Fatal Sunset

by Jason Webster

  He allowed it to draw close. The driver had noticed the Guardia Civil vehicle present, the staring, questioning eyes, and had slowed to a crawl. Cámara put his hand out and he stopped, lowering the window.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ came a nervous voice.

  Torres stood next to Cámara.

  ‘Could you step out of the car, please?’

  The door opened and a man in his late twenties got out. He was dressed in jeans and a black shirt, with sideburns running the length of his cheeks. He wore a confused expression, uncertain about where he was or what he had walked into.

  ‘What …?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  Cámara thought he could detect a Madrid accent. Rodríguez was still speaking into his car radio, but Méndez walked over.

  ‘Who are you?’ Cámara said.

  ‘Andrés Benítez,’ said the man. He looked frightened, glancing back and forth at the policemen surrounding him.

  ‘I can … Do you want to see my ID?’

  He fished his wallet out from his pocket and handed it to them. Torres took it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Cámara.

  ‘I’ve just flown in from Barajas,’ said Andrés. ‘Came straight here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The place is closed,’ said Méndez sharply.

  ‘No,’ said Andrés. ‘I’m not here for the disco. I’m a relative of José Luis.’

  Cámara examined him closely, looking for any family resemblance.

  ‘The nephew?’ he said.

  Andrés shrugged.

  ‘Well, kind of. Not exactly nephew. And I hardly knew José Luis. But his mother was my grandmother’s sister, so we’re, I don’t know, second cousins or something.’

  He spoke with a lightness of voice that contrasted wholly and completely with the mood of the moment. Méndez’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he snarled.

  ‘Have you come for the funeral?’ Torres asked.

  Andrés looked at them with unease.

  ‘I got an email,’ he said. ‘From José Luis’s solicitor.’

  Cámara nodded.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He told me about José Luis. And said that as executor of his will he was informing me that I was to inherit …’ He hesitated. ‘Well, this. The nightclub.’

  The three men stared at him silently.

  ‘I’ve got a printout with me in the car,’ he said. ‘He called me as well, said it was all totally true.’

  His eyes widened.

  ‘I know, I couldn’t believe it either.’

  ‘Show us the printout,’ said Torres.

  Andrés took a step towards the boot of the car. Méndez tailed him, his hand hovering over his pistol. Andrés took out a laptop case and rifled through a side pocket for a piece of paper, which he handed to Torres.

  ‘When did you hear?’ asked Cámara.

  ‘Yesterday morning.’

  At the side, Torres was clutching the printout and taking out his phone.

  ‘No signal,’ said Cámara. ‘Try one inside the building.’

  Torres walked towards the main doors as Andrés continued.

  ‘Came completely out of the blue. We haven’t had any contact with José Luis for years. Apparently I met him once when I was little, but I can barely remember. I knew about this place, heard about it sometimes, but we never talked on the phone or anything. Not even at Christmas. When the solicitor got in touch I thought he was just letting me know that José Luis had died, passing on the information. But then he told me about José Luis’s will and how everything was being left to me. I thought he was joking at first. But I checked the solicitor’s website and everything – it’s real. Not a fake. But, well, when I realised it was all true I thought I should come round. See what it was all about.’

  ‘You caught a plane,’ said Cámara.

  ‘Yeah. Hired a car at Manises and drove straight up here. It’s easy to find once you see the sign.’

  His face fell.

  ‘But something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I mean, you lot …’

  Torres was coming back from the main building. Cámara turned.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Torres. ‘Confirmation from the solicitor himself; just had him on the phone.’

  From the Guardia Civil car came the sound of the radio crackling. Rodríguez went to answer.

  ‘José Luis changed his will one week ago,’ continued Torres. ‘Everything’s going to his relative.’

  He glanced at Andrés.

  ‘Our sudden visitor here.’

  ‘Who was it going to before?’ asked Méndez. ‘Before he changed the will?’

  ‘The solicitor wouldn’t say,’ said Torres. ‘Confidential. But we can find out.’

  ‘We don’t need to,’ said Cámara.

  Rodríguez put the radio back into its slot in the car and stepped towards them.

  ‘Two pieces of news,’ he said. ‘My colleagues in Valencia have picked up Paco: he’s been arrested and charged with drug dealing.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Cámara. ‘You must be relieved.’

  Rodríguez nodded at him with bloodshot eyes. Paco was clearly the one, in his mind, to blame for his son’s death, the personal link, perhaps even the man who had sold him the drugs that killed him in the first place.

  ‘What’s the other piece of news?’ asked Torres.

  ‘We’ve found Abi’s car,’ said Rodríguez. ‘It’s parked at a petrol station on the A7 motorway.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But no sign of Abi.’

  Méndez stayed on guard at Sunset, waiting for the Guardia Civil crime scene officers to arrive. Rodríguez offered to drive Torres down to the Guardia Civil station while Cámara took his motorbike. Andrés was ordered to leave and head to Los Arcos bar, where he was to wait for further instructions.

  ‘Abi could be anywhere by now,’ Rodríguez said, opening his car door. ‘If I were him I’d have hooked up with someone on one of these car-sharing websites and caught a lift somewhere. No way of tracing him, totally invisible.’

  ‘Unless we can find the website in question,’ said Torres, getting into the passenger seat.

  ‘He’ll be miles away before we can do that.’

  Cámara stood silently by his bike, slipping on his helmet as he watched Rodríguez and Torres drive away.

  ‘There’s got to be a way,’ he said to himself.

  The bike fired into life; he slipped it into gear, let the clutch out and powered on down the dirt track.

  Cámara’s mind raced over everything that he had learned over the past three days. He had joked about Abi back in Rita’s office: Cherchez la femme. It hadn’t gone down well, not politically correct. Yet it had never been Enrique, nor Paco, nor the mayor and the hunters, the Romanians or even Father Ricardo, momentarily forgotten yet still languishing in the Guardia Civil cell. It had been Abi all along.

  He began picking up pieces from the mass of information, turning them in his hand like shattered shards of a mirror before placing them down, shuffling them carefully as he located each one in its given position, slotting them into place to give him a cracked, disjointed, yet complete reflection.

  He had barely made note of the argument that Abi mentioned between himself and José Luis, put it down as some lovers’ tiff. It was clever of him to have mentioned it. To put Cámara off his guard? What had they been arguing about? The will? Was that when Abi had learned the truth? Something about the nephew had been mentioned before, during the dinner down in Valencia with José Montesinos, José Luis’s old boyfriend. Was that when Abi first began to suspect? He had been with José Luis for eleven years. There was no marriage certificate, but any judge would have regarded their arrangement as a civil partnership in all but name. Abi would likely have inherited in the event of José Luis’s death. Yet Montesinos had seen the warning signs that night, the sense that José Luis was about to fall into another pattern of de
structive behaviour, of pushing away the very people whose acceptance and love he had sought. Did that include Abi? Was Abi the person really set to suffer from José Luis’s impending breakdown? An immigrant here in Spain – his only anchor was José Luis. His entire life devoted to Sunset. And he was about to lose it all.

  So what had he done? Had he known that José Luis had already changed his will? Perhaps he thought he still had time to act. And so everything came to a head on his birthday.

  There was always something that nagged Cámara about his story of going into the village to buy José Luis a present. What kind of a present could you buy there? A baker’s, a grocer’s, a hardware shop, a bar and little else. Exactly what gift was he intending to buy for José Luis? The point was that he had already bought him something there – days before in the Romanians’ shop: the cheap, black cologne stuffed with pheromones. How had he presented it to José Luis? As a joke, perhaps? It must have been the present in the golden box. What kind of cologne could you buy a man who already had such a wide selection? Had he sprayed it on José Luis himself? Had José Luis tried it, more out of idle curiosity than anything else?

  It mattered little how it got there. The point was that once José Luis’s skin was peppered with the stuff all it took was to get him to the right place and let things take their natural course. Enrique was wrong: bees could be made to sting a person. Why else had they stung Cámara himself when he walked past them the second time? Because he had been covered in José Luis’s new, cheap cologne, full of pheromones that made the bees aggressive. ‘Perhaps they don’t like the smell of policemen,’ Enrique had said. There had been an unwitting clue right there in front of him.

  Cámara’s mind spun like the speeding wheels of his bike, casting back over every scene from the past few days. But he kept returning back to the birthday dinner with Montesinos; the poor man clearly loved José Luis, yet he had unwittingly caused his undoing. Abi hadn’t known the full truth about José Luis’s rejection by the Air Force until that night. The allergy was a key piece of information. Add to that Enrique’s stubborn placing of the hives up at the Chain and everything was in position.

  ‘I told that Abi,’ Vicente had said. Yes, Vicente had mentioned the hives to José Luis’s lover. Abi had known. All he had to do was get José Luis up to the Chain on his own.

  And so the farce of going down to the village to buy a birthday present. He hadn’t bought anything at all. Had he lingered before going into Los Arcos? The only public phone in the village. He slips in, lifts the receiver, puts in his money and dials. Not José Luis’s number, naturally – there was too much of a risk of being found out. Instead he calls Paco. And he – what? – puts on an accent? Tries a different voice? Whatever he did – and it was a very short call – he managed to persuade Paco that it was Enrique on the line, that he wanted an urgent meeting with José Luis. At the Chain. Paco had then dutifully passed the message on.

  It had been quick, and the phone was not in clear view. But someone had seen him, had seen the ‘poof’ from Sunset making the call.

  ‘The mariquita,’ the man in the bar had said. Which could only be Abi.

  Cámara wondered what Abi had done after the call. He couldn’t head back to Sunset too quickly – he needed to give his plan sufficient time to work. José Luis would have to walk up to the Chain in the first place. And he probably wouldn’t rush, despite the supposed urgency. Then the bees would have to play their part, and José Luis would have to be left some considerable time on his own as the allergic reaction kicked in. Reach him too soon, get him medical attention, and the chances of killing him would be reduced.

  And so Abi spent his time in the village – it would give him more alibis. Nowhere near the scene of the murder when it was taking place. Perhaps wondering – fearing, even – if his complex plan would even work.

  Then he had driven back to Sunset relatively quickly. That much was clear because an ambulance did get to José Luis just before he died. It was on his way down to hospital in Valencia that he had breathed his last. Confirmation of death came on arrival.

  So what had drawn Abi back? Remorse? Had he had second thoughts, tried to undo what he had set in motion?

  Cámara pulled up outside the Guardia Civil station and parked the bike.

  ‘I think I know,’ said Cámara, walking inside and finding Torres and Rodríguez already there. ‘I think there’s a way we can find him.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The car was cramped, and he wondered whether it would make it all the way, but he was safely out of the mountains and heading south, unspotted and untraceable. In a few hours they would reach a port. There were ways of getting across the sea undetected. He had enough money in cash: it wouldn’t be too difficult to find someone to help him make the crossing.

  He was squashed against the door next to a teenage boy, squeezing into a space that wasn’t really there. But the father had listened when he’d shown him the hundred-euro note and had made up his mind when there was promise of another at the other end.

  His car had broken down, he said. But he had to get to Tangier in a hurry: a member of the family had died. Calling out a tow truck would take too long. Was there room in the man’s Peugeot?

  The family was driving down from Toulouse as they usually did at this time of year. The schools had finished and they embarked on their annual journey back to Morocco to visit the relatives, reconnect with their own land. France meant work and money and education. Morocco was about life, about identity.

  The roof rack was piled high with cheap chequered bags filled with presents and goods for everyone in Tétouan: blankets, clothes, cooking pots, a few electronic items that were more expensive south of the Strait. They were tied on precariously with lengths of coloured rope that were fraying at the ends after six hours’ driving. They had stopped at the service station to wash and rest, have a bite to eat by the grass verge and visit the toilets before getting back into the car and setting off once again.

  He congratulated himself on leaving his own car on the other side of the motorway and crossing here, skipping past the speeding cars and jumping over the central reservation. Should the vehicle be located, they would assume he was heading north, had picked up a lift on the road heading to Catalonia and France. It would put them off the scent for a while. To be doubly safe he had switched off his phone: he had seen enough TV cop shows to know they could locate someone by the signal. He wasn’t going to make that mistake. He hated disconnecting, but it had to be done. Just as he’d done three days before. He had been certain that Vicenta would see it there on the window ledge; she’d been the one to mention it when he’d returned from the village.

  ‘Have you seen José?’

  His voice hadn’t faltered, steady, unwavering, calm, with just a hint of concern.

  ‘Paco said something about him having a meeting with Enrique. Up at the Chain.’

  ‘Oh.’ And he left it, just long enough. Perhaps twenty minutes, a bit less.

  ‘He’s been gone a while. I’ll go and see if he’s OK.’

  Was that when he first caught a glimmer of suspicion in her eye? She nodded silently to him, as if she already knew. Damn her!

  And then came the walk. He took his time, resisting every urge to break into a run, pacing slowly and deliberately through the pine trees, his eyes wide open, watching for any movement, any sign.

  And then he saw him, his lover, lying in the sunshine, basking in a ray of light that penetrated the canopy and shone down from the sky, accusing, unforgiving, final. José Luis was staring upward, a hand clutched to his throat.

  He had watched from a distance for a while. His lover was not quite dead, still in the process of leaving this world. Yet it would not be long. The bees had done their work. As he had hoped they would. Was that the sound of their buzzing he could hear? Were they still flying around him, swooping down to sting even as he struggled to draw his last, pathetic breath?

  A chasm opened in him at that moment, d
ark, vast, like a great tear in the fabric of the universe, a consuming emptiness that stuck to him like glue. Regret? Sorrow? No words came close to describing the experience. He felt love and hatred, tenderness and anger in equal measure, and yet he was removed at the same time: feeling and unfeeling; lover and stranger; murderer and disinterested observer.

  Returning to the nightclub he had run as fast as his legs could carry him.

  ‘It’s José. Something’s happened. Call an ambulance!’

  Genuine, confused tears of concern had flowed down from his cheeks. Vicenta had comforted him while they waited.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  And again the doubt creeping through his mind like shadows from a setting sun. What did she know? How did she know?

  He had insisted on driving down behind the ambulance as much to get away from her as to keep up pretences. By the time they made it to La Fé he almost wished José Luis would survive. When they told him, minutes later in a side room by Accident and Emergency, he couldn’t take it in, as though they were telling him a sick joke, or a lie. He who had planned everything not able to comprehend that his design had been successful. He had loved José, thought his love was returned. The parties, the orgies, the drugs – they meant nothing. He himself had taken part at times. Yet José, in his heart, loved only him.

  Or so he had thought.

  José had mentioned Andrés a couple of times over the previous month. Which was unusual. His name had come up before in the past, but very infrequently. Now it was clear that Andrés was, for whatever reason, on José’s mind. And he had begun to wonder.

  Then Montesinos invited them to dinner, an old lover, José Luis’s first. He saw disquiet in Montesinos’s eyes that night, watching as José Luis talked endlessly, demanding and receiving every drop of attention that he could get, like a hippo wallowing in fresh cool mud. And there was more talk of Andrés. Watch out, Montesinos had said when José Luis left them for a moment. Watch him: I’ve seen him like this before. It bodes ill.

  Which was when he had told him about the Air Force. And the allergy.