A Death in Valencia

by Jason Webster

  Cámara shuffled on his perch; Torres sat motionless.

  ‘So while you two are playing Cowboys and Indians, not only are you making the investigation look a fucking mess, you’re giving them the excuse they need to come down here and take over the entire fucking show.’

  Cámara made to speak, but Pardo held up his hand.

  ‘Wait your turn,’ he barked. The anger was rising in his chest, despite his efforts to dampen it down, and he was beginning to breathe heavily.

  ‘Now I know,’ he said through tightened lips, ‘that you’re a good policeman.’ He turned to Torres. ‘You’re both good. So this is what we’re going to do: you’re going to tell me in very simple language what the fuck it is you’ve been doing for the past couple of days while the rest of us have been running around like headless chickens trying to find Sofía Bodí before the fucking Pope flies into town.’

  He nodded at Cámara to speak. Cámara gave a cough.

  ‘I’d really prefer it,’ Pardo butted in before he could start, ‘if you sat down on a proper fucking chair.’

  Cámara grabbed a spare seat from the other side of the office, hauled it over in front of Pardo and sat down.

  ‘There, that’s better,’ Pardo said. ‘See?’

  ‘There’s a link,’ Cámara said, pressing his fingertips together.

  ‘A link,’ Pardo echoed.

  ‘Between Bodí and Roures.’

  For the next few minutes Cámara outlined what he’d learned: about Sofía’s diaries; about the entries for each day with the names of the women she’d carried out abortions on; about the mark next to a recent entry when she’d gone for lunch at La Mar, and how that mark had referred to an abortion carried out back in 1977 on Roures’s ex-wife, Lucía Bautista. Pardo sat in silence, listening, his eyes cast down towards the floor.

  ‘There were no other marks in the diary like it,’ Cámara said. ‘We’re looking at something exceptional, something tying her in with our murdered paella chef just weeks before she herself goes missing.’

  ‘Anything in the diary to suggest she knew who might be about to kidnap her?’ Pardo asked.

  ‘Nothing from what I read. The entries were getting shorter over time. She wasn’t sleeping. She was probably close to breaking down, physically and mentally.’

  Pardo signalled for him to stop, thinking the information through in silence for a moment.

  ‘You’ve talked to this Bautista woman?’

  ‘Inspector Torres carried out an initial interview,’ Cámara said. ‘I spoke to her again yesterday.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Claims she’s had no contact with Sofía Bodí. Said she’d only heard of her from the news stories. But she confirmed the abortion back in seventy-seven.’

  Pardo rested his cheek against his knuckles, his eyes unfocused.

  ‘All right,’ he said, getting up from his chair. ‘It’s good enough for me. Too much coincidence–don’t like it. You’ve got my permission to keep at this. But you’ve got to work quickly. Keep a proper record of everything–I mean everything. I’m going to keep a lid on this for the next few hours, but once you find something we’re going to have to go official, which means no spelling mistakes and no missing commas. Right?’

  He looked over at Torres.

  ‘No more wasting time covering for this arsehole, got it? I need you both working flat out. And I need a result by this afternoon. There’s enough to start with, but we’re going to need more to convince the top floor.’

  Cámara was familiar with this particular version of Pardo–no longer a comisario but one of the boys, pretending to get his hands dirty while making common cause against the ‘bosses’ upstairs.

  ‘What about Maldonado?’ Torres asked. ‘Do we need to—’

  ‘Fuck Maldonado,’ Pardo snapped. ‘He can look after himself.’

  He moved towards the door. Cámara took a step after him.

  ‘One thing, chief,’ he said in a low voice.

  Pardo opened the door and turned to him.

  ‘This is only ever between you and me. Don’t ever do that to Torres again.’

  Pardo’s eyes widened in disbelief.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he spluttered. ‘You threatening me?’

  ‘Pecado de mucho bulto no puede estar siempre oculto,’ Cámara said in a low voice. You can’t hide a big sin for ever.

  Pardo’s expression of disbelief shifted from one born of rage to one sustained by fear. He held Cámara’s gaze for a moment and then stepped out into the corridor, slamming the door behind him.

  Cámara moved back to his desk and sat down in the chair Pardo had just vacated.

  ‘Chief,’ Torres said. Cámara kept his head down.

  ‘Have you got some dirt on Pardo?’

  Cámara shrugged as he flicked through some forms lying on his desk.

  ‘Looks like I do now.’

  Twenty

  Captain Herrero was not in uniform, but Cámara recognised him immediately from his tall, angular body and sharp features. He walked purposefully into the bar, ordered a café solo from the barman, then crossed over to where Cámara was sitting in the corner as though he’d known he was there from the start.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said as he sat down.

  ‘Neither should I,’ Cámara said. ‘Specific orders.’

  Herrero’s mouth twitched into a grin: they understood each other.

  ‘Any fallout from the other day?’ Cámara asked.

  ‘The body on the beach? No, not really. Who was he, anyway?’

  ‘Pep Roures. Used to run a paella restaurant in El Cabanyal.’

  ‘La Mar?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard about that case.’

  ‘But you haven’t come here to talk about that, have you?’ Cámara said.

  Herrero paused as the barman brought over his coffee and placed it down on the table in front of him. Cámara was already halfway through a café cortado; the skunk felt to be pretty much out of his brain by now, but he eschewed a usual mid-morning beer in favour of more caffeine to keep him sharp. On the television set above the bar, images were being broadcast of the Pope’s arrival at Valencia airport, the King and Queen welcoming him along with a host of local politicians. Emilia was there, smiling as broadly as she could, a yellow patent leather handbag swinging from her arm.

  Herrero didn’t speak until the barman had gone back behind the bar and was well out of earshot.

  ‘They transferred me out of Servicios Marítimos the next day,’ he said. ‘Some reorganisation of personnel. Or at least that’s what they said.’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘I was virtually the only one not on sick duty for depression and they pulled me out. I mean, what’s the point?’

  ‘We get the same kind of bullshit,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Herrero continued.

  ‘We didn’t come here to moan about the demotivational skills of our respective superiors,’ Cámara finished for him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Herrero said. ‘Listen, they shunted me into an office in the Comandancia. It’s comms and protocol stuff mostly, like a kind of hub.’

  ‘Got it,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Well, look, something interesting passed by me yesterday, records of a phone tap.’

  Cámara raised an eyebrow. Already Herrero was sticking his neck out more than any other Guardia Civil he’d encountered. Even if the information turned out to be useless, this was already important in itself.

  ‘Are you sure you want to…’ Cámara said. ‘We can stop right now and forget everything about this. It’s not too late.’

  ‘You need to know what I’m about to tell you,’ Herrero said. ‘If we’ve got some nutters on our side running around kidnapping civilians I want them flushed out as much as you do.’

  Cámara nodded. It seemed that Maldonado’s ‘GAL theory’ was common currency.

  ‘OK. Go on.’

  Herrero put a spoon into his coffee, stirred it for a c
ouple of seconds, then took a gulp.

  ‘Right, as I said, this office I’m in, it’s just light stuff mostly. And as the new boy they weren’t going to show me anything sensitive. But yesterday I was there on my own. I reckon the others thought I’d picked up enough to know the score and they could bugger off to the beach for the day. So this pink envelope comes through–that means class 2 security–and I had to process it.’

  ‘You use pink envelopes for top secret?’

  ‘No that’s red. Pink’s one down. But, yeah, pink. I know what you mean. Not the kind of colour you associate with the Guardia Civil, right?’

  He looked down into his coffee, as though weighing what he was about to say.

  ‘OK, look, I’ve just got to tell you this, all right?’ he said, launching himself into it. ‘Sofía Bodí’s phone was being tapped.’

  ‘Right,’ Cámara said. ‘Probably to be expected given Lázaro’s investigation into the clinic.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Herrero raised his hands as though to slow Cámara down. ‘That’s what I thought. Comandante Lázaro was behind the tap, but what I was looking at was a list of all the people who were receiving the transcripts.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We use codes to denote who they are. I know them by now; they were people you might imagine: Lázaro’s superiors, a couple of people in Madrid, one or two others.

  ‘But,’ he went on, ‘one code was different. An emergency code, not one for someone inside the Guardia.’

  He reached over for a paper tissue from the metal dispenser at the side of the table, fished out a pen from his shirt pocket, and started writing in small, heavy lettering. When he’d finished he turned the paper round and showed it to Cámara, keeping his finger on the paper.

  Cámara looked down and saw: X461252015.

  ‘Yeah,’ Herrero said. ‘It wouldn’t have meant much to me a week ago. But I’m a fast learner. Look, we can break it down.’

  With his pen, he drew a line down after the ‘X’, separating it from the numbers.

  ‘That’s X for external. We know this is going to someone outside. But where?’

  He drew another line, this time after the numbers ‘4’ and ‘6’.

  ‘Forty-six. That’s the first two digits of the Valencia city postcode.’

  Cámara pursed his lips.

  ‘That was easy,’ Herrero continued. ‘The next bit was more complicated. But I had a breakthrough last night.’

  He turned the paper round and started writing again.

  ‘Let’s assume each letter of the alphabet has been assigned a number. A equals one, B two, and so on. Now the only letters that would make sense out of the remaining digits here would be these.’

  He drew his pen down, dividing the numbers into four groups: ‘1, 25, 20, 15.’

  ‘One is A,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Twenty-five is Y,’ Herrero continued. ‘Twenty is T. And fifteen is O.’

  He wrote each letter out as he explained: ‘A’, ‘Y’, ‘T’, ‘O’.

  Cámara’s eyes stayed fixed on the paper.

  ‘And we all know what that means,’ Herrero said.

  Ayto. It was the common acronym for Ayuntamiento, the Town Hall.

  Cámara took a breath.

  ‘Listen,’ Herrero said. ‘I can’t do anything with this. I’m not even sure these days who I could mention it to. Know what I mean? Everyone’s on edge at the moment. The last thing anyone wants is a Policía Nacional investigation into the Guardia Civil. It’s got people paranoid.’

  Cámara had pulled out a Ducados and was lighting it, his gaze fixed on the piece of tissue paper on the table in front of him, with Herrero’s proprietorial finger still pressed down on it.

  ‘I owe you one,’ Herrero said. ‘From the other day. I know you’re on this case.’

  ‘I suppose that’s how you got my mobile number as well,’ Cámara butted in.

  ‘I’d be a pretty hopeless Guardia if I didn’t.’

  Cámara smiled.

  ‘The point is,’ Herrero said, ‘this needs to be known about. You need to know this. Whatever you do with the information from now on is your affair, though. This cup of coffee, this bar, this meeting, none of it exists.’

  Cámara nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  He was busy trying to memorise the numbers on the piece of paper, wondering if Herrero was ever going to lift his finger off it and let him keep it.

  ‘I just wish I could get my hands on those transcripts,’ he said under his breath. ‘Find out what Sofía was saying, who she was talking to.’

  Herrero put a hand into his back pocket and lifted out a wad of folded papers, placing them in front of Cámara.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I thought you might say that.’

  Twenty-One

  In the end there was no reason not to. Seeing him walking down the street with Herrero’s papers in his hand, the bus driver thought Cámara was flagging him down as he skipped on to the melting tarmac around the edge of the bus stop in order to get past the two old women blocking the narrow pavement. And so when the vehicle came to a stop, and the doors opened with a long hiss, Cámara wondered for just a fraction of a second before hopping on and letting himself be carried by the wave that had unexpectedly come his way. He needed somewhere he could read the transcripts in peace anyway. And there was always the chance that Herrero was being watched by his own team. Which meant a tail might be following him now.

  Quien peces quiere mojarse tiene. He who wants to catch fish has to get wet.

  He sat in the higher seat at the back, checking that no one else was getting on board with him, studied the street for watching eyes and then, as the bus jerked back into motion, opened up the folded papers, barely conscious of the cool blow of conditioned air blowing down the back of his neck from the vent above his head.

  Sofía had made dozens of calls over the course of the week before she’d disappeared. At the top of each conversation was typed the time and date, her name and her mobile phone number, along with the number and identity of the person at the other end, and outgoing or incoming to denote whether she had initiated the call or not. Cámara flicked through the pages, searching for names that jumped out. There were several to Ballester, Sofía’s partner–quick calls to arrange the shopping for dinner, an apology for arriving late for a meeting at the clinic, discussions of their defence against the Lázaro investigation. And, less frequent but more important, comments of mutual support and affection. Stripped of their true context and subtleties such as tone of voice or the length of a pause, phone-tap transcripts often seemed pathetic and sad, Cámara thought, like a badly written–if realistic–play, built around the unthinking set phrases that made up so much of everyday speech.

  Cámara continued skipping through the pages, avoiding lingering too long on any one detail as he tried to grasp a sense of the whole, the generic picture of Sofía’s days leading up to the kidnapping, before going back to read in more detail. Calls to and from other members of the clinic, names he recognised from the notes he’d read back at the Jefatura; a misdialled number which had caused her much anxiety judging by the subsequent conversation she’d had about it with Ballester. Was she being stalked? Ballester had done his best to calm her down, but Cámara could sense the paranoia that was taking hold of both of them.

  Sofía: ‘Do you think…’

  Ballester: ‘…What?’

  Sofía: ‘This phone could be tapped.’

  Ballester: ‘It’s possible. Quite likely, I should say.’

  Sofía: ‘What should we do?’

  Ballester: ‘Keep talking. You’ve done nothing wrong. Let them listen, if the sons of bitches want to.’

  And then there it was, the name that jumped out and grabbed him by the throat. The name that somehow, without knowing, he’d known he would see.

  Sofía: ‘¿Hola? Is that Lucía Bautista?’

  Cámara stared at the name to make doubly sure, before reading on.

 
; Lucía: ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  Sofía: ‘My name’s Sofía Bodí. You may not remember me. But we met, years ago. I used to work at a gynaecological clinic in Paris in the nineteen seventies.’

  Lucía: ‘How do you…? How did you…?’

  Sofía: ‘I’m very sorry to be calling you like this. I wouldn’t do so if it weren’t extremely important. For you as well as for me.’

  Lucía: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m putting the phone down.’

  Sofía: ‘No, please…I saw Pep Roures just a few weeks before he died.’

  Lucía: ‘You met Pep? What’s going on?’

  Sofía: ‘Look, can we meet? It’s vitally important. There are things I don’t want to mention on the phone…’

  And so Lucía had been persuaded; they’d arranged to meet that very afternoon at the Montblanc café in El Cabanyal, not far from Lucía’s home.

  What had they talked about? Had Lázaro sent someone along to spy on them? If so, had his agent overheard the conversation?

  The bus was racing down the long stretch of the Avenida del Puerto, the driver jumping three or four lights as they were turning red. Cámara looked up at the small television screen suspended from the ceiling showing a graphic of the route: he was on the number 2, heading away from the city centre towards the harbour. In a couple of minutes the bus would be swinging to the left and entering the narrow grid of streets of the fishermen’s quarter that stretched out along the beach front to the north. All roads, it seemed, led to El Cabanyal.

  The screen changed to a slide-show newsreel, showing the Pope’s smiling face, while text alongside quoted a statement he’d made about Sofía Bodí’s kidnapping. The Holy Father was said to be ‘appalled’ at the news. However, the newsreel text continued, the Vatican had no plans to curtail his planned anti-abortion comments during his visit, a decision that had been welcomed by the Town Hall.