Death in Seville

by David Hewson

  ‘Mrs Romero,’ said Menéndez, ‘you say your husband was a professor of history?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was his speciality?’

  Teresa Romero changed her mind, picked up the cigarettes and lit one. ‘Luis was a fine historian. No one can take that from him. He began as a classicist, but for the past decade he really has had only one subject. His field was the history of the Civil War.’

  ‘Here? In the city?’

  ‘Why, yes. Without the city there would be no history.’

  ‘No,’ said Menéndez flatly. ‘I suppose not. But he was particularly involved in the history of the war in Seville? What happened here? This may be important.’

  She stared at him, surprised by the pressure behind the question. ‘I think so. You should ask his colleagues. I was never privileged to hear the fine detail of what interested him.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Menéndez said and signalled to Quemada and Velasco to leave. When they had gone, he said, ‘I will let you know what happens.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your husband’s death. The causes.’

  ‘Lieutenant,’ said Teresa Romero, ‘you don’t understand. I don’t care. It’s a matter of no importance to me. He’s dead and my life has not changed.’

  Menéndez nodded and looked once more at the canvas: Miró. Now he could make out the imagery: sun, bulls, blood, death.

  ‘No,’ he said and walked outside into the fresh morning air.

  TWENTY

  The phone rang on the bedside table. She was dragged abruptly from a bottomless slumber, spent a moment trying to work out where she was, then picked it up. The little green digital clock by the bed said eight: she felt she could have slept forever.

  ‘Good morning.’

  That soft, calm voice. It was Torrillo. For a moment she wondered why she thought it might have been somebody else. Then she remembered the curious call the night before. She tried to assemble her thoughts. It wasn’t easy.

  ‘I’m sorry. I overslept. It’s not like me.’

  ‘No problem. There are plenty of people here going to oversleep too. It’s been a busy night.’

  ‘There’s been another murder?’ She winced at the sudden excitement she felt. It seemed improper, it had a prurience she felt did not belong to her.

  ‘No,’ replied Torrillo. ‘Some of the night guys picked up a lead. We’re starting to get some names to chase and that always makes people happy.’

  ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes once I’ve got dressed.’

  ‘Lieutenant says not to bother. He’d like you to go straight to Cristina Lucena, visit her in the hospital. See if you can get her to talk about the war. We’ve got some things to chase this end. He’d like a conference at noon; we’ll try to get down to things there.’

  ‘He really wants me to go on my own?’

  ‘Seems to think it’s essential. That old bird won’t be talking to the likes of us.’

  Maria wondered what simple instinct told them she would fare any better.

  ‘You can get there OK?’

  ‘I can walk from here.’

  ‘If you like. When you need a car, call and we’ll send one.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And good luck.’

  Torrillo rang off. His brightness so early in the morning amazed her. It was not an academic habit. She pulled herself out of bed, showered, ate a little breakfast in her dressing gown, then changed. A simple pair of dark slacks, a white blouse. She remembered the way Cristina Lucena had looked at her jeans.

  At twenty to nine she walked downstairs, let herself out of the front door and set off on the ten-minute walk to the hospital.

  Forty minutes later, when the optician’s opened, a young man in a light-blue uniform with the name of the state electricity company embroidered on the left shoulder finished his coffee in the corner cafe opposite the apartment, crossed the street and walked into the shop. The optician, an aloof patrician figure in a white nylon jacket, stood behind the counter. He wore expensive tortoiseshell spectacles and the officious air of the semi-professional. He stared at the visitor with faintly disguised distaste.

  ‘You want an eye test?’

  ‘No,’ said the man in the uniform. ‘Miss Gutiérrez from upstairs rang. Said she thought she had a problem with the power supply and it was urgent that we should have a look at it. She was out and couldn’t hand over the keys herself. Said you had a spare set and would let us borrow them.’

  The optician stared at him.

  ‘She said nothing to us.’

  The workman shrugged. ‘Nothing to do with me. If you want to let me in, fine. If you don’t . . . best ring her first. If I have to come out a second time there’s an extra charge. That goes to the landlord. Not her. All I want to do is look at the meter. Make sure it’s running properly.’

  The optician polished the glass counter with a small yellow duster.

  ‘I’ll send in one of the girls. She can watch you.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the workman.

  ‘You have some tools?’

  He pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket.

  ‘Like I said. All I need to do is see the meter. Check it’s OK.’

  The optician reached beneath the counter and pulled out a set of three keys. Then he put them on the counter.

  ‘Laura?’

  A pretty teenage girl with shoulder-length auburn hair came out from a back room. She was wearing a pink overall and was carrying a wire-framed pair of spectacles. The optician nodded across the counter.

  ‘He wants to check the meter on the apartment. It’s at the bottom of the stairs, just behind the door. He doesn’t go any further.’

  She looked at him and smiled. He looked nice.

  ‘The front door is this one,’ said the optician, indicating a brass key on the chain.

  They walked out of the shop door, turned left and she turned the key in the lock.

  ‘Is the old fart always that cheerful?’ he asked.

  She giggled, said nothing, then pushed the door and they were inside. The entrance hall was dark. The girl hit the light switch; it was on a timer. He could hear it clicking the seconds away as he closed the door behind them. He started counting the seconds in his head.

  ‘It must be in there.’ She pointed to a cupboard held by a single latch. He opened it, then looked at the dials and switches inside: ordinary stuff.

  ‘Is it OK?’ the girl asked. ‘We’re on the same circuit, you know. Once, they cut the flat off and we had to close the shop.’

  He stood up and said, smiling, ‘No problem. Just a false alarm.’

  She wondered how old he was: thirty, maybe older. The moustache didn’t suit him. His hairstyle could be improved too.

  ‘OK. I got to go back to the shop now.’

  The workman scribbled something in a pad he’d taken out of his pocket.

  ‘Yeah. Let me lock up for you.’

  He took the keys from her hand, briefly put them inside the big wide waist pocket, put a hand on her back and they walked out of the door. The light switch was still ticking: at least two minutes. He pulled the door shut, put the brass key in the lock and gave it a half-turn.

  ‘Do you need to do that?’ asked the girl.

  ‘You can never be too careful, Kiddo. Some of these locks need an extra turn,’ he said then tried to pull the key out. It didn’t come.

  ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘It’s stuck.’

  She looked at him, doe-eyed and mute.

  He pulled the screwdriver out of his overalls.

  ‘Won’t be a moment.’

  She watched him remove a panel from the lock, move some levers with the blade, waggle the key around, then pull it out from the front.

  He wiped the brass key with his hands, then took a good look at it. ‘No damage done. Just a bit stiff, that’s all.’

  Then he handed her back the set.

  She returned to the shop under the baleful gaze of the optician. Th
e man in the light-blue uniform put his hands in his pockets, felt the wad of putty there, was happy the impression would hold, then set off back to Santa Cruz.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Cristina Lucena sat upright in bed in a tiny private room of the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy. Maria had seen her once before, on the day after the discovery of the bodies. It was natural, then, that the old woman had been distressed. Now she seemed a changed person. Her skin had taken on a grey sallowness it had not previously possessed, yet there was also a calm about her that Maria had not expected.

  Sunlight streamed through an enormous window by the bed. The room had a high ceiling with plaster ornamentation almost hidden by years of rough painting. It felt what it was: an old servant’s room in a mansion now given over to the public good. A nun, dressed in grey and white, brought the drinks they had asked for: a lemon tea for Maria, hot water for Cristina Lucena. She smiled at them, then left and Maria searched for a way to begin, until she was saved the task.

  ‘Tell the policeman I’m grateful.’

  ‘I am sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘The nuns told me. This room, it’s from some police charity. I couldn’t afford it myself. Tell him.’

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded and sipped her tea. It was lukewarm and had a metallic taste. ‘How do you feel?’

  She smiled. ‘I’m old. I always feel this way. They call it the onset of pneumonia. Perhaps. I feel no better, no worse, than I would usually, except that they do not allow me my manzanilla, which is, perhaps, for the best. In any case, I don’t miss it. They’re kind. They do not ask questions. They accept me for what I am: a lonely old woman near the end of her life. Their faith in God is touching, though entirely misplaced.’

  Maria listened to the birdsong outside the window and thought there could be worse places to end one’s life. ‘I’m sure you’ll get better.’

  ‘You’re trying to be kind,’ she said. ‘The young always do this with the old. Treat us like children. But you want to ask questions too. Or hope to.’

  Maria put down the tea and looked more closely at the old woman on the bed. There was a strength to her, an inner steeliness, however frail the body that enclosed it.

  ‘I’m not a policewoman. Not a professional interrogator. I imagine it shows.’

  ‘It does,’ she said. ‘And that is why they sent you. The lieutenant is no fool. He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. There are more killed?’

  Maria nodded.

  ‘I thought so. They don’t give me the newspapers. They treat me like a senile old woman. But I knew, if more died, you would be back.’

  ‘What is it that the lieutenant doesn’t know?’

  Cristina Lucena seemed to be looking right through her, eyes burning deep in their wrinkled sockets.

  ‘They are excluded from this. Men. They cannot belong.’

  ‘From what?’ asked Maria and, from nowhere, an image she had seen once before crossed slowly, tentatively in front of her vision: an image of a white bird, headless, descending slowly out of a pure blue sky, blood pumping droplets of scarlet from its severed neck. She shook her head and it disappeared.

  ‘From the flow of life and death that runs through the world,’ said the old woman, and Maria felt the room turn cold. ‘It comes only from us; when it is taken away, it is owed only to us.’

  Maria was shivering. The room looked smaller than before and the light had turned from a golden warmth to a different colour, bright, cold, harsh. There was a craziness about the woman that frightened her. ‘I’m not sure I understand . . .’

  ‘You will. They will hurt you, they will dominate you, but in the end you will understand. And you will defeat them, through the pain. That is the gift we have, the gift they hate us for because they can never take it away.’

  Maria looked at her hands and saw they were shaking. She held them together and they steadied, slowly. The blood returned, warmth with it. The room resumed its earlier appearance.

  ‘He sent you here to ask about the war,’ said the old woman on the bed in a voice that sounded centuries old. ‘He knows I will never tell it to him. He knows I have never told it to anyone else. He thinks you can unlock the secret. Why does he believe that of you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Because he knows they have marked your past too. He can recognize the scars.’

  Luis? she thought. Were the wounds so visible? Or were they simply records in a file somewhere? One passed to Menéndez by Captain Rodríguez?

  ‘To be hurt by someone you love is more painful than being hurt by someone you hate,’ said Cristina Lucena.

  Maria dug her nails into her palms, summoned herself. ‘How do you know these things? Where does it come from?’

  ‘I look, I see.’

  She laughed. It was the sound of brittle leaves crushed underfoot.

  ‘So,’ said Cristina Lucena, ‘you would like to hear about La Soledad?’

  No, thought Maria, no, no, no. I would like to hear of anything else. I would like to hear of music, of flowers, of sunshine, of cool patios, running water, the sound of laughter, children, the light. I would like to hear a conversation that inspired me, that filled me with life. I would like to hear of life, of kindness, of gratitude.

  The green mask and the red velvet walls.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I would like to hear about La Soledad.’

  And for a moment the dove returned, ten feet tall, in front of her face, blood pumping relentlessly into the air.

  When she recovered, when the scream deep within her had faded towards nothingness, she looked at the old woman. There was a sense of triumph on her wrinkled face.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When the war began she was barely fourteen. The Lucena family had lived in the old family mansion by the Murillo Gardens for more than a hundred years. It was a grand house, in a fine and noble location. When she leaned out of the window of her little bedroom the first thing she saw was the banyan in the park, the one her brother said was the body of a tortured soul turned into a grey and grotesque twisted tree trunk. Further to her right she could hear the torrent of water pouring from Mercury’s fountain into the cistern in the private garden of the Real Alcázar; the peacocks and the cats, strutting, fighting in the lush green flowerbeds that stretched to the broad road that marked the edge of Santa Cruz; the voices of the poorer people talking, screeching sometimes from the narrow streets of the barrio behind. There were few cars then. Spain was a poorer nation, though not the Lucenas. The highway now throttled by traffic was, in her childhood, littered with dark-brown piles of dung left by the horse-drawn carriages that people still preferred.

  She was the youngest child: three brothers and a sister stood over her, from sixteen to twenty-one, and took care to define her position in the household, which was that of the infant. From as far back as she could remember they had kept her apart. Cristina would be too young to understand something. She would not be ready for the games they played, the circles they moved in. When Papa’s important friends came to visit, she was the first to be told to leave the room. They were allowed to stay, at least for a little while, to be privy to the news and gossip that came, from Madrid, from Barcelona, from Palma. She would sit outside the room, listening to the whispers beyond the door, like the fluttering of moths’ wings in the dark, and there would be anger and injustice, burning her face.

  She was the youngest, the baby. Yet weeks before, as she lay on her bed, hot, covered in sweat, in the sweltering afternoon, she had felt a burning pain in the pit of her stomach, had looked down at her light afternoon shift and seen the dark stain of red at her groin. She had held herself, through the fine cotton, felt the thick dampness seep through the fabric and reach her fingers, watched the mark grow until it streaked the dainty, embroidered coverlet of the bed, a pattern of childish pink flowers.

  She had carefully removed the shift, folded it on the bed to leave the stain facing uppermost, bathed, cleaned herself an
d changed into fresh clothes. She left it there as a sign. To say: I am growing, I am becoming like you. Then she went downstairs and walked from room to room, her face shining, eyes radiant. When finally she returned to her room the shift was gone, the coverlet had been changed. She waited for someone to speak: her mother, her father, her sister. Even a maid. But it was as if the thing had never existed. Three times it had happened, once each month, with the same brief, aching pain, the heat, the sweat, the tremors, and then the blood. Three times she had left the sign of her change on the bed. Three times it had been removed without a word. And there was no one she could ask, no one she could speak to. The family was growing more apart, retreating from her, retreating from each other.

  She did not understand.

  As the summer wore on, Papa ceased to leave the house except on rare occasions when he needed to see the bank. He spoke to her only rarely. He seemed preoccupied. His reserved, handsome face seemed gaunt and worried. There was an affliction there that she could not recognize, an interior, wasting concern that seemed to be without cure. Her mother, who now retreated into herself more than ever, scarcely seemed to acknowledge what was happening. Daily life became disjointed, a routine of meals taken in silence or interrupted by minor items of news, of gossip. Then vast, empty hours in which she was left to roam the house on her own, reading books, talking to the servants.

  It was like being in the garden during the approach of a great storm. She could feel the pressure building, the change in the atmosphere, the close, clammy approach of catastrophe. Yet all around her the family would pretend that nothing had changed. Life was a parody of what it had been before. The same events were enacted as if by rote, as if by reliving the ritual, the past – was it a happy past? she wondered – could be magically revived and made real in the present.

  One night, when the heat was so strong that she could not sleep, she sat upright in her bed, alone in the room that overlooked the garden, listening to Mercury’s fountain and the cawing of the peacocks, waiting. Outside there were new noises. The world seemed disturbed. There were sounds, foreign sounds, of soldiers and horses, heavy, unfamiliar carriages and, all around, that strange, aggressive voice that men used when they were trying to prove they were men. From downstairs she could hear shouting, getting louder and louder. It was her mother’s voice, high and hysterical and accusatory, and the words seemed to go round and round in an everlasting circle: ‘Why did you have to take sides? Why? Why? Why?’