A Death in Valencia (15 page)

Captain Herrero was not in uniform, but Cámara recognised him immediately from his tall, angular body and sharp features. He walked purposefully into the bar, ordered a
café solo
from the barman, then crossed over to where Cámara was sitting in the corner as though he'd known he was there from the start.

‘I shouldn't be here,' he said as he sat down.

‘Neither should I,' Cámara said. ‘Specific orders.'

Herrero's mouth twitched into a grin: they understood each other.

‘Any fallout from the other day?' Cámara asked.

‘The body on the beach? No, not really. Who was he, anyway?'

‘Pep Roures. Used to run a paella restaurant in El Cabanyal.'

‘La Mar?'

‘That's the one.'

‘Yeah, I heard about that case.'

‘But you haven't come here to talk about that, have you?' Cámara said.

Herrero paused as the barman brought over his coffee and placed it down on the table in front of him. Cámara was already halfway through a
café cortado
; the skunk felt to be pretty much out of his brain by now, but he eschewed a usual mid-morning beer in favour of more caffeine to keep him sharp. On the television set above the bar, images were being broadcast of the Pope's arrival at Valencia airport, the King and Queen welcoming him along with a host of local politicians. Emilia was there, smiling as broadly as she could, a yellow patent leather handbag swinging from her arm.

Herrero didn't speak until the barman had gone back behind the bar and was well out of earshot.

‘They transferred me out of
Servicios Marítimos
the next day,' he said. ‘Some reorganisation of personnel. Or at least that's what they said.' He gave a cynical laugh. ‘I was virtually the only one not on sick duty for depression and they pulled me out. I mean, what's the point?'

‘We get the same kind of bullshit,' Cámara said.

‘Anyway,' Herrero continued.

‘We didn't come here to moan about the demotivational skills of our respective superiors,' Cámara finished for him.

‘Yeah,' Herrero said. ‘Listen, they shunted me into an office in the
Comandancia
. It's comms and protocol stuff mostly, like a kind of hub.'

‘Got it,' Cámara said.

‘Well, look, something interesting passed by me yesterday, records of a phone tap.'

Cámara raised an eyebrow. Already Herrero was sticking his neck out more than any other
Guardia Civil
he'd encountered. Even if the information turned out to be useless, this was already important in itself.

‘Are you sure you want to…' Cámara said. ‘We can stop right now and forget everything about this. It's not too late.'

‘You need to know what I'm about to tell you,' Herrero said. ‘If we've got some nutters on our side running around kidnapping civilians I want them flushed out as much as you do.'

Cámara nodded. It seemed that Maldonado's ‘GAL theory' was common currency.

‘OK. Go on.'

Herrero put a spoon into his coffee, stirred it for a couple of seconds, then took a gulp.

‘Right, as I said, this office I'm in, it's just light stuff mostly. And as the new boy they weren't going to show me anything sensitive. But yesterday I was there on my own. I reckon the others thought I'd picked up enough to know the score and they could bugger off to the beach for the day. So this pink envelope comes through–that means class 2 security–and I had to process it.'

‘You use pink envelopes for top secret?'

‘No that's red. Pink's one down. But, yeah, pink. I know what you mean. Not the kind of colour you associate with the
Guardia Civil
, right?'

He looked down into his coffee, as though weighing what he was about to say.

‘OK, look, I've just got to tell you this, all right?' he said, launching himself into it. ‘Sofía Bodí's phone was being tapped.'

‘Right,' Cámara said. ‘Probably to be expected given Lázaro's investigation into the clinic.'

‘Yeah, yeah,' Herrero raised his hands as though to slow Cámara down. ‘That's what I thought. Comandante Lázaro was behind the tap, but what I was looking at was a list of all the people who were receiving the transcripts.'

‘Go on.'

‘We use codes to denote who they are. I know them by now; they were people you might imagine: Lázaro's superiors, a couple of people in Madrid, one or two others.

‘But,' he went on, ‘one code was different. An emergency code, not one for someone inside the
Guardia
.'

He reached over for a paper tissue from the metal dispenser at the side of the table, fished out a pen from his shirt pocket, and started writing in small, heavy lettering. When he'd finished he turned the paper round and showed it to Cámara, keeping his finger on the paper.

Cámara looked down and saw:
X461252015
.

‘Yeah,' Herrero said. ‘It wouldn't have meant much to me a week ago. But I'm a fast learner. Look, we can break it down.'

With his pen, he drew a line down after the ‘
X
', separating it from the numbers.

‘That's
X
for external. We know this is going to someone outside. But where?'

He drew another line, this time after the numbers ‘
4
' and ‘
6
'.

‘Forty-six. That's the first two digits of the Valencia city postcode.'

Cámara pursed his lips.

‘That was easy,' Herrero continued. ‘The next bit was more complicated. But I had a breakthrough last night.'

He turned the paper round and started writing again.

‘Let's assume each letter of the alphabet has been assigned a number. A equals one, B two, and so on. Now the only letters that would make sense out of the remaining digits here would be these.'

He drew his pen down, dividing the numbers into four groups: ‘
1, 25, 20, 15.
'

‘One is A,' Cámara said.

‘Twenty-five is Y,' Herrero continued. ‘Twenty is T. And fifteen is O.'

He wrote each letter out as he explained: ‘
A
', ‘
Y
', ‘
T
', ‘
O
'.

Cámara's eyes stayed fixed on the paper.

‘And we all know what that means,' Herrero said.

Ayto
. It was the common acronym for
Ayuntamiento
, the Town Hall.

Cámara took a breath.

‘Listen,' Herrero said. ‘I can't do anything with this. I'm not even sure these days who I could mention it to. Know what I mean? Everyone's on edge at the moment. The last thing anyone wants is a
Policía Nacional
investigation into the
Guardia Civil
. It's got people paranoid.'

Cámara had pulled out a Ducados and was lighting it, his gaze fixed on the piece of tissue paper on the table in front of him, with Herrero's proprietorial finger still pressed down on it.

‘I owe you one,' Herrero said. ‘From the other day. I know you're on this case.'

‘I suppose that's how you got my mobile number as well,' Cámara butted in.

‘I'd be a pretty hopeless
Guardia
if I didn't.'

Cámara smiled.

‘The point is,' Herrero said, ‘this needs to be known about. You need to know this. Whatever you do with the information from now on is your affair, though. This cup of coffee, this bar, this meeting, none of it exists.'

Cámara nodded. ‘Don't worry about it.'

He was busy trying to memorise the numbers on the piece of paper, wondering if Herrero was ever going to lift his finger off it and let him keep it.

‘I just wish I could get my hands on those transcripts,' he said under his breath. ‘Find out what Sofía was saying, who she was talking to.'

Herrero put a hand into his back pocket and lifted out a wad of folded papers, placing them in front of Cámara.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I thought you might say that.'

In the end there was no reason not to. Seeing him walking down the street with Herrero's papers in his hand, the bus driver thought Cámara was flagging him down as he skipped on to the melting tarmac around the edge of the bus stop in order to get past the two old women blocking the narrow pavement. And so when the vehicle came to a stop, and the doors opened with a long hiss, Cámara wondered for just a fraction of a second before hopping on and letting himself be carried by the wave that had unexpectedly come his way. He needed somewhere he could read the transcripts in peace anyway. And there was always the chance that Herrero was being watched by his own team. Which meant a tail might be following him now.

Quien peces quiere mojarse tiene
. He who wants to catch fish has to get wet.

He sat in the higher seat at the back, checking that no one else was getting on board with him, studied the street for watching eyes and then, as the bus jerked back into motion, opened up the folded papers, barely conscious of the cool blow of conditioned air blowing down the back of his neck from the vent above his head.

Sofía had made dozens of calls over the course of the week before she'd disappeared. At the top of each conversation was typed the time and date, her name and her mobile phone number, along with the number and identity of the person at the other end, and
outgoing
or
incoming
to denote whether she had initiated the call or not. Cámara flicked through the pages, searching for names that jumped out. There were several to Ballester, Sofía's partner–quick calls to arrange the shopping for dinner, an apology for arriving late for a meeting at the clinic, discussions of their defence against the Lázaro investigation. And, less frequent but more important, comments of mutual support and affection. Stripped of their true context and subtleties such as tone of voice or the length of a pause, phone-tap transcripts often seemed pathetic and sad, Cámara thought, like a badly written–if realistic–play, built around the unthinking set phrases that made up so much of everyday speech.

Cámara continued skipping through the pages, avoiding lingering too long on any one detail as he tried to grasp a sense of the whole, the generic picture of Sofía's days leading up to the kidnapping, before going back to read in more detail. Calls to and from other members of the clinic, names he recognised from the notes he'd read back at the Jefatura; a misdialled number which had caused her much anxiety judging by the subsequent conversation she'd had about it with Ballester. Was she being stalked? Ballester had done his best to calm her down, but Cámara could sense the paranoia that was taking hold of both of them.

Sofía: ‘
Do you think
…'

Ballester: ‘…
What?
'

Sofía: ‘
This phone could be tapped.
'

Ballester: ‘
It's possible. Quite likely, I should say.
'

Sofía: ‘
What should we do?
'

Ballester: ‘
Keep talking. You've done nothing wrong. Let them listen, if the sons of bitches want to.
'

And then there it was, the name that jumped out and grabbed him by the throat. The name that somehow, without knowing, he'd known he would see.

Sofía: ‘¿Hola?
Is that Lucía Bautista?
'

Cámara stared at the name to make doubly sure, before reading on.

Lucía: ‘
Yes. Who's this?
'

Sofía: ‘
My name's Sofía Bodí. You may not remember me. But we met, years ago. I used to work at a gynaecological clinic in Paris in the nineteen seventies.
'

Lucía: ‘
How do you…? How did you…?
'

Sofía: ‘
I'm very sorry to be calling you like this. I wouldn't do so if it weren't extremely important. For you as well as for me.
'

Lucía: ‘
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm putting the phone down.
'

Sofía: ‘
No, please…I saw Pep Roures just a few weeks before he died.
'

Lucía: ‘
You met Pep? What's going on?
'

Sofía: ‘
Look, can we meet? It's vitally important. There are things I don't want to mention on the phone…
'

And so Lucía had been persuaded; they'd arranged to meet that very afternoon at the Montblanc café in El Cabanyal, not far from Lucía's home.

What had they talked about? Had Lázaro sent someone along to spy on them? If so, had his agent overheard the conversation?

The bus was racing down the long stretch of the Avenida del Puerto, the driver jumping three or four lights as they were turning red. Cámara looked up at the small television screen suspended from the ceiling showing a graphic of the route: he was on the number 2, heading away from the city centre towards the harbour. In a couple of minutes the bus would be swinging to the left and entering the narrow grid of streets of the fishermen's quarter that stretched out along the beach front to the north. All roads, it seemed, led to El Cabanyal.

The screen changed to a slide-show newsreel, showing the Pope's smiling face, while text alongside quoted a statement he'd made about Sofía Bodí's kidnapping. The Holy Father was said to be ‘appalled' at the news. However, the newsreel text continued, the Vatican had no plans to curtail his planned anti-abortion comments during his visit, a decision that had been welcomed by the Town Hall.

Cámara stared absent-mindedly through the window.

Hot damp sea air swamped him as he got off the bus. He darted across the road into the shade of a palm tree, using the cool of the air conditioning still clinging to him for a precious few seconds to get his thoughts together. The heat had intensified over the course of the morning, passing the crucial 37-degree mark when the air became hotter than blood.

Why had Lucía lied about Sofía? Her house was a two-minute walk from where he stood; he could go there now and ask her directly. But coming here unexpectedly had moved some other piece inside his mind, and he decided to explore a different route first, to check on something he'd missed the first time.

‘So you've come back. I haven't heard anything new, I'm afraid.'

Mikel Roig was sitting behind his desk, talking on the phone, but he interrupted his conversation to beckon Cámara in. Fold-up metal chairs were arranged in rows, filling up the remainder of the large ground-floor room. At the far end a banner was scrawled with the slogan
El Cabanyal, Sí–Especulación, No
.

Cámara remained on his feet. He could hear Roig trying to bring his phone conversation to a close, but the person at the other end kept talking. Roig rolled his eyes in a look of mock desperation at Cámara, before finally he was able to hit the hang-up button.

‘Admin stuff,' he said with an apologetic sigh. ‘Takes up so much time.'

‘You're having a meeting?' Cámara asked.

‘Later this evening. We don't usually hold them on a Friday, but we've heard there's going to be another wave of bulldozing. Imminent.'

‘How many houses are they planning on knocking down?'

‘This time? I don't know. There's at least one building for certain, but they might come in and take half a dozen. You can never be sure.'

‘And in total? What's the actual plan here?'

‘Over fifteen hundred houses have been marked for demolition,' Roig said. ‘They pulled the first one down a couple of years ago. Just to show they could, you know. Some sort of power thing. It was a beautiful place. Had this magnificent wooden mirador looking out on to a hundred-year-old palm tree. Someone even used it as the location for a film years back, it was that special.'

Roig pointed to a nearby chair.

‘Here, do you want a seat?'

Cámara shook his head.

‘Have they knocked any more down since?' he asked.

‘They took a couple of houses the week before last,' Roig said. ‘The
Municipales
make a cordon round them, the demolition team comes in and they're gone in a couple of hours.'

‘What about the residents?'

‘So far Valconsa are only pulling down what they've already bought on behalf of the Town Hall,' Roig said.

His phone rang again. He picked it up, looked who the caller was, then hit the reject button.

‘So how does it work?' Cámara asked.

‘They could take the whole lot using the land expropriation laws,' Roig said, putting the phone back on the desk. ‘They give them power enough.'

Cámara had come across Valencia's controversial land-grab laws, which gave the local government almost total powers to take whatever they wanted and even, in some cases, to force the owners they were depriving of their property to pay for part of the subsequent development costs. No one had been able to do much about it until a Scandinavian MEP with a holiday home on the Costa Blanca found himself having to fork out for the new dual carriageway running through what had once been his front garden. He took the case to Brussels, where officials forced the Valencian government to change the law. So the Valencian representatives went away, tweaked their legislation, gave it a new name, and carried on virtually as before.

‘The problem is, though,' Roig continued, ‘that would mean having to give a set rate of compensation to the owners. And we're talking about a lot of houses here; it would cost too much.'

‘So?'

‘So they run the area down. They buy the houses they can, then let them out to Gypsies and immigrants. These people have no connection with El Cabanyal–they don't care if this neighbourhood lives or dies. And they bring with them their own culture.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning that in ten years El Cabanyal has gone from being a relatively quiet neighbourhood to becoming the city's drug supermarket. I can tell you exactly where to go at exactly what time and who to talk to to get whatever drug you want. Soft, hard, anything.'

There was nothing in Roig to suggest that he was some xenophobe or racist. This was not, Cámara could tell from the man's demeanour and way of speaking, anything to do with a problem with skin colour. He was simply describing a reality, and the reality was that large sections of the Gypsy community were involved in the drug business. He'd known enough about it himself from when he'd been in narcotics, five years before. There had been indications the dealers were moving out of their usual haunts in Natzaret and La Coma back then. El Cabanyal had been one of the areas named as a new drug centre.

‘So the area gets run down,' he said.

‘That's it,' Roig said. ‘Things start going downhill; dealers and junkies everywhere, people lighting bonfires in the middle of the street, a few skirmishes between rival gangs. No serious violence yet, but it's enough to make people living here uncomfortable. Enough so that when Valconsa comes along offering to buy their property for next to nothing, they're happy to sell.'

‘At a lower price than if they'd got compensation.'

‘You got it,' Roig said with a resigned grin.

‘Aren't these houses protected?' Cámara asked. ‘This is like an open-air museum, with all this old tilework on the facades.'

‘Yes, they're protected. But only until the Town Hall decides otherwise. Which, not surprisingly, they do on a regular basis.'

Cámara got up and Roig went to join him at the door, stepping out into the street. The sun was intense and felt as though it were burning the skin off their backs.

Cámara frowned at the death-threat graffiti that was still staining the front walls of the building.

‘It's really nothing,' Roig said. ‘We've had worse. The other day they smashed the windows and broke in. They didn't take anything because there's nothing to take.' He laughed. ‘Of course we reported it, but the
Municipales
…'

Cámara noticed a wooden board covering a hole in the window.

‘Who do you think it was?'

‘The Valconsa lot,' Roig said.

Cámara raised his eyebrows.

‘Trying to intimidate us, I suspect. Cuevas, the boss, used to be
Guardia Civil
. The company's hand in glove with the Town Hall. They've even got the contract to build that big stage down in the river bed where the Pope's saying Mass later on.'

‘Have you got anything that might show it was someone linked to Valconsa?' Cámara asked.

Roig shrugged.

‘No,' he said. ‘But who else would it be?'