‘I see. I must start to read the UK media on a daily basis.’
‘Yes, but read the lot. The Guardian’s facing three ways at once, as usual, but The Times and the Telegraph both subscribe to another theory, that our guy is a little too ambitious to be trusted, and that when he does kick off the upheaval, the party will get behind someone who’s shown a bit more loyalty, and who’s just as smart.’
‘Justin?’
‘Ah, you’re on first-name terms,’ he chuckled.
‘I’ve met the man twice,’ I told him, firmly.
‘Then you must have impressed him. Now, when can you come to London? Next week too soon?’
‘A little. I’ll have to make arrangements for my son, and in addition I’m involved in a situation here that’s going to take a couple of days to resolve.’
In the end we agreed that I’d report to the Foreign Office one week from the following Tuesday, 10 a.m. ‘What’s the dress code?’ I asked.
‘Pinstripe suit, blue shirt, white collar,’ he replied, ‘or jeans and a T-shirt saying “Welcome to Spain” if you prefer. Whatever’s your norm. But no jewellery of a religious nature; we’re not allowed to show or imply favouritism.’
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘Fortunately, yes.’
I’m going to like John Dale, I thought as I hung up. But what to do about Tom? Was I really prepared to be a working mum? Yes, I told myself, and the answer’s simple: get Gerard out of jail, and he can look after him.
I kept that thought with me through the evening, even after I’d called Father Olivares and been depressed by his pessimism over Gerard’s prospects, especially when I told him that he’d rejected Josep Villamas’s offer of representation. ‘He is accepting his situation, my dear,’ the old cleric sighed. ‘If that is the case, then perhaps we should also.’
‘I’ll never do that,’ I insisted. ‘Father, do you know how to get in touch with Santiago Hernanz, Gerard’s brother?’
‘I’m afraid not. I was away on both his visits to L’Escala, so I’ve never met him, and Gerard rarely speaks of him.’
That was true enough, I had to concede.
I found relief from one problem by concentrating on another. Should I go to Dolores Fumado’s funeral? After all, I’d met the woman as often as I’d met Justin Mayfield, and on one of those occasions she’d been dead. Still, Justine had been pretty square with me. On balance I decided that non-attendance might be seen as a snub, so next morning I dug out a black dress, left Tom with Ben Simmers, in charge of the dogs, and drove into L’Escala. Parking wasn’t a problem; there’s an official area behind the church. In the winter it’s free, so it’s full, but in the summer you have to pay, so it’s half-empty; the locals don’t use it then, on principle, even though it only costs a few cents. See Catalans; see money?
I bought a new shawl in a shop at the top of the hill, not because I wanted one, but to comply with convention. It wasn’t as nice as my old one, but the police still had that, and anyway, going to a funeral wearing the murder weapon would have set a new standard in political incorrectness.
As I had at Planas’s send-off, I tried to make myself invisible in the middle of the congregation, but I could only find a seat at the end of a row, right on the aisle. Hah! If the ghost of John Paul II had appeared at the altar to conduct the Mass he wouldn’t have attracted much more attention than I did. For all the discretion that the police had shown in bandying my name around when I was on the run, I must still have been the talk of every hairdressing salon in L’Escala . . . and believe me, that’s a lot of shampoo and set; anyone parachuted into the town and asked to name its main industries on the basis of a quick walk round would probably say anchovies second, hairdressing top of the list.
Just about every head in the place turned to look at me, and a buzz of conversation started. It was only stilled when the mayor, her sister, looking more ghostly than ever, and Angel entered the church and walked slowly up the aisle; they were followed by two other men, of an older generation. Justine stopped beside me. She put her hand on my arm, kissed me on the cheek and said, in a voice loud enough to carry for several rows in every direction, ‘Thank you for coming, Primavera. I know you’ve had an ordeal too.’
That took care of the chattering classes, I’m happy to say. I was forgotten as the Mass progressed. It didn’t seem to last as long as the previous one had . . . Father Olivares was acting alone; that may have accounted for it . . . before we were making our way outside, into the square with the vast palm tree, full of noisy birds, in the centre. I would have left straight away, but Justine came across to me. She’d been talking to the two older men, but detached herself. One of them, the taller of the two, moved on to talk to Angel, but the other followed her with his eyes, until they settled on me. ‘My uncles,’ she explained. ‘My parents’ brothers. What have you heard?’ she asked me quietly.
‘Nothing that I believe,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to Girona this afternoon to see the new head honcho. He wants to interview me.’ I stopped, and reminded myself that I was talking to a woman who’d just lost her mother in terrible circumstances. ‘But how are you? I haven’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am.’
‘I’m as shocked and disbelieving as everyone else in this town,’ she replied. ‘The man you’re going to see, he visited me last night. Primavera, I’m like you. There are things I find it almost impossible to accept. When Gomez told me you were a suspect, I laughed at him. I was ready to laugh at the man Valdes too, but after he’d spoken to me . . . I still find it hard to conceive of such a thing, but . . . You go see him; maybe you’ll spot a flaw in his argument. My God, I hope you do.’
I followed the cortège to the cemetery on the edge of town. They bury their dead differently in Spain, not in the ground as a rule . . . for much of the year you’d need to use explosives to dig a grave . . . but in a space in a wall, a vertical mausoleum, which is then sealed. I watched Justine’s mother’s sad little box being slid into hers, then slid off quietly myself and headed for Girona. I’d looked up the address of the Mossos headquarters. It’s in a street called Vista Alegre, near the river that flows through the city. I didn’t know it, but my satnav took me straight there.
Commissioner Valdes was ready for me, in a utilitarian office with one-way windows and cream-painted walls, a tall slim man with a high forehead and black hair that was cut fairly long. He reminded me very much of John Cazale, the actor who played Fredo Corleone in The Godfather series. I suspected that he’d adopted the hairstyle after seeing the movies. I wondered whether he’d made a special trip, or whether he always worked Saturdays. That was unlikely, I decided, for someone of his rank; I didn’t know whether to be flattered, or worried. ‘What do you want to discuss?’ I asked him, bluntly.
‘Why did you run after you found Dolores Fumado’s body?’ he retorted, as if to show he was better at bluntness than I was.
‘Because I was scared. I’d had a tip that my DNA had been found on the murder weapon; when I found Dolores dead in my wood store I flipped.’
‘Who told you that you should go?’
‘In those circumstances, do you think I needed telling? If it had happened to you, Commissioner, you’d have been out of there like Speedy Gonzalez.’
A gleam in Valdes’ eyes suggested that he might not have liked being compared to the fastest mouse in all Mayheeco, but he let it pass. ‘One never knows how one will react until such a thing happens,’ he conceded. ‘And in your case, Senora Blackstone, you may as well have vanished into a mouse hole. For there was no trace of you to be found when Intendant Gomez put out a call for your apprehension and arrest. You must have had help; there’s no question. Nor is there any question in my mind that the person who helped you was Father Hernanz.’
I shrugged. ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, casually.
‘I’m helped by the fact that we found your passport, your credit cards and a bicycle, later identified by Inspector Guinart as
yours, in a garage in L’Escala, rented by Father Hernanz. We searched it on Thursday evening, before his arrest. Now why would he have those?’
‘Maybe I left them at his residence,’ I suggested, ‘and asked him to keep them for me.’
Valdes laughed. ‘When you started to run, I can’t see you dropping anything off. He made you leave them behind when he sent you off, with your dyed hair. No point in changing colour if you were carrying documents that identified you.’ I didn’t see any point in commenting on that, since he’d got it dead right. ‘Do you know what I thought when I found those things, senora?’ He picked up an envelope and tossed it across the desk. ‘They’re all in there, by the way. You can have them back.’
I picked it up. ‘Thank you. No, what did you think?’
‘I thought you were dead, I honestly did. I thought that your friend the priest had killed you too, and that we’d find charred remains of you in the boiler below the church. I thought I was going to have to tell your little boy that his mother was gone. I was afraid, senora; afraid I was going to have to do that.’ Valdes frowned, and I saw that he was serious. ‘Even when I went to arrest him, I thought that was the case. It was only later that morning when I asked Guinart to identify your bike that he told me, no, that you had come back. Do you still want to deny that he helped you?’
‘I’ll choose to say nothing, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Fine, for it doesn’t matter to us. It should matter to you, though, for it was all part of the set-up.’ He stood up. ‘Before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to talk to.’
For a moment I thought he was going to take me to see Gerard, down in the cells or wherever they were keeping him, but all he did was lead me into the room next door. It was bigger than his, with several desks; most of them empty, but one, near a window, was occupied by a man in civilian clothes. Even seated he looked big, and when he turned towards me, he looked ugly as well, a touch of Frankenstein’s monster in his thick gnarled eyebrows.
‘Let me introduce you,’ said Valdes. ‘Senora Blackstone, meet Captain Jorge Lavorante, of the Granada city police. He’s a contemporary of Gerard Hernanz; they were at school together, in fact. He has a story that I believe you have to hear.’
I had a terrible feeling that I knew what it was, but I held on to my poker face as I took the seat that the commissioner offered.
Lavorante’s voice turned out to be as soft as he was hard, with an attractive Andalusian lisp. ‘A long time ago, back in the city,’ he began, ‘I was a new kid on the force, when we got a call. It was from a house up on Cuesta de los Cabras, where the Hernanz family lived, from one of their neighbours, scared. She said that someone was being killed up there. I got sent to the scene by my sergeant, on my own. On my own, lady, d’ you hear that? Why? Because Gerard Hernanz and his old man were involved, and none of my brave colleagues wanted any part of them. Plus they knew I knew Gerard, and that if anyone could calm things down, I could.’
‘You make him sound like a monster.’
Lavorante shook his head. ‘I make him sound like the toughest man in Granada, for that’s what he was. You know he was a pub bouncer when he was a kid, after he got out of the marines?’
I nodded, defiantly.
The big cop ignored me. ‘Nobody fucked with him, apart from one time. I got the story afterwards, from the other doorman. There was one guy wouldn’t take a telling. He was rude and abusive. Gerard’s girl was there at the time, and the idiot called her a whore. He was still semi-conscious when they got him to hospital, yet Gerard only hit him once. He was a gypsy, and later three of his family came to the bar looking for revenge, the knife-carrying kind. Like I say, Gerard had been in the marines by then, and he had learned all sorts of close-combat skills. He took the blade off the biggest of them so fast he didn’t even see it, put him in an armlock, and held it to this throat. Then he told them very quietly that their brother had been way out of order, and that it would be a pity if someone had to die because of a stupid little shit like him. “Put like that,” one of the gypsies said, “we can’t argue.” They all shook hands with him and went off into the night.’
I didn’t realise it, but I was trembling as he told his story. ‘Senora,’ said Valdes, ‘would you like a glass of water?’
I realised that I would. Once I’d drunk it, the Andalusian carried on. ‘So there I am, up at the Hernanz house. The neighbour had said that the trouble was in the garden so I went in the back way, through a little gate. It was all quiet, not a sound. Then I saw Gerard’s old man. He was lying there, covered in blood, and when I say he was out of it, I thought he was dead, till I took a closer look at him, and found a pulse. I could hear voices inside, Gerard’s and his brother. Santi was all right, the more sociable of the two, but he was as formidable as Gerard. No way was I handling one of them, let alone two, and besides, they were my friends, so I picked their father up, carried him out of there over my shoulder, and took him to hospital. We were there when the boys brought Gerard’s girlfriend in. They didn’t see him, or me, and I made sure it stayed that way, but I found out from the staff that the girl had been raped. I also heard that she’d refused, point blank, to call the police. The old man was starting to come round by that time. He’d a fractured skull, they reckoned, and maybe his upper jaw too, but they said he wasn’t going to die. “Oh no?” I told them. So I got him out of there, again, put him back in my car and drove him all the way to Cordoba, and left him at the hospital there. I also told him that if he ever came back to Granada, I’d fucking kill him myself. Trust me, he believed that.’
I listened to the rest of the story, although I knew it all. Irena’s leaving, and Gerard’s decision to save his life, as Lavorante put it, by entering the priesthood. ‘I never did find out what happened to the old man after that,’ he concluded. Ah well, I was one up on him there.
‘Now you’ve heard that,’ said Valdes quietly, ‘there’s something else I want you to listen to.’
He led me back to his office, produced a minidisc recorder, and put it on the desk. He peered at a dial as if he was setting it up, then pressed Play.
‘Do you love Senora Blackstone, Father,’ I heard him ask, ‘in the way a man loves a woman, that is?’
I heard a sigh. ‘Just once,’ a disembodied Gerard said, ‘I’ll answer your question, although I wouldn’t if she was here. Yes, I do.’
‘I thought so. In that case, I’m going to put a proposition to you, the same one I’m going to put to the court. Two weeks ago, exactly, the lady had an argument with José-Luis Planas in his office, during which he called her a whore, loudly enough for it to be heard by people outside. I’ve spoken to the lady who managed the business for him; she told me this. Eighteen years ago, in Granada, you knocked a man unconscious and were prepared to kill his brothers when such an insult was aimed at the last woman you loved. When she was attacked by your father, you beat him almost to death. That isn’t part of my proposition, by the way; that is witnessed fact. In this case, what I believe is that you went to Senor Planas’s home on the night of his insult to Senora Blackstone; you left the residence after Father Olivares had retired to bed. He let you in, you hit the man with a chair and you killed him. The London forensic team are very good, much better than our people, I have to admit; eventually they found a hair on the murder weapon. The DNA they took from it matches a sample you gave Intendant Gomez for elimination purposes, in Figueras when you went to the morgue to perform the final offices on the man you’d killed. But that night, at the house, you didn’t know you’d find Dolores Fumado there. Her relationship with Planas was very much their secret. You dealt with it; you made the scene look as if an accident had occurred, you abducted the lady, and you imprisoned her. You drove her car into the countryside, and you burned it. But not well enough, for you also left a DNA trace on a corner of the driver’s door, more hair and some skin, as if you’d bumped your head. So what to do with D
olores? You didn’t know, until . . . A few days later, you learned that Gomez’s team had found Primavera’s palm print on the chair, and you conceived a very bold plan. You killed Dolores, with a shawl belonging to Senora Blackstone. We believe that either she left it in your car on that Friday night, or that you stole it from her, possibly on the Sunday afternoon in St Martí.’
Of course, I thought, I wore it to church.
‘You put the body in her storeroom. Careless, Father, you left your DNA there again.’
Of course he did, I sent him in there to look. ‘When she found it, and called you, as you knew she would, you told her she must leave. You actually framed the woman you love for two murders that you had committed, and then you persuaded her to confirm her own guilt by escaping.’
There was a pause in the recording. ‘But why would you do this?’ it continued. ‘What possible reason could you have had? Let me tell you. You planned to disappear too; you planned to take her son and to join her in hiding, letting her be condemned as a murderess in her absence, but freeing you to spend the rest of your life with the woman you love. Brilliant, flawless . . . or it should have been. You underestimated her resourcefulness, and her ability to prove her own innocence.’
‘Something I will never do again,’ said Gerard, quietly.
‘So that’s it?’ Valdes asked him. ‘You admit it?’
‘You’re a very smart man, Comisari,’ he replied, with a soft chuckle that caused me physical pain as I listened to it, ‘to have figured all that out. You put it on paper and I’ll sign it; as you said, it’s brilliant.’
The commissioner switched off the recording. ‘So you see, senora,’ he sighed.
I stared at him, that John Cazale lookalike, and as my eyes filled with tears, I knew that he’d done to me what Fredo did to Michael in Godfather Two. He’d broken my heart.
Forty-eight
I asked Valdes if I could speak to Gerard. He told me that he had no personal objection, provided that there was a guard present for my security, since I was now a potential witness against him, but that ‘the prisoner’ . . . how I hated it when he used that word . . . had made it clear that he did not want to see anyone.
Blood Red Page 23
