A Death in Valencia

by Jason Webster

  ‘Yes, the people working on the El Cabanyal project.’

  ‘He’s still editor of El Diario de Valencia, I take it?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Which is why you never read any criticism of the bulldozing in the paper.’

  It was Alicia’s turn to shrug.

  ‘Or on regional TV.’

  ‘Well, that’s totally controlled by Emilia’s party,’ Alicia said. ‘Has been for years.’

  Cámara frowned.

  ‘We have elections every four years,’ Alicia said with a starry-eyed smile. ‘We’re a member of the European Union, we even criticise other countries for their lack of transparency or human rights records. Yet back home we have politicians and judges from Franco’s day still in their jobs and a corrupt, politically manipulated media.’

  ‘I can see you’re feeling at home at your new paper, then.’

  Alicia sighed.

  ‘Yes, it’s a little more to the left, but newspapers are newspapers. You’re going to get the same tensions and squabbles wherever you go. And no one’s feeling safe these days. I got in just before a whole load of the workforce got the chop. But at least I don’t have to censor my own stories any more.’

  ‘As a bullfighting correspondent?’

  ‘That was only part of what I did. Although you’d be surprised.’

  For a moment, Cámara’s thoughts turned to the hotel room he’d booked for the night. He wanted to kiss her.

  ‘How do you like living in Madrid?’

  ‘It’s fun. Bloody freezing in winter, but there’s a lot going on. The people are great.’

  ‘So you’ve…made some new friends?’

  ‘One or two. Work keeps me busy, so I can’t get out as much as I’d want.’ Alicia smiled at him. ‘It’s good to be back here, though.’

  ‘Are you over for a while?’

  ‘I’ve got to get back tomorrow.’

  ‘Staying at the flat?’

  ‘Yes. It’s empty.’

  There was a pause as the conversation lost momentum and they ate in silence, Cámara watching as the light reflected from the silver dolphin ring on her finger.

  ‘So how did Gallego end up on the board of Valconsa?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s friends with José Manuel Cuevas, the CEO,’ Alicia said. ‘Who in turn is the brother-in-law of Rafael Mezquita.’

  ‘The new urban development councillor?’

  ‘That’s the one. Clean churchgoing type. Emilia put him in to replace García Ramos, remember?’

  ‘Someone mentioned it. Something about a scandal involving a goalkeeper’s wife.’

  ‘It was a big blow for Flores–Ramos was one of his disciples.’

  ‘So now the head of development in the city is related to the head of the company that’s going to pull down El Cabanyal?’

  ‘Cuevas is married to Mezquita’s sister. They were in the FES together at university.’

  The Frente de Estudiantes Sindicalistas had been a Fascist youth movement back in the seventies and eighties before it was absorbed into the Falangist party. Former Prime Minister José-María Aznar had been a member before joining the Partido Popular.

  ‘So you do think there’s a right-wing conspiracy afoot?’

  Alicia smiled.

  ‘The forces of evil are out to get us,’ she said theatrically. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  Cámara took a sip of his wine, masking his face.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘There’s a personal angle to the abortionist story for you, isn’t there?’

  Alicia’s smile dropped. Without finishing her food first, she placed her fork down and started looking in her handbag for her cigarettes.

  ‘I mean, this is the clinic where—’

  ‘Max!’ She held up a hand. ‘Stop there.’

  ‘We never had a chance to talk about it.’

  ‘Look, I…’

  She lit her cigarette and stared out into space.

  ‘So what do you want to say?’ she asked.

  The moment of anger seemed to have passed, and Cámara fell silent.

  ‘You want to know what I think’s happened to Sofía?’ he blurted out as the idea took hold in his mind of a sudden. ‘I think some disgruntled would-be father who never got a chance to say what he thought about his child being aborted has decided to exact some revenge. You’re right, we don’t need any conspiracy theory to understand this. There’s motive enough, thousands of them. One for every life she snuffed out. I’ve seen Sofía’s diaries. She wrote down the name of every woman she carried out abortions on, like some death register.’

  The cigarette was twitching in Alicia’s hand.

  ‘Or life.’

  ‘Life?’

  ‘I met Sofía. She was the kindest person you could imagine, only interested in helping people in difficult, painful circumstances. Those women were given control over their lives by what she was doing.’

  ‘Only by killing—’

  ‘What? By killing what, exactly? Children? Babies? What do you think they are? Do you think they’re actual people? Biologically they’re less complex than the pig whose flesh you’re chewing on right now.’

  They were both raising their voices and looks were being cast in their direction from neighbouring tables. Cámara closed his eyes.

  ‘So what are we talking about?’ Alicia continued. ‘The soul? Do you think embryos and foetuses have souls? You’ve got religious all of a sudden?’

  Cámara had picked up his glass and was swirling the wine around inside it.

  ‘Come on,’ Alicia said, lowering her voice as she realised that they were becoming the focus of attention. ‘Do you even know yourself what you think?’

  She took a deep breath and sighed.

  ‘Don’t imagine I didn’t go through all this myself. Or do you think I skipped happily into the clinic with a bloodthirsty glint in my eye at the thought that I was about to abort something that had grown from an act of love, of intense, joyful love?’

  Cámara wanted to look her in the face, but his eyes remained fixed on the circling wine.

  ‘I could probably have done things better. But that’s the case with almost everything we do. What should I have done, though? Tell you I was pregnant?’

  Cámara nodded.

  ‘And would that really have been fair on you? You were still confused about that other woman, admit it, Max. I was very close to falling in love with you. There. I’ve said it. But we’d only slept together once. I was busy working out how to get away from Javier and the suffocation of El Diario. I didn’t know what you wanted, what you felt. You’re a policeman, you’re hardly classic father material.’

  Cámara put the glass down on the table, but found that he still couldn’t look up.

  ‘What was I supposed to say? Hey, look, we’ve only just met, and we had sex once and, oh, by the way, can you help me raise this child? And then what? Stay in Valencia? Have the child and move in together? Get married and live felices como perdices?’ Happily ever after.

  Ash was beginning to fall on to the table from her cigarette.

  ‘Yes, that might have been how things turned out, but I just couldn’t see it. What I saw was me being stuck in Valencia, at a crap local newspaper, with a father to my child whose most outstanding characteristic was that he was never around.’

  ‘You could at least have told me.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Before the abortion.’

  Cámara could feel a tightness in his shoulders, a fuzziness in his brain that he usually took as a warning sign that any thoughts at that moment were best left alone, unvoiced and ignored. But anger and indignation were getting the better of him.

  He looked up. Alicia was staring at him incredulously.

  ‘What? So you could hold my hand? You’re not listening to me. There was no way I could have told you before. Who would I have been telling? I barely knew you. I barely know you now.’

  ‘I was the fucking father.’ Cáma
ra’s voice lowered as he spat the words out. ‘Doesn’t that count for something?’

  ‘This isn’t about the child, or the foetus, or whatever you want to call it,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s not some moral thing. It’s about you not being able to control the situation.’

  Cámara’s eyes widened.

  ‘There was no solution here. No opportunity for Chief Inspector Cámara to come along and solve the problem. That’s what pisses you off. Yes, it was yours as well, but it was growing inside me. I was the one who would give birth to it and raise it. Disappearing, giving up, only taking care of it at weekends–these weren’t options for me like they were for you.’

  ‘I…’

  Cámara tried, but couldn’t speak.

  ‘What? You would have been a great dad? Maybe. But that’s easy to say now. More difficult when there’s an actual child that needs taking care of.’

  She paused.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘whatever pain it caused you, whatever angst you went through, believe me, it was worse for me.’

  The fuzziness seemed to be intensifying inside him. Just say nothing, he told himself. Don’t speak.

  ‘This isn’t about whatever happened to you in the past, that big dark secret you never want to talk about. This isn’t about Cámara the policeman, the murder detective desperately trying to undo the deaths that have scarred him so deeply. It was about you and me and a little group of cells that was about to cause a huge mess.’

  He walked her to her old flat. There was no point mentioning the hotel room.

  He stepped away as she unlocked the main door, making it clear he wasn’t expecting to be invited up, but she moved towards him and kissed him softly on either cheek.

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about us this past year,’ she said, gripping his arm affectionately.

  ‘So have I,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s within you. Whatever it is that holds us apart is in you.’

  She moved back towards the door and stepped inside.

  ‘Come and find me,’ she said, glancing back for a moment. ‘If ever you’re ready to tell me about it, come and find me.’

  Nineteen

  Friday 10th July

  He stepped into the first bar he found, dizzy and foggy-headed. He’d woken early, hunger lifting him out of his leaden, skunk-induced sleep, paid for the hotel room in cash, and crashed out into the bright sunlight outside, looking for somewhere to have breakfast. The bar was just around the corner in the next street.

  Flores’s puffy face wasn’t the first thing he wanted to see on any day, but less so that morning. Nonetheless, there he was on the TV, in a beige summer suit with a lemon shirt and a pink, black and white striped tie, frowning at the journalist who had dared corner him to ask a question. Cámara ordered a café con leche and some toast with olive oil and salt and then glanced up at the screen screwed to the wall opposite, wondering if the world had turned upside down while he’d been asleep. But no, this wasn’t Valencian Canal 9–they would never have the temerity to buttonhole one of their paymasters in this way; it was a national channel, one less pervious to the censoring tendencies of the local ruling party.

  He sipped on his coffee, trying to ignore the man who had organised violent attacks against him during the Blanco case. Flores had been trying to slow Cámara’s investigation down, using him as a tool in the campaign to get Mayoress Emilia Delgado re-elected. But since then, apart from a few fines for supposedly not paying his car tax, Flores had left Cámara alone. If Vicent was right, he wasn’t as powerful as he once had been, not as close to Emilia. Perhaps someone else had replaced him in her bed.

  He drained the coffee, ordered another one, took a bite of the toast, and glanced back up at the screen. Flores looked angry.

  Journalist: ‘You’ve ordered the removal of an exhibit at an art show that the Town Hall itself organised.’

  Flores: ‘The piece in question was grossly indecent and insulting.’

  Journalist: ‘And you’ve also banned an anti-Pope rally organised for this afternoon. Aren’t you stifling a constitutional right to freedom of expression?’

  Flores: ‘Freedom comes with responsibility. We have to maintain standards of common decency.’

  Journalist: ‘But the demonstration?’

  Flores: ‘It’s illegal. The application for permission came in after the deadline.’

  Journalist: ‘A deadline you only made public after the application had been made.’

  Flores: ‘That’s a lie!’

  Journalist: ‘What do you say to allegations that public money spent on the Pope’s visit has been siphoned off…’

  But Flores wanted no more. He pushed past the girl with the microphone and stepped into a waiting car to be whisked away. The image cut to a photograph, the anchorman explaining that this was the exhibit that the Town Hall had ordered be removed from the exhibition at the modern art gallery. Cámara stared up at a montage showing a naked, crucified Emilia, blood tricking down her torso, a group of praying Town Hall councillors circling beneath her. On one side a figure representing Flores himself was placing a fig leaf over Emilia’s mouth, while below a man with Mezquita’s face superimposed over his head was busy anointing her feet.

  A TV commentator was speculating whether the image hadn’t reached a wider audience by cack-handed attempts to censor it. Then they cut to a different Town Hall spokesman, one Cámara hadn’t seen before, writing off the accusations against them as a smear campaign by the opposition parties. They would only be happy, the spokesman insisted, when Emilia was woken up in the middle of the night, put against a wall, shot and buried in an unmarked pit.

  The parallel to the killings of the Civil War period was obvious, and the shock at hearing such brutal language quickly stifled Cámara’s laughter. The wounds were still too open, too fresh, for talk like that.

  As the images cut to show the recent demolition of more houses in El Cabanyal, he turned away from the screen, his belief in the corrosive effect of news media further strengthened. Inflaming, depressing or exciting, all it ever did was pull at lower emotions, making people twitch like puppets while rarely passing on truly useful information.

  The phone in his pocket vibrated twice in succession as he finished his toast and drained the last of his coffee. The first text was from Maldonado, threatening to have him formally disciplined if he failed to report to him by ten o’clock that morning.

  The second was more interesting: Captain Herrero, the Guardia Civil he’d met on the beach when they’d fished out Roures’s body from the sea, was asking to meet him later that morning at a bar near the railway station.

  Outside, it was as if two rival football teams were about to go head to head, with yellow-and-white flags for the Pope’s fans, and red-and-white banners hanging from the windows of the more anti-clerical persuasion. From the flatter, darker, more Asiatic faces that had suddenly appeared in the city, it felt as though half the population of Latin America had been parachuted in to fill out the Vatican’s numbers.

  Cámara pushed his way through the crowds of excited teenagers and elderly ladies lining the sides of what was later to be the papal route through the city and crossed the old river bed in the direction of the Jefatura.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said to Torres as he walked into their shared office. ‘Pardo wants my head on a plate.’

  ‘On a plate with a nice salsa verde and a side helping of allioli. Just to give it some flavour.’

  ‘He knows how to eat well, you’ve got to give him that.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be flattered to hear it, chief,’ Torres said. ‘Did you manage to find Roures’s ex?’

  But Cámara wasn’t listening. Sitting down at Torres’s desk, he started clicking his way through the web pages of Sidenpol, checking up information on Valconsa.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t know how to use that thing,’ Torres said, glancing over his shoulder.

  ‘I lied.’

  Torres started playing wi
th his packet of Habanos cigarettes. It was time, he was trying to signal, for a smoke downstairs outside the emergency exit. But still Cámara wasn’t paying him any attention, his concentration fixed on the screen.

  ‘I’ll, er, go down on my own, then,’ Torres said.

  But he didn’t get a chance to make it across the office floor. As though drawn by a scent, Pardo walked in at that moment and slammed the door shut behind him.

  ‘Buenos días, jefe,’ Torres said. Pardo wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. Glancing about the office like an arsonist about to set fire to the place, he stepped over the piles of reports and box files and wandered over to Cámara’s desk, where he slumped down in the chair and started spinning around.

  ‘Do you want to go through the whole your-job’s-on-the-line routine,’ Cámara asked, standing up, ‘or shall we go straight to the explanations?’

  Pardo kept spinning, not saying anything.

  ‘You look like you need to let off some steam.’

  Torres threw Cámara a look. Pardo placed his feet on the ground and stopped, keeping his back to both of them, staring out through the window at the monotone brick facades of the block of flats in front.

  ‘They really didn’t give you the best view, here, did they?’ he said at last. ‘I wonder why that was?’

  He spun round in the chair to face them.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said.

  Torres sat at his own desk; Cámara perched on the edge of a table.

  ‘Right, here’s the deal,’ he said calmly. ‘You’re both–that’s right, both–facing disciplinary hearings. I don’t need to explain why in your case,’ he said to Cámara. ‘But you,’ he nodded in Torres’s direction, ‘for covering for him.’

  Torres froze, his face turning a pale, waxy colour.

  ‘That’s right, Cámara. It’s not just about putting your own neck on the line any more. You want to run around making your own rules, it’s the people around you that’s going to feel the consequences as well this time.’

  Pardo started rolling his tongue around in his mouth as he chose his words.

  ‘Half the Interior Ministry’s poring over every piece of paper we produce on this case. Meanwhile Madrid’s itching to send over a special investigations unit ’cause they reckon we’re out of our depth on this one. Want to turn it into a nationwide thing. Can’t believe there are rotten apples only in the Guardia Civil here. Must be everywhere, they reckon.’