Death in Seville

by David Hewson

  ‘He won’t be there,’ she said. ‘Not at the house.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Velasco, still fiddling with the weapon.

  ‘He’s on his own somewhere,’ she answered.

  He shook the gun. The barrel fell upwards, locked in place, with a flat, metallic slap. ‘All the same,’ Velasco said. ‘Precautions. This guy don’t like cops too much.’

  ‘This guy,’ said Quemada, slowly turning the wheel to take another bend, ‘don’t like anyone. She’s right. He won’t be there.’

  He slowed down, turned into the drive and parked outside the front door. It was just past midnight and in a downstairs room a light burned feebly. The air was thick with the scent of oleander blossom, sweetly cloying on the breeze. Menéndez stepped up to the front door and rang the bell. She watched Velasco fumble for the weapon, hold it gingerly underneath his jacket. Quemada stood stock still, hands in his trouser pockets. He looked at her and whispered, ‘All the same, it’s a good idea we came, don’t you think?’

  There was a sound from behind the door, a light came on, the clatter of a key in the lock. It swung open and Teresa Romero was there. She wore light slacks, a light top. Her hair looked a uniform and artificial shade of blonde. There was a fine gold chain around her neck, which glittered, sharp and shining, under the lamplight.

  ‘Are you alone?’ Menéndez asked.

  She looked at them, at Maria in particular.

  ‘This is the woman?’ she said. ‘The woman in the paper, who was attacked?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Menéndez.

  Teresa Romero sighed and said, ‘Yes. I’m alone. Who else is supposed to be here?’

  ‘We have to talk,’ said Menéndez.

  ‘If you must,’ she replied, turned her back on them and walked into the big, open living room. They followed, Velasco still clutching his gun like a totem against the dark.

  ‘Brandy?’ she said when they were seated in the soft leather armchairs. ‘No? Well, I will.’

  She poured herself a long, viscous glass of spirit, then sat back in the chair. She looked, thought Maria, like a woman close to the edge. The face, drawn and lined, framed by dyed hair cut too young for her, had an angular kind of faded beauty. No family resemblance to Cristina Lucena there. Or, as far as she could tell, to Alvarez, either. But there was pain.

  ‘You know why we’re here,’ said Menéndez.

  ‘Do I?’ she asked, clinging to the glass. There was almost a look of amusement in her face.

  ‘We believe these killings, including the death of your husband, are connected in some way with a dead councillor in the city, Antonio Alvarez. Do you know the name?’

  She nodded. ‘I know the name.’

  ‘Did you have a sexual relationship with him?’ asked Menéndez.

  ‘How politely you put it. You make it sound like a flirtation.’

  ‘This isn’t prurience,’ said Maria. ‘We’re not here out of curiosity. People are dying. I was almost killed.’

  There was grief in Teresa Romero’s face. The facade of strength was paper thin.

  ‘They won’t understand,’ she said to Maria. ‘They never do. I was given to Antonio Alvarez. I was a gift. My parents arranged all this. When I was thirteen. They introduced me to him. They told me to do what he said. And they were not people you could disobey. Not at that age, not when you depended on them for everything.’

  ‘Your parents?’ asked Menéndez.

  She stared at them, uncomprehending. ‘Yes. Why do you say it like that?’

  ‘The way we heard it . . .’ began Quemada, and Menéndez talked him down.

  ‘We had information that you were brought up by guardians. In Melilla. And came here later.’

  She shook her head. ‘Your information is wrong. Again. Where do you get your ideas? My parents came from Seville. My mother still lives here. In El Arenal. They worked for the city. Always.’

  Menéndez blinked and looked lost for a moment. Something had thrown him.

  ‘What could make your parents do such a thing?’ asked Maria.

  Teresa Romero stared at her. ‘At the time I thought it was money. That was part of it certainly. Antonio was a strong man, a powerful man. He had control over people, particularly anyone who had something to do with the city, as my parents did. Does that make sense? No. You never met him. He could make you do things, things you didn’t want to do. Without overt threats, without any visible unpleasantness. He had a kind of charm. A kind of magic really. You went along with what he wanted, without thinking. It seemed as if there was really no choice.’

  ‘You had a child,’ said Menéndez.

  She gulped at her drink. ‘When I was fifteen, when I began to understand what he was doing to me, I realized I was pregnant. I tried to hide it. You can do this for a while, then it becomes impossible. When they realized, when my parents understood, they told him. They said I had to go and see him. To talk to him about it.’

  Maria said, ‘You mean it was his decision. What would happen?’

  ‘Of course. Everything was Antonio’s decision.’

  ‘And he said what?’

  She closed her eyes. Her skin was so pale it seemed translucent. ‘I thought he would send me to the abortionists. He’d done that before. With other girls. But that wasn’t what happened. He said I was special to him. He sent me to some clinic in Cadiz. I stayed there until the child was born. The birth was messy. They did something to me. I couldn’t have children again. I was there two, perhaps three months recuperating.’

  ‘And the child?’ Maria asked.

  Her face flared in fury. ‘The child? The child was Antonio’s child! His. Do you understand? He didn’t belong to me. I was just the thing that brought him into the world. They took him. As soon as they could, they took him. And you know what they said to me?’

  She stared at them, something crazy in her eyes. ‘They said they were doing me a favour. They wanted me to be grateful to them – grateful to Antonio – for saving me from this. From this stigma of being a child with a baby.’

  ‘What happened to the child?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t know. When I came back to the city, Antonio waited a few months. Then they told me to go and see him. You know what he wanted? To go back to the old ways. He wanted me to have sex with him again. He never mentioned the child. Not once. It was as if it had never happened. I was supposed to go back to doing what I did before. Whatever he wanted.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I spat in his face and told him, “If you touch me, I will kill you.” He looked at me as if I was insane. I thought he might have me murdered. He could do that. He had done it. He was a gangster, you know. For all that pose, all that pretence, he was a criminal, nothing more. The money he had, he stole it, then used it to make more gangster money. Everything then, the police, the politicians, the people around him, he controlled them all through his money. Why do you think he got away with all this?’

  ‘Did he accept what you said?’ asked Maria.

  ‘Accept? Antonio accepted nothing he didn’t want. He held me. He said he loved me. I was special. Then, when I said nothing, when I did nothing, he let me go. I died for him then. I disappeared from his sight. When I returned home my mother and father looked at me as if I was a stranger. They were terrified. They drove me round to some little apartment they said Antonio owned. I was left there, on my own, paid for, like a grocery bill, left to exist. Eventually I got a job as a secretary at the university. I left the apartment. I found somewhere of my own. I didn’t want his money. I met Luis at the university. The rest you know. It wasn’t a happy marriage. I don’t blame Luis for that.’

  She put the glass back on the table and left it there, waiting for them to go on.

  Maria asked, ‘You were contacted. Recently. By someone who was connected with all this.’

  Teresa Romero spread her long, thin fingers across the top of the glass table, stared at them and said, ‘Six months or so ago I got a call,
here at home. Someone who wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘Who did you think he was?’ asked Maria.

  She stared out of the window, refusing to look at them.

  ‘I thought . . . I thought that possibly it was someone I might get to know. Luis had ignored me. Behaved as if I didn’t exist, for years. Someone young rings me. Sounds nice, sounds flattering on the phone. Says he’s seen me in the street, not dared to speak. And that he wanted to meet me. Needed to meet me.’

  She looked at Maria, frankly. ‘You’re a woman. What would you think?’

  Maria felt something grow cold and hard in her stomach. ‘That he wanted to start an affair.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Teresa Romero.

  She picked up the bottle and poured another long glass of spirit.

  ‘I bought a new dress. I went to the hairdresser. I made myself look as attractive as I could. I hadn’t done these things for years. And then I went to the Murillo Gardens. We sat, at one of the open-air tables, drinking coffee, talking. I could sense his interest, sense that he wanted me in some way. That there was something I could provide for him. Are you shocked?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘He looked at me and . . . it was odd. I think he wanted to say yes. He wanted to come home with me. Then – that very day. He found me attractive. And he had to say it. Before we left. He had to say this nonsense, crazy nonsense. That he was my son.’

  She faltered, looking for the reason to go on.

  ‘I just went blank. It was like a bad joke. All that time, all that effort I’d made preparing myself. Offering myself. And the reason he wanted to see me was to tell me that. And still he wanted to go through with it, still he wanted to go to bed with me.’

  Maria watched her struggling with the story, trying to turn it into something that made sense.

  ‘What was he like?’ she asked.

  ‘Like? He was like Antonio. To look at. In some other ways too. There was something driving him. Something he couldn’t help. When he said this, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t say anything for a while. He wanted to order a taxi. Then. To come with me. I said no. This was wrong. This was something that could not happen.’

  Menéndez pulled a piece of paper out of his notes and passed it to her.

  ‘Is that him?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. I saw the picture on TV. I would have called you. In the end. It’s just . . . it’s just not that easy.’

  Maria said, ‘How did he find you? After all these years?’

  ‘Luis. Our marriage went a little crazy ten years or so ago. He got sick of me, I guess, and went off and did what he liked. He was a very determined man. When he wanted something, he just kept on and on until he got it. He started this study project, on the city during the war. At night he’d come home and all he could talk about was what he was starting to dig up about the Falange, about what had happened at that camp the old people used to talk about. Things that had been hushed up, even though a lot of people knew they’d happened. I wanted to tell him to drop it. But that wasn’t Luis. One day he came back and he was really excited. He said he’d found someone, a family who did things, ran errands, looked after business, for some crime figure in the city. He met a son, who kept talking and talking. He knew a lot about the war, knew connections, links to things that Luis was looking at. Over the next few weeks they spent a lot of time together, swapping different pieces of the same puzzle, putting things together. He was so excited. He talked about nothing else.’

  ‘This “son”? This was the man who rang you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you met him . . .’

  She folded her thin, bird-like hands on her lap and said, ‘When I met him . . . I couldn’t believe it. Any of it. He was Antonio’s son, for sure. You could see it, just looking at him. But mine? I told myself there’d be something there, some feeling, something I would recognize. And there was nothing. He sat there, calling me Mother in this flat little working-class voice, telling me how much he loved me, missed me, how important to him I was. He was a grown man behaving like a child. Behaving as if we could pretend the past had never happened. I looked at him and all I saw was this picture, this replica of Antonio telling me how much he wanted me, how he would now be part of my life. Always. No questions, no request. It was like his father. He arrived, he demanded something, he expected me to give it to him, just like that. There was money, he said, money he could put his hands on. We could live on it. I could leave Luis. We would be together, always. All this, out of the blue, in the park, and I sat there thinking: I’m going mad. I will leave this place, I will never see him again.’

  ‘You told him that?’

  ‘I said, If it was true he was my child, if it was true, then I was sorry I didn’t have the opportunity to be his mother in the right way. But that wasn’t my choice. Or his. What we had been deprived of was something we couldn’t replace, something we couldn’t pull back out of the last thirty years. We couldn’t recreate something that had never existed in the first place. I told him to go home, to forget the past, to live his own life – not one that might have been.’

  Menéndez grimaced. ‘You let him down gently?’

  ‘As gently as I could. Until he started screaming at me. He was Antonio’s son. You could see that. Antonio had this demon in him; it drove him, but it came out in the sex, the way he saw women as something to be used, a kind of physical instrument for whatever he felt like doing. This man, his son, had the demon too, but it was different. Antonio revolted me. This man scared me.’

  ‘Did he threaten you?’

  ‘Not directly. When he got mad, he said he would destroy Luis. Destroy our life together. I thought – I hoped – this was an idle threat in the heat of the moment. He felt rejected. I couldn’t blame him. But I couldn’t make myself feel, make my heart feel, something that wasn’t there. I don’t know anything about being a mother, but I knew then, when we talked, that it was not just a matter of biology. I couldn’t invent it out of nothing.’

  ‘Did he contact you again?’

  ‘Three months later. When Luis was out somewhere, God knows where, there was this call from some gay dating agency. Asking after Luis. Luis? I couldn’t believe it. It just wasn’t true. This was part of his game, part of how he said he would destroy our lives. He phoned afterwards, said he would start spreading rumours, start leading Luis into situations that could harm his reputation. They were still meeting, you see. Still talking about the work Luis was doing. He was taking Luis to see people to talk about the war.

  ‘I told him to go away. I told him the same thing I told him before. It wasn’t possible. A week later . . . a week later he phoned again and said that what had happened – what would happen – was all my fault. It was the night they found Luis in the car. That man killed Luis to spite me.’

  She was silent for a moment until Menéndez prompted her. ‘We need to know his name. Has he spoken to you since?’

  ‘That’s the last time I spoke to him. He called himself Antonio. He said he lived in Santa Cruz. That’s all I know.’

  ‘But Luis must have kept some record?’

  ‘When he died I went to the university. Everything had gone. Stolen. There had been some kind of break-in. There was nothing left of the project he’d been working on.’

  Maria tried to catch her eyes, to look into them fully, but it was impossible. ‘Teresa. He tried to kill me. He’s killed other people. The Angel Brothers. Señor Castañeda. Why would he do that?’

  ‘I can’t begin to imagine.’

  ‘Was it for the money? Did he talk a lot about the money?’

  ‘He said there was money. A lot of it. The other people . . . I don’t know. Luis had met them. He’d got to know the Angels too, but I think that was some social event. With that bullfighter. Mateo? They seemed to move in the same circles. But why . . . ?’

  She thought for a moment and said, ‘What was driving him wasn’t money. He wanted legitimacy. Some kind of normality. A famil
y, or as much of one as he could find. I couldn’t give that to him. It was impossible. So when Luis died, I never told you. When these other killings happened, I never told you. I waited for you to find out. I prayed for you to find out. But I couldn’t tell you myself.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Menéndez.

  Teresa Romero looked at him, astonished. ‘Only a man could ask that question. Because I was ashamed. Why else?’

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘Nice woman,’ said Velasco as he wheeled the car back into the centre of the city. ‘Kid comes along after thirty years, says, “Hello, Momma, I’m your long-lost son”, she tells him to get lost. Charming.’

  Maria fought to stop herself screaming at him.

  ‘She was right,’ she said, finally. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Velasco replied in an acid tone. ‘She was right. All this ’cos she can’t cut it. Can’t bring herself to speak with him. Sure. You can’t expect her to say: Fine, move in with me, what do you like to eat? But she didn’t need to turn him off like that. No need.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ said Quemada quietly. ‘He must have been more than half-crazy already. Fuse out, just waiting for someone to come along with the match. In any case . . .’

  His voice drifted off.

  ‘In any case what?’ asked Maria.

  ‘How’d she know he was telling the truth? What proof did he have, except that he looked like his father? Maybe he was her son, maybe he wasn’t. No way of knowing.’

  ‘I think,’ said Maria, ‘that was what she was trying to tell us. That she did know. And he wasn’t.’

  ‘How could she be sure of that?’ Velasco demanded. ‘How could she know?’

  Maria sighed and wondered if there were words that could bring it home to the man.