Death in Seville

by David Hewson

  Even then, the face was not a face any more. It was tissue, raw flesh, disfigured, ripped apart. A human being reduced to mere organic matter. She stared at it, stared harder and harder until something inside her head began to hum gently, insistently, like a little living creature. Their arms gripped her, shook her, forced her away, out again into the milky light, the faint, warm rain and the world.

  Maria Gutiérrez realized her eyes were streaming. She wiped them with her sleeve, then wiped her nose and walked out of the Puerta del Principe, through the mud and the litter swirling gently in the wet, choppy wind, thinking to herself, over and over and over again . . .

  No rain, Bear. We agreed. No rain . . .

  FIFTY-SIX

  The streets should have been strewn with people, full of noise and colour and gaiety. Instead the city was indoors, driven there by the rain, the atmosphere, the curious, sinister mood that had hung in the air for days on end, then produced its savage outburst in the ring. Rumours swept the streets, of murder and deceit and tragedy. They flourished in the little bars of El Arenal and Santa Cruz, travelled across the river to Triana and beyond. In the city’s bars, full to the doors, ill-tempered, truculent men, young and old, felt cheated, dispossessed, lost. They drank cheap red wine, coffees thick with coñac, spoke little, watched the television, following the rerun of Mateo’s death, over and over again, first on one channel, then on another – replaying, reliving every second, looking for answers that never seemed to come. The week had ended in an ugliness that infected them all, and what made it worse was that they recognized their infection, they could touch the virus inside, knowing that, in hating it, they despised themselves.

  Along cobbled streets of muddy water, through piles of floating debris and trash, Maria walked, not stopping, not looking to see where she was. Her hair was now plastered to her skull, dank and greasy with the rain. Her clothes were soaked. They stuck to her skin, chafing it to redness. Her legs ached, her feet felt sore and blistered.

  Finally, she stood inside an unlit doorway, wiped her face with her sleeve, stared blankly at the darkened window. Distorted by the rain, the glass flashed back the reflection of a neon light from across the street: red, green, blue and yellow. She turned round and looked across the road. The optician’s shop. To her right, the bar on the corner where, a lifetime ago, she had declined a drink with Torrillo.

  Maria shuffled across the cobblestones, put the key in the door and walked upstairs.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  In the city morgue, deep in the bowels of the police station, Quemada coughed phlegm into a grubby handkerchief and swore. This weather was getting to him. He could feel Velasco’s cold coming on and his head hurt. He looked at the body on the bright shiny metal table and thought: What a lousy day.

  It was naked now, the flesh, where it was unmarked, the pale dun grey of death. Blood, caked around the entry holes in the abdomen, the neck and the face, was being carefully wiped away with cotton swabs by the medical examiner. Quemada knew him vaguely: Castares. Creepy Castares, they called him, to his face too. He looked a little like a cadaver himself, tall and thin, with a whey-coloured face and a permanent smell of medical spirit that just might have been a peculiar brand of booze.

  Quemada watched him moving around the corpse on the plate, muttering asides to his girl assistant, who wrote them down in a plain ringbound police notebook. He was taking his time. There was a lot to look at.

  ‘Hey, Creepy,’ Quemada said.

  The pathologist shot him a venomous look. Off-duty, in places he marked out as sociable, he didn’t mind the nickname. In the morgue, and in particular in front of his nice new girl assistant, he liked a little more respect. Quemada spotted his error.

  ‘Sorry. Doctor.’

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘I’m curious about this guy. Something bugs me about him, and I thought maybe you could help me out.’

  ‘What?’ said Castares, and poked a metal probe into a hole in the corpse’s abdomen.

  ‘That wound. The one that nearly took his face off. You think a bull could do that?’

  ‘I haven’t got that far yet. I’m working from the bottom up.’

  ‘All a matter of taste, I guess,’ said Quemada, automatically. ‘We didn’t actually see this guy buy it. We heard something. But it was very dark. There was some shooting too. And I was curious. That wound. I guess I never saw anything quite like it. And I just wondered . . .’

  Castares grimaced, not a pretty sight, then muttered obscenely. ‘I hate these kind of interruptions, you know. I have a way of doing these things. A method. When you interrupt my train of thought, the method goes out the window.’

  ‘I just wondered what you think. That’s all. You’re the expert.’

  The pathologist stared at the flap of flesh, picked it up in his latex-gloved hand, looked underneath it, into the red morass of the skull.

  ‘See,’ said Quemada. ‘What interests me is, we know this man was in the middle of a pen of bulls going crazy. We know that, because we found him there afterwards. And you got these marks on his body. But say I brought him in, brought him to you and all he had was that wound on his head. Nothing else. What would you say caused it? A bull?’

  Castares felt the weight of the pad of flesh, like a housewife weighing up a piece of fish in the market.

  ‘I’d say it was caused by a powerful blow from some kind of broad, blunt instrument. Maybe one of the tools you see in construction crews. You know, the other end of the pick.’

  ‘Not being gored by a bull?’

  ‘Definitely not. A wound that comes from something sharp is very easy to pick up. Even you could spot that.’

  ‘That’s kind of you to say so,’ Quemada said.

  ‘No problem. On the other hand, if this man was in a pen of stampeding bulls, you’d have to consider the possibility that he was kicked, maybe trampled underfoot.’

  ‘He was. Definitely. That could cause that kind of wound?’

  Castares shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe. I wouldn’t like to say until I take a closer look.’

  He picked up the flap again, then bent over to peer inside the skull.

  ‘On the other hand . . .’

  Castares motioned for his assistant to pass him something from the surgical tray by the table. It was a pair of long-nosed tweezers. He poked inside the head, round about where an eye socket would have been if the flesh had not been pulled to one side to flap along the opposite cheekbone. Then he retrieved the instrument. There was something small and shiny in the tweezer head.

  ‘That didn’t come from any bull.’

  Quemada walked over, tried to ignore the meat smell from the table and looked.

  ‘You’re the expert in this, Detective. What would you say that was?’

  ‘A small-calibre bullet.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Castares. His face was buried back in the skull again. He adjusted the bright examination light over the table, bent to one side of it, and took a scalpel to the brain tissue there. Quemada saw something being sliced, then turned away. Castares cut and fiddled for a minute or so, then made some clucking noises, left the corpse and put the instruments back in the tray.

  ‘Do I get the benefit of your wisdom?’ asked Quemada eventually.

  ‘I remove the brain in any case. I always look, so I would have got this anyway. Without you.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Quemada. ‘You’re a whizz.’

  ‘My guess – and it stays a guess until I do a formal examination – is that the bullet killed him. The way the blood behaves, around the entry wound in the brain. He was alive when he was shot.’

  ‘So maybe there was some unlucky – what am I saying “unlucky”? – some ricochet in the dark, and it hit him. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘What I’m saying is the shot killed him. And that there was some interval between the shot and these wounds to the body. That would explain the way he bled. If the heart had been pumping when the wounds were made, the
re would have been more blood. The wound on the face. That’s different. That was probably closer to the shot.’

  ‘So he got shot. Someone took a pickaxe to his face. Then some time later, in the dark, he got bumped around a bit by some bulls. When he was dead.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ said Castares. ‘Provisionally.’

  ‘I see,’ said Quemada. ‘You done the prints yet?’

  The pathologist grimaced. ‘Of course I’ve done the prints. That’s what I meant when I said I worked bottom up. It’s part of the method.’

  ‘I’d like to see them.’

  The assistant walked over to the far side of the room and pulled two pages of paper from a brown folder. She came back and handed them to Quemada. He put them on the desk by the examination table, then opened up a file marked ‘Antonio Mateo’ and let the contents slide onto the table. A set of old charge sheets and station reports – minor thefts, drug pulls, a reported robbery that somehow never came to court – fell onto the desktop. He picked up a set of prints from the pile and placed them side by side with the fresh ones from the corpse.

  He smiled at the assistant.

  ‘Say. You’re young. Your eyesight’s better than mine. Take a look at these prints. One against the other. Tell me what you see.’

  The girl retrieved a magnifying glass from a drawer, came and stood beside him, then bent over the pages. He could smell cologne on her body, something expensive, something exotic underneath the plain white nylon jacket with the stains of blood and less savoury things on the sleeve. She wore thick-rimmed glasses and had her hair tied back in a bun, but, when he came to think about it, he could understand why Castares didn’t like being called Creepy in front of her.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘They’re different.’

  He took the glass off her and looked at the prints himself.

  ‘Correct,’ said Quemada.

  Castares blinked and looked puzzled.

  ‘You mean this isn’t who you thought it was?’

  Quemada put down the glass and scooped up the papers. ‘It’s not who I thought it was. Somebody else might feel different. Will you do me a big favour?’

  ‘If it’s legal, ethical and decent, and doesn’t cost me money.’

  ‘You go back to the bottom and keep working your way up. And don’t feel in a hurry. Tomorrow this thing will be sorted. One way or another. But I’d be grateful if you could keep this between us just for the time being.’

  ‘You get through on three counts, but is that ethical?’

  Quemada sniffed and wondered whether it was really a cold or just all the medical junk they had in the air in these places.

  ‘Tell me tomorrow. I’m not saying you hide anything. I’m just saying – just asking – that you go back to working in your own sweet way, at your own sweet pace, and give me some space. For tonight only.’

  Castares’ face looked long enough to touch the ground.

  ‘I hate it when you detectives do this stuff on me. It’ll cost you a drink.’

  Quemada’s heart sank. ‘Agreed. Provided all we talk about is football, food and sex. On second thoughts, skip the sex. I’m not sure my stomach could take it.’

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Thirty minutes later, back in the deserted squad room, Quemada took a crowbar to the locked cabinet by Menéndez’s desk, thrust it into the crack between drawer and frame, then heaved hard on the end. The woodwork came away with a groan. He reached inside and fished out three files of papers, each marked ‘Alvarez’ in the late lieutenant’s scrawly hand.

  He pulled up a chair, then sat down and started reading. When he’d seen enough he bundled up the pile of papers with some new notes he had made, put them in a folder, tied it round with a couple of elastic bands, wrote a covering note, then found a routing slip for the internal mailing system. He looked at the form, paused over the ‘To:’ portion. Then he screwed it up into a ball and threw it into the waste-paper basket underneath the desk.

  Quemada picked up the phone and dialled his brother’s number. It rang out half a dozen times, then a gruff male voice answered.

  ‘Miguel, it’s me. Carlos,’ said Quemada. ‘Sure. Sure, I’m fine. No. I don’t want nothing. Huh? Well, yeah. I do want something. It’s important. You can come now? I need to see you. Outside the station, in the square. Fifteen minutes. I said it was important, didn’t I? Sure. Why else would I be asking?’

  His brother was late. He was always late. After half an hour a shiny blue BMW coupé drew up in the square and a young, serious face poked out of the driver’s window.

  Quemada looked at the car and whistled. ‘The insurance business must be good these days. If I save a year, maybe two, I just might be able to afford the down-payment on one of these things.’

  ‘What do you want? I’m busy.’

  ‘I want you to look after this,’ Quemada replied. He pushed the bundle through the car window and let it fall onto the passenger seat.

  His brother looked horrified. ‘You know I hate it when you try this crap on me. What is it?’

  ‘Just some papers I’d rather not keep at the station.’

  ‘Is this one of your stunts? Should I be doing this?’

  ‘No stunt. You just keep ’em a day. Two days at the most. If I have an accident, something like that, you give ’em to the TV station, the newspapers, whoever you like. Photocopy them and hand them out on the street, if you want. So long as you come to the funeral.’

  ‘Jesus. Jesus! I got a wife and kids, you know. I can’t go around playing these games.’

  ‘These aren’t games, Miguel. You been reading the papers. You been following what’s been happening here?’

  ‘That’s a good reason to have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘You’ve got something to do with it. Me. Be a good little brother and do as I say, huh? No one knows I gave you this stuff, no one will know. You just go back home, turn on your stereo and your satellite TV, go make lots more money and in a couple of days we can all go back to normal. You can forget you ever knew me.’

  Miguel gunned the engine with his toe and let the noise do the talking for him. It sounded loud and powerful and angry. ‘You’re a real shithead, you know.’

  ‘Fraternal greetings to you too, Brother. Run along now, and careful you don’t scrape the paintwork. Oh. And thanks.’

  The coupé pulled away from the kerb with a long, high screech. Quemada waved as he watched it disappear from the corner of the square.

  ‘Do they drive the car like that because of the car or because they want to drive like that?’ he wondered to himself.

  He flashed his ID at the gate, then went back into the station.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Maria turned on the hallway light, walked up the narrow flight of stairs and went into the apartment. The room was empty. She tried to think. They must have called the policewoman off. No point in there being a guard any more.

  She went to the bathroom, took off her wet clothes, wiped her face and looked in the mirror. Her eyes seemed twice their normal size: round and white and frightened. Her skin was pale, bloodless. She took off her underclothes, towelled herself down, rubbed her face into the thick, rough fabric and felt something like life begin to return. Still pummelling at her head with the towel, she reached behind the shower curtain, felt for the tap, felt her hand grip, unmistakably, the outline of a human head, hair underneath her touch, wet, thick hair. Her hand jerked back, automatically. She looked at it. The fingers were thick with blood, red and fresh. It dripped slowly onto the tiled floor.

  Maria reached forward, drew back the curtain, half-knowing what she would see. In the bath, on her back, unseeing eyes open, staring sightless at the ceiling, was the policewoman who wanted to be called Mike. A crimson wound, like a deathly red grin, ran obscenely from ear to ear, through the fleshy folds underneath her chin. Her mouth was set in a bizarre grimace, the teeth stained red, like lipstick that had run. Maria pulled back the curtain further. The
woman was still in uniform. Her knees were bunched up to fit the length of her frame in the bath. On a strap at her waist hung her radio. Somewhere out of nowhere it turned itself on, hissed and crackled stupidly at nothing.

  From behind, soft and low, came a voice that said, ‘He told me to kill her. He told me. So I did.’

  She turned round, automatically clutching a towel to herself from the rack. He stood in the doorway, dressed in a tattered T-shirt, faded jeans, mouth half-open, eyes – dead eyes – staring at her. A long knife, its thin blade covered in blood, hung in his left hand. There was something lethargic, something spent, about him. She stared and stared and then it came, the tiny, unforeseen revelation. She was not afraid.

  ‘Did he tell you to kill me?’ she asked.

  He nodded, slowly, reluctantly.

  ‘Yeah. He uses me. He says I’m his. You understand?’

  ‘Antonio. Your father’s dead. He can’t order you to do anything.’

  The man shook his head and laughed.

  ‘Don’t say that. He doesn’t like it if you say that. He’s as alive as you and me. He talks to me. He knows what you do.’

  His eyes looked wrong. Maybe it was drugs. Maybe it was simply exhaustion.

  ‘He knew when I started talking to that university guy, started getting him too close to the secrets. How’d he know that? I didn’t tell him. My brother didn’t tell him. He’ll know if I don’t kill you. Like he’d know if I didn’t kill Jaime. And then he’d kill me. But he loves me too. That is why we did the thing. At the corrida. Fooled you all. There’s a million ways out of that place that the cops don’t know about, specially if you got a little help, specially in the dark. We were laughing at you. You know that? Just setting things up in there with the bulls, waiting for the time, and I was out of there so quick, so fast, you didn’t even see me gone. Real clever stuff. Not that you need clever stuff for dumb fucking cops.’