Cámara saw the bait clearly, and refused to bite. He’d been on extended sick leave from his job as a homicide detective with the Policía Nacional in Valencia for almost four months. He didn’t know himself if he was still really police or not, or if he’d ever go back. But the last person he was going to talk to about it was Hilario, with his strong, anti-authoritarian beliefs.
‘They’re trying to make you better.’
‘Funny way of going about it, making me lie down and shoving bits of plastic piping into me. If you make someone act dead for long enough you’ll kill them in the end. It’s sympathetic magic. They should have me up and about, making my brain work again.’
‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about there,’ Cámara mumbled.
‘What’s that?’
‘I think your brain’s fine,’ he said more loudly.
‘I’ve got to get my brain communicating with my body properly again. Build some new neurological pathways. Because at the moment there’s a bunch of grey cells up here that looks like something you might spread on your toast.’
He tried waving a hand in the direction of his head, but it failed to budge. Cámara wasn’t sure what was happening at first, until he saw the frustration in Hilario’s eyes, the veins bulging in his neck as his hand merely quivered on the bed sheet where it refused to lift up.
‘Stop, stop!’ he cried.
‘¡Me cago en la hostia!’ Fucking hell!
‘Take it easy. You want to give yourself a heart attack as well?’
‘It was moving. Did you see it? It was moving. Idiots say I’m paralysed, but it was definitely moving.’
Cámara nodded, pursing his lips.
‘You’re right, it moved. A little bit. But you need to rest.’
The door opened and the nurse walked in.
‘What’s going on? He needs to sleep, you know. You can’t stay if you’re going to excite him.’
‘Who are you?’ Hilario growled.
‘There’s a chair here for you to sleep on,’ the nurse indicated to Cámara. ‘But I need you to be quiet. You’re waking up the other patients with all this noise.’
‘Piss off.’
‘Rest, Señor Cámara. The doctor will be round in the morning.’
The nurse switched off the light and closed the door behind him.
‘He’s a cheery sort.’
‘I’ll turn on the light again.’
‘Don’t bother. There’s a lamp here somewhere by the bed.’
Cámara fumbled around until he found a switch, and a pool of harsh, bluish light shone down on them.
‘It’s these low-wattage bulbs,’ Hilario said, squinting.
Cámara stood up and walked to the window. He pushed the blinds back and looked out at an occasional car streaming past, a solitary smoker outside the hospital entrance stubbing out his cigarette before heading back inside to watch over a loved one for the night. An ill wife? A child?
‘I can’t sleep,’ Hilario said. ‘Too much going on in this damaged brain of mine. Repairing itself, I shouldn’t reckon. Nothing to do with the pills they’re giving me. Just let nature take its course.’
‘Do you want anything?’ Cámara asked, turning back to the room. ‘Some water?’
‘I’m fine. You can read to me if you like. There’s a copy of today’s paper around somewhere. I saw Pilar with it earlier.’
The newspaper was resting on a ledge opposite the bed. Cámara picked it up, sat down, and started flicking through the pages.
‘A new kindergarten’s been opened on Calle Cervantes.’
‘Stop showing off. I know you hate newspapers. Doesn’t stop you going out with a journalist, though.’
‘I don’t hate the media. I just don’t like the way they manipulate people.’
‘A story about a new kindergarten is hardly major propaganda.’
‘Albacete FC lost again.’
‘That’s not news. More like the weather report.’
The pages ruffled as Cámara flicked through. He paused.
‘What’s that?’ Hilario said.
‘They’re digging up part of the cemetery.’
‘Run out of space, have they? Too many dead people round here. Some of them still walking the streets.’
Cámara continued reading.
‘Something to do with people executed under Franco, after the war. They reckon many were buried in an unmarked mass grave, right in the middle of the cemetery. It’s just a patch of wasteland now. The Town Hall’s behind it, putting up the money. Say it’s time to heal the wounds from the past.’
‘Funny way to heal wounds by opening them up again. These Socialists just want to remind everyone how nasty the right-wingers were. Forget that they were capable of killing a few people themselves in their time. It’s just vote grabbing. There’ll be elections coming up soon. Otherwise they wouldn’t bother.’
Cámara was silent.
‘Anything else?’
Cámara folded the paper and let it fall on to the floor below his chair.
‘A murder,’ he said. ‘Fifteen-year-old girl. Found her body near the tip by the industrial estate.’
He closed his eyes.
‘She’d been raped.’
TWO
Thursday 29th October
GETTING OUT OF the hospital proved difficult. The morning brought a wave of visiting doctors, nurses, more doctors, and people who didn’t identify themselves, but walked in, peered and prodded at Hilario in various ways and then left, without a word. Afterwards he had to track some of these creatures down, trying to get them to say something coherent about his grandfather’s condition. After several hours’ shadowing and buttonholing, it seemed that medical opinion was that the patient was ‘stable’, ‘improving’ even, but would need ‘continued observation’. The stroke had been mild, thankfully, but he was still at risk.
Pilar turned up after lunch, in time to find a nurse showing Cámara how to put a bedpan in place.
‘He hasn’t eaten since his last bowel movement. What’s he need that for?’
‘In case of emergency,’ Cámara said. ‘During the night, when I’m here. They’re putting him on to solids later this afternoon.’
‘He’ll be constipated after all that’s happened. And the drugs they’ve filled him with won’t help. Always bung you up.’
Hilario fell in and out of sleep. Cámara had tried putting the television on during the night to help his grandfather through his insomnia, but you needed a special plastic card-key from reception, and no one could give him one till the morning shift had started. So they’d chatted, and Cámara had read articles in the sports pages building up to the weekend’s matches, until he had fallen into uncomfortable, shallow sleep on the black, sweaty chair. Both he and Hilario were woken at dawn by the first morning rounds.
‘Idiots. Leave me alone.’
Hilario had waved his hand – his right hand, the one that was supposed to be paralysed. Not very high, and it had quickly flopped back on to the bed. Was he regaining some movement there?
Cámara had managed to get some coffee from the canteen on the ground floor, and then a sandwich and a flavourless chocolate doughnut from a vending machine near the lifts, but by the afternoon he was ready to head over to the flat, have a shower and lie down for an hour or two while Pilar relieved him.
But Pilar wanted to talk; she was nervous about sitting here on her own with Hilario. Life at the flat was different – there she had things to do, and a certain power. Here in the hospital she was jumpy, anxiously looking for little tasks to perform. And in this state she talked at him, as though nailing him to the chair, ignoring Hilario. Not waiting for her to pause, Cámara got up and walked out the door. A few minutes later, with the card-key from reception in its allocated slot, the television was on and Pilar was absorbed in a Venezuelan soap opera.
‘Yes, you go. We’ll be fine.’
Hilario had fallen asleep again.
‘I’ll be back in
a few hours.’
‘Don’t you worry. Take your time. There’s some meat stew in the fridge, left over from Tuesday. Should still be all right.’
It was getting dark by the time he stepped outside. The first street lamps were flickering and cars were driving with their sidelights on.
He breathed in deeply and leaned against a railing for a second, wondering to himself about suddenly being back here, in Albacete. What would happen to Hilario? He’d been livelier the night before. Today he’d barely spoken, acting out far better the role of ill old person than was expected of him. There would be time for rebuilding connections in his brain later. If he made it.
He pulled himself away from the railings and started to walk. He needed to stretch his legs, get some air back inside him after hours on the train and then in the hospital. Albacete was a small city, and the flat was no more than a fifteen-minute walk from where he was, but he decided to strike out into the streets in another direction first. Exercise, not more sitting and lying down, would set him up better for another night on duty.
It was gone seven and the shops were busy with last-minute buyers before eight-o’clock closing time. Cars were left double-parked with flashing emergency lights on as people dashed in and out of grocers’, stationers’ and the shops run by Chinese immigrants selling cheap plastic household goods. He was always surprised that there could be so much bustle in this small urban space. Just a few streets away, where the suburbs ended, the flat, featureless light brown fields of the Albacete basin – La Mancha – stretched for long distances. The city felt like an oasis in the desert, or an island many, many miles from any other civilised land mass, and yet you were almost unaware of this as the cars and the people created a bubble of noise and energy. As if to protect themselves, he thought. To protect themselves from remembering that they were afloat, lost, and alone.
It could almost have been a place worth visiting. There were a few interesting little corners, and a large, attractive public garden, known simply by locals as El Parque, although it did have some official, more long-winded title. Yet in reality there was nothing to recommend the city – no riverbanks, no museums of note, no great public buildings. If anyone did associate it with anything, it was with knives: Albacete was, for reasons that no one could explain convincingly, a centre of knife manufacture, and knife shops, selling anything from mediaeval-style swords to fat short blades for cutting off a pig’s testicles, catered to the odd tourist who happened to have got lost and found himself in this unloved part of the country.
Albacete – caga y vete, went the phrase. Albacete – shit there and get out. It was a motto Cámara himself had tried to live by.
Except that now he was back.
Not for long, he tried telling himself. But the truth was that he couldn’t be sure. Much depended on Hilario, and how he recovered. If he remained partially paralysed it would be too much for Pilar to look after him on her own. And there was no way they would ever get him into an old people’s home. Not that he really wanted that anyway, but the idea of Hilario sitting quietly in some television lounge surrounded by other OAPs was ludicrous. He’d either be trying to sleep with the nurses or digging a tunnel to get out before the sun had set on the first day.
So what would happen? Would he have to stay here in Albacete indefinitely, acting as a home help? They could move together, go elsewhere. But where? Madrid? Valencia? That would mean taking up his job with the police again.
And Alicia? What happened to her in this scenario? She’d texted him a couple of times during the day to see how things were going, and he thought about giving her a ring now, but he was still working things out. Time to think and digest first.
These had been a good few months with her. If circumstances had been different he would never have moved in like that with any woman. And he told himself that he hadn’t – not really. It was just that he didn’t have a home at that moment – the last one in Valencia had collapsed into a heap of rubble after work on a nearby metro line had sent cracks running up the walls. So really he’d only bedded down for a while, until he could set himself up again, and decide what he was going to do.
But weeks had passed, and vivified by an erotic energy that had quickly reignited between them – and which had surprised them both by its force – he had ended up staying in Alicia’s small attic apartment for the entire summer, enduring the intensity of the Madrid heat, splashing their bodies cool with water in between bouts of lovemaking.
When the heat began to lessen, and Madrileños returned from their beach holidays, he got a job working at a bar in the next street. The late shifts coincided well with Alicia’s work at the newspaper, and they usually got part of the morning together before she had to leave again. Then at weekends he tried taking photographs with a new digital camera he’d bought. Shots of the city, of faces in the street, of details that caught his eye – a griffin statue on top of a facade, a broken ‘No Entry’ sign, anti-capitalist graffiti on the walls. Nothing anyone else would be interested in seeing, perhaps, but he enjoyed watching the city through a lens for a while.
Yet the question remained: would he return to his job in the police? His boss in Valencia, Commissioner Pardo, had placed him on ‘indefinite’ sick leave at the end of the Sofía Bodí case back in July, but he knew that couldn’t last. It was late October already. Some time soon, he could tell, a phone call would come from someone in Personnel making enquiries about his state of health, hinting that his salary – or the 80 per cent of it that he was still getting paid – might not continue beyond the New Year. Money was tight; they were making big cuts. He would have to take a decision. But life with Alicia, enjoying a mini late adolescence, had drawn him in, and he was reluctant for it to end.
Except that now, it seemed, decisions were being made for him.
He checked the time: Pilar would be all right for another couple of hours at least.
He’d meandered through the city centre. The flat was close by now, but rather than continue down the avenue that took him almost to his old front door, he turned right and pushed up through streets lined with tightly packed dark-brick blocks of flats. On his left he saw the cemetery, while up ahead, where the street ended, metallic grey warehouses closed off the view, like city walls. Skirting around them, he skipped over some bollards and headed into the industrial area. The streets here were built for lorries and vans; pedestrians weren’t catered for, and so he had to walk close to the edge, standing out of the way as articulated trucks came bearing down, their headlamps shining brightly in his eyes, returning to their depots after a day out on the road.
After a few hundred metres he crossed the street and stepped over the kerb to strike out over a patch of wasteland. It was completely dark by now, and he had to watch his feet to avoid stepping in dog turds, but the street lamps on the far side of the plot dimly showed him where he was heading, while the blackness beyond marked the end of the city and the beginning of the La Mancha emptiness.
Old shoes, broken chairs, crushed empty yoghurt pots and shredded tyres littered the ground. They had never got round to building anything here. Some said there was a legal dispute over who owned it that had never been resolved. Others that no one wanted to buy: it was haunted. The memory of what had happened here over thirty years before had still not faded. Neither for him nor for the rest of the city.
There was the same feeling that he always had whenever he came this way, as though being hit on the head by a slab of ice. He could feel his cheek muscles tensing, the knot somewhere in his gut.
A dark green rubbish container stood on the far side. A curious place to put one, for a plot of land everyone used as a makeshift dump in the first place. But from the police tape that had been stuck around it, he concluded that that was where the girl’s body had been left.
Once he was about twenty metres away from it, he slowed his pace, looking closely at the ground, then back up at the container. Edging around it in a circle, gradually getting nearer, he kept glanc
ing between the floor and the bin, checking for anything that might catch his eye. The problem in this littered environment was finding anything, any clue. The wealth of material almost obliterated the evidence. And if something was found that could be linked, there was a high chance of it being contaminated and unusable.
There was simply too much, and it was too dark to make anything out. What was he doing here, anyway?
Stupid question.
He took a couple of steps forward and drew closer to the rubbish container. Blue-and-white tape had been wrapped around it a few times, as though marking territory, and then more had been placed around the top edge, to seal it down. The local científicos – the crime scene squad – would already have been round, but they might want to make more inspections in the morning. In the meantime it had to be kept closed. He was surprised they hadn’t placed a guard to watch over it for the night.
He leaned in, pulling at the tape to see if it would come off. He just wanted to see. Just needed to catch a glimpse of where the girl had been left. He had already caught the smell of the decomposing corpse that had been pulled out of here . . .
By the time he understood what the noise was, the squad car was drawing up behind him, screeching to a halt as it braked hard.
Cámara sniffed and turned round, but already a policeman was grabbing his shoulders, pulling him down to the ground and jerking his arm behind his back.
‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Just hold on a minute.’
The other officer had jumped out of the car and was approaching with a pair of handcuffs.
‘Keep him down, Fuentes.’
‘He’s struggling.’
‘I am not struggling,’ Cámara called up. ‘Calm down and let me explain. I’m police. Chief Inspector Cámara.’
There was a blow to the back of his head.
‘Disturbing a crime scene and impersonating a police officer. I’d keep quiet if I were you.’
The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara) Page 2