A Death in Valencia

by Jason Webster

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I’m taking you out. And then we’ll go shopping. You’re going to need a whole new wardrobe.’

  They met outside the post office, and she took him to a salad buffet bar, filled with office workers trying to eat themselves into better health by piling their plates high with lettuce leaves and rocket doused in creamy dressings. Cámara fancied a hamburger, something heavy and greasy to soak up the brandy and create a sense of weight in him as a counter to the light-headedness he had felt since that morning. But they didn’t have anything like that, so he settled for chicken pasta and some wholegrain rice, washed down with peach juice.

  It felt odd being with her like this, having slept in her bed, and acting as though nothing had happened over the previous year, as though they had still been lovers all this while. Yet the last time he had seen her before this she had been gripped tightly in the arms of a killer pressing a gun to her head and threatening to shoot. Had she ever got over that? Was the shock still coursing through her in some hidden, more secret parts? He wanted to ask, but his own current state barely allowed room to discuss another’s anguish.

  So much had remained unsaid between them. The relationship had ended in part because she was having problems conceiving. At the time she had hinted the fault was his, yet he had discovered subsequently with another woman that he wasn’t infertile at all. He shuddered at the thought of telling her now; she wasn’t part of his life. Or at least hadn’t been until she’d scooped him up from the pavement. And what about the new guy? Was she trying to have a baby with him?

  ‘We can start at El Corte Inglés,’ she said. ‘It’s just round the corner.’

  Of course, being told by a woman you felt on the brink of falling in love with that she’d aborted your child wasn’t the best way to discover you were, in fact, capable of having children. He still felt a smoking anger about it even now, a year later. But that had been between him and Alicia, nothing to do with Almudena.

  For the time being he should remain silent, and do what he did best: watch and see what happened.

  On Almudena’s advice, at the department store he bought a sponge bag with essentials, two triple packs of stripy boxer shorts, some thin summer socks, spare shoes, leather sandals and flip-flops. A couple of short-sleeved white shirts were on special offer. At Zara, he picked up some light cotton trousers–one pair blue, the other grey. He would have bought linen ones, but he was thinking more about work clothes than anything else, and tempting though it was in the summer heat to buy only shorts and T-shirts, part of him knew that he had to put some effort into appearing like a chief inspector. At least for now.

  Here he was, he thought to himself, a man whose house had fallen down, taking most of his possessions with it, his neighbour and her little son–a boy he had felt closer to than he had cared to admit–dead. And yet he sensed a curious, if slightly unreal, calm. No shaking, no panic, no short, shallow breathing. Yes, he felt tired, and would happily have given up the mundane task of finding new clothes to wear in favour of sitting down somewhere, lying back, perhaps helping himself to another brandy. But the crash, the stress, the sense of loss and lack of direction had come before the disaster of his house falling down. Now that he was facing a real crisis, he might possibly start to get on with things again.

  He grabbed another couple of shirts from the rack without trying them on, and went to the cash register to pay. He checked the time from the watch on the checkout man’s wrist: there were probably still a few minutes before Susana and Tomás’s funeral, and he could make it if he rushed. But the weight of Almudena’s presence, combined with a growing leaden sensation in his body, was temporarily depriving him of the energy and decisiveness needed to get there. At that moment he felt like a dead leaf being blown about by a cold, cutting wind, a man no longer in charge of his own movements. Almudena stepped outside to wait for him in the dying evening light.

  ‘You can stay at my place again tonight,’ she said when he emerged on to the street. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve already arranged to go somewhere else. I know you too well.’

  ‘Are you sure that won’t be a problem?’

  She ignored the question, and pushed her hand down into her handbag, before bringing out a package for him.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘A present.’

  He unwrapped the paper to find an iPod underneath.

  ‘For your new flamenco collection,’ she said. ‘To start again. You’ll need a computer for it as well, to download songs. But we can use my one at home for now.’

  Cámara smiled.

  ‘You’ll have to show me how it works,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not an old man yet,’ she said. ‘No matter how much you tell yourself you are.’

  Back at her flat, he had a long, cold shower, taking advantage of the momentary coolness to try on some of the new clothes before the humidity stuck them to his skin. She walked in as he was pulling on a pair of trousers.

  ‘They suit you,’ she said. ‘The boxers, I mean. Colourful. More fun. Make you look younger.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Look, Almudena.’

  She reached over and placed her hand on his cheek, then let it fall slowly, drawing her fingers over his exposed neck, till it rested on his chest, circling her thumb in the hairs around his nipple.

  ‘I’ve been making some margaritas while you were in the shower. Come into the living room. We can drink them there.’

  Wednesday 8th July

  He woke up on the sofa. It was already hot, and he felt the blood pulsing in his thighs, a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. He placed his hand down between his legs and felt the frustrated stiffness of his erection. No, this time he had to allow his head and heart to make the decisions. He had done the right thing.

  It was curiously quiet outside. In the absence of traffic he could even hear birdsong coming from the acacia trees. Should he get up now? Perhaps he could wash and dress before she’d even woken up. He checked the time on his phone, and sighed. Past eight o’clock. Her regular morning routine would have already kicked off. At least, though, he’d got somewhere to sleep for another night. Even if he’d refused to pay the price that she’d been asking. The margaritas had slipped down easily enough. Things had only got more complicated after she started kissing him. Or at least five or ten minutes after she’d started kissing him, when she’d moved on to taking off their clothes.

  The door opened and Almudena stood there with her hair in a towel, wearing a thin white cotton dressing gown through which the shadow of her sex was partially visible. The hardness in her eyes, with which he had once been so familiar, had returned, as if to reproach him for what he had turned down the night before. This could have been yours again, they said.

  ‘The shower’s free,’ she said out loud. ‘There’s still some hot water. I’ve got to leave in five minutes.’

  He waited for her to go before getting up. There was no point displaying the weakness in his resolve.

  She was already standing by the door with the key in her hand, as if about to walk out, when he emerged, drying his hair with the hand towel she’d left for him by the sink.

  ‘Esteban’s coming back today,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘He called. Catching a different flight. Says he doesn’t want to miss the Pope’s visit.’

  Cámara tried, but failed, to stifle a laugh.

  ‘You mean he’s…’

  ‘You’ll have to go,’ she said.

  Trying to stop just made it worse.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ she yelled over his guffaws.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Cámara wiped away the tears from his eyes. ‘Of course. Didn’t realise he was a believer.’

  She swung the door open out on to the stairwell.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  The laughing stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, more seriously. ‘Fuck me.’

  Now he was a homeless policeman
investigating the murder of a man who had been in danger of losing his own home. There was a curious symmetry to it, one that he wasn’t sure he appreciated.

  He placed his bags down in a corner of the office and stared out of the window at the brick facades of the tower blocks opposite. That was all he had: a few shopping bags with a couple of changes of clothes, and some dirty washing. He’d forgotten to buy a new charger for his phone the previous day, and the battery had gone dead. Perhaps he’d pop out before lunch to get a new one. With that, his wallet and his police badge, he’d be pretty complete. At least to survive for the next few days.

  He wondered about digging out an old camp bed he’d used to sleep here a couple of times, when they’d had to work through the night, catching a couple of hours before dawn. It had made his back ache, he remembered. But it might do for a few days. A week if necessary. He’d have to ask Torres if he knew where they’d put it.

  But Torres wasn’t there. Nor was anyone by the looks of it. Other offices along the corridor were empty.

  Cámara pottered around for a few minutes, pouring himself some bitter, frothy coffee from the new machine that had finally been installed, reading notices on the walls. There’d been a shoot-out at an immigrants’ house on the Avenida Burjasot. Two black Africans had been killed and another had died of his injuries after jumping out of the fourth-floor window. Survivors of the attack talked of white men bursting through the door, shouting at them in what might have been Russian accents. But they weren’t sure.

  Then there was a new wife-murder. A former soldier this time, who had managed to hang on to his service weapon, and then used it on his wife and their two children before making a dash for it. For some reason he hadn’t used the pistol on himself afterwards–which was the more common pattern, especially when military men were involved. Eventually the soldier had been located at the house of his brother, who had also been armed. The two of them held out for over five hours before handing themselves in. Not that they would have had a chance if they’d insisted on fighting it out, Cámara thought to himself, especially when he saw that his old mate Enric Beltrán, a sharpshooter now back in the GEO special forces, was part of the emergency team that surrounded the flat. In tight circumstances you could rely on Beltrán’s sharp eye and steady trigger finger, as he’d learned himself.

  So this was his life. Sorting out the mess, trying to pick a line, to find a meaning–a coherence–in the chaos. Other people’s chaos.

  It was time to find Ramón the fisherman.

  There was a shout–a gruff, familiar, if unexpected voice.

  ‘We’ve been calling you all fucking morning.’

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Pardo without a suit.

  ‘The battery’s dead,’ he said. ‘I still haven’t—’

  ‘Get into the conference room, like all the others,’ Pardo barked. ‘Now. The whole of Homicidios has been ordered to report. Emergency meeting.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  Nine

  The air-conditioning unit in the conference room had broken completely, so the windows giving out on to the street had been opened in an attempt to keep the temperature down. But the collective heat radiating from a score of men and women of the Policía Nacional punched him like a greasy fist. Unhindered by the glass, the noise from the cars and buses racing along the avenue outside filled the room like an echo chamber, and Cámara noticed that Chief Inspector Maldonado, recently promoted to head of the organised crime squad, was having to use a microphone to make himself heard.

  ‘Nice of you to join us.’

  Spotting a seat at the back near the window, he eased himself down behind Torres, who sat bolt upright, ignoring him. Perhaps it was his position at the back of the room, or the fact that his old bugbear Maldonado appeared to be in charge of things, with a seriousness on his face that spoke of ambition and lust for power, but Cámara was seized by a schoolboy urge to lean over and pull on Torres’s hair. Pardo, however, had taken a seat on the dais next to Maldonado, and was watching them all like a headmaster.

  He leaned back, trying to make himself comfortable on the hard plastic chair. No breeze came from outside, and the yellow-and-white flags strewn across the street hung like dead animals being left to dry in the sun. From the front, Maldonado began his talk, revelling in his new-found importance.

  ‘As I was about to say,’ he said. Cámara closed his eyes. ‘At 0835 hours this morning Sofía Bodí, the well-known abortionist, was kidnapped from outside her home near the Colón market. Two witnesses saw her getting into an unmarked dark saloon car with two men.’ He paused. ‘Both of them were wearing Guardia Civil uniforms. The Guardia Civil, however, from the highest levels, have denied any involvement whatsoever in this morning’s events.’

  Cámara’s eyes reopened. There was a collective intake of breath, followed by an outbreak of murmuring and swearing. Ostias. Me cago en la puta. People shuffled in their seats, turning their heads towards their neighbours with shocked expressions. In spite of the denials, this involved the Guardia Civil, the other national police force–the opposition. This was big.

  Maldonado held out his hands for quiet.

  ‘Sofía Bodí, as you all know,’ he said as the voices quietened down, ‘has been in the news recently thanks to the Guardia Civil investigation into her clinic over alleged malpractices.’

  The murmuring picked up again.

  ‘You’ll find details of the investigation in the handouts you’ve all got.’

  Cámara saw that he was missing the report, and leaned over to grab the papers from Torres’s lap.

  ‘Given the nature of what we’re dealing with,’ Maldonado continued, ‘the implication of the Guardia Civil, the high profile of the victim and the timing–need I remind you who’s about to visit Valencia?–the case is being led by my unit.’

  As he continued, Cámara quickly got up to speed on a case which his newspaper-reading colleagues were already familiar with.

  Sofía Bodí was fifty-six years old, he read, a Valencian woman originally from the Benimaclet district, the only daughter of a school-teacher and his wife. The previous December her clinic, the Clínica Levantina de Salud Ginecológica, in the neighbourhood of Patraix, had been the subject of a raid by the Guardia Civil, who had conducted a search after clinic employees were seen carrying out bags of waste and placing them in a van. According to the official Guardia Civil account, at that moment the officers, from the environment-protection Seprona unit, suspected that an ecological crime was being committed–something to do with the waste not being disposed of in the proper way–and decided to investigate. When they raided the clinic and took away the refuse sacks, they claimed to have found the remains of foetuses up to twenty-five weeks old–three weeks over the permitted twenty-two-week limit. The officers involved, led by Comandante Lázaro, applied to the duty investigating judge to open a case, but she rejected it out of hand, saying their claims were unfounded. So they waited a couple of days, pulled some strings, until a judge they knew to be more conservative was available, and officially opened the case with him. This time the evidence was admitted.

  Since then, the investigation had been continuing under intense media attention, until, two days earlier, the Guardia Civil raided the clinic once again, this time taking away the computers and files for inspection. According to comments overheard at the time, Comandante Lázaro, who was present, warned Sofía Bodí that the next time they would be back for her.

  Despite his self-imposed media blackout–why read the papers or watch the news when you always heard in the end if something really important was happening?–Cámara was aware that the country’s abortion laws had been under scrutiny over the past few months or more. The government in Madrid, he felt sure, was going to liberalise them, and make abortion legal, as opposed to simply decriminalised. Had they gone ahead and done it already? He seemed to remember images seen somewhere of large dem
onstrations in the capital against the move, with various grumpy old archbishops wagging their be jewelled fingers over the issue. The Pope’s visit now was great timing for them.

  Ahead, he noticed that Maldonado was still talking.

  ‘…which is how the case was being carried out. There is plenty of evidence,’ Maldonado said, taking a deep breath, ‘to suggest that the Sofía Bodí investigation is politically motivated. We’ve already spelled out the backdrop to all this, particularly with the new abortion law and His Holiness’s imminent visit.’

  A couple of people sniggered. But no one was sure if Maldonado was being sarcastic this time.

  ‘Bodí herself,’ he continued, ‘is a leading pro-abortion campaigner, and has been at the forefront of the movement since the mid-seventies. She’s a founder member of the pressure group Mi Cuerpo, Mi Elección–My Body, My Choice. Then there’s Comandante Lázaro. He’s a known conservative–old school. And a churchgoer. There’s ever more reason to suspect an ideological element to all this.’

  A hand went up. Maldonado nodded for the policewoman to speak.

  ‘But you said the Guardia have denied anything to do with Sofía Bodí being taken this morning.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Maldonado said, putting on the most serious face he could. ‘Officially, they have said they know nothing about this; no arrest order was issued for Sofía Bodí this morning.’

  Cámara was longing for a smoke, and started fingering the packet of Ducados in his trouser pocket. Sweat was pouring down his back and he was beginning to feel light-headed. He still wasn’t sure why officers from Homicidios had been called to this meeting.

  ‘And I believe them,’ Maldonado continued. ‘Which is why…’ He looked down at the floor for a moment, as though collecting his thoughts. The guy should be on the stage, thought Cámara. ‘…we are seriously considering the possibility of a GAL-type operation being behind this.’

  This time Cámara’s own jaw dropped with surprise. Several years had passed since he had heard that word. He hadn’t expected to come across it again, except in some retrospective articles or books on the González government–and the dirty war it had waged against ETA, the terror group seeking independence for the Basque Country.