Fatal Sunset

by Jason Webster

  A passageway to the left-hand side led to the toilets. The door of the first showed a picture of a buxom woman lifting her skirt and placing a hand between her legs; the second a silhouette of a man with an oversized erection. On the third a sketch was drawn in felt-tip pen of someone with both exposed breasts and a penis.

  Not much room for confusion there, thought Cámara.

  In front, through double swinging doors, was the main body of the disco. He pushed and stepped through.

  The contrast to the entrance was remarkable. The fresh smell gave way to something more akin to what he had expected from the start: the sticky staleness of spilled drinks, the toxic combination of sweat and bleach. Here everything was dark: the windows had been painted black on the insides and only tiny rays of sunlight managed to penetrate where the paint had peeled or cracked, shooting across the empty space like splinters of glass. It was just enough, once his eyes had adjusted, to find his way around. He looked, but saw no sign of any light switch.

  The floor was wooden and, like the windows, painted black. Steps led up to a main dance area. To the right was a long bar with dozens of bottles of liquor stacked neatly along shelves at the back. The walls had tall mirrors that came down to the floor at regular intervals for people to watch themselves as they danced.

  Four pedestals no larger than a dining-room table were placed at various points for young, semi-clad dancers – the go-gos – to stand above the heaving mass of bodies and perform: something to look at and admire, something to aim for, even. They were a common feature of most discos: a focus for lustful imagination. What kind of dancers performed here?

  The ceiling was a labyrinth of exposed piping and air-conditioning units, all painted black. Speakers and spotlights were placed at various points, while disco mirror balls hung forlornly like little moons, waiting to come alive with new light to reflect.

  Cámara looked around: nowhere could he see anywhere to sit down.

  A staircase shot up the left-hand side, doubling back on itself to an open upper floor which led to a booth for the DJ. Mirrors on the ceiling inside gave a clear view of the mixing decks and a laptop computer with a shiny chrome cover. Whoever was on shift up there would be clearly visible to those below, yet majestically lifted above them, like a musical deity.

  He took the stairs and came up to a smaller area at the side of the DJ’s booth. This had the air of an executive lounge: a second bar stood at one side, while doors at the other indicated more bathrooms. Black-painted metal railings divided it from the larger dance area, but whoever was up here would still have a clear view of below – and the people dancing. Black leather sofas and chairs were also arranged in a U-shape for greater comfort. The sense of hierarchy was evident in everything from the furnishings to the cleaner, less suffocating air. He had the sense of entering the bridge of a large, steaming ocean liner, the point from where the captain stared out and viewed the horizon while reassuring his crew as they powered towards the next sea port.

  José Luis must have spent a great deal of time here, he thought, watching over his creation.

  A door with a circular window led to a dark corridor. He felt for the lights, but could find none and had to creep forward using his fingertips. As he made out the beginnings of a door frame and edged closer, thinking he might find a source of light on the other side, he heard a click and fluorescent strips on the ceiling shuddered into life.

  ‘You still here?’

  It was Paco, shutting a door further down the corridor behind him and locking it with a key.

  ‘That your office?’ asked Cámara.

  ‘If you want to look inside, you’re going to need a warrant.’

  Paco walked up the corridor and brushed past, heading towards the executive lounge. Cámara watched him go.

  Alone again in the corridor, he tried the various doors to see what lay behind. There were a couple of small, cramped changing rooms with crates of bottles stacked at the sides. A third room was the main store area for the bars, with shelves weighed down under hundreds of bottles of booze, with more stacks of plastic crates. The one nearest was full of Coke.

  Cámara tried the handle, but Paco’s office was securely locked. To his surprise, however, the room opposite was not: it was another office. A walnut desk stood in the middle, with a large executive chair behind, like a throne. A globe – one of the illuminated kind, judging by the flex trailing from the bottom – was perched on a corner. A cabinet in walnut stood against one wall, with bottles of vodka and gin placed on a special mirrored shelf next to a silver cocktail shaker, a bottle of bitters, and various other materials, as well as an engraved crystal jug with a long silver stirring spoon and a silver ice bowl.

  The floor was tiled, but a large, brightly coloured Oriental carpet covered the space between the doorway and the desk. On it was the design of a creature that looked like a stylised peacock.

  But for one thing the room looked like the office of some small-scale mogul in a bad 1970s spy film – it felt clean and unused, the furniture trying to make a statement but one that had no heart to it, could not take itself seriously. And what underlined this was the gigantic photo on the back wall of Dolly Parton wearing a white Stetson and black-and-red check shirt, tilting her head coquettishly to the side and smiling at the camera through blonde curls. It was housed in a gilt frame to which fairy lights had been attached: when switched on it must have appeared like an altar.

  Smiling a polite greeting to the Queen of Country, Cámara passed round the room, trying to gauge what impression it gave him about José Luis – for something told him clearly this was his space – but the messages were confused and unclear. Flamboyant and sensual on the one hand, yet with a streak of conservativism.

  He glanced down at the back of the desk. A small safe sat at the bottom to one side. He tried to open it, but, not unexpectedly, it was locked.

  He left, wondering who now might have the key.

  Cámara found José Luis’s apartments in the larger building adjacent to the stables on the far side of the courtyard. The door was open and he passed through into a hall with steps leading to the first floor. At the top, a white security door with golden edgings was ajar. The air from inside the apartment was stuffy and thick, tinged with a hint of sweet perfume. He felt at the side and turned on the lights.

  José Luis’s home was open-plan and very big. Shuttered windows, each one about two metres across, were in every wall, yet looked as though they were rarely, if ever, opened. With the blinds up, they would have given a panoramic, almost 360-degree view. Cámara walked across to one of them and pulled on the cord. With a dusty rattle, afternoon sunlight began to filter through, eventually revealing vistas down the mountainside, through the pine trees to the Mediterranean in the far distance. He lost himself in it for a moment, wondering why anyone would choose to close themselves off from something so beautiful.

  He felt a sudden urge to allow more daylight and fresh air into this dank space. Jerking hard on the cords of the blinds, he lifted them all, then opened a couple of the windows to the full to allow a cross-breeze to enter.

  His eye was immediately caught by a large golden Chinese cat standing in the middle of the apartment waving its arm in perpetual motion. He had seen them before – they had been everywhere a few years earlier – yet never so big. There was something sinister and uncomforting about its fixed grin, as though it echoed the presence of the man who had been living here only hours before. It certainly hadn’t brought José Luis much luck. Who the hell was it waving to now?

  He shook himself, forcing himself to turn his attention away from the cat and take a proper look at his surroundings, wondering in the back of his mind what was making him so uncomfortable there.

  Most of the fittings were in white or pale tones. Cream-coloured rugs lay on a floor of shiny, brilliant tiles; a white coffee table was surrounded by a U-shaped combination of soft white sofas, with fluffy white pouffes for people to place their feet on. A gigantic telev
ision near the middle of the room on a white stand had a white plastic frame and back rather than the usual black or grey. A couple of free-standing bookcases used to create divisions within the diaphanous space were equally white, with porcelain figures – no books – painted in pale glazes on the shelves: a shepherdess gazing into the distance, a man sitting mournfully with a guitar. Yet there were also more eye-catching ornaments: a couple of indistinct gender held in an erotic embrace; a phallus, proud and unembarrassed. And white.

  It was all luxurious, if not to Cámara’s taste, and well kept – there was barely a grain of dust in the entire apartment. There was also something self-indulgent about it. Mirrors were everywhere, seemingly on every spare patch of wall. A place of darkness, where no natural light entered, yet which spoke of brightness and reflection, as though desperate for the very thing from which it had cut itself off. Why go to so much trouble? thought Cámara. Why not just open the windows? What had José Luis been afraid of?

  Only one piece of furniture provided a different tone: a glass cabinet on one wall with old toys displayed in neat rows, as though in a museum. They were familiar to him from his own childhood: whistles, tin cars, wind-up trains – decades old yet immaculate, as though they had just been purchased. Cámara would never have thought of hanging on to them himself, still less put on show like this. What had they meant to José Luis?

  A king-size double bed stood on a raised platform a few centimetres higher than the rest of the room. The floor nearby was littered with scraps of purple tissue paper. The bed itself was unmade and in the middle sat a small pile of presents, all – but for one – unopened. Cámara peered at them: there were no cards or signs of who they were from. The open box was made of golden card, yet there was nothing nearby to suggest what it had contained. Had José Luis only had time to open this one before he had been called out? Cámara left the others as they were: something about opening a dead man’s birthday presents made him uneasy.

  At the foot of the bed was a smaller television in a set of shelves. Cámara opened the drawers beneath to reveal a collection of DVDs. He smiled: José Luis had just turned sixty. Was he still watching these things? Certainly Cámara did.

  He lifted one out. The cover showed a photograph in garish colours of three naked men having sex, with small silver stars covering their genitals and cheap-looking graphics framing the scene. The others in the collection appeared to be in a similar vein, although one or two showed both men and women.

  A glass door on the far side of the bed led to a bathroom. A shelf at the side was home to a large array of colognes and perfumes. Cámara leaned over and sniffed tentatively. Most were in expensive-looking glass bottles, with one or two more ordinary-looking, the kinds sold at the supermarket. He lifted one, a black can, and sprayed it just in front of his face. It was sweet and dark, with a clinging, cloying quality about it that almost made his eyes water. Who on earth wore this stuff?

  A second cabinet in the bathroom, below the sink, captured his attention. A box contained over a dozen throwaway hypodermic needles. In his mind flashed the sight of José Luis’s corpse at the Forensic Medicine Centre earlier that morning and the pinprick marks he had seen on the left arm.

  But what kinds of drugs had José Luis been injecting himself with? The bottles next to the syringes were the ordinary kinds one found in any medicine kit: paracetamol, omeprazole, aspirin, antihistamines.

  Cámara stood up and went back to the bed. He lifted one corner of the sheet to reveal the frame underneath the mattress: as he suspected, there were drawers, probably intended for storing linen. Yet the rattle that sounded when he pulled on one spoke of quite different contents.

  With daylight shining directly down through the open window, he lifted out a handful of small plastic bottles. Most contained liquids; a few had pills; others simple white powders. Cámara counted: there were over a dozen bottles with ‘GHB’ written on them in different, multicoloured fonts. A handful of the others contained mephedrone, while the majority – over twenty in total – were filled with methamphetamine, or ‘T’, as the bottles claimed on their labels. At the bottom of the drawer, squeezed in at the side, was a used syringe.

  Next to it, lying sleepily like a bird in its nest, was a small handgun, a 6.35mm Astra 2000. Cámara picked it up: it was partly scuffed around the handle, the trigger looked worn, and it had the appearance of something picked up from an antique dealer rather than a potentially lethal weapon. He opened the magazine and counted six bullets before putting it back in its place, making a mental note.

  He went to every window, closing the ones he had opened and letting the blinds down again. He had seen enough. After one look back at the golden Chinese cat, he closed the door behind him and went downstairs out into the courtyard.

  His feet took him round to the front of the main building, near where he had parked his motorbike. The Mercedes that had been there when he arrived – the car he assumed was Paco’s – had gone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Everything was silent. The light breeze had stilled and in the later afternoon heat a bright, blinding sense of emptiness had come over the place. No birds sang, no insects chirruped, no animals moved, as if some sleep of death had entered into every living thing.

  Cámara listened. There was one, distant noise breaking through the vacuum; he heard it once, then it stopped. Yet it was unmistakable, coming from higher up the mountainside in the direction of the Chain: the harsh, rasping bark of a dog.

  It was time to visit Enrique.

  He checked his phone again, hoping that through some miracle he might have picked up a signal. Yet the screen stubbornly insisted that there was ‘no service’. He thought for a moment about looking for a landline and giving Torres a call. What had he been able to find out?

  He had seen a phone back in José Luis’s apartments. And it would be simple enough to find others. He was curious. José Luis had been using powerful narcotic cocktails to boost his sex life. The ‘chemsex’ phenomenon was well established up here in the sierra, by the looks of things. Mephedrone to keep you awake, methamphetamine to give you power and confidence, and GHB to raise your libido. Sex on a combination of those could last for days on end, no need to eat or sleep.

  Would any of this be in the police computer system? Anything be reflected in the files? If so, Torres would find it. He had always been so much better than Cámara at using the intranet to dig up information. And he needed him now as much as ever.

  And yet he hesitated – concerned that something in those files would show very clearly that this was anything but murder. What exactly had killed José Luis would become clearer the following day when the autopsy report came through. Yet Cámara wondered whether Torres already had something that would make his investigation pointless.

  Vicente and Vicenta emerged from the kitchen as he was about to start on the path back towards the Chain.

  ‘We’re going now,’ said Vicente.

  Cámara turned.

  ‘Abi’s all right on his own,’ said Vicenta. ‘I think the best thing is for him to sleep now.’

  ‘We’ll be back in the morning,’ added Vicente.

  Cámara was confused.

  ‘I thought you lived here,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got a little house on the other side of the wood,’ said Vicenta, ‘where we spend the evenings. It’s a five-minute walk.’

  ‘Will we be seeing you tomorrow?’ asked Vicente.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Cámara.

  ‘Enrique should be back.’ Vicente nodded up the path. ‘Heard his dog a minute ago.’

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ Cámara said. ‘And for lunch.’

  Vicenta nodded. The couple turned and walked off through the trees. Cámara waited until they were out of sight before heading up the path.

  It was darker now, the sunlight slanting in at a low angle through the branches, laying diagonal stripes pregnant with tiny motes of dust. He watched carefully when he reached the spot where the
viper had been sleeping.

  At the Chain, the hives appeared to have more life about them. He went over to take a closer look: dozens of bees were circling the tiny entrances and many were flying off, catching the sunlight on their wings as they darted past.

  Almost immediately, however, he noticed that his presence was unwelcome. The buzzing increased in volume and pitch, a clear aggressive intent noticeable purely from the sound. Instinctively, Cámara made to step away, yet already a bee had burrowed its way through his hair into his scalp. The sting, when it came, was excruciating – sharp, piercing and with a cold, acidic bite. His eyes watered, back arching with surprise at the intensity of the pain. It was swiftly followed by a second sting, this time on the back of his shoulder, the bee managing to penetrate the cloth of both his jacket and shirt underneath.

  He let out a low scream of agony, drawing away as quickly as he could from the hives. Yet to his astonishment, the bees came after him, over a dozen of them still darting from side to side around him. Cámara threw his hands into the air, swatting in vain as he tried to defend himself. Another piercing needle of flame shot into his right hand, then a fourth sting near the back of his neck.

  His legs finally took control and he started running as fast as he could, turning right at the Chain and sprinting up the track leading towards Enrique’s house, his muscles pumping as hard as they could. When he had put over a hundred metres between himself and the hives, he threw a glance over his shoulder, expecting the bees to have given up on him. Yet amazingly, two of them were still with him, flying straight for him as he paused mid-step. With a final, panicked burst of energy, he flew off again, running until he was almost at Enrique’s house. Only then did he stop, leaning against a nearby tree, panting and out of breath. It took several minutes to convince himself that the danger was finally past.

  His whole body throbbed with pain, as though he could sense the poison not only where the bees had stung him, but flowing through his bloodstream. He was dizzy and in a state of shock, legs trembling, a coldness creeping under his skin, harsh, metallic taste in his mouth. He longed to sit down on the ground, yet he knew it would only make standing up again that much harder. The four stings on his body seemed to be linked by some invisible thread, sharp waves of agony passing from one to the next, like a spider spinning its web.