo.’

  Jesús doesn’t cry or wail, or even sniffle. Within a couple of minutes, he drives on, his jaw set. ‘So, who killed Agustín, and Manolo, too? Do you have answers?’

  ‘What would you say?’ says Staffe. ‘This is your jurisdiction, after all.’

  ‘I’m in the dark, I really am,’ says Jesús.

  ‘The Cano family has been decimated. Now, only poor Rubio is left alive. We know it stems from an association with Barrington.’

  Jesús says, to Staffe, ‘Manolo clearly involved you. Right? He drew you in.’

  Staffe says, ‘It begins in the plastic. And you’re right – Manolo took me to the Quinta Toro. If I hadn’t gone there, I wouldn’t have found you‚ and then Raúl and he wouldn’t have come up to Almagen.’

  ‘Raúl was already looking upon you as a story,’ says Pepa.

  ‘Santi Etxebatteria,’ says Staffe.

  ‘Just tell me! Who do you think killed Agustín?’ says Jesús.

  ‘Manolo,’ says Staffe.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Agustín went back to Germany and Manolo’s future was bright. He had a scholarship to study in Granada but he couldn’t go. Agustín dropped out, just hanging around for his inheritance. But he came back and he discovered Astrid was having an affair with Jackson Roberts, and maybe he was thinking ahead to his inheritance. Rubio was emasculated by it all, and it’s quite possible that he killed Astrid and ran. The others buried her the way they might have in the war – to cover it up because they were worried about the art scam they had going. But then Rubio went mad and he was institutionalised. Or they put him there to protect him.’