A Death in Valencia (12 page)

‘You look, er, different somehow.'

Torres was sitting at his desk cross-referencing some material on
Sidenpol
, the police intranet, as Cámara walked in.

‘Been on the piss?'

‘Where did we put the files on the Roures case?' Cámara said.

‘I mention it because you often get this weirdly relaxed, almost serene expression on your face afterwards. While we mere mortals suffer from hangovers, you seem to get a kind of cathartic release from alcohol poisoning.'

‘Fuck it. We were only working on it a couple of days ago. Can't have gone far.'

‘Although it does seem to affect your short-term memory. They're on the second shelf. And a couple of the later reports were still floating around your desk the last time I looked.'

‘Spying on me again?'

‘It's that Maldonado gets me to do it, chief. Seduces me with his bad skin and halitosis.'

‘Tart.'

‘So what's this? Leaving me to do all the work–yours and mine, I mean–on the Bodí case? Back to Roures? Sod the orders? To be honest I didn't see you staying the course that long, but this has to be something of a record, even for you, right?'

Cámara gave him a look.

‘I need a minute,' he said.

Torres grunted and turned back to the computer screen as Cámara picked up the box file he was looking for and started rifling through the papers. Eventually he found the one he wanted and placed it out in front of him, ran through the details for a couple of minutes and tightened his lips.

‘Do me a favour, will you?' he said, lifting his head to look across the office at Torres. ‘Check up the clinic in Paris where Sofía Bodí used to work, the first one. Should be in the background section on your screen somewhere.'

‘Do you want me to give you a foot massage while I'm at it, chief?'

‘No. It'd just slow us down. The address and phone number of the clinic will do for now. But thanks for the offer.'

‘No problem.'

Torres's fingers tapped away at the keyboard for a moment or two, then after a couple of clicks of the mouse, he said, ‘
Clinique Fontaine
. Rue Floréal. Number: 01 44 19 16 66.'

Cámara pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket–a leaflet from the brothel–and scribbled the information down with a ball-point pen in a gap between photos of bare-breasted women. Oblivious to the images of naked skin, he sat staring at the digits for a while and then reached over to pick up the phone.

‘You're calling them now?' Torres said.

‘Might be.'

‘Shouldn't you put a request through to Interpol?'

‘And die of old age before they get back to me?'

‘This isn't entirely by the book.'

‘You know that. But they don't.'

Cámara heard the high-pitched sound of a French phone ringing at the other end. He wanted to make contact with this lead, this urgent connection that had burst through from nowhere, even if it only meant ringing up early in the morning and hearing an answer machine at the other end.

There was a click as the ringing stopped.

‘
Allo
?'

He paused. This was no answer machine. Over in Paris, someone had answered the phone. Cámara lunged desperately for the French that remained to him from school.

‘
C'est la Clinique Fontaine
?'

‘
Oui, monsieur
.'

‘This is Chief Inspector Cámara of the Spanish National Police,' he said, continuing as best he could. ‘Who am I speaking to, please?'

‘My name is Madeleine Marché. I'm the secretary of the
Clinique
. How may I help?'

‘I'm investigating the disappearance of a former employee of yours.'

He enunciated the words slowly, but, he hoped, correctly. Years had passed since he'd last practised, and he could understand much more than he spoke.

‘Yes, Sofía. We heard. Have you found her?'

‘No. Sadly not. But I do require some information from you.'

‘
Bien sûr, bien sûr
. If there's anything I can do. Is this about the phone call we had from Sofía last week?'

Cámara cleared his throat.

‘That was part of it,' he said. ‘Could you tell me about the call?'

‘Yes, of course. She rang last Wednesday. I answered the phone myself. I didn't work here when Sofía was an employee, but I've met her on several occasions at gynaecological symposia here in Paris, and in Switzerland. So we know each other, and of course there's the link to the
clinique
.'

‘What did she ring about?'

‘It was about a patient who had been at the clinic years ago, many years ago. It was a little strange, but she said she needed to check something. I assumed it had a bearing on the investigation they were carrying out into her. That's not you, I take it?'

‘No. That was…others,' Cámara said. ‘Different police. We're only interested in finding Sofía as quickly as possible.'

‘Good. It's a sorry state of affairs when we have to be frightened of the police just for carrying out our work helping women, you know?'

‘I understand. But please, you were saying–something about a patient? Could you tell me more? It's very important.'

‘Yes,' came the answer. ‘It was about a Spanish girl who came here back in the seventies. Can you hold on for a moment. I'll just check the record again.'

There was a hiss at the end of the line as the phone was put down and Madeleine walked away. From his desk Torres was staring at Cámara with his eyes raised, amazed that he had got so far, but sniggering at his French.

‘Stop laughing at your superior,' Cámara said. ‘That's an order.'

There was a shuffling back in Paris and Madeleine picked up the phone again.

‘Here it is,' she said. ‘Third of November nineteen seventy-seven. She wanted to know the names of the girls we saw that day. I've got the list here, but there was one name in particular she was interested in.'

Cámara waited with his pen ready.

‘And that was?'

‘Here it is,' she said. ‘I remember. Lucía Bautista Sánchez.'

Cámara swallowed.

‘She didn't…? Did Madame Bodí say anything about why she was interested in this particular girl?'

‘No. I didn't ask. As I said, I assumed it had something to do with the investigation. That perhaps this girl–or woman as she will be now–might be able to help, or something. But I don't know exactly why. She didn't say.'

‘All right,' Cámara said. ‘You've been very helpful.'

‘Not at all.'

‘Just, er, one other thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘Was there any indication where Lucía Bautista was from in Spain? Is there any record of that? An address, perhaps?'

‘No, we don't have that information. But Sofía herself said Lucía was from Valencia. From her own home town. She mentioned it when she rang. She said she remembered feeling homesick when girls from Valencia came to the clinic. Of course, the sunshine, the paella. It must have been hard for her back then.'

Cámara put the phone down, stood up and stared out of the window at the facades of tower blocks behind the Jefatura. A thousand lives stacked into slot-like boxes, defined and delineated by the cubic dimensions of each identical apartment. Except that human lives had the tendency to spill beyond these restricted spaces.

Behind him, Torres had got up from his desk and was looking down at the notes beside Cámara's phone.

‘Lucía Bautista Sánchez? That's—'

‘Roures's ex-wife. Yes.'

‘Same name, at least.'

Cámara spun round.

‘Let's check
Sidenpol
again, shall we?' He walked over to Torres's terminal. ‘Come on, you're faster at this than I am.'

Torres grunted and sat down again at his desk.

‘How many women with that name are there in Valencia province?' Cámara said.

‘I'm on it.'

After a few moments accessing the database, three women, complete with photos, came up on the screen.

‘Well, it's not her,' Torres said, pointing at a little ten-year-old girl. ‘And even this one's too young. She's only thirty-five. Still wearing nappies in nineteen seventy-seven.'

‘Which leaves Roures's ex-wife,' Cámara said.

They both looked at the photo of a woman with black curly hair and fleshy features, her skin pale and shiny from the over-powerful flash of the photo booth. It was the same photo on the file they had for the Roures case.

‘She's better-looking in real life,' Torres said.

‘She'd have been fifteen or sixteen in nineteen seventy-seven.'

‘Makes sense. Got banged up. Too young for a kid, so off to France for an abortion.'

‘At the clinic where Sofía Bodí was working at the time.'

‘Coincidence?'

So why did Sofía mark her down in her diary? Why did she ring up her old clinic to check her name just days before disappearing? They had a dead man and a missing woman.

And Lucía was the unexpected link between the two.

Lucía Bautista lived in a traditional El Cabanyal house on the Calle Barraca, not far from the port. The facade was tiled in blue-and-white check, with vegetal motifs over the entrance. The large wooden door had a smaller door inside which opened into the house itself. Cámara peeped through the glass, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun, trying to see if anyone was in, before lifting the Hand-of-Fátima door knocker and banging it a couple of times against the metal panel.

From the reflection in the glass he was aware that an elderly woman was watching him from the opposite side of the road. She was sprinkling the pavement outside her front door with water to draw cooler air into the haze of her home, glancing up at him as he waited to see if anyone answered his call.

‘
Que no está
,' she shouted over after a couple of minutes had passed with no sign of life inside. She's out.

Cámara turned and crossed the road to talk to her, lifting his badge for her to see.

‘
Policía!
' The woman dropped her eyes and shrugged. It was a common reaction among some elderly people–an instinct to have as little as possible to do with law enforcers, instilled over centuries of State and Church repression.

‘Do you know where I can find her?'

‘Don't know,' she said. ‘She goes out sometimes. Walking.'

‘Do you know how long ago?'

The woman was sprinkling the last of her water as quickly as possible on to the ground, looking for an excuse to head back inside.

‘Maybe five minutes ago.' And she waved her hand in the direction of the port, as though to indicate the way in which Lucía had gone.

Cámara thanked her and set off in the same direction. It felt good to be back in this part of the city; the area had a village-like feel to it, a proper neighbourhood, and the traditional design of the houses gave it an elegance and sense of history that was hard to find in all parts of Valencia. More reason, he thought, for the Town Hall to want to pull swathes of it down. Like tyrannical rulers of the ancient world, the authorities had a crazed need to destroy anything that had been made before their rule, setting the clock to zero in order to remake the city in their own, shining, modern, reinforced-concrete image.

He smiled. These were political thoughts coursing through his mind. Not something he was accustomed to in himself. Hilario would be proud.

He looked up: above the line of the roofs stood a tower, perhaps another four or five metres higher. A
torre-miramar
it was called: one of the towers from which fishermen's families had used to attach lights to help guide the boats back to the beach; a place from which one could see the sea over the heads of the neighbouring houses. There were fewer and fewer of them left now: already a couple had been pulled down by order of the Town Hall.

He emerged from the shade of the street and out into the open space of a square near the port. Opposite, the colourful boatyards that had been put up for the America's Cup stood empty and dusty. This area had come alive briefly during that time, a couple of years before, when multi-million-dollar yachts were floating in and out of the harbour, but many of the bars and restaurants had closed now, a nosedive depression taking hold once the glamour set had moved on. Valencia had failed to turn itself into a new Monte Carlo, despite all the money that had been spent. Having marginalised neighbourhoods full of drug dealers next to the port area hadn't helped.

There was a tram stop in the square, partially shaded by palm trees. From here he could catch a lift back into the centre. Locating Lucía might have to wait till the morning.

The tinted plastic of the shelter just seemed to intensify the heat, however, and he sought refuge under the portico of a nearby block of flats. The display at the stop showed that he had another seven minutes before the next tram came this way.

So close to the sea, the air was even denser here with the humidity, but a breeze was already developing, bringing partial respite from the sticky heat. He closed his eyes as the dizziness fell away from his skin, dripping like water and trickling away along the pavement. What had he been thinking, going to the brothel the night before? He'd never done anything like that before in his life. His fingers caressed the plastic bag of skunk still nestling in his pocket. He'd find a dustbin somewhere later and throw it away.

His eyes opened as a couple walked past him, tiptoeing into the sunshine to get around him and then back into the shade. He watched as they headed into El Cabanyal, then turned his head to glance back over the square. Three minutes till the tram arrived.

A figure caught his eye: a woman wearing a white sleeveless top and beige shorts that stopped just above the knee. She was small and curvaceous, with a fleshy nose and curly hair that was almost all black save for a few white streaks.

Cámara took a step out from his shady sanctuary and crossed over towards her.

‘Lucía Bautista?'

The woman stopped and looked at him suspiciously. The man had used her surname; it was clear she didn't know him.

‘Who are you?'

There was a bar open on the other side of the square and she accepted Cámara's offer to go over there rather than talk in her house. No need to give further gossip material to the old woman across the road. Or others like her.

‘They know about Pep. The whole
barrio
does. And they know one of your colleagues came to talk to me the other day. But even so…'

Cámara ordered a
café solo
, still needing the caffeine to sharpen himself up after the previous night. Lucía asked for a
bitter
.

‘Any news?'

There was something soft and engaging about Lucía's eyes. Torres was right, she was prettier in the flesh than in her ID photo, but there was something tarnished about her as well, like a light that had been dulled in some way.

‘The investigation is progressing,' Cámara said. ‘You spoke to Inspector Torres, I believe.'

‘Perhaps. I can't remember his name. Big black beard. Is there something wrong? In my statement, I mean.'

‘No, your statement was fine. We just have to do some follow-up calls sometimes. Trying to pick up something we might have missed. It's perfectly normal. There's nothing to be worried about.'

Lucía gave a sigh, her shoulders dropping as she lifted her glass and sipped her bright, cherry-red drink.

‘I told him as much as I could. He seemed to be interested in establishing where I was the night Pep…you know.'

‘That's fine. And I'm not here to go over that again.'

Cámara pulled out his cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?'

She shook her head.

‘We need some more background on Señor Roures,' Cámara said, inhaling. ‘His past, people he knew, that sort of thing. And as his ex-wife, well, you're an important part of that picture.'

‘Yes,' Lucía said. Her gaze drifted away, staring out from their terrace table at the empty, mid-afternoon street. It was still too hot for most people to venture out. ‘I suppose so.'

‘Perhaps you could tell me about how you met.'

Lucía took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

‘Pep and I knew each other from way back,' she said after a pause. ‘We were at school together. Both kids from El Cabanyal. But we didn't get together until we were in our teens. He used to play
pelota
at the sports club and come round to a bar afterwards where I hung out with some of my friends.'

She swirled her glass round, watching the ice clink against the sides.

‘Anyway, one night, well, you know, it just happened.'

‘Do you mind if I ask when that was?'

‘No, that's fine. I can tell you exactly. It was the night of the big demonstration in Valencia for the
Estatut
. The ninth of October, nineteen seventy-seven.'

Cámara remembered Valencians mentioning the date to him, the day almost the entire city had rallied in support of the region becoming autonomous rather than governed directly from Madrid. Locally, it was one of the important moments during the
Transición
–the years following Franco's death as the country moved towards becoming a democracy. Over 600,000 people from both the right and the left had marched through the streets.

‘I think it was a Sunday,' Lucía continued, ‘and we all met up in our usual bar, El Polp, afterwards for a drink. Pep was there, and…that's it.'

‘And then you got married?'

‘Yes. A few years later. A big, El Cabanyal wedding. They like those round here. Feels like a tribe, sometimes. So it's always good when two people from the neighbourhood get together.'

‘How long was this before La Mar opened?'

‘That was pretty soon after. Pep always knew he wanted to open a restaurant, and was looking for somewhere from before we got married. Then, I don't know, it must have been a few months later, that place became available–I think there'd been a bar there before–and we took it on. My father helped us out getting started.'

‘Your father's dead, I understand.'

‘Yes. Was that on my file?'

Cámara didn't reply.

‘I'm sorry. I know, you're just doing your job. Three years ago I lost both my mother and father in the space of four months. It's just…There's only me and my brothers now.'

‘Can you tell me what happened? Between you and Roures?'

‘Why we divorced, you mean?'

Cámara nodded, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray on the table.

‘It was the restaurant, really. It's a small place, but there were only ever the two of us. Others came and went, but we shouldered the whole thing. Living there, working there. It took its toll.'

‘No kids?'

‘No! No time. The idea was crazy. Besides, I don't think Pep…It wasn't acrimonious, or anything. We knew it had to happen, so we arranged things, Pep gave me a lump sum for my share of the restaurant, and that was it.'

‘Still friends?'

‘Yeah. I mean, we didn't hate each other or anything like that. But we weren't socialising either. After you've spent so many years living every second of the day with someone you need a bit of a rest. Anyway, without me at La Mar Pep was busier than ever. It's not as if we could have seen much of each other anyway.'

She paused, taking another sip from her drink. And for a moment Cámara glimpsed something of what had dulled the spark inside her.

‘I used to bump into him in the street sometimes, or at the market. We'd stop and chat, catch up on things. But then he got involved more in the
El Cabanyal, Sí
thing and I hardly ever saw him at all. Last time must have been around Christmas.'

‘You're not involved yourself?'

Lucía shrugged.

‘Don't get me wrong–I think it's criminal what they want to do here. Pulling old houses down. But…' She frowned. ‘I don't think there's much you can do. All right for me to say that, I suppose. My house isn't one of the ones under threat. For Pep it was different–he was right there in the cross-hairs.'

She placed her hands over her face, as though hiding herself.

‘Sorry. That's not very appropriate language, is it?'

‘I'd like you to tell me what you can about the abortion,' Cámara said.

Her hands remained where they were, shielding her face and eyes from the rest of the world. Then very slowly she dropped them until they rested on her knees, her eyes downcast.

‘Wow,' she breathed at last. ‘You really have…Is this relevant?'

‘I know it was a long time ago, but if there's anything you remember.'

‘You don't forget something like that. I think about it every day.'

Her gaze remained fixed on the floor as she spoke.

‘It was a girl,' she said after letting out a deep sigh. ‘I know because I developed a rash on my chest, just as my mother did when she was pregnant with me. Didn't happen with my brothers. It's a family thing.'

The sun had begun to dip a little by this point and a shaft of light was beginning to stream over part of Lucía's body, casting a twitching shadow where the vein in her neck pulsed rhythmically.

‘We weren't very well off, so my aunt had to help out. My father called a doctor friend he knew, who gave us the name of a clinic in Paris.'

Cámara took out another cigarette and lit it.

‘Pep had a little Renault 5, so we drove up. My mother as well. Set off in the middle of the night and we got to Paris late the following evening, driving straight through and eating sandwiches my mother had prepared to save money.'

‘Do you remember how much it cost?'

‘I think it was about fifty thousand pesetas. It was a lot of money, particularly back then.'

‘How long were you in Paris for?'

‘Just a couple of days. We stayed the night in some
pensión
on the outskirts of the city, went to the clinic the next morning. They carried out the procedure, and we had to go back in the afternoon for a check, to make sure everything was all right. Then it was back in the car and poor old Pep driving through the night to get back here.'

‘Do you remember what the clinic was called?'

‘No. No, I don't.'

‘Any other Spanish girls there?'

‘Yeah. One or two. I remember the girl who went in before me. Catalan, I think she was. Very nervous. They had problems with the anaesthetic and she was screaming.'

She lifted her eyes.

‘I was only fifteen. I was way too young to have a child. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life then, but I was thinking of going to university, I don't know. Just not, you know, settling down, having a baby. My parents thought about adopting it, bringing it up as their own, but they were already quite old by then. There was nothing else we could do.'