Or the Bull Kills You (21 page)

‘I need you to tell me what happened.'

Quicker than Cámara had expected, Cyril began to uncurl himself and placed a hand on the floor to push himself up.

‘This is the end for me,' he said as he got to his feet. Cámara led him to the edge of the bed and then sat down on a nearby chair.

‘Carmen was my life. Now I have nothing. No papers, nowhere to go.'

‘Cyril,' Cámara said. ‘Listen to me. I work in homicides, murders. I don't care how you got here or if you stay. Understand?'

Cyril looked down at the floor.

‘Now you must have friends, someone you can turn to.' The Moroccan was silent. ‘But right now I need you to tell me exactly what happened. It was you who put the call through, right? You called the emergency services.'

After a pause, Cyril nodded.

‘When was that?'

‘I don't know,' he mumbled. ‘Perhaps an hour ago.'

‘Did you find Carmen?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I found
La Señorita
, then I made the call.'

‘Did you hear anything?' Cámara asked. ‘How did you find her? It must have been dark.'

Cyril held his head in his hands and began to sob. Tears streamed through his fingers and down on to the floor by his feet. Cámara looked for a handkerchief or paper tissue, but his pockets were empty. He got up, went into the bathroom opposite, pulled out some toilet roll and then went back into the bedroom.

‘Here,' he said, thrusting it under Cyril's face. ‘Here, take this.'

Cyril grabbed it and blew his nose. His eyes were burning red, his slim brown hands shaking as he gripped at the tissue paper.

‘Last night,' he said, ‘
La Señorita
received a phone call. She could receive a lot of phone calls, but this one was different.'

Tears were still falling from his eyes and he dabbed at them before carrying on.

‘I could not hear what was said.
La Señorita
herself said almost nothing during the entire call. It was perhaps ten, fifteen minutes long. I don't know for sure. But afterwards she shut herself in her room. This was not normal with her. Normally she liked to stay up and eat, enjoy my cocktails. Then, since Jorge died, and if no one came round, then sometimes we would stay up just me and her for hours, talking. She liked people, being with people. But last night was different. She just went to her room and closed the door. Didn't even say goodnight or anything. So I knew something was very wrong.'

A shudder seemed to pass through him, and for a moment Cámara thought he was about to break down again.

‘I stayed up later than usual,' Cyril eventually continued. ‘I thought
La Señorita
was perhaps ill, or would come out of her room at some stage and would need me there. So I stayed up, waiting. But eventually I fell asleep on the sofa.'

He brought his hands to his face for a second, covering his eyes as though with shame.

‘If I'd managed to stay awake I could have stopped this,' he said. ‘I could have stopped her. But I fell asleep, I fell asleep.'

‘It's all right,' Cámara said. ‘Please, go one, tell me what happened.'

‘Something made me wake up. I don't know what. I heard nothing, I swear. No sound. But suddenly I woke up, as though some hand had reached out and grabbed me.'

‘Something didn't feel right?'

‘Yes, that's it. I don't know, but I just knew.'

Cámara had heard words to this effect often over the previous years. They had become so common in the murders he had dealt with that he had come to expect them. A sense of something not being right in the moments before the body – or bodies – were found, as if the person already knew, at some primitive level, that something awful, something horrific, had taken place. An intuition, perhaps? Or just the mind playing tricks, creating powerful false memories after the shock? It didn't really matter which – the experiences were all too real for those who went through them.

‘What happened then?' Cámara asked.

‘That's when I looked out the window and saw
La Señorita
in the water,' Cyril said.

‘What did you do then?'

‘I don't know. I ran out. I went down to the pool. I cried. I…'

‘How long before you called the emergency services?' Cámara asked him.

Cyril thought for a moment. ‘Maybe, I'm not sure, five minutes. Ten minutes? I was very upset.'

‘Did you see anything else? Anything strange, out of the ordinary?'

The Moroccan shook his head. His lips had hardened, a white, fearful look in his eye.

‘I need you to show me Carmen's bedroom,' Cámara said. ‘It's very important.'

Cyril got to his feet shakily and headed towards the door, Cámara following close behind. Out in the corridor, they turned right and walked to the door at the far end. Cámara stepped forwards and opened it himself. The room gave on to the east side of the house and the morning sun was streaming in through the large single-pane windows. One of them was partially open and from the garden below came the sound of Huerta's team. Beyond the palm trees the sea still lapped the shore unusually gently.

The room was simpler than he had expected. A double bed, a dressing table, a couple of chairs, and just a couple of photographs on the walls: one of Carmen when she was younger, the other of Blanco in his
traje de luces
, holding up a couple of ears he had been awarded at a bullfight. A door to the side led off to an en-suite bathroom. Cámara poked his head through: a collection of large starfish had been mounted in a glass cabinet above the bath, but he saw nothing untoward. He turned his attention back to the bedroom. Cyril was leaning against the doorway, fresh tears streaming down his face. The bed was covered in a simple white bedspread, and although someone had lain on top of it, it had not been slept in. Cámara began to open the drawers of the bedside cabinet: old magazines, a box of tissues, underwear. Then he turned to the dressing table, with its collection of hairbrushes, make-up and perfumes. Again, the drawers held no secrets, but Carmen's mobile phone was there. He scrolled through the received calls: the last one came from a number marked ‘private'.

It was something: they could check later where that call had come from. Yet he felt sure there would be something else here, something that he needed to find. He glanced about the room again. The edge of the bedspread, near the top, had been pulled back. He darted forwards and began to feel under the pillows. Almost at once his fingers found something.

He pulled out the note by the corner and held it up to the light: thin writing paper that had been folded twice. He knew he should call Huerta at once and get them to open it up and study it ‘scientifically', but his curiosity got the better of him. There were no other prints on the paper than Carmen's: of that he was sure. The importance of the paper was what was written inside. He unfolded it as carefully as he could. From the doorway, Cyril seemed to come back to life.

‘A note?' And he rushed forwards.

Cámara held out a hand to hold him back as he studied the writing. Just five lines, in purple ink. The handwriting reminded him of how girls at school had written – all rounded, short, squat lettering.

‘
I have been drowned in the lies of others
,' Cámara read. ‘
I am a lie, my life has been a lie. I am nothing. By doing this I shall wash myself clean as others never can. For Cyril, I love you. I'm sorry
.'

Cámara looked over at the Moroccan, then back down at the final sentence of the note.

‘
For the others, for all of you
,' Carmen wrote, ‘
but especially for Jorge Blanco, I have nothing but hate
.'

The first batches of story-hungry media vans came screaming down the road from the city as Cámara drove along the pine-clad banks of the Albufera lake. The biggest story of the moment was about to get even bigger still, and no gossip journalist in the country would want to be anywhere else except Carmen Luna's villa at that moment. Usually they would have got there sooner, and he was surprised when he left the place himself that no one had arrived yet. A suicide caused people to react slightly differently, perhaps, out of a sense of respect, or shock. He wasn't quite sure. But now the news had got out and the house would be under siege for the next few days. He'd tried to warn Cyril as he'd left, but the poor man was still inhabiting a deep, aching emptiness. Eventually he had shut the gate behind him himself, hoping that it would keep the journalists at bay long enough for the Moroccan to gather himself and deal with them.

Cámara dialled a number in El Cabanyal district as he drove away and took the road back towards the city. After listening to the ringing tone for over a minute with no response, he hung up. No one at home. But he had an idea of where he might find the person he was looking for.

The road crossed a tributary to the lake and ran alongside the few tower blocks that developers had managed to build in this picturesque corner before it was turned into a national park. Les Gavines was another stain on the local coastline, but it was almost admirable if only as a symbol of how bad things could have become if the project to continue building on the narrow strip of land between the beach and the lake behind hadn't been stopped in time.

At the roundabout, instead of heading back towards Valencia, Cámara turned into the maze of pot holed roads that circled around the twenty-storey-high blocks of flats. On the beach front he followed the road northwards for as far as it went, past a handful of beach houses with rusting iron railings over the doors and windows leaving dark streaks down the greying white paintwork of the facades. After a few yards the tarmac ran out and he parked the Seat in a sandy area at the edge of an umbrella pine forest. There was no one else in sight, but six other cars were already parked nearby, while a couple of motorbikes had been chained to wooden posts marking the edge of the beach area. A path cut through the undergrowth seemed to lead the way and Cámara headed off into the trees.

The smell of hay and dung brought back powerful memories of the Ramírez farm from the previous day, and instinctively he put a hand down to feel his thigh. The skin was hard and tight where the cow's forehead had made contact with his leg, but if he didn't put too much strain on it he could walk without too much difficulty, certainly without any outward sign of a limp.

In a clearing in the trees ahead he could make out the yellow walls of the corrals. This was where they brought the bulls during
Fallas
week, and during the summer bullfighting season, as a kind of way station between the farms and the bullring. For the bulls, this gentle sea breeze, heavily scented with pine, would be the last air they breathed before being plunged into the violent world of the city.

But Cámara wasn't there for the bulls, nor for the sea. Because of the relative privacy the trees offered, and because the nearby beach was quiet and out of the way, this had become one of the biggest gay cruising grounds in the area.

Pushing on into the forest he began to catch sight of figures and faces up ahead. In a small clearing a man with closely cropped greying hair and a cyclist's outfit was leaning with one arm against a tree, basking in the sunlight as it broke through the branches above. He gave Cámara a hard stare as he approached, but his shoulders hunched when Cámara pulled out his ID.

‘Antonio?' he said when Cámara asked him. ‘I don't know. What's he done?'

‘I'm not here to bust anyone,' Cámara said. ‘But I need to speak to him. Urgently.'

‘What makes you think he's here?' the man asked.

Cámara looked back in the direction of the bull corral. ‘Just a hunch,' he said.

The man seemed to size Cámara up for a moment, then said, ‘If you can promise me you're not going to bust anyone…' Cámara opened his hands as if to show he was clean. ‘Then listen. There's some guy been coming round recently. New, haven't seen him here before. Someone told me his name was Antonio. I don't know if it's the one you're looking for, but if he is then just keep walking.' He pointed in the direction of another path leading out of the clearing where they were standing and along through the trees in the direction of the beach once more. ‘There's an old abandoned factory up there.'

Cámara headed up the path and before long came out of the trees and into a scrub area with a concrete floor and piles of broken brick scattered about the place. It smelt strongly of stale piss, with empty wine bottles and beer cans strewn about, scribbled graffiti with illegible words and names, or crude phallic drawings, etched on to the few remaining pieces of wall still standing vertically. Everyone knew about the place – an old plastics factory that had been abandoned some thirty years earlier and which had crumbled over the intervening period thanks to the harsh sea air. A legal dispute over who actually owned the land it was built on had meant nothing had been done to pull it down once and for all, and so at first drug users, and now gay men, frequented it – out of the way, next to a long stretch of nudist beach. Occasionally some local councillor kicked up a fuss about it, condemning the moral horrors that were said to take place down there. It was a threat to all, a danger to children. But nothing ever got done, and in the meantime the men kept cruising, and coming.

Cámara heard footsteps behind him and turned on his heel. Antonio Aguado was standing in front of him, unafraid and unbowed.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘What a surprise.'

‘Yes,' Cámara said. ‘I need to ask you some more questions.'

Aguado sighed.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'd rather hoped we'd said it all earlier on.' He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Let's go down to the beach. You never know who's watching or listening round here.'

Cámara followed as they walked away from the concrete and brick rubble of the old factory and through the dunes which banked up against it. Small green rubbery plants poked through the sand at the edges of the path next to broken shards of glass and shredded tissue paper. Over the low peak of the dunes they were suddenly hit by the breeze blowing in off the sea. Waves a foot high were breaking on the shoreline just ahead of them.

‘It's picking up,' Aguado said. ‘It was as still as I've ever seen it when I got here.'

He found a more sheltered corner in the fold of one of the dunes, and sat down in the sand. After a pause Cámara sat next to him.

‘You been coming here quite a bit recently?' Cámara said.

‘Drowning my sorrows, you might say,' Aguado replied, forcing a smile. He dug into the sand beneath him and pulled it up in handfuls, letting it filter back down through his fingers. ‘The bull corrals just over there…they remind me of him.'

‘I need you to talk to me about Carmen Luna.'

‘Come on,' Aguado started. ‘I've told you—'

‘Carmen was found dead this morning,' Cámara interrupted him. ‘I've just come from her house.'

Aguado closed his eyes and slowly let his head fall.

‘She committed suicide,' Cámara went on. ‘Tied a weight to her wrist and then threw herself into the swimming pool. There's something you didn't tell me last time. Whether it was to protect her, or to protect Blanco – perhaps yourself. But I know there's more.'

Still slumped forwards, Aguado's head began to nod softly as Cámara spoke.

‘What happened? What was it about Carmen, about her “doing her bit”, as you said?'

Aguado gave a low moan and then lifted his head again.

‘Carmen was a cover story,' he said, his eyes still closed. ‘She was useful. For Jorge. For us.'

‘You mean the relationship?' Cámara asked. Aguado nodded. ‘It was a sham.'

‘Of course,' Aguado said. He opened his eyes and looked Cámara in the face. ‘We needed to do something. All the rumours, all the stories.'

‘But she didn't know, did she?' Cámara said. ‘You used her, but she wasn't in on the game.'

Aguado rubbed his eyes and dropped his head again.

‘I know.' He sighed. ‘We thought about telling her. Perhaps at the start. She seemed the kind who might understand. Might even help her play her part even better. But how could we know if we could trust her? Then, I don't now, after a while it seemed to be going so well, so why bother. You know what I mean?'

‘
We
?' Cámara said. ‘Who's the
we
? Who came up with this idea? You?'

‘Good God, no,' Aguado said.

‘Jorge?'

‘No.'

‘Ruiz Pastor?'

‘Ruiz Pastor didn't know.' There was something approaching a smile playing on Aguado's lips. ‘He bought the whole story, the Carmen Luna thing. He was there helping with the wedding plans, talking to all the journalists, who was going to get the photo rights, that kind of thing.'

‘So who was it?' Cámara got up off the sand and grabbed Aguado by the arm, pulling him to his feet.

‘Carmen Luna is dead,' he barked into his face. ‘As dead as Blanco, as dead as Ruiz Pastor. Stop trying to hide your little secrets and tell me what was going on.'

‘All right,' Aguado said, trying to shake himself free. ‘Look, I don't know. I don't know whose idea it was or who set it up. But, look, the Ramírez family. They're powerful, right? They had a lot riding on Jorge. He was their big star, the greatest bullfighter, and all that. And he was theirs, championed their name. As long as things were going well with Jorge they were going well with them. So, I don't know, but I always assumed they were involved in it somehow. They'd known Jorge since he was a kid. If anyone else was going to know about him being gay it was them.'

Cámara let his hand fall away from Aguado's arm.

‘They're rich, they've got contacts,' Aguado said. ‘They could have set the whole thing up.'

‘Francisco?' Cámara said. ‘You think the father was behind all this?'

‘I don't know. I told you. I have nothing to say it was them. I'm just guessing. But who else was it going to be?'

Who else was it going to be? That was the point. But if the Ramírez family had set the whole thing up, who'd called Carmen up that night and told her the whole thing? That her love story with Blanco was nothing but a play, carefully staged and orchestrated, where everyone except her understood that they were just reading the lines they'd been given.

‘Someone called Carmen Luna last night,' Cámara said. ‘Explained the whole thing to her. I'm convinced. That's why she killed herself.'

‘Oh, my God.' Aguado looked suddenly shocked. ‘Oh, my God,' he repeated, barely able to draw a breath.

‘She left a note,' Cámara said. ‘Cursing Blanco. But what I want to know is who told her? Who made that call?'

The anger in his voice took him by surprise, but Aguado was crumpling in front of him, his face pale, eyes red, a look of fear and desperation in his face.

‘I don't know about the call,' he said under his breath. ‘I don't know anything about that.'

He fell back down into the sand again, burying his head as he wrapped his arms around his knees. Remorse, self-pity, guilt. Cámara had seen it so many times, the moment when a suspect or a witness broke. Sometimes they looked to him in those moments as a redeemer, someone who could cleanse them of what they had done just by hearing them out. Others simply vanished into themselves. It was too late for Carmen Luna, however. She'd been useful to them while she'd been alive, and ‘done her bit'. Had anyone really had a thought for her in all this, though? Not Aguado. Nor Blanco. But someone had been thinking about her. Which was why they had made the call.

 

Back at the Jefatura, Cámara picked up the phone and dialled a number.

‘Gómez?'

‘Cámara?
Hijo de puta
. Son of a bitch. Didn't think I'd be hearing from you all of a sudden. Got your hands full at the moment, right?'

‘Something like that.'

‘Or don't tell me. You've just worked out who killed Blanco and you wanted your old friend to be the first to know. You're a sweetheart, you know that?'

‘All right. Cut the crap.'

‘Hey! I'm just glad to hear your voice. Don't get much to talk about down here. Just the usual Chinks and Moros filling up the corridors with their dodgy paperwork. You know how it is.'

‘Thankfully, I don't. But I can imagine.'

‘Listen, strictly between you and me, you might not have to do any imagining soon if things carry on the way they are. People are talking, Cámara. This is a high-profile case you've got. And if they don't get someone nailed for it soon the chances are you'll be down here with me in Foreign Nationals within a week. Unless you prefer the
Depósito
, of course, the impounded goods depot.'

‘Right.' Cámara sniffed. ‘I'll worry about that when I get to it. In the meantime…'

‘What's on your mind?'

‘There's someone who needs some help.'

There wasn't a great deal they could do. But at least by flashing Cyril's case up first it might mean he didn't get roughed up and deported as soon as some uniformed thug got his hands on him.

‘Abdel-Krim Rifai,' Gómez repeated his full Moroccan name. ‘But he goes by the name of Cyril, you say?'

‘He did, at least when Carmen was around. Listen, just keep an eye out for him, will you?'

‘Will do,' Gómez said. ‘And you keep an eye out for yourself, Cámara. Much as I'd love your company, I don't want to see you down here. I really don't.'