Death in the Sun (7 page)

Staffe hangs up the phone. Because of what happened to his parents, he never completed his degree, but he kept in touch with a couple of his friends from Merton College. A few years ago, he bumped into David Grice, a short-lived best friend. They went for a pint and Grice had told him there was a Gaudy coming up and that he was on the committee and could get Will on the list, if he would come.

At the Gaudy, Staffe had talked to Jasper Newton who knew all about his parents. Jasper’s specialism is Spain and in particular its Civil War. The following week, he had called Jasper to talk more about ETA, Santi Etxebatteria, and their real levels of activity.

This morning, five years on, he called Jasper again – to enquire about methods and rituals of torture.

Jasper described several types of torture, leading to execution, and Staffe’s stomach slowly turned, and turned, until the professor’s supply of the horrific was exhausted.

‘Did you ever hear of anybody being buried and made to drink?’

‘Aah. The Caligula,’ Newton had said. ‘Caligula liked to seal off the route for a man’s piss. He’d use twine and then pour water into his victims until the bladder bloated and bloated and finally burst. Well, the Spanish weren’t as cruel as all that, but what they would do, to extract information, was bury a man, usually kneeling, up to his neck in the earth, and then pour water into him. It would be fast and furious and the man would feel like he was drowning.’

‘It sounds like waterboarding.’

‘This was the real thing. They would put a peg in the earth and use their belts to hold the poor man’s head back so his face pointed to the sky. It is just one of many . . .’ He had paused; said nothing more.

*

Staffe is shown through the small
comedor
of the Quinta Toro. There are two besuited fifty-year-old men at the bar, swigging brandy as if it is nothing to be ashamed of at eleven in the morning.

The room is adorned head to toe with bullfighting posters and photographs, including one of Angel, the bar’s owner, shaking hands with King Juan Carlos. Otherwise, the place is empty.

Jesús, the young officer who was at the plastic greenhouse, is in his father’s tiny office which has crates of beer and boxes of broad beans and sacks of potatoes stacked high. He stubs out a cigarette and immediately lights another, says, ‘You come asking about him and three days later, he is in the ground.’

Staffe sits on a beer barrel on the opposite side of the room to Jesús. ‘I don’t believe in chance. There is a reason why people do things; a reason for everything that happens. That’s all that we do, as police. We find out why.’

‘He was drunk.’

‘The dead man in the plastic was tortured, wasn’t he?’

‘Tortured?’ Jesús’s eyes are wide. He stubs out his cigarette on the floor.

‘I’ll bet there was a peg in the ground. Tell me, Jesús – am I right? And were there marks on his forehead?’

‘I was standing guard, outside. That’s all.’

‘Did you cut the rope that held him – or was it a belt? And did you have to dig him out of there? Did you lay him out and make it look as if he had just taken a little too much heroin?’

Jesús leans forward and sighs heavily. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Was he dead before they put him in the ground?’

According to Manolo, Jesús got his job in the Guardia because of who his father is, because of this place. Knowing where his
papas a lo pobre
are sautéed, the young man isn’t talking. He says it by leaving.

*

From her desk, Pepa can see the castellated towers of the Alcazar. She thinks about the history, wonders if she did the best thing coming to the city, when her family wanted her to stay in Gabo. She looks down at her notes on the latest batch of demolition orders. Her instructions from the chief of the newspaper are to shame the outgoing mayor. She is to report how preposterous it is that these demolitions, urbanisations bought off-plan and principally by the English, are being pushed through.

Her door swings open. Her chief chews violently on his nicotine gum, holds his head high, pince-nez balanced on the bridge of his nose. ‘I saw you at the funeral, Pepa. And I saw you leave. Where did you go with your new friend?’

‘I think he likes me. That’s all.’ She says this knowing he doesn’t; that, or he is a cold fish.

‘You know Raúl was a fine man.’ The Chief glazes over, looks wistfully at the Alcazar. ‘He could be a fine man, when he allowed it. And he was a friend.’ He pulls up a chair. ‘His reputation is his legacy. It’s all he leaves behind and we must protect him now. Now it’s too late. There is no story here. Do you understand?’

Pepa has to look away, such is the intensity of the way he looks at her.

‘The
feria
is coming and there’s no space for new copy. We have to report the
casetas
and the
corrida.
You know how it is.’

‘You mean we shut up.’

‘Raúl’s demise leaves a vacancy. It will be advertised, of course. But I expect you to apply and I expect your application to be strong. We mourn, we move on. New life shoots up from beneath. That’s nature.’

*

Staffe pulls up by the bridge on the Mecina road in his hire car – a Cinquecento. Squeezing himself in at the Atesa depot, he had chuckled to himself, wondering if, in any estimation, he could be a Quijote. He doesn’t know what he is tilting at, for sure. As soon as he left the coastal plain, the Fiat began to struggle on the mountain passes. This car, quite appropriately, is more donkey than horse-powered.

He eases himself out of the tiny vehicle and two workmen, resting in the shade of an olive tree, interrupt their lunch of ham and beer to laugh at him. The workmen have been tasked with repairing the bridge; the police tape has already been taken down, bundled up beneath the idling cement mixer.

The bridge railings comprise a five-centimetre metal tubing frame, painted blue and stuck into a knee-high concrete base. Staffe approaches the bridge and is confused. The men appear to be working at its wrong end – the eastern, Mecina end. Raúl had breached the bridge at its western end – that is to say‚ on the Almagen side.

Staffe peers down into the ravine, looks for the blood-soaked rag, colours of the Spanish flag, but he can’t see it. It was directly below the bridge, not twenty yards from the crashed car – but now it is gone.

One of the men stands up and strolls up to Staffe, holding his
bocadillo
of ham like a club. ‘You can’t stand there.’

‘Is this a new accident?’ Staffe points at their handiwork.

The man shrugs. ‘You can’t stand there.’

Staffe thinks it odd that the men are repairing damage which presents no threat to the motorist, while at the other end of the bridge is a gaping hole that any car could easily go sailing through, the bridge being on a tight, downhill bend. ‘The accident was at the other end, right?’ He peers over the bridge into the
barranco
. The dry bed of the Rio Mecina is sixty feet below and Raúl’s Alfa Spyder is still down there, its red boot pointing towards Almagen.

‘You can’t stand there!’

Raúl could only have gone into the
barranco
on his way out of the village, but the damage at the other end of the bridge suggests that perhaps another vehicle had come at him. ‘Was there a car coming the other way? Is that what you are repairing?’

The workman sighs.

Staffe peers back down into the
barranco
, focusing on the Alfa’s bonnet – caved in on its left-hand, driver’s side, from the impact with the bridge’s rails. The front of the bonnet is partially crushed from the slide down the hillside into the river bed. But Staffe’s curiosity is touched by something he sees on the car’s right-hand wing.

He bids the workman farewell and as he goes along the bridge, he runs his hand along the blue-painted rail, shiny and smooth, but then rough, where the paint is taken away. Thin streaks of red run along the rail. He pauses, watches the workman return to his lunch. For three metres before the breach that the men are working on, the paint is scratched from the bridge’s two rails.

Just before he gets to where his Cinquecento is parked, Staffe darts down the side of the bridge and clambers down the
barranco.
The workmen shout at him, but he doubts they will bother to follow. The brambles scratch his arms as he grabs them to stop himself from tumbling and he has to throw himself onto his back to avoid toppling over.

The sun beats down ferociously on the valley bottom and he is drenched in sweat, crouching by Raúl’s Alfa. He peruses one side of the car and his suspicion is confirmed. On the car’s right-hand wing, two thin strips of blue run like tramlines, where the Alfa had surely crashed into the railings – on the side the men were repairing. The wrong side.

The workmen lean over, shouting down at him. He looks up and the
barranco
now seems steeper. The bridge is a long way off.

Tilting at bloody something, he thinks, ignoring the workmens’ calls and looking in the dry river bed for the blood-soaked rag, finding nothing of the sort – just the rogue bush of wild strawberries, fruit withered and dry, but with a cluster of leaves, petalled red with a smear of what could be blood, fully twenty metres from Raúl’s dead car.

*

When Staffe parks up in the
plazeta
, his neighbour, Carmen, beckons him from the alley that leads to his house.

Carmen could be anywhere between forty-five and seventy. She smokes the local black tobacco as she tells him that his landlord has been to the house. He came with another man and they had entered the house despite her protestations. When she had stood in their way, the other man had laid hands on her and they had locked the door behind them so she couldn’t even oversee what they were up to.

‘Here,’ she says, touching her shoulder as if it were a wound. ‘Here, he touched me.’ They said they had come to check that the water and the gas were working. ‘But that man had never seen a spanner in his life. A plumber? Mother of God!’

Staffe opens the door to his house and can immediately tell someone has been in because they double-locked the door when they left – something he never does. He quickly goes up to the small studio that leads out onto the roof. As he goes through his papers, Carmen huffs and puffs behind him, the sweet black tobacco preceding her.

He checks what few documents he has, sees nothing is missing. His camera is still there, his laptop, too. But when he stands back and reappraises the position of everything, something is wrong. He sits in the corner of the studio, in the old rocking chair with the padded, hide arms. From here, he can see all of Gador. If you sit there for an hour, in the morning or evening, the big mountain constantly changes colour. It’s where he sits with his laptop and when he is done, he places it on the sideboard, but when he reaches for it now – even at full stretch, it is beyond.

Someone has moved it.

He fires it up and tries to log in. As he does – about to type in the last digit of his password – he is alerted to a message. He has one remaining attempt to log in.

Carmen bends double at the top of the steep stairs, hands on knees, getting her breath and still pulling on the cigarette that hasn’t left her mouth. ‘Is there anything wrong?’ she pants.

‘No, Carmen. I remember now. I did call the landlord about the hot water for my shower. It was a couple of weeks ago, but at least he has come now.’

She looks at him as if she knows his game, goes out onto the roof terrace, and tells him he shouldn’t have lavender pots up here. He should grow a vine, for shade. If he did, she could water it for him and train it. She laughs, says he will never learn how to live here properly.

Carmen pulls the dead lavender from its pot and hurls it over the walnut tree and into the
campo
. As she does it, Carmen catches the eye of Consuela, hanging her washing on the roof opposite. Carmen tuts and sits down heavily, eyes up an unopened bottle of Anís del Mono that Manolo brought once. Staffe asks if she would like a glass and she shrugs, lets him pour, tells him she can get him a cutting from a vine.

‘Why don’t you like Consuela, Carmen?’ he says in a low voice.

‘Nobody knows who the wretched child’s father is. You need to choose your friends more wisely. That Manolo is no better.’

Carmen watches him plug in the dongle to his laptop and lights up another of her black cigarettes.

He taps away at the keyboard then pauses, wondering whether to ‘send’, going outside while he decides. He has a glass of Anís del Mono with Carmen and accepts a drag on her cigarette. It takes him back to a previous time and he returns to the computer, presses the return key and his request pings across the sky to Jasper Newton: that he might arrange an audience with his good friend and one-time comrade, Professor Peralta in the School of Military History at the University of Granada.

Staffe recharges Carmen’s glass and hears a dog barking across the roofs. When he looks, he is sure he sees the tail end of Suki, tucked under Gracia’s arm as she disappears through the hatch of their roof. Manolo doesn’t go anywhere without his Suki.

*

Salva nods politely to Staffe as he goes into Bar Fuente. He is putting up more posters for the new Academia. Now, they propose it will be called the Academia Barrington. It will bring tourists flocking.

As Staffe works his way around the bar, the tinny clatter of conversation that normally rings off the tiles, dims quickly to an awkward silence.

When Salva brings his mint tea, Staffe asks, ‘No Manolo today?’

Salva looks at him suspiciously. ‘He was up the mountain with that journalist friend of yours.’

‘I haven’t seen him since then. He wasn’t at the funeral.’

‘Why would he be?’ says Frog, talking around his wagging
duro
cigarette. ‘He didn’t really know that cunt from Almería. None of us did, you understand.’

‘The Junta decide any day now,’ says Salva, tapping the poster. ‘It could be the making of us.’

‘Our very own Academia Cultural,’ says Frog – as if this is café society. ‘We don’t want any boats capsizing. It was you that brought that journalist here. Remember? You and your friend Manolo. That man’s thick in the head.’