‘IF THEY’D WAITED a day longer to do these we might never have got the results.’
Laura asked him up to her office to talk things through.
‘Everyone’s trying to act like normal, but the place is close to paralysis. This morning I saw policemen supposed to be on patrol driving the squad car to the supermarket to stock up on food. How’s that for helping to keep people calm? There’ll be nothing left on the shelves by the end of the afternoon.’
Cámara sat in a chair next to her desk and looked around, trying to pretend it was the first time that he had been in there. The smell of air freshener was almost overpowering.
‘Nice place.’
‘Yes, I feel rather guilty up here on my own. Things can get pretty cramped down in the murder squad offices, right?’
Cámara smiled.
‘Sometimes. It’s not all bad, though.’
Laura tapped a pen on the surface of the desk.
‘The uniform business?’
‘I notice you’re not wearing one.’
‘I don’t have to answer to Maldonado.’
Cámara lowered his gaze. The subtext was clear: Laura had as low an opinion of the head of the murder squad as Cámara did. But that on its own was not enough for there to be a connection between them. He still did not know how much he could trust her.
‘I got your note,’ she said. ‘I understand you’ve been working nights.’
‘It seemed appropriate. At least for a while.’
‘The, um, the death in the family. Yes, I heard. I’m very sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t know why they force people to return to work so soon. You should be given more time off.’
‘I prefer it this way.’
She paused.
‘Yes. Takes your mind off things.’
‘I’m a detective. This is what I do.’
She looked at him with a question in her eyes. The dynamic of the conversation was shifting and curious. They were in her office, which gave her a certain authority. And for a brief moment it was as if she were Cámara’s superior. Yet at the same time, as she tried to control the conversation, Cámara slipped through her fingers like a live, silvery fish.
She needed him. Her attempts to find Amy Donahue’s killer had so far come to nothing.
‘The American ex-boyfriend,’ she began. ‘I don’t know if you heard.’
Cámara shrugged.
‘He was in Madrid the whole time. Never came to Valencia in the end. I got a report sent over. They interviewed him. Alibis. He wasn’t here. It wasn’t him.’
‘And Ruiz Costa?’
She pursed her lips.
‘He’s free. The tests came back on the rubber marks on Amy’s hands. It doesn’t match any of Ruiz Costa’s shoes. There’s not enough on him. Yet.’
‘You still think . . .?’
‘We can’t rule it out. So he used another pair of shoes, one we haven’t found yet.’
‘What about the bullets? Did those results come through as well?’
She paused before answering.
‘Yes, but they’re inconclusive about a silencer being used.’
‘Even in as noisy a city as this, I can’t imagine five gunshots going off without someone noticing.’
‘True. In which case perhaps it was Ruiz Costa who used a silencer.’
He let it go. Statistically, as she had pointed out before, she was right. Besides, she needed to keep face.
There was a box of sweets on the desk. She leanted over, picked it up and offered one to Cámara.
‘A present,’ she said. ‘From a battered wife. We helped sort her husband out for her.’
Cámara grinned and took a sweet.
‘Thanks. At times like these you never know when you’re going to get your next meal.’
‘It’s not looking good,’ she said. ‘Like everyone else, I keep asking myself if there’s going to be a proper revolt of some kind in this country. And maybe this will spark it off – first the King falling ill, now closing the banks. But at the same time I think that if it hasn’t happened yet it’s because it’s not going to happen.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘The King? No, they made a statement this morning. But no pictures, which probably means he’s still unconscious. God knows it would be all over the news, covering up the financial mess, if they could just get him to open up one eye at least.’
Cámara sucked noisily on his sweet. It tasted pink, like roses.
‘I think we’re going to be quite busy for a while,’ he said.
‘Yes. I just don’t know whose side some police officers are on.’
The ambiguity lay between them like a mist. Cámara was silent, happily shrouded. He knew where his own loyalties were. Laura’s, however, were still uncertain to him, although he was beginning to have his suspicions.
‘But we should get on.’
He was starting to recognise the expression on her face: she was a compartmentaliser. First one thing, then the next; one file, then another. Her brain functioned like her office layout: neat, ordered and with precious little spill-over.
‘It was, of course, unorthodox to get a handwritten note like that under my door, but I appreciate your discretion. With hindsight it may seem that I put my neck out over this case. What happened in the interrogation room with Ruiz Costa has done the rounds. I can tell by the way people look at me in the corridors, even ones I’ve never met.’
‘They’ll forget it soon enough. They’ll have forgotten it already, what with everything else.’
‘Perhaps. But still, communicating directly like that, privately, rather than via email or a report for all to see on Webpol . . . I appreciate it.’
‘I’m beginning to think that handwritten notes should be the preferred means of communicating in future,’ Cámara said. ‘No other method seems secure these days.’
She smiled, as though having picked up some important clue to his character.
‘So this link,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you could tell me,’ Cámara said, ‘what the results of the tests on Amy’s clothes are.’
‘Yes, of course.’
She picked up the file sitting squarely in front of her on the desk and handed it over.
‘See for yourself. The hairs found on Amy do not belong to Ruiz Costa.’
‘Nor are they Amy’s,’ said Cámara, glancing through the report.
‘No match on the DNA database.’
‘So I see.’
‘They could be anyone’s.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘But only for the time being.’
He handed her the file. She placed it back on her desk in exactly the same position it had been before.
‘I don’t have it here,’ she said, ‘but I did manage to see the results of another test the científicos were running at the same time as ours.’
‘The Oliva case?’
‘Inspector Torres is working on it.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I don’t suppose I’m betraying a confidence here. They gave me the wrong report – Torres’s instead of this one. I’d already read it before I realised the mistake and handed it back.’
Cámara smiled.
‘They were checking the DNA of material found underneath Oliva’s fingernails,’ he said.
‘You’re already aware of it, I see. I understand you and Torres are friends.’
‘So what did it say? The report?’
‘It’s not Oliva’s. Organic material – skin – from two other people. Both male, but again, no match from the database.’
Cámara threw his head back.
‘So there was a struggle,’ he said. ‘He was pushed.’
‘Inspector Torres wants to turn it into a murder investigation.’
Cámara sat up straight.
‘But Maldonado is refusing,’ she said.
She looked down at the desk, drumming her fingers on the file. There was a sense of danger: neither wanted to say another word about it.
‘But back to our own case,’ she said. ‘This theory of yours.’
Cámara took a deep breath and crossed his fingers over his chest.
‘As far as I can see,’ she said, ‘we haven’t got much else.’
Castro was alone in the murder squad offices, her chin resting on her fist as she stared at a computer screen. She looked up as Cámara walked across, a crumpled sheet of printed paper in his hand.
‘If you get a moment,’ he said, ‘perhaps you could take a look at this.’
She took it from him without question and quickly read the violent, threatening text.
‘There may be some patterns there – the language used, that kind of thing,’ Cámara said. ‘There’s a database on Webpol somewhere. Not complete, but it might give some indication – in case there’s a match.’
Castro looked up at him anxiously and nodded.
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘And then there’s the email address it was sent from. Almost certainly masked in some way, and I’m assuming – if they’re not total idiots – that a proxy server was used. But you never know.’
‘I’ll get on to it,’ she said. ‘Can I ask who . . .?’
‘My friend,’ Cámara said. ‘My partner. Her name’s Alicia Beneyto.’
Castro scribbled it down on the paper.
‘OK.’
‘Thanks.’
He turned to leave.
‘It’s probably nothing, but you never know.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And if you don’t mind, perhaps you could keep this to yourself.’
Castro was silent as he closed the door behind him.
Daniel was away.
‘He just left,’ Dídac said. ‘Don’t know where he’s gone. He’ll be back sometime, I suppose.’
Dídac was on dinner shift along with half a dozen others.
‘We’re getting more food than ever now,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s so sad about Hilario they want to give us more. That, and a feeling that a revolution might be just around the corner.’
Cámara walked across the ticket hall to look for Alicia. The metro station felt subdued that night. It looked as though they had about the same number of people as usual, but the tone had changed subtly. The sense of fun was diminished: there was no music, no sound of children laughing.
‘The clown’s not coming back,’ Alicia told him when he mentioned it. ‘Got a chance to do some work in Germany, so he left.’
‘Working as a clown?’
‘No. I wish. Some cousin in Berlin found him a job at a pizza place, working in the kitchen.’
Cámara nibbled some of the leftovers on the table. They tasted old, on the verge of going rotten.
‘I sometimes wonder myself,’ he said.
‘What? About getting an underpaid job as a pizza chef?’
‘About getting out. Out of this country.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ she said. ‘But not everyone’s got an escape route. Ramón was lucky.’
‘Was that his name?’
‘He’ll miss the paellas. The real ones.’
He reached for her waist, pulled her towards him and kissed her.
‘If I did ever go,’ he said, ‘I’d want you to come with me.’
‘I’d kill you if you left without me.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But it might be me leaving,’ she said. ‘Then I’d be taking you along with me.’
‘I can see this will require some intense negotiation.’
His hand lowered from her waist for a second and he stroked the top of her hip with his fingertips.
‘Did you get much done today?’ he asked.
‘I wrote another article. The syndicate want me to file more pieces on the crisis. It seems that foreign newspapers are picking them up.’
‘That’s good.’
He paused.
‘Any . . . Any more word from . . .?’
‘Oh, that? Nah,’ she said. ‘I’m not . . . I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’
She smiled at him; her eyes were tired.
‘There’s something I want to show you.’
She took him by the arm and led him across the ticket hall. Groups of people sat at the tables, finishing off their dinner. Many of them looked up and greeted him as he passed; he recognised faces from the funeral. A hand reached out and grabbed his; he looked down and saw a face he recognised but could not place – a woman with Ecuadorean features.
‘The chemist’s,’ she said in answer to the question in his eyes. ‘That night when the men came.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember now.’
‘You saved us,’ the woman said. ‘My friend and I ran, but we watched from the other street. We saw what you did.’
She still held his hand, squeezing it affectionately, and smiling at him. But there was a doubt there as well.
‘You’re a policeman,’ she said at last.
Cámara nodded.
‘That’s right.’
‘So why are you here? Why are you helping us rather than closing this down?’
Cámara shrugged and smiled.
‘He’s a good policeman,’ Alicia said, leaning in to join the conversation. ‘One who knows the true difference between right and wrong.’
‘I think perhaps that night you saved my life,’ the woman said.
And she stood up and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Perhaps we’ll see you here tomorrow,’ Cámara said.
‘Tomorrow I’m flying back to Ecuador. I love Spain, but there’s nothing left here for me now. I have no work and I’m frightened. There won’t always be someone like you around.’
She squeezed his hand again. Alicia led him away.
‘If we carry on like this there’ll be no one left at all soon.’
The candles were arranged in a semicircle on the ground. No one had been able to find a photograph, but someone had attempted a drawing instead. It was not a perfect likeness of his grandfather, but he recognised Hilario immediately.
‘A shrine?’ he said.
‘A memorial. Of sorts. The children wanted to do it. I couldn’t see any harm.’
He felt the warmth rising up from the candles and bent down to take a closer look. Several dozen notes had been pinned to the cork board next to the drawing. He reached out and touched them.
‘We miss you.’
‘Hilario, our hero.’
‘We love you, Hilario.’
He bent his head, tears welling behind his eyes. Alicia crouched down and put her arms around his shoulders.
‘It hurts so much,’ he said.
‘It hurts so much.’