by David Hewson
Torrillo shook his head. ‘Me.’
‘You’re about to. They were found dead last night. Murdered, probably. Most inconvenient at the start of Semana Santa, I must say. I had hoped to engage your attention with an explanation of our excellent systems for traffic control and crowd management, Professor, but it seems this is not to be. The house is on the edge of the barrio. Overlooking the Murillo Gardens. I will be placing Lieutenant Menéndez on the assignment. He will meet you in the parking lot.’
She did not move. ‘Last night, Captain?’
‘As I said.’
‘And it is now nearly nine in the morning, the following day? Does it take this long for a senior policeman to arrive at such events?’
‘They were found by a very old lady. She is frail and, understandably, somewhat confused. When she phoned the emergency switchboard she simply complained about a very bad smell. Nothing more.’
‘And?’
‘The operator put her in touch with a plumber, which is not easy at that time of night. When the plumber arrived, he called us and explained the true situation. I think it is fair to say there was a problem with our – how would you put it? – methodology. Please. Lieutenant Menéndez is waiting.’
She followed him out of the door, scribbling frantically into a small pocket notebook as she walked.
Torrillo stopped at the despatch desk to sign out. Quemada sat at the adjoining table, grinning stupidly for everyone to see. He looked her up and down, sang little clucking noises, shrugged his shoulders, made a downturned grin as if to say: Maybe, on a bad day.
She stopped scribbling, leaned over and stared Quemada straight in the face, so close she could smell the tobacco on his breath. Torrillo caught the sudden charge of atmosphere in the office and turned to watch.
Quemada bent over the table, flexed his arm. A flabby wad of muscle formed between elbow and shoulder.
‘You like biceps, lady?’ He grinned, a stupid expression, and he knew it.
‘Not when they’re between the ears.’
Torrillo burst out laughing, a big loud rumble of a sound that caught around the office. Quemada sat silent, red-faced amid the noise. Maria Gutiérrez straightened up, tucked her notebook into a small grey leather valise and walked out of the door to a ripple of light applause.
Torrillo looked at Quemada, whose chin was still almost on the desk, and felt a twinge of sympathy.
‘She may be a lesbian, friend,’ he said. ‘But if she is, she’s our lesbian.’
Then he followed her, down two flights of stone stairs into the parking lot. Outside, Torrillo walked over to a big Ford saloon and opened the door for her. The man in the front didn’t even look round.
‘This is Lieutenant Menéndez,’ Torrillo said, half-embarrassed.
‘Good morning,’ the man in the front added, without turning round.
Two minutes later they were leaving the front entrance of the police station in silence, dodging the carriages, the cabs and the tourists meandering into the street. The heat had come early this year: it hung heavy and humid in the air.
Gangs of workmen were starting to erect barriers and grandstands along the routes of the main processions. They climbed and hung on the huge skeletal frames like insects inspecting the bones of a long-dead beast.
Torrillo drove right at the Giralda, waited for the traffic light to turn green, then skirted the edge of Santa Cruz, through narrow, convoluted streets, heading for the beautiful quiet park that sat by the side of the barrio and the Real Alcázar. It would have been quicker to walk, she thought. Perhaps cops didn’t do that.
‘Semana Santa. Phooey.’
He made ready to spit out of the half-open window before he remembered there was company in the back.
Menéndez scanned the streets, then turned round to look at her. A thin, cold face, no more than thirty, angular, with a light, black moustache. The lieutenant was dressed in a neat dark-blue suit with an immaculate white shirt and dark-red silk tie. He looked like a stockbroker.
‘Tradition is not a strong point in the police force,’ he said, in a flat, monotone, classless voice. ‘We tend to live day by day.’
‘Tradition,’ Torrillo barked out of the open window. She watched his little ponytail, gathered together with a plain elastic band, jittering as he spoke. ‘Holy Week – holy shit! You know what they do? They spend the few days on their knees and the next four on their backs. Drinking or f— . . . well, you get my point. We get maybe a hundred thousand visitors here for Holy Week and they’re all the same. First they’re crying’ – his voice turned falsetto and for a moment he took his big hands off the wheel and pressed them together as if in prayer – ‘“Please, sweet Jesus, please save us, we have been very, very bad this last year.” Then it’s straight to the feria, all night long in the casitas, and watch all that free fino loosen their pants. If you’re a cop during Semana Santa you’re either directing traffic or lost drunks, or just dealing with people in trouble ’cos they can’t decide whether to fight or fuck. Excuse my language, lady, you’re not writing this down too, are you?’
Torrillo looked in the mirror and saw her smiling amiably.
‘Good. I wouldn’t want you to write that down. Might give the good people who pay our wages the wrong idea.’
The car negotiated a tight, narrow corner, against white stone walls, past pedestrians stumbling along tiny pavements. Then the street opened out into a wider thoroughfare. The houses looked bigger, with massive wooden doors, most half-open to reveal shady courtyards, lit by splashes of colour: geranium red, jacaranda purple.
‘Santa Cruz. There. You see that church? Best Virgin in town, they say. Now where I come from, there are no virgins in town. Here they say they’ve still got a few. And most definitely we do not say the f-word here, not till Sunday,’ said Torrillo. ‘Do that and people faint away dead in the streets, they’re so delicate.’
Torrillo watched as a horse and carriage, full of passengers who looked more than a little drunk, slowly turned into a side street. They got to the edge of the barrio and the broad avenue that led past the Murillo Gardens and then turned right, into a narrow dead-end lane. He stabbed an index finger at a building along the street, part whitewashed walls, part crumbling golden stone, like the remnants of some ruined castle left behind as the city grew. A Citroën ambulance estate car was parked outside with two police vans. Torrillo edged along, then drove through iron gates that needed a coat of paint and parked in a gravel drive underneath a tangled mimosa tree. Like a taxi driver, he hurried to get out of the car first, swivelled round, then opened the back door.
‘You can call me “Bear” if you like. Everyone else does, except the lieutenant.’
Maria Gutiérrez swung her legs out of the back seat of the Ford and stood up. The top of her head came somewhere close to Torrillo’s chest.
‘Bear.’
‘I think it’s affectionate. Most of the time anyway.’
When they turned to the house, Menéndez was already deep in conversation with one of the officers from the scene-of-crime squad. His face, tanned and angular, now hidden behind dark glasses, was quite unreadable.
FOUR
‘I gather the captain asked you, Professor, but I guess I have to ask again. Are you squeamish?’
They were standing in the hallway. It reminded her of a European art-house film of the 1970s: faded grandeur, dust, a pervasive sense of decay. Menéndez’s face bore the signs of slight impatience.
‘I will follow you and leave if I must.’
‘Good.’
They walked up the stairs, past men in white overalls dusting with fine brushes, drawing ink circles around marks that seemed barely discernible. The smell got worse as they approached the top. She took out a handkerchief, shook a little cologne on it, then briefly clutched it to her nose. It helped a little.
Menéndez and Torrillo walked into the apartment without exchanging a word. She followed in their joint shadow.
It was an asto
nishing sight. The door opened to an immense room, sunlit through huge panel windows at the front. In the centre was a hulking, dark shape surrounded by forensic officers. Over it hovered a noisy swirl of dark, buzzing flies. From time to time a white hand would attempt to swat some away: it was a hopeless task. Some deep, primeval instinct told her not to face the thing in the centre, not yet.
She looked around the perimeter, examining what appeared to have no interest for the police officers: the earthly possessions of the late Angel Brothers. A marble fireplace dominated the long, left wall of the room, with a large gilt mirror over it. On the high shelf stood an ormolu clock almost three feet high: the hands were set at midnight. The opposite wall was covered in a hotchpotch collection of modern art: a mural that she dimly thought might be by Gilbert and George, a Warhol silk-screen, several pieces that were probably by the brothers themselves. Close to the door was something more personal: a single plasticized board on which newspaper and magazine cuttings were stuck with pins. She looked at them: a picture from an English magazine of the brothers at a London party. A review of an exhibition in New York. Amateur snapshots of the brothers in the company of various members of the international glitterati.
Between her and the far windows was a jumble of disordered furniture. Could they have lived like this? No. The furniture had been pushed back from the centre of the room to make way for whatever now occupied it. In another situation she could have laughed at the incongruity of the styles. Four dining-table chairs appeared to be English Chippendale. The table, however, was a vinyl representation of a semi-naked woman kneeling on all fours, carrying the Perspex top on her back. She wore knee-length leather boots, vagina open and grotesquely exaggerated, with breasts that swept almost to the floor. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open: an expression, it occurred to her, that male artists of a certain age seemed to associate with ecstasy.
From the centre of the room came Menéndez’s voice: low, firm and questioning. She could put this off no longer. Maria Gutiérrez walked towards the small crowd and heard the murmur of men’s voices blend into the buzzing of a thousand flies. Torrillo noticed her creep gently behind him and, automatically, stepped back to let her have a better view. She blinked and was amazed that she did not throw up on the spot.
The Angel Brothers lay directly beneath a small, modern chandelier that dipped low from the ceiling. Their corpses were posed side by side, as if by an undertaker, though opposed, so that the head of one was placed next to the feet of his brother. They lay on a dark-red velvet coverlet spread over an oversized double bed. The closest corpse was wearing the costume of what she guessed was a bishop from around the mid-seventeenth century. A plain paper mitre was perched precariously on his scalp. His right hand gripped an old walking stick as if it were a crook. The second twin was bareheaded, his matted hair resting on a pillow placed at the foot of the bed. He was naked from the waist down, wrapped in an off-white sheet. A patterned piece of fabric, curtain perhaps, with a red clover-leaf design, was thrown loosely over his shoulders.
Both brothers had been dressed in white, frilled shirts, of the type still worn by horsemen and followers of the bullring. The arm holding the crook covered most of the corpse’s chest. Its sibling’s was open to view, however, and she could see, in the centre, a huge wound, marked by a dried black stain. Around this large wound was a ragged line of darts. Short ribbons, red, yellow and blue, had been tied to them, and the points were stuck hard into the flesh. At least six had pierced the body from close to the neck to the navel, a small black stain on the shirt beneath each. Elsewhere on the chest, other marks denoted wounds that had no obvious cause.
The ears of both men had been removed, cleanly, viciously, leaving a black, dried wound on the side of the scalp. On the chest of each rested a single ear alone.
She took in this scene, remembering, making the connections.
Menéndez moved to the other side of the deathbed, then lifted the rigid arm holding the walking stick. Beneath it, the same pattern could be seen: a large central wound, a pattern of darts with ribbons, a small number of other bloodstains. He returned to the other side, and touched the shirt. It was not buttoned. He lifted it and for a second she thought she would be sick. The flies had not come from outside. There were maggots moving within the body, yellow and white, given life by its putrefaction.
A little unsteadily, she turned and left the room, went downstairs, out of the front door, then sat on the top step of the mansion. Even there, the air seemed tainted by the smell from inside. She wondered if it would ever leave her.
With her vision swimming, Maria Gutiérrez walked to the police Ford, opened the back door, then passed out on the seat.
Menéndez never saw her go. He was walking around the bier transfixed, examining the bodies, lifting pieces of clothing, prodding the wan, waxy flesh with a pencil, then dictating short notes into a small tape recorder. For safety’s sake, Torrillo scribbled down the asides in a small notepad.
The rest of the crew stood back and waited. No one spoke. They watched the detectives at work, a few bored, most intrigued.
Outside, the city came to life. Birds sang in the mimosa trees lining the avenue beyond the courtyard wall. A procession went by, first in silence, with a welcome whiff of incense floating in through the window, followed by the noise and happy chatter of the crowd. The morning hustlers tried half-heartedly to drum up some business among the tourists and the locals, but found the combination of the heat and a short-lived religious fever too much for most. A policeman was knifed, not seriously, when he intervened in a bar brawl that began as a civilized argument over football. Close to the Giralda seven members of a religious sect erected a stall that detailed the imminent end of the world: next Sunday. ‘Before or after the bullfight?’ asked a concerned spectator, watching them assemble their banners. And they thought he was joking. A lorry illegally overladen with a cargo of mountain ham from the Alpujarra overturned on the ring road and caused a traffic jam that tailed back to the edge of the city. In the heat and anger one man had a heart attack, several fights ensued, and a baby girl was born prematurely to a teenage mother, delivered by a female bus conductor.
And Maria Gutiérrez slept and slept, through a nightmare in which headless doves tumbled out of the piercing blue sky, falling to the ground like red rain, over and over.
She woke with a jolt, the shocking scarlet images still imprinted somewhere on the cerebral retina that lived inside her head. There was a moment when she had forgotten where she was, then she recovered, sat upright, straightened her jeans, ran a few fingers through her hair, checked in the driver’s mirror, and got out of the car. A man with a doctor’s bag was walking through the front door.
‘Late as usual,’ she thought, then checked herself. She was there to observe the cops, not become one of them. Least of all, to start thinking like one.
Menéndez and Torrillo were walking down the staircase when she came back into the mansion. The lieutenant looked preternaturally alert, absorbed in a way that precluded interruption. The work – the killings – had energized him and there was something dark, almost sinister, about the energy it had released. His face seemed to glow, his deep-brown eyes snatched at everything around him. They caught her. He waved gently, almost effeminately, with one hand towards a door at the side of the room, then walked over, Torrillo in tow.
‘You’re feeling better?’
She nodded.
‘Good. It’s a shocking sight. Most people would have collapsed on the spot. You did very well. And now . . .’
She waited.
‘Now we must talk briefly to the lady who owns the house. I think she has little new to tell us, but it will be an interesting interview, in any case.’
Menéndez motioned to the door. They walked in. A local policewoman in a blue uniform that was too tight for her bulking frame stood next to the old woman, who sat bolt upright in an aged, fading armchair, gripping its wings tightly. Her face resembled a Greek mask, resolu
te, impassive, filled with tragedy. As they walked towards her, she lifted her eyes to them – deep, incisive eyes – measured Menéndez to be the superior, made a gesture for him to sit down and said, ‘You know who I am. I want no scandal. The family name is still good enough for that.’
FIVE
In fact, Menéndez was able to tell Cristina Lucena more about the brothers than she could tell him. He had asked for the criminal files and cuttings from the newspaper library to be brought to the house, skimmed through them briefly. They revealed almost everything that had already been in the public print, sanitized for Hola!, suitably juiced up for Esquire and Playboy.
Pedro and Juan Angel were born thirty-four years before in one of the poorest ghettos of Barcelona. They were Siamese twins of a kind, joined at birth at the waist, but only marginally, though this was unknown to the doctors at the time. The connection was simply through the flesh: they shared no internal organs. But in the Spain of the time they were medical freaks, and no one knew how to diagnose the case.
Their father was a deckhand working on long-distance freighters. A year after their birth, he sailed on a ship to Kowloon and was never seen again. Most people felt he could no longer face the medical bills being charged by the Hospital of the Virgin. Shortly before their second birthday, the Angel Brothers were separated by a simple operation paid for by public subscription, and thereafter they fell out of the newspapers, disappeared from the public consciousness.
This was partly an act of social convenience. The newspapers had first painted a picture of a poor honest ghetto family bravely facing up to an unusual predicament. Barcelona is a large city, but a small place. Such fictions have limited lives. Their mother worked as a dockside prostitute, most hours of the day, and the city soon knew of it. The operation duly salved the public conscience and let people become concerned with other matters. It changed nothing for the family. The mother continued to work as a prostitute, leaving the children to be brought up most of the time by an aunt who had six, all boys, of her own. She resented the task, and in particular resented the fact that they were male. She had prayed to the Virgin Mary for daughters ever since her first son, but the appeals went unanswered. Pedro and Juan were slight, quiet, effeminate children, however, so, for the aunt, the answer seemed obvious. For the first eight years of their life, both were treated as if they were girls. They wore dresses, big, fancy, flouncy ones on Sundays, they went to dance classes, they took part in the parades. They used girls’ names – Anna, Belen. On occasion, when they were in their Sunday best, with a little rouge on their cheeks, someone would smile and say: ‘Guapas’. Pretty little things. No one connected them with the Siamese twins any longer. That story had been confined to the past.
