The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara)

by Webster, Jason

  The door clicked open again and Teresa walked in carrying three cups of coffee. Cámara and Torres got up to take theirs, thanking her, then all three started blowing and sipping on the hot liquid. Teresa looked a little uncomfortable, not quite sure what to do with these two senior policemen in her office, using her computer in a not-entirely-regulatory fashion.

  ‘Teresa,’ Cámara said after a pause. ‘I wondered if you could help us.’

  He explained briefly about the Mirella Faro case, and what they were doing.

  ‘You’re looking for links, patterns. Great. I like that kind of thing.’

  Torres looked at her.

  ‘Thanks, Teresa. I suppose I should point out—’

  ‘That neither of you has ever walked into my office, or used my computer. Yeah, I’ve got it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do you want to use my login, to be safer?’

  ‘No, we’re fine.’

  There were ten cases left to look at. Torres scrolled down to each one, letting them all read the details over his shoulder and see the photos of the murdered girls. Details included each one’s name, date of birth, age when murdered, weight, height, hair and eye colour, what they were wearing – if anything – when found, and what they were last seen wearing when alive. Then there were accounts of how, exactly, they had been sexually assaulted, with a primary murder scene and a secondary in the cases where the body had been moved after death. Except for two, each case had been resolved, with the killer named, a mugshot provided, and information about his sentence and where he was currently being held. No women were involved in the attacks.

  The first murder dated back to 1992, in Seville.

  ‘The year of the Expo,’ Teresa said.

  Julia del Barrio’s body had been found near the banks of the Guadalquivir, her dress ripped, although not entirely, from her body. She’d been raped and then strangled with a hemp rope. One of her silver hoop earrings had been torn out in the struggle. The three of them looked at the school photo taken of her a month before she was killed, and then the black-and-white police images taken where they found the body. At the bottom of the file was a picture of a man by the name of Antonio Gabarri. He’d been found guilty of the murder after a shred of the girl’s clothing was found in his car, an Opel Astra. Given life, he’d been refused bail for never admitting his guilt. He was still being held in Seville’s Number Two Prison, although his term was due to finish in eight months’ time.

  ‘Gypsy?’ Torres said.

  Cámara pursed his lips. It wasn’t easy to say.

  The next two cases were in Madrid, involving Vanesa Romero Pérez and Rosa Esquivel Fuentes. They had been murdered two months apart in 1998, and at the beginning police had suspected a link, but none had ever been established. The first girl was aged sixteen and had started working as a prostitute only a couple of months before. No one had ever been found guilty of her murder.

  The second Madrid victim, Rosa Esquivel, had been found not far from the railway tracks leading out of Atocha station. She’d been assaulted, although not raped, strangled by someone using their hands, and her body stripped and left. No trace of her clothing had ever been found. A young friend of the girl’s, with a previous record for drug dealing, was convicted of her murder. He was currently serving at the Valdemoro prison in Madrid.

  The following three murders took place from 1999 to 2001, occurring outside the capital. One in Barcelona, another in Badajoz, near the border with Portugal, and the third in Guadalajara, about an hour’s drive north-east from Madrid. In each instance the MO was similar or the same – a young adolescent girl assaulted and strangled. No one had been found guilty of the Guadalajara case, while two different men – one an Algerian immigrant, the other another drug dealer – were serving time for the other cases.

  The next case had taken place in Albacete seven years previously. Paula Gutiérrez Soria’s body had been found in a rubbish container, like Mirella Faro’s, although this time it was near the university campus area.

  ‘Not long after they finished building it,’ Cámara said.

  The name of the murderer was one he had already come across: Juan Manuel Heredia, currently held in Albacete’s Torrecica jail. Cámara picked up a pen and paper to jot down a couple of notes before Torres scrolled on.

  The last two murders had taken place in Madrid again, one in 2005, the last in 2008. Carmen Montero Ferrero had been fourteen when her killer had attacked her as she left home one Friday night to meet up with friends for a birthday party. Her semi-naked body was found four days later in a tip three kilometres away. A former vagrant she’d been seen with a few times in the run-up to the murder was sentenced to life after it was learned that he’d lost his job as a teacher eight years previously for inappropriate relations with two of his female students. His wife had divorced him and refused to let him see their three children any more, since when he’d lived on the streets.

  The last case before Mirella’s involved María Teresa Machado Ballesteros, fifteen, a promising basketball player who used to go training on Tuesday and Thursday nights at a sports centre a ten-minute walk from her home in the Leganés district of Madrid. Her trainer’s assistant, Raúl Rojas Sánchez, had been found guilty of raping and murdering her after her body was found in pieces inside his freezer.

  The final case was that of Mirella Faro in Albacete. A photo of her, taken just a couple of months before, took up a large part of the screen.

  ‘That’s it,’ Torres said, standing up.

  Both he and Cámara reached for their cigarettes.

  Teresa coughed.

  ‘Would you mind,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s just that I have a chest infection that’s not going away.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course.’

  Torres put his cigarette back in its box; Cámara left his in his mouth, unlit.

  ‘So,’ Torres said, ‘any thoughts?’

  Cámara sniffed.

  ‘The similarities are obvious. It’s less obvious similarities I’m wondering about.’

  ‘There’s something similar about quite a few of the attackers,’ Teresa said.

  ‘You mean they’re fringe people,’ Torres said.

  ‘Drug dealers, a suspected paedophile, a Gypsy . . .’

  ‘Yes. That’s right. Except for the basketball trainer.’

  Teresa kept looking at the screen.

  ‘Anything else?’ Cámara asked.

  ‘I’m just wondering,’ she said. ‘Not all of them, but with quite a few of the girls they’re of a similar type.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Cámara looked down at the screen with her as she picked up the mouse and began to scroll over the cases again.

  ‘These ones,’ she said, pointing out the Seville murder, the first of the 1998 Madrid cases, the Guadalajara girl, the Albacete girl, the Madrid case from 2005. And then Mirella Faro, the last one they’d looked at.

  ‘There’s something quite similar about them,’ Teresa said. ‘Not so much their colouring – the Guadalajara girl is quite pale and has light brown hair; the others are darker. But there’s a look there – they’re all quite slim, athletic looking, and there’s something strong, almost square about their faces. Perhaps it’s their jaws, I’m not sure.’

  Torres and Cámara looked at the photos – they had been taken at different times, with different cameras of different quality. But Teresa had seen something they hadn’t.

  She was right. Something about all of the girls she mentioned was very similar.

  ‘It’s almost as if they were related in some way.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Thursday 5th November

  YAGO HAD TOLD them to expect him. The guard at the gate checked his name and ID number and then rang through to the administration office. Cámara was made to wait a few minutes; there was nowhere to sit and the guard didn’t look like the kind who wanted to make conversation, so he paced around the small room, humming a song by the Flamenco rock band
Triana.

  ‘Abre la Puerta’. Open the door.

  Eventually a second guard appeared to escort him inside the Torrecica prison proper. Cámara followed in silence as they went through a series of entrances and doors that had to be unlocked and locked again each time. Cámara could hear voices as they passed along corridors, groups of men in various rooms hidden behind the brown-painted bars. In fact, the whole place had been decorated – if that was the word – in shades of brown: light, dark, chocolate, coffee, and . . . well. The walls, the doors, the floors, the guards’ uniforms – it was all brown. Even the smell, he thought, had a brownness about it.

  Another door was opened. The guard stepped through and then stopped, beckoning Cámara wordlessly to follow. Inside, there was a scuffed wooden table at which sat a man in a toffee-coloured shirt, hunched over, his chin resting on his hands.

  The guard began to back out.

  ‘I’ll call you when I’ve finished,’ Cámara said.

  ‘You’ve got ten minutes. No more.’

  The door slammed behind him, but his face remained at the small window of reinforced glass at the top.

  Cámara moved towards the table. The prisoner sat still, looking bored, his eyes unmoving from the wall in front of him. Cámara pulled out a chair and sat down, placing himself in the man’s direct line of vision. The eyes rested on him without emotion, and stayed there.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Cámara asked.

  The man didn’t move. Cámara had seen photos of Juan Manuel Heredia years before, when he’d been a suspect in Concha’s murder. He’d been much younger then – more than thirty years younger – and considerably thinner. But he still wore his hair long, like many Gypsy men, while the walrus moustache he always sported was distinguishable over the thick carpet of black spiky bristles that covered the lower half of his face and neck. There were spots of white there now, as well as in his hair; he was in his mid-fifties, and old age appeared to be making inroads.

  ‘I’m Max Cámara. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  Heredia shrugged.

  ‘You must be police,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t let you in. It’s not visiting hours.’

  ‘Yes, I’m police.’

  Cámara thought for a moment before pulling out his packet of Ducados and lighting a cigarette. People were becoming so tense about smoking, but that also made it useful in certain circumstances. It had worked with the FBI man. Now, for want of a new idea, he would try it again. He took a deep drag before releasing a plume into the air. Seconds later, as though on cue, there was a knocking at the door from behind. Heredia’s eyes darted from him to the door and back. The knocking came again, but still Cámara ignored it. Finally the door opened and the guard barked at his back.

  ‘No smoking!’

  No reaction. Heredia’s eyes were beginning to widen.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ the guard barked, taking a step forwards. ‘This is not a designated smoking area.’

  ‘It is now,’ Cámara said. Heredia sniggered.

  ‘If you’ve got a problem,’ Cámara said, ‘you’d better go and call your superior officer.’

  There was a pause, then eventually the guard backed out, slamming the door behind him and locking it.

  ‘Just you and me,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Give me one of those,’ Heredia said.

  ‘You still don’t know who I am, do you?’

  Heredia sighed.

  ‘Look, what do you want? That was good, what you did just now. But you want to play games with me as well?’

  ‘Cámara. Doesn’t the name Cámara mean anything to you? Concha Cámara. Think, Heredia, think. Quite some time ago. You were in your twenties then.’

  ‘And you were still wearing nappies. What the fuck!’

  ‘My sister—’

  ‘Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. What? You her baby brother? Come to do me in for big sister’s murder? Now? Thirty years on? Get the fuck out of here.’

  Cámara sat back in his chair. His cigarette packet was on the table in front of him. Heredia leaned forward and grabbed it, taking out half a dozen and shoving them into his shirt pocket.

  ‘They never got me for that. And you know why? Because I never did it. I didn’t kill your sister. They never had anything on me, although they tried. They were desperate. No suspects. So they picked up some Gypsy kid and tried to nail it on him. It’s what they always do. But they didn’t even sit me down in front of the judge. It didn’t even get that far. They fucked it up.’

  Cámara sucked hard on his cigarette.

  ‘You’re in now, though. For murdering and raping a young girl. And her body was found in a rubbish bin. Strange, that. An almost identical murder.’

  Heredia began to laugh.

  ‘Yeah, this time I’m inside. God knows, they’ve been trying to get me in here for years. And they finally managed it. Another Gypsy off the streets.’

  ‘What is it? You just can’t keep your hands off young girls? They do it for you?’

  There was a loud splitting sound as Heredia smashed both fists down on to the table, cracking the wood.

  ‘I didn’t kill any fucking girl, you got it?’ he shouted.

  ‘She was from a rival family, a family trying to take over your patch.’

  ‘I’ve got daughters of my own! You think I could do something sick to a girl like that, when I’ve got my own daughters, almost the same age? You stupid fuckers who’ve never had kids don’t get it – all children are your children. You see a kid getting hurt, it could be yours. How the fuck am I going to go round doing sick shit like that? I don’t care whose family she’s from.’

  ‘The drugs—’

  ‘Yes, I’ve done drugs. This city was mine. But they never could get me on that. So what do they do? They come up with some crap about murdering this girl.’

  ‘One of your own men had been beaten by them. You had a feud going. You needed to tell them you were in charge.’

  Heredia’s face hardened.

  ‘I can’t believe how fucking stupid you people can be sometimes.’

  Cámara took a last drag on his cigarette and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Heredia shrugged.

  ‘What’s the point.’

  ‘You’re innocent. You’re here telling me you’re innocent.’

  Heredia turned his head and spat on the floor, the spit landing with a fizz as it expertly extinguished the burning butt of Cámara’s cigarette.

  ‘You didn’t kill Concha, and you didn’t kill Paula Gutiérrez. You’re a wronged man. Perhaps there’s something I can do.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘You see,’ Cámara said, ‘it seems odd to me that a man like yourself would rape and kill his rival’s daughter as part of a feud. So they beat up one of yours? You go back and beat up one of theirs, harder, perhaps even kill him, I don’t know. Things can get out of hand.’

  Heredia stared at him.

  ‘But to rape and then kill the man’s daughter? You see, that doesn’t seem to fit for me either. There’s an etiquette to these things. I know that. You know it. So what happened?’

  The door crashed open behind them.

  ‘Time’s up!’

  Without looking round, Cámara looked at Heredia quizzically, as if to ask if this time the guard had brought reinforcements. Heredia glanced at the door, then gave an almost invisible nod.

  ‘What happened?’ Cámara repeated.

  Heredia shuffled in his chair. One of the new guards had entered the room and was coming round to his side of the table to escort him away.

  ‘An ajuste de cuentas,’ he said. A settling of scores. ‘That’s all it takes.’

  It was getting blustery – strong, cold winds were beginning to blow in from the north.

  Estrella’s bar was gradually emptying as the last lunchers of the day finished their meals and prepared for the second half of the working day by knocking back strong dos
es of coffee laced with brandy or whisky.

  ‘Hola, cariño.’ She greeted him affectionately and nodded him to the same stool at the bar.

  ‘It’s your place,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten? We’ve got some swordfish fillets left, and pasta, but not much else. It’s all gone. I can fix you up a sandwich if you like.’

  She poured him a beer and placed it down on the bar in front of him.

  ‘You looked troubled, sweetie. Everything all right?’

  He nibbled at the food she offered him. The fish was warm and seemed to promise a night of poisoned agony, while the pasta was overcooked and going dry. He poured some olive oil over it, to try and make it go down better, but more came out than he’d intended, and the plate swam in golden-green grease.

  Half an hour later, when only a couple of customers were left and the girl who helped behind the bar had started cleaning the stove, Estrella came and sat down next to him, an exaggerated frown on her face.

  ‘Tell me all about it.’

  She placed a hand on his knee.

  Cámara drained the last drop of his beer, trying to encourage the pasta stuck in his gullet to move further down towards his stomach. Smothering a belch with his hand, he looked her in the eye.

  ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Of course. Go ahead, ask anything, my dear.’

  Her eyes darted to the side for a second before coming back to his face.

  ‘What kind of thing? You mean police questions?’

  Cámara shrugged.

  ‘Oh. Well, if I can help. Is it something to do with Concha?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘This man who left you, your ex . . .’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘He was a dealer, right?’

  ‘Fuck, Max. Did I tell you that?’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’

  ‘How did you—? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Yes, I’m pretty sure he was. I mean, he is.’

  She pulled her hand away from his knee and turned towards the bar, tapping her nails on the metal counter.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to ask me? Are you trying to bust him?’

  Cámara didn’t say anything. Slowly, she turned back round to face him.