Fatal Sunset

by Jason Webster

  ‘All right,’ laughed Torres. ‘The usual, then. Any time pressure here?’

  Cámara clicked his tongue.

  ‘No worries, chief,’ said Torres. ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Cámara. They were back, a duo again, almost as if nothing had changed. As though Rita didn’t even exist.

  ‘Oh, and listen,’ he added. ‘Someone in the ops room might be in touch. Guy called Azcárraga.’

  ‘No problem. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Help him in any way you can,’ said Cámara. ‘He’s one of the good guys.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘OK, I’d better go.’

  ‘I’ll give you a call.’

  The line went dead. Cámara put the phone back in his pocket and felt his packet of cigarettes nestling at the bottom. It was time for a smoke.

  The taste of tobacco on his breath only served as a partial barrier, however. His head swirled for a moment as the usual cocktail of scents greeted him in reception. The woman behind the desk recognised him.

  ‘Hola.’

  ‘Is Dr Quintero around?’ asked Cámara. ‘I’d like to have a word.’

  A couple of minutes later, sitting in a visitor’s chair, Cámara heard his name being called.

  ‘Max!’

  Cámara stood up, watching as an erect, slim, grey-haired man approached, a beaming smile on his face. Cámara could never quite understand how someone who spent his day cutting up bodies could be so unfailingly cheerful. His white coat alone – as bright as the ones those fake doctors wore in TV adverts – seemed to reek of death.

  ‘Darío,’ he said, shaking the man’s hand warmly. ‘Thanks for seeing me like this.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Quintero. ‘I’ve got a few minutes. Come with me.’

  They passed through swing doors into a corridor. Double metal doors at the far end marked the entrance to where the dead were kept.

  ‘I heard something about changes at the Jefatura,’ said Quintero in a lower voice. ‘Not affecting you, I sincerely hope.’

  ‘I’ve been reassigned,’ said Cámara. ‘Back in Homicidios.’

  ‘They’ve put you in charge?’

  The look in Cámara’s eye said everything.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Quintero. ‘I … well. No hay mal que por bien no venga.’ Every cloud has its silver lining.

  Cámara smiled.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s what I’ve been telling myself all morning.’

  ‘So,’ said Quintero, ‘if you’re back in Homicidios, I assume you’re here to see one of our guests.’

  ‘José Luis Mendoza,’ said Cámara. ‘Should have checked in yesterday.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Owned one of those nightclubs, didn’t he? Somewhere up in the mountains?’

  ‘Never been myself.’

  ‘No, of course not. Well, I haven’t had a look at him yet. I think he’s scheduled for tomorrow. We’ve got a bit of a glut at the moment. Bad case of food poisoning at an old people’s home.’

  Quintero checked his watch.

  ‘But we could take a very quick look at him now if that would help.’

  Cámara nodded, more out of duty than actual desire.

  Quintero headed towards the double metal doors. After a pause, Cámara followed.

  An assistant was inside, writing name labels to put on the drawers. Quintero asked her about José Luis and she pointed to his slot.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Quintero to himself. ‘We tend to put the heavier ones in the middle,’ he explained to Cámara. ‘Gives us more room to manoeuvre them about. Problem is, everyone’s getting heavier these days.’

  He pulled open the drawer. Cámara swallowed. The sheet was removed, revealing the cold, naked body of a fat, middle-aged man. The assistant handed over a file before heading out the door.

  ‘Thanks, Luisa,’ said Quintero.

  ‘Those are the ones I need more of,’ he said to Cámara once she had gone. ‘Proactive, doesn’t need asking first.’

  Cámara was staring down at José Luis. There was a resemblance there to the photos he must have seen on occasion, perhaps in newspapers or on TV. It was difficult trying to get a reading from a corpse: death changed and disfigured people, took them worlds away from who they had been while still alive. Yet despite the ghostly grey of his complexion, the sinking of his chin, yellow front teeth sticking out from his mouth, Cámara thought he could detect a kindness there, perhaps a generosity and sensuality in what had once been full lips. Lines around his eyes seemed to speak more of laughter than concern or anger. Even stiff and emptied of life, an echo of the jollity of the man was almost perceptible.

  Quintero scanned the file.

  ‘Not much here,’ he said. ‘He was found up near the nightclub. Declared dead once he got to La Fé.’

  Cámara glanced over the body, alert for clues. Several blue marks – small, slightly raised circles on the neck and hands – caught his attention. He pointed them out. Quintero leaned across, putting on his glasses to get a better view.

  ‘Look like some kind of insect bite or sting, at first glance,’ he said with a frown.

  He knelt down, peering closer.

  ‘I’ll check properly tomorrow, but that might be a sting still inside.’

  He pointed, but Cámara couldn’t make anything out.

  Something on the dead man’s arm caught Quintero’s eye. He prodded at a couple of tiny dots in the inside elbow.

  ‘Looks like our friend injected himself from time to time. An occasional drug user, perhaps?’

  Cámara frowned.

  ‘It would fit, I suppose. That kind of lifestyle.’

  ‘Or maybe he had a medical condition that required using a syringe sometimes. There’s nothing more I can say right now. We’ll take a closer look tomorrow.’

  He closed the drawer and they stepped back out into the corridor.

  Quintero put a hand on Cámara’s shoulder.

  ‘You want this to be a murder, don’t you,’ he said. ‘Need it to be a murder.’

  Cámara sniffed.

  ‘You know if I could I would make it one,’ continued Quintero. ‘But only the results speak the truth. I’m afraid you may be disappointed.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Cámara, shaking his hand. ‘I appreciate you taking the time.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Quintero. ‘As soon as I know.’

  EIGHT

  Her mobile started to ring as she finished dressing, flattening out the wrinkles in her jeans around her thighs and bending at the knees to make the cloth stretch into shape. She had a feeling it would be Max with some nonsensical romantic words to complete and sustain the liquescent joy of their earlier lovemaking. She brushed her hair off her face and went to pick up: the number on the screen looked unfamiliar.

  ‘¿Hola?’

  ‘Alicia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Nacho.’

  She paused, dimmed lights from the past beginning to glimmer inside her.

  ‘Nacho? My God! What …? How …?’

  ‘Are you doing anything this morning?’

  She was trying to work out how long it had been. Six, seven years – perhaps more – since their last get-together, when half a dozen from the old university crowd had managed to be in the same place long enough for a dinner and a chance to rediscover one another. She had spent most of the evening talking to Marta, she recalled, and Pablo. But Nacho had been there, tall and angular, with that sparkle in his eyes that spoke of both fear and excitement, as though he had something extraordinary and terrifying to tell. Nacho had always been different, present yet at one slightly darkened remove from the others. It gave him a sense of mystery, although not necessarily of the attractive kind.

  And now, true to form in some strange way, he was on the other end of the line, forgoing the usual rituals of friends from the past reconnecting. What did he want?

  ‘Are … are you in Valencia?’ she asked.r />
  ‘Yes.’ He sounded tired, his throat constricted. ‘But only for a few hours. I just thought, perhaps, seeing as I’m here, and if you weren’t too busy with things. But really, I understand. You’re tied up. Should have rung before. It’s just that …’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’ll be great to see you. Why don’t we …’ She tried to think about where they could meet.

  ‘San Vicente,’ he said. ‘By the old convent.’

  ‘OK.’ It wasn’t the most obvious place, and it was a little out of the centre, but she could still walk there from the flat. ‘What time?’

  ‘Twelve o’clock good?’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Looking forward to it.’

  There was silence from the other end: Nacho had already hung up.

  She spent the rest of the morning checking emails and reading the news. The apartment was in a mess and needed a tidy – actually more than that, a damn good clean – but she put her domestic self in its place and concentrated on more important matters: the papers were filled with stories of the recession and its growing repercussions. The government in Madrid looked more unstable than ever; a new civil-disobedience movement was gaining strength, feeding off a growing sense that voting never brought any actual change. Then there was the persistent, nagging threat of more Islamic terror attacks, creating a collective anxiety that became deeper rooted every day. Plenty of news was there to be reported, but the economic outlook meant that her chances of getting full-time work again as a journalist were worse than before. Yes, people wanted to know what was going on, but they weren’t prepared to pay for it. And part of her didn’t blame them – many had more important things like paying the rent or feeding their children to worry over. But it did mean that she had to think in different ways about how to relaunch her career.

  The past few years had been difficult – first losing her job at the paper in Madrid, then scratching around as a freelance. It had worked for a time. Until the medical-funding case and the episode in the underground. She still found it hard entering enclosed spaces, a kind of claustrophobia that was, a doctor had told her, a normal reaction to what happened. Others might have suffered greater psychological damage, she was informed. They admired her ability to cope. Yet scars did remain, she knew. Not just on her skin where the thugs had put out their cigarettes, but deeper inside. Scars like that could not be erased. But that did not mean they had to take control, either. She saw them, she recognised them, and she did her best to keep them at bay. Life threw stuff at you and how you dealt with it was the important thing. Becoming a victim, wallowing in what had happened, was not the kind of person she was.

  Not that recovering had been easy. Max had helped – as he always did. And she knew she had made him suffer as a result, had even blamed him for a time. But it was, she had told herself – had told him when she was able – never her punishing him: it was the scars. And now the scars were dormant. No need to inflame them any further by dwelling or remembering. It was not and had never been his fault: she had leapt at the chance to help him with the case, and what they had exposed together – the rotting corruption scandal at the heart of Valencian politics – had brought some degree of change, had opened eyes to what was going on. Which meant that her pain had not been without cause. She could reason it into stillness this way, give it shape and meaning. And finally place it out of her way.

  And now, yes, she felt ready – ready to embrace her own world once more. Nothing like that could ever happen to her again, she reasoned: lightning didn’t strike in the same place twice. There was no need for fear. And she felt a longing for a proper story to follow, like a dog lusting for a bone. Some, she knew – editors, potential employers – saw her as being too old: she was in her late forties and had been out of the game for some time. But she had beaten off bigger problems before. And she knew exactly where they could stick their prejudice.

  She jotted down a few notes – questions arising from the news stories she was reading, possible articles or lines of investigation that she could follow on her own – and checked the time: it was past half-eleven. She would have to go.

  The crumbling Gothic stone doorway to the convent had no shade, and she stood in the blistering late-spring sunshine, shading her eyes with her hand and searching for Nacho. He was normally easy to spot, towering over most people and with his pronounced, mule-like features. Yet it was already five past twelve and she could see no sign of him. She pulled her phone out of her bag, thinking that she would wait another five minutes before calling. Cars roared into motion as the lights changed, and the wide avenue was filled with bellowing noise. At first the hissing sound appeared to be coming from the traffic – perhaps some wheezing old engine or the brakes on a bus. But it was insistent and after a while she realised it was coming from another direction. She turned her head to the right and caught sight of a figure in the shade of a tree, beckoning her with a low, suspicious movement of the hand.

  Nacho?

  She hitched her bag up on her shoulder and went to see.

  ‘Alicia,’ said the figure as she stepped closer. ‘It’s me.’

  He was standing behind the tree, beckoning her closer. Alicia slowed down. Had it finally happened, what they had always feared for him?

  ‘Nacho,’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘Not too close. Just follow. We can’t be seen here. I’ll explain in a minute.’

  He took a step away and walked in the opposite direction, quickly and with a light, uncertain stiffness. Alicia found herself glancing around the street to see if anyone was watching – genuinely or simply to play along, she couldn’t say – then started following, careful not to get too close. At the first opportunity he turned right up a side street. When she came round the same corner, he had vanished – presumably into the small neighbourhood bar, whose grimy red-and-white canopy was the only decoration in an otherwise drab prospect.

  She resisted the temptation to check behind her as she stepped inside. The place was half full; Nacho was sitting at a table at the far end, his back against the wall and with a full view of people coming and going.

  He pulled out a chair for her, its aluminium legs scraping on the tiled floor. A cup with the remains of a café con leche sat in the middle of the table. Had he been here some time already?

  ‘Thanks for coming. So great to see you.’

  She tried to look into his eyes as they kissed each other on the cheeks, searching for signs of … what? Would she even recognise it if it were there?

  ‘I have to give it to you, Nacho,’ she said. ‘First the surprise call, now this.’ She kept her expression light, playful, intrigued.

  ‘Listen,’ he said as they both sat down. ‘You’re still a journalist, right?’

  A couple of minutes later, two fresh cups of coffee were on the table before them, Alicia having got them herself after sensing Nacho’s reluctance to leave his chair, his eyes flickering every couple of seconds or so towards the door.

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asked. The bar had some tortilla that looked edible, and some ham-and-tomato sandwiches recently made by the bar owner’s wife. She had ordered one for herself. But Nacho shook his head.

  ‘Sure?’

  He stared out over the bar, watching the door, no reply.

  The drugs, they had all blamed the drugs. Nacho had taken them along with the rest – it was what you did at university back then. But the impact had always seemed greater in Nacho, some inner balance disturbed, perhaps irrevocably. For the others it had been about having fun, breaking rules, even a degree of some psychological exploration – although never in any self-conscious kind of way. There had been one or two freak-outs, moments when the fun had given way to darker experiences. And as a group they had more or less given them up. But Nacho had continued – or so they suspected. The damage became more visible in him, if not
in a clearly definable way. Yet now, as they sat in this little bar, Alicia had the feeling of being with a wreck of a man, a paranoid, shaking husk of a person who had once had so much promise, a token scientist among their humanities-dominated group and easily the brightest and most academically promising of them all.

  Almost automatically she clicked into listening, sympathetic mode, like some sort of therapist. She was already thinking of people she knew, health workers, experts in this kind of thing who might be able to help.

  ‘What’s happened, Nacho? What’s going on?’

  NINE

  Back at his motorbike, Cámara pulled his helmet out, and paused. Should he give Alicia a quick call? Their lovemaking that morning felt like a distant memory, yet he smiled at the thought of her, wondered what she would be doing right now. She had been speaking recently about trying to get back into journalism, perhaps find a job at one of the local papers. It was still a bad time, yet there were people out there trying new things, not giving up on quality news reporting. They might, she reasoned, appreciate her experience.

  Cámara had encouraged her. The good thing was that they could get by on his salary alone. But now, after what had happened, her finding paid work would be an even better idea: he had no idea how things might develop in the coming days or weeks.

  He wanted to ring her, wanted to tell her about the morning’s events, Rita, his effective demotion. But he didn’t want to worry her. She might blame herself, say that she had made him late that morning. And it would only put more pressure on her to get a job, perhaps push her down a wrong path, make the wrong choice.

  He slipped his helmet over his head and climbed on to the bike. It could wait. She would hear everything when he got back home later that night.

  The bike fired into life and he wheeled it off the pavement on to the road before feeding into the traffic, crossing the old river bed and heading north through the city. A wide, tree-lined avenue took him past modern, square buildings, with shiny square windows looking into box-shaped apartments. The most expensive homes in the city were in this area, with views over the new but already crumbling complex of museums and theatres that had become the symbol of Valencia. The City of Arts and Sciences had cost hundreds of millions, with large amounts of the cash being siphoned off to line the pockets of politicians and officials. Some of these were now in jail or facing charges, but not enough to remove the stench of decay about the city, its reputation as Spain’s capital of corruption. It would take generations, and many more successful prosecutions, to change that.