A Murder Most Watchful

by Jefferson Bonar

  Salvador got free of Mencía’s grip. Hector was behind her, trying to grasp her waving arms. Hector had spent his life pulling in fishing nets, so his hands were like irons. If he got hold of her wrists, there would be little she could do to break free.

  Salvador had gotten the door open and was about to step through.

  A mix of panic and rage took hold of Mencía. She couldn’t give up. Not like this. Not when her entire life was at stake.

  Without thinking, Mencía picked up Hector’s wooden mallet from the mantelpiece and brought it down over Salvador’s head.

  Salvador hunched his body over from the blow, grasping his head.

  “Mencía!” Hector shouted as he stepped back from her.

  They both watched as Salvador fell to the floor. He winced as he held the back of his head. A large pool of blood formed on the broken tile floor.

  Salvador tried to get to his feet but fell flat on his back.

  Moments later, he drew his last breath, his eyes wide and fearful, staring at the ceiling.

  And then he was dead.

  Chapter Nineteen

  October 1660

  Armada held his breath.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. There was a shuffling about inside the house after he’d announced himself. Then a door slammed. The back bedroom, no doubt. A move to make sure the one person he’d come to see wasn’t available.

  It was quiet on the little lane where he stood. The Maraion house had been built right at the end on the edge of town just before the terrain became too steep to build on. Because of mudslides during rainy springs, what was once a cobbled lane in front was now covered in a thick layer of soft mud and sand that had slid down from the hillside above, meaning poor Señora Maraion probably spent a lot of time sweeping it back out the door after her family tracked it all in.

  The door swung open to reveal the angry face of Rodrigo Maraion. And he hadn’t come empty-handed, which was exactly what Armada was hoping.

  “I told you what would happen if you ever tried to speak to my Isabel again,” Rodrigo said. He gripped the harquebus from the middle of the barrel, probably hoping just having it in his hands would be enough of a threat.

  Armada kept calm. He knew Rodrigo was protecting his daughter, a very primal instinct that could be difficult to get round.

  “Good afternoon, Señor Maraion,” Armada said.

  “I suggest you leave. Right now,” Rodrigo spat.

  Over Rodrigo’s left shoulder, Armada could see Quiteria watching from the kitchen area and looking worried.

  “Not until I have a word with your daughter, Isabel. I believe she may have information that would…”

  Rodrigo threw the harquebus from one hand to the other, as if readying to point it at something. Armada could tell it was loaded.

  “I told you no.”

  “Very well, then maybe you can tell me where you were the night of Esteban Marañón’s murder,” Armada said.

  A broad smile crossed Rodrigo’s face. “You think I killed that boy?”

  “I don’t think anything yet. Where were you?”

  “Hunting.”

  “With that?” Armada asked, gesturing to the harquebus.

  “Of course.”

  “Where?”

  Rodrigo hesitated. “In the hills. Just by the watchtower.”

  “So you were in the area with the same weapon that killed Esteban Marañón at the time he was killed. And you had a very good reason for wanting him dead. Is that what you’re telling me?” Armada asked.

  The amusement faded from Rodrigo’s expression. Worry seeped into his eyes. “That’s right.”

  “Did you kill Esteban Marañón?” Armada asked.

  “No. But I would have liked to,” Rodrigo said.

  “Rodrigo, no…” came his wife’s voice from behind the door.

  “Do you have any proof of your innocence?” Armada asked.

  Rodrigo glanced over his shoulder at his wife, then back to Armada. The man seemed to believe he was about to be arrested and may never see her again.

  “No,” Rodrigo said. “Are you going to arrest me now?”

  Armada let the moment hang in the air as Quiteria came to embrace Rodrigo. He needed Rodrigo to remember this moment.

  “No, Señor Maraion. I’m not going to arrest you.”

  “You’re not?” Quiteria asked.

  “Your husband may be unpleasant, Señora, but he is also honest,” Armada said. “Besides, your daughter already proved your innocence. She told me you are useless at lighting your firepit. Which would have made it impossible for you to light the signal fire as the killer did the night Esteban was killed.”

  Quiteria couldn’t help but chuckle through her tears. “That’s true! You are terrible at it!”

  Rodrigo grinned.

  “You see, Señor Maraion, despite the reputation of my fellow brothers for taking shortcuts, I’m here for the truth,” Armada said. “Nothing less. And right now, your daughter has information I need to get to that truth. I need to speak to her. Alone.”

  Rodrigo moved to let Armada in, and Armada made his way to the door to the back bedroom.

  “I’m guessing you have heard everything that’s been spoken out here,” Armada said through the door. “Which means you know why I’m here. May I come in?”

  “Yes.”

  Armada opened the door to find Isabel sitting up in bed with a bit of sewing, using her large belly as a sort of table.

  “I’m sorry for looking like this,” Isabel said, gesturing to the large, soiled dress she wore. “Because of the baby, this is the only dress I can wear anymore.”

  “It’s quite all right. Now, I was hoping to talk to you about Esteban. Is that all right?”

  “Despite what my father thinks, I enjoy talking about him. I want my baby to remember who he was.”

  “How much do you know about what he got up to when he wasn’t here at night? Did he ever talk about it?”

  “That’s simple. He never went out. Esteban spent almost every one of his nights here at home with us.”

  “What about the other men in his company? Did he ever go out with them?”

  “Esteban never felt like he was one of those boys. He didn’t drink much; he didn’t like to gamble. He didn’t visit women of the night. They teased him about it. But he said he much preferred our company.”

  Armada found this odd. A young boy like that, growing up poor in the streets as an orphan, coming here with wages for the first time in his life and not using them to indulge in vices at all. In all his years as a soldier, Armada had never met someone like that.

  “Did he ever mention Jose Encinas?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “What about Martin Figueroa? Did he know the alcalde well?”

  “No more than anyone else.”

  “What about money? Did he ever have more than he should have? Or come into a great windfall of some kind?”

  “No. He gave us most of his wages on the first of every month. I never knew him to have money outside of that. A few times Mother told him to keep a bit for himself. But he insisted.”

  That was even odder to Armada. What had Esteban been after? True, he could have just been generous. But he wasn’t generous with any other aspect of his life that Armada could find. Generous people were generous about everything. Which suggested this was about something else.

  “How did he seem in the days leading up to the raid? Was he anxious? Or sad? Did he seem upset at all?”

  A darkness swept over Isabel’s face, and she stared down at the neglected sewing in her hands.

  “It was just a few weeks before the raid when I learned I was pregnant. That was when Esteban began to act strange. He said a lot of cruel things to me. The night before the raid he came to me and apologised. He said he felt bad, and he meant it. I could tell.”

  “So he had changed his mind about the baby?”

  “No,” Isabel said. “But I
knew he would with time. Esteban begged for my forgiveness. Which I gave him. I knew that cruel side of him wasn’t real. I knew it!”

  “What happened after the raid? Did he ever tell you about that night?”

  “He wanted to. But those awful soldiers in his company, they wouldn’t let him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never saw him again after the raid. That Captain Salinas never let him come back. He said it was for Esteban’s own safety. The whole town had turned against him, and that captain didn’t do anything to defend him. None of those soldiers did! They just let poor Esteban take all the blame. I think they hoped the town would hate Esteban and not them. But it didn’t work. Martin Figueroa made sure of that. Esteban wanted so much to see me again.”

  “You sound very sure of that. How do you know?” Armada asked.

  Isabel reached under her mattress and pulled out a letter, folded over many times and almost falling apart from being handled so much.

  She gave it to Armada. “He wrote me this. Just before he died.”

  Armada opened it to find it was a letter from Esteban addressed to Isabel. It was short, just a few paragraphs long. The first half was very apologetic, reiterating that he was sorry for how he had behaved and how she and her baby hadn’t deserved that.

  It was the last few sentences, however, that drew Armada’s attention: “Please can we meet in secret? No one must know. I think my life might be in danger. I have gotten proof of something that I have to tell you about. You need to know the truth.”

  And that was it. Esteban had ended it there, signed it, and folded it up.

  “You see? He wanted to see me again.”

  “What was he referring to? What was happening?”

  “I don’t know. He was killed before we could meet,” Isabel said, holding her hand to her mouth and trying to keep her composure. “I never saw him again.”

  “Where did this letter come from? Who delivered it to you?”

  “My father. He’d gone up to the army camp where Esteban was being held to try to convince him to come down. And Esteban gave him that letter.”

  Armada looked it over. It was written in haste, possibly because Esteban was worried it would be intercepted. The only people who would intercept it would be Captain Salinas, Pedro, or Barros. Which meant Esteban hadn’t wanted one of those three to know what he was about to reveal to Isabel.

  “May I keep this?” Armada asked. “Just until the case is over. It might prove very useful.”

  Isabel nodded, and Armada tucked it away in his coat. He put his hand on Isabel’s shoulder.

  “If it is worth anything, I believe Esteban loved you.”

  His words didn’t help much, so Armada said his goodbyes and rose to leave. Before he left, something caught his eye. He reached down to the bottom hem of Isabel’s dress and picked off a bit of small, sticky vine. It was green with small, thin leaves and a stalk that stuck to anything it touched.

  “In Granada, we call it chickenweed,” Armada said. “Chickens go mad for it. Try feeding this to yours. You’ll see.”

  Isabel gave him a curious look as she took the bit of vine. Armada stood and left.

  Chapter Twenty

  Lucas watched as Pedro pretended to meander through the camp, looking for something. It was quiet except for the rustling of a large pine tree overhead whose canopy gave the camp a bit of shade at this time in the afternoon. It was ancient, with a thick trunk covered in fraying scraps of rough-edged bark and lots of lower branches that had long since dropped their needles, never to grow them back. It was also a prodigious tree, with thousands of old, dead pine cones that had long since opened and released their seeds but had yet to drop from the branches.

  It was one of those pine cones that decided now was a good time to drop and startle Lucas. He wasn’t sure what he thought it might be. Armada was in town for the day, Barros was doing a shift in the tower, and Captain Salinas was falling asleep in his shelter.

  At least, that’s what Lucas hoped was happening. Because if the captain woke up at the wrong moment, there would be trouble.

  Pedro walked past the captain’s shelter, glancing over his shoulder as he passed, then hurried over to Lucas.

  “I think he’s asleep,” Pedro said.

  “So what do we do now, sir?” Lucas asked.

  “We? Don’t get me involved with this, joven. This is your plan, not mine. I’m going to sit over here and make fun of you if you get caught. Good luck explaining yourself.”

  Lucas took a breath for courage, then stepped through the camp. The wind had died down, and the hush sound it made as it whipped through the pine trees faded away, making Lucas’s footsteps in the gravel crunch ever louder. He couldn’t help but remember how soldiers were trained to not let someone sneak up on them. And Salinas was a captain. It was possible Salinas would awaken and gut Lucas with a dagger before either knew what was happening.

  But by this point, Lucas was distracted by how the target was in plain sight. A small iron key, hooked by a string to Salinas’s belt, lay glinting in the sun, as if beckoning him. He only needed to borrow it for a short time. Salinas would never miss it. He would return it a quarter of an hour later, just long enough for Pedro to shimmy up the watchtower and have a look in the shed. Then he could drop the key back down, and Lucas would have it back on Salinas’s belt in no time.

  It was a simple plan predicated on the next few moments going well. Lucas was now standing over Salinas, trying not to breathe. Salinas lay on his back, his head tilted backwards on a provisions bag he’d stuffed with soft weeds as a pillow. He had one arm flopped over his eyes to keep out the sunlight, and his mouth was agape. A snore had begun to erupt from somewhere deep within Salinas’s nostrils, just as it did with Armada for the first half hour or so after falling asleep.

  Lucas grabbed hold of the key. He untied the rope belt and began to work the key loose, trying not to think of how awkward it would be if Salinas were to awaken in this moment.

  Lucas held his breath and slid the key free of the belt before returning to where Pedro was waiting.

  “You did it,” Pedro said.

  “Can you go look at the shed, then?”

  Pedro got to his feet.

  “You should take a weapon, sir,” Lucas said. “Just in case.”

  Pedro sighed and grabbed a dagger he kept under the mattress in his shelter. “I better not need this, joven. I agreed to look, nothing more. I don’t want to have to fight off some deranged killer. Not today.”

  “We have to know,” was all Lucas could think to say.

  “Yes, well, I’ll get Barros to do it. He’ll be happy for the excitement.”

  Lucas followed him as far as the bottom of the ladder and watched as Pedro, still with an injured arm, clambered up to the top and disappeared into the entrance.

  Lucas wished he could go with him. If the killer had been in the storeroom, then he would have left behind a wealth of clues that Pedro and Barros wouldn’t give a second thought to. Lucas kicked himself for being such a coward when it came to the ladder. A few times he almost worked himself up to trying to go up the ladder again.

  But if he got stuck and had to shout for help, it would wake Salinas. And it would be the beginning of a very bad day.

  So Lucas had no choice but to wait. The storeroom was only accessible through the main entrance to the tower, which meant Pedro had to climb all the way up to get in the tower, then had to climb almost all the way back down along a tiny staircase inside to get to the storeroom.

  Lucas waited for what felt like ages, pacing back and forth and keeping his eyes on Salinas. He could just see Salinas’s feet sticking out of his shelter on the north side of camp. He knew it was only a matter of time before Salinas woke up, and he still had to get the key back on his belt before then.

  Minutes ticked by. Lucas heard nothing. Then he heard laughter. Pedro and Barros were talking in the tower, but the wind howled in Lucas’s ears, making it impo
ssible to hear what they were saying.

  “Pedro, sir!” Lucas tried to whisper. He glanced back at Salinas, who was shifting his body position. Was he waking up?

  “Pedro!” Lucas whispered again. But it was no use. He would have to shout to be heard from all the way down here, which was too risky.

  Lucas stared up at the entrance, thinking of all the ways this ploy could go wrong. What if Pedro popped open the shed door to find himself face-to-face with a killer? What if he was stabbed? What if he got Barros as well? The killer, having been found out, would then come down the ladder to find Lucas there. Lucas wouldn’t have much time to get away. And where would he go?

  Perhaps this had been a big mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have taken the risk. Maybe he should have told Armada and let him decide what to do. Why had he taken it all on himself? He’d been a fool. An absolute fool. And now he would have to live with the consequences of that.

  A pair of legs popped out of the entrance, and Pedro began to climb down the ladder. Lucas was glad to see him alive, as well as Barros, who stuck his head out of the tower.

  Pedro reached the bottom and faced Lucas.

  “Well, sir?” Lucas asked.

  “Nothing, joven. That shed is just full of the same mouldy, old provisions we put in there two years ago, and none of them have been opened. The door was locked. No one’s been in there.”

  “Did you see any sign of—?”

  “No one has been in there,” Pedro said. “Me and Barros both looked. There was nothing.”

  It left Lucas in a bind. The killer hadn’t used a rope, and he also wasn’t still somehow in the tower, nor had he hidden out in the provisions shed below.

  So how did he get out of the tower after killing Esteban? It was impossible. Could Esteban have faked his own murder? But he was shot in the chest with a harquebus. Very hard to point it at one’s own chest and pull the trigger. The barrel was far too long for that. But at the moment, there was no way there could have been anyone else up there with him.

  Lucas looked up at the tower. It no longer had the sinister look he’d felt before. It was now just a point of frustration. His mind worked through all the possibilities again, but everything came to naught.