by David Hewson
When they were eight the brothers exposed themselves during communion classes and were duly expelled from both the Church and the school that the Church ran. The general view was that their predicament was of their own making, and their future their own responsibility. Both took this to heart and spent the best part of the next decade and a half living on the street, hustling as juvenile prostitutes, selling both hard and soft drugs, and becoming involved in the familiar round of juvenile crime: stealing handbags and cameras from tourists, joy-riding cars, minor hijacks of goods around the docks. They spent four periods in reform school, and later jail, before they were twenty-two, always together, since they refused to be separated. It was during their final prison spell that they took up painting classes.
On their release, the brothers declared themselves to be artists and produced a series of works that spawned increasing fame and controversy, first in Barcelona, then internationally. They sold a set of bull’s testes encased in Perspex for $32,000 through Sotheby’s in New York, then outraged Catholic opinion by inflating a 150-foot replica of a condom outside the cathedral of the Sagrada Familia in their home city. Later works included a stillborn lamb shrink-wrapped in plastic, which fetched £25,000 in London. (Torrillo, on hearing this, said, ‘I must tell my cousin Carlos, he’s a sheep farmer in Antequera. I think he could have let them have one just like it for, I don’t know, maybe even half that price.’) An item simply entitled Still Life, which consisted of a cardboard box full of Kleenex tissues into which the brothers had masturbated, remained unsold when it appeared in Los Angeles with a reserve price of $50,000.
By the time they were thirty, four years before their deaths, the Angel Brothers were established on the international modern-art circuit. They had appeared as walk-on celebrities in three Almodóvar movies and designed an ad campaign for Benetton. The magazines estimated they were both dollar millionaires, with four homes around Spain, one on the French Riviera and a small apartment on the Lower East Side in New York.
The police files also showed that they had not altogether given up the past. Both had been fined for possession of heroin during the mid-eighties – Menéndez was struck by how the brothers always seemed to become involved in events together, never alone – and both had been warned over an incident in Barcelona in which a twelve-year-old boy complained of sexual abuse and various perversions, but dropped the accusations when, it appeared, he was paid off. They admitted to habitual drug abuse and, two years before their deaths, revealed that they were HIV positive, though there were no signs of the onset of full-blown AIDS.
Menéndez left out the more salacious parts of the story. Cristina Lucena was an old woman. She probably still had high Catholic values. When he had finished, she was glaring at him.
‘They paid, and they were hardly ever here,’ she said, angry that she had to say that she needed the money. ‘They were not . . . not my people. But they paid.’
Menéndez thought about the geography of the house. ‘You heard nothing, you saw nothing.’
‘I did not say that.’ The old woman spoke firmly. ‘You did not ask me before.’
‘Please . . .’
She took a sip of water from a glass on an ancient side table. ‘When I awoke yesterday afternoon I heard something in the courtyard. Someone, one of these young thugs, had been in the garden. He climbed over the wall.’
‘Why did he not walk out of the front gates?’
‘Because they are locked, and they are high. You must have seen this.’
‘Did you lock them yourself?’
She stared at him contemptuously. ‘Do I look as if I am capable of that? The maid does it. The part-time maid. She comes when the Angels ask her to. When they do not, she still helps me. It is an understanding.’
‘What did this person look like?’
‘Red. He was wearing red. It was a long way off. Behind the trees. I only glanced, but . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘My eyes are not so good.’ She drained the glass and turned to the policewoman. ‘There is a bottle of fino in the case over there. I would like some.’
The officer returned with the bottle: a cheap supermarket brand that Menéndez did not recognize.
‘I think he may have been wearing a costume.’
‘What sort of costume?’
‘A . . . robe. Perhaps. I know I could not see a face and—’
She broke off and for a moment Menéndez thought she was about to cry. ‘I think we have asked enough questions. I am grateful for your help.’
She nodded, clutching a grey handkerchief to her face.
‘These trees – you mean the ones by the vine?’ He pointed to the left of the courtyard.
‘No, no. There. At the back.’
‘Ah. Now I understand.’
‘He was a thug. A thug from the street.’
‘Yes. Perhaps.’
Torrillo was squinting at the back of the garden. Menéndez closed his notebook.
‘Doña Cristina. I must ask. You are owed money for their tenancy, I assume?’
She looked at him with suspicion.
‘We have found cash in the brothers’ room. I will ensure that a full six months’ tenancy is paid from it – this is, I think, the city minimum these days.’
She nodded, clutching the damp handkerchief. ‘It’s the smell.’
‘I know,’ said Menéndez. ‘I know.’
SIX
Torrillo lurched the Ford back towards the centre. It was mid-afternoon and the streets were half-empty. He held a huge cheese sandwich in his left hand, out in the breeze of the open window, and took chunks out of it whenever the traffic permitted.
‘What will you do next?’ She sat in the back of the car, feeling distant from their thoughts.
‘The initial medical report will be waiting for us when we get back to the station. The cause of death is fairly obvious, I think. There are minor wounds to the chest on both parties – you saw the darts, but there are other wounds too, though no sign of the weapon that caused them. None of these was serious enough to kill. My guess is that there was one large thrust to the heart – perhaps with a sword, I don’t know – which killed each man. The pattern seems to be identical.’ Menéndez paused. ‘Everything about the Angel Brothers seems to be identical.’
‘So?’
‘So we follow our procedure. We determine the cause of death. We find out what we can about the last hours of the deceased – this may not be easy, since I think they have been dead for at least a week and I still do not understand why two rich men, with homes all over the world, should rent an apartment like that and use it so seldom. And we talk to the people who knew them. We have a diary, a contacts book, from the apartment. But . . .’
He stopped and seemed reluctant to go on.
‘But . . . ?’
‘But . . . You’re interested in our methodology? Most murders are simple affairs. Domestic. Lovers’ quarrels. They are not . . . complex.’
She was scribbling in her notebook again.
‘What we have here, Professor, is what appears to be a ritual murder of two well-known and highly eccentric men who seem to have no reason to be where they are. And the pose . . . their bodies – that was a pose, you agree?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think the Angel Brothers had some curious tastes in dress, but it did not extend, I suspect, to, what – doublet and hose? Almost. Had they been to a fancy-dress party or something? I don’t know. It was somehow . . . formal.’
He looked in the driver’s mirror and could see that she was smiling.
‘Policemen don’t follow art, Lieutenant.’
‘You call that art?’ mumbled Torrillo through a mouth half-full of bread. ‘My cousin Carlos could . . .’
‘Sure, sure, sure.’ Menéndez signalled him to silence. ‘I think the professor has something to tell us.’
‘We have time for a small diversion?’
‘How long?’ said Menéndez.
‘Fi
ve minutes. To get there. How long after that depends on you.’
She shuffled herself upright in the back of the car and looked out of the window.
‘You know the old people’s home near the bullring?’
‘The hospice?’ asked Torrillo.
‘There.’
The car turned off the main road, navigating a series of meandering lanes close to the bullring.
Torrillo chuckled grimly. ‘My uncle was in that place. Walked in like a lamb, three months later out in a box. Good people, mind. Not their fault. He used to smoke for Spain.’
They turned into a narrow street and parked the car on a yellow line. Torrillo pointed to an old door, like that of a church. ‘You want me to come? I hate these places. Spooky.’
‘Yes,’ said Menéndez and got out, the woman close behind him.
They walked through the door and found themselves in a cool reception area. Behind an open diary and an old-fashioned inkwell sat a man dressed in a fresh white shirt and grey trousers. He finished reading the notice in his hands and then looked up at them. His manner was neutral.
‘The chapel,’ said Maria. ‘It is open?’
He pointed to a battered wooden donations box. Menéndez threw in a 1,000-peseta note and whispered, ‘I hope this is worth it.’
They walked through a beautiful courtyard decorated with blue and white tiles depicting scenes from the Bible. An old man, incredibly thin, with a face that spoke only of despair, watched them from a wheelchair.
Torrillo walked quickly ahead and opened the door at the end, ushering them in. Maria watched, with a little surprise, his sudden turn of speed. ‘It’s cold in here,’ he said. ‘These places always make me feel cold.’
It was dark too, and their eyes took time to adjust to the lack of light.
Not that she needed light. Maria walked them through the anteroom, then opened the door into the chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad.
The first painting stood where she remembered it, ahead of them in the gloom. A skeleton weighing the sins of the world, above a spent and dusty collection of earthly riches. Alongside: the motto In Ictu Oculi. In the blink of an eye.
‘Creepy,’ Torrillo muttered.
‘Turn round,’ she ordered.
They did and Torrillo’s mouth dropped open like a trapdoor. ‘Jesus . . .’
Above the entrance through which they had entered was the sister canvas by the same artist, Juan Valdés Leal. Two small lights played on it from either end of the frame. The picture looked like a photograph, rendered in oils, of the scene they had just left: two men, one dressed as a bishop, the other as a Knight of the Order of Calatrava, lay dead, head-to-toe. Their skin was putrefying, maggots crawled from their eye sockets. In the right-hand corner of the frame a spectral hand – the hand of God – appeared with a set of scales, weighing the worth, the soul and the heart of each, and finding them wanting. Beneath stood a scroll that read, ‘Finis Gloriae Mundi’. The end of the glories of the world.
‘Artists in life, artists in death,’ she said, with more than a hint of smugness. ‘Perhaps the Angel Brothers would have approved.’
SEVEN
Captain Rodríguez came straight from the press conference, the camera flashes still hurting his eyes. There was a blackboard in the corner of the office. Menéndez stood in front of it, chalk in hand. The two detectives newly assigned to the case, Velasco and a still-blushing Quemada, had joined Torrillo and Maria Gutiérrez. It was nearly 9 p.m. Outside the sun was dying, painting the city a burnished gold. A new shift had come on duty as they assembled, with a mixed murmur of greetings, jokes and the odd catcall. Rodríguez did not look like a man about to go home. ‘Questions,’ he said, then began to write on the board.
1. Who did the brothers know in the city? Who have they seen recently?
2. Why were they here?
3. Who had a motive to kill them?
4. What is the significance of the way they were killed? The darts?
5. Why were their bodies laid out after the fashion of an old painting?
‘Any more?’
‘Sure,’ said Torrillo. ‘How many people are we looking for here? These Angel guys couldn’t have been a pushover. They wouldn’t just lie there letting you stick darts in them. Were they tied? What?’
Rodríguez pushed forward a piece of paper on his desk. ‘Drugged. It says here in the medical report. Common hospital anaesthetic.’
‘So we’re looking for someone with access to drugs? A doctor or something?’
‘Maybe,’ said Menéndez. ‘But you have to remember the Angels were junkies. A good proportion of the dope they used probably originated in the health service in the first place. If it was their pusher who killed them, he’d be able to get hold of anaesthetic as easily as heroin. Could mix them together, so they’d inject themselves with it. But it’s a point.’
6. How, exactly, did it happen?
‘Any more?’
‘Where did the other two ears go?’ asked Quemada. ‘I mean, I know that kind fight like alley cats sometimes. But ears? That go missing?’
Rodríguez looked underwhelmed, ringed item three on the blackboard. Quemada shrugged his shoulders. It didn’t seem such a dumb question.
‘Any more?’
‘Why did he come back?’ The two new detectives turned to gaze stonily at Maria. ‘Don’t you want to know?’ she said. ‘They were dead for a week. Why did he have to come back to the house?’
‘Lost something. Forgot something. Most likely,’ said Quemada.
‘Yeah. Most likely,’ Velasco agreed. She looked at the new man and tried to figure out his place in the station hierarchy. And hierarchy there was, even so early on, that was clear. A pecking order, rigidly enforced without a word being spoken. Rodríguez was at the top, not just out of rank, but also through some simple, unspoken sense of status. Velasco looked in his mid-thirties, with dark, sallow skin the colour of a tobacco stain, a gaunt, unhappy face shadowed by stubble. He wore a crumpled polyester suit that shone in the light of the office, its fabric a swirl of different, mirrored colours. Velasco thinks it looks smart, she said to herself. He thinks wrong.
‘Most likely?’ she asked. Quemada’s fat little frame quivered as if he didn’t expect an answer. ‘Then why did he leave the door open? Why didn’t he just go in, get what he wanted, then close it like he did before. It’s as if—’
‘Captain?’ Quemada’s eyes pleaded with Rodríguez. ‘I understand we got to have the lady here, but do we really have to listen to her?’
Rodríguez stiffened, with a slight pomposity the men had all come to recognize, looked at her and said, ‘We need all the ideas we can get. I didn’t see any of you getting the line about the painting. Go on, Professor.’
She could hear Quemada grunting as she spoke.
‘It’s as if he almost wanted the bodies to be found. Not just any time, but then.’
‘Why would he want to do that?’ asked Rodríguez.
‘I don’t know.’
‘No,’ said the captain, and made a note on his pad. ‘But it’s a good question.’
7. Why did he come back and leave the door open when he left?
‘Any more?’
Torrillo tapped the table with his pen, looked at the captain and said, ‘You know this Cristina Lucena, right?’
‘I know of her. Most of us who grew up in the city do. Very old, very distinguished family. Last of the line. The rest of her family got wiped out in the Civil War.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Torrillo poked a finger in his ear and twirled it around. ‘I got to say, Captain, it just sort of struck me she might not be telling the whole truth there.’
‘Why?’
‘She is one old lady who is on the ball, right? I mean, maybe she’s old, but I don’t think her brain is on the way out, like she wanted us to think.’
Rodríguez said nothing.
‘Well, that’s the way it struck me. She said she didn’t see anything in the garden but
some guy dressed in red – no face, nothing else. Her eyesight looks pretty good to me. She knew when the lieutenant was pointing to the right place and the wrong place. How come she didn’t see any more? Is she just old and batty, or maybe scared that she knows who did it and he might come back?’
Rodríguez turned to the board and wrote.
8. Did Cristina Lucena lie?
‘Guess that’s the nub of it,’ said Torrillo.
Rodríguez drew a line underneath the last question, then turned to them.
‘Go through the diary and the address book you found. Talk to Barcelona and Madrid – that’s where the brothers lived most of the time. Track down contacts, appointments. Find out who they used to spend their time with when they were here. When they arrived. What they did.’
Velasco brushed some invisible crumbs off his suit and stood up.
‘The ears?’ Quemada asked.
‘Let me know when you find them,’ Rodríguez said.
Velasco and Quemada picked up their papers and left by the glass-fronted door, followed by Menéndez.
Rodríguez looked at Torrillo and said, ‘You’re off duty, Sergeant. It’s been a long day and it’s likely to be another long one tomorrow. Get some sleep.’
‘Get some food first,’ the big man grumbled.
