The Anarchist Detective (Max Cámara)

by Webster, Jason

  Hilario looked pale and dazed, but there was a smile in his eyes as he saw his grandson leaning over him.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he panted. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

  Cámara quickly checked for bleeding.

  ‘I’m fine, a bit winded, that’s all.’

  ‘Where’s the gun? Where’s the Luger?’

  ‘I found a wedding ring down here, after Concha was killed. Those policemen are useless.’

  Cámara looked at him.

  ‘Mirella. You mean Mirella? Faro Oscuro’s granddaughter?’

  ‘Yes. He said it was his. Said he lost it.’

  ‘The gun!’

  Hilario looked him hard in the eye.

  ‘That’s how I knew it was him. Who else would it have been?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  But the smile had turned to fear.

  ‘It’s too late.’

  Cámara swivelled on his heel. Yago had managed to pick himself up and, staggering, was pointing the Luger in his direction. Blood was pouring from his left eye, but his right eye, the one he needed to shoot with, could see clearly.

  Cámara looked at him squarely. For an instant they were two young boys again, cutting their way through the weeds and waste with sticks, chatting, singing, playing and hoping . . . until they had reached this spot, and childhood had been brought to a grubby, naked end. They had become almost like brothers in that instant, joined by an experience so dark and intense that it welded their emotions together.

  ‘I never liked you.’

  But Cámara wasn’t listening. Without thinking he dived to the side to draw Yago’s fire away from Hilario.

  CRACK!

  Yago fired, the gun recoiling in his hand.

  And in the split second before he could pull the trigger again, Cámara was on him, tackling him at waist height and pulling him to the ground. Yago smashed the butt of the gun down on to the side of Cámara’s head, but a bull-like force had entered him and he barely felt the metal pushing down and tearing into his scalp. Reaching up he ripped at Yago’s ear, catching the side of his face with his forehead as Yago lifted his hands up in pain.

  Cámara stood up, blood beginning to dribble through his hair and down his face. Hilario was still on the ground behind him. He held up a hand and signalled with his thumb that he was all right.

  Yago was curled up in a ball by Cámara’s feet. Cámara thought about landing a last kick in the man’s side, but held back. His breathing was getting heavier and heavier as his chest began to tighten.

  From the ground, Yago glanced up. The Luger was still in his hand. Shaking, he lifted it as high as he could for a final shot. Cámara watched as his finger pressed against the trigger, the barrel pointing directly at his chest.

  There was a click, but nothing happened. Yago tried again, but the gun refused to go off. It had jammed.

  Weakness from the head wound was overcoming Cámara. He was incapable of fighting any more.

  Taking a step, he staggered closer towards Yago, looked down into his good eye and then slumped down, crushing the thinner man with the weight of his body.

  It was finished.

  THIRTY

  A Couple of Days Later

  HE’D SEEN DEAD bodies before – plenty of them. But never like this.

  Slowly, for fear of breaking them, the bones were uncovered, exposed and finally liberated from the earth.

  ‘You think it’s him?’

  ‘A DNA test will tell us for sure. We’ll take a sample from you then do the procedure, just to be a hundred per cent.’

  Eduardo García put his hands on his hips and looked over at the body.

  ‘But for my money, that’s Maximiliano.’

  Cámara stepped down into the pit, dirt pushing into the creases of his shoes, blood pulsing underneath the scabs on his scalp. The doctors had had to shave off some of his hair to apply a couple of stitches, but apart from the oddness of his appearance, and a few bruises, he’d come out of the fight better than he’d expected. Or at least he’d suffered nothing that half a bottle of brandy couldn’t sort out.

  He was sober now, however, very much so, skidding down the side of the hole and pacing towards the dead man. The technicians moved slowly out of the way to let him past. It went against protocol to let family members in while they were in the middle of a dig. But they knew he was a policeman, a murder investigator; they could trust him.

  The bones were practically clean by now, the soil brushed away. And while the browning bones were partially rotten and crushed from having spent so much time in the earth, the form and shape of his great-grandfather was visible. Round glasses, their frames almost rusted away, lay broken over the lower section of what had been his face. The jawbone lay open and had fallen to one side, giving him a wild, almost hysterical laugh. He tried to imagine the eyes that had once rolled and shone from the empty sockets. Small clods of chocolate-brown mud, still waiting to be cleaned away, had taken their place.

  And he wished he could reach out and let him know in some way. We’ve found you – you’ll be all right now. We’ll do this properly, at last.

  Just a collection of broken bones. Maximiliano had gone years before. Neither a photo nor his mortal remains could bring him closer to him.

  For that, he had to look inside himself. If Maximiliano was to be found anywhere, it was there.

  THIRTY-ONE

  JIMÉNEZ WAS WAITING for him outside the cemetery with a dark-haired woman.

  ‘This is Inspector Silvestre,’ he said sternly. ‘From Madrid.’

  The woman held out her arm and shook Cámara’s hand.

  ‘Internal Affairs.’

  Cámara smiled; he could have guessed.

  They crossed the street and headed towards a café on the corner. It was cold, the first taste of winter in the air, and so they ignored the tables on the pavement and dived into the relative shelter inside. Cámara ordered three cafés con leche and a shot of Torres 10 brandy for himself on the side.

  ‘Faro Oscuro’s handed himself in,’ Jiménez said. Still head of the local murder squad, he had temporarily been asked to cover Yago’s old job in charge of the whole of the investigative police force until they could find a permanent replacement. There was something beaten, if not quite broken, about him: every policeman in the city, – as in the rest of the country – was in a state of shock over what had happened.

  ‘Is he talking?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jiménez said. ‘He may have tried avoiding capture at first, but there was nowhere he could go. Drove himself to the Jefatura last night. I’ve just come from seeing him now.’

  He rubbed his eyes and took a slurp of coffee as though to emphasise his lack of sleep.

  ‘And the link with . . . with Yago?’

  ‘As you said, it’s there. Faro Oscuro says he was paying Yago off – probably to keep quiet about the saffron scam. We’re waiting for the bank to send in details of his accounts so we can confirm, but there may be other accounts with different banks, so it will take some time.’

  Methodical and slow, even now when it came to investigating his own superior.

  ‘What about the shooting?’ Cámara asked. ‘Has he mentioned that?’

  Jiménez scrunched up his nose, wringing his paw-like hands together. It pained him to say this.

  ‘Yago . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘Yago asked Faro Oscuro to get rid of you. As a favour. Said you were dangerous and could blow the whole thing.’

  The phrase Yago had used at their meeting at the cemetery trickled back into his mind: ‘You should be dead.’ He had really meant it.

  ‘Which is why he sent me to Pozoblanco,’ Cámara said. ‘Not to see what I could find out – he knew it all already. He wanted to have me disappeared. So what happened? Why did they botch it up?’

  ‘You showed up with someone else – a woman,’ Jiménez said. ‘They weren’t expecting that. Some journalist from a national newspaper. They checked her out while you were still
in the village. She was a real journalist, not a fake one like you. So they couldn’t just kill you. That’s what Faro Oscuro said. Said it was too dangerous. They’d create more danger for themselves.’

  ‘But they still tried to kill us.’

  Jiménez shuffled in his seat. Beside him, Inspector Silvestre listened intently.

  ‘Faro Oscuro told us he called Yago as you were leaving. He was angry you were still alive, so he ordered – that was the word Faro Oscuro used – ordered to have you killed.’

  ‘So that’s when they tried to shoot us in the car.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Which Reza the Iranian did.’

  ‘Reza, Ahmed. Whatever his real name is.’

  ‘Any sign of him?’

  Jiménez shook his head.

  ‘None. Vanished. Probably out of the country by now. We’ve issued an international warrant. People in the village want to find him as well – they’re really pissed off. Say masses of saffron has gone missing. That’s their livelihood. They reckon Ahmed ran off with it.’

  Cámara kept a straight face. There was no point mentioning his encounter with Reza now. It would come out eventually. Or not.

  He knocked back his brandy and took a sip of the coffee. It was cooling now, but it seemed to burn his mouth as it mixed with the alcohol lingering on his tongue. Lifting out his packet of Ducados, he offered them cigarettes: Jiménez took one; Silvestre declined with a smile.

  ‘We’re looking at the others,’ Jiménez said, blowing out smoke. ‘That list you gave us of the killings with a similar MO.’

  Cámara nodded.

  ‘They fit. And Yago could have done them. He was either in the city at the time or near enough to get there and back without anyone missing him. Guadalajara is a short drive from Madrid.’

  ‘And all of them either unsolved or attributed to men who could quite easily be set up,’ Silvestre said.

  ‘Drug dealers, a homeless guy, Gypsies.’

  ‘A settling of scores,’ Cámara mumbled.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s going to take time,’ Jiménez said. Cámara smiled: it was the inspector’s favourite phrase. ‘We’ll have to go through the records pertaining to those cases, bring in other units. It’s a wide net.’

  ‘But it will be done,’ Silvestre butted in. ‘And done thoroughly. This is the most serious case we’ve had for decades. The Ministry has given it top priority. The Policía Nacional is one of the most respected institutions in this country. We can’t have that image spoiled by one rotten egg.’

  ‘And I think it is just one egg in this case,’ Cámara said. ‘It was just Yago. No one else. At least as far as these cases are concerned.’

  Silvestre leaned back in her chair.

  ‘I’m glad you think so. I’m of the same opinion. You knew him, though. From back when you were children. Your comments will count for a lot in this.’

  ‘We hadn’t seen each other for years. Not since academy.’

  ‘Nonetheless, you shared a harrowing experience when you were boys together.’

  ‘How is he?’ Cámara asked suddenly. Anything to avoid the inevitable questions about why, about the past, about the ‘psychological scars’, or whatever the lingo was at the moment.

  ‘You mean Yago?’ Silvestre asked, surprised.

  Cámara nodded.

  ‘He might not get full sight in his left eye again, but we’re expecting the all-clear from the doctors later today,’ Jiménez said. ‘We’ll start the interrogation straight away.’

  ‘You doing that?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Jiménez said. ‘It’s a murder inquiry, plain and simple.’

  The butt of his cigarette burnt brightly as he sucked hard and then blew smoke out through his nostrils.

  ‘This is a complex case,’ Silvestre said, correcting Jiménez gently. ‘There’s the murder to investigate. Thanks to what you’ve given us I think there’s a substantial advance on the Mirella Faro case. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind about Yago’s guilt on that score. The wedding ring places him at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘The pills,’ Cámara said. ‘Said he was losing weight very quickly.’

  ‘It was clever of you to find that. Can’t think how it got missed.’

  She threw a glance at Jiménez, who ignored her. The Policía Científica was another department. He might be temporarily in charge of the investigative police, but he wasn’t taking the fall for cock-ups by the crime scene lot.

  ‘Years of experience,’ Cámara said. And he thought he might get away with it. Just. OK, so it was Hilario’s experience he was really thinking about, but they didn’t need to know that. En boca cerrada no entran moscas. Flies can’t enter a closed mouth.

  Silvestre threw him a quizzical glance, as though he might be making fun of her, then continued.

  ‘DNA testing can confirm the rest. We’re scouring Yago’s home, office, car. Then there’s the semen traces found on Mirella’s body. If it matches . . .’

  ‘All we need is a hair or something from Mirella and we’ve got him,’ Jiménez said, almost spitting out the words.

  ‘His wife?’

  Silvestre looked at Jiménez, as though expecting him to answer.

  ‘With relatives,’ she said when Jiménez refused to speak.

  ‘I’ve spoken to her once,’ Jiménez burst out. ‘We’ll be getting her down to the Jefatura again in the next few days, mark my words.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any—’

  ‘No. But there’ll be something. Some detail that will help bring that cunt down. A dinner date he was late for, a late call-out he then couldn’t explain properly. I don’t fucking know. But there’ll be something.’

  They sat in awkward silence for a moment. Jiménez was right to be angry, but for some reason Cámara couldn’t share his feelings. It was too close to him. Mirella – Concha – Maximiliano. There was a chain of death in his life, one that seemed to wrap itself around him and weigh him down, like a heavy, wet, rotting blanket. And yet now, for the first time in his life, he felt capable of casting it off, discarding it and leaving it here in Albacete for good.

  It was a time for cleaning, patching up the rips and tears as he always tried to do. But not for rage. Not any more. That had passed.

  Concha. He could barely remember her any more. Except, perhaps, for a smell he associated with her – something woody, like pine, and a sweet waxy scent that perhaps came from some perfume or a candle. He wasn’t sure. It was the smell of her room. He always caught it when he walked past, in the weeks and months after her disappearance. Someone had spoken of clearing her things out. But no one had ever got round to it. And then other things had started to happen – his mother’s breakdown, the pills, the drink, the loneliness. And Hilario, picking him up and taking him with him. At that moment he’d hated him, of course. But then he was the only one it made sense to hate – back then, at least.

  Hate. It felt like such a distant emotion now, as though he were seeing it through an inverted telescope – reduced in size and importance.

  He wondered about ordering another brandy, but the barman was looking in the opposite direction, catching the highlights from a recent football match on the TV news.

  ‘They’ll be dragging the psychologists into it,’ Jiménez said, flicking his head in Silvestre’s direction.

  ‘It’s inevitable,’ she said. ‘Jiménez has already made his feelings clear on this—’

  ‘Waste of fucking time,’ Jiménez mumbled.

  ‘—but there’s no loose ends with this case. We’ve got to tick all the boxes.’

  Cámara breathed deeply, stifling the groan that jargon like this always provoked in him.

  ‘A team will be coming down from Madrid later this afternoon,’ Silvestre said. ‘They will be wanting to talk to you.’

  Cámara shrugged. Did he have a choice?

  ‘Your . . . your shared history. It
will be vital for providing a complete profile.’

  ‘I’m not the one being investigated, right?’

  Silvestre looked shocked.

  ‘N-no. Of course not.’

  Jiménez grinned cheekily.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cámara said, smiling. ‘Sure, whatever they need.’

  ‘There may be a link.’

  ‘Course there’s a fucking link,’ Jiménez said.

  ‘Mirella’s murder – and perhaps the others, if they can be proved – stem from some trauma Yago suffered as a boy. I understand he was with you when you found the body of Concha? Your sister?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She was found on the same patch of ground.’

  ‘Thirty-two years ago,’ Cámara said. ‘They haven’t built on it.’

  ‘Yes, well, that will all be covered in your interviews with the psychologists, no doubt.’

  ‘What they need to work out is how a fucking psycho like him got into the police force in the first place,’ Jiménez said. ‘It’s all very well doing the profiling now, coming up with a “narrative” after he’s been on his killing spree. What about before? I ask you.’

  He threw his hands up.

  ‘We’re all upset,’ Silvestre said. ‘I know that. And if you want some time off—’

  ‘No fucking chance. Time off now? When I’ve got the biggest case of my career on my hands? No way. I’m seeing this all the way through. And I’ll be there when they fucking throw away the key as well.’

  But I won’t, Cámara thought to himself.

  THIRTY-TWO

  HE’D CALL ALICIA. Soon. They still hadn’t spoken. Was he avoiding her? Perhaps. Avoiding her, the situation, everything. It was what he tended to do. But no more. Things had changed. Something in him . . .

  It would be good to hear her voice again.

  Besides, there was something he had to tell her.

  ‘Is there anything else I need to know about you?’

  Hilario’s face was grey, his lips thin and dry. A drip dangled from his arm, which looked thinner and weaker than Cámara remembered.

  ‘There’s always something else to know about people.’