‘No,’ Paco agreed. ‘I don’t want that.’
‘Then you’re going to behave?’
‘I’d be a fool not to.’
Carlos Méndez had been watching the whole incident. Now, when the bodyguard nodded, he went back to the Rolls-Royce and opened the door. Paco wondered what it must be like to be him – to be the lackey who always went ahead to clear up whatever crap lay in the Great Man’s way.
Herrera stepped out of the car, not even acknowledging his brother-in-law. He was wearing an expensive black suit with accompanying black gloves, and on his face was an expression of suitably dignified grief. He did not close the door behind him – Carlos Méndez was there to perform such functions – but instead stepped clear of the Rolls. Immediately, he was surrounded by a group of large men with wary eyes. If José Calvo Sotelo had had that kind of protection around him, the policeman in Paco thought, they wouldn’t be burying him now.
By the time Herrera had reached the edge of the crowd, two of his bodyguards had already started to create a path through it. It was a fascinating process to watch: no one seemed to be being treated roughly, yet a gap appeared through which Herrera could pass without rubbing shoulders with the common herd. The politician walked regally towards the grave, with Méndez following at his heel.
‘Do you like your work?’ Paco asked the bodyguard on his left.
‘It pays well,’ the man replied flatly.
A murmur ran through the crowd. The coffin was coming! The coffin was coming! Heads turned and people stood on tiptoe to get a brief glimpse of the last journey of one of Spain’s most important political figures.
As the coffin passed through it, the crowd roared at the top of its collective voice, and many people gave the fascist salute. Then, starting at the middle and spreading out to the edges, an unnatural quiet fell.
Paco looked around him. The Asaltos had left the shade of the trees, and were fanning out around the edges of the crowd. He was not the only one to have noticed them. Several of the blue-shirted Falangists had moved away from the grave and were heading for positions from which they could outflank their enemies.
In the centre of the mourners, a man with a rich, powerful voice had begun to make a speech. ‘I take an oath, before God and Spain, that the murder of this very great man will not go unavenged . . .’ He relinquished each word as if it were as valuable as gold.
The Falangists and the Asaltos were getting dangerously close to one another. Trouble was almost inevitable, and Paco wanted no part of it. ‘Am I free to leave?’ he asked the bodyguard on his left.
‘Yes, you can go,’ the man answered. ‘But be warned – the next time you make any attempt to get close to the jefe, we won’t be so gentle with you.’
Paco turned and walked briskly away, towards the car park near the main gate. The orator at the graveside had called for revenge, he thought, and the crowd was roaring its approval. But who was there to demand that María’s death be avenged? Who was there to call for justice for the peasant girl who had been driven by poverty into the arms of a rich, married politician, and forced by blackmail to give into the demands of his lecherous servant?
‘Felipe and me!’ Paco said aloud. ‘There’s only Felipe and me.’
He heard the rapid footsteps behind him, getting closer all the time, but only when he felt the tap on his shoulder did he stop and turn around. Carlos Méndez was standing there, looking slightly breathless. ‘Yes?’ Paco said.
‘Why won’t you leave my family alone?’ Méndez asked, almost apologetically.
‘What are you?’ Paco demanded. ‘The messenger boy?’
‘Your investigation is making Eduardo angry,’ Méndez said, choosing to ignore the insult. ‘And when he’s angry, it is those around him who are made to suffer.’
‘You’re saying he’s making you suffer?’
‘Me – and others,’ Méndez admitted.
Paco put himself in Don Carlos’s position – a penniless aristocrat who was forced to eat shit on a daily basis. And though he had an instinctive dislike of the class, he almost felt sorry for the man. ‘I have no choice but to carry on with my inquiries,’ he said. ‘Your brother-in-law is involved in a murder.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Don Carlos said. ‘Yes, María was Eduardo’s mistress, and I admit we made a mistake by not telling you that from the start. But why should he want to kill her?’
‘Jealousy?’ Paco suggested. ‘Because he found out she’d been seeing someone else?’
Méndez laughed. ‘You make it sound like he was in love with her.’
‘And wasn’t he?’
‘Have you seen the apartment she lived in?’ Don Carlos asked.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. The rent must be quite high.’
‘It is,’ Méndez agreed. ‘Anywhere within walking distance of our apartment would have been quite expensive, and that was one of Eduardo’s requirements – that she was in easy reach. But what about the furniture? What did you notice about that?’
‘Cheap, mass-produced,’ Paco said. ‘Did the girl choose it herself?’
‘No, I chose it,’ Don Carlos said, with just a hint of bitterness creeping into his voice. ‘And given the pitiful budget Eduardo allowed me, I think I did quite well.’
‘What’s your point?’ Paco asked.
‘When you love someone, you want to give them the best of everything, not cast-off dresses and sub-standard furniture,’ Don Carlos said. ‘Eduardo didn’t love María; she was just someone he liked to screw. And even that was beginning to pale on him. He’d have kicked her out weeks ago and moved in a replacement, but I talked him out of it.’
‘And why did you do that? Because you were sleeping with her yourself?’ Paco asked nastily.
Don Carlos looked down at the ground. ‘No, I was not sleeping with her,’ he said. ‘My tastes lie in another direction.’
‘So why . . .?’
‘Because I felt sorry for her,’ Don Carlos said, lifting his head again, and looking Paco squarely in the eyes. ‘Because I didn’t want to see her thrown out onto the street.’
‘All right, so he didn’t love her,’ Paco said, getting the conversation back on track. ‘But he may have had other reasons for killing her?’
‘Such as?’
‘Perhaps she’d threatened to go to the newspapers with her story.’
‘Eduardo has enough influence to prevent most of the papers printing it. And as for the rest – the yellow, left-wing press – no one of any importance would believe them. And even if it was believed, do you think that the Spanish people don’t know that politicians – even Catholic politicians – keep mistresses? If it had done anything to Eduardo’s popularity, it would only have increased it.’
Méndez’s words had a ring of truth about them which Paco found depressing. ‘Maybe he was afraid his wife would find out,’ he said, advancing his other theory. ‘Or maybe she did find out, and had María killed herself.’
A look of what could only have been genuine surprise came to Méndez’s face. ‘You think she didn’t know?’ he asked.
‘Did she?’
‘Not about Eduardo giving María her old dresses, I’ll grant you. They had a blazing row about that. But that he had a mistress – of course she knew.’
‘And she didn’t mind?’
Don Carlos resumed his examination of the ground. ‘My brother-in-law has certain tastes which might best be described as . . . er . . . bizarre,’ he said. ‘María satisfied his yearnings and saved my sister from having to turn him down. Believe me, Señor Ruiz, Mercedes was at least as satisfied with the arrangement as Eduardo was.’
Paco pictured Mercedes Méndez in his mind. Yes, he decided, she was hard enough and cold enough to be happy that her husband was taking his pleasure elsewhere. ‘What about Luis?’ he asked.
‘Luis?’
‘Did you know he was sleeping with her, too?’
‘Yes,’ Don Carlos said, with a hint of shame in his voice
. ‘I knew, and I did nothing about it.’
‘Why not, if you felt sorry for her as you claim you did?’
‘By the time she told me, the damage had already been done. Suppose I had told Eduardo about it. He would have dismissed Luis, and Luis, to get his revenge, would have gone to see María’s mother. So the poor girl would have made her sacrifice for nothing.’
‘You could still have ordered Luis to leave her alone in future,’ Paco said.
Don Carlos laughed again, hollowly this time. ‘You seem to have a high opinion of my position in the household,’ he said. ‘I wish to God everyone else did.’
‘You’re frightened of him!’ Paco said.
‘Yes, that too,’ Don Carlos admitted.
‘Frightened enough to shield him even if you knew he was a murderer?’
‘Luis didn’t murder María.’
‘He has no alibi for the time of her death.’
Don Carlos shook his head in contradiction. ‘He has no alibi he’s prepared to produce,’ he said.
‘And what does that mean?’ Paco asked.
‘Check the records of the police station nearest to the bullring, and you’ll find out for yourself,’ Don Carlos told him.
So Luis had some kind of alibi, Don Eduardo didn’t care enough about María to murder her, and Doña Mercedes actually approved of her husband having a mistress. If all Don Carlos had said was true, he had effectively eliminated the three main suspects with one fell swoop.
But there was one big question which was still unanswered. ‘If no one from the household had anything to do with María’s death, why is someone trying to get me killed?’ he demanded, and without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and strode towards the park gates.
*
Paco covered nearly a kilometre and had almost reached his car when he heard the gunfire coming from the part of the cemetery he had left. He wondered, briefly, who had started it. But it didn’t really matter. Asaltos or Falangists, Falangists or Asaltos – what was the difference? This was not a fresh quarrel, merely a re-enactment of an old war – a war between the left and right which had plagued Spain for at least a century. A simple policeman like him couldn’t do anything about it, even if he wanted to.
There were more shots. Paco got into his car and drove away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Taverna walls were decorated with the blue and white tiles of the south of Spain. Legs of mountain-ham hung from ceiling beams, and strings of garlic from hooks behind the bar. There was cured cheese in olive oil on the counter, and the smell of cooking floated enticingly through the air. It was a cool, pleasant place to be. But for all Paco noticed of his surroundings, it might as well have been the seediest bar in the seediest street in Madrid.
He checked his watch anxiously, for the tenth or eleventh time. Felipe had been gone for over an hour. Even with heavy traffic, it shouldn’t have taken him that long to get back to the bar. So what the hell had happened to him?
‘I should never have got him involved,’ Paco told himself. ‘When he gave me all that partnership shit, I shouldn’t have listened.’
But the problem was, it wasn’t shit, not to either of them. Paco thought back to some of the investigations he’d worked on over the years. The headless corpse in the metro. The tobacco smuggler’s murder. The university professor who’d been discovered floating on the lake in the Casa de Campo. On all those cases, Felipe had been by his side, letting Paco bounce ideas off him, tolerating his boss’s occasional bouts of irrationality, always steering a clear – if rarely inspired – course. To have cut Felipe adrift after what they’d been through together would have been both hurtful and insulting, and he deserved better than that.
The bar door swung open, and two people entered. One was a fat man in a shabby suit, the other a little mouse of a thing who had country girl written all over her. Paco breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Paco watched as the fat constable guided Belén – the maid from the apartment opposite María’s – between the tables. The girl seemed reluctant to be there, and but for the fact that Felipe had a firm grip on her arm, would probably have tried to run away. This wasn’t going to be easy.
‘What took you so long?’ Paco asked.
‘She was out shopping when I got there,’ Felipe told him. ‘I had to wait till she got back.’
Belén looked up at Felipe. ‘You told me we were going to the police station,’ she said accusingly.
‘It’s more comfortable here,’ Paco said.
‘Is this the man you’ve brought me to see?’ Belén asked, and when Felipe nodded, she turned to Paco. ‘Last time I met you, you said you were the landlord’s agent, now it turns out you’re a policeman. I don’t know what to believe any more.’
‘I am a policeman,’ Paco assured her, ‘and if I lied the last time, it was only because, in our line of work, deception is sometimes necessary.’
‘I still don’t like it,’ the girl said, looking longingly over her shoulder at the door.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Paco suggested.
‘Don’t want to sit—’
‘We can talk better when you’re sitting down,’ Paco said, gently but firmly.
The maid sat, but only on the very edge of the chair. ‘He told me that María’s dead,’ she said, pointing at Felipe.
‘I’m afraid it’s true. Her body was discovered in the Retiro a few days ago. She’d been murdered. That’s why we need you to answer a few questions for us.’
The girl’s eyes had started to water, but she bit her lip and clenched her hands tightly on the table in front of her. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘You were a friend of hers, weren’t you?’
A hesitation. ‘I knew the señorita,’ Belén admitted.
‘I think it was more than that,’ Paco said, as Felipe eased his large frame into the third chair. ‘A minute ago, you called her María, and I bet that’s what you called her to her face, too. In fact, I think you were the only person in the whole city she could really talk to. Isn’t that true?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And what did you talk about?’
Belén shrugged. ‘This and that. Our villages. The city. What we’d do if we were rich.’
‘But María was already rich, wasn’t she?’
‘No, she . . . she . . .’
‘She what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘She must surely have been rich to afford that expensive apartment, mustn’t she?’ Paco said.
The girl looked down at the table. ‘I suppose so.’
‘And she didn’t even have a job, did she? So where did her money come from?’
‘I . . . I’ve no idea,’ Belén stuttered.
‘Yes, you have,’ Paco said. ‘You nearly always knew when she had visitors, didn’t you?’
The girl nodded. ‘I spend most of my time working in the kitchen. You can always hear when anybody comes down the hallway.’
Paco smiled. ‘And you always look through the peep-hole in the front door to see who it is, don’t you?’
The girl blushed, as if she felt she’d been caught out in something wicked. ‘It’s very boring being in the kitchen all the time,’ she said, excusing herself. ‘Seeing who’s going by makes my life a little more interesting.’
‘And how many people came to see her?’
‘Only two.’
‘Both of them men?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re sure she never had any other visitors?’
‘I’m sure.’
Paco took out his cigarettes, and lit one. ‘Did either of the two men ever quarrel with her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Surely, you’d have heard them if they had.’
‘The walls are quite thick.’
Paco sighed. ‘Did she ever have any bruises – as if one of them might have hit her?’
‘No.’
‘Did she ever tell you she’d quar
relled with either of them?’
‘No.’
‘So what did she say about them?’
‘I think she quite liked the old man sometimes.’
The old man! Christ, Herrera was forty-five! Paco wondered when had been the last time he’d thought of forty-five as old. ‘What do you mean, she quite liked the older man?’ he prodded.
Belén shrugged. ‘She didn’t say it in so many words, but I got the feeling that he didn’t just, you know, take her to bed. That he sometimes talked to her.’
‘And the younger man?’
‘He was never there for more than half an hour.’
Just enough time to screw her, Paco thought. It was looking as if Luis had been telling the truth when he said he hadn’t loved her. ‘María was often away, wasn’t she – sometimes for as long as a week?’ he asked, turning his line of questioning in a new direction.
‘Yes, she was often away.’
‘Do you have any idea where she went?’
‘All over the country.’
It was so exasperating. Every scrap of information had to be dragged from this girl. ‘Where exactly did she go?’ Paco asked.
Belén frowned in concentration. ‘Burgos, Valladolid, Granada, Leon . . . and Seville. She went to Seville three or four times.’
‘Why did she make all those journeys?’
‘I asked her that once. She said she’d like to tell me, but she couldn’t.’
‘Had it anything to do with her gentleman – the older man?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps she was lying to you about where she went,’ Paco suggested.
Belén shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t do that. I was her friend. Anyway, she always sent me picture postcards from the places she visited.’
So either she really had travelled all over Spain, or she had constructed an elaborate fraud to fool Belén. But why would anybody go to the trouble of fooling a simple maid? ‘Did you hear anything unusual on the night María disappeared?’ Paco asked.
‘When was that?’
‘Four evenings ago.’
The girl counted back on her fingers. ‘It was my day off. I went back to the village, and didn’t return to Madrid until the first train the next morning.’
A Murder of No Consequence Page 14
