ALEXIS AND EMILY STEPPED OUT of the hotel and strolled a few hundred metres down the Calle de Alcalá. They crossed the vast stone expanse of the Puerta del Sol and kept going until they reached the Chocolatería San Ginés. The esteemed chocolate shop was a hole in the wall tucked away down a rabbit warren of alleys steeped in years of history: its nickname ‘l’Escondida’ – the hideaway – was well earned.
That morning, Madrid was again basking in the warm, golden light of the sun, which helped take the edge of the brisk chill that had descended on the city.
They could smell the chocolate shop before they saw it. A heady scent of fried dough and sugar, reminiscent of summer funfairs, drifted through the surrounding backstreets. All that was missing was the sound of children’s gleeful footsteps and cries of joy.
Emily and Alexis went straight to the back of the café area, passing a group of men crowded around two tables who were in the middle of a heated discussion about the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. Laughter abounded and hands slapped heartily on the white, marble bistro tables, lending a rhythm to their exchange.
The previous evening, the person whose call had cut short Alexis’s conversation with her mother was one Vicente Guardiola, a journalist with El País. Apparently he had information for them about Dr Burgos and his clinic, and wanted to meet them the next morning. When Alexis asked how he had got her number, he said they’d cover all that later – in a patronising air that didn’t bode well.
One of the men stood up from the group and strolled towards the back of the café, continuing the repartee over his shoulder as he tucked his white shirt into his black pleated trousers and smoothed his artfully trimmed beard, getting ready to serve them, Alexis presumed.
Alexis scanned the menu, suspecting that Emily would turn her nose up at the house speciality – churros con chocolate – that she yearned to order for herself. She decided she would just order a coffee instead.
‘Alexis Castells? Vicente Guardiola.’ The man Alexis had mistaken for a waiter introduced himself.
Perplexed, she stood up and they shook hands. The journalist turned to Emily, who was now also on her feet.
‘This is Emily Roy,’ Alexis said.
‘What’s the Yard doing poking its nose into this business, I wonder?’ Guardiola said in English, with a smirk and firm shake of the hand that Emily had extended.
‘I see we’re already comparing penis size, Señor Guardiola,’ she quipped, returning his smile.
His mouth gaped open, freezing his face in surprise. ‘Touché, Ms Roy,’ he conceded, looking Emily in the eye with a series of resigned nods of his head. He grabbed a chair from the next table and took a seat between them.
‘Eh, Vicente?!’ a waiter hollered from behind the counter at the other end of the café.
Without turning around, the journalist raised his left hand and extended three fingers.
‘So, all roads lead to Sweden, it seems – via the Yard,’ he said, pushing the paper-napkin holder into the middle of the table. ‘Your commissioner got in touch with our CID officers, because he was fishing for information about Burgos and his clinic. That’s how I got your number, Alexis: he gave it to the CID officers because your Spanish is apparently better than your intrepid profiler’s.’ He winked at Emily. ‘And that same commissioner, Lennart Bergström, if you’ll forgive any mispronunciation of his name, also left me a couple of messages. Now assuming I’ve done my homework properly, his calls must have had something to do with the murders of the people who ran the Lindbergh Clinic.’
‘One of the three victims was found in possession of your telephone number—’
‘Well, you certainly don’t beat around the bush, do you, Emily? Yes, I was in touch with Louise Lindbergh. Can you at least tell me a bit more about her death?’
‘We don’t know anything more than your Scandinavian counterparts, Vicente.’
Flashing a cocky, flamboyant smile, he held Emily’s gaze again with the kind of probing look that encroaches on your personal space so much it feels like skin contact.
After a fruitless standoff with a deadpan Emily that lasted a good minute, he laughed and said, ‘You’re a force to be reckoned with, aren’t you?’
At that very moment, a waiter breezed up to their table and slapped three cups of chocolate as thick as cream and a mountain of churros on an oval platter on the cold marble, as well as a bottle of water and three glasses to wash it all down.
‘At the end of 2011 I published a series of articles in El País about medically assisted reproduction and, more specifically, in vitro fertilisation,’ Guardiola began, pouring them each a glass of water. ‘I raised a flag about a few things, including the conditions surrounding the selection of sperm donors and the handling of their personal information. That was what I originally set out to do. But as I investigated, I inadvertently struck gold. It turned out that the big boss of La Virgen del Pilar clinic, that saco de mierda Carlos Burgos, was not only using his own sperm to impregnate his patients, but unbeknown to them he was also using top-quality eggs and embryos sourced from strangers, all to boost his clinic’s success rate.’
Vicente Guardiola dipped a sugar-coated churro into his cup and took a big bite, dripping with chocolate.
‘Louise first reached out to me at the end of January 2012, because she had read my articles,’ he continued, munching the last of his churro. ‘She told me that, officially, La Virgen del Pilar was supplying the Lindbergh Clinic with sperm from donors with Mediterranean, South American and North African profiles. But Louise insinuated that the two clinics were trafficking embryos. She suspected that certain embryos that had been put into storage and forgotten, and others that should have been destroyed, were being used in patients whose own embryos had slim chances of surviving, all against their knowledge. She didn’t know who was implicated, but she had her suspicions; which she refused to share with me, unfortunately.’
‘What do you mean, “forgotten”?’ Alexis asked, swallowing a mouthful of hot chocolate and savouring the rich, sugary goodness that coated her tongue and palate.
Guardiola reached for a minuscule paper napkin and wiped his lips. ‘During a cycle of in vitro fertilisation, several eggs are fertilised. One, maybe two, of those that turn into embryos are implanted into the patient’s uterus two to six days after they form. The others are then frozen and put into storage in anticipation of a later pregnancy, should the patient want another child. Clinics then bill patients every six months for keeping their embryos in storage. Often, after one or two pregnancies, patients decide they no longer need those embryos and the clinic supposedly destroys them. In fact, more often than not, they completely forget about the embryos and the direct debit keeps coming out of patients’ accounts every six months, lost in the sea of other household expenses. Meanwhile, all this raw material is just sitting at the bottom of a freezer in the MAR clinic, waiting to be exploited.’
Alexis rinsed her mouth with a sip of water. That seemed to fit with Paola Cuevas’s story about her embryos supposedly being lost in transit. Perhaps the clinic had used them to impregnate other women?
‘And as for that filthy gilipollas, Burgos, I’m still investigating his death.’
Emily frowned. She opened her mouth to say something, but Guardiola beat her to it.
‘That’s right, Little Miss Profiler, I saved you the best for last,’ he teased, with more than a little suggestive arching of his eyebrows. ‘Burgos, the filthy old pervert, didn’t die of natural causes.’
Guardiola licked his chocolate-covered fingers.
‘I think now’s a good time for us to measure our penises, wouldn’t you say, Emily?’