Never taking his eyes off the knife, Cámara reached around him for something he could use against Mezquita. The gun was trapped between his back and the ground, but at least he might find a loose tile or some rusty wire lying around–something he could throw at him and win a precious second in which to draw his pistol.
What a stupid way this would be to die, he thought to himself. Why, people would ask themselves, if he had a gun, didn’t he use it? Faced with an imminent end, he was no longer sure himself.
His hands and arms were wet with blood, and although he kicked out as hard as he could, his lower legs were now beginning to suffer from Mezquita’s lashing out. No giving in, no sense that this fight was over, but he was losing, perhaps had already lost. Images began to flash through his mind and he pushed them away: no, these were not his final moments, he told himself, no reliving his life.
But one face kept repeating itself, forcing its way in.
Alicia.
Hot tears were squeezed from his eyes as the panic began to take hold. Mezquita was tiring, but his thrusts were getting stronger, harder. The floor was spattered now from the cuts in Cámara’s calves and shins. Once he reached up to the thigh, and the femoral artery, it would be over.
BANG!
There was the crack of gunshot. Mezquita stopped and looked up from the panting Cámara lying at his feet. A voice called out.
‘Police!’
It was Torres.
Mezquita pulled away as the sound of feet pounding over the tiles came from behind. Cámara tried to roll over and reach for his pistol, but his hands could hardly grip it as layers of shredded skin caught in the fabric of his clothes.
Another shot.
He looked up and saw the figure of Mezquita climbing over the railings and taking off once again over the rooftops.
Seconds later, Torres was beside him, pulling his shirt off and wrapping it around the wounds on Cámara’s arms.
‘Don’t bother with me,’ Cámara said. ‘Get him!’
Torres paused for a second, seeking and finding the assurance in Cámara’s eyes, then pulled himself over the railings and headed after Mezquita.
Cámara rolled on to his front, pulling at Torres’s shirt with his teeth to tighten the pressure on his bleeding cuts. He felt thirsty and cold, unable even to stand up as he lay in a streaky pool of his own blood.
His pistol had fallen from the back of his belt and lay on the rooftop in front of him.
Mezquita raced away and was scattering roof tiles in his wake as he passed over first one, then another house. Torres chased after, pausing a couple of times to take aim with his gun, but unable to make the shot.
The miramar tower rose up from the third house along. Mezquita leapt towards it, stuffing the knife down the front of his trousers and catching hold of the bottom of a glassless window. Finding weather-worn holes in the brickwork, he began lifting himself up, his long arms and legs allowing him to scale the outside like a mountain goat.
Within a few seconds he was up on the top of the tower.
Behind, Torres halted again, holding his pistol to shoot.
‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘Stop!’
Mezquita looked around at him, then back over at the sight of the bleeding Cámara lying on the terrace roof.
Cámara pulled the cloth from around his hand and picked up the gun.
Shooting straight is simple but not easy.
He’s already dead, he thought.
The shot rang out as Mezquita fell forwards and off the tower.
The solid, muffled thud of his body hitting the tarmac resounded from the street.
Silence.
Then a scream.
Thirty-Two
A Few Days Later
Lucía lived.
Torres’s intervention, thrusting his fingers into her wound and pressing on the artery, gave her enough time before medics could arrive and take over. She lost three litres of blood, but was saved by having a common blood type which made receiving a massive transfusion that much simpler.
Once she was stable, and could be interviewed by police officers, she confirmed that Mezquita had been the real father of the child she’d aborted back in 1977. Roures was the only other person who knew, and in all these years she’d never mentioned it to anyone until she received a phone call from Sofía Bodí, asking her to confirm what Roures had told her shortly before he was murdered. Even then she was reluctant to say anything, but her ex-husband’s death had disturbed her, and in the end she had given in to Sofía’s insistence.
Less than a week after being stabbed, she was able to leave hospital, and a brother and his wife came to look after her at home. In El Cabanyal she was received like a returning heroine. The neighbourhood was still going through difficult times and needed a cause for celebration.
Lying in hospital, Cámara saw pictures on the television of the large demonstration through the streets of the city in protest at Sofía’s death. The charred corpse inside La Mar was identified as hers: Mezquita had stabbed her in the abdomen repeatedly with one of Roures’s knives.
Mezquita himself had died virtually on impact after falling from the torre-miramar. Cámara’s shot had hit him in the lower back. The subsequent fall had almost killed him, while the knife thrust into the front of his trousers had been pushed deep into his groin, causing serious blood loss. He was dead before ambulance men could get to him.
There was no protest or march in his memory. Flores had already begun a Town Hall campaign to distance Emilia and her councillors from him in a swift and ugly damage-limitation operation: further allegations against him were brought out, including that Mezquita had taken kickbacks from construction companies for projects carried out in the city–although not, surprisingly, from Valconsa. The idea, however, was to show that the Town Hall was glad to have had the chance to distance itself from this one. The rest of them were entirely clean.
Meanwhile, members of Mezquita’s church refused point blank to believe any of the story, insisting it was a conspiracy to bring the anti-abortion movement into disrepute. For his part the Pope didn’t comment, but a Vatican official issued a bland statement lamenting recent events in Valencia, but affirming the Holy See’s opposition to abortion and gay weddings as dangerous threats to the institution of marriage. Despite this, however, few churchgoers showed up for Mezquita’s funeral, which was attended by his wife, a priest, and only a handful of acquaintances. Neither his sister, nor her husband, José Manuel Cuevas, was there.
Rafael Mezquita, the rapidly rising star, had turned out to be just a passing, brightly burning comet, now extinguished in the mother-waters of the horizon.
From his bed, unable to still his imagination, Cámara meditated on what the probable outcomes of the case were likely to be.
No firm link, he thought, would be established in the end between the Roures case and José Manuel Cuevas. Cuevas, the former Guardia Civil intelligence officer, would be able to throw up enough doubt in people’s minds about how close he’d actually been to Mezquita. Valconsa would continue its position as the number-one construction firm in the Valencian region, principally engaged in public works, with Cuevas as its CEO for many years to come.
Corporal Navarro would get anything up to six years for his part in the kidnapping of Sofía Bodí. He’d be released after two and a half years, and probably get a job with a security firm.
Juan Antonio Guisado, Mezquita’s driver and Navarro’s former colleague, would also be condemned for the kidnapping, but would get a harsher sentence, perhaps ten years.
A Guardia Civil inquiry would be launched into Lázaro’s investigation into La Clínica Levantina de Salud Ginecológica. It would conclude that Comandante Lázaro’s conduct throughout had been justified and entirely honourable.
Frustrated in his job, and unhappy at the punishment he’d received for passing on confidential information to the Policía Nacional, Captain Herrero would leave the Guardia Civil shortly after the events of the Sofía Bod�
� case, and take a job in the port authority.
Javier Flores would return to his position as Mayoress Emilia Delgado’s right-hand man in the Town Hall.
With Mezquita dead, Flores would ensure that the former councillor of urbanismo could now take the blame for the collapse of Cámara’s block of flats. It had happened on his watch. No one else, either in Valconsa or the Town Hall, would ever be held responsible for the deaths of Susana and Tomás.
The members of El Cabanyal, Sí would continue their struggle to preserve their neighbourhood in the face of continued Town Hall attempts to pull a large part of it down.
Cámara’s wounds were bad but not life-threatening. The cuts in his lower legs were healing rapidly; at worst, walking was slightly uncomfortable. For a while the doctors had feared for one of the tendons in his right hand: it had been cut, but thankfully not severed completely. However, it would take time for him to have full use of it again.
He smiled, thanked them and ignored their words, getting out of bed as soon as he could, putting his bloodstained clothes back on and insisting he be discharged. The duty doctor, happy to have one less patient to think about, obliged.
It was mid-morning, but he picked up some of the new clothes he still had sitting in a plastic bag in his office and went upstairs to let himself into Pardo’s bathroom. The soap slipped from his grip as he struggled against the stiffness of the slowly scarring tissue on his palms and fingers.
Fresh towels had been laid out for him when he got out of the shower.
As he dried himself he was aware of a sense of finality. Not just from the case ending, but about his life here. He felt as certain as he could ever be that he would never stand in this bathroom again, never come back and see these green-tiled walls.
A smile formed, not on his face but in some deep part of his brain. His hunches, his intuition–they felt stronger than they had done for a long time.
As he walked towards his office, a hand reached out and grabbed his shoulder–tight, hard, unfriendly.
He knew, before turning round, who it was.
‘You’re up for a disciplinary.’
The blotches on Maldonado’s face were rosy pink.
‘That’s…kind of you to tell me.’
‘Don’t think you can fucking slip your way out of this one!’ Maldonado barked. ‘If you’d stuck to the plan rather than going off on your own like that Sofía might be alive right now. We might have got to her.’
Cámara looked him in the eye. The allegation was absurd, but he could tell Maldonado was completely serious. His entire investigation had been ridiculed by what had eventually happened; he needed a cabeza de turco–a scapegoat to remove the tarnish that was in danger of sullying his reputation. Maldonado thought of only one thing: moving up. His concern for Sofía was perfunctory, not heartfelt. Police work per se meant nothing to him. A captured drug distributor did not represent an improvement in social conditions but merely another step up in his relentless, meaningless climb towards higher pay, higher status and greater authority.
Towards nothing, in other words.
Maldonado reached over and pushed him in the chest. Solid and heavy, Cámara barely moved, but the offence was clear.
‘Did you hear me?’ Maldonado said. ‘She’s dead now because of your fuck-ups. The diaries you didn’t tell anyone about, pissing off interviewing people on your own, not reporting back to me.’
Cámara took a deep breath; he wasn’t going to let this turn into another scrap, but already a reaction, a different reaction, was starting to take form inside him.
‘And you know what?’ Maldonado continued. ‘Someone had a look around your office.’
He shook his head in mock dismay.
‘An executive member of the Policía Nacional with drugs on his person? It beggars belief.’
Cámara turned to go, but Maldonado reached out and pulled him back.
‘You know what I think?’ he said. ‘I think you’ve been stoned on duty, that’s what. There’s a woman dead out there that we could have saved but didn’t because you were fucking doped out of your brain. Now, some people might take pity on you, and say it was because your little house fell on your head, and you were upset about your neighbours getting crushed to death, and so you needed an escape.’
Cámara felt a spasm of pain in his right arm as his fist clenched, cracking open the still-fresh wounds. A single punch in the solar plexus would bring this man to the floor. And perhaps ruin his hand for ever.
Was it worth it?
‘But I think you’re just a fucking crap policeman,’ Maldonado was saying. ‘And you need to get fucked in order to hide that from yourself.’
Blood was beginning to seep into the bandages in his hand. He paused for a moment, then slowly allowed his fingers to relax.
He stepped away, and Maldonado’s hand fell from his shoulder.
‘Maldonado,’ he said. ‘You may be right.’
Pardo wasn’t in his office, and Cámara had to find him on the top floor.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ Pardo hissed as Cámara interrupted his meeting with command and pulled him out into the corridor.
‘I quit,’ Cámara said.
‘You’re on extended sick leave,’ Pardo hit back without blinking.
‘No,’ Cámara insisted. ‘I’m off, I’m leaving. I’m not doing this any more.’
Pardo took a step towards him, his nose almost touching Cámara’s.
‘You’re depressed.’
‘I’m not. I haven’t felt so relieved in ages.’
‘You’ve got serious physical injuries—’
‘They’re just superficial,’ Cámara interrupted him.
‘—and they’ve made you depressed. I’ve got a doctor’s note to prove it.’
‘Doctor? What doctor?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Pardo said. ‘It’s a doctor’s note and it clearly states that Chief Inspector Maximiliano Cámara Reyes has got a bad fucking case of the blues and needs to piss off and sort his fucking life out.’
Cámara sucked on his teeth.
‘Besides, you shot someone, you killed Mezquita.’
‘He would have fallen anyway.’
‘Yeah? You just keep telling yourself that. The truth is you’ve had your baptism; you’re more of a Homicidios detective than you’ve ever been. You’ve got a big sin of your own to hide now.’
Cámara didn’t move.
‘Right, I’ve got to get back inside there sharp and continue covering up for the best policeman in my squad,’ Pardo signalled the meeting room behind him, ‘or I’m going to get it in the arse. ¿Comprendes?’
Cámara shrugged.
‘Now I would give you a kiss goodbye, but I’m in a hurry, and someone might get the wrong idea. Fuck off. I don’t want to see you here for a long time.’
Torres wasn’t in the office. Cámara thought about phoning, but decided against it and scribbled a short note to drop on his desk. Nothing to explain: just an apology for leaving suddenly, and a promise to call some time soon. He thought for a moment about adding that he hoped things worked themselves out at home, but decided against it. Torres was anything but sentimental, and he wouldn’t appreciate words like that from his superior officer.
It was still painful and difficult to hold a pen, but he took out a form and filled it in, detailing the events in El Cabanyal. Inspector Torres had showed bravery and sound judgement throughout, saving the lives of both the civilian Lucía Bautista and Chief Inspector Cámara of the Grupo de Homicidios. He thought for a moment: Torres had actually saved him twice that day: first from the fire at La Mar and then afterwards from Mezquita, but he decided that the decorations board would think he was taking the piss if he mentioned both. One was enough.
Torres was a good poli, one of the very best. He deserved that medal.
He got up to go, taking one last look around the room. All so familiar, yet he felt divorced from it in a curious way. Was it guilt? Did he feel sullie
d? Pardo was right–he’d killed for the first time. Yet he couldn’t feel guilty about killing someone like Mezquita.
A red leather-bound book on top of a pile of papers stood out from the usual office shades of brown, grey and grubby white.
The last volume of Sofía’s diary; it was still here. He’d never got a chance to ask her about why she’d written down all those names. He picked it up and went to find an envelope to place it in. The pages fell open as he held it in his hand, and he glanced down at the familiar neat handwriting.
She had suffered. She had suffered from the moment the Lázaro investigation had started. She would have suffered when she thought she was being arrested, and when she discovered the truth that she had actually been kidnapped.
He felt a knotted swelling in his throat as images of her chained up and silenced passed through his mind.
Was it too much to pray that her death had been quick?
He scribbled Ballester’s name and address on the envelope. The pages were still open, and he glanced through till he found the last entry:
6 July: A bad day. CB says things can’t get any worse.
And I try to believe him.
Thirty-Three
The train station was stuffy and noisy, groups of backpackers lying in piles in the middle of the floor as they sucked on plastic bottles of water and plaited each other’s hair in the lull between connecting trains.
Cámara dragged a compact dark blue wheeled suitcase behind him as he stepped into the shade of the front porch and headed to the ticket office. Sunlight was reflecting off the shiny marble floor, lighting up the mosaic designs decorating the walls, showing bucolic scenes of Valencian farmers in traditional dress picking oranges from trees.
He took a number and waited his turn. A newspaper on the floor showed pictures of the riot that had taken place the day before: Emilia’s bulldozers had moved back into El Cabanyal and were ripping down more fishermen’s houses. Members of El Cabanyal, Sí had tried to stop them, tying themselves to the railings, but had been dragged away and beaten by members of the Policía Local. The violence wasn’t only architectural, but physical.
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