by David Hewson
The city reached out to her in a hydra’s head of events, ideas and notions, unsorted, without priority, without logic, each fighting for its own space in her confused, anxious mind.
And no device, no ready Occam’s razor, was at hand to cut through this sea of material, slice to the quick, to the bone.
Occam’s razor, Maria thought, and for a moment it brought back the hazy, distant pleasures of university classes a lifetime ago when the world existed primarily as a topic of learned debate: Life, discuss. For a brief moment an image floated above her, an image of a blade, silver-sharp, scything through the night, sorting myth from fact, deceit from truth, what is necessary from what is spurious. It shone, a metallic beacon lighting the darkness, then disappeared, leaving an after-image in its wake. Maria held her eyes tight shut, hoping for it to return, but there was nothing.
When she opened them she felt Cristina Lucena’s cold, aloof stare wash over her.
The old woman lay still on the bed. She now seemed to be too weak to move. There was little life left in her, except for the eyes. They watched Maria, grey and icy, something like amusement lurking behind them. The mouth opened, gave a small, unreadable smile, then closed in on itself again.
‘Did you find him?’ she asked, her voice the rustle of dry leaves across parched earth on an early autumn day.
‘Find who?’ replied Maria, trying, with little success, to disguise the harshness in her voice.
‘My boy. My son?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
Cristina gave a little cough. Perhaps she was trying to laugh.
‘Not yet . . . Such a fine police force.’
Maria reached into her pocket and pulled out the police printout from the computer. She had sketched in the moustache, as best as she could remember from the old woman’s description. And added in a few lines to the face too. It made the face more human, somehow. She could see the attraction there, the crude film-star looks, could imagine how this man might appeal to a young, inexperienced girl.
She thrust the portrait in front of Cristina Lucena.
‘Look at this.’
The old woman screwed up her eyes and stared at the printout. She went silent, her lips drew tight together, making the pucker lines of age stand out as deep, unsightly wrinkles on her face.
‘You know him,’ said Maria, and it was a statement, not a question.
Cristina Lucena breathed in deeply through her nose, the grey eyes stared at the ceiling.
‘You play tricks on me. This is your idea of amusement. To play jokes on an old woman.’
‘This is no trick. People are dying because of him. Last night, this man, this man tried to kill me. He has as good as killed a police officer. A good man. He will kill again.’
‘This, this . . .’
The old woman’s breath came in gasps. Maria watched her strain and the cruelty of her own thought processes astonished her: Do not die before I know, she thought, do not die beforehand.
‘This man,’ said Cristina Lucena, ‘kills no one. This man is Antonio Alvarez. He is long in the grave.’
Maria smiled. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I did play a trick.’
She took the paper, pulled an eraser out of her bag, rubbed out the moustache, the extra lines.
‘This is the man who’s doing these things. Who is he? You know. You can help us stop the killing. Who is he?’
There was something about her voice now. It was too loud, too shrill. Something had been pushed too far, it was over the edge, and Cristina Lucena had retreated, returned to her own private hell, to brood, to gloat, to contemplate. A figure bustled around Maria. She hadn’t heard the door open. Grey and white, the smell of soap and antiseptic. A nurse’s face appeared in front of her.
‘You have to leave,’ said a strong, insistent female voice. ‘She’s an old woman. She cannot be upset like this.’
Maria felt the fury burn through her. ‘Upset? This woman is made of stone. Nothing upsets her.’
She broke away from the nurse’s grip and leaned over Cristina Lucena, now lying on the bed, eyes closed, face a leathery, wrinkled death mask.
‘People are dying. Because of what happened at La Soledad. And you won’t help us stop it.’
The nurse held her, arm twisted behind her back, pressing painfully on the wound. She was starting to shout for help. From outside the room came the sound of hurried footsteps. It was no good.
Maria relaxed, came back from the bed, held out her free hand and said, ‘No. It’s fine. I’ll go.’
She was almost through the door when the old woman spoke, the last words Maria would ever hear her say.
‘He loved me,’ she said, voice cracked, dry and brittle. ‘That’s why he died as he did. The cancer. The pain. It was a judgement. On him. On me.’
Maria turned and walked down the corridor, down the stairs, through the swing doors and out into the bright sunlight of another perfect day.
FORTY-THREE
‘We’re at a dead end,’ said Rodríguez. ‘Nothing links any of this together.’
Menéndez looked at the captain’s face and wondered how much longer he could keep going. There were lines of fatigue. They showed through in his impatience, his unwillingness to listen. He was weary and lost for ideas. As were they all.
‘No link to the Alvarez story. No students at the university who come anywhere near the profile. Nothing except the circumstantial stuff – he knew Mateo, he seems to have known the dating agency . . .’
In front of him, on the desk, Rodríguez had the morning papers. They were plastered with the story. It seemed to grow bigger, more sensational by the hour.
‘Where are Velasco and Quemada?’ Rodríguez asked. ‘I think you’re in a dead end trying to chase this history idea. This is what I said all along. Some psychopath. We should stop wasting our resources on this research now and throw a wider net on what we already have.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Menéndez and left it at that.
‘Good. You read this stuff?’
Rodríguez pushed the newspapers across the desk.
‘I carry the can with these people, Lieutenant. Not you. If they don’t see something happening soon, they’re going to be baying for my blood. You run your show with what you’ve got – Velasco, Quemada – and that’s it for the moment. I’m putting this out as a major surveillance piece right through the uniformed branch. Under my personal control. We’re going to have them checking IDs right, left and centre, random roadblocks, whatever else I damn well think of. While we’re at it, we can take a look at some of those gay clubs too. You can tell everyone out there they’ll be on permanent overtime until this show’s over.’
‘Sir,’ said Menéndez and felt both belittled and somewhat grateful at the same time.
The door opened and Maria walked in. She was wearing the same drab clothes she had found in the hospital. Menéndez looked at her and thought she looked just a touch deranged.
‘I thought you were going home.’
‘I changed my mind,’ she said.
‘We sent an officer to look after you.’
‘She’s waiting outside. Thanks. I don’t know what she might do to our man, but she scares the living daylights out of me.’
Menéndez had assigned her protection to one of the uniformed women in the force, a muscular Amazon by the name of Gema Poveda. She wore a uniform that was one size too small in order to emphasize the extent of her biceps. Maria had never seen a gun belt shine so much. It looked like a mirror. It took all the persuasion she possessed to steer Poveda away from taking her home and into driving her to the station instead.
‘You should go home and rest,’ said Rodríguez. She looked at him and noticed some change. The politeness had gone. He looked jumpy, nervous, and this depressed her: like the rest, she looked to him for something from outside, some kind of inspiration. ‘We’ve got precious little here. There’s nothing for this report of yours, even if that matters any more. From now on, th
is is a major security exercise. We clamp down until this bastard comes out of hiding.’
‘I’ve been resting all day,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of resting. This thing keeps hammering around my head like a pinball machine. I can’t turn it on and off like that. You know my brief – to follow everything through. Besides . . .’
‘Besides what?’ asked Menéndez.
‘I talked to Cristina Lucena again.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘I drew a moustache on the computer picture. A few lines on the face. She thought it was Alvarez.’
Rodríguez looked ready to explode.
‘She’s a sick old woman,’ the captain said. ‘We can’t believe a word she says. Go home and leave this to us. Please.’
‘That’s wrong,’ said Maria. ‘You haven’t met Cristina Lucena. I have. There’s nothing uncertain, nothing unplanned in what she says. What does it mean?’
‘That the killer has a strong facial resemblance to Alvarez,’ said Menéndez. ‘So presumably he’s related.’
Rodríguez’s eyes were closed. He looked as if he were in pain.
‘Fine. So you’re saying it might not be his son, it could be his grandson?’
‘It’s possible,’ Menéndez said.
‘Possible. Everything’s possible, but we can’t go chasing everything. Say it is a grandson. The only way you’ – she noticed how Menéndez reacted to the use of the word ‘you’ – ‘can trace him is through the parents. How else?’
‘Could Romero be part of the link?’ Maria asked. ‘Somehow he seems to be.’
Menéndez shook his head. ‘We traced his family, eventually. There’s nothing to say he has any connection with the Alvarez line at all. If there’s a connection, then it’s through something he found, something he saw at the university.’
Occam’s razor, thought Maria. Pare it down.
‘You said Alvarez stole money from the brotherhood.’
‘Yes,’ said Menéndez. ‘A lot. Two million pesetas or more.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘We don’t know. There was too much to go on paying off a few kids from the barrios.’
Rodríguez watched them throwing the idea around, his hands flat on the desk, not writing, not taking notes. Then he looked at the papers again and closed his eyes.
Maria tried to separate the strands, tried to think them through. ‘There has to be a reason. A motive.’
‘Money,’ said Menéndez. ‘Who collected what was left when Antonio died? Not his wife. She predeceased him. No kids. No relatives. Sure, he handed out money to his bastards in the barrios and it may have seemed a lot to them, but it was nothing compared with what went missing. Where did the rest go?’
‘Do you keep records of that sort of thing?’ Maria asked.
‘If they do it legally, we do,’ Rodríguez replied. ‘Under the bed, it’s harder to trace. Don’t you think this would be hidden? If it happened at all. What’s the point in stealing something, then letting everyone know you’ve got it – the taxman included – when you die?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Menéndez. ‘Every crook I ever knew made a will. I’ll check the registry. See what’s there.’
He made a note with his pen.
‘Remember what I told you,’ Rodríguez said. ‘You’ve the resources you’ve got. I can’t spare any more. If anything does come up, I want to hear about it. Straight away.’
Maria felt she could talk forever. ‘If it was for money, then some of the people involved, the ones that weren’t random, must have stood between him and what was left. They must have been blocking him somehow.’
‘How?’ asked Rodríguez.
‘If the money was in the legal realm, other relatives might have had a claim. If it was illegal, people who knew about it could have used that knowledge. Blackmail. Whatever. The Angel Brothers knew a lot of criminals. They could have found out. Castañeda, too, he had the records, he could have known.’
‘And Romero?’
‘I don’t know.’
Menéndez screwed up his face and reached in his head for something. ‘One of these women who made the complaints against Alvarez said he had a special girl. No name, nothing much to track her by. But she thought there was something different there.’
‘Why not go back? See if she can remember any more?’ said Maria. ‘This money idea. It makes sense. More sense than anything else.’
‘None of this makes sense,’ said Rodríguez and there was the faint trace of colour in his sallow cheeks. ‘I’ve let you pursue this too far already. This time next week you and I may both be facing an internal inquiry, Menéndez. The best thing we can hope for is that this lunatic, this crazy, pops off in front of one of the uniform teams sometime soon and we can crow about it to the papers.’
Menéndez nodded. He’d been thinking much the same himself. This was meant to be the case that got him the captain’s chair. Instead it could set back both their careers. Even bring them to a close.
‘The plain fact is you’ve been chasing through the history books for days and you’ve got nothing,’ Rodríguez went on.
‘That’s not the case,’ said Maria. ‘We do know something. Maybe we don’t recognize it. Maybe . . .’
The thought was quick and unheralded. It made her shiver in the warm, confined office.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘we do know something, but don’t recognize it. And the reason he wanted me dead was because he knew that. He wanted me dead before I saw it.’
‘Oh, please,’ said Rodríguez, and the force with which he spoke took them both aback. ‘This is not some academic exercise, Professor. People are getting killed. I’m telling you now, as captain of this division, as someone who’s spent more time on those streets than anyone in this city, what we have here is a crazy. An unpredictable, psychopathic lunatic. If we’re fortunate, if I flood the streets with officers, we’ve a chance of catching him. If we don’t, once Semana Santa is over he probably goes back to his day job in any case. You can play your little game until the whistle blows, but it’s going to be blowing damn soon. And I’ll be blowing it.’
Menéndez stared at the old man and kept his peace.
The atmosphere was cut when Velasco hammered on the door, then walked in without waiting to be asked. They all turned to look at him.
‘We got two calls while you were in here,’ he said.
‘What?’ Rodríguez demanded
‘Someone in Melilla rang, said they managed to trace the couple. They were both long gone from there, but someone remembered them. And yeah, they remembered the kid.’
‘The child,’ said Maria. ‘There was a child.’
‘Yeah. We got that much right. But not a lot more. It was a girl. Not a boy. A little girl – weird, quiet kid, dyed her hair when she was only six or so, never talked to no one, the sergeant said. No one knew her. No one liked her.’
‘What happened to her?’ Rodríguez wanted to know.
‘She left for the mainland when the couple did. No one knows where.’
‘They give you a name?’
‘Yeah,’ said Velasco. ‘I was coming to that. But there was another call too. Quemada’s friend. This Maggi woman. One of Alvarez’s lays? She called from some bar somewhere. Sounded a really nice sort of place. Said she remembered the name. The kid Alvarez liked, kind of special. You know what? Same name. The guy in Melilla, the whore from Triana.’
Menéndez stared at him. ‘Yes?’
‘Teresa. Said she was called Teresa. Nothing more.’
Menéndez shut his eyes and felt his fists clenching automatically.
‘Teresa,’ said the lieutenant. ‘There is one Teresa here, one in the loop.’
‘You mean the kid wasn’t Romero, it was Romero’s wife?’ asked Velasco at the door.
‘Exactly.’
‘And you mean . . .’ Velasco was adding it all up, like a bill, in his head. ‘Jesus! He was screwing his own kid. The picture on the wall was h
is own daughter.’
Maria wondered. Did a case like this click into place so easily? Like a piece in a puzzle? A circle joined with some awful, terrible symmetry?
She walked out of the station, down the stairs into the parking lot, into the waiting squad car, her head whirling, oblivious of everything around her. The dam seemed about to burst.
Back in the office, Rodríguez looked at the papers again, swore quietly to himself, then phoned his opposite number in the uniformed branch. There were procedures for this kind of thing, plans going back years that involved street searches, roadblocks, random ID checks, a host of very public policing procedures that would make this Semana Santa one that no one was going to forget.
‘As if it isn’t already,’ said Rodríguez quietly to himself. Fifteen minutes later a convoy of police trucks, sirens flashing, klaxons blaring, pushed their way through the crowds and into the plaza. Everything Rodríguez could lay his hands on was going out there, and pretty soon there’d be scarcely a soul in Seville who wasn’t aware of it.
FORTY-FOUR
The mourning was over, the city was coming back to life. They sped past sullen crowds, repopulating the barrios. Vast, hulking silver ceremonial carriages toured the streets. Tomorrow was the last day: the final rituals, then the great corrida that served as the opening act of the feria, the frantic holiday, a celebration of resurrection, of life’s temporary victory over death.
Maria closed her eyes and willed it to be over, prayed for an ending that spilled no more blood.
In the car Quemada and Velasco checked their weapons. The atmosphere in the vehicle was hot and close and rancid, even with the windows half-open. They were sweating, they were nervous, with excitement, with a little fear.
Quemada took a corner too fast and the tyres sang across the cobbled street. She could see heads turning in the crowd, could hear voices being raised. Then they were out into the broad avenue that led out of the cramped, busy centre, driving underneath a canopy of palms waving lazily in the hot, black evening air, driving past angular cast-iron street lamps throwing pools of yellow into the night. Menéndez sat with her in the back of the car, silent.
