‘WE’LL GO IN my car.’
Torres was adamant.
‘All right.’
They walked through the patio and out to the back street. The paintwork on Torres’s Seat Toledo had blistered over the years. Torres squeezed the car out of its tight parking space, barging against the vehicles at either end as he manoeuvred round, and they set off. Cámara wound down the window; there were hardly any electrics in the car, he noticed. Although there was a button for air conditioning. He hoped for Torres’s sake that it worked. They did not need it now, but within a month’s time it would be indispensable.
He opened a new packet of cigarettes, peeling off the plastic around the top and ripping into the silver paper. The image of a man with an unfeasibly large and festering growth on his neck stared up at him from the packaging. The man also had a long, drooping moustache and looked like a refugee from a 1970s prog-rock band. If the authorities wanted to scare people away from smoking they could at least use ordinary people for the photos. Otherwise the exercise turned into a useless freak show. ‘Serves him right,’ too many people would think, ‘for being a hippy.’
Cámara had already lit the cigarette before Torres asked him to stub it out.
‘I’ve got to keep this car in good nick,’ he said unapologetically. ‘Might need to sell it some day. If everything goes tits up.’
Cámara did his best to put out the burning end without damaging the rest of the cigarette, and placed it behind his ear for later.
‘I still don’t think this is a good idea,’ Torres said. ‘I mean, what good’s it going to do?’
It was late in the afternoon. Cámara had gone home and slept shortly before dawn. When he awoke, around lunchtime, he sat up, examined his conclusions of the night before, and finding that they had survived the test of being slept on, decided to act. By the time he got to the Jefatura and located Torres the working day was almost finished.
Cámara was surprised to see Torres in his uniform. He had forgotten about Maldonado’s new directive himself, but the fact that his colleagues were following it was unexpected.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Torres had said before Cámara could say anything. ‘Some of us have responsibilities.’
And this was how they always got you. They promised you regular pay, pensions and perks. And you built something around those promises – a home, a family, children, the rest. Happily you placed the noose around your own neck and stood over the trapdoor. And then one day they threatened to pull the release on you, and only then did you realise how stuck you were, that there was no way out but down. And paralysed by fear and your own stupidity, you did whatever they asked. All it took to bring you into line was to give a little twitch on the lever again.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Torres asked. ‘I assumed you would only come in at night.’
‘We need to go to the hospital,’ Cámara said, ‘and see Oliva.’
And after a minor confrontation over their means of transport, they had finally left the Jefatura.
‘You shouldn’t stick around here anyway,’ Torres said. ‘Not dressed like that.’
The car moved slowly through heavy evening traffic.
‘Take me through this again,’ Torres said. ‘Why are we going to the hospital?’
Cámara hung his arm out of the open window and drummed his fingers against the outside of the car door, his fingers searching for something to fiddle with.
‘Because we have to find out once and for all what caused Oliva to fall. His own will, or the will of others.’
‘And you think the hospital will be able to help? We’ll get the DNA tests from the material underneath his nails in a few days. That should tell us something.’
‘The DNA testing could take weeks,’ Cámara said. ‘They’re backlogged as it is. And you’re not going to get this bumped up the queue if everyone thinks it’s just another suicide attempt. In the meantime the only person who can really help us might have kicked the bucket.’
‘You want to talk to Oliva himself? Good luck. He’s in a fucking coma.’
‘We need to go round, present ourselves to the doctors and impress on them the importance of doing all they can to get Oliva lucid enough for us to speak to him, even if it’s just for a few minutes. You being in uniform will help.’
‘Fuck off. What, you think they’re not doing everything for him as it is?’
Cámara paused before answering.
‘We need to tell them this is now an attempted murder inquiry.’
Torres snorted.
‘But it’s not an attempted murder inquiry.’
‘It is now.’
The car inched forwards before they were stopped at another traffic light.
‘You seem to have forgotten,’ Torres said in a low voice, ‘that we’re not on this one together. This is my case. I’m looking into what appears to be an attempted suicide, and the only person who can decide to change it to a murder investigation is—’
‘Maldonado?’ Cámara could feel a knot forming at the centre of his forehead as he watched Torres slipping away. ‘Yes, officially perhaps,’ he said. It felt like talking to a child. ‘But the doctors don’t know that, do they.’
Torres grunted as he shoved the Seat into first gear and they broke away from the traffic with a jerk. The car was not in the best of shape. If Torres ever did decide to sell it he would be lucky to get seven or eight hundred euros for it. Few people had money for anything but the basics these days. Houses, cars – the usual assets that people owned and which might, in an emergency, be sold to raise some cash – were losing value.
If he wanted to, Torres could turn the car around, or simply tell Cámara to get out. For a few blocks Cámara waited for it to happen, for a sudden swerve on the wheel as Torres rebelled against his presence.
‘What’s the urgency, anyway?’ Torres asked as they approached a roundabout. Would he carry on straight towards the hospital or use the junction to do a U-turn? There were four cars ahead of them in the queue waiting to pull out.
‘There was something in your notes,’ Cámara said. The first car set off and they moved forwards. Only three cars ahead of them now before the roundabout.
‘When the American girl, Amy, was murdered, one of the neighbours overheard some men around eleven o’clock ringing the front doorbell.’
‘And?’
‘They called out that they were postmen.’
The second car pulled out into the flow of traffic. There were only two cars ahead of them now.
‘So?’
‘So they almost certainly weren’t postmen. The witness said that wasn’t the normal time for deliveries to be made. That the cartero always came later in the morning.’
‘Could have been one of the other delivery companies. One of the private ones.’
The traffic lurched forward again. There was now only one vehicle between Torres’s car and the roundabout.
‘Unlikely. They weren’t dressed in any uniform.’
‘All right. So what the fuck has this got to do with Oliva?’
They were now at the interchange themselves. Torres turned from Cámara to look left, waiting for a gap in the traffic so that he could pull out. The road to the hospital lay ahead; the Jefatura in the other direction.
‘In your notes,’ Cámara said, ‘one of Oliva’s neighbours said the same.’
‘What?’
Torres was not listening properly, focused more on the traffic flowing heavily from the side.
‘One of your witnesses – a man called Hernández – mentioned the same word. Cartero. Said he heard it from the intercom. Someone trying to get in from the street.’
A gap emerged in the traffic.
‘It was just before eleven o’clock,’ said Cámara. ‘Only minutes before Oliva went flying from his balcony window.’
Torres pressed on the accelerator and the car shot out.